Service Strategy In Action

In today's competitive global markets, simply making a great product is not enough. To achieve profitable growth and stand out among competitors, you must start to strategically compete through service and innovative solutions for business customers. Professors Christian Kowalkowski and Wolfgang Ulaga guide you how to shift your business from a goods-centric to a service-savvy model. The authors' proprietary twelve-step roadmap to profitable service growth will help you break out of a narrow product-centric logic and discover how to � determine if your company is "fit-for-service," � make the most of your existing services, � innovate and create value-added services and customer solutions beyond your products, � embed a true service-centric culture in your organization, � drive change and align your service strategy with corporate goals, � transform your product-centric sales force into a service-savvy sales organization, � design an organizational structure that promotes service growth, and � align your interests with distributors and partners. Kowalkowski and Ulaga's twelve-step roadmap is based on rigorous research and long-standing experience working with businesses. They have worked with hundreds of managers in industrial and professional services companies, conducted research projects, led executive workshops, and published numerous articles in scientific and managerial journals, including Harvard Business Review, among others. Here, they share not only their own insights but the lessons learned from successful case studies and years of extensive research.

Strategy as Action presents an action plan for how firms can build, improve, and defend their competitive advantage at every stage of their life cycle. For start-up firms entering a market, it provides a model for exploiting competitive uncertainty and blind spots; for growth firms who have established some market advantages, it provides an action plan for exploiting relative resources; for mature firms, it explains how to exploit market position; finally, for firms that have no decisive resource advantage, it provides an action plan based on firm co-operative reactions.

This open access book is an outcome of several years of research, practice, and teaching experience of the authors on the challenges that underpin the successful switch to services for manufacturing firms. Ideal for a student as well as a practitioner, the book describes the industrial services ecosystem, the barriers and challenges, and a roadmap for building service excellence. Curated cases are used to describe the current approaches in practice to overcome the barriers. The book also provides several tools, each with a short introduction, that the authors have used successfully in projects to help overcome the servitization barriers. Many of these tools are from management, design thinking, or service design. The service excellence roadmap is based on the development methodology and helps current and future business leaders to create their own individual roadmaps.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.

How to close the gap between strategy and execution Two-thirds of executives say their organizations don’t have the capabilities to support their strategy. In Strategy That Works, Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi explain why. They identify conventional business practices that unintentionally create a gap between strategy and execution. And they show how some of the best companies in the world consistently leap ahead of their competitors. Based on new research, the authors reveal five practices for connecting strategy and execution used by highly successful enterprises such as IKEA, Natura, Danaher, Haier, and Lego. These companies: • Commit to what they do best instead of chasing multiple opportunities • Build their own unique winning capabilities instead of copying others • Put their culture to work instead of struggling to change it • Invest where it matters instead of going lean across the board • Shape the future instead of reacting to it Packed with tools you can use for building these five practices into your organization and supported by in-depth profiles of companies that are known for making their strategy work, this is your guide for reconnecting strategy to execution.

In the world of industry and management producing 'intangible products' poses unique challenges. This book provides a comprehensive framework on these unique management issues and looks into the special characteristics of services and conditions necessary for success in the management of service organizations This classic book, as relevant as ever and updated, provides a set of ideas which has proved its power and validity beyond the fads of the moment, over an extended period of time. A book that is at the same time very holistic and conceptual, and yet both easy to grasp and to translate into practical action. It also evokes an alternative perspective on services, namely that of refocusing attention from the production and the product to the value creation process of customers. With these perspectivess every company todays needs to see itself as a service company. The book stresses the need for a streamlined service management system and analyses and illustrates growth strategies and the nature of innovation -but above all it emphasizes the special role played by good leadership. In particular, this edition looks at the role of technology in services as well as - more generally -the role of services in society. Of great value to managers and academics involved in the service industry this practical book, which has been translated into eight languages, will stimulate people to analyse and act on their situations.

This handbook provides an innovative, thorough overview of service management. It draws together an impressive, international group of leading scholars who offer a truly global perspective, exploring current literature and laying out guidance for future research. Beginning with defining service as a perspective on value creation, and service management as “a set of organizational competencies for enabling and realizing value creation through service,” it then moves on to follow the evolution of service research. From there, the book is structured into six main themes: perspectives on service management; service strategy; service leadership and transition; service design and innovation; service interaction; quality and operations; and service management and technology. This book is valuable reading for academics, lecturers, and students studying service management, operations management, and service research.

From Simon & Schuster, Strategy in Action is Boris Yavitz and William H. Newman's guide to the execution, politics, and payoff of business planning. Two management consultants explain how to transform business objectives into strategic action, detailing measures for changing business practices, eliminating ineffective personnel, and instilling confidence through well-defined statements of goals and missions.