Title: Command performance
Description: Now more than ever, companies that want to stay competitive must deliver superb service to their customers. In Command Performance, leading business thinkers and executives provide valuable - and often unexpected - insights into achieving that goal.

Featuring the most influential recent articles and interviews on quality service from the Harvard Business Review, Command Performance focuses on four major areas (Developing a Service Strategy, The Art of Quality Service Delivery, Delivering Quality Service in the Public Sector, and Linking Service and Profit). The contributors provide a range of timely, specific, and practical insights into what it takes to deliver quality service profitably and competitively.

In addition, first-person accounts and profiles of individual firms provide inspiration and lessons from the field.

Command Performance effectively integrates cutting-edge thinking on successful service delivery with experiences from real companies. Peter F. Drucker writes about how the economic landscape in the coming century will be dominated by nations with high productivity gains in knowledge and service. Frederick F. Reichheld uses the success of State Farm to demonstrate ways in which companies must revitalize their services in order to gain long-term customers.

Harvard Business School professors Leonard Schlesinger and James Heskett describe a new model of the "service-driven service company," which designs business processes around workers with the closest customer contact. A twenty-five-step audit allows managers to determine how to implement successful service practices in their own companies.

. Other writers explore issues of delivering quality service in the public sector arena. Peter Johnson analyzes the challenges he faced as the administrator of the Bonneville Power Administration in Portland, Oregon. Former New York City Police Commissioner Lee P. Brown describes that city's Community Patrol Officers Program. Also included are profiles of two successful community enterprises, Chicago's South Shore Bank and the Greater Southeast Community Hospital in a suburb of Washington, D.C.
Subjects: Customer services, Quality control, Customer relations