Dr. Lynn W. Phillips is a renowned expert in customer experience (CX) engineering and customer-centric strategy. He is an accomplished teacher and scholar and was a faculty member at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business (GSB). Previously, he held faculty positions at Harvard University, Northwestern University, Rice University, and the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
Dr. Phillips has codeveloped many fundamental CX engineering ideas. These concepts help businesses select compelling customer-value propositions (CVPs) and then create value-delivery systems (VDSs) to efficiently offer and communicate these CVPs. These ideas are based on imaginative insights about a target customer community’s unmet need states and occasions—as revealed through day-in-the-life-of-customers analysis—which are then transformed into breakthrough solutions that transcend what customers can envision by cross-functional business teams.
The frameworks, concepts, methods, and tools pioneered by Dr. Phillips and his colleagues are rapidly evolving to meet the demands of the digital age. Companies are leveraging digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver more profitable value and enhance competitiveness. Dr. Phillips frequently provides guidance to startup ventures working in this area and to established companies seeking to implement these technologies and digital business models to transform how they select, provide, and communicate their winning CVPs.
Dr. Phillips has supported over two hundred new-business initiatives that rely on developing new digital capabilities to deliver valuable customer experiences. He possesses a profound understanding of the best and emerging practices in customer-centric strategy, gained through client work in industries including aerospace and defense, construction, energy, financial services, healthcare, IT infrastructure, logistics, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, telecommunications, and transportation, spanning more than forty countries.
Dr. Phillips is a widely published author in journals that span a range of fields from marketing, social psychology, and sociology to administrative science, business policy, economics, consumer affairs, and public policy, including antitrust.
Dr. Phillips’ book Customer Experience Engineering in Aerospace-Defense: Best and Emerging ‘Next Practices’ in Delivering Winning Value Propositions in a Rapidly Changing New-Game Competitive Landscape, coauthored with Marvin L. Hughes II and Dr. Stanton D. Sloane, outlines the most effective and cutting-edge practices in customer experience engineering for teams working in the aerospace-defense sector. The authors define and put into action the foundational concepts of CX engineering, which have been refined over more than thirty years of application in various global companies, with a significant focus on the aerospace-defense industry and its use of digital technologies.
In 2022, Stanford’s Class of 1985 recognized Dr. Phillips as one of three professors who had the greatest impact on people’s careers, reflecting on their experiences thirty years after graduating from GSB.
Dr. Phillips holds a PhD from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and has more than thirty-five years of experience in executive education and consulting.