The Value Profit Chain : Treat Employees Like Customers and Customers Like Employees

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.

Most employees are not owners and will never really behave (work hard) like owners - they talk much about loyalty and responding to good practices but experience tells me that when it comes to the choice of a midnight session to complete a presentation, most will have an excuse (got to take the cat to the vet) and those that stay will want two days off as their matching reward while telling you for the next year how hard they work.

This book sides with the employees as being open to great things so you just have to treat them as per their instructions.

Yes in some cases, employees will meet the expectations. But mostly they will let you down, as does this book.