Practice What You Preach: What Managers Must Do to Create a High Achievement Culture

Practice What You Preach: What Managers Must Do to Create a High Achievement Culture David H. Maister The Free Press New York, NY 2001 ISBN: 0-7432-1187-1

251 pp.

Review DOI 10.1108/09564230310478873

The key message of Practice What You Preach by David Maister is: firms that are perceived by their employees to practice what they preach are more financially successful than their competitors. In his book, Maister provides empirical evidence for the long argued sequence: If you energize your people, they serve your clients well, and you will make lots of money. What Maister preaches relates strongly to the idea of the service profit chain proposed by Heskett, Sasser and Schlesinger. Also Kotter and Heskett (1992) in Corporate Culture and Performance arrive at similar conclusions. As the author states in his introduction: "Most of the findings confirm what other writers (and 1) have been advocating for years. What's new here is that this study presents substantial evidence." (p. 3).

In the book, Maister presents a worldwide survey of 139 offices in 29 professional service firms in 15 countries across the world, in 15 different settings within the marketing communications business. The central question in his survey: Are employees' attitudes correlated with financial success? The answer to this question is "yes". Furthermore, he shows that employee attitudes cause improvement in financial performance. In addition to the survey, Maister conducted in-depth interviews with managers and employees of the firms surveyed. From these interviews, he concludes that the success of firms is not based on the systems of the firm, but is determined by the character and skills of the individual manager.

The book, which aims at providing proof to practicing managers that financial rewards come from living up to the standards that they preach, is build around the evidence. By presenting readers results one at a time it builds up from the simplest to the most complex, finally leading to lessons of the evidence that managers can help increase firm growth and profitability. Although the discussion of the results of the survey forms a substantial part, the core of the book is the interviews with managers who got the best results in the survey. The survey and the interviews together determine the overall structure of the book. That...