No Greater Service

March 1, 2021, Peace Corps turns sixty. Its mission—to teach a skill and to spread the Peace Corps brand of goodwill around the world—still resonates. In No Greater Service, author Alvin J. Hower highlights its relevance yesterday, today, and the years to come. This memoir offers a stirring, personal, vivid, and action-packed account of a Peace Corps volunteer’s remarkable life in the underserved areas of the southern Philippines. With curiosity, empathy, and wry humor, Hower creates a distinct Peace Corps photo memoir. An avid photographer, he produced more than 5,000 images of everyday people and the awe-inspiring beauty of a nation of 7,641 islands. He was a teacher and social worker in General Santos City, and a management consultant for a mission school in the remote mountains of Lake Sebu, Surallah, working and living with the indigenous T’boli people featured in the August 1971 National Geographic Magazine. No Greater Service also serves as a history of his host country, providing information about its complex customs and traditions as well as the notable stories of Filipinos he met and their fascinating updates fifty years later. At times hilarious, others sad and grim, it also shares a love story of his romantic alliance with a Filipina girl.

A choral worship cantata composed by William Byrd.

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.

Civil servants are not generally known for their soldierly qualities. Yet in the Great War a volunteer regiment of 'civil servants and their friends' served with distinction in the front line, fighting in many of the major battles. This new study, the first since the 1920s, draws on previously unpublished material personal memoirs, diaries and interviews to tell their extraordinary story, and is supported by a wealth of marvellous photographs."

“Normalize Great Service. The 5 Week Plan” is a detailed, practical guide, inspired by 5* hospitality best practices, for entrepreneurs and small-business owners to better serve their employees and customers. It leads with the vision that great quality service should be normalized, making it possible to have attentive and professional interactions across all customer-facing businesses, regardless of their scale and level of luxury or simplicity. Along with a structured and practical approach to change, allocating the necessary importance to the follow-up steps as well (reinforcement and celebration), the guide includes: Self-audits to assess the current state of your employee engagement or customer satisfaction; A Facilitator Guide to help you streamline the training; A Participant Workbook to serve as the foundation for your team members' training; An abundance of examples to inspire you, based on a practical study case; Useful exercises and templates to support your team’s efforts. So, Take What You Need and Join the Movement to Normalize Great Service! If you are a small business owner in the customer-facing service industry, a servicepreneur, then you are the leader, everything will reflect your actions and decisions. So, TAKE WHAT YOU and your team NEED to exceed those expectations! Appreciate and celebrate more, listen to the emotional and physical voice of your employees to better care for them, and listen to the needs and wishes of your customers to guide your service. If you are a freelancer or a solopreneur, you are a one-(wo)man-show being at the same time the business, the employee, the brand, and the values. TAKE WHAT YOU NEED to shape your skills and create experiences rather than provide services. Answer that call, write that email, connect in that meeting, and deliver that project at its best level! Select the gestures, words, tools, and mentalities that add value to your work. If you are a service professional, I admire your dedication to self-development. TAKE WHAT YOU NEED to upgrade your many talents, become even more valuable on the market, and declare yourself an experienced curator because that’s what you are! If you are a customer (and all of us are customers, daily!) respect yourself by not accepting service below expectations, and appreciate the service employees' continuous effort to create experiences. TAKE WHAT YOU NEED, know what you deserve, and don’t settle for less!

Improving service quality has finally become a top priority of management today, yet according to service quality expert Leonard Berry only a handful of companies have managed to determine exactly what to improve and how to improve it. For the past two years, Berry studied dozens of companies of all sizes renowned for their capacity to deliver what they promise and more. From his on-site observation of the strategies and practices of such companies as Mary Kay Cosmetics, Tattered Cover Book Store, Longo Toyota & Lexus, Lakeland Regional Medical Center, and Hard Rock Cafe, Berry has constructed a dynamic new framework for improving service. This framework provides a roadmap for implementation found nowhere else in the service quality literature. In every chapter Berry draws on his twelve years of research in service quality to explain each part of the framework in detail. He provides rich insights and inspiring examples of great service -- including numerous examples unique to this book as well as the classic success stories of USAA, Taco Bell, and many more. Berry shows that a company must (1) develop service leadership skills and values -- a concept substantially different from developing general leadership; (2) build a service quality information system; and (3) create a comprehensive service strategy based on the four principles of great service: reliability, surprise, recovery, and fairness. He demonstrates how these four principles, when adopted by the leadership and infused into the systems of a service company, are the building blocks of the framework and form the anchor for implementation. Berry shows how the "artistry" of great service can be systematically created from this foundation through a company's organizational structure, technology, and often under utilized human resources assets. He challenges service managers to set their service quality aspirations higher, and his innovative, practical ideas will help them achieve those higher standards. Linking service excellence to value creation, Berry provides solid financial reasons for the necessity of great service. Here, at last, is the book for which managers in every service industry have waited: Leonard Berry's "operating manual" for turning plans for great service into action.