Unlocking the Customer Value Chain: How Decoupling Drives Consumer Disruption

This is a long overdue book. Many articles attempt and fail to describe (in detail) the relationship between customers, companies and technology. Whilst it’s true that the big four continue to take more control of our lives, this book brilliantly describes how customers will always find a way to break new grounds. Whilst tech is the latest enabler, we all recognise (including the author) this scale and structure of change feels materially different.

An incredible book that teaches you how to look at, predict and use disruption to your advantage. Teixeira includes plenty of case studies which provides practical insights and are fascinating to read. The frameworks are clear and easy to interpret. You will almost get embarrassed by the fact that you have not thought about disruption in this way before. Reading this book will be crucial for long-term success for a business!Bottom line: Fantastic book that will change the way you look at businesses and disruption, should be mandatory for all CEOs and consultants.

I have been building new businesses for the last 12 years. I have read a lot of books and spoken to a lot of people who have also built new businesses. So I know a little about disruptive business models. And yet I was blown away by this book. Its easily one of the very best business books that you can find on understanding the dynamics of disruptive business models. I have been recommending it to everyone and getting a lot of thank you's.The core argument in this book is to understand the business model from a customers view point. Thales lays it out in the form of a framework he calls the Customer Value Chain. This framework splits the various steps in the customer journey and classifies them as value creating and value destroying. A disruptive business can take one or more parts of this chain and build a business around it by offering a superior customer experience. By doing so, they disrupt the existing business models - often taking away their most profitable and value enhancing components.This is an elegant framework. Reminds me of those elegant mathematical proofs. Simple yet rigorous. As Thales puts his framework to test in various scenarios from different industries, its effectiveness in explaining disruption becomes apparent. There are enough practical examples to explain the different points.A corollary of this model is the debunking of the technology myth - that disruptive business models are built on technological innovations. Unless, you are building a tech product, technology only enhances and enables the scaling up of the business. Disruptive business models need the fuel of intelligent insights that comes from understanding the customer value chain.It also offers useful advice to the incumbents. On how to deal with disruption.

Unlocking the customer value chain: How decoupling drives consumer disruption by Thales S. Teixeira is one of the most critical, paradigm-shifting read on disruption & disruptors. Drawing on the "disruptive innovation" concept from Prof. Clayton M. Christensen, the author has, over a period of 8 years, researched multiple companies across a wide band of startups, large incumbents, and tech companies to identify a crucial link that disruptors break in the Customer Value Chain (CVC) of large incumbents, to achieve successThe book is replete with many new references to startups - that have disrupted established players in the specific industry as well as brought out how inertia and decline in innovative approaches within the large incumbents - that have leveraged these factors to succeed in a cutthroat environment. Also, as a reminder and refresher for incumbents, the author has brought out the importance of reverting to customer-centric approaches, rather than remaining firm-centric, to ensure they avoid the mistake that many large corporations made, after they gained market shareAfter the era of The Lean Startup, Zero to One, Innovation Stack, and Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0, the concept of decoupling is already disrupting multiple industries where startups are succeeding through efforts to deliver products or services that are customer-centric and looking to break the weak links in CVC of large incumbents. It is truly a commendable effort by the author, in both sharing the concept/theory behind the decouplers as well as his own journey in unearthing something as subtle as identifying, leveraging, executing, and winning on the strength of linkages within the CVC. This is one book, any intra- or entrepreneur, who have bright ideas and are interested in disrupting the industry or service should not miss!

This book is more about focusing on the right thing in your business....we all have something good to sell but we don't have the business model for it...we have to focus on right business models and not on blaming technologies or thinking that we have a bad product...you have a great product and I believe that so get your ass down the table and start focusing on creating a good business model.