The Cult of Service Excellence

This book explores and demonstrates the transformative learning experiences that organizations and their leaders can derive from the arts. It is through the arts that we have always explored our humanity: through dance and music; art and sculpture; theatre and poetry. The arts allow us to explore our own selves and our relationship to others and to the world around us. This central role of the arts is commonly accepted in everyday life, but the implications of this are not typically extended to the world of business.The authors argues strongly that, to the contrary, the methodologies and approaches that are fundamental to performing artists of all kinds can provide exactly the kind of inspirational, people-centred and performance-related techniques that are missing from much of the typically mechanistic, systems-based and process-driven training and development of managers and executives. Technical proficiency and expertise are not enough to deliver an award-winning result; what enables a truly outstanding performance is the elusive but entirely recognizable element of artistry – the spark that transforms a technically good performance into something extraordinary.

This is the autobiography of one of the most influential management consultants of recent times. Herbert Henzler grew up in the German village of Neckarhausen during the Second World War. Starting his career as a sales apprentice with Shell, he went on to study at the universities of Saarland, Ludwig-Maximillian and California, Berkeley, where he received his PhD in economics. In 1970, Henzler accepted an offer to join McKinsey & Company, a rapidly growing firm that would eventually become the world’s leading consultancy group. Working in its German office, Henzler quickly rose to Partner in 1975 and then Director in 1978. His spectacular rise continued when, in 1985, Henzler became head of McKinsey’s German office and one of the most powerful management consultants in the world. Honest and at times direct, this book provides a rare insight into the world of management consultancy and how one man made it to the top by constantly pushing the boundaries.