JU-YEON LEE, SHRIHARI SRIDHAR AND ROBERT W. PALMATIER
The new conventional wisdom on corporate structure is that companies can do better by organizing themselves around customer groups. The logic sounds compelling: A customer-centric structure, as the approach is known, can help a company understand its customers better, develop deeper relationships with them, and improve customer satisfaction. Some 30% of Fortune 500 firms, including Intel, Dell, IBM, and American Express, are already on board, and the numbers are growing all the time.