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.

James L. Heskett is UPS Foundation Professor of Business Logistics, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School. Among other honors he was awarded the 2010 Distinguished Career Contribution Award in Services Management by the American Marketing Association.

W. Earl Sasser, Jr., is a Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School and has been a member of the faculty there since 1969. Sasser developed the school’s first course on the management of service operations in 1972.

Leonard A. Schlesinger returned to Harvard Business School as a Baker Foundation Professor of Business Administration in July 2013 after concluding a five-year term as the twelfth president of Babson College.