Customer Experience (CX) Engineering in Aerospace and Defense:

This book details best and emerging “next” practices in the rapidly evolving discipline of Customer Experience or CX Engineering that new business capture, keep-sold and campaign leaders and teams operating in the aerospace-defense sector tasked with choosing and delivering winning Customer Value Propositions (CVPs) can exploit. Applying these practices will yield significant increases in their contract win-rates, dramatically improve their program executional excellence and financial success, by boosting customer intimacy and staff engagement. To that end it defines, explains and operationalizes with vivid examples the foundational concepts of CX Engineering first codeveloped at Stanford, which since then have been continuously honed and proven to work in over 20 years of applications in diverse companies globally, including extensive work by the authors in aerospace and defense. In doing so, the book challenges many outdated managerial mindsets about the true source of competitive advantage.

The authors, who are a unique triumvirate comprised of award-winning scholars, teachers, senior executives and practitioners, contend that capture teams which adopt a best practices, outside-in and customer centric approach to executing their capture processes can attain supranormal contract win-rates. They explain why mastering the discipline of CX Engineering is key to thriving in a “new game” competitive era. They demonstrate how the aerospace and defense industry, like all sectors, is fast morphing into a set of tightly interconnected new-game markets where the value creation model is changing and how these new-game competitive landscapes alter the rules in applying CX Engineering best and emergent next practices, which are constantly being evolved within these dynamic spaces. The validity of the book’s precepts is shown by the author’s work and examples in other technology -intensive sectors in energy, finance, healthcare, IT, logistics, pharma/biopharma, semiconductors and telecoms.

The authors go on to describe key elements of the strategic mindset and capabilities that CX leaders use to win new-game markets which have been unmistakably revealed over the past two decades of 21st century competition, and as wielded by the world’s most valuable companies. The book showcases their application and obstacles to adoption in an industry where the future fate of nations and humankind often hangs in the balance and where choosing and delivering winning CVPs requires an equivalent of a 10th degree black belt in the management art of CX Engineering. Details of how to integrate these best practices of CX Engineering into competitive proposals capable of winning new business contracts worth billions of dollars are vividly illustrated using example after example that the authors were personally involved with, many of which have never-before-told-backstories that make the rivalries and infighting on popular TV soap opera series such as Dallas or Succession or movies like Air and Ford vs. Ferrari look petty.

What sets this book apart from other titles on new business capture and best practices is the book’s wuthering criticism of the industry’s dominant logic, one predicated on an internally-driven, inside-out and technology-centric approach in which new business capture teams try to convince a customer community that the existing products, services and capabilities their enterprise excels at are exactly what their stakeholders need, often wrapped in unsubstantiated claims of “better performance, faster schedule and lower cost”. Even more distinctive is how major firms unable to escape the tyranny of this dominant logic were soundly beaten by teams wielding the outside-in, customer-centric processes and mindsets advocated in this book. The case studies on captures like the Orion spacecraft that will take humans to the Moon and solar system beyond, and Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, which will modernize the US aging nuclear missile arsenal, are all jaw-dropping reversals of this dominant logic.

But unlike many authors who are long on criticism of the industry and its many needed reforms, and yet short on proffered solutions, the authors of this book who were “in the ring” leverage their unique “on the ground perspective” to show in detail how new business capture, keep-sold and campaign teams can weaponize the ideas in the book to reap rewards for their enterprise, national security customers and the nation. The authors also pitch in their views on how the US Government Acquisition Community can leverage these concepts for the nation’s benefit. Downloadable versions of the author’s exercises, templates, toolsets and short eLearning modules are also available to help speed application of the ideas. This is ever more important at a time when US near-peer rivals in the great global power struggle are accessing and investing heavily in new technologies that are widely available to all adversaries—and in several cases, these players are more advanced than the US and its allies in their deployment and usage.

Finally, we think we would be remiss if we didn’t mention one other aspect of the content of this book that separates it from many other industry-related titles—and that is the fact that the generalizability of the book’s best and emerging next practices extends far beyond just the aerospace-defense sector to address formidable challenges confronted by leaders and teams in other enterprises operating in diverse technology-intense industries. The best evidence for this is the enduring work over the last 30 years conducted by one of our authors, Dr. Lynn Phillips, in applying these same precepts to other industry sectors including energy, natural resources, financial services, capital markets, healthcare, IT, logistics, pharma/biopharma, semiconductors, software, telecoms, transportation, and a host of venture capital backed startups and private equity-owned companies. Executives from these other sectors whose mindset is “what happens in aerospace-defense stays in aerospace-defense” because of its unique nature, do so at their own peril.