Synopsis "The Workplace Where Everyone Wins"
Using two service businesses-a 100 room hotel in downtown Santa Fe and a 350-seat restaurant in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida-as experimental laboratories, the author tells how, with the enthusiastic support of their staffs, these two businesses were turned into uniquely profitable "Workplaces Where Everyone Wins." This was achieved with a landmark management system never before thought applicable to service organizations. These businesses demonstrated, however, that not only can this landmark system work wonders in service but that the service sector is where it needs to be applied first if its huge but little-understood potential is ever to be realized. Jefferson F. Vander Wolk, a native of Massachusetts, attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Yale University, and Babson College. During a Korean War tour of duty as an air force instructor pilot in West Texas, he formed a construction company to build homes and, later, rental apartment and commercial projects. At age thirty-five, he semiretired on the East Coast to pursue interests in related management and problem-solving methodologies.During his college years, he had become familiar with the Lincoln Electric Company and its highly successful management system. A later visit with that company's president, James F. Lincoln, led to an enduring interest in Lincoln's approach. This long-standing interest, combined with what he viewed as a mistaken belief that Lincoln's approach would never work in service businesses, finally prompted him in 2004 to establish two "management laboratories" to qualify that contention. What these two laboratories demonstrated is the inspiration for this book.
