Extraordinary Guarantees : A New Way to Build Quality Throughout Your Company & Ensure Satisfaction for Your Customers

Explains how guarantees can work to attract and retain customers, to sharpen quality commitment internally, and to outdistance competitors

Christopher Hart is an adjunct professor of marketing on the executive-education faculty at the University of Michigan Business School and president of Spire Group, Ltd., a management-consulting and executive-education firm that specializes in helping clients to strengthen and expand customer relationships.

Previously, Dr. Hart was a professor in the marketing department at Cornell and in the operations-management department at Harvard Business School.

Dr. Hart has been a speaker at numerous conferences and senior-executive seminars. He also is a prolific author, having written six books, including the definitive Extraordinary Guarantees: Achieving Breakthrough Gains in Quality and Customer Satisfaction. His best-selling Service Breakthroughs: Changing the Rules of the Game was a cooperative effort with former Harvard colleagues James Heskett and W. Earl Sasser, Jr. In addition, he has written more than 40 articles for academic, management, and popular publications. Dr. Hart has received four awards for these writings, including a McKinsey ("Article of the Year") Award for his Harvard Business Review article, "The Power of Unconditional Service Guarantees."

Dr. Hart served for three years as an examiner for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. His clients include American Express, AT&T, CitiBank, Deloitte & Touche, FedEx, General Electric, GE Capital, GTE, Harley Davidson, IBM Global Services, MONY, Promus Hotel Corp., Wang Global and Williams Companies.

He received his bachelor's degree from Cornell University, his MBA from Harvard, and his doctorate from Cornell.