Strengthen Customer And Supplier Intimacy
Customers
A profitable company depend in a large measure on its ability to attract and retain customers (while denying them to competitors), and charge high prices. The Power of customers grows if they can easily switch to a competitor’s product and service, or if they can force a business and its competitors to compete on price alone in a transparent market place where there is little product differentiation, and all price are known instantly(such as on the internet).
Supplier
The market power of suppliers can have a significant impact on firm profits, especially when the firm can’t raise price as fast as can supplier. The more different suppliers a firm has, the greater control it can exercise over supplier in terms of price, quality, and delivery schedules.
Customer intimacy is the largest source of the growth, sustainable competitive advantage, and profit. Everyone in organization should practice it. Customer-intimate companies bring an entirely fresh perspective. They discover unsuspected problems, detect unrealized potential, and create a dynamic synergy with customers. They often merge their operations with those of their customers. In the integration of their operations, suppliers become more than merely useful: they become indispensable.
Business have traditionally relied on technology and product innovation for competitive advantage. However, as products became commodities due to global competition and relentless technological advances, the battleground for differentiation and customer value creation shifted to customer intimacy and service. This service-focused competitive strategy has worked well for numerous companies across various industry sectors.
Benefit to everyone in the organization
Customer intimacy
 gives senior managers a new vision of the future, a strategy that makes sense, and the tactics to make it work.
 helps sales and account managers build deeper and more productive relationships with selected customers, arming them with a real-world model of success in their battle to unite factory and field.
 helps information-technology professionals leverage emerging innovation: keeping information flowing back and forth to customers, and coaching them on how to get the best results with that information.
 helps human-resource professionals to deal with a most sensitive challenge of the commitment to deliver results – to integrate the supplier's personnel into a customer's operation.



Case in poiny 25 Lessons from Jack Welch
Jack Welch’s goal was to make GE “the wold’s most competitive enterprise”. Welch believed in trying to know every employee and every customers, just like a village grocer. Welch even nicknamed GE “the grocery store”: what is important at the grocery store is just as important in engines or medical systems. If the customer isn’t statisfied, if the stuff is getting stale, if the shelf isn’t right, or if the offerings aren’t right, it’s the same thing. He knew that it would take nothing less than a "revolution" to transform that dream into a reality. "The model of business in corporate America in 1980 had not changed in decades. Workers worked, managers managed, and everyone new their place. Forms and approvals and bureaucracy ruled the day."2 Welch's self-proclaimed revolution meant waging war on GE's old ways of doing things and reinventing the company from top to bottom.
Today, GE with its unique learning culture and boundaryless organization is one the most admired company in the world.