ACB Leadership Summit 2025: Mastering Operations, Enhancing Customer Experience.

The philosophy behind the “ACB Leadership Summit 2025” and its theme, “Operational Mastery for Customer Experience,” is to provide practical solutions and strategies to help businesses elevate their customer experience from within. The event, taking place on May 15–16, is led by Professor Ryan W. Buell from Harvard Business School. It brings together CEOs, successors, and senior leaders from top companies.

“Customers don’t see the operating system but are the ones who experience it directly”

According to a PwC report, 73% of customers say that experience is a key factor in their continued loyalty to a brand, but only 49% of companies believe they are providing a good experience. Where does this gap come from? Is it due to the disconnect between experience-building strategies and actual operational capabilities?

Business owners can envision a great experience, but if the organization lacks the ability to operate cohesively, consistently, and proactively, that experience will remain a design that never comes to fruition.

Global companies beloved by consumers, such as Apple and Starbucks, have proven that success comes not just from massive advertising campaigns but from turning customer service into a seamless “operating system.” While Starbucks invests in creating uniform spaces and ordering processes, ensuring a consistent experience wherever you are, Apple sells a lifestyle and, more importantly, builds a community of devoted fans that transcends the concept of “customers.” Apple understands that a product cannot succeed without a consistent, easy, and inspiring customer experience.

This is evident in Professor Ryan W. Buell’s Harvard Business Review article, “Show Your Customers How Hard You’re Working for Them.” In this article, Professor Buell emphasizes: “Customers can’t see your operational choices, but they feel them.”

This reflects his perspective on the importance of operational transparency. He believes that when customers cannot see the efforts and processes behind the service, they may underestimate the value the company brings. Therefore, designing “windows” for customers to partially observe the operational process will help them understand and appreciate the product’s or service’s value more.

Hence, for leaders, the challenge is not just designing an experience strategy but actualizing that strategy through practical operations.

ACB Leadership Summit 2025: When CEOs of Large Enterprises Learn from Harvard Professors and Valuable Lessons

That’s why this year, ACB organized the Leadership Summit 2025 with the theme “Operational Mastery for Customer Experience.” Avoiding theoretical discussions and slogans, this is a practical workshop for leaders, designed based on the Harvard Business School’s training model and taught by Professor Ryan Buell himself.

This year’s summit is structured into five in-depth sessions, revolving around real-world lessons from leading global companies. Each session focuses on a critical operational aspect—from increasing efficiency and quality, redrawing the strategic map, adapting to changing customer needs, deploying at scale and speed, to building leadership capabilities based on principles and core values. The ultimate goal is to turn operations into a competitive advantage and elevate the customer experience.

With the participation of leaders and CEOs from various industries, ACB expects this event to be more than just a meeting of academia and practice. It aims to be a forum for debating and developing operational strategies to enhance the customer experience as a core competency to drive businesses forward.

The Leadership Summit 2024 left a deep impression on many leaders who directly experienced the program and applied it to their businesses. They are a testament to the value that a practical training program can bring.