Internally-Driven - Overall

Managing a business in an Internally-Driven fashion results from the need of every enterprise to focus intently on its own internal processes for developing, producing and marketing its products or services. Such an organization can easily be so focused on these processes that it under-appreciates the importance and power of analytic, profound insight into customers' real behavior, motivations and competing alternatives.

The priority of highly Internally-Driven organizations is to produce what utilizes their existing resources, and then to sell it to customers. Fundamentally rethinking an organization's businesses, truly from the perspective of customers, is difficult for an Internally-Driven organization. Rationalizations abound for perpetuating this approach.

Overall, to what extent does this description accurately fit the business you are reviewing?

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Not At All	To Minor Extent	To Some Extent	To Large Extent	To Very Great Extent	Don't Know

Below are six descriptions of more specific "Internally-Driven" business cultures. Consider to what extent each depicts the business you are reviewing

By this philosophy, products should be developed based on the technologies we have developed or which are being pursued by competition; then these products should be marketed and sold to the customers most needing them. Although product development, in this approach, may react to input from customers, it is not primarily driven by an understanding of and commitment to the resulting experiences customers want.

By this philosophy, cost is controlled independently of value delivered to customers, beyond the indirect impact on price. The Cost-Controlled organization may commit to "not reducing our excellent quality or service," while reducing cost; but beyond vague generalities, there is limited if any systematic measure or analysis of the impact of cost reductions on actual value delivered to customers. Short term and even long term costs may improve, but without serious regard to growth or long term profit.

This special cultural form emerged in the 1990's, much fueled by the mass dot com illusions. It often reflects a triumphant alliance between IT (usually harboring a strong Technology-Driven worldview), and the Procurement function. This culture disregards the research of the 1970's and 80's that showed the value of close, supportive relationships with suppliers. Instead, in the name of lofty 'Supply Chain Partnerships' and using cutting edge technology where possible, this mentality focuses on reducing all issues, especially all relationships with suppliers, to the question of cost and price. Costs are cut, but often at the expense of suppliers' abilities to help the business deliver value, and thus at the expense of the business' long term profitability. (While easy to vilify the Procurement function for this syndrome, it is often the relentless corporate pressures for short term earnings that primarily drive this behavior.)

With this mentality, the Sales function does whatever it takes to convince customers to buy what we make, regardless of long term value actually delivered, and regardless of profitability. While easy to blame Sales, this approach usually reflects the priorities assigned to this function by senior management. Customers may be asked what they want and require, but mostly to facilitate answering objections and better positioning our product/service. The Selling function does not attempt to discover new experiences that customers would potentially value. If the customer ultimately does not get superior value, or if the business makes inadequate profit, these are not concerns of the Sales Obsessed.

Here the Marketing function takes exclusive ownership for understanding customers. It takes great pride in its expertise in a wide range of established, often sophisticated, marketing methodologies (e.g., Conjoint Analysis, Multivariate Research and Segmentation, Focus Groups, psycho-graphics, concept testing, etc.). But the organization loses the forest for the trees - we proudly use scientific (or, scientific-sounding) techniques, specialized (sometimes pretentious) vocabulary, and treat the customer as Marketing's turf, but often fail to discover actionable insights, or to really understand customers deeply. Winning Value Propositions are rarely the result.

Here, we must produce certain short-term, largely financial, quantitative results expressed in our budget process, often at the expense of delivering or even measuring value to our customers. Sales volumes, costs, profit, asset levels and financial ratios (e.g.. ROA, ROE, etc.) are the dominant content of the documents that count, our Budgets. Our business must manipulate whatever variables necessary to produce those results over 1-year and shorter time frames. We may blame share holders or other forces, but making these numbers is equated with "management" and "leadership." Understanding and pursuit of the drivers of these numbers, especially longer-term, are not of much importance in this philosophy.