Hank Fieger

Hank Fieger is an American author and business consultant whose work focuses on sales, customer relationships, and organizational effectiveness. His book The Customer-Centered Enterprise: How IBM and Other World-Class Companies Achieve Extraordinary Results by Putting Customers First (2000) drew on his consulting experience with IBM and other major corporations to articulate a framework for building businesses that orient strategy, processes, and culture around genuine customer value rather than internal efficiency metrics.

The book, written with colleagues from the IBM consulting practice, was published at a pivotal moment in corporate thinking about customer relationship management (CRM), as the first wave of CRM technology was creating both new possibilities and new confusions about what it actually meant to be “customer-centered.” Fieger’s contribution was to argue that the technology was only as useful as the underlying commitment to genuinely understanding and serving customers, and that organizations that confused CRM software with customer-centricity missed the point.

His work draws on consulting engagements with organizations across industries and brings a practitioner’s perspective to questions that academic management literature often addresses in more abstract terms. The customer-centered framework he articulates has been used in corporate training programs and MBA courses on marketing and organizational strategy.

Fieger has been a consultant and speaker on business strategy and customer experience at corporate events and executive education programs. His work represents the best of the practitioner-author tradition in business literature — grounded in direct experience, practically oriented, and accessible to working managers seeking applicable frameworks.