The Delta Model

Strategy is the most central issue in management. It has to do with defining the purpose of an organization, understanding the market in which it operates and the capabilities the firm possesses, and putting together a winning plan. There are many influential frameworks to help managers undertake a systematic reflection on this issue. The most dominant approaches are Michael Porter’s "Competitive Strategy" and the "Resource-Based View of the Firm," popularized by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad. Arnoldo Hax argues there are fundamental drawbacks in the underlying hypotheses of these approaches in that they define strategy as a way to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. This line of thinking could be extremely dangerous because it puts the competitor at the center and therefore anchors you in the past, establishes success as a way of beating your competitors, and this obsession often leads toward imitation and congruency. The result is commoditization - which is the worst outcome that could possibly happen to a business. The Delta Model is an extremely innovative view of strategy. It abandons all of these assumptions and instead puts the customer at the center. By doing that it allows us to be truly creative, separating ourselves from the herd in pursuit of a unique and differentiated customer value proposition. Many years of intense research at MIT, supported by an extensive consulting practice, have resulted in development of powerful new concepts and practical tools to guide organizational leaders into a completely different way of looking at strategy, including a new way of doing customer segmentation and examining the competencies of the firm, with an emphasis on using the extended enterprise as a primary way of serving the customer. This last concept means that we cannot play the game alone; that we need to establish a network among suppliers, the firm, the customers, and complementors – firms that are in the business of developing products and services that enhance our own offering to the customer. Illustrated through dozens of examples, and discussion of application to small and medium-sized businesses and not-for-profits, the Delta Model will help readers in all types of organizations break out of old patterns of behavior and achieve strategic flexibility -- an especially timely talent during times of crisis, intense competition, and rapid change.

Emerging from the authors' work with companies such as Coca-Cola, Motorola, 3M, General Motors and Unilever, The Delta Projec t provides a unique model through which to develop strategy in the new economy. Hax and Wilde examine how globalization, deregulation and the emergence of the internet infrastructure have changed the rules for success and identify three distinct strategic positions that can be used to realign the direction of your business. Introducing new models of 'bonding', 'complementors' and 'customer lock-in' this book provides a fundamental shift in the way we think about competitive positioning.

Delta CX is a refreshing model bringing CX and UX together in task and in name with the key goal of improving the products, services, and experiences (PSE) that we offer our potential and current customers. Rather than following trends or drinking the snake oil, Delta CX presents a time-tested, thorough approach that helps you establish values, vision, strategies, and goals. Great PSE require the right teams and strategies in place to proactively predict and mitigate the risk of delivering wrong or flawed PSE. Adopting Delta CX means we all finally speak the same language, from tasks and deliverables to job titles and required skills to where CX fits into Agile organizations to processes and teams. Calculate the ROI of investing more time and resources into building the right PSE the first time. Save time, money, and sanity. Replace guessing and assumptions with Lean customer research that is planned, conducted, and interpreted by experts. Learn why quality should be our #1 priority, and how to rededicate our organization to our external and internal customers.Target audiences: Managers, workers, practitioners, freelancers, consultants, contractors, execs, stakeholders, and everybody else working in CX, UX, Marketing, Product Management, Engineering, Project Management. Business Analysts (BAs), Data Scientists, Writers, Visual Designers, Information Architects, Interaction Designers, Product Designers, and Researchers.The long and problem-focused version: In an era of faster, faster, faster, our workplaces are sacrificing quality, collaboration, culture, and the customer experience to "just ship it." Business goals don't seem to align with customers' needs. Customers constantly raise their standards and expectations, and they notice when companies are out of touch or get it wrong. Competitors, investors, shareholders, the press, bloggers, social media, and Wall Street also notice. Brands are being surprised when their products, services, and experiences (PSE) are disliked or rejected by customers, or go viral for the wrong reasons. Companies claim they are customer-focused, user-centric, and designing for the needs of real customers. Initiatives to increase the ability to build the right PSE should have meant hiring more CX and UX talent. However, with UX still misunderstood, circumvented, overruled, and excluded at many companies, workplaces that didn't know how to assess CX and UX talent hired anybody who put "UX" on their resume. Poor hiring choices lead to silos and "bad design." Rather than wondering if "UX" workers were unqualified, leadership blamed UX and User-Centered Design (UCD): They must be bloated, outdated, not Lean, not Agile things we don't really need. We started imagining that "everybody can be a designer." Get people sketching in design sprints, and solve our company's biggest challenges. We called for democratization and decentralization of UX and design because perhaps taking some power away from these "high-ego UX people" we hired will fix this. Suddenly, everybody was a design thinker doing design thinking, yet few people can agree on what design thinking is.Everybody became quietly desperate. UX practitioners wanted to evangelize, and invited teammates to UX evangelism presentations, which often backfired. Companies of all sizes and ages, including Fortune 500s, tried methodologies designed for startups. Startups fail roughly 95% of the time. It's so rare that they innovate or build something the public actually wants. Why would we want to emulate a segment with such a high failure rate? We're lost. We need another business transformation, a return to prioritizing the quality of what we ideate, architect, design, test, build, and unleash on the public.(Return to the top for the short and happy version.)

Profiling more than 50 ships that Voyager encountered in the Delta Quadrant, this is the 2nd of two volumes that profile the ships from STAR TREK: VOYAGER. Featuring the Lokirrim Warship, the Species 8472 Bioship, and the Vidiian Warships, and many more. Including technical overviews and operational histories, the ships are illustrated with CG artwork, created using the original VFX models made for the STAR TREK: VOYAGER TV series. With previously unseen artwork, the two official volumes form the most comprehensive account of ships from STAR TREK: VOYAGER ever produced. Be sure to also look for Volume 1, The Borg and Delta Quadrant: Akritirian to Krenim, which features the ships of the Borg, and includes the Borg Cube and Borg Sphere, Borg Queen's Ship, the Renegade Borg Vessel and the Borg Tactical Cube, in addition to thirty-five ships of the Delta Quadrant species.

This book answers key questions about environment, people and their shared future in deltas. It develops a systematic and holistic approach for policy-orientated analysis for the future of these regions. It does so by focusing on ecosystem services in the world’s largest, most populous and most iconic delta region, that of the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta in Bangladesh. The book covers the conceptual basis, research approaches and challenges, while also providing a methodology for integration across multiple disciplines, offering a potential prototype for assessments of deltas worldwide. Ecosystem Services for Well-Being in Deltas analyses changing ecosystem services in deltas; the health and well-being of people reliant on them; the continued central role of agriculture and fishing; and the implications of aquaculture in such environments.The analysis is brought together in an integrated and accessible way to examine the future of the Ganges Brahmaputra delta based on a near decade of research by a team of the world’s leading scientists on deltas and their human and environmental dimensions. This book is essential reading for students and academics within the fields of Environmental Geography, Sustainable Development and Environmental Policy focused on solving the world’s most critical challenges of balancing humans with their environments. This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

As a follow-up to the successful Competing on Analytics, authors Tom Davenport, Jeanne Harris, and Robert Morison provide practical frameworks and tools for all companies that want to use analytics as a basis for more effective and more profitable decision making. Regardless of your company's strategy, and whether or not analytics are your company's primary source of competitive differentiation, this book is designed to help you assess your organization's analytical capabilities, provide the tools to build these capabilities, and put analytics to work. The book helps you answer these pressing questions: What assets do I need in place in my organization in order to use analytics to run my business? Once I have these assets, how do I deploy them to get the most from an analytic approach? How do I get an analytic initiative off the ground in the first place, and then how do I sustain analytics in my organization over time? Packed with tools, frameworks, and all new examples, Analytics at Work makes analytics understandable and accessible and teaches you how to make your company more analytical.

The two LNAI volumes 6678 and 6679 constitute the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Hybrid Artificial Intelligent Systems, HAIS 2011, held in Wroclaw, Poland, in May 2011. The 114 papers published in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 241 submissions. They are organized in topical sessions on hybrid intelligence systems on logistics and intelligent optimization; metaheuristics for combinatorial optimization and modelling complex systems; hybrid systems for context-based information fusion; methods of classifier fusion; intelligent systems for data mining and applications; systems, man, and cybernetics; hybrid artificial intelligence systems in management of production systems; habrid artificial intelligent systems for medical applications; and hybrid intelligent approaches in cooperative multi-robot systems.