The book appealed to me as a middle manager because I believe a focused study of population behavior can help us direct innovation in our older product line areas. The view of customers in large corporations tends to be very segmented. Each department thinks it has the true view but in fact they’ve only got a piece of the elephant. The study of populations gives you the rough outline of the elephant and forces you to confront different questions about your customers than the narrower view does. Few companies today have data that would give both breadth of population and intimacy of face to face relationships. I hope the two approaches can be combined for a balanced view.
I agreed with your point that TQM and LSS and other operational disciplines just raised the baseline for everyone, but that doesn’t mean a company can refuse to do them, they just become tickets to the game because now the market expects that level of perfomance from everyone. I actually think analytics will become a baseline ticket to the game in time but how soon? Given the IT sophistication that is implied in the book maybe quite a few years. In addition, operational discipline takes more time to imitate than product designs since there is a large cultural change drag. At worst, even a couple of years temporary advantage is better than no advantage, better positions a company see the next big thing and better prepares them to afford it. I believe the authors are on to a good thing in Competing on Analytics, even if it turns out that everyone will be excellent in the next decade.