About This Resource

Chapter 5 of Where Value Lives makes an important distinction: every customer deserves reliable service quality, but not every customer can receive the same depth of organisational attention.

The Strategic Attention Allocation Assessment helps leadership teams examine where senior time, cross-functional effort, investment and management energy are currently being directed—and whether that allocation reflects the organisation’s real strategic priorities.

This is not an invitation to neglect smaller or non-strategic customers. It is a structured way to separate dependable service for all customers from the deeper human attention reserved for relationships with genuine strategic significance.

What the Assessment Will Help You Do

• Identify the customers and issues currently attracting executive attention.
• Understand what is driving that attention.
• Test whether attention is aligned with strategic priorities.
• Distinguish strategic investment from habitual firefighting.
• Recognise where scarce organisational attention may be overextended.
• Agree practical attention priorities and actions.

How to Use It

Complete the assessment first as an individual reflection. Then compare the results with colleagues from leadership, sales, operations, customer service and other relevant functions.

Differences in perception are useful. They often reveal that an organisation has not made explicit decisions about attention at all. Instead, attention has accumulated around the loudest problem, the most persistent internal sponsor or the most recent crisis.

The purpose is not to produce a perfect score. It is to create a better executive conversation about where attention goes—and where it should go.