Indispensable: Build and Lead A Company Customers Can't Live Without

by James M. Kerr

Overview

"Read this book, apply its concepts, and see how your business transforms.” — Marshall Goldsmith, Thinkers 50 #1 Executive Coach and #1 Leadership Thinker

Outstanding leaders make business indispensable. 

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines "Indispensable" as being absolutely necessary and not subject to being set aside or neglected. INDISPENSABLE: Build and Lead A Company Customers Can’t Live Without provides a framework that you can follow to transform your business and features dozens of examples from industry including those drawn from Amazon, Uber, Facebook and more. 

Each business example illustrates how the concepts offered in the book are already being used to make businesses indispensable in the marketplace. Keep in mind, though, only your customers can decide if your business is indispensable. We don’t get a vote on that. However, there are steps that we can take to improve our chances.

A Leader's pursuit of greatness for his or her company is important, but, it’s not enough, and a business does not become indispensable by accident. Outstanding leadership is essential to bring a company from greatness to indispensability. This is an important distinction because anything less than outstanding leadership will not suffice. Why? Outstanding leaders lead by example. They demonstrate desired qualities and behaviors to their followers through their actions and conduct. By doing so, these leaders put forth a sense that they and their teams share the same goals and aspirations, and, that together, they are going to go about achieving these ambitions as one. 

Indispensable businesses share a common purpose so they need leaders that can set the example.

As you read the book, you will come to recognize how vital TRUE leadership is to helping your business become indispensable. Regardless of your rank or position, you must study, learn, exemplify and LIVE these essential behaviors to be able to provide the people you work with and serve:

• A Captivating Vision: Outstanding leaders can articulate a vision for the future that every staff member can understand and buy-in to. This vision becomes the stuff of rallying cries and establishes the common goal that leader and team will share. Outstanding leadership is required to articulate the vision of being indispensable and to work to drive it deep into the enterprise. If the troops don’t “get” it, they won’t follow. 
• Active Direction-Setting: Next, a game plan for execution must be built in support of that vision. But, building a plan without engaged direction-setting will not suffice. Outstanding leaders at every level will be fully involved, monitoring progress and charting the course for execution throughout their firm’s journey to indispensability.
• Enlightened Coaching: Outstanding leaders support their team and understand how to provide the “right” touch at the “right” time – directive when the path to success is unclear and supportive when it’s time to empower – just like any world-class coach does when building a champion.
• A Collaborative Environment: Outstanding leaders know how to establish a collaborative tenor within their area of responsibility. Selfish and egocentric behavior is stomped out; teamwork is recognized and rewarded.

There are many great companies – only a few are indispensable. This book was written to help you build an indispensable business – one that your customers can’t live without.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781630061838
Publisher:	Humanix Books
Publication date:	02/16/2021
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

James M. Kerr is one of today’s foremost authorities on leadership, organizational design, and culture transformation. He is a best-selling author and CEO World columnist. A long-time management consultant and coach, Jim specializes in vision, culture and people strategies. His clients comprise many discussed in the book including: The Home Depot,General Dynamics, and Mitsui Sumitomo, to name a few. It is his strong dedication to research and learning that enables Jim to continue to develop and deliver cutting-edge solutions to his clients, like the strategies necessary to become indispensable. His previous books include: It’s Good To Be King, The Executive Checklist, The Best Practices Enterprise, Inside RAD, and The IRM Imperative.

Indispensable-Consulting.com

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1 to INDISPENSABLE: How to Build and Lead A Company Customers Can’t Live Without by James M. Kerr

Your Business Needs to Be Indispensable

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines indispensable as “being absolutely necessary and not subject to being set aside or neglected.” This book is written for business professionals who want their companies to become indispensable.

It provides a framework that you can follow to transform your business by first reimagining what it can be and then describing what is needed to reconstitute it in ways that make it compelling and irresistible to your customers.

This book features dozens of examples from the industry, including ones drawn from Amazon, Uber, Facebook, and more. Each business example illustrates how the concepts offered in the book are already being used to make businesses indispensable in the marketplace.

Keep in mind, though, only your customers can decide if your business is indispensable. Indeed, what we think of our businesses and their ability to delight our customers is irrelevant. It is our customers who determine who is indispensable. We don’t get a vote on that. However, there are steps that we can take to improve our chances.

This book was written to help you build an indispensable business—one that your customers can’t live without.

Why Indispensable?

The answer is simple: the competition is overwhelming.

Please believe that regardless of what your company does or how it does it, there’s another firm right behind you ready to take your spot. Moreover, your competition is not just local businesses. It’s global. There’s no need for us to recount all the reasons why this is so. Let it suffice to remember that the internet and related technologies have made the world a whole lot smaller.

Your customers have choices. If you can’t give them what they want in the way that they want it, someone else will. It’s just a point and click away. So you better figure out quickly just how to become indispensable, or you just might be replaced.

Here are just a few examples of what can happen when you take your eye off the ball and neglect to strive for indispensability:

• Boeing: They certainly demonstrated their hubris when they worked with inspectors to certify a plane that crashed twice within months of its release. After grounding their Boeing 737 Max fleets for most of 2019, the company still has to convince the worldwide flying public that the aircraft has been appropriately modified, tested, and determined to be safe. It’s unclear if the company will ever fully recover from this debacle.
• Apple: The stock took a tumble when it came to light that the tech giant had purposely slowed down older iPhones to force consumers to upgrade. This move forced them to offer inexpensive battery replacements to win back customers.
• Mylan: The drug-maker claimed it took up to a $260 million revenue hit when news came out of the possible price gauging and fixing practices related to its lifesaving allergy shot product, EpiPen. Imagine the challenge that comes with having to justify a more than 400-percent price jump on a product that has an estimated 3.6 million prescriptions. Mylan certainly has little care for the people relying on its products to save their life.
• Volkswagen: When it was discovered that the car manufacturer hoodwinked emissions testers by installing software into eleven million cars to sidestep air pollution laws, Martin Winterkorn, then CEO of Volkswagen, resigned soon after. He should have left—he lied to his customers.
• Wells Fargo: The fake-account scandal (highlighted by the creation of as many as two million fake bank and credit card accounts in the names of their customers) forced its stock down 10 percent when it was slapped with a $185 million fine by the government.
• United Airlines: Their stock plummeted after videos of a passenger being bloodied and dragged off an overbooked plane circulated on the internet and in the media. You really can’t manhandle customers, even if they get argumentative.

I could go on.

The point is simple: just do not become one of these companies—one that misunderstands their customers or takes them for granted! There are repercussions.

Instead, learn what your customers truly want and exceed those expectations.

What Your Customers Want

Industry innovators like Apple, Amazon, and Netflix inspire other business leaders to consider ways to disrupt their respective industries. Of course, you don’t have to disrupt an industry to become an indispensable business! Instead, you must be driven to excellence in all that you do and deliver what your customers want. In essence, you want to be on a constant lookout for ways to unlock your customer’s potential.

Paradoxically, the key to unlocking that potential in your customers lies with the leadership and culture of your organization. These are the keys needed to differentiate you from your competitors. These are the things that will enable you to be the provider of choice in the hearts and minds of your customers. These will enable you to help them become disruptors of their own respective industries.

Some examples of leaders who drive winning organizations through their leadership style and focus on culture include the following:

• Reed Hastings, Netflix’s CEO, helped create a culture based on trust that has made the company indispensable to many streaming TV viewers around the world. At the height of the pandemic, there were even memes reflecting the firm’s indispensability. The world was shut down and there was nothing left to do but stay home and watch Netflix. The company “believes that people thrive on being trusted, on freedom, and on being able to make a difference . . . dedicated to constantly increasing employee freedom to fight the python of process.” By encouraging independent decision-making, Netflix allows staff to use sound judgment, not administrative policy, to delight its subscribers.
• Jack Ma, executive chairman of Alibaba Group (the world’s largest retailer), is known for his willingness to drop whatever he is doing to assist his employees, whether it be “6 a.m. on a Wednesday, a Sunday, or during my best friend’s birthday party.” This attitude is indicative of a leader who believes that their role is to serve their people and build a culture that leads to indispensability.
• Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, is known for valuing his company’s culture and truly empowering employees by saying, “Make it happen. You have full authority.” He seems to have an ever-present curiosity and is on a constant lookout for ways that others can win.
• Virginia Rometty, CEO of IBM since 2012, is credited with restoring the company to greatness. She believes staff development should be a primary focus, suggesting that talent development can set the stage for “changing the way work is done, using AI, putting skills at the center,” which enables the company to remain vital even as digital transformation changes the business culture in which IBM operates.
• Kent Taylor, Texas Roadhouse CEO, gave away his salary and bonus of $800,000 to help employees during the pandemic. He also contributed $5 million to an employee emergency fund—demonstrating through his behavior the values that the chain espouses: “A family built on love, care, and concern. We celebrate our people in the good times and we have each other’s backs in the tough times too.”
• Bill Belichick, head coach of the New England Patriots, has an unflinching commitment to a “Do your job!” philosophy that has created a winning culture at the NFL football franchise. He has led the Patriots to sixteen AFC East division titles, thirteen appearances in the AFC Championship Game, and nine Super Bowl appearances, winning a record six of them. Certainly, leadership and culture is the key to success in New England.

Why does it come down to leadership and culture?

The answer is simple: leadership drives behavior, and behavior establishes culture. Unsure on where to begin?

Just Ask Some Basic Questions of Yourself

Here are some basic questions to ask yourself about your organization. The answers to these questions will establish the platform from which you can begin to change your business and shape it into one that your customers prefer. They have been organized across several essential dimensions:

On Leadership

1. What are the leadership attributes required to drive transformation to achieve your vision of becoming the provider of choice for your customers?
2. Which of the attributes do you believe are strengths among your midtier leaders?
3. Which of the attributes do you believe are weaknesses among your leadership team? How would you begin to transform these weaknesses into strengths?

On Culture

1. How is the current culture (beliefs, behaviors, assumptions) facilitating or hindering movement of your teams toward achieving transformation objectives?
2. How are definitions of responsibility, decision-making, and structure facilitating or hindering movement of your teams toward your vision?
3. How do you navigate competing internal priorities and drive innovation?

On Transformation and Change

1. Do you feel your organization is agile enough to be competitive? Can you move at the speed required to drive change with velocity? If not, what needs to be done to increase agility?
2. What is your approach to drive transformation by enhancing the customer experience?
3. What is your strategy to move your organization to optimize its interactions with its internal customers?

On Talent and Development

1. Do you think that attracting, inspiring, retaining, and deploying top talent is a priority for the firm? What are you doing to facilitate that?
2. How do you develop your team, engage and develop junior-level employees, and show you care?
3. How do you mentor staff to build high-performing and diverse teams?

On Opportunities and Innovation

1. How do you innovate at the firm?
2. How does the firm influence its industry? What more should be done?
3. How do you inspire entrepreneurial thinking and behavior?

On Breaking the Current Paradigm

1. What three things should the firm stop doing to enable you to achieve your vision?
2. What three things should the firm do to enable its leaders to accomplish transformation objectives?
3. What keeps you up at night when thinking about the state of your organization? What are you doing to address those concerns?

Clearly, it is essential to recognize that these questions are only the beginning of your journey toward creating an indispensable company that can help your customers innovate and disrupt. It is why I suggest to my clients that they adopt the Golden Rule of Indispensability and work to make it their true north.

Golden Rule of Indispensability

There are all kinds of principles that you will need to adopt to make indispensability a reality. We will present and discuss many of them throughout this book. However, there is one overarching rule that you can begin to ponder immediately, and it’s this: “Do unto your customers and your staff what you’d want them to do unto you.”

If you want to build an indispensable business, you must treat your customers with the utmost care. That goes for your people too. They’re the ones who you’re counting on to make your customers happy. This means they need to be happy too. The Golden Rule of Indispensability must be a foundation stone on which your business is built.

Consider how Southwest Airlines treats its employees. Besides four decades of profit-sharing, it employs a multimedia approach to acknowledging exceptional staff effort. The recognition program includes feature articles about employees in Southwest Spirit (the company’s monthly in-flight magazine), streaming videos at worksites highlighting staffers and the work that they do, and not to mention weekly public callouts from CEO Gary Kelly praising specific employees who have demonstrated great customer service.

This kind of effort demonstrates a company’s pride in its employees while embedding a strong sense of purpose in its culture. A purpose-centered culture pays dividends. Last March, just as COVID-19 was beginning to wreak havoc on the airline industry, more than twenty thousand Southwest employees signed up for unpaid time off in order to contribute to lowering costs at the carrier.

It’s true that the airline industry has taken quite a beating due to the pandemic. So I feel compelled to use another industry example—this one from a customer perspective—to remind us that a few decent companies have felt the impact of the virus.

Delta Air Lines works at treating its customers with respect and caring. They go the extra mile by sending personalized notes to passengers whose travel has been diverted due to weather and the like. The notes recognize the customer’s frustration while offering an apology and providing a goodwill gesture in the form of additional frequent-flier points.

Perhaps the note does little to offset the inconvenience suffered by passengers. However, as the recipient of more than one of these notes, I can say it does exhibit a desire to show customers that the airline cares about their experience, even when weather gets in the way of service delivery.

A Different Mindset Is Needed

Of course, all of this requires an openness to think differently about the customer and employee relations. The centerpiece of your new mindset must be loyalty and fairness. You want to earn loyal customers and staff, and you want to reciprocate that loyalty by being fair and honest in all your doings.

If you choose to create a business that operates in this way, you will become indispensable because with such values comes a whole lot of other great behaviors that will make your business the one that customers can’t live without.

So make the search for common decency the primary goal of your policy-setting efforts by making graciousness and fair-mindedness their centerpiece. When you do, you will begin to enable the creation of a company culture that possesses high standards of propriety, good taste, and modesty. This is how leaders can weave that same mindset throughout their enterprises.

Don’t buy it? Tell me what you think when you hear these companies referenced: Hertz, Frontier Communications, Fresh Market (all in the top fifteen worst companies to work for). What do you think when you hear about these companies? Southwest Airlines, Lululemon, In-N-Out Burger (all are in the top fifteen best companies to work for).

I bet the ones that you like the most are the ones that have reputations for treating their people and customers exceptionally well. I bet the ones you don’t like so much fail to share that same reputation for customer focus and common decency.

Yes, you must adjust your thinking to commit to live by the Golden Rule of Indispensability, but it is absolutely essential to flourish. It is the only way to turn the notion of placing “laser-like focus on the customer experience” into something more than a consultant’s catchphrase. I should know—I’m a longtime consultant and use that phrase all the time! The point is, whether you know it or not, you are a service business—and, of course, your customers (and the staffers who service them) must feel like they are receiving the respect and attention that they deserve.

Every Business Is a Service Business

Indeed, every business is a service-driven business. To remain competitive, customer gratification must become the bull’s-eye of your target. That said, every interaction that a customer or experiences with you matters!

The good news is that you control the situation. It’s the combination of all the ways and means of how you do business that determines their experience—and it’s that experience that determines whether they prefer you over any other competing product or service available in the marketplace.

Consider how easy Zappos is to do business with. The e-tailer’s vast online catalog allows shoppers to search by brand, style, size, and color, among other categories. If you can’t find the shoe that you’re looking for at Zappos, you probably don’t need it! Moreover, shipping and returns are free. They put the customer first and make each associate pledge an oath of their commitment to deliver the wow through service—something they call “Zappos easy.”

How do you become “Zappos easy”?

Your work setting must be built to please. Have you optimized the way work gets done? Have superfluous activities been eradicated? Are you easy to do business with? Do your products and services demonstrate that you care?

They had better.

Should your customers ever get a whiff that you can’t respond quickly, that you’re difficult to work with, or that you don’t care, they will immediately begin to look for another company to service them.

Let’s take a look at some of the considerations involved should you need to revamp your work environment and improve the ways in which your customers interact with your business.

When a Renovation Is in Order

Here are some of the things that I advise when a client is considering revamping their business:

1. Look for leverage: Most companies have done work in the past that can be used to inform future change efforts. Look at those past efforts and determine if there is anything that can be used today. Most every change engagement that I’ve led has uncovered good amounts of great ideas that we can leverage.
2. Identify quick hits: Determine if there are any straightforward and meaningful changes that can be made quickly to demonstrate progress and represent early success for the business. For example, this past April, as the pandemic was ramping up, Zappos revamped its customer service line to include people whom customers could call just to chat with: “Sure, we take orders and process returns, but we’re also great listeners,” Zappos said in a statement on its website. “Searching for flour to try that homemade bread recipe? We’re happy to call around and find grocery stores stocked with what you need.” It served as a reminder to staffers to always be on the lookout for ways to revamp the way work gets done, even in the midst of an international health crisis.
3. Teach while doing: Be sure to utilize business optimization experts on your business renovation teams. These people can impart their knowledge to project participants while the renovation work is being done, extending the capabilities of your team.
4. Keep score: Be sure to institute some simple metrics that can be used to map your progress as improvement ideas are being instituted. At Zappos, for instance, they use the “Daily Breakdown Report,” which is handwritten on a central blackboard at Zappos’ onsite contact center. It lists three categories of customer contacts—phone, chat, and email. Each day, someone writes the number of customer inquiries received the day before and the average time it took for Zappos to respond. It serves to inform and motivate and is a lot less formal than the call analytics systems used in traditional contact centers, which makes it feel a little less formal yet provides the data required to track progress.
5. Promote changes: Encourage staffers to embrace the improvement ideas that come out of your business renovation efforts by formally communicating those ideas and recommendations to all personnel. Change efforts yield better results when their recommendations are widely broadcasted throughout an organization. I routinely recommend that clients follow a roll-out plan that ensures all staffers have the opportunity to discover the changes that the renovation team has unveiled and schedule for further follow-up or implementation. This promotes understanding and builds trust among staff members. No one is left to wonder what came of the change effort or what’s to happen next.
6. Provide proper attention and follow through: Your work isn’t complete when the renovation team delivers its final report. Rather, additional oversight will be needed to ensure that the recommendations are instituted. It is no surprise that Zappos’ CEO, Tony Hsieh, is a customer service zealot. He places immense value on delighting the company’s customers and works to bake that mindset into the culture. He expounds on this in his best-selling book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose. Clearly, Hsieh provides the continuous leadership needed to inspire his people to deliver service above and beyond all expectations.

We will discuss more about how to manage change and optimize the customer experience in subsequent chapters. For now, let’s note that laser-like focus is more than a slogan to tack up on a wall and that philosophical and process changes are needed to keep your customers coming back to you. In fact, if you do it right, you can compete quite successfully on service delivery.

How to Compete on Service

Many of my clients are surprised when I point out that there are only three ways to differentiate a business in its marketplace—product (think Maserati), price (think Walmart), and service (think Nordstrom). That’s it!

Sure, every business needs to have strategies for all three components. However, definitive differentiation, the kind that leads to indispensability, can come from only one. Of the three, service delivery is the one that must be at least good enough, or your business will fail. Even Walmart, a low-cost competitor, has greeters at the door who help direct you to the “right” aisle.

So how do you begin to compete on service?

Here are the five essentials:

1. Develop an outsider’s eye: Develop the ability to look at your business from the outside in. What’s it like to do business with you? What needs to be improved so you’re the one that your customers can’t live without? By adopting an outside-in perspective, you begin to see ways that you can become indispensable. Domino’s is a great example of a firm that takes an outside-in POV. They’ve taken to help pave the streets of towns across the country to save customers’ pizza from bad roads. Check out their Paving for Pizza campaign for more on their program.

1. Have an “In It Together” philosophy: Sadly, COVID-19 made this idea famous, though I’ve been touting it for years within my management-consulting practice. Nonetheless, your frontline staff defines the customer experience—period. If they’re good, so is your business. If not, rest assured your customers are already looking for alternatives to your products and services. You must encourage trust and demand cooperation among those on your front line. Trust and cooperation will not only make their jobs easier; it will begin to embolden them to keep one another honest in the delivery of impeccable service to “their” (i.e., your) customers. JetBlue, for example, is one of those companies that strive to be “in it together.” In fact, its chairman, Joel Peterson, considers trust a key element of success. He suggests that “where there’s trust, a company is free to become a whole greater than the sum of its parts. In what he calls a low-trust organization,’ everything is harder; insecurity drives political maneuvering, individuals are less likely to put the company first, and there’s a self-protective aversion to risk that limits the company’s potential.

1. Hire and train compassionate people: As mentioned earlier, you must demonstrate that you care. How do your customers experience that feeling? It’s through your people, of course. Thus it makes sense to invest in finding and developing people who can exhibit empathy and deliver the service customers expect. There’s even software that can help. For instance, Cogito can detect emotions and speech patterns in phone conversations and then give customer service and sales agents suggestions for improving a call. A coffee-cup icon, for instance, is a signal to speak with more enthusiasm, as low-energy interactions can be seen as a sign of disrespect or a lack of interest. That’s not all the software has to offer. After the insurance giant MetLife started using Cogito at its call center in Warwick, Rhode Island, for example, supervisors realized many of their agents were fast talkers when a speedometer icon repeatedly urged them to slow down. Clearly, the tool is helping customer service agents become more engaged with customers, who are often in distress after suffering a loss.

1. Build trust in the frontline: We’ll discuss this more throughout the book. For the moment, let’s agree that a properly prepared staff should be empowered to make the call on handling most mainstream customer situations. Most people want to do the right thing. So train them up and let them! JetBlue provided a wonderful example of this point when its frontline staff chose to refund a customer’s fare (a bridesmaid had been dumped from the wedding party and asked for help via its social media channel). In fact, the carrier’s customer service rep went a step further and offered, “When you’re ready to patch things up, we’d like to help make your old friendship feel like new. A future girls’ weekend is on us!” Talk about a perfect response to a tough customer service situation!

1. Push to exceed customer expectations: Performance measurement is a thing that most companies do but too few do well. Again, we explore this in more detail in subsequent chapters. Just know, if you often get subpar performance, you are likely measuring the wrong things. It’s not effort that matters—it’s results. Look to establish goals and measurements of behaviors that delight the customer. Do not limit your people by inadvertently measuring them against the wrong metrics. Here are some examples of mismatched measurements:

• average handle time versus customer outcomes
• number of calls answered versus number of resolved cases
• total customer interactions versus interactions per resolution

A business that measures (and rewards) improperly (by using the wrong metrics, as illustrated earlier) likely has a customer service department that fields a lot of calls, of short in duration, which require a ton of follow-up in order to resolve customer problems.

Alternatively, those that measure the right things are often characterized as getting customer issues addressed correctly on the first call.

At the end of the day, your customer always has other choices. Accordingly, instituting a service delivery model that truly inspires confidence from customers (especially your most discerning ones) is paramount to becoming indispensable.

That said, I can unequivocally state indispensability is a choice.

Indispensability Is All up to You

As a leader, you have the power within you to establish a culture that can make your business indispensable. Extraordinary integrity, high trust, focus on the customer—that’s all on you. People mimic their leaders. Be the kind of leader who raises the bar in all that you do and say.

Here are some examples of the kinds of mayhem less honorable leadership behavior causes in an organization:

• Self-centeredness: A leader who steals the limelight, exaggerates their abilities, and needs to be the center of attention is tremendously demoralizing to staffers. Why strive when your boss steals the credit? Consider the case of Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of Theranos, for example. Her hubris led her to believe that she could do no wrong. Seeking to disrupt the health-care industry by offering cheaper and less invasive blood tests, Holmes purposely misled investors with false claims of her firm’s technological capabilities. When the fraud was discovered in October 2015, she was forced to step down, and Theranos ceased to exist within three years. Who knows what could have been achieved if Holmes was not driven to be a celebrity CEO and instead guided the firm with a slow and steady hand. Maybe her vision would have been achieved. A company is corrupted when its top leaders act selfishly. Indispensability requires a culture of cooperation and success-sharing.

• Blame: If a leader lacks culpability, their staff will play the blame game too. For example, there’s no doubt that Elon Musk is a visionary leader. However, he may not be an inspiring one. His erratic interactions with critics and inexplicable behavior—calling investors names and sending outlandish tweets—make many wonder if he has what it takes to make his companies indispensable. A leader who takes responsibility for failure demonstrates the kind of behavior that inspires others to do their best—and it’s that effort that creates the best businesses on the planet.

• Fabrication: Should a leader operate unscrupulously on a regular basis, a culture of mistrust takes hold. This kind of culture is very difficult to reset. No one feels respected or empowered. Performance suffers as a consequence. Take Wells Fargo, for example. CEO John Stumpf stepped down in October 2016 following a scandal involving the bank’s creation of new deposit and credit card accounts for millions of customers without their knowledge. Apparently, the behavior was encouraged by senior leaders at Wells Fargo whose bonuses were based on new accounts. While the stock remained buoyant after the scandal was reported (it’s a lot of work for customers to change banks), many Wells Fargo staffers were certainly disheartened. On the other hand, a leader who inspires trust through their actions sets the stage for an invincible culture—one capable of supporting an indispensable business.

• Opaqueness: If a leader fails to communicate transparently, they are promoting a culture that evades accountability and manipulates the facts. It makes one wonder what morale must be like at Facebook, as staffers a few years back had to watch and listen to their CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg slowly and elusively respond to public scrutiny over their slow reaction to allegations that their company was manipulated by the Russian government to influence the election. On the other hand, staffers exude confidence when their leadership communicates in open and honest ways.

• Unpredictability: When a leader is unpredictable and demonstrates a willingness to bend the rules when they’re not convenient to follow, they send the message that’s it’s OK for others to do the same. Consider the impact on a company when its CEO or chairman is accused of sexual misconduct—which seems to continue to make headlines as the #MeToo movement continues to evolve. Recently ousted leaders like former CBS chairman Les Moonves, former McDonald’s CEO Fred Easterbrook, and former Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara appear to have been operating under a double standard. None of these men are inspiring their companies to become indispensable. On the other hand, a leader who demonstrates great integrity and is highly consistent brings about a culture that demands discipline and rigor in all that it does. With all of that, should your culture lack the trust and integrity that is needed to earn indispensability in the marketplace, draw a circle around yourself. It’s your behavior that dictates the actions of others around you. Recognize that it only trickles down from there. Indeed, indispensability requires a concerted effort—both personally and throughout the enterprise. It makes continuous planning and execution central to ongoing success.

Continuous Planning and Execution

The country of New Zealand provides a great argument for continuous strategic planning and execution. In 2017, it developed a strategic plan for managing a worldwide pandemic, should one emerge. The plan called for regular monitoring of world health information to identify early warning signs that a pandemic was about to commence. In 2020, as COVID-19 began to ravage the world, New Zealand was on top of it and began to execute its strategic pandemic management plan. As a result, the country was the first one on the globe to contain and eliminate the virus from its shores.

Like New Zealand, companies need to actively develop and maintain strategic plans in order to react to the subtleties of an unpredictable and swiftly changing world. A comprehensive strategic plan has the potential to propel an organization toward indispensability.

In fact, it is by making your strategic planning a regular routine—one that you monitor and adjust throughout the year—that you help your business better get ahead of and acclimate to the changes needed to consistently delight your customer. In fact, it can be the means by which you become indispensable.

How do you begin to make strategic planning a regular activity? Here’s what I recommend to my clients.

Become a visitor. Take up the intellectual challenge of putting yourself in the shoes of a visitor to your company. You gain insight from the wider perspective that comes by seeing your business through the eyes of your customers, vendors, and other strategic partners. It gives you an edge by helping you identify better ways to execute. It enables you to better anticipate issues before they become problems.

This is what Danny Deep, the president of General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS), the military tank–builder, does as a matter of practice. He regularly travels the world, talking with his global customers and the rest of the players who comprise the vast ecosystem that his company uses to deliver its products around the globe. His goal is to see his company through the eyes of customers and other key stakeholders. He knows that this is the only way to keep his company the combat platform solution of choice.

Push your people to see past the obvious. The same old, tired approaches only deliver the same old, tired results. Help your team think differently by regularly asking “why.” Why will that work? Why will customers like it? Why hasn’t the competition thought of this? You’re pushing them out of their comfort zone when you engage in this kind of dialogue with your people. You will get better strategic ideas as a result.

This is what JPMorgan Chase’s (JPM’s) CEO Jamie Dimon does through his “Mobile first, digital everything” mantra as he drives America’s biggest bank toward becoming the clear technological leader in the banking industry.

Look to advance your operation. Ask your team what can be done to improve the way work is performed. Take those ideas and spin them into potential projects and programs that can be part of your strategic plan—refining the business and making you more competitive.

This is what Don Ishmael, vice president of manufacturing, did at GDLS. He folded the improvement ideas coming from his shop floor staff and manufacturing leaders into an Industry 4.0 program, which continues to be used as the blueprint for modernizing the way the manufacturer builds tanks.

Track results as you progress. Be sure that your performance monitoring system assesses the following questions:

• Are we putting our customers first?
• Are we better enabling our people to get the job done?
• Are we delivering improved products and services?

The answers to these questions will inform other ideas to be weaved into the strategic plan, bringing your business closer to indispensability.

Moving to make strategic planning more than an annual event offers many advantages, including enhancing your company’s agility, improving its customer relationships, and bettering financial performance. Be sure to include it in your thinking as you execute your Indispensable Agenda.

The Indispensable Agenda

As you have undoubtedly come to understand, you have to get a lot of things “right” in order to gain indispensability in the marketplace. Please note, I said “right,” not perfect.

In fact, chasing perfection is a fool’s game. Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, the game changes. Don’t be fooled into thinking perfection is the only path to indispensability. It is not. However, doing things “right” is what’s needed to become indispensable.

The heart of your Indispensable Agenda is instituting the following:

• the right leadership
• the right vision
• the right culture
• the right people
• the right empowerment and trust
• the right change management practices

The rest of the book delves into these essential elements of indispensability and works to demystify each one, providing you with the frameworks and practices needed to make your business indispensable.

To Close

Yes, every business aspires to become indispensable.

Here are five fundamentals that underpin many of the ideas discussed throughout the rest of the book. Keep these top-of-mind as you chart your path to indispensability.

Put your customer first. This is an easy principle to embrace. If you do this, you’ll likely inspire your clients to grow a fondness for your commitment to their cause—whatever that cause may be.

In the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos would put an empty chair in every meeting to represent the customer. It served to reinforce to everyone in that meeting exactly who they were working for and needed to exceedingly satisfy.

Anticipate and solve problems before they become “big hairy” monsters. In order to do this, you absolutely have to understand your customer and be able to empathize with their situation. Prove that you can anticipate and solve problems and you will establish a level of intimacy that shows that you’re someone that they can count on.

The Apple Store does a nice job with this concept. Understanding that many customers may be intimidated by the technology, Apple has instituted a customer service philosophy that incorporates the idea of listening for and resolving expressed and unexpressed needs. The approach goes a long way in locking in reluctant customers to the Apple product line.

Ask for feedback. The only way to get better is to learn where there are areas for improvement and direct the effort needed to advance. Seeking feedback from your customers is one way you can better understand what is needed to become indispensable. Institute ways to solicit, understand, and use customer feedback.

Adidas’ decision to make running shoes made from ocean waste was a direct result of doing something positive with its customer feedback. Besides selling more than one million pairs of shoes in the first year that the concept was introduced, the company combined two aspects of consumer demand: well-made shoes and the desire to do good for the planet.

Keep your promises. This is absolutely essential to building the intimacy that you need to become indispensable. If your customer can’t trust you, they don’t need you. Say what you mean and mean what you say.

Geico’s “Fifteen minutes or less can save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance” promise is a wonderful example of a company putting its money where its mouth is. They’ve done a great job of maintaining their image and keeping their promise.

Do more than you promised. Going above and beyond the call of duty is a surefire way to make your client reliant on what you bring to the party—and the greater the reliance, the more “sticky” you become. As mentioned earlier, people want to work with companies that they can trust and rely on. Doing more than what is expected is a way to exhibit your pledge to your client’s success.

For example, Richard Branson’s latest venture, Virgin Hotels, offers all of the amenities one would want in a higher-end hotel. However, it strives to exceed customer expectations with policies like these: no cancelation fees, no early check-in fees, and no late check-out fees. These policies exemplify a company wanting to deliver more than what has been promised.

With these fundamental philosophies in mind, let’s address after our first agenda item: putting the right leadership in place.

Chapter 1’s Indispensable Top Ten List

This chapter is stacked with great content and insight. This list of the top ten takeaways is provided for easy reference. Be sure to take a deeper dive into other key concepts by reviewing the chapter in detail.

1. Indispensable means being absolutely necessary and not being subject to being set aside or neglected. You want your business to be indispensable to its customers.
2. Your customers have choices. If you can’t give them what they want, in the way that they want it, someone else will.
3. The key to unlocking the potential of your customers lies with the leadership and culture of your organization. These elements are needed to differentiate you from your competitors.
4. The Golden Rule of Indispensability is this: “Do unto your customers and your staff what you’d want them to do unto you.”
5. Every business competes across only three dimensions—product (think Maserati), price (think Walmart), and service (think Nordstrom). Certainly, strategies to cover all three elements are essential for the ongoing growth and success of any business. Of the three, service delivery is the one that has to be at least good enough, or your business will fail.
6. Be sure to establish goals and measurements that deliver customer delight, and don’t limit your people by inadvertently measuring them on the wrong things.
7. A leader who takes responsibility for failure demonstrates the kind of behavior needed to create a culture of integrity.
8. A leader who prepares their team and empowers them to make good decisions (and helps them learn from their mistakes) establishes a culture of trust—one where the individual feels safe to do their best.
9. Keep your promises to build the customer intimacy that you need to become indispensable. If they can’t trust you, they don’t need you.
10. The path to indispensability, includes the right leadership, the right vision, the right culture, the right people, the right empowerment and trust, and the right change management practices. Each must be fine-tuned for your company to become indispensable.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents to INDISPENSABLE: How to Build and Lead A Company Customers Can’t Live Without by James M. Kerr

Acknowledgments

A Word to the Reader

Prologue: Outstanding Leaders Make Businesses Indispensable

Chapter 1: Your Business Needs to Be Indispensable

Chapter 2: The Right Leadership

Chapter 3: The Right Vision

Chapter 4: The Right Culture

Chapter 5: The Right People

Chapter 6: The Right Trust and Empowerment

Chapter 7: The Right Change Management Practices

Chapter 8: How to Ensure Lasting Indispensability

Epilogue: Just Keep It Real!

The Last Word

Notes

Index

Preface

Prologue INDISPENSABLE: How to Build and Lead A Company Customers Can’t Live Without by James M. Kerr

A Word to the Reader

First and foremost, Indispensable is a leadership book. It contains a framework, or Indispensable Agenda, that you can use to help you make your business one that your customers can’t live without.

Indispensable is intended for one type of reader: a business professional who wants to make a difference in their organization. Whether you are a C-suite executive looking for ideas to make your business more competitive or a Gen Z new hire who is eager to establish yourself as a fresh thinker, as long as you want to make a difference, Indispensable is for you.

Anyone who regularly reads my Inc.com column will recognize many of the ideas and concepts gathered and presented here. Like the articles off which it’s based, Indispensable is written for quick consumption, fast understanding, and easy reference. Bulleted paragraphs are used to present key concepts. Ample industry examples are included throughout each chapter to help provide context and reinforce major points. I’ve even included a Top Ten list at the end of each chapter that summarizes its key points. I hope that you find the writing style achieves its purpose.

Lastly, Indispensable is meant to be shared among colleagues and teammates. Its value comes through the building of a common understanding of what it takes to build an indispensable organization.

With that, if you’re a business professional who wants to make a difference in your organization, please read on.

Prologue

Outstanding Leaders Make Businesses Indispensable

Now that the pandemic is essentially behind us, it’s time to begin focusing on what we have to do to become the kinds of businesses that our customers can’t live without. Yes, Amazon, Walmart, and Facebook continued to dominate their markets while other companies, like Zoom Video Communications and TeleDoc Health, leaped ahead of their competition by offering needed services in an easy-to-use framework.

Indeed, there are many great companies—only a few are indispensable.

If you’re reading this book, chances are you’re already the type of person who wants to lead your company to greatness. The pursuit of greatness is important, but it’s not enough. Make no mistake, however—a business doesn’t become indispensable by accident. Outstanding leadership is essential to bringing a company from greatness to indispensability.

This is an important distinction because anything less than outstanding leadership will not suffice. Why?

Outstanding leaders lead by example. They demonstrate desired qualities and behaviors to their followers through their actions and conduct. By doing so, these leaders put forth a sense that they and their teams share the same goals and aspirations and that together, they are going to go about achieving these ambitions as one. Indispensable businesses share a common purpose, so they need leaders who can set the example.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, for example, was one of the first CEOs to lay out a plan to address the COVID-19 crisis. His eight-point plan included, among other things, a call for other CEOs to take a ninety-day “no-layoff pledge” in response to already accelerating unemployment rates—demonstrating a commitment to attending to the welfare of his people.

Further, outstanding leaders transform. They not only revitalize the organizations that they work in, but they rejuvenate the people they work with. The most preeminent leaders enable success through steady direction-setting, a single-minded sense of purpose, and unvarying communication, which facilitates the continuous transformation required to maintain indispensability.

For example, when the pandemic began to take shape, Jeff Bezos immediately pivoted attention away from his new rocket company, Blue Horizons, and placed it squarely on strengthening Amazon’s online retail business. He drove the hiring of 175,000 additional workers in order to meet the gigantic flood of orders coming Amazon’s way from a quarantined world—transforming the business almost overnight.

Indeed, the crisis has proven to be a great equalizer, separating outstanding companies from the rest. However, this book is not about the pandemic. Its intent is to provide you with a framework that you need to help your business become so outstanding that it befits holding the indispensable moniker.

As you read the book, you’ll come to recognize how vital your leadership is to helping your business become indispensable. Regardless of your rank or position, you must be able to provide the following to the people you work with and serve.

A captivating vision. Outstanding leaders can articulate a vision for the future that every staff member understands and buys into. This vision becomes the stuff of rallying cries and establishes the common goal that leader and team will share.

But the vision effort must begin with understanding. If the troops don’t get it, they won’t follow. Outstanding leadership is required to articulate the vision of being indispensable and to work to drive what that means deep into the enterprise.

Active direction-setting. Next, a game plan for execution must be built in support of that vision. But building a plan without engaged direction-setting will not suffice. Outstanding leaders at every level will be fully involved, monitoring progress and charting the course for execution throughout their firm’s journey to indispensability.

Enlightened coaching. Outstanding leaders support their team and understand how to provide the right touch at the right time—directive when the path to success is unclear and supportive when it’s time to empower—just like any world-class coach does when building a champion.

A collaborative environment. Outstanding leaders know how to establish a collaborative tenor within their area of responsibility. Selfish and egocentric behavior is stomped out; teamwork is recognized and rewarded.

Please keep these essential behaviors in mind as you read the book. You must personify them as you enable your business to become indispensable.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Executive Checklist: A Guide for Setting Direction and Managing Change by James M. Kerr

"James Kerr's The Executive Checklist will not only help you achieve your goals, but make getting there far easier and less stressful. In operating rooms and airline cockpits checklists save lives, and this book may very well save your professional life. Put it at the top of your book buying checklist." — August Turak, Forbes.com leadership contributor and author of Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks

"James Kerr's The Executive Checklist is, indeed, a great checklist for business executives a 'to do' list chock full of useful examples and wise advice. And we particularly like the fact that a number of Kerr's examples are bad examples: tales of managers or initiatives that were not successful. As business authors ourselves, we know how difficult it is to find these kinds of cases, which are usually even more instructive than the successes, and Kerr does a great job of tying the cases to his checklist of principles. The Executive Checklist is well worth the read!" — Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D., authors of Extreme Trust: Honesty as a Competitive Advantage

"If you really want to change an organization, you need to be very clear what outcomes you want. The Executive Checklist does this and is also a practical, accessible, and comprehensive handbook for doing business in the 21st century. Any manager who wants to thrive in 'the new normal' needs this on their bookshelf." — David Bosdet, Executive Editor, Management-Issues.com

"Jim Kerr's The Executive Checklist belongs on your 'must read' list. There's something for executives in all sectors. As government leaders learn to embrace unprecedented change, this book offers profound strategies laid out with common sense and anchored in proven results that will help them set a new course of action." — Kevin Sullivan, Connecticut's Commissioner of Revenue Services and former Lt. Governor

"James Kerr provides a simple, everyday technique for successfully managing a business. All aspiring managers should learn from his excellent insights." — Neil Smith, author of New York Times bestseller How Excellent Companies Avoid Dumb Things

Praise for It's Good To Be King: A Leadership Fable for Everyday Leaders by James M. Kerr

"One of the most creative and entertaining books on leadership I've ever read. Bravo!" — Marshall Goldsmith, Thinkers 50 #1 Executive Coach and #1 Leadership Thinker

"A 2017 Leadership Book of the Year Nominee" — Management Issues Magazine

"This year's Who Moved My Cheese. Should be bought in bulk across Corporate America!" — John Baldoni, an Inc. Magazine Top 50 Leadership Speaker

Praise for The Best Practices Enterprise: A Guide to Achieving Sustainable World-Class Performance by James M. Kerr

"Management's Joy of Cooking — no fads, no celebrities, just straightforward recipes for applying important new-economy management ideas."— Christopher Meyer, Chief Executive, Monitor Networks, and author of It’s Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business

“Every executive who has attempted to implement best practices in their organization can benefit from Kerr’s simplicity of advice." — Ron Harder, Chief Executive Officer, JMIC

“...provides a powerful formula for both near-term and lasting success for firms that compete on the international stage.” — Robert Hitch, COO, Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Group

Praise for The IRM Imperative: Strategies for Managing Information Resources by James M. Kerr

"In today's rough and tumble, competitive marketplace, you must "manage information resources aggressively or concede to your competition! This book will teach you how. I highly recommend this easy-to-read book — not only to information professionals,but to business management professionals in general. It serves well as a basic building block for any one interested in developing a successful business information strategy for a competitive enterprise today." — Karen Takle Quinn, IBM Santa Teresa Laboratory San Jose, California

Praise for INDISPENSABLE: Build and Lead A Company Customers Can’t Live Without by James M. Kerr

“In his latest book, INDISPENSABLE, Jim Kerr provides a leadership philosophy that is compelling and instructive. He presents a way to combine the essential elements required to build a business that customers can’t live without. Read this book, apply its concepts, and see how your business transforms.” — Marshall Goldsmith, Thinkers 50 #1 Executive Coach and #1 Leadership Thinker, author of New York Times bestsellers What Got You Here Won’t Get You There and Triggers

“All of us like to think our businesses are indispensable. Few of them truly are. James Kerr’s new book, INDISPENSABLE, provides insights that demonstrate what it truly means to be an indispensable enterprise. It is a matter of people, culture, strategy, and, of course, leadership. The book is packed with real-life examples culled from Kerr’s research and consulting practice. The result is a book that will make you and your business indispensable.” — John Baldoni, internationally recognized executive coach and leadership educator and the author of 14 books, including GRACE: A Leader’s Guide to a Better Us

“Anyone familiar with Jim Kerr’s previous books knows that he has a knack for demystifying complex business ideas. He has done it again with INDISPENSABLE. Follow the agenda offered here and make your business indispensable.” — Harry M. Jansen Kraemer, Former Chairman & CEO, Baxter International and Clinical Professor of Leadership Northwestern UniversityKellogg School of Management

“The straightforward, common-sense principles in Jim Kerr’s book Indispensable are exactly what you need for building a durable business in today’s world of connected and empowered customers, easily disengaged workers, and accelerating technological change. If you’re trying to ensure your own company’s success in the 21st Century, then you should consider INDISPENSABLE to be, well, indispensable.” — Don Peppers, Speaker, CX Expert, and Co-Author of Extreme Trust: Honesty of a Competitive Advantage

“In INDISPENSABLE, leadership expert James Kerr provides readers with a simple, yet highly effective blueprint for transforming any business — taking it from great to astounding. With this book as your guide, your business can become truly indispensable and gain the tremendous benefits that result.” — Peter Economy, Inc.com The Leadership Guy columnist

“James M. Kerr’s new book will catapult your organization from irrelevant to indispensable. By following the roadmap Jim provides, you will develop the systems, people, and culture that will deliver sustainable success in the midst of increasing competition.” — Skip Prichard, CEO, OCLC, Inc., Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Book of Mistakes: 9 Secrets to Creating a Successful Future

“This book could not come at a better time. This is a must read for every organization who is looking to survive and thrive in an uncertain world. Jim has created a roadmap to ensure that you understand what truly drives your business in a way that is both accessible and immediately actionable." — Nadia Bilchik, former CNN Editorial Producer and President Greater Impact Communication.

From the Publisher