Category Archives: C. Business

103 – Adopting a collaborative stance

Paul Skinner

In this episode, I welcome a guest author from the UK to the podcast. Paul Skinner is the author of Collaborative Advantage: How collaboration beats competition as a strategy for success. Paul believes that collaboration is a worthwhile stance because most value is necessarily created by the customer (and other stakeholders), and co-creation of value with others can provide a winning strategy and a new path to organizational growth.

In addition to writing and speaking about Collaborative Advantage, Paul is the founder of the Agency of the Future, which helps clients create collaborative advantage to drive their own organizational success. He is also the founder of the social enterprise Pimp My Cause, which brings together marketers and good causes to create transformational pro bono projects for social good. In his book, Paul presents Collaborative Advantage as a radical alternative to the conventional goal of competitive advantage. Join this episode to gain an overview of Paul’s fascinating book.

You can connect with Paul on LinkedIn, or at the Agency of the Future (www.theaof.com) or Pimp My Cause (www.pimpmycause.org).

Charles G. Chandler, Ph.D.

Reference:

Skinner, Paul. 2018. Collaborative Advantage: How collaboration beats competition as a strategy for success. London, UK: Robinson – an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group.

098 – The Purpose of a Corporation

This month, August 2019, the Business Roundtable issued a new overall statement of purpose for a corporation, signed by the CEOs of almost 200 of the largest US corporations. This is a big deal because the previous 1997 statement from this same group had created a major problem by elevating shareholder value as the prime purpose of business. The new statement broadens the corporate commitment to all stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers, local communities, and shareholders in order to set an improved tone for business activities going forward.

Let me include the statement here, it’s not long.

Business Roundtable Statement on the purpose of a corporation

Americans deserve an economy that allows each person to succeed through hard work and creativity and to lead a life of meaning and dignity. We believe the free-market system is the best means of generating good jobs, a strong and sustainable economy, innovation, a healthy environment and economic opportunity for all.

Businesses play a vital role in the economy by creating jobs, fostering innovation and providing essential goods and services. Businesses make and sell consumer products; manufacture equipment and vehicles; support the national defense; grow and produce food; provide health care; generate and deliver energy; and offer financial, communications and other services that underpin economic growth.

While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders. We commit to:

Delivering value to our customers. We will further the tradition of American companies leading the way in meeting or exceeding customer expectations.

Investing in our employees. This starts with compensating them fairly and providing important benefits. It also includes supporting them through training and education that help develop new skills for a rapidly changing world. We foster diversity and inclusion, dignity and respect.

Dealing fairly and ethically with our suppliers. We are dedicated to serving as good partners to the other companies, large and small, that help us meet our missions.

Supporting the communities in which we work. We respect the people in our communities and protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses.

Generating long-term value for shareholders, who provide the capital that allows companies to invest, grow and innovate. We are committed to transparency and effective engagement with shareholders.

Each of our stakeholders is essential. We commit to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities, and our country.

[Issued August 19, 2019, by the Business Roundtable and signed by almost 200 CEOs]

Significance. Stephen Pearlstein, writing in the Washington Post this month, notes that “what most distinguishes America’s brand of capitalism is the widely held belief that the first duty of every business is to maximize value for shareholders. The benign version of this credo is that there is no way to deliver maximum value to shareholders over the long term without also satisfying the needs of customers, employees and the society at large. But in its more corrosive application — the one that is inculcated in business schools, enforced by corporate lawyers and demanded by activist investors and Wall Street analysts — maximizing shareholder value has meant doing whatever is necessary to boost the share price this quarter and the next.” Over the years, this approach has justified corporate efforts that have mislead or defrauded customers, squeezed workers & suppliers, reduced or avoid taxes, but showered stock options on executives. It has been the ruthlessness, the greed and inequality that most people find distasteful in American capitalism, and such attitudes are rooted in the persistent notion that maximizing shareholder value is what business is all about.

Which is why the new statement by the Business Roundtable disavowing shareholder primacy is important. Pearlstein further notes that “in the Roundtable’s new formulation of corporate purpose, delivering value to customers, investing in employees, dealing fairly and honestly with suppliers, supporting communities and protecting the environment all have equal billing with generating long-term value for shareholders.” The statement rejects the whole idea of “maximizing” the value benefiting one stakeholder over all the others. Instead, it calls for balance and compromise in serving all company stakeholders.

Despite the upbeat statement from the Business Roundtable, a blanket statement of purpose for all corporations remains contested territory. Reaction from opposing quarters was swift, as the Council of Institutional Investors expressed concern that the statement undercut managerial accountability to shareholders because of their ownership rights within the corporation (Bertsch, 2019).

Let me stop here and note that, as has been mentioned before on this podcast, shareholders do not own a public corporation. Shareholders only have a claim to some of the residual assets of the company via stock ownership. The related argument for shareholder primacy (among all stakeholders) also falls apart when the following is considered: 1) shareholders do not have the right of control over corporation assets; the Board of Directors has that right. Similarly, 2) shareholders do not have the right to help themselves to a firm’s earnings; they only receive dividends when the Board of Directors sees fit. The claim that shareholders own the corporation is empirically incorrect from both a legal and an economic perspective (Stout, 2002). No-one owns a public company; it owns itself. As the British say, it’s like the river Thames, nobody owns it (Kay, 2015).

Yet it was the political and economic landscape of the 1980s that enshrined shareholder value maximization as the main purpose of a corporation. The decades-long influence of that narrative cannot be easily put aside. To review how we got here, the period after World War II until the late 1970s was characterized by a “retain-and-reinvest” approach to resource allocation by major U.S. corporations. During this period corporations tended to retain earnings and reinvest them to increase the corporation’s capabilities. This served to benefit the employees who had helped improve firm competitiveness and provided workers with higher incomes and greater job security. It also gradually increased shareholder value as firms grew.  The “retain-and-invest” pattern gave way in the late-1970s to a “downsize-and-distribute” regime where corporate efficiency became an overriding goal, justifying layoffs, asset sales, and other cost reduction approaches, followed by the distribution of freed-up cash to financial interests, particularly shareholders (Lazonick, 2014). The downsize-and-distribute approach tended to strip value from a firm and contributed to employment instability and income inequality inside the firm because the firm’s ability to be productive in the future was weakened. During the “retain and invest” regime, workers were relatively happy because they felt that their organization was keeping their interests in mind. With the advent of “downsize and distribute,” however, stresses built up around the social contract between management and workers (Chandler, 2017).

There was likely more than one cause for the adoption of the downsize-and-distribute regime during the 1980s. Not insignificant was the corporate raider model first employed by activists such as Carl Icahn, who employed asset-stripping techniques in the 1985 hostile takeover of TWA. One example was that in 1991 Icahn sold TWA’s prized London routes to American Airlines for $ 445 million. Icahn later took TWA private and made a personal profit of $ 469 million while leaving TWA with debt of $ 540 million (Grant, 2006). Partly in response to these techniques, management of some publicly traded corporations adopted countermeasures designed to make corporate raids and hostile takeovers less attractive, including legal poison pills, C-suite golden parachutes, and debt level increases on the balance sheet. Even after such measures, however, activist investors or hedge funds could buy as little as 10% of the stock of a public company to argue for a seat on the board and pressure management to increase returns to shareholders. While hedge funds have claimed that their efforts create a more efficient industrial structure and a better allocation of capital overall, it is doubtful that history will be kind to the downsize-and-distribute regime, since it strips away assets and hampers a firm’s ability to produce in the future.

Another trend associated with the practice of shareholder value maximization has been the widespread increase in executive compensation, largely influenced by the popularity of agency theory — championed by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics. Agency theory holds that C-suite executives are agents of the owners and need to be heavily incentivized to be sure that their interests are aligned with those of the owners (who are equated with the shareholders).  Over the years, friendly boards have increased CEO compensation to extraordinary levels (tens of millions of dollars) by benchmarking with other firms that were doing the same (Whoriskey, 2011) . Starting with the 1980s, recent decades have seen a meteoric rise in executive compensation in the USA relative to the average worker’s wage. This is an example of the perverse incentives that operate under agency theory, due to the elevation of the inappropriate goal of shareholder value maximization. Milton Friedman’s view that the sole social responsibility of the firm was to maximize profits (Friedman, 1970)—leaving ethical questions to individuals and governments—became dominant in both finance and law by the 1980s. It also provided the intellectual foundation for the “shareholder value” revolution.

A prominent view during the period was that the invisible hand of the market remained a dominant force in the economy. Conservatives, such as Friedman (and Alan Greenspan at the US Federal Reserve after 1987), argued that the market could be relied upon to regulate the economy and that government intervention is unnecessary and undesirable. In their view, government was the problem and needed to get out of the way. While it has often been taken for granted that an organization’s purpose is to produce economic value, and although economic value can often add to social value, sometimes it does not. According to Mary Ann Glenn (2016) of the Academy of Management, this disjunction raises the question of meaningfulness, which can be viewed as an organization’s expression of purpose, values, or worth. It should involve a sense of significance that goes beyond material success or profitability by highlighting how an organization expects to play a larger and more positive role in the world (AOM, 2015)

No matter which theory of business purpose you ascribe to, we all can agree that corporations have a central role in modern life. They offer goods and services. They are places to work. They are force multipliers, allowing individuals to achieve purposes much larger than they could accomplish by themselves. The best corporations help add meaning to our lives. Truly great ones occupy an important niche in their environment and act in ways that benefit the common good. That’s why the revised statement of purpose for corporations issued by the Business Roundtable represents a more hopeful note on what they can become.  

References:

Bertsch, Ken. 2019. “Council of Institutional Investors Responds to Business Roundtable Statement on Corporate Purpose.” Council of Institutional Investors, Washington, DC. August 19.

“Business Roundtable Redefines the Purpose of a Corporation to Promote ‘An Economy That Serves All Americans'”. www.businessroundtable.org. Retrieved 2019-08-19.

Chandler, Charles G. 2017. Become Truly Great: Serve the Common Good through Management by Positive Organizational Effectiveness. Powell, OH (USA): Author Academy Elite.

Friedman, Milton. 1970. “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits.” New York Times Magazine, September 13.

Glynn, Mary Ann. 2016. “Making Organizations Meaningful – Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2016.” AOM.org.

Grant, E. X. 2006. “TWA — The Death of a Legend.” St. Louis Magazine, July 28, online ed.

Kay, J. 2015. “Shareholders think they own the company — they are wrong.” Financial Times, November 10, online ed.  

Lazonick, W. 2014. “Profits Without Prosperity.” Harvard Business Review, September 2014, online ed.

Pearlstein, Stephen. 2019. “Top CEOs are reclaiming legitimacy by advancing a vision of what’s good for America.” Washington Post. August 19 (online edition).

Stout, Lynn A. 2002. “Bad and Not-so-Bad Arguments for Shareholder Primacy.” Southern California Law Review 75: 1189-1209.

Whoriskey, P. 2011. “Cozy relationships and ‘peer benchmarking’ send CEO pay soaring.” Washington Post, October 3.

097 – Finding clarity in business

Dolores Hirschmann

In this episode, I am joined by Dolores Hirschmann as we discuss the IDEA method for finding clarity in business. Dolores is a STRATEGIST, COACH, and BUSINESS OWNER. Her focus is on helping clients find their ‘core idea’ on which to base their business (or any other initiative). Her clients have become speakers and authors to take their message to large audiences on a TEDx stage or beyond. She works through group coaching, workshops, one-on-one coaching, as well as public speaking. Dolores is a CTI certified and ICF accredited coach and has a business degree from the Universidad de San Andres, Argentina. Originally from Buenos Aires, Dolores speaks fluent Spanish, English, and French and lives in Dartmouth, MA with her husband and four children.

Charles G. Chandler, Ph.D.

Link to more information from Dolores:

Masters in Clarity

096 – The freight market

Mandy Barton, President/CEO of Barton Logistics

This episode continues our occasional series in which we visit a business to try to understand how it works. Today, our guide will be Mandy Barton who is President of Barton Logistics. Mandy shares an interesting story which serves as a window into the movement of freight by truck, rail, and air in the USA. Barton Logistics is a market maker in freight and sits at the intersection between its customers (and their supply chains), its carriers (who operate one or more large trucks, or other vehicles), and its trading partners. The business is physically located in central Texas, but it could have been located anywhere since it operates largely as a call center using the telephone, email and the Internet.

Mandy Barton has been involved in the trucking and third-party logistics (3PL) industry for 23 years.  She founded Barton Logistics in the dining room of her parent’s home in 1997 and currently serves as its President/CEO.  Her degree is in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin.  She is the author of the self-development book, Step One: Jump! published in 2016 and has an active coaching practice.

See below for a link to her book on Amazon:

086 – Why does worker productivity remain low?

Worker productivity is the output of goods and services per hour worked. In the broad terms of an industry, productivity is the gross output of industry sales divided by the number of workers allocated to produce the output.

After World War II, worker productivity in the USA improved significantly due to the investments made by companies in the technological advances of the period. Increasingly, American products were in high demand as much of the rest of the world rebuilt after the war. The US government provided educational opportunities largely free of cost to returning service personnel, who then entered the workforce with improved skills. Typical of the times, firms retained and invested profits in their growing businesses. It was a period that is now remembered fondly as being a golden age in the American homeland. During the period 1947-1973, non-farm worker productivity grew at a robust 2.8 percent per year (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics).

By contrast, the last decade (2007-2016) has seen non-farm worker productivity grow at an anemic 1.2 percent per year. Granted, the USA (and much of the world) was working its way out of a deep recession during the period, but that may not fully explain the low rate of productivity growth. Productivity growth has been weak, and getting weaker, for decades in most industrialized countries. If it continues at this pace, living standards in the USA and highly developed countries around the world will stagnate for most workers.

Economists have provided a number of competing explanations to try to explain what is going on:

1. management strategies that worked in the past have been widely implemented and may no longer contribute to productivity (e.g., efficiency improvements like downsizing, re-engineering, KPIs, etc.);

2. the slow down in capital investment following the financial crisis of 2008 has probably contributed to low productivity;

3. measurement error may be a factor, since the measurement of productivity is notoriously difficult;

4. a delay or lag in productivity gains from any investments in new technology (which may be realized in coming years);

5. a fall in wages across the globe during the recession has put pressure on workers compensation in the USA;

6. the psychological pressures on workers that do not feel secure in their current position;

7. continued weak growth in demand; and

8. the continuing shift from a manufacturing to a service-based economy.

The above explanations generally reflect common beliefs among economists about the nature of the current problems surrounding productivity.

Now let me focus on another possibility — the underlying negative effect of current management practices on productivity and worker engagement. As Gary Hamel (London Business School) has pointed out, many organizations remain inertial, incremental, and insipid in the face of the creative destruction going on in the world economy. The top-down, command and control, and bureaucratic nature of most organizations is hampering innovation at a time when innovation is key to survival and growth.

Clayton Christensen (Harvard Business School) has found another management behavior that is limiting innovation and growth. It relates to the financial metrics (e.g., IRR) being used in public companies. First, Christensen outlines three common types of innovation:

1. Market-creating innovation. This type of innovation creates growth in the economy as it discovers ways to take expensive products that have limited appeal and makes them widely available at lower cost to a mass market. The evolution of the computer from the mainframe to the personal computer, to the smartphone, is an example. The benefits of this type of innovation in the financial metrics are apparent only in the long term (5-10 years), while there is likely to be a short-term decrease until the investments pay off.

2. Sustaining innovations. This type of innovation makes good products better but doesn’t create growth, due to the substitution of new for old. For example, if you buy a Toyota Prius hybrid, you will not be buying a Camry.

3. Efficiency innovations. This type of innovation tries to do more with less, through downsizing, rightsizing, and other cut back measures. It generally eliminates jobs but frees up cash. The benefits of this type of innovation are apparent in the short term in the financial metrics.

Since efficiency innovations provide short-term results which can be seen quickly in the financial metrics, but market-creating innovation only pays off in the long term, it is the efficiency improvements that usually win out. This too can help explain low worker productivity in recent decades.

A recent article in Harvard Business Review (March 1, 2017) noted that great companies obsess over productivity rather than efficiency, since the benefits of efficiency improvements have now played out. Despite weak top-line growth in many years, the 1990s and 2000s saw the earnings growth of S&P 500 companies run nearly three times the rate of inflation due to improvements in efficiency; however, starting with the quarter ending March 31, 2015, S&P 500 earnings began falling and has remained negative ever since. Without top line growth, continuing efforts to achieve improvements in efficiency eventually hit a proverbial brick wall. The same HBR article found three fundamental tenets of a productivity mindset that executives need to understand:

1. Most employees want to be productive, but the organization often gets in the way;

2. A company’s talented “difference makers” are often put in roles that limit their effectiveness; and

3. Employees have plenty of discretionary energy that could be devoted to their work, but many are not sufficiently motivated to do so.

As is often the case with this podcast, we have once again found a need to reinvent management for the 21st Century and beyond. Efficiency improvements have worked their way through companies in recent decades, but have taken a significant toll on future growth. The current path on which many public corporations find themselves is not sustainable. Now we need to create corporations that invest for the future, in workers and their work, by providing the freedom and the tools to do creative and innovative work. It seems that innovation is the only likely path out of the current low productivity regime.

To find this path, I recommend a new management approach that we have discussed before on this podcast, and which is described in my 2017 book, Become Truly Great: Serve the common good through Management by Positive Organizational Effectiveness.

Charles G. Chandler, Ph.D.
[email protected]

References & Links:

1. Link to Gary Hamel’s blog
2. Link to Clayton Christensen’s talk
3. Mankins, Michael. 2017. “Great companies obsess over productivity, not efficiency.” Harvard Business Review, March 1, on-line edition.
4. Chandler, Charles G. 2017. Become Truly Great: Serve the common good through Management by Positive Organizational Effectiveness. Powell, OH: Author Academy Elite.

082 – Vending & School Spirit

Matt Miller

In this episode, we visit with Matt Miller, founder of School Spirit Vending. Matt heads a business enterprise that uses a franchise model to serve a unique niche at the intersection of vending & school spirit — helping to raise extra funds for elementary schools.

Charles G. Chandler, Ph.D.

Links mention in this episode:

  1. School Spirit Vending
  2. Vending Secrets for Passive Income (course)

080 – Adventures in Capitalism

Consider how an upbeat story about a business (Shake Shack) was distorted on social media, eliciting some negative responses in which people question the underlying motivation of management. There seems to be a dominant, and rather negative narrative that plays in the back of people’s minds about capitalism, providing a context in which to interpret daily events. Clearly, capitalism is not working for everyone.  This episode suggests a partial answer.

Charles G. Chandler, Ph.D.

079 – Claim a niche and serve it

It is said that the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Whether generalist or specialist, an organization needs to claim a niche and serve it so well that the competition is irrelevant. In doing so, an organization can carve out a continuing role in its ecosystem. This episode explores (among other things) how Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton and Starbucks have created a mutually beneficial ecosystem that serves convention goers in downtown Atlanta (USA).

Charles G. Chandler, Ph.D.

077 – The outcome economy in technology services

Today I want to focus on a transition happening in the technology services industry driven by some macro trends. This issue appeared on my radar screen while I was looking into the business models used by technology services firms such as IBM, Cisco, and SAP. It is the emerging phenomena that some have called the outcome economy. The outcome economy in technology services, as SAP defines it, is the leap from selling software to selling outcomes to its customers. The old economy was an output economy. As you know, an organization’s outputs are its products and services, or its projects and programs. In technology services, the output economy involved selling boxes of software to customer organizations, so that their internal IT department could install and manage the software on in-house servers. Vendors also sold software directly to individual consumers, for example, Microsoft Windows or MS office.

The new economy is outcome-based. It involves delivering results valued by customers, while providing software as a service in the cloud. In the Outcome Economy, selling an outcome is much more complex for the vendor than selling a product (or output) because delivering outcomes typically involves an integrated and managed end-to-end process.

Now, long-time listeners to this podcast may be wondering whether the outcome economy refers to ‘outcomes’ in the same way as we have used them in the past when discussing organizational effectiveness. The quick answer Is ‘not exactly,’ since those promoting the outcome economy do not define their terminology in a precise way, but let’s not quibble over terminology just now. Today’s discussion is simply a report on trends in the technology services industry, which may have lessons for the rest of us, since these trends are likely to spread elsewhere in the future.

Let me outline three macro trends in the market that I believe are pushing the disruption in technology services.

1. The search for knowledge worker productivity. Today, all knowledge workers require technology services for productivity, and there is a continuing need to enable higher levels of capability and productivity as time goes on and applications evolve. Knowledge workers in the traditional professions include doctors, lawyers, and teachers, to name a few. Knowledge workers master a body of knowledge and apply it to accomplish a task. Knowledge workers become productive within a system that manages the scheduling of the work with the worker. It is a system that either they create themselves (if they are running their own practice) or someone else creates for them (as part of a larger organization). The basic ingredients of the system for knowledge worker productivity can be divided into two categories: a) back office operations — which takes care of the administrative functions, such as personnel, accounting, budgeting, maintenance, facilities, etc., and b) production operations — which organizes the internal production tasks in order to acquire the work (from a customer), and then distribute the work to the individual knowledge workers in a logical, timely, and efficient manner. The knowledge worker remains in control of how the knowledge is applied to the work. Technology services vendors are enhancing the basic productivity model for knowledge workers by adding additional services, such as cognitive computing (e.g., IBM’s Watson in the medical field) to diagnose problems and suggest solutions based on the latest research. Many fields are becoming so complex (e.g., medicine, law) that no single knowledge worker can keep up with everything that has changed since they graduated. Cognitive computing addresses this problem, striving to extend the reach of knowledge workers in new ways.

2. Outsourcing in search of lower costs. Pervasive internet connectivity, together with mobile and cloud computing, are leading to outsourcing and some atomization of business processes in a search for improved efficiency and lower cost. For instance, because everybody is connected to the internet, we can have Virtual Assistants in the Philippines (who act like they are simply part of your office), or social media services optimization by vendors in India. This is just the tip of the iceberg, and the trend is leading to the outsourcing of bits and pieces of processes where it makes sense to do so.

3. Increasing customer expectations. Customer expectations are increasing, and organizations are integrating technology within their offerings to compete. The customer experience, particularly the customization of that experience for the customer by the organization, is increasingly being driven by algorithms. The best experience that the customer has had is driving expectations toward higher and higher norms. For instance, Amazon knows what you have bought in the past, and suggests what else you might be interested in now. Your car, once repairable by you a few decades back, but no longer (yet it monitors itself, and alerts you to a problem). Your kitchen appliances are increasingly being connected to the internet (IoT), and they can schedule a service call before a major problem occurs.

Technology services vendors report that the revenues from their old business models are decreasing rapidly, and they are searching for new ways forward. Many have already moved away from selling software boxes and are now selling software subscriptions (e.g., Microsoft office). Smart analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT) has made it possible to move from the “break it-fix it” model to the “fix it before it breaks” model involving offerings that are sold as a service, tied as closely as possible to business outcomes. These trends have been termed the outcome economy, the consumption economy, or the B4B economy — simply different terms for the same macro trends. In the outcome economy customers pay on the basis of usage (e.g., a cell phone contract) or on the basis of business outcomes (e.g., hours of jet engine operation for an airline, rather than allocating capital toward aircraft engine ownership).

Technology services is complicated, and can be scary for customers. The customer needs (and values) a trusted advisor and partner with whom to chart their journey into the future. Vendors are best placed to absorb the risk of the journey for their customers. In return, they can experience high adoption and renewal rates for their new as-a-service offerings.

In summary, the writing is on the wall. Old business models in technology services are dying as part of the outcome-based economy, and new ones are taking their place. For some, their current situation represents a burning platform, and it creates a “bet the farm” moment, requiring a major change going forward. It must start with what their customer wants (an outside-in approach), and big new investments are likely to be needed going forward to make the transition a reality. Vendors must convert their burning platform into burning ambition, in order to successfully overcome an adverse situation and claim a new future within the outcome economy.

076 – The Boomerang Principle (encore)

Lee Caraher
Lee Caraher

In this episode, I welcome back Ms. Lee Caraher, CEO of Double-Forte, a public relations and marketing services firm with offices in San Francisco, New York, and Boston. Lee was first on the podcast in June 2016 (episode 021) to talk about her first book (Millennials and Management). She has written a second book entitled, The Boomerang Principle: Inspire Lifetime Loyalty from your Employees. By engendering a lifetime of loyalty from former employees, leaders can see them “return” in the form of customers, partners, clients, advocates, contractors, and even returning employees.

Charles G. Chandler, Ph.D.
[email protected]

Reference:
Caraher L. 2017. The Boomerang Principle: Inspire Lifetime Loyalty from your Employees. New York, NY: Bibliomotion.

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