Most of us as leaders and managers understand that business is about people.  With the right people, a clear and worthwhile aim and good leadership you can achieve anything. How then can business be reduced to formulas?  More to the point, why would you want to do such a thing? Well of course business is measured using formulas; profit margin, growth, return on investment, customer retention and so on.  Used with intelligence and insight as key performance indicators these measurements can drive action and improve life for business owners. But that's not the kind of formula I'm talking about.  I'm thinking about meta-formulas, "belief formulas" that capture a belief about business. Perhaps the most famous of these is the formula that links employee satisfaction to customer satisfaction to profitability explained by Heskett, Sasser and Schlesinger in "The Service Profit Chain".  There are data supporting this linkage but in essence it describes a way of m...