The Future of Competition

Chapter Nine

MANAGER AS CONSUMER

MANAGING the co-creation of unique value demands a new capability: the ability for managers to relate to consumer interactions with the experience network. Managers must increasingly experience and understand the business as consumers do, and not merely as an abstraction of numbers and charts.¹

How can managers of large and mid-sized companies achieve the kind of visceral understanding of the business that a mom-and-pop store owner has? How can line managers feel and share the consumer’s concerns, desires, and aspirations? How can they make their experience of the business, on a real-time, continuous basis, approximate to the experience of consumers?

In the emergent world of co-creation, we consider every employee ...