Service Leadership – Some Critical Roles

Abstract

Offers some new dimensions to service leadership: a strategic refocusing from traditional services to knowledge‐intensive services, based on intelligence components, information technology and information flows. Highlights three distinct roles for service leadership: thought leader, process leader and commercial leader. It also highlights the growing amalgamation of services and information to create the transformation of the old merchant into new roles such as those of information broker. To judge and evaluate service leadership a very critical ratio is “value added per employee”. Management development programmes should also focus on development of the three new roles. Investment in development and maintenance of knowledge capital to create service leadership should be handled as systematically as technology investments and as intellectual capital.

Citation

Edvinsson, L. (1992), "Service Leadership – Some Critical Roles", International Journal of Service Industry Management, Vol. 3 No. 2, pp. 33-36. https://doi.org/10.1108/09564239210011980