Competing in a Service Economy is a hands-on guide to creating services, with illustrative examples from service-oriented companies including Disney, Ericsson, IKEA, National Association of Convenience Stores, Ritz Carlton, Scandinavian Airline Systems, Sterling Pulp Chemicals, and Telia Mobile. This practical resource for executives, general managers, and managers in marketing, operations, and human resources reveals how to gain a competitive advantage by creating and implementing a strategic plan that will ultimately improve their organization's services. Written by the authors of...

The intensely competitive global automotive industry is in the midst of both a quality evolution and management transfonnation. In an evolutionary fashion, industry attention has progressed from a focus on internal quality, to external perceptions of customer satisfaction, to subsequent customer retention and profitability. More transfonnational is the change in the way automotive companies operate and manage themselves. An industry once dominated at a product level by engineering and a management level by fmance is becoming a cross functional, customer oriented industry. Understanding the...