Waldemar Schmidt, Gordon Adler, Els van Weering
ISBN: 0-470-84823-5
Cloth
200 pages
January 2003

This book looks into the business best practices of four service industries that have become extremely successful over the past two decades. Each company featured had only one leader at the helm during their expansion. These CEOs share their effective leadership skills throughout the book and reveal tools and techniques they used to meet the bottom line. Following extensive interviews with the four CEOs named below, research has shown that these leaders stuck to three basic principles:

1. Identify your true north and stick to it
2. Put people before strategy.
3. Create deep understanding of the business mechanics on all management levels.

This book is also packed with executive summaries, etrensive interviews, bullet points on financial and historical data, checklists, and anecdotes to affirm lessons covered.

The CEOs interviewed were Thomas Berglund of Securitas and J. Philip Sorensen of Group4Falck, the world's two largest security companies, Francis Mackay of Compass plc and Pierre Bellon of Sodexho Alliance, the world's two largest food service companies.