The Value Effect: A Murder Mystery about the Compulsive Pursuit of 'The Next Big Thing'

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 adherents 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 we at getAbstract.com recommend 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.)

John Guaspari is a true-blue man of business, being the cofounder of Guaspari & Saltz, Inc. of Concord, MA. He is a thought guru on various aspects of customer service and has written four books on the subject.The Value Effect is not another of John Guaspari's well known books about quality in business, but is a good old-fashioned whodunit murder mystery based in the world of business, competition, and things not being quite what they seem. Even Detective Larry Gatling is not quite what he seems. He comes on like Columbo, and in the end uses simple logic to solve a mystery that has the big thinkers at Lodestar, Inc. baffled.Lodestar has what they call an annual NBT, or Next Best Thing. Their latest NBT has been a smashing success. Michael Fallon engineered what was called "Creating Value Connections," and, surprisingly, it worked with Lodestar's customers and staff. But just as he is about to uncover the master stroke, Michael Fallon ends up dead, and the execs of Lodestar are the primary suspects. Gatling goes to work and hooks up with Ronald Carpenter, who was working with Fallon at the time of the murder:"Gatling was intrigued. `Let me ask you something,' he said. `I know more than I'd like to know about all this murder stuff. It's my business. When it comes to some of the stuff you were talking about, like Total Reengineering and Empowered Quality and NBTs and CVSs and all the rest, though, I can't say I know much about those kinds of things. So I'm thinking, maybe you can help me understand the business side of all this. You know, behind the scenes, help me sort through what I'm gonna hear when I talk to the others."Gatling, who has been "on the beat for twenty-two years-be twenty-three years in June," uses his moxy to disarm and expose the killer.The Value Effect is written in a stripped-down, "just the facts, ma'am" manner. It is clean, concise, contains no fluff or unnecessary side characters, and drives its point home well.Shelley Glodowski Reviewer