Driving Digital Strategy

Chapter 1

Business Scope

In 1960, Theodore Levitt, a Harvard Business School professor, published a provocative paper in Harvard Business Review in which he argued that companies were too focused on products and not enough on customer needs. To help managers address this problem, he asked, “What business are you really in?”¹ More than five decades later this fundamental question has become even more important, as companies are moving from products to platforms and as industry boundaries are getting blurred. Yet even though the majority of firms are trying to become customer-centric, it is not uncommon to hear senior executives, be it from General Motors or Walmart, define their businesses, their industries, and their competition by the products ...