The Value Profit Chain: How to Manage Employees Like Customers and Customers Like Employees »

James L. Heskett is Baker Foundation Professor at the Harvard Business School and co-author with Earl Sasser and Leonard Schlesinger of the landmark bestseller The Service Profit Chain.

James Heskett, Earl Sasser, and Leonard Schlesinger reveal powerful new evidence that paying close attention to the employee-customer relationship will enable any organization to be a low-cost provider and achieve superior results — proving that you can have it all, a goal thought inadvisable just a few short years ago. At the heart of this bold assertion is the authors' indisputable conclusion supported by thirty-one years of groundbreaking research: today's employee satisfaction, loyalty, and commitment strongly influences tomorrow's customer satisfaction, loyalty, and commitment and ultimately the organization's profit and growth — a quantifiable set of associations the authors call the value profit chain.

In what may be the most far-reaching study ever undertaken of the strategic importance of the employee-customer relationship, Heskett, Sasser, and Schlesinger offer profound new insights into the life-long value of both employees and customers and the increasingly important concept of employee-relationship management. Readers will discover how organizations as diverse as aluminum maker Alcoa, travel agency Rosenbluth International, and the Willow Creek Community Church treat employees like customers (in the case of Willow Creek, volunteers as well). Conversely, the authors show how advertising agency Merkley Newman Harty and financial services provider ING Direct treat customers like employees, pursuing the ones they want most. At the Vanguard Group, Cisco Systems, and Southwest Airlines, both practices are common. The authors explain how these organizations and many others — whether large or small, public or private, or not-for-profit— achieve profitability and growth or the equivalent by leveraging results and process quality to deliver differentiated products and services at the lowest cost.

Timely, essential, and important reading, The Value Profit Chain should be readily accessible on the desk of every forward-thinking manager.

Publishers Weekly

Serving employees well and knowing when to "fire" a customer will boost a firm's bottom line, according to this team of Harvard Business School professors. The authors of The Service Profit Chain here stress the creation of lifetime customers and detail the complex relationship between employee satisfaction, customer retention and profitability. They use examples from firms including Federal Express, Southwest Airlines and Wal-Mart. The highly successful Southwest Airlines, for example, couldn't deliver its much-envied 25-minute aircraft turnaround, from arrival to departure from the gate, without a dedicated, team-oriented staff that's vested in the company. That's why all Southwest employees with more than six months of service hold ownership stakes in the firm. Perhaps more important is how Southwest manages customers that must be "targeted, selected, and `trained' in the unusual ways of the airline-no assigned seats, no meals, no connections with other airlines." By turning high-maintenance customers away, the firm stays profitable. These anecdotes aside, the book is laden with b-school sentences, e.g., "The value concept is achieved with maximum benefit for customers, employees, partners, and investors through an operating strategy that seeks to leverage results over costs by means of such factors as organization, policies, processes, practices, measures, controls, and incentives." With text like this and numerous charts and diagrams, the book will appeal mainly to academics and business professionals. However, there are a few nuggets that will appeal to a broader audience, like the fact that the greeters near the entrance to Wal-Mart stores were originally put there to reduce shoplifting. (Jan. 9) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.