CHAPTER 3

Designing Operating Strategies That Support the Service Vision

What great service leaders know: the best service operating strategies don’t require trade-offs.

What great service leaders do: they foster both/and thinking in designing winning operating strategies.

One or two companies in an industry produce off-the-chart performance while changing the rules of the game by which competition occurs around the world. Each of these organizations exhibits a well-thought-out strategic service vision. You know these breakthrough service organizations when you see them, hear what their leaders have to say, and watch them act out their beliefs.¹ While they are not necessarily the largest in their respective industries, they do share a few things in common. For example, organizations producing outstanding performance on two important dimensions of breakthrough service, “best places to work” and “best customer service,” show an unusually high, statistically significant overlap. In fact, 20 percent of the organizations found among Bloomberg Businessweek’s Customer Service Champs from 2009 through 2013 also appeared on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For, after eliminating manufacturers from both lists (figure 3-1).²

Figure 3-1 Relationships between Best Places to Work, Companies Providing Best Customer Service, and Profitability, U.S., 2009 through 2013

To understand the significance of this overlap, Michael Burchell and Jennifer Robin analyzed Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For in the United States and concluded that companies on the list earned more than three times the market returns of companies in the S&P 500 between the years 1998 and 2009.³ Another study concluded that organizations that provide the best customer service nurture customers who are 21 percentage points (62 percent to 41 percent) more willing to say they would “definitely recommend” their service provider and 17 percentage points (55 percent to 38 percent) more willing to say they would “definitely repurchase” the service.⁴ Putting these findings together, one has to conclude that there is something going on here that should be of interest to anyone managing a service organization.

These organizations have figured out how to create outstanding operating strategies—ones that deliver a great deal of value to employees, customers, and investors alike. By and large, this is the way they have done it: first they create value for employees. That value encourages employees’ commitment and ownership, drives employee loyalty, fosters productivity, and enhances value for customers. That value in turn produces similar attitudes and behaviors among customers. It results in customer loyalty—the single greatest contributor to revenue growth and profit. These are organizations managed by dashboards comprising deep indicators of success. One such organization is the United Services Automobile Association (USAA).

GREAT SERVICE LEADERS PRACTICE BOTH/AND THINKING

As you drive out of the main gate at the West Point Military Academy in upstate New York, the first building on the right is not a bar, a cleaning establishment, or a barber shop. It’s a building housing a United Services Automobile Association (USAA) Financial Center. US Army officers in training get an early exposure to the centrality of USAA in their lives—that is, if they haven’t already been exposed to it by a family history of military service. The company dominates in supplying insurance, investments, and other financial services to military personnel and their families (who are eligible to become members), roughly 8 million of them. Its ingenious strategy has frozen out most of the competition for this market; it has more than a 95 percent share of US active duty military officers. USAA is a mutual company that reflects its profits in low rates as well as rebates to its customers. The result? Great service at low cost—in other words, extraordinary value. USAA customers do not have to trade one for the other.⁵ This is what we regard as both/and—both great service and low cost—results. It is the result of both/and versus either/or management thinking.⁶

USAA’s operating strategy starts with hiring. The company hires many of its managers from the ranks of the people it serves: military personnel. As a consequence, management understands the needs and concerns of USAA’s clientele. For example, rather than avoiding doing business with servicemen or -women going into battle, USAA may advise them to increase their life insurance. The military experience provides the military attitude—qualities such as devotion to duty, loyalty, and accountability that are important to those going into battle together—that is also important in staffing service jobs. USAA looks for these same qualities in its associates, even though many may not have served in the military. It also does what service leaders are best equipped to do: provide a clear message concerning the organization’s shared beliefs, values, and behaviors, as well as training in the skills needed for the job.

USAA trains its associates both for the job and for life. It offers hundreds of courses on a wide range of topics to help personalize what otherwise could be a highly impersonal workplace—one with thousands of associates. One course is even designed to familiarize employees with military basic training, including push-ups, so they can better relate to the company’s customers. It sanctions a four-day work week, which further emphasizes the importance of work/ life quality for associates. Many members of management use the fifth day for concentration on more complex challenges, which are of increasing importance in today’s hectic work environment. All of this helps explain why USAA regularly appears not only in the ranks of best places to work (especially for women) but also at or near the top of lists of companies providing best customer service, as shown in figure 3-1.

USAA’s support systems are among the most sophisticated in the industry. For example, years before competitors, the company’s frontline service representatives had multiple-screen capability to call up the documentation concerning a member’s transactions with the company. Today, such systems provide a high level of transparency, helping to ensure no surprises on a two-way basis among both managers and associates. USAA is cited for its innovative practices in the use of technology.

Support systems also include the careful scripting of many interactions that USAA frontline personnel have with members. For example, when a member calls to inform the company that he’s had an automobile accident, a triage process goes into effect, one that also endears the member to USAA. The first question he’s asked is, “Is everyone all right?” While the member hears concern for his safety, the question is also designed to trigger triage. Accidents involving medical injury are referred to the most experienced of USAA’s personnel, whereas injury-free accidents can be handled quickly by less experienced service personnel. This saves both time and money, while enhancing member satisfaction. Service breakthrough organizations like USAA don’t settle for strategic results such as low cost or differentiation through outstanding service. They pursue practices that produce both/and results that are impossible for competitors with either/or strategies to top.

The things that drive both/and performance—what we have come to think of as deep indicators—are of prime importance. While some of the earliest work around deep indicators established links between employee and customer satisfaction and loyalty,⁷ other studies have linked customer loyalty to profitability.⁸ Although these studies merely associated one phenomenon with another, a more comprehensive study measured cause and effect. It indicated that financial performance was driven in at least one sample of marketing service organizations by quality and client focus, which in turn was a function of employee satisfaction and high standards.⁹

THE SERVICE PROFIT CHAIN AND THE SEARCH FOR DEEP INDICATORS

In our search for deep indicators, based primarily on field observations and data analysis, we have found that measures of employee satisfaction, loyalty, engagement, and ownership are important predictors of customer loyalty, customer ownership, profit, and growth.¹⁰ Years ago, we termed this the service profit chain—a set of relationships describing the operational ways in which an organization converts a strategic service vision (chapter 2) into profit and growth. As shown in figure 3-2, our early research led to the conclusion that the two concepts complement each other in important ways.

Think of the service profit chain as an effort to identify the deep indicators making up the management dashboard that helps explain and predict the ability of some organizations to achieve both/and results in service. The term deep indicator is used here to refer to the what that drives something else. Like Toyota’s “six why’s” of quality improvement, a deep indicator is what we find when we ask “what” several times. For example, if customer loyalty is one of the most important drivers of profit, what drives customer loyalty? What, in turn, drives that? And so on.

Since Version 1.0 of the service profit chain, our work, combined with that of others, has led us to a more complex view of the both/ and management dashboard in the service profit chain (figure 3-3).¹¹The strength of relationships shown there will vary from organization to organization and situation to situation. But we are convinced that the deep indicators of service success for nearly all services are shown there.

Figure 3-2 The Service Profit Chain, Version 1.0

Source: James L. Heskett, Thomas O. Jones, Gary W. Loveman, W. Earl Sasser Jr., Leonard A. Schlesinger, “Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work,” Harvard Business Review, March–April 1994, pp. 164–174, at p. 166.

Factors leading to both/and results in service primarily progress from left to right in figure 3-3, with many interactions along the way, beginning with management practices that influence the quality of the work environment. This in turn leads to employee attitudes and behaviors that help determine the value delivered to customers, customer attitudes and behaviors, and finally financial measures. At numerous points elements interact directly to reinforce one another. For example, profit and growth both result from and confirm the rightness of the culture and other elements of the operating strategy. In an effort to provide explanations, scholars have examined relationships at various points in the chain, slowly connecting their findings in ways that help us dig deeper and deeper into the chain. But profit and growth merely describe what happened—not how it happened. We have a practical objective: to help managers in their efforts to construct management dashboards that explain and predict, not just describe.

Figure 3-3 The Service Profit Chain, Version 2.0: Factors Leading to Both/And Service Results

THE PATH TO BOTH/AND SERVICE SUCCESS

Just how the service profit chain is being pieced together through research tells us a great deal about the potential impact on service management in the future. Stay with us here as we peel back the layers of this onion, starting with the outermost layer. The next several pages may be among the most important of the book.

In our field studies, customer loyalty and engagement are more strongly correlated with profit than is any other factor. If you accept this, you will be curious about the factors influencing customer loyalty, engagement, and ownership.

Customer and Employee Engagement and Loyalty: The Mirror Effect

If our beliefs about the service profit chain prove to be correct, customer engagement should be reflected in scores for employee engagement. The same should be true for loyalty measures. We call this the mirror effect. Our proprietary efforts for various clients suggest that the mirror effect is a strong presence in a wide range of service endeavors. We are convinced that it can be applied especially well to operating entities within the same organization as part of efforts to spread best practice to units with less success in engaging customers and lower profitability. Other studies confirm similar findings.¹²

Some have raised questions about the validity of the mirror effect. However, the questions are based on research that suffers from such things as inadequate sample size and the combination of data from facilities of varying size.¹³ In addition, collecting comparable data from employees and customers has been difficult. The studies often compare employee satisfaction scores with what employees say about the quality of their relationships with customers.¹⁴ As a result, they introduce a strong employee bias into their findings.

Employee Engagement and Loyalty

The service profit chain is based on the hypotheses that employee engagement (i.e., agreement with statements such as “I like my job” or “I would recommend my organization to a friend as a place to work”) is directly related to loyalty, and that both are directly related to productivity and profitability. A growing body of research supports these hypotheses.¹⁵

The research shows that highly engaged employees are more loyal than less engaged employees. A Corporate Leadership Council study found that highly engaged employees say they are half as likely to leave as an average employee in the same organization.¹⁶Service Management Group regularly measures the relationship of engagement to an employee’s intent to leave the job. Its most recent edition of the study concludes that employees with high engagement scores are 2.5 times more likely to remain on the job for the next six months than their less engaged counterparts.¹⁷ Several such studies report similar findings.

These numbers alone help explain the difference between breakthrough and average performance in services. But when differences in productivity are added in, employee performance becomes pivotal in explaining success in the service profit chain.

Employee Productivity

Employee engagement levels are positively related to productivity. Because productivity reduces costs, it is an important factor influencing value delivered to customers. A study of Danish manufacturing firms concluded that high labor turnover negatively affects productivity.¹⁸ The Corporate Leadership Council study cited above estimates that employees with high engagement scores are perceived as performing 20 percentage points better than those with low scores.¹⁹ Perhaps most striking of all is a finding by Service Management Group that employees with high engagement scores were 21 percent more productive than those with the lowest engagement scores.²⁰ If ever there was an argument for hiring carefully, training well, and building engagement in a workforce, this is it.

What drives employee loyalty, engagement, and productivity? Internal service (workplace) quality.

Internal Service (Workplace) Quality

Research has shown that worker satisfaction with workplace quality has a significant impact on engagement (often measured by willingness to recommend the organization to prospective employees). For example, data compiled by Service Management Group from many organizations and thousands of frontline workers in retail services regularly shows that employees who are “very satisfied” are 2.7 times as likely to recommend their organization as a place to work as those who are merely “satisfied” and more than 9 times as likely to recommend their organization compared to those who are “neutral” when asked if they are satisfied with their job.²¹

An inspiring mission and set of shared values, combined with a shared belief in behaviors consistent with those values, are at the core of an organization’s culture. When backed up with measures of behavior and, when necessary, corrective action, an organization’s culture can be a powerful competitive force. It contributes to workplace quality along with the organization of work, incentives to perform it well, and the quality of the people hired to do it.

An in-depth study conducted by one of us (Heskett) illustrates the importance of workplace quality, which is generally equated to an organization’s culture.²² The objective of the study was to determine a method for calculating the economic value of an effective culture. Using a combination of internal data collected from several offices of a global marketing services company, combined with independent estimates for pieces of data not available in the company, Heskett developed a process for estimating the impact of culture on operating profit. The process employed measures of the kind shown in figure 3-3 along with assumptions drawn from service profit chain research.

Two findings from the study stand out. First, the study found that the internal quality of the workplace was responsible for nearly half of the difference in operating profit between pairs of offices operating in the same business. A high number might have been expected in a professional service organization in which most of its employees occupy frontline customer-facing jobs (as opposed to a “manufactured” service with little interaction between employees and customers). But a number this high? This should be enough to raise the curiosity of any manager.

The study sought an explanation for these striking results. Fortunately, all offices conducted the same employee engagement survey during the time of the research. Comparisons of survey data with operating data for a sample of offices showed that affirmative responses to the statement “In my office, management is trusted” were positively associated with high office performance.

Predictably, organizations with high levels of internal trust have a competitive advantage. To the extent that they combine trust with delegation of authority and accountability, they operate faster, less expensively, and more effectively than competitors. The result begs for consideration of how trust is developed.

Trust and Its Determinants

The study of the impact of culture on operating performance cited above suggests several possible factors that might contribute to high levels of trust that accompany breakthrough service performance.²³These include transparency, delegation, and accountability for acting according to the commonly understood and shared values and behaviors of the organization. Also important is the practice of setting and meeting employee expectations in ways that eliminate surprises or unexpected behaviors or actions—in a sense, no-surprises management from the top down rather than bottom up in the organization.

Knowing and Meeting Employee Expectations

Managers who set out to meet expectations have to know what those expectations are. That means they have to be in close touch with associates, a behavior that itself contributes to trust.

Based on research in which Schlesinger has been involved, we have a good idea of what employees expect and how those expectations are shaped. The most frequently expressed expectations concern the quality of leadership and peers on the job, opportunities for personal development, the frequency and quality of feedback, latitude to deliver results, and reasonable compensation. The likelihood that expectations will be met is enhanced by a philosophy of hiring for attitude and training for skills, providing outstanding support systems, allowing enough latitude to deliver results to customers, and holding everyone accountable for the use of that latitude. These practices compose the very core of what it takes to create an effective workplace from which everything else, especially growth and profit, flow. They contribute significantly to competitive advantage, even in association with an inferior competitive strategy and position.

Trust as a Deep Indicator of Competitive Advantage at USAA

At USAA trust is at the core of its competitive advantage. It was an important element in the agreement among 25 military officers in 1922 to insure one another’s automobiles, the agreement on which USAA was founded. USAA’s current leaders, from CEO Josue Robles Jr. on down, operate with a distinct code of conduct derived from the organization (the military) from which most of them were hired. In the military they were trained to carry out a mission dependably, to meet expectations of those depending on them. At USAA, they have the mission to do the right thing for employees and members (customers).

Further, because USAA’s members are selected from the same military culture, they are trusted by management. This trust saves time, eliminates costly verification, and reduces losses from default or fraud. It enables the organization to concentrate on the well-being of its members (who also happen to be “shareholders” in an insurance company with a mutual form of organization). For example, a USAA policyholder involved in an automobile accident can be advised to get her automobile fixed and send USAA the bill; there is no need for multiple estimates and documentation. Other insurance companies serving a diverse clientele don’t have that luxury. If they trust, they have to verify first. At USAA, it may not work every time. But the instances of those taking advantage of the organization’s trust are few.

WHAT FIELD-BASED STUDIES TELL US

Several studies of service profit chain phenomena shed additional light on findings discussed above.

Multilevel Linkages in the Chain

Studies link several elements of the service profit chain. One study recently performed at L Brands in its Victoria’s Secret lingerie and beauty specialty retail chain found links between the quality of the customer experience and customer conversion (the proportion of customers entering the store who buy something), the likelihood to recommend the Victoria’s Secret store to friends, and future sales.²⁴The quality of customers’ experiences reflected those of associates (employees) in the same store. Associates’ experiences, particularly with their onboarding (hiring) process, appeared to have an influence on retention rates, which further contributed to the quality of customers’ experiences.

Time Lags in Service Profit Chain Relationships

The L Brands study looked for a correlation between customer engagement (likelihood to recommend) and sales. When same-month data was used for both, no correlation was found. When customer engagement scores were related to the next months’ sales, a strong correlation was found. One possible explanation for this is the frequency with which the typical Victoria’s Secret customer visits the stores.²⁵

One of the first efforts to lag results in service profit chain relationships was reported some years ago. It concluded that a 5 percentage point increase in employee satisfaction at retailer Sears led to a 1.3 percentage point increase in customer satisfaction and a 0.5 percent increase in sales. However, the relationship was not clear until increases in sales were lagged by nine months after increases in employee satisfaction scores.²⁶

The findings of time lags make sense. The effects of increases in employee satisfaction, engagement, loyalty, and ownership behaviors can’t be observed immediately. The lag in observable effects will vary from business to business, depending on such things as the “rhythm” of the business (seasonality or natural fluctuations), the nature of the management intervention to improve loyalty, levels of loyalty among employees and customers at the time of the intervention, and the amount of recent hiring or turnover among employees. Failure to lag service profit chain data has proved to be a shortcoming of work by researchers. It has also led to unrealistic expectations among practitioners, many of whom expect immediate results from their decisions.

From Correlation to Cause and Effect in the Pursuit of Deep Indicators

Nearly all of the research conducted to date on service profit chain relationships measures correlations, not cause and effect, between elements of the chain. The most extensive study of cause and effect in service profit chain relationships to date supports the nature of the relationships diagrammed in figure 3-3. In it, David Maister analyzed data provided by more than 5,000 employees of 139 offices of 29 marketing service firms. He found that the chain of effects leading to profit and growth does indeed begin with a culture of “enthusiasm, commitment, and respect” that infuses the coaching of employees.²⁷ He concluded that financial performance results from a combination of quality of work for clients and client focus (as judged by employees, not clients). This in turn was found to result from employee satisfaction levels, influenced by such things as empowerment, coaching, high standards, long-term orientation of the organization, training and development, enthusiasm, commitment, and respect for others, as well as fair compensation.

Studies of this kind inform managers about how strategic decisions and policies, when well-executed, affect service outcomes and ultimately financial performance. They influence the way services are designed and managed.

THE SPREAD OF SERVICE PROFIT CHAIN THINKING

Recent indicators suggest that service profit chain thinking is gaining acceptance among practitioners. Advertising campaigns are beginning to trumpet rankings on surveys of customer service or best places to work. One firm that develops software for “human capital management” (Ultimate Software) advertises itself as being on Fortune’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For while promoting its latest software product for predicting the likelihood that an employee is likely to defect, terminating his employment.²⁸ A news report singles out a private-equity investment management company, Brentwood Associates, for its practice of investing in companies with “a fiercely loyal customer base.”²⁹ These are real businesses applying service profit chain thinking to money-making pursuits.

Customers are now commonly asked the likelihood that they would repurchase a product or service or recommend their service provider to a friend. These are questions resulting from the spread of measurement practices using some form of a so-called Net Promoter Score—a score that indicates the likelihood that a customer would recommend particular services to others. The concept is a direct reflection of a belief in service profit chain relationships.³⁰Service profit chain elements regularly appear in “balanced scorecards” (see chapter 4) utilized by a growing number of organizations to track their performance.³¹

One recent study of management practice found that among a sample of managers in 92 firms, 81.8 percent were aware of a positive relationship between customer loyalty and financial performance in their firms. Further, roughly one-third measured the relationship between employee and customer satisfaction (the mirror effect). All who were aware of the outcome of the measurement effort “reported the relationship . . . to be strong.”³²

Other anecdotal evidence also shows that many organizations are employing service profit chain thinking, whether they call it that or not. A comment by Ed Wise, chairman and CEO of the marketing services firm CDM Group, reflects this:

It has been a long time since I actually read about the service profit chain, and I can’t truthfully say that we have ever really used those three words widely within the company. . . . For me, the great insight from . . . the [service profit chain] was that there is a right way, a kind of system, for thinking about managing an agency. I was struck by seeing the proof that people were the key lever to growing an organization and making it excellent. . . . In short, service profit thinking will continue to spread because it works.³³

ROADBLOCKS TO SERVICE PROFIT CHAIN IMPLEMENTATION

Even with the growing body of evidence that service profit chain concepts work in practice, many organizations still seek other means of achieving competitive advantage. We have to ask the question: why hasn’t this thinking been implemented more extensively?

It’s Not Simple

Tom Davenport has pointed out some of the complexity in the concept of service profit chains that inhibits its implementation:

1. The concept requires sustained effort to implement successfully.

2. Implementation has to be cross-functional.

3. CEOs have to be engaged in the process.

4. This is a way of life, not an individual program.³⁴

One test of the relevance of a concept is that people begin to take it for granted. They express amazement that something so simple as “employee loyalty, engagement, and ownership drive customer loyalty, engagement, and ownership and ultimately growth and profitability” could command attention. The answer, of course, is that it wasn’t always thought to be that simple. For years, the concept went unrecognized. Now that it is taken for granted by so many, it becomes the norm against which other strategies are judged.

It Requires the Right Data

In the study of the effect of culture on operating performance, cited earlier, Heskett confronted the absence of relevant data available to managers. Of the 35 key measures required to quantify the impact of culture on performance, only about one-third were readily available. Another one-third were obtainable with more effort than any manager would be willing to exert on a routine basis. And the final one-third simply did not exist in the organization. In terms of the measures shown in figure 3-3, the access of managers to data declines significantly as one moves from the lower right (profit, growth, and other financial measures) to the upper left (employee expectations and the degree to which they are met). Surprisingly, in our work we have found little effort on the part of managers to measure whether or not their employees trust them. Yet that may be one of the most important deep indicators they could be tracking!

We find it ironic that in an era of so-called big data, so little of the data relevant to the management of service profit chain relationships is available to managers on a regular basis. The growth of interest in a form of big data being called “people analytics” may foster attention to closing this gap.

It’s Contingent on Employee and Customer Loyalty

Most service operating strategies reflect the belief that customer loyalty is the primary determinant of growth and profitability. A decline in the level of loyalty is a cause for grave concern. That’s why the research of two marketing scholars, Itamar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen, is worth noting as we look to the future.³⁵ Based on their work, they have concluded, contrary to popular belief among their marketing colleagues, that the increasing capability of Internet search devices, combined with the reviews and recommendations of other users, will enable customers to cope effectively with the increasing amount of information, products, and prices they confront on a daily basis. As a result, they will know more about their options for everything from services to employment opportunities than ever before. They will place trust in reviewers whom they do not know. Their inclination to try new products and services and pursue new job opportunities will increase. The power of brands will decline. And of greatest interest to us: customer and employee loyalty, as well as the lifetime value of customer relationships, will decline. This is a lot to comprehend and contemplate.

Internet search, consumer ratings, and new apps clearly put more information and power in the hands of customers. What effect this will have on beliefs and practices based on the service profit chain is less clear. In part it depends on whether one believes the impact on the consumption of services will equal that for product purchase decisions. For example, sites such as Angie’s List focus on recommendations of those who have experienced all kinds of services. Many shoppers for services use these recommendations in their purchase decisions. They do so particularly for the kinds of services that are not consumed regularly, such as furnace repair. Consumers who are disenchanted with their current service provider may also use such recommendations.

The development of Internet search and referral capability underlines the importance of a zero-defection mentality among managers, especially in services. To the extent that the Internet enables customers to recommend their service providers, a sign of ownership, we believe it will actually strengthen ties between breakthrough service providers and their best customers. While we may see a decline in loyalty among “passive” consumers (who tend to be less loyal to begin with; more about them in chapter 7) served by undistinguished service providers, the effect is not inevitable for all providers and their relationships with customers.

THE SERVICE PROFIT CHAIN AS A WAY OF LIFE

Think of the service profit chain as one set of deep indicators—one kind of balanced scorecard by which an organization’s operating strategy can be tracked and controlled.

Service profit chain thinking has spread in recent years. It is characterized by the fact that a growing number of firms advertise high customer service rankings or citations as great places to work. Measures of links in the chain, such as relatively wide application of the Net Promoter Score to assess customer and employee engagement, have improved. Development has been encouraged as well by the adoption of a balanced scorecard of financial and nonfinancial measures (especially those tracking customer loyalty and employee retention) in a growing number of organizations.

This trend is somewhat remarkable in that the service profit chain comprises a demanding set of relationships and objectives. It requires significant organizational effort to implement the concept successfully. Much of the implementation is cross-functional in nature. In a sense, the service profit chain is a way of life, not simply another management program. For these reasons, CEO engagement and leadership are critical to any effort to introduce service profit chain thinking and action to an organization.

The goal of most service profit chain–based actions is to leverage value for employees and customers alike over costs in order to achieve a high return on investment for the service provider. It is a way that an organization attains an edge on competition. Ways that organizations have sought to achieve such edge include customer engagement (at organizations such as Build-a-Bear Workshop and Eleven Madison Park), service guarantees (Hampton Inn), innovative ways of organizing the work of frontline service employees (Caesar’s Entertainment and Ritz-Carlton), team-based organization (Taco Bell), an effective organization culture (Whole Foods Market, Southwest Airlines, Zappos.com, and Disney), and resource sharing (Airbnb, Uber, and Instacart). That’s what much of the rest of this book is about.