Luis Maria Huete

Why organisations work with Luis Maria Huete

• He brings a named, structured methodology, Clienting, that gives a management team a shared language for customer segmentation, business model alignment, and service mix economics. It is the rare customer-strategy framework with both an academic anchor and four decades of board-room application.
• He has facilitated senior offsites in more than 800 companies across 70 countries, including Banco Santander, BBVA, Telefonica, Coca-Cola, Repsol, and ISS. The work is execution-focused: redesigning structure, coordination mechanisms, and the operating model behind a strategy.
• His doctoral work on commercial banking service strategy was named best dissertation of 1988 by the Decision Sciences Institute. The same analytical discipline shows up in the way he treats customer profitability as an operating problem, not a marketing one.
• He has taught inside Harvard Business School’s Achieving Breakthrough Service and Advanced Management programmes, alongside his chair at IESE. The combined platform gives senior audiences confidence that the frameworks have been pressure-tested in serious academic and corporate settings.
• He works fluently in English and Spanish, with board-level experience across Europe, Latin America, and Asia. For multinational teams that need a single voice on customer strategy across regions, that range is genuinely scarce.

Biography highlights

• Professor of Operations, Information and Technology at IESE Business School, on faculty since 1982.
• DBA, Boston University. Fulbright Scholar. Doctoral thesis on commercial banking service strategy awarded best dissertation of 1988 by the Decision Sciences Institute.
• Author of thirteen management books, including Clienting, Service Management, Leading for the Common Good (2015), 50 Leaders Who Made History (2017), and Leadership and Governance (2025).
• Faculty contributor to Harvard Business School’s Achieving Breakthrough Service and Advanced Management executive programmes.
• Regular contributor to Harvard Deusto Business Review and Expansion.
• Chairs the Advisory Board of Makro and the Instituto de Capital Humano. Board member of Altia, the Instituto Gobernanza y Sociedad, and the International Academy of Management.

Biography

Customer profitability is an operating problem before it is a marketing one. Most companies cannot say, with any precision, which of their customers earn the margin that funds the rest of the business, or how the service model would need to change if they could. That is the question Huete has spent four decades putting in front of senior teams.

His framework, Clienting, gives a management committee a structured way to work that question. It moves through segmentation, business model alignment, service mix, implementation, and performance measurement, treating customer strategy as a coordinated set of operating decisions rather than a brand exercise. The methodology is documented across thirteen books and tested inside the executive programmes of IESE Business School and Harvard Business School, where Huete has taught Achieving Breakthrough Service and Advanced Management.

The academic anchor is serious. His doctoral thesis on commercial banking service strategy was named best dissertation of 1988 by the Decision Sciences Institute, and he holds a chair at IESE he has occupied since 1982. Alongside that, he has facilitated senior offsites in more than 800 companies across 70 countries, including Banco Santander, BBVA, Telefonica, Coca-Cola, Repsol, and ISS. He chairs the Advisory Board of Makro and the Instituto de Capital Humano, and writes regularly for Harvard Deusto Business Review and Expansion.

What a senior team gets is a working vocabulary for customer strategy and a facilitator who has watched several hundred management committees try to install it. The conversation he runs is rarely about ideas. It is about what to stop doing, which customers to organise around, and how to align the operating model to the answer.

Key speaking topics

• Clienting and customer strategy
• Service management and service economics
• Strategy execution and operating model design
• Corporate culture and senior-team alignment
• Leadership and governance
• Family business transitions
• Customer loyalty and profitability

Ideal for

• CEOs, CCOs and CMOs reviewing customer segmentation and the underlying service economics.
• Boards and ExCos running a strategy refresh or post-merger operating model redesign.
• Senior leadership offsites that need a structured outside facilitator on customer strategy and execution.
• Family business owners and boards navigating governance and succession alongside commercial repositioning.

Audience outcomes

• A working vocabulary for Clienting, segmentation, service mix, and the link from customer loyalty to operating margin.
• A sharper read on which customer segments the organisation is actually built to serve profitably, and which it is not.
• A structured view of the gap between stated strategy and operating execution, and where coordination mechanisms break down.
• Specific examples drawn from senior offsites with European and Latin American multinationals on how the management committee owns customer strategy.
• A reference set of books and frameworks the team can use after the session to continue the work internally.