Karl Albrecht, renowned business thinker and co-author of the bestseller Service America!, challenges today's business leaders to embark on a journey on The Northbound Train. His northbound train is a metaphor for achieving a focused vision of the direction your company must take to succeed and then moving inexorably toward that goal. And as Albrecht shows, this vision must always be based upon an understanding of what will create value for your customers. He provides a step-by-step guide to soul searching, strategy setting, and customer wooing. Using insightful, real-world examples of effective and ineffective processes, he helps you map out a path - a strategic success model - that your company must follow to find out what makes its business unique. He illustrates how to formulate a reality-based vision; define your company's core values and philosophy; create a company mission statement that is accurate, concise, and inspiring; evaluate your competitive strategy to see if it's based on real strengths; reach a unified concept for creating value for your customers; and distill these decisions, finally, into a few critical areas of focus.--[book cover]

1. Quo vadis: why organizations are losing their way -- 2. Beyond executive management: the call for leadership -- 3. Learning the new rules of the game -- 4. The design of meaning: piecing together the strategy puzzle -- 5. The environmental scan: what's going on out there? -- 6. The organizational scan: who are we? 7. The opportunity scan: what are our possibilities. 8. Model building 101: the customer value model -- 9. Model building 102: vision, mission, and values -- 10. Model building 103: business logic and strategy -- 11. Model building 104: the customer value package -- 12. Strategic gap analysis: what's the "delta"? -- 13. Action planning -- 14. Strategy deployment.