Jerry Stead, when he was at National Cash Register, once said, "If you are at a meeting and you're not discussing customers or the competition, raise your hand and ask why not!" This forms the backbone of putting the Big Equation of Business into practice. The idea is that all companies are after profits. Profits come from Revenue minus Cost. Revenue is driven by Market Share and Acquisition of Market Share (buying companies or assets). Market Share is driven by customers’ perception of value. Value, according to Gale and Kordupleski, is determined by customer satisfaction and customer perception of the cost of doing business with you (not just price, but all price attributes). These, in turn, are driven by internal predictive metrics. The metrics are driven by employee satisfaction. Employee satisfaction is predictable from other metrics, which are driven by management decisions. Managers make decisions based upon the data they are given, usually customer, market or shareholder pain of some sort.  

 An example of this concept would be when Cadillac was audited by examiners for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1990. The examiners picked an employee at random from our Hamtramck plant, out of 7,000 employees. The examiners approached the worker and asked him who his customer was. The employee was putting in windshields. He responded, "Do you mean my internal customer or my external customer?" I could have kissed him on the lips! He proceeded to discuss how he talks to his customer, the next worker in the assembly line, at every break to discuss how things were going. He also talks to his predecessor in the assembly line, the guy who supplies him. For the external customer, he talked about how we had arranged for each person on the assembly line to come off the line for a half hour a month to call customers who had ordered a Cadillac. He described how their car looked and how he had just put in their windshield. In this way the customers got excited and the employee felt connected to the customer.

Initially, management had been reluctant to execute this idea. They were worried about the employees in Detroit speaking with the types of customers who bought Cadillacs. In fact, everyone enjoyed these conversations very much, including the customers. Everyone felt motivated. The customers could not wait to see the car they had ordered. The employees often wrote notes and letters to put into the glove box. There were frequent stories of employees being invited to go fishing or to a ball game when making these calls to customers. Cadillac has traditionally had the highest customer loyalty in the industry, in part, because of programs such as this. Not only were our customers loyal to Cadillac, but our employees were loyal to the customers as well.

The Baldrige examiners were impressed that Cadillac had stressed making the connection at each step in the Big Equation of Business from the employees to customers, and eventually to profits. Everyone, including the customer, benefitted from the connections being made.