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eCustomerServiceWorld.com recommended reads
(NB Check out our Top Ten and our New Books as well!)Browse through and click on a title for a review. 
 | | The Truster Advisor
Author: David Maister
UK Publisher: Free Press
ISBN: 0743207769
An Amazon reader review:
“The key theme for the book, the Trust Equation is actually in the middle of the book. The first part of the book leads up to it by framing the issue of trust and what a trusted adviser is. The second part, starting with the Trust Equation gives some structure to the challenge of building trust whilst the third part is all about putting trust to work. It contain loads of tips and ideas to help anyone who needs or wants to become a "trusted adviser" and it will be of particular interest to lawyers, accountants, account managers, consultants, tax advisers, business coaches etc. -- anyone in a long term relationship with a client. A really good book -- but I didn't actually finish it, partly because I had got enough out of it, and also partly because the format seemed a bit repetetive. Well worth the money spent though!”
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| | The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth
Author: Fred Reichheld
UK Publisher: Harvard Business School Press
ISBN: 1591397839
Amazon reader review:
“One Question Can Determine Your Business’s Future. Do You Know the Answer?
CEOs regularly announce ambitious growth targets, then fail to achieve them. The reason? Their growing addiction to bad profits. These corporate steroids boost short-term earnings but alienate customers. They undermine growth by creating legions of detractors—customers who complain loudly about the company and switch to competitors at the earliest opportunity.
Now loyalty expert Fred Reichheld shows how to reverse the equation, turning customers into promoters who generate good profits and true, sustainable growth. The key: one simple question—Would you recommend us to a friend?—that allows companies to track promoters and detractors and produces a clear measure of an organization’s performance through its customers’ eyes. In industry after industry, this "Net Promoter Score" is the single most reliable indicator of a company’s ability to grow.
Based on extensive research, The Ultimate Question shows how companies can rigorously measure Net Promoter statistics, help managers improve them, and create communities of passionate advocates that stimulate innovation. Vivid stories from leading-edge organizations illustrate the ideas in practice.”
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| | The Value Leadership: the 7 Principles That Drive Corporate Value in Any Economy
Author: Peter Cohan
UK Publisher: Jossey Bass Wiley
ISBN: 0787966045
Quick review: In Value Leadership, renowned management and investment expert Peter Cohan -- whose 2002 stock picks gained 81percent when the S&P 500 plunged 24 percent-- provides a new and powerful concept of sustainable corporate value. Using his expertise in understanding shareholder value, Cohan offers executives seven management principles that were tested in periods of economic expansion and contraction. These principles are: valuing human relationships, fostering teamwork, experimenting frugally, fulfilling your commitments, fighting complacency, winning through multiple means, and giving to your community. Cohan illustrates these principles by drawing on examples from eight Value Leaders-- Synopsys, WalMart, Goldman Sachs, MBNA, Johnson & Johnson, J. M. Smucker, Southwest Airlines, and Microsoft. Through two recessions, these companies grew 35 percent faster, were 109 percent more profitable, and generated five times more shareholder wealth than their peers. buy UK() buy US($)
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| | The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
Author: Thomas A. Stewart
UK Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1857882873
US Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 0385500718
Quick Review: Reveals how today’s companies are applying the concept of intellectual capital into day-to-day operations to dramatically increase their success in the marketplace. The heart of the book is a revolutionary 4-step process that shows how to put intellectual capital to work to improve performance and profitability, as well as manage knowledge processes. buy UK() buy US($)
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| | The Welch Way
Author: Jeffrey Krames
UK Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
ISBN: 0071387501
US Publisher: McGraw-Hill
ISBN: 0071429530
From the back cover: “Unlock the Welch in You. Jack Welch transformed GE into the world's most valuable corporation¬¬ and became one of history's most admired and successful CEOs¬¬ by cutting through bureaucratic noise and letting hands-on, frontline employees tell him what needed to be done. The Welch Way shows you how to work the Welch magic in your career and reach new heights in today's wide-open, idea-driven workplace. The Welch Way is the first book written specifically to help employees infuse their careers with the actions and success strategies of business icon Jack Welch.” buy UK() buy US($)
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| | The Wisdom of Crowds
Author: James Surowiecki
UK Publisher: Abacus
ISBN: 0349116059
The very phrase ‘group decision-making’ probably has you reaching for the Scotch and shaking your head in despair as you pour yourself a large one. Nobody built a statue to a committee; consensus decisions are inherently weak; ‘group think’ is herd-like. And yet, and yet…the received wisdom on this may now be past its sell-by date.
Smart groups have been shown to out-decision individual leaders every time. In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki explains the four conditions that satisfy smart groups, or what he calls ‘wise crowds’:
Smart groups beat individual decisions if they have:
1. Diversity of opinion (each person should have some private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts)
2. Independence (people’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them)
3. De-centralization (people are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge)
4. Aggregation (some mechanism exists for turning private judgements into collective decision )
The mathematical principle is simple, says Surowiecki: “Ask a hundred people to answer a question or solve a problem and the average answer will often be at least as good as the answer of the smartest member. With most things, the average is mediocrity. With decision-making, it’s often excellence.”
Basically we are talking about bringing the power of the market inside your organization. Hewlett-Packard and Innocentive, a spin-off of Eli Lilley, have both experimented with using the ‘smart groups’ principle to create internal decision markets predicting respectively which printers would be successful and which drug candidates would win approval from the regulators. The markets – made up of a diverse group of employees from across each business – out-performed the decisions made by the companies’ leaders.
Creating internal decision markets allows you to tap into the collective instinct, intuition and knowledge of large groups of informed people. They’ll out-decision you, for the most part. Phil Dourado
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| | The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization
Author: Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith
UK Publisher: HarperBusiness
ISBN: 0060522003
Quick Review: Motorola relied heavily on teams to surpass its competition in building the lightest, smallest, and highest-quality cell phones. At 3M, teams are critical to meeting the company's goal of producing half of each year's revenues from the previous five years' innovations. Kodak's Zebra Team proved the worth of black-and-white film manufacturing in a world where color is king.
But many companies overtook the potential of teams in turning around tagging profits, entering new markets, and making exciting innovations happen -- because they don't know how to utilize teams successfully. Authors Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith talked with hundreds of people in more than thirty companies to find out where and how teams work best and how to enhance their effectiveness.
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| | Thinking for a Change: 11 Ways Highly Successful People Approach Life and Work
Author: John C. Maxwell
UK Publisher: Warner Faith
ISBN: 0446529575
Quick Review: New York Times bestselling author and expert on leadership, John C. Maxwell explores the concept that success is really just a frame of mind. Good thinking. It's the one thing all successful people have in common. People who achieve their dreams understand the critical relationship between their level of thinking and their level of progress--and they know that when thinking is limited, so is potential. Now, John C. Maxwell explores this idea and identifies the specific skills people need to make their potential for success explode into results. From focused and creative thinking to thinking of the big picture or the bottom line, he provides examples of effective thinking for every situation. buy UK() buy US($)
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| | Thriving on Chaos
Author: Thomas J Peters
UK Publisher: Pan
ISBN: 0330305913
US Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0060971843
Soundbite: “The sheer pace at which we have to respond to customer needs today can leave customer-facing business units stretched and frazzled. This book explains how to turn ‘hanging on by your fingertips’ into thriving, by giving your people the framework and power to respond ‘nimbly’ and effectively to customers.”
eCustomerServiceWorld.com’s Ian ParsonsOne sentence summary: Try to ‘manage change’ and you will be drowned by it; the real challenge is to learn to ride waves of change by re-inventing your organization. What’s so special? Traditional business models and organizational structures are based on certainties: relatively long product lifecycles, relatively conservative customer demand, predictable (to a degree) markets and supplier-led demand. The result? Supertanker-like slowness in adjusting to the new realities: volatile markets, non-existent sectoral boundaries, fickle and all-powerful customers. Peters’ answer (though he always claims not to have the answer to anything, just the urge to shake us out of complacency) is to re-structure and re-shape your organization to build in responsiveness, flexibility and the much-vaunted ‘nimbleness’ that will allow you to survive and ‘thrive on chaos’. The compelling proposition in this book is that ‘managing change’ is not enough. Your organization needs to embrace change and ride it like a surfer to avoid being engulfed. This demands a new organizational way of being, argues Peters. The ‘fifty ways’ to embrace change you will find in this book foreshadow Peters’ current ‘list’ approach to book-writing (his latest books are, basically, structured as lists. Damn good lists, though). You need to develop customer responsiveness, the capacity to innovate to deal with unpredictable problems thrown up by volatile markets (because formulaic, proven solutions embedded in your corporate ‘way of doing things’ and based on the certainties of a stable business environment are, by definition, unlikely to be able to solve such problems), empowered employees (to facilitate fast-paced decisions at the points where your business meets its market) and the willingness to challenge conventional wisdom. Hard to argue against isn’t it? We love this book for its acknowledgement of the centrality of customers to the new ways of doing business that we all have to adopt in a business environment of fast-paced change. Quote we like: “I have no answers. I’m a complete fraud!” (He doesn’t actually say this in ‘Thriving On Chaos’, but we heard him say it in Texas and couldn’t resist repeating it here…It’s not true, by the way) buy UK() buy US($)
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| | To the Desert and Back
Author: Philip H. Mirvis, Karen Ayas, George Roth
UK Publisher: Jossey-Bass
ISBN: 0787966770
Quick Review: Dove, Lipton, Ben & Jerry's, and Slim*Fast are a few of the brands that are part of the $66 billion global empire known as Unilever. When To the Desert and Back opens, one of Unilever's divisions is in deep trouble -- declining volume, eroding margins, critical quality problems -- and is close to being sold off. Then Tex Gunning, the visionary new division chairman, takes the stage and the division grows by double digits and energizes Unilever's path to thrive around the globe. Learn the inside story of this transformation and discover proof that a revitalized business is about personal growth and encouraging inspiration. buy UK() buy US($)
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