Broken Windows, Broken Business: How the Smallest Remedies Reap the Biggest Rewards - Hardcover

Levine, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0446576786 ISBN 13: 9780446576789

Publisher: Business Plus, 2005

Synopsis

The author of Guerrilla PR offers a practical guide for business managers, providing strategies to identify and rectify the small problems that can and will sink your business, sharing case studies from such companies as McDonald's, K-Mart, and Google to outline an integrated approach to stimulating business growth and customer loyalty. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Levine is the author of 14 books, including Guerilla PR: How You Can Wage An Effective Public Relations Campaign Without Going Broke plus its sequel. His writing has appeared in USA Today, National Review, LA Times, New York Times and Psychology

From Publishers Weekly:

Law-and-order criminology inspires this dour, hectoring treatise on the importance of sweating the small stuff in business. PR executive Levine, author of Guerrilla P.R., combines his professional concern for detailed image control with James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling's theory that minor signs of disorder foster a climate of insecurity that causes decent folk to flee. He contends that a company's metaphorical "broken windows"—a confusing Web site, messy restrooms, peeling paint, nagging inconsistencies like "when the waiter at a Chinese restaurant is named Billy Bob"—signal an indifference to consumer satisfaction that repels customers. His remedies are fairly routine: deploy mystery shoppers to ferret out shortcomings, remember that first impressions are lasting, strive to "exceed expectations." What's unusual is his fanaticism, his demands that businesspeople cultivate "the obsessive, compulsive, almost violent need to find the flaws," even when others "deny such things exist or insist that they are unimportant and that you are being ridiculous." Such denials may indicate that "more employees should be getting fired," particularly those who don't smile or are otherwise "coasting, doing their time, merely existing" and infecting other workers with their "virus." Levine is one hard-nosed beat cop, but his strident, repetitive style and emotionally insensitive methods mean that many readers (and certainly their underlings) will find the book more demoralizing than motivating.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Business Plus
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0446576786
• ISBN 13: 9780446576789
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192