9. Benefits

The BWB paradigm brings out the best in staff, and induces the best business decisions for the organization and for the corporation as a whole. Consider its benefits:

• Recognizing internal customers creates a culture of customer focus, and enhances partnerships and communications.

• Clearly defining products and "contracts" brings about a results orientation, and clearly specifies accountabilities for results, prices, and delivery times.

• Respect for customers' purchase decisions automatically ensures strategic alignment throughout the corporation.

  Instead of vague plans, committees, and decrees which ask providers to guess what their customers might need, internal customers will use their limited spending power to buy just what they most need to accomplish their strategies. This maximizes ROI.

• Using the internal value chain rather than top-down plans adjusts the internal economy -- what each organization does for whom -- dynamically throughout the year, allowing the corporation to realign resources quickly and flexibly as strategies shift in turbulent times.

• Treating peers as internal suppliers provides a mechanism for flexible, dynamic cross-boundary teamwork. Everyone buys from peers just what they need to get their jobs done. This is much more flexible and effective than pre-defined business processes.

• Recognizing peers as customers improves the quality and customer focus of internal support staff. It also encourages all groups to sell their products and services to others within the organization just as they do to clients outside the organization, eliminating the "cobbler's children" syndrome where the organization is the last to utilize its own products and services.

• Viewing internal support functions as businesses eliminates two classes of citizenship (operational versus support functions), and brings efficiency and innovation to what some might call "back room" functions.

• The pressure of competition (internal and external) makes everybody frugal, to ensure that they're delivering the best value and growing their market share. Top-down cost-cutting edicts are replaced with cost-conscious decision making at every level, on every issue, every day, maximizing the organization's returns on investments.

• Earning market share through performance makes each group an internal vendor of choice. This reduces pressure for expensive decentralization and outsourcing.

• Managing staff by their P&L rather than expense caps allows internal entrepreneurs to respond to new, high-payoff opportunities rather than being resource-constrained obstacles to customers' business objectives; and it encourages staff to be innovative about offering new, high-payoff products and services.

• Viewing contractors and vendors as extensions to internal staff makes the best use of insiders and outsiders in every case, all the time (unlike massive, monolithic outsourcing studies).

  Whenever vendors and contractors offer a better value, internal entrepreneurs are the first to offer outsiders as part of their product line. And when vendors are brought in through the appropriate internal staff, those in the profession manage their external colleagues, ensuring compliance with corporate standards and policies.

• The feeling of ownership of a business motivates people to do all they can to improve the organization, including performing at their own peaks.

• The entrepreneurial spirit gets everyone thinking about improving current processes; innovating to keep current products and services up to date; and inventing new products and services that might contribute to customers' businesses.

• Fulfilling, whole jobs engage the creative thinking of everyone in the organization.

  People are motivated by more than just money; they work to seek self-fulfillment, to contribute meaningfully to worthwhile purposes, and to enjoy social interactions. BWB organizations offer all these motivators. By becoming employers of choice, BWB organizations attract and retain the best talent in a way that obviates hiring bidding wars.

• The experience of running a small business cultivates the next generation of corporate leaders.

The positive effects of the BWB paradigm are lasting, not fleeting, because they're based on systemic change. Unlike strategic plans, leadership development programs, and executive exhortations and commands, implementing a BWB organization maximizes everybody's performance, on every front, forevermore.