Winning on Purpose: The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customers
Fred Reichheld with Darci Darnell and Maureen Burns
Harvard Business Review Press (December 2017)

Need an unbeatable strategy for success? Enrich the lives of your customers.

Years ago, Southwest Airlines’ then chairman and CEOI, Herb Keller, was asked to explain why his company was more profitable and had a greater cap value all of its nine competitors…COMBINED.

“We take great care of our people, they take great care of our customers, and then our customers take great care of our shareholders.”

With the assistance of Darci Darnell and Maureen Burns, Fred Reichheld has written another book in which he once again focuses on the “secret sauce” of success is for all great organizations: their core mission is “to deliver happiness to their customers — solving their problems and turning frowns into smiles.” Their leaders “embrace enriching customers’ lives as the organization’s primary purpose” and these leaders think of themselves “as servants to their companies’ frontline teams.”

It is no coincidence that companies annually listed among those most highly admired and best to work for are also annually ranked among those that are most profitable and have the greatest cap value in their industry segment. However different these companies may be in most respects, all of their leaders are totally committed to serving workers who, in turn, are totally committed to serving customers. This is the WHAT and the WHY of business success and they remain the same.

True, Reichheld covered much of this in previously published books — notably The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value (1996); Loyalty Rules! How Today’s Leaders Build Lasting Relationships (2001), The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth (2006), and The Ultimate Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer Driven World (2011), all published by HBSP — but the business world today is far more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous than at any prior time that Reichheld and I (and probably you) can remember.

In his latest book, he explains the HOW, introducing the the Earned Growth Rate: the first reliable , complementary accounting measure that can truly leverage the power of the Net Promoter Score/ System that Reichheld invented. Business leaders now have even more– and better — resources to enrich the lives of their customers. The system he invented — then called NPS — has a 26-year track record of high-impact success in customer/client relationships.

Also keep in mind that a primary purpose of enriching the lives of customers also offers significant value-added benefits that include enriching the lives of supervisors and their direct reports, especially those who have frequent contact with customers; also, it substantially increases the percentage of workers who are positively and productively engaged. (Note: According to Gallup’s most recent research, the current average is less than 30% in U.S. companies. The other 70% either mail it in to keep their job or work actively to undermine their employer’s success.) Moreover, companies with consistently high NPS/S scores retain a much higher percentage of valued employees as well as customers, deliver 2-3 times the average stock market returns, and therefore are a preferred stock for individual as well as institutional investors.

Fred Reichheld is a pragmatist. He has an insatiable curiosity to understand what works, what doesn’t, and why. If your company needs an unbeatable strategy for success, here it is: Enrich the lives of your customers. HOW to do that? Read Winning on Purpose, then re-read it or at least review the passages you have highlighted. Absorb and digest the material, then share what you have learned with others. Urge them to read the book. Discuss key insights. ASAP, collaborate on a plan, with special attention paid to the material in Appendix A, “Net Promoter Checklist.”

The Chinese character for the word “crisis” has two meanings: peril and opportunity. Which will it be for you and your company? In this context, I am again reminded of Hillel the Younger’s two key questions: “If not now, when? If not you, who?”