About the Authors
Charlie Dawson is the founder of The Foundation, a consultancy set up in 1999 to help organisations be customer-led, not financially led, creating value for customers as the first priority but also for the business, in order that commercial success is decisive and sustained.
The growth of The Foundation has meant learning what it takes to put customer-led ideas into practice. It has meant bringing together skills usually found separately, in particular customer and business understanding. Charlie was originally inspired by working on a new car company launch that did this by happy accident to great effect, and it was in discussing the story with the MBA class at London Business School that Charlie and Seán first met – Seán was doing his PhD there at the time. Charlie previously worked in advertising and has a First Class degree in Manufacturing Engineering from Cambridge.
Seán Meehan is the Martin Hilti Professor of Marketing and Change Management at IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is an accomplished academic, instructor, consultant and a thought-leader working with companies across industries globally to grow capability to create customer value in new and better ways.
Over 25 years he has studied customer focus – what it is and how it contributes to superior performance. He has authored two other important books on the subject: Simply Better: Winning and Keeping Customers by Delivering What Matters Most, and Beyond the Familiar: Long Term Growth through Customer Focus and Innovation. He has been published in Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review and received awards from The Marketing Science Institute, The Academy of Marketing and The American Marketing Association.
Speaker Topics
The authors welcome invitations to speak on topics including:
How to become a customer-led success
What it means, why it matters, how it’s done, learning from the best customer-led companies.
How business purpose is most effective when it’s customer-led
Seeing through the fog of purposewash with clear thinking about who organisations serve and the one quality that success depends on – shared belief.
Why all customer-led successes will lose their mojo
What goes wrong and how to delay the inevitable, keeping the organisation on Day 1.