What Great Service Leaders Know and Do: Creating Breakthroughs in Service Firms

Entire service businesses have been built around the ideas of Heskett, Sasser, and Schlesinger, pioneers in the world of service. Now they test their ideas against the actual experiences of successful and unsuccessful practitioners, as well as against demands of the future, in a book service leaders around the world will use as a guide for years to come.

The authors cover every aspect of optimal service leadership: the best hiring, training, and workplace organization practices; the creation of operating strategies around areas such as facility design, capacity planning, queue management, and more; the use—and misuse—of technology in delivering top-level service; and practices that can transform loyal customers into “owners.”

Looking ahead, the authors describe the world of great service leaders in which “both/and” thinking replaces trade-offs. It's a world in which new ideas will be tested against the sine qua non of the “service trifecta”—wins for employees, customers, and investors. And it's a world in which the best leaders admit that they don't have the answers and create organizations that learn, innovate, “sense and respond,” operate with fluid boundaries, and seek and achieve repeated strategic success.

Using examples of dozens of companies in a wide variety of industries, such as Apollo Hospitals, Châteauform, Starbucks, Amazon, Disney, Progressive Insurance, the Dallas Mavericks, Whole Foods, IKEA, and many others, the authors present a narrative of remarkable successes, unnecessary failures, and future promise.

About the Authors

Heskett, Sasser, and Schlesinger were the founding members of the Service Management Interest Group at Harvard Business School, where they partnered on the research that resulted in the publication of The Service Profit Chain: How Leading Companies Link Profit and Growth to Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Value (1997) and The Value Profit Chain: Treat Employees Like Customers and Customers Like Employees (2003) and the production of two video series, Achieving Breakthrough Service and People, Service, Success: The Service Profit Link.

James L. Heskett is UPS Foundation Professor of Business Logistics, Emeritus, at the Harvard Business School, where he has taught courses in marketing, business logistics, the management of service operations, business policy, service management, general management, and the entrepreneurial manager at various times since 1965. In addition, he served in several administrative positions at HBS, including that of Senior Associate Dean in charge of the MBA and other academic programs.

Heskett is the recipient of several awards, including the John Drury Sheehan Award for contributions to the field of logistics and the American Marketing Association's Lovelock Award for lifetime contributions to the field of services marketing.

Heskett has served on a number of for-profit and not-for-profit boards, including Cardinal Health, Office Depot, and Limited Brands and was the founding President of Logistics Systems, Inc. In addition, he has consulted for a number of firms in Europe, Latin America, and Asia as well as the United States.

Earl Sasser Jr. is a Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School and has been a faculty member there since 1969.

Sasser developed the School's first course on the management of service operations in 1972. Sasser has taught a variety of courses in the MBA program, including Production and Operations Management, Decision Making and Ethical Values, The Operating Manager, and Service Management.