Discovering the Soul of Service

LEONARD L. BERRY

Reviewed by Jack

In Discovering the Soul of Service, Dr. Leonard Berry discusses fourteen companies that are sustainable businesses with service at their core. Written ten years ago, the featured businesses had an average age of thirty-one years of work, an admirable amount of time in which to develop tried-and-true strategies. The companies Berry studied are not the usual business-media suspects and range from Charles Schwab, The Container Store, and Enterprise Rent-A-Car to the St. Paul Saints minor-league baseball team, all companies whose missions vary widely. I must admit that there is only so much new material to read about Southwest Airlines or Starbucks or Harley-Davidson or Ritz Carlton, those common elite examples of good business, no matter how fascinating their evolution. So, Berry’s featured businesses offer a fresh perspective, and include those managing 120 employees to over 35,000, those that are public and those that are private, those that are local, national, or international. I find this range adds a depth to this book absent in many others that focus only on the giants of the service industry.

Despite the differences in companies represented, the one thing they have in common is that they all built their success on sustainable service. Only three of the fourteen have had more than two CEOs in their history. Even now, ten years after Berry wrote the book, most are still run by their original CEOs. Having this kind of stability at the top level allows leaders to build trust and show the integrity and authenticity needed to sustain the success.

These organizations are built on the value of humanity, of treating their employees and customers—or, as the author states, the organization and its partners—humanely, with concern for their well-being and opportunities for development. Value-driven leadership, trust-based relationships, and generosity are three of the nine drivers the author calls out as being essential when establishing a humane organization. These values are remarkably consistent among the companies.

Berry shares with us wisdom from leaders who have faced the challenge of maintaining humane organizations in the face of constant pressure. Restaurateur Drew Nieporent has been very successful in a business that can be very defeating. He has many restaurants scattered around the globe and has won every major restaurant award. He believes that building a values-based business is key to building a sustainable business. “‘Restaurants are like children,’ he says. ‘They need your attention when they’re young. You give them values and principles and hope they grow up strong.’”

“My purpose in this book is to identify, describe, and illustrate the underlying drivers of sustainable success in service businesses.”

Yet there are three challenges in sustaining service success. These challenges are made worse when you are creating value for the customer with service: “The more labor-intensive the service, the greater the challenges of: operating effectively while growing rapidly, operating effectively when competing on price, [and] retaining the initial entrepreneurial spirit of the younger, smaller company.” Berry then offers the selected companies as examples of successfully avoiding these pitfalls. He talks about Valujet and its rapid growth in the 1990s . . . and its equally rapid decline because of lax controls and a lack of attention to nonfinancial goals. The company that eventually returned as AirTran had not been able to operate effectively during rapid growth.

Age has taught me to lead a quiet and happy life, and has given me the knowledge that the way to achieve such a life is to live it for the right reasons, whether you follow the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule. For my own life, I place a lot of value on karma (or, what goes around comes around). You do something because it is the right thing to do, not because you are going to get paid for it. Discovering the Soul of Service shows that this type of soul-inspired philosophy has been successful in a wide range of organizations, and Berry shows you how to succeed while holding on to the values around which you built your business and live your life. JC

Discovering the Soul of Service: The Nine Drivers of Sustainable Business Success, Free Press, Hardcover 1999, ISBN 9780684845111

WHERE TO NEXT? Here for discovering more possibilities Here for the soul of leadership Here for another airline with soul | EVEN MORE: A Complaint Is a Gift by Janelle Barlow and Claus Moller; Minding the Store by Stanley Marcus; The Nordstrom Way by Robert Spector with Patrick D. McCarthy