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About The Book

Drawing on research at the Harvard Business School dating back to 1974, Heskett, Sasser, and Schlesinger demonstrate how any company - whether manufacturing or service firm, profit or not-for-profit-- can achieve outstanding profit and growth by adopting their revolutionary organising framework, the Value Profit Chain. Building on research in more than 200 large corporations, they show how a quantifiable set of relationships exists between the loyalty, trust, and satisfaction of customers, employees, partners, and investors that is linked to profit and growth. The authors introduce a number of helpful concepts, including the "performance trinity," the starting point for changing the organisation, and the "strategic value vision," which will enable any manager to build more focused operations and results-oriented management capabilities. Of particular significance is a simple but powerful concept they call the "value exchange": what a company gets in return for its efforts to relate to customers, employees, partners, and investors. Written in clear non-technical prose, The Value Profit Chain will be received as a tour de force: timely, relevant, and essential reading.

About The Authors

Product Details

  • Publisher: Free Press (June 16, 2003)
  • Length: 400 pages
  • ISBN13: 9780743225694

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Raves and Reviews

David H. Maister Chairman, Maister Associates, Inc., and author of Practice What You Preach This is an important book. With careful reasoning and the patient unfolding of evidence, the reader is led to a profound understanding of powerful truths about the keys to success, all organized into a readily implementable framework.

John C. Bogle Founder and former CEO, The Vanguard Group, and author of Bogle on Mutual Funds and Character Counts For those leaders who don't believe, The Value Profit Chain will make you a believer. For those who do, it will give you strength to carry on your mission.

Lorenzo H. Zambrano Chairman and CEO, CEMEX The Value Profit Chain eschews platitudes and the stale alphabet soup of management acronyms for practical real-world examples. It takes customer focus to a higher plane through the "hardwiring performance" concept, which effectively illustrates how organizations can achieve superior returns by tying their employees' success to their customers's needs.

Leonard L. Berry Distinguished Professor of Marketing, Texas A & M University, and author of Discovering the Soul of Service Three of our best thinkers on organizational success combine their career learnings in one volume rich in wisdom.

Colleen C. Barrett President and CEO, Southwest Airlines Co. This is a veritable how-to of important ideas for fostering customer ownership and 'hardwiring' performance, methods by which an organization can achieve breakthrough value while preserving a high-performance culture.

M. Bruce Nelson Chairman and CEO, Office Depot, Inc. The Value Profit Chain clearly articulates the drivers of sustainable competitive advantage. Understanding the performance trinity will unlock the keys to truly remarkable growth and results.

Tom Watson Vice Chairman and Chief Growth Officer, Omnicom Group, Inc. Heskett, Sasser and Schlesinger's The Value Profit Chain is a must-read for managers. A simple organizing concept, value chain thinking is an underlying driver of change in our company that has increased value for our clients, employees and shareholders.

Pete Blackshaw Founder and Chief Marketing and Customer Satisfaction Officer, PlanetFeedback, a Division of Intelliseek A refreshing and enlightening detour from the usual media focus on dumb things companies and executives do to set themselves up for failure. The Value Profit Chain deeply explores the habits of overachievers and the successful tactics that help companies win, and win big.

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