Sir, We read with interest Will Hutton's article "Five ways for British companies to raise their game" (November 13), warning that in terms of productivity the British economy languishes at the bottom of international league tables.
A popular response is to relocate manufacturing operations to the newly developed economies. However the lifecycle over which low-cost strategies such as this bear fruit is shortening.
Our experience of today's global markets indicates that to grow and secure higher shareholder value, companies need to break our of their current mindsets and get off this treadmill of educing production costs and revenue. The UK's businesses can grow their top lines by delivering propositions that create much higher value for customers.
Successful delivery of these strategies, which are not without risk, can be secured by adopting solutions that integrate knowledge and experience from across the organisation, breaking the mindset to move companies into new and less cost-dependent market positions that are much harder to imitate.
Achieving this goal will involve three fundamental changes: anticipating customers' needs to identify sustainable new value-creating opportunities; determining how new propositions affect an organisation and creating and delivering an intergrated business to enact the strategy.
