One of the enduring mysteries of business is why established market leaders are so frequently elbowed aside by aggressive upstarts, and why, in general, big corporations die so young. Large companies should derive enormous survival advantages from the richness of their resources, the reach of their economic and political influence, the breadth of their experience, and the depth of their information about customers and employees.

It’s tempting to accept this high corporate mortality rate as the wholesome result of natural selection in the economic sphere. When companies fail to adapt to changing environments, they die. Firms that earned superior levels of customer loyalty and retention also earned consistently higher profits and they grew faster as well. By this concept, we have learned that customer loyalty is inextricably linked to employee and investor loyalty and that major improvements in one often requires improvements in the other two.