"Mrs. Smith" is not only alive and well, she's one of the fire department's biggest boosters. Why? Because for years now, Phoenix Fire Chief Alan Brunacini has been preaching far and wide: "Take care of Mrs. Smith. She's our customer, the person with an emergency, the one who called the fire department to make a bad day better."

Oklahoma State University's Doug Forsman calls Brunacini "the most insightful fire chief of our time" for applying commonsense principles, like customer service, to operating a fire department. In addition, Brunacini helped thrust incident management - the opposite of the "put the fire out with your face" approach - into fire departments everywhere. Ditto with firefighter health and safety, most prominently with his efforts on nfpa 1500. "Safety leads to customer service," he says. "It's pretty difficult to deliver service if you're trying to save yourself from some position you've gotten yourself into." He also served on the Wingspread iii and iv panels in 1986 and 1996.

With Brunacini's leadership, the Phoenix Fire Department has become recognized the world over as innovative and first-rate. Though The Wall Street Journal featured Brunacini in its pages for applying business practices to the public sector, he's quick to note that his approach has more to do with family than business. "Our firefighting family is helping the customers and their families," he says. "That goes way beyond just business. After all, sending a million-and-a-half dollars worth of fire trucks to a $40,000 structure doesn't make any business sense at all, unless you own the structure - or you're in it."

Between his 1996 instant classic, "Essentials of Fire Department Customer Service," and his still top-selling 1985 "Fire Command" text, Brunacini has changed the day-to-day vocabulary in thousands of fire departments. Terms such as "empowerment" and "added value," however, can turn into meaningless buzzwords without support from a department's leaders. "You can run, but you can't hide as a manager," Brunacini says. "People know what you stand for, what you won't stand for, what you'll reinforce and reward. It's an ongoing reality therapy."

How has Brunacini helped ensure that his department's values are applied every day? "We tell our firefighters and everybody else in the department: Simply be nice." So whether it's firefighters finishing a heart attack victim's work on a new driveway or completing a stricken barber's haircut, citizens appreciate the fire department in terms they understand.

"The customer doesn't need to understand the details of what we do," Brunacini says. "If I go to the hospital, I'm probably going to evaluate my experience with them more in terms of how they treated me than in technical terms. I think it's the same with us."