Business Book Summary of Employees First, Customers Second

March 14, 2014 - PRLog -- Business Book Summary of Employees First, Customers Second

EBSCO Publishing has just released a new book summary. In 2005, Vineet Nayar took over one of India’s leading suppliers of IT services. He saw a company doing well but headed for potential disaster as it failed to keep up with the pace of change in the industry. Just as enterprise IT was becoming increasingly important, the underlying hardware and software were themselves becoming commodities. In Employees First, Customers Second, Nayar tells the story of how he transformed the company by increasing transparency to build trust, shifting responsibility and power down the corporate hierarchy, and ultimately inverting the organizational pyramid. He focused relentlessly on empowering customer-facing employees who actually delivered value to customers. The “Employees First” concept generated huge financial returns along with enhanced customer and employee satisfaction. It set the company on a sustainable path to ever better performance.

Vineet Nayar offers readers the following advice:

·         Businesses should adopt the “Employees First, Customers Second” concept given that the core of every business is to create value for its customers. Because value is created in the interface between employees and customers, management’s role should be to put employees first.

·         “Mirror Mirror” is the first step in effecting change. It is the process of taking a hard look in the mirror to gain agreement within the company that change is needed.

·         Once Mirror Mirror has embedded the desire for change, leaders need to paint a romantic picture of a better and brighter future. If these two steps are done, change will happen.

·         Transformations flow from small “catalyst actions.” Wholesale reorganizations are less effective than these small-scale changes.

·         Without trust between management and employees, there is no possibility for positive change. Trust is undermined by traditional hierarchies in which managers accrue power by controlling information.

·         Transparency is the only way to build trust. Generation Y, or Millennials, take transparency for granted; engaging these employees demands transparent communication as well.

·         In global corporations, CEOs are often so far removed from the value zone and the employees who work in it that they cannot directly affect employee behavior. Company fortunes are therefore in the hands of these value-zone employees.

·         Inverting the pyramid of the organization and transferring responsibility from CEOs to employees transforms organizations from those led from the top to those that are leaderless. Leaderless organizations are self-governing, self-reproducing, and self-directing. Such organizations have a competitive advantage independent of their relative positions in areas such as price or product features. This is the ultimate goal of “employees first” as a management strategy.

In addition to a 7-10 page summary of the book, each Business Book Summary includes a Key Concepts section that outlines the main points of the book, an About the Author section that informs readers of the author’s background as well as their additional written works, and a Features of the Book Section that explains the special features found within the book.

For busy professionals, Business Book Summaries from EBSCO provide an easy, quick way to stay on top of the best business books in the market. With many titles available in audio format, it becomes even easier to obtain the helpful information available in these top business titles.

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