Are There Excellent Service Firms,and Do They Perform Well?

While the construct of business excellence, as defined in the very successful hook by Peters and Waterman, had a marked influence on managers in the 1980s, and in all likelihood in the 1990s, it met with some scepticism in academic circles. This was because the construct as conceptualised did not meet the more rigorous requirements of reliability and validity established by critical researchers, and also because many of the so-called excellent firms later showed themselves to be rather ordinary performers at best. Recently, an apparently successful instrument to measure the original Peters and Waterman excellence construct named EXCEL has been developed by Shama et al., in the United States. In this article the authors describe the use of EXCEL in a sample of large UK service firms and comment on its reliability and validity. Links are also established between excellence and overrall business performance in these firms.