The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs & Boost Profits

Publication date: February 12, 2015

But in The Good Jobs Strategy, Zeynep Ton, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, makes the compelling case that even in low-cost settings, leaving employees behind—with bad jobs—is a choice, not a necessity. Drawing on more than a decade of research, Ton shows how operational excellence enables companies to of­fer the lowest prices to customers while ensuring good jobs for their employees and superior results for their investors.
 
Ton describes the elements of the good jobs strategy in a variety of successful companies around the world, including Southwest Airlines, UPS, Toyota, Zappos, and In-N-Out Burger. She focuses on four model retailers—Costco, Merca­dona, Trader Joe’s, and QuikTrip—to demonstrate the good jobs strategy at work and reveals four choices that have transformed these compa­nies’ high investment in workers into lower costs, higher profits, and greater customer sat­isfaction.
 
Full of surprising, counterintuitive insights, the book answers questions such as: How can offering fewer products increase customer sat­isfaction? Why would having more employees than you need reduce costs and boost profits? How can companies simultaneously standardize work and empower employees?
 
The Good Jobs Strategy outlines an invaluable blueprint for any organization that wants to pur­sue a sustainable competitive strategy in which everyone—employees, customers, and investors—wins.


About the authors

Zeynep Ton is a professor of the practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Previously, she was on the faculty of the Har­vard Business School. Ton received numerous awards for teaching excellence at both schools. Her work has been featured widely in the media, including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Bloomberg TV, and MSNBC.