From Customer Intimacy to Post-Efficiency
The quiet collapse of a value strategy — and the economic philosophy we need next
Thirty years ago, Treacy and Wiersema gave us a clean model: three value disciplines: operational excellence, product leadership, customer intimacy. Pick one. Excel at it. Be adequate at the rest.
It was elegant. It was actionable. And it’s breaking down. 😞
Not because the model is wrong, but because we’ve allowed one discipline to consume the others while wearing their clothes.
The simulation of care
Here’s what I see happening: operational excellence has learned to impersonate customer intimacy. The language of care, “we value you” - “your experience matters” is everywhere. But the substance of care is disappearing.
The supermarket lets you self-scan but removed the staff who could help you find what you need. The restaurant replaced waiters with QR codes, efficiency gains captured, relationship lost. Customer service sends personalized emails at scale while making it nearly impossible to reach a human.
I’d call this extractive intimacy: the techniques of relationship deployed not to create value for customers, but to extract value from them. It’s intimacy as interface, not intimacy as commitment.
Technology made this possible. CRM systems, predictive analytics, AI-driven personalisation, they create the appearance of knowing you without the cost of knowing you. Scalable personalization without relationship. The economic upside of intimacy without the investment it requires.
A philosophical problem disguised as strategy
But here’s where it gets interesting. This isn’t just a business strategy question. It’s a question about what kind of economy (and society) we’re building.
When a company optimizes for efficiency and calls it customer-centricity, something breaks in the social contract. The customer feels it, even if they can’t name it. There’s a dissonance between what’s promised and what’s delivered. Trust erodes slowly, then suddenly.
And we’re complicit. As consumers, we’ve been trained (or have trained ourselves) to optimize for price and convenience. We choose the cheaper option, the faster delivery, the frictionless transaction. These aren’t even rational choices in the classical sense. As Kahneman showed us, most decisions run on intuition, not calculation. We default to cheaper and faster because it feels obvious, not because we’ve weighed the trade-offs. That makes this pattern harder to break, you can’t reason your way out of something that was never reasoning to begin with. The collective outcome is impoverishment.
This is like a prisoner’s dilemma (chicken-egg) at societal scale. And like all prisoner’s dilemmas, it requires coordination to escape.
The hidden costs
What bothers me most is what we’re not counting. When the checkout person disappears, we save labor costs. But we also eliminate, for some people, the only human interaction they’ll have that day. When we automate customer service, we gain efficiency. But we lose the texture of relationship that builds loyalty beyond reason.
These aren’t soft concerns. They’re economic realities that don’t fit in quarterly reports. The costs don’t disappear, they externalize. They show up as loneliness, as unemployment, as the hollowing out of communities, as brands that inspire no devotion.
We’ve built an economic system that’s remarkably good at measuring what’s easy to measure, and remarkably bad at valuing what matters.
Beyond nostalgia: the case for post-efficiency
The temptation here is romanticism. Back to the village shop. Vintage marketing. The good old days. That’s a trap. Nostalgia is easily dismissed, and rightly so. You can’t compete with scale economics by wishing them away.
The more interesting move is forward, not backward. Through the efficiency era, not around it. We’ve seen what hyper-optimization produces. We’ve experienced its limits. The question now is whether we can consciously choose something else.
Let’s call it: post-efficiency.
Not anti-efficiency, that would be naive. Efficiency remains a means. But post-efficiency recognises it’s not an end. It asks: efficient for what? Optimised toward what?
A post-efficient company might accept 10% margin instead of 12% because it understands that the 2% captured by eliminating human contact will leak out elsewhere, in customer churn, in employer branding, in the slow erosion of what made the brand worth choosing in the first place.
This isn’t charity. It’s a longer time horizon. It’s recognising that some assets don’t appear on balance sheets but determine everything.
The integrity test
Here’s the practical tension I see every day: companies that say they value customer intimacy but whose culture, incentives, and processes are pure operational excellence.
That gap is unsustainable. Brand promise and organizational reality can diverge for a while, but eventually customers feel it. Employees feel it first. The dissonance becomes corrosive.
Treacy and Wiersema weren’t wrong. But their model assumed you’d actually choose and live with the consequences of that choice. What we’ve created instead is a widespread pretense: efficiency operations wearing intimacy masks.
The question for every organization isn’t “how do we simulate intimacy at scale?”
… but …
To accept that some things worth having can’t be optimised?
To believe that the long game might actually be the winning game?