In this talk, the speaker traces the evolution of business strategy from the competition‑focused era of the 1980s (Michael Porter’s competitive advantage) to the customer‑centric wave sparked by Amazon and Jeff Bezos in the 1990s, and argues that a new paradigm is emerging: treating employees as the next primary customer. Citing thought leaders such as David Ulrich, Stefan Mayer, Tiffany Bova, and Felix Oberholzer, the speaker explains why companies have long used sophisticated segmentation, data, and personalization for customers but have largely ignored these tools for their workforce. He highlights modern HR and collaboration platforms (OfficeVibe, 15Five, Lattice, Culture Amp, Slack, Teams, Asana, Trello) that generate real‑time employee data, and proposes applying customer‑lifetime‑value (CLV) thinking to employees (Employee Lifetime Value, ELV). The talk outlines the four core motivators from self‑determination theory—purpose, autonomy, competence, relatedness—and suggests segmenting employees by these drivers to design personalized job “products.” Using the historical analogy of General Motors’ multi‑brand car segmentation, the speaker predicts that a company that truly personalizes employee value propositions will gain a competitive edge, while others will eventually be forced to follow. The overall message is a call to shift from generic employee packages to a data‑driven, segmented, and purpose‑aligned employee experience.
Chapters
In the 1980s, business strategy was dominated by competition. Michael Porter introduces the concept of competitive advantage, and strategists and business leaders, they become obsessed with differentiating their business from the competition, taking market share, being, as GE famously did, number one or number two in their market. Then in the mid-1990s, something changed. Amazon is founded, it rapidly scales and becomes the poster child for a new perspective. Jeff Bezos's line, if you're competitive-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something, and being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering. This mindset becomes the dominant logic. Winning depends on deep customer insight and responsiveness to needs. Now, I believe we are about to enter another paradigm. We are moving from competition to customer and now to to employees. Numerous business experts are alluding to this. David Ulrich, the father of modern-day human resources, on our podcast pointed out that while companies have developed sophisticated methods over many decades to segment and target customers, we apply almost none of this to employees. We sell employees the same standard package. We still follow Henry Ford's approach, you know, where he said, you can have any color car you want as long as it's a black Model T. Now, Stefan Mayer, Columbia professor and author of a new book, The Employee Advantage: How Putting Workers First Helps Businesses Thrive, shows that the same trends that push customers to the center of focus are now pushing employees to that center. First, there's competition and innovation. Your competitors are starting to offer employees more attractive, innovative options. Number 2, there's transparency. There's a lot more transparency about the employee experience. Jeff Bezos, when he introduced customer centricity, he once said that if you fail a customer in a brick-and-mortar environment, they might tell 6 people, but if you fail them in a digital environment, they may tell 6,000 people. Now, the same thing is becoming true for workers. Using platforms like Glassdoor, your employees can complain about the work product you are giving them. And then data. Amazon rose during a period in which the amount of data about customers was surging. And now we see that same proliferation of data around the employee. Think about tools like OfficeVibe and 15Five, which allow employees to provide continuous feedback, track goals, and give recognition in real time. Managers receive instant insights into team dynamics, and they can address issues promptly rather than waiting for an annual performance survey. Platforms like Lattice and Culture Amp. They enable ongoing performance reviews and feedback. Managers can set goals, track progress, and give feedback continuously. Then you've got, of course, workplace communication tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams. They've got integrated feedback mechanisms. For example, using bots or apps with these platforms, employees can give and receive feedback instantly. Also, we have project management software like Asana and Trello, which also provide real-time data when things get done, how quickly they get done, when they get completed. Employees are becoming digital employees just as customers became digital customers. And then number 4, preferences have changed. Experience and purpose and meaning has become more important to workers for a variety of reasons. Here's how you can think of it. Think of a company as creating value in 2 ways. This is the value stick model taught often at Harvard Business School. And there's a great explanation of this in Felix Oberholzer's Gee's Better, Simpler Strategy. He was also on our podcast. You increase a customer's willingness to pay by offering ever more attractive products, and then you decrease your supplier's willingness to sell, pushing it down by becoming ever more attractive as a partner. So your employers are your suppliers. If you can give them a better experience, they would be willing to work for less. Now, that doesn't mean that you necessarily ask them to work for less because it also means that they will give you more productivity for what you pay them. They will come in earlier, they're going to work harder, they're going to be more creative, they're going to look for ideas for improving the company. So your value proposition to your employees is as important as your value proposition to customers. And the truth is, most companies, maybe even all companies, are terrible about thinking about their employee value proposition. They create lots of friction by trying to make things easier for customers. They make their employees' lives more complicated. Tiffany Bova breaks this down in her Experience Advantage book. What we need to start doing is measuring and managing employee lifetime value, just as so many companies have done with customer lifetime value. CLV is a simple but powerful concept. You take each customer and you ask, how much does it cost to acquire this customer? How many times will they How profitable will those transactions be? How long will they stay? And how many other valuable customers will they refer? Then you can do a net present value calculation and actually value each customer. Ask if a company looks at employee lifetime value, and they'll probably look at you like you're crazy. And if a company doesn't— there are a few that do, they talk about ELV— all they're doing is taking their total profit, dividing it by the number of employees, so that's Profit per employees, and then just multiplying that by the number of years employees tend to stay. That's like doing a Net Promoter Score but not measuring P, not measuring how much are people promoting. That's like measuring customer lifetime value not on an individual customer basis or even by customer segments, but just piling all of the customers into one bucket and measuring their collective value. What's the use of that? If you're an investor, Yes, you can choose between companies, but if you're a company, you're not segmenting. You're just measuring how well you're doing by treating everyone the same. What we should be doing is looking at the unique needs of each employee, or at least each type of employee. For example, self-determination theory proposes that there are 4 primary motivators: purpose, autonomy, competence, and relatedness or connection. While all of these may be important to each of us, we each have different priorities. Some of us care more about a sense of purpose. They want to get to the moon. They want to have meaning. Some really value autonomy, having the trust to do it my way. Some want competence, to build new skills and improve themselves. Some value relatedness, a sense of belonging and connection. Now, if we were talking about customers and these were identified as the primary motivators for why they buy, what we would automatically do is figure out the rank order of these things for different types of people, then we'd segment the ones that are similar together, and then we customize our product to perform well on what matters most to each segment. That's the attribute map. But we don't even think about doing that for our employees. So what would that look like? What would it look like if you treated employees like you did customers? What if you were selling a job? For the person who wants autonomy, you might create a situation in which they can work from wherever, whenever they want. You don't need to have any in-person contact. But then take the person who maybe is doing the exact same job, but what they care about is connection. You wanna give them a job in which they have to come into the office, they have to work in open spaces, they interact with others. What about the person who cares about competence? Maybe you give them no freedom of where and when to work, or even consistency with who they work with, and instead they go from one demanding project to another, building skills along the way. The question should not be, should we work from home or the office? Should we work in teams or on our own? Should we allow people to work on the same thing or change what they do all the time? That is like asking, should we make a car that is safe or fast? Luxurious or economical? You don't sell cars that way. You segment, you personalize. Before 1920, car companies pretty much sold the same type of car to any customer they came across. Then one car company revolutionized the automotive market by segmenting and designing cars for different customer segments. That was General Motors. Alfred P. Sloan, who became president of GM in the 1920s, introduced the concept of a car for every purse and purpose, positioning different brands under the GM company brand to cater to various market segments. That is what is going to happen here. One company is going to finally emerge and truly personalize the job product that they offer employees, just as GM did for cars and Amazon did for customer centricity. That company will prove that employees really are the new customer. They will start sucking up the best talent. They will start thriving. They will get ahead. They will be the outthinker. And as history predicts, other companies will resist first, then they're going to struggle, and finally they're going to wake up. The employee is the next customer.
