How do you destroy a trillion dollars of shareholder wealth? You remain ignorant of the value of customers. That's the allegation presented in Angel Customers and Demon Customers, an extraordinary book that makes the case for organizing around customers (instead of products).

The authors, Larry Selden and Geoffrey Colvin, go to the heart of power and make an extremely articulate case that transformational change will be necessary to drive superior stock performance in the coming years. Citing companies such as Dell, Fidelity and Royal Bank of Canada as models, the authors believe that customer-focused change is the way to go. That means that power should shift from product and territory managers to customer segment managers -- a radical shift for most companies today.

Intriguingly, the authors discuss how much shareholder wealth has been detroyed in recent years because acquirers paid a premium for unprofitable customers ("demons"). Whether AOL-Time Warner, Exxon and Mobil, or Travelers and Citicorp, they believe ignorance has proved disastrous. Fortunately, they point to a future that promises to be dramatically different.