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Service Strategy

Title	Author(s)	Key Concepts	Comments
Service Management
Managing Professional Services	David Maister	Stakeholder needs Leverage & Profitability Profitability Tactics	A wonderful introduction to the challenges of managing a service firm.
Product Plus	Christopher Lovelock	Solid overview of helpful frameworks for managing a services business. Great insights on: Service Quality Service Delivery Systems Creating customer value	Book is heavily weighted on the “marketing” and “customer experience” side of the equation. Very little information on how to structure and scale delivery capabilities.
Marketing Professional Services
Branded Customer Service	Janelle Barlow Paul Stewart	Defining your Brand Brand Assessment Delivering your Brand Moving the Culture	The first book I have read that explores the practice of explicitly linking brand attributes to service delivery practices.

United We Brand	Mike Moser	Brand Attributes Brand Personality Brand Cohesion Brand Roadmap	Provides a step-by-step process for defining your brand positioning.
Marketing Professional Services	Philip Kotler	Services Marketing Marketing Mix Pricing Strategies	Introduction to the activities associated with marketing services. Geared toward traditional professional service firms such as Law, but still contains concepts applicable to marketing other types of professional services.
Partners and Channels
Getting Partnering Right	Neil Rackham, Lawrence Friedman, Richard Ruff	Three ingredients to a successful partnership Partner selection	Discusses the three ingredients required for partnerships to be successful. Very relevant to professional services organizations that are partnering to deliver complete solutions to customers.
The Channel Advantage	Lawrence Friedman, Timothy Furey	Channel costs Channel attributes Channel capacity Channel mix	Practical framework for assessing what channel mix is appropriate for the services organization

Service Structure

Title	Author(s)	Key Concepts	Comments
Service Management
Getting Into Your Customer's Head	Kevin Davis	The eight roles in the buy-learning wheel	Provides a great model to understand the various roles a consultant plays for the customer.
Selling the Invisible	Harry Beckwith	Pointers on positioning and selling services	Light read, but does provide some good points to ponder.
How Customer's Think	Gerald Zaltman	Insights on how to ask the right questions when doing market research.
Metrics
The Balanced Scorecard	Robert S. Kaplan David P. Norton	Four point balanced scorecard	Introduces four categories that a business should create metrics around: Financial, Customer, Internal Processes, Learning
Service Development & IP Management
Intellectual Capital	Leif Edvinsson	Hidden sources of value Intellectual Capital financial equation
Revolutionizing Product Development	Steven C. Wheelwright & Kim B. Clark	Definition of effective product development life cycle.	Opportunity to apply best practice product development techniques to services development.
The Success Case Method	Robert Brinkerhoff	Methodology for identifying and documenting how your most successful employees are getting the job done.	The SCM approach is practical and relevant to any service organization that is attempting to document and justify best practice methodologies.

Service Culture

Title	Author(s)	Key Concepts	Comments
The Innovator's Dilemma	Clayton M. Christensen	The impact company structure and culture has on incubating new strategies	Findings are directly applicable to what happens when product-centric companies attempt to incubate a professional services business.
Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?	Louis Gerstner, Jr.	Discusses the three key challenges of strategy, structure, and culture.	Gerstner’s perspective of IBM’s transition from a product-centric company to solution-centric. Wonderful read.
The Power of Alignment	George Labovitz Victor Rosansky	Vertical and Horizontal Alignment	Discusses how to align company efforts, from top down.
The First 90 Days	Michael Watkins	Four Transition Types Four Phases of Transition	Provides high level road map for the process of transitioning the culture of an organization. Practical tactics to accelerate transition.

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