Professional and technical literature is already full of books, for all levels of readers and interests. In fact, I think there are more books out there that we need to know about, let alone read. Service Thinking is definitely not “yet another business book.” I have found the content inspirational in several unique ways. First, it presents a practical collection of techniques that people will definitely use in actual field-based work. Second, the content invites the reader to have a deep-dive, not an anecdotic description of consulting experiences put together with the intention of creating more branding for the authors. Third, the content is a serious elaboration of a number of services systems ideas without the reader needing to be a business researcher.
The framework that the book introduces covers several dimensions that are among the most commonly encountered when understanding and acting on change in organizations. The target of the framework is services organizations—but understood in a modern sense, where the new economy will show traditionally inward-looking enterprise “service centers” an opportunity to add value beyond the firm, deconstructing traditional value-chains and redefining competition in and across conventional industry boundaries.
I had read another book by the same authors in 2008 (Improve Your Marketing to Grow Your Business, Wharton School Publishing) that made visible then the most common trends in enterprise marketing that we see emerging today. This book is another seminal milestone in creating a new generation of more competent business and engineering professionals by providing them interdisciplinary material that comes from many market-proven experiences. This book is then very far from “personal illumination,” so typical of those we see from “gurus,” done with the pretense of making an isolated experience a new trend for organizations to embrace and voiced by the marketing power of the publishing house. The “new” thing in this book is around a methodology that should be definitely imitated by other business writers, i.e., ingenious and creative approaches based on the evidence of what works in practice (and not only in the practice of one or two people but thousands).
I truly believe this book will be a companion reference for serious consultants either with a business or engineering background. And it will also be used by business and enterprise engineering researchers to revisit and shed new light on those theories that we have been using to approach the modeling and transformation of enterprises. I think each chapter of the book is an invitation to conduct further investigation and to be used in the corresponding class of a graduate curriculum or professional education course. I bet the next edition will double the size of the present one and will show the further evolution of the framework as consumed and improved by practitioners and researchers in the few upcoming years.
Dr. Jorge Sanz
Director Business Analytics Center—National University of Singapore
Chief Innovation Officer Retail Banking—IBM Corporation