Telecom Book

 Customer relationship management, commonly known as crm, is part of a late 20th-century systematic shift in the structure and strategies of corporations. It is, says Dale Renner, ceo of Seisint, a data-mining business, something that encompasses “identifying, attracting and retaining themost valuable customers to sustain profitable growth”. crm is a way of designing structures and systems so that the company is focused on providing consumers (profitably) with what they want, rather than on making products that it, the company, thinks they might want.

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The experience curve is an idea developed by the Boston Consulting Group  in the mid-1960s. Working with a leading manufacturer of semiconductors, the consultants noticed that the company’s unit cost of manufacturing fell by about 25% for each doubling of the volume that it produced. This relationship it called the experience curve: the more experience a firm has in producing a particular product, the lower are its costs. Bruce Henderson, the founder of bcg, put it as follows: Costs characteristically decline by 20–30% in real terms each time accumulated experience doubles. This means that when infiation is factored out, costs should always decline.

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 The idea of business as a game, in the sense that a move by one player sparks off moves by others, runs through much strategic thinking. It is borrowed from a branch of economics (game theory) in which no economic agent (individual or corporate) is an island, living and acting independently of others. In sectors where firms compete fiercely for market share and customer loyalty, this stylised progression of moves closely parallels actual behaviour. Few firms nowadays think about strategy without adding a bit of game theory.

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Following the publication in 1982 of the best-selling management book of all time –  In Search of Excellence, written by two consultants, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman – a movement grew up behind the main idea in the book, the idea of excellence. The authors claimed to have found eight attributes that characterised what they defined as excellent companies in the United States (the subtext read “try them and you can be excellent too”).

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