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The Value Effect
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The Value Effect

A Murder Mystery About the Compulsive Pursuit of "The Next Big Thing"

John Guaspari
Berrett-Koehler, 2000
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

John Guaspari uses a murder mystery - Who killed the consultant? - to set up his explanation of the value effect and its power. While value effect advocates at a corporate retreat are busy devising strategies to serve customers by employing the fundamentals of human nature, the consultant gets whacked. But who did it? The guilty party is someone from the corporate department that is most threatened by the use of the value effect. Do we have a human resources murderer or a marketing manslayer? Trying to figure out the mystery adds some fun to this business saga, which getAbstract.com recommends while applauding the author’s originality in creating a corporate thriller. His book is a cut above the usual "next big thing" pomposity, even if the main CVC concepts described within will sound distressingly familiar to readers of management theory. (By the way, if you don’t care about who done it, but are curious about CVC, the value effect itself is skillfully summarized in a concluding memo.)

Summary

Who Killed the Consultant?

Who killed consultant Michael Fallon? The deed was done during the Lodestar executive team’s annual two-day retreat at an old estate turned into a business conference center. As usual, the agenda was dedicated to reviewing the current next big thing. In previous years, the Lodestar leadership had examined total quality, reengineering, empowerment, customer focus and other next big things (or NBTs). This year they gathered to decide whether to continue their creating-value-connections (CVC) program for another year, since it had dramatically improved productivity, efficiency, market share and profits.

Fallon was prepared to start the meeting, but he talked to Carpenter, the head of his consulting firm, and changed his plan. Instead of discussing his agenda topic - CVC: The Bigger Picture - he gave opening remarks and said he would discuss it the next morning. Then, executives who had been involved in the CVC program gave their presentations.

One executive talked about how eight teams of three people each had engaged customers in a series of face-to-face "value conversations." These teams included people from different functions and hierarchical...

About the Author

John Guaspari, one of Quality Digest Magazine’s "New Quality Gurus," is co-founder of Guaspari & Salz, Inc., a management consulting firm in Concord, Massachusetts, and the author of I Know It When I See It, Theory Why, The Customer Connection: Quality for the Rest of Us and It’s About Time!

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