People-focused knowledge management

New Successful Services Strategy Made Possible by
Costly Education
People throughout Financo, a financial services firm, were 
following developments in the marketplace closely. They were
encouraged by the executives to identify customer and competi-
tor behaviors and to assess trends and potential opportunities.
Table 6-3
Simplified example of situation-handing in finding location, deciding type,
building, and opening a new store.
Situation-Handling Activities
Monitoring
Sensemaking
Identify geographic market
Ascertain that company 
to be served
goals for market size and 
Assess cost-performance 
profitability are observed
feasibility of potential
locations
Decision-Making &
Determine potential store 
Ascertain that company 
Problem-Solving
designs for likely locations
standards for store 
Select store location
designs can be
implemented
Implementation
Perform final store design
Ascertain that company 
Build, staff and open store
criteria for contractor
selection, contract terms,
personnel policies, etc.
are followed
Metamonitoring
Ascertain that project is
pursued and monitored
according to company
strategy and not as
business-as-usual
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The executives were particularly interested in new strategic
directions that would support CEO Paul McTierny’s belief that
they never should offer services that could be perceived to exploit
customers. Instead, the firm should offer services that would
provide as great a value to customers as possible. The basis for
this philosophy was that success would be secure when their 
customers were served better by the firm than by competitors.
Based on inputs from everywhere, the Marketing Department
and executive committee identified several market opportunities
that could be created and exploited. They decided to provide a
new service to give advice to customers that would build their
understanding of how to make their own investment decisions.
Such a service would be competitively novel and fall in line with
the desired strategic intents as well as the CEO’s philosophy of
being of genuine help and value to customers. However, pursu-
ing this strategy required delivering the new services to its cus-
tomers with a great deal of expertise. The new services would
require customer service representatives (CSRs) to possess addi-
tional knowledge, which they would have to acquire through
additional costly education.
Nevertheless, the executive committee judged that the new
strategic direction would be worth the risk. They therefore pro-
ceeded with implementation by creating a pilot program that
would provide the new service to key customers using a small
number of highly experienced and specially educated CSRs. This
program was highly successful. The next step was taken to
create an educational program for all service representatives,
using the experienced CSRs as extra resources to share their
approaches and deeper understanding of how to assist 
customers.