Then again, if you wanted to provide the best overall solution, you took yet another course, becoming “customer intimate,” that is, developing products flexible enough to serve a wide variety of customer needs and working closely and collaboratively with customers to give them what they wanted. To do that and still earn a profit, you had to structure the whole company around the customer-intimate discipline. Not that you wouldn’t strive to be as efficient and innovative as possible, but you would always do so with an eye toward enhancing your ability to deliver products and services that would
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