Follow This Path: How the World's Greatest Organizations Drive Growth by Unleashing Human Potential » (Abridged)

Curt Coffman is the coauthor of the best-selling book, First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently.

Gabriel Gonzalez-Molina is a former Global Practice Leader for Gallup Path Management. He received a Ph.D. in Social Sciences.

When it comes to getting ahead in business, The Gallup Organization has led the way with two landmark books: the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths. In its latest guide the world's hottest management consulting firm reveals your company's most valuable asset-and, with groundbreaking new findings and methods, shows you how developing that asset can lead to a quantum leap in cost efficiencies and profits. What do the world's greatest organizations have in common? They know that their most valuable resource is human-their employees and customers. And the best companies understand two important facts: people are emotional first and rational second, and because of that, employees and customers must be emotionally engaged in order for the organization to reach its full potential. Gallup research not only bears that out, but has uncovered the secrets of creating and managing an "emotional economy" that will provide boom possibilities for your company. Follow this Path shows you how the traditional ways to engage people no longer apply in today's world. Instead, it offers a system it calls The Gallup Path, based on the proven, revolutionary strategies of the most successful businesses. You'll learn the prerequisites of an effective workplace, forge unbreakable bonds between employees and customers with the book's 34 Routes to Superior Performance, know the three crucial links that drive productivity and growth, discover the best employee and customer motivators, and much more. Ignore the emotional economy-and miss out on financial performance. Helping you build relationships one customer and one employee at a time, this important book offers a unique new path for your organization to follow. All you have to do is value and develop human relationships all around you to transform your business-starting today.

Publishers Weekly

Rejecting conventional "rational actor" theories, this dense volume of management theory argues that emotions deeply impact economics. Customer loyalty comes from a non-rational, even addictive "passion" (such that customers "can actually suffer from withdrawal" if "deprived of a specific brand") based on personal "emotional bonds" to a company's employees. Workers, in turn, must feel emotionally connected to managers who value their contributions and give talent its head. The authors, management consultants for the Gallup Organization, deploy a complicated theoretical apparatus-drawing on cognitive neuroscience and elaborate statistical analyses of mountains of survey data-to prove that companies profit when workers and customers feel appreciated and listened to. This is a welcome message, enlivened by anecdotes illustrating good employee relations, salesmanship and customer service, but in extolling "a management style that doesn't try to 'tell people what to do,'" the author's disparagement of training and organization in favor of "innate talent" and "emotional engagement" sometimes seems excessive. Worse, the passages celebrating "The Gallup Path" and the Gallup Organization's proprietary methodologies for assessing "talent themes" and emotional states read like excerpts from a brochure for the company's consulting services. (Oct.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.