Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journa~ VoL 7, No. 3, 1994

Book Review Value-Directed Management: Organizations, Customers, and Quality. By Bernard Arogyaswamy and Ron P. Simmons. Quorum Books, Westport, Connecticut, 1993, 230 pp.

This book attempted to cash in on American firms' Diogenes-like quest for a "competitive advantage." In today's customer-driven environment, stressing value as a conscious and committed strategy is seen as the elusive elixir. According to the authors, "Delivering value to customers is a glue that can bind internal and external perspectives together into a unified whole" (p. 6). Arogyaswamy and Simmons promise at the outset a systematic and coherent "how to mode" in examining three dimensions of value--product, customer, and firm. They seek to provide a succinct vision of value and its relationship to customer-oriented success including competitive forces that are stimuli for maintaining product and service quality. The first three chapters are really the heart and soul of the book. Chapter 2, especially, provides a good analysis of the many faces of the value concept. The authors introduce 3Cs as the dominant activities in the creation of value--Conceptualize it, Construct it, and Communicate it. Together they constantly drive the organization attempting to hit the ever-moving target of customer value. In all fairness, it should be pointed out that many of the insights mimic other strategy management proponents, particularly Michael Porter. Concepts such as value analysis, differentiation, customer-based quality, and value chain have been revisited and repackaged. The book attempts to forge a framework for realizing value enhancements regardless of the dynamics of customer needs, competitors' strategies, and product changes. Liberally blended into each chapter are techniques of Just in Time manufacturing, Total Quality Control, semiautonomous work teams. Strategic Business Units, value teams (or their term "structure busting teams"), job rotation, and the concept of holography, in a so-called "tapestry of the high value organization." Arogyaswamy and Simmons developed a value model centered around 5 INs: Interdependence, Integration, Involvement, Indicators, and Ingraining. Chapter 7's discussion of Ingraining (essentially organization culture) provides an operationalization of the earlier introduced 3Cs. Maximizing customer value through the 3Cs, as the authors contend, "requires dealing with the heightening interdependencies between proximate value activities, establishing and managing integration among groups of activities with no direct links, evaluating the levels of 263 0892-7545/94,~900-0263507.00~)0 1994 Plenum Publishing Corporation

264

Book Review

commitment, empowerment, and involvement so that they spread throughout the firm" (p. 150). Chapter 8 offers sage advice regarding the crucial nature of value to a firm's success as well as the importance of measuring value. To wit, "ascertaining the firm's value-performance means measuring the firm's ability to deliver the components of value that are deemed important by customers. Not only must the relative weights of the components be drawn from expressed customer needs, the firm's delivery capability must also be evaluated by customers" (p. 165). In spite of numerous attempts, the book overall does not provide a systematic or coherent value-management framework. Seeking to offer a strategy of value and a comprehensive "how to" approach for building and sustaining value-based excellence is a noble objective, but the authors fall short of delivering. Discussions centered on attaining a competitive advantage via value-directed management failed to sharpen our understanding of value relationships or extend the theoretical envelope. Since the book reinforces existing treatments of strategic management, TQM, production management, and organization theory, therein may lie its Achilles' heel. Many concepts, thoughts, and theories have been adopted without necessarily having a clear relevance. What comes across is a disjointed rehash of competitive advantage through customer-based quality or in this case value-driven management. The authors have taken good ideas and useful concepts and tested the reader's ability to maintain focus, for example, in discussions of holography and structure busting teams. The holographic narrative is confusing or marginally beneficial at best to understanding the meaning of Integration. A discussion of Katz and Kahn's basic work would have been more than sufficient. The chapter on Interdependence, Chapter 4, provides a weak treatment of the concept and does not contribute much beyond the seminal work of Thompson. Accompanying figures fail to abate the weakness of the chapter or to provide a clear focus of Interdependence's relationship to the value focus of the book. Arogyaswamy and Simmons seem to sense the reader's confusion with Chapter 6, acknowledging "Before the alert reader get the impression that our minds have been afflicted by a case of terminal wandering we hasten to point out the connection between Marxism's misery and our mission of value" (p. 103). Again in Chapter 6 Arogyaswamy and Simmons seek to justify pursuit of ideas without clear theoretical or practical linkage to value. They acknowledge that, "At the risk of testing our readers' patience, we capitulate, at some length, the groundwork necessary. It is necessary to articulate and pursue a vision, a long-term purpose which gives shape to a strategy of value" (p. 113). Yet, these do not assuage the inquisitor. Value-Directed Management appears to be an outlet for the authors to philosophize about managing in the 1990s. It provides a platform for pontificating which stretches the reach of the "value" theme. Woven into the book's fabric are an assortment of tangents, analogies, and aphorisms. While such things are not necessarily proscribed, the overkill has, unfortunately, siphoned away the focus and diminished the potential for a worthy scholarly treatment. The authors make attempts to defend their wanderings and too frequent use of analogies. For example, "As we have pointed out earlier, extending sports analogies to business organizations is instructive since we can more easily relate to people and teams that are

Book Review

265

constantly in the news" (p. 108). This is highly presumptuous, since it ignores many who are not sports literate and those who find such analogies in a scholarly work lacking in relevance. The authors do offer insights, albeit too few, of some possible utility for those seeking a primer on customer-based quality or value-based products and services. The book may, however, be of little benefit to theoreticians or those seeking a succinct "how to" manual on competitive advantage through management of the three dimensions of value---the product, the customer, and the finn. William M. Moore

Associate Professor Department of Management College of Busbtess and Public Admhzistration Drake University Des Mohles, Iowa 50311