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Talent, as defined by Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones, and Beth Axelrod, is shorthand for a key employee who possesses "a sharp strategic mind, leadership ability, communications skills, the ability to attract and inspire people, entrepreneurial instincts, functional skills, and the ability to deliver results." It's also, they contend in The War for Talent, an overarching personnel characteristic that companies of all kinds will require throughout their organizations in order to survive the competitive recruiting era that we appear to be entering. Michaels, Handfield-Jones, and Axelrod, authors of a 1997 McKinsey Quarterly article that uncovered a definitive connection between top performers and superior corporate achievement, spent the intervening years studying 13,000 executives in 27 companies to identify the programs and behaviors that help today's foremost firms attract and retain the best kinds of employees. The authors outline five common "imperatives" that they found these companies employed to strengthen their talent pools ("Embrace a Talent Mindset," "Craft a Winning Employee Value Proposition," "Rebuild Your Recruiting Strategy," "Weave Development into Your Organization," and "Differentiate and Affirm Your People") and construct a practical framework for making it happen in your company. --Howard Rothman ... Read more

Reviews (13)

An outstanding, although not original, look at talent
I recommend this book highly for anyone who works in or owns a business. The information contained here is not original in concept, as many of the concepts can be found in (not surprisingly) successful and well know businesses.

The basic premise of this book is that the ability to attract, retain and engage the best talent available will give your business a competitive edge in the marketplace. Looking at these components in the "war for talent" the authors outline several strategies:

The first issue is that in order to be able to focus on talent, companies must "embrace a talent mindset" and realize that in this age of intellectual capital, getting the top talented people to work for you and your customers will make the difference in your results. "Embracing a talent mindset" means not just awareness of the importance of great people, but investing in development, setting high performance standards, and getting actively involved in people related decisions. In order to do this, companies must look closely at "EVP" or an "Employee Value Proposition" approach to keep top talent engaged in exciting work and value added opportunities.

The authors also discuss several different approaches to recruiting and identifying the key talent required for your business. In my experience, getting better talent up front makes all the subsequent processes better: training, communication, innovation, and of course business results.

The book also discusses a concept made famous by GE - differentiating performance and performers. While it sometimes feels like business Darwinism, differentiating your top performers and rewarding and investing in them accordingly will bring about better results than trying to raise the poorer performers up a level.

Overall, a great summary of the challenges and opportunities in this "war for talent" businesses are facing everyday.

A powerful tool for leaders across organizations.
In a market characterized by uncertainty and instability, one thing holds true for all organizations: building strong talent is crucial to success. "The War for Talent" delivers a powerful argument for why this is the case, illustrating the need for leaders to adopt a "talent mindset" and develop a strategic approach to talent management. Executives and managers will find this book a valuable guide that lays out the steps required to attract, develop, excite and retain highly talented employees.

McKinsey & Company consultants Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones and Beth Axelrod translate five years of in-depth research and analysis into a clear perspective on how to develop a corporation's greatest asset - its people. The authors artfully weave examples of success stories from such companies as Amgen, GE, The Home Depot and Enron into a comprehensive framework for addressing long-term talent management. Their approach continually challenges the reader to assess his or her own organization and to take action. Leaders from all levels of organizations will gain practical knowledge and an insightful roadmap for winning the war for talent.

The War For Talent Is About to Begin In Earnest
The War for Talent is a great book for the leaders of an organization to read. Why? They are the ones who can affect the culture of the organization. Most workers, even A Players, do not have the power to drive cultural change.

As a contract recruiter (www.recruiterguy.com), when I go into a company for the first time, I interview the managers and ask them, in their view, "Why would a top performer want to work for this company, in this position, for you?" As the competition for talent begins to gain steam over the next few months, companies who do a better job of addressing the needs of the Gen X'ers will find themselves in the enviable position of attracting the replacements to the Baby Boomers who are retiring or otherwise leaving the workplace. Sure there is still a surplus of workers as a result of the recession. However, companies who do not have a recruitment strategy will soon find themselves spending much more money to attract the best talent.

In The War For Talent, the authors used specific examples of companies who had either a recruiting or attrition problem and then solved it by improving their Employee Value Proposition (EVP). For instance, SunTrust had a problem where they were losing 46% of their branch employees in their Publix supermarket branches in Georgia and 55% of their high performers. The book discusses the steps they took to dramatically lower their attrition rate in a relatively short time.

Unfortunately for the book, it came out just as Enron was spinning into the ground. Therefore, some people have focused more on the Enron EVP and other qualities and possibly not enough on the other companies' qualities. Enron, while it was growing, appealed to a specific group of people who were not afraid to take what now appears to be excessive risks. There are many examples of other companies with other EVP's who have survived and possibly thrived during this recession. They were able to attract and retain the high performers, who generally tend to be more strategic and less tactical than their counterparts.

Just as Brad Smart in his book "Topgrading" focuses on recruiting, developing and mentoring the A Players, the authors of The War For Talent stress the importance of the A players in a company. It is surprising that "The Peter Principle" came out in 1969 and we are still discussing the concept but in different terms.

The War For Talent concepts should be discussed from the boardroom to your hiring managers. Your leaders need to embrace a talent mindset (title of a chapter in the book), develop a winning differentiation for your company, and develop recruiters who have the ability to attract A Players.

Read this book if you want to win "The War For Talent." .........

A worthwhile read
Easy reading, entertaining, interesting and informative. Light on details but a very good general overview of the topic.

Conceptually excellent. The value is in how you implement the recommendations - which is where you will find this book wanting.

If you get nothing else out of this book, the quote from Dee Hock (founder of Visa) will make it worth buying:

"Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second motivation; third capacity; fourth understanding; fifth knowledge; and last and least, experience.

Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind."

Good theory but doesn't work in the real world.
This book is a good theory and in an ideal world it would all work out that way: the highly talented and highly skilled would get the promotions, good jobs, and plum assisgnments. But unfortunately, more often than not, the pie isn't divided so nicely. There are often other reasons, not work/talent related, that a person gets a promotion or a job. The classic example is the boss' son getting handed a top job in a company, which still happens today. Also how do you fit Affirmative Action into the equation? AA is not based upon talents, only gender & race. Personally I wish more management would read this book and use the basic idea but it probably won't happen. Companies keep talking about "needing good talent" but they don't walk the walk. ... Read more

Book Description

The Evolution of a Brand Powerhouse

The candles that lit the nights of Union soldiers during the Civil War. The synthetic detergent that eradicated hours of toil for women in the 1940s. The disposable diapers that added convenience to the lives of busy parents.

All of these breakthrough "firsts" and a host of others came from the same source: consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble. Rising Tide chronicles this company's extraordinary 165-year climb from a small, family-operated soap and candle company to a global powerhouse whose market-leading brands improve the lives of consumers everywhere.

Authors Davis Dyer, Frederick Dalzell, and Rowena Olegario were granted unprecedented access to P&G's corporate archives and exclusive interviews with key executives and employees. They describe the introduction and evolution of such household brands as Ivory, Tide, Crest, and Pampers and illustrate how P&G learned to satisfy consumers and compete in markets all over the world. They also recount insightful lessons about product innovation, global expansion, leadership transformation, business reinvention, and brand building.

Compelling and candid, Rising Tide is a fascinating journey through business history and material culture from colonial times through the Industrial Revolution and into the Information Age. ... Read more

Book Description

A Pathbreaking Model for Building a New-and Far Better-World of Work

For more than a decade, business thinkers have theorized about how technology will change the shape of organizations. In this landmark book, renowned organizational theorist Thomas Malone, codirector of MIT's "Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century" initiative, provides the first credible model for actually designing the company of the future.

Based on twenty years of groundbreaking research, The Future of Work foresees a workplace revolution that will dramatically change organizational structures and the roles employees play in them. Malone argues that current notions about decentralization merely scratch the surface of what will be possible as technological and economic forces make "command and control" management increasingly less useful.

In its place will be a more flexible "coordinate and cultivate" approach that will spawn new types of decentralized organizations-from internal markets to democracies to loose hierarchies. These future structures will reap the scale and knowledge efficiencies of large organizations while enabling the freedom, flexibility, and human values that drive smaller firms.

Exploring the skills managers will need in a workplace in which the power to decide belongs to everyone, this optimistic book shows how we can help create a world that is not just richer, but better. ... Read more

Reviews (5)

The Future of Work, by Thomas W. Malone
"The Future of Work" began changing my thinking and attitudes about work from its very first pages. It clarified and extended my understanding of myself as a worker, as well as of friends and colleagues, many of whom are either, like me, self-employed, or have entrepreneurial-type positions within organizations. I've already begun using Malone's ideas in consulting with individual clients and organizations, and found them relevant, productive and fun.

Malone's central tenet is that the nature of organizations has been substantially influenced throughout history by the cost of communication. Thus, face-to-face communication characterized hunting and gathering bands, but the advent of writing--with its reduced cost of communication compared to face-to-face talking-- made larger, more powerful and more centralized societies possible. Kingdoms and empires were richer and more powerful than hunting and gathering bands, but at the cost of some of the freedom of most of their members. The advent of the printing press, by further reducing the costs of communication, made possible the reversal of the ancient trend toward greater centralization, facilitating the democratic revolution.

Business organizations show a similar developmental path. Up until the 1800s, most businesses were small and local. By the 1900s, the telephone, telegraph, typewriter, and carbon paper allowed centralization on a large scale, and business "kingdoms" emerged. Today, e-mail, instant messaging, and the internet make it economically feasible for huge numbers of workers to access the information they need to make, for themselves, more of the choices that matter to them.

This change, Malone asserts, is driving a revolution in our attitudes about organizational leadership. "We need to shift our thinking from command-and-control to coordinate-and- cultivate...Good cultivation involves finding the right balance between centralized and decentralized management, between controlling and letting go...Coordinating and cultivating... include the whole range of possibillities for management...To be an effective manager in the world we're entering, you can't be stuck in a centralized mind-set."

Reading "The Future of Work" made me think about the political implications of Malone's vision of the future. Malone grew up on a farm, and his vision of self-employed, or loosely employed, freelancers (or "e-lancers") evokes the same values of independence, and a combination of self-sufficiency and interdependence when necessary, that characterize people who live by working the land. Thomas Jefferson saw the educated independent farmer as the backbone of the American experiment in democracy. But the Jeffersonian polity has been fundamentally altered by the evolution of large, hierarchically organized, centrally managed organizations, in which only those at or near the top have the same sense of personal stake in their work that characterizes the independent farmer. This has contributed to the development of an electorate which sems to me to be largely apathetic or dependent. Malone's vision of a nation of independent or semi-autonomous freelancers might presage a return to Jefferson's vision and values among a substantially larger proportion of the electorate than currently.

Another direction of thinking provoked by "The Future of Work" is to wonder how many people are really capable of the measure of independence which Malone envisions. As a well-established leading international management thinker, and professor at MIT, Malone has been rubbing shoulders with people at the top of the planetary organizational learning curve. His stories about how they've grown their companies, both in the U.S.A. and internationally, delight and inspire throughout this book. But as somone who's been closer to the bottom of things, I see a lot of stupidity, as well as success, when people actually get more control over their work-lives. I discussed this with a client who is the CEO of his own successful company, and who sits on the boards of several others. He agreed that Malone's vision was optimal and appealing, but felt that only about 1/4 of the people he knew could actually thrive with that level of independence. Most people, he felt, needed to have their hands held and be told more or less what to do.

In any case, Malone's is a refreshing, insightful and inspiring vision of humanity's nature, history, and future, and of the power of organizations and markets to maximize human efficiency and ingenuity, for whatever proportion of humanity who are, or may become, ready, willing and able to take their economic fates into their own hands and make their future work.

A Communications Cost/Benefit Analysis of Organizations
The title of this book is misleading. A more apt title would have been: The Future of Organizational Structure. If you really want to read about the future of work, I suggest you look for a different book.

As an expert on communications costs and benefits, Professor Malone explores how the pros and cons of centralized hierarchies, loose hierarchies, democracies and free markets compare in producing better organizational results. The book abounds with examples, most of which were not new to me.

The book's overall theme is that with the costs of communications plummeting and the value of the information communication increasing it is inevitable that organizations will decentralize more than ever . . . by employing hybrid forms of loose hierarchies, democracies and free markets for the same organization.

The book ends up with a call to live your dreams that draws on decidedly nonmanagement sources of inspiration. The key idea is that organizations can live values that uplift everyone in them.

If you would like a solid introduction into the forces that are influencing shifts towards decentralization, The Future of Work is a good theoretical overview. Professor Malone also points you to online resources for finding out about best practices in some of these areas.

As a book for a practitioner, The Future of Work leaves a lot to be desired. Most will find it too abstract and theoretical to help them decide what changes to make in an organization. The book would have been vastly more valuable if it had focused on a few key areas of management performance (such as developing new business models, creating breakthrough new products, or bypassing competitor's established cost advantages) and described how best to apply the concepts in those contexts. I hope that Professor Malone will choose to do this in future books and articles.

The writing leaves something to be desired. Although the book is brief, it has a startling number of repetitions of examples and references. I sometimes felt like I was being talked down to (as though I could not make the links for myself or remember the example that had been mentioned two chapters before).

Much of the book also suffers from an over focus on the "economic human" rather than the "total human." For instance, there is little reference to psychology until quite late in the book. Any success with organizational structure has to take into account both the rational and emotional sides of those involved in the organization.

But I am unaware of any better book on the theory behind this subject, so for the time being we should view this book as the gold standard . . . and thus worthy of five stars.

I suspect that many people will find that rereading books about chaos theory as applied to organizations will have new meaning when viewed through Professor Malone's perspective. I encourage you to do some of that rereading after you tackle this book.

Typical Academic Vapor
Interesting theoretical stab, but lacking in substantiation. Will be of interest to governance theorists, as a thought-provoker or dialog-starter.

We heard similar things twenty years ago. This lacks a true big-picture perspective and is too rooted in organizational design and leadership thinking to be of true utility in terms of enterprise-level or industry-level business architecture. While it presents some intersting concepts, few of these are new ideas The author either does not grasp, or assumes the reader cannot grasp, the true complexity of the situation in large, complex organizations -- issues of centralization and decentralization must be examined across a number of interrelated parameters (strategy, business/performance model, policy, information frameworks for interoperability, business process framework ownership/standardization, actual business processes and busieness rules, organizational model, actual organizational structure, information technology governance, corporate infrastructure -- and, of course, time. This is highly dynamic n-dimensional network of interacting forces, flush with uncertainties.

Academia routinely spouts prophesy based on a sophomoric grasp of business reality. This is interesting and worth reading, but of limited practical value.

A timely, provocative essay on the changing workforce
The Future of Work provides a lucid, common sense analysis of the changing nature of work. This book will benefit not only MBA types but any senior level manager looking at how decentralization, smart client technology and global connectivity are shaping our present and future of work.

A book for its time
Given all the controversy regarding outsourcing, offshoring and its impact on the economy and the upcoming presidential election, this book couldn't be more timely. Malone says we're in the early stages of another revolution -- a revolution in business that may ultimately be as profound as the democratic revolution in government. Given his years heading up the Center for Coordination Science at MIT, it's no wonder that he concludes that new information technologies make this revolution possible. No doubt. One need look no further than the impact Napster and Kazaa have had on the recording industry, or the potential for Skype to disrupt the telecommunications sector. Malone suggests that as businesses and technologies decentralize, we will have to manage in new ways. He summarizes this perspective by saying that managers must begin shifting their thinking from command and control to coordinate and cultivate. Given the very changing nature of work itself, this is sound advice, and Malone offers guidance, if not a prescription, for how to navigate the shifting currents of management and work. This book provides important insights for managers and non-managers alike. It's also refreshing to read a business book that doesn't offer a lame 10-step guide to survival. The presidential candidates and their staffs would be well advised to read this book. Maybe then, we'll get past the superficial bromides that permeate the current debate about offshoring, and begin to substantively address the very changing nature of work itself. ... Read more

Book Description

Surprising Advice from Top Business Minds on What It Really Means to Lead

Leadership requires many attributes besides intelligence and business savvy-courage, character, compassion, and respect are just a few. New managers learn concrete skills in the classroom or on the job, but where do they hone the equally important human values that will guide them through a career that is both successful and meaningful?

In this inspirational book, Daisy Wademan gathers lessons on balancing the personal and professional responsibilities of leadership from faculty members of Harvard Business School. Offering a rare glimpse inside the classrooms in which many of the world's prominent leaders are trained, Remember Who You Are imparts lessons learned not in business, but in life. From the revelations on luck and obligation brought by a terrifying mountain accident to a widowed mother's lesson of respect for people rather than job titles-these unforgettable stories and reflections, shared by renowned contributors from Rosabeth Moss Kanter to HBS Dean Kim Clark, remind us that great leadership is not only about the mind, but the heart.

Addressing the moral, ethical, and personal dilemmas professionals face as they climb the ladder to success, Remember Who You Are will help aspiring leaders everywhere use their time and talents in ways that truly matter. ... Read more

Reviews (10)

Reflect, Learn and be Inspired
Is this book destined for the best seller's list? Probably not...but anyone who reads it will read it again.

This is a solid piece of work, an amazing collection of stories wherein the reader can reflect on their own life and career and be inspired.

Beyond inspiration, the stories are also a very telling of the professors who have spent decades training the world's current and next generation of leaders at Harvard Business School. You can just imagine Wademan talking with these professors, soaking in their every word as they talk about what is important to them, what they make sure every student hears of them. And a relief: when exposed to these professors, the money-greedy stereotype of the the MBA goes out the window.

A perfect book for anyone thinking about their career, in school or in transition, or those looking to be better leaders in whatever they do.

Defining Moments of Harvard Business School Professors
This book was inspired by the Harvard Business School tradition of sharing life lessons with students in the final class. Ms. Daisy Wademan, a recent graduate in 2002, collected a number of these stories as shared in final classes and in many cases rewrote them to fit into this wise volume. In other cases, the professors wrote and polished the stories themselves.

At its best, the essays in this book are among the most compelling that I have ever read. At its weakest, Remember Who You Are's essays remind me of the most boring moments I have spent in a classroom. With stronger editing, this could have been a knock-out of a book. As it is, the book is very valuable . . . and will be a five-star offering for any Harvard Business School graduate who wants a quick course in key life lessons. I graded the book down one star as being less relevant for those who did not attend Harvard Business School. To have met that standard, the book's stories would have had to have been geared for those involved in less exalted roles than Harvard Business School professors and alumni. As a side note, I took two courses there in marketing while studying law at Harvard Law School so I have a foot inside the camp as well as one outside of it.

Each essay describes a defining moment in a professor's life, and the epiphany that resulted from that defining moment. Unfortunately, the defining moments sometimes had a little too much to do with being a good student . . . and becoming a good professor rather than focusing on how to become an effective person in a business career.

The most universal business story in the book is "A Bad Meal, and the Truth" by Stephen P. Kaufman a professor since 2001 who is the former long-time CEO of Arrow Electronics. He describes the way that organizations form around their leaders to shelter the leaders from difficulties and bad news (or even the truth). He provides excellent advice on how to overcome those tendencies. This idea and its development are worth being the subject of a whole book.

There are two stories that are so compelling that I defy anyone to forget them. The first, "A Fall before Rising," opens the book and recounts a life-threatening fall during a climb in the Himalayas by the late professor Ramchandran "Jai" Jaikumar. He has a beautiful reaction in terms of the karmic debt involved in all of our lives which should echo forward into future generations. Ms. Wademan has given us a great gift by capturing this story.

The second remarkably compelling story is "The Mount Rushmore Question" by Thomas J. DeLong. On a motorcycle journey to Mount Rushmore with his young daughter, she asks him if he makes a difference in people's lives. The essay goes on to encourage you to ask two questions for becoming more effective in these dimensions. One, "how do people experience you?" Two, "how do people experience themselves with they are with you?" I thought that those three questions are among the most perceptive ones that I have ever run into. I wish I had heard them many years ago. Please pass them along.

One of the most intriguing sections is "The Oath" by Nitin Nohria in which he expresses the moral and ethical responsibilities of the manager. This essay should receive much wider dissemination as well. I am always struck by how many people see business leadership as solely a personal opportunity rather than as a social responsibility to create positive results for all stakeholders. The management oath in the essay is a good step in the right direction of redressing this fault. Peter Drucker has often said to me that management has few problems that becoming like a profession wouldn't solve. He points out the many differences between how physicians advance medicine and medical practices versus how business managers perform. I hope that this thought process will receive more attention in the future.

Many of the other essays reminded me of those dreams we all have about impossible tests that we cannot complete. Some of the more memorable ones include "The Stuffed Bird" by Jeffrey F. Rayport, "Katharine Hepburn and Me" by Rosabeth Moss Kanter and "The Race" by Henry B. Reiling.

With due nostalgia for my two courses at Harvard Business School, I remembered that two of my biggest career lessons came from brief moments in class that were not the final class. In one, Professor Marty Marshall told us about friends of his who ran a small video company in New Hampshire that had a great life style . . . while providing New York quality work at New York prices. In another, I heard a McKinsey partner describe a consulting assignment in which he solved the problem by moving beyond the charter the client had given him. I have drawn on both stories successfully many times in my career to become the head of my own strategy and financial consulting firm in suburban Boston.

The lesson that I learned from this book is that it would be a good idea to ask people who have more experience than you what the defining moments in their lives have been . . . and what they learned from those experiences. I hope that Ms. Wademan will consider writing other books using this format that focus on thoughtful, ethical business leaders.

Nice job!

Genius!
This book is a must read for those interested in the power of thought and introspection. It is an important tome that inspires us to think about what we want in life and how we are all going to get "there." Kudos to Ms. Wademan, she is clearly a star in the making, a most impressive debut.

Food For The Soul
This superb collection of inspiring stories is a must-have addition to any collection. You will find yourself going back and rereading many of these tales time and again.

This book has quickly become one of my favourite gifts to give to friends. The stories are not only inspirational, but make you want to take a closer look at your own path in life.

I keep a copy of this book in my spare bedroom (it's the perfect size, if you only have time to read a few short tales at a time), and find that guests who pick this book, end up chatting about the stories throughout the day.

Well Done!

A compilation of simple inspirational messages
Great short and simple book. Read the messages which every HBS professor transmits to their students during the last day of class. From real life stories, to amazing metaphors, to inspirational messages, I am happy see a fellow grad had the initiative to put in writing some of those messages with which our professors leave us year in and year out. Inspirational messages don't get any simpler than this - you will truly spend a couple of hours of magnificent inspirational reading from some of the top thinkers in the business world. ... Read more

Book Description

CEOs are more than frustrated by marketing's inability to deliver results. Has the profession lost its relevance?

Nirmalya Kumar argues that, while the function of marketing has lost ground, the importance of marketing as a mind-set-geared toward customer focus and market orientation-has gained momentum across the entire organization.

This book challenges marketers to change their role from implementers of traditional marketing functions to strategic coordinators of organization-wide initiatives aimed at profitably delivering value to customers. Kumar outlines seven cross-functional and bottom-line oriented initiatives that can put marketing back on the CEO's agenda-and elevate its role in shaping the destiny of the firm.

Nirmalya Kumar is Professor of Marketing at IMD-International Institute for Management Development, Switzerland.

... Read more

Reviews (3)

Marketing is Strategy and Kumar explains why
Professor Nirmalya Kumar explores the world of Marketing from the CEO's perspective, making a strong case in favour of a major role for the marketing director in the developing of the company's strategy.

His message is clear: marketing and strategy are closely related, if not the very same thing, and in today's highly competitive environment no single company could afford to ignore this fact.

Perhaps two of the most important contributions of this book are the use of the "three Vs" approach (Valued customer, Value network and Value proposition) as a means to get answers to the three basic strategic questions: Who, How and What, and the section devoted to the discussion of the concept of strategic segmentation.

I had the privilege of having Professor Kumar during a term of my Sloan Fellowship Masters Programme at the London Business School, in 2003, and we used parts of his then unpublished manuscript to explore some of his revolutionary concepts. Even though nothing can replace having Nirmalya in front of you talking about his experience and incredible knowledge of the Marketing science, by reading this book you will have access to some of his most innovative ideas.

Definitively, a Marketing/Strategy reference book for the years to come

Making Marketing Matter to Your CEO
With increasing pressures on CEOs to deliver profits in the short term and increasing concerns of Board members about financial reporting requirements, the corporate agenda is less and less likely to include marketing issues. Yet in every organization, it is marketing's answers to the who?, what? and how? questions that build the growth engine of the enterprise. Professor Kumar explains why leaders must have their eyes on the marketing ball.

Though Professor Kumar is a marketing academic, his book is useful not just for marketers, but also for CEO's and general managers. He convincingly argues why marketing must be elevated from the tactical responsibility to sell more of our products and services to a strategic influence in the future direction of the organization.

To do this, he suggests that marketing no longer employ the traditional four Ps model of product, promotion, price and place (distribution) but rather a more strategic approach he calls the Three Vs: valued customer (who to serve), value proposition (what to offer) and value network (how to deliver).

With practical suggestions and examples, he details a menu of seven marketing initiatives that will drive growth and innovation in all organizations. The seven transformational initiatives along with some questions from the checklists provided are:

1. From Market Segments to Strategic Segments: Who are our valued customers?; Which customers are unhappy with current offerings in the industry?; Is the target large enough to meet our sales objectives?; What is our value proposition?; Does it fit the needs of customers we are trying to serve?; What benefits are we delivering?; Can we deliver and earn a profit?

2. From Selling Products to Providing Solutions: Do we guarantee customers outcomes and benefits instead of product performance?; Have our sales people developed consulting skills and deep industry knowledge?; Have we developed effective processes to allocate resources to solution projects?

3. From Declining to Growing Distribution Channels: What service outputs will the new channel provide?; How will the relative importance and power of existing channels change?; Which competitors will enter the new channel?; What changes in channel incentives to existing members will competitors try? What new competences do we need to enter the new channel?

4. From Branded Bulldozers to Global Distribution Partners: Have we identified our most valuable clients on a worldwide basis?; Are there single points of contact for global customers?; Have we optimized our supply chain for global efficiency?; Have we harmonized pricing structures?

5. From Brand Acquisitions to Brand Rationalization: Which brands are contributing to our profits?; What needs-based segments exist in each category?; How much sales revenue would we risk by deleting non-core brands?; What is the role of the corporate brand?; How will we articulate our program to stakeholders?

6. From Market-Driven to Market-Driving: Are new ideas routinely imported from the outside?; Do we tolerate failures and have processes in place to learn from failures?; Do we mix people on teams to generate new ideas?; Do we ensure that radical ideas do not lose resources to incremental ideas?

7. From Strategic Business Unit Marketing to Corporate Marketing: How does the organization rate on customer focus in processes, including new product development, order fulfillment, customer relationship management?; Is the organization organized around customers?; Are metrics and rewards related to impact on customers?; Does the organization systematically learn about customers?

Read this important new book to learn how to live up to today's pressing challenges of identifying new markets, keeping prices up and retaining customers.

Making Marketing Matter to the CEO
With increasing pressures on CEOs to deliver profits in the short term and increasing concerns of Board members about financial reporting requirements, the corporate agenda is less and less likely to include marketing issues. Yet in every organization, it is marketing's answers to the who?, what? and how? questions that build the growth engine of the enterprise. Professor Kumar explains why leaders must have their eyes on the marketing ball.

Though Professor Kumar is a marketing academic, his book is useful not just for marketers, but also for CEO's and general managers. He convincingly argues why marketing must be elevated from the tactical responsibility to sell more of our products and services to a strategic influence in the future direction of the organization.

To do this, he suggests that marketing no longer employ the traditional four Ps model of product, promotion, price and place (distribution) but rather a more strategic approach he calls the Three Vs: valued customer (who to serve), value proposition (what to offer) and value network (how to deliver).

With practical suggestions and examples, he details a menu of seven marketing initiatives that will drive growth and innovation in all organizations. The seven transformational initiatives along with some questions from the checklists provided are:

1. From Market Segments to Strategic Segments: Who are our valued customers?; Which customers are unhappy with current offerings in the industry?; Is the target large enough to meet our sales objectives?; What is our value proposition?; Does it fit the needs of customers we are trying to serve?; What benefits are we delivering?; Can we deliver and earn a profit?

2. From Selling Products to Providing Solutions: Do we guarantee customers outcomes and benefits instead of product performance?; Have our sales people developed consulting skills and deep industry knowledge?; Have we developed effective processes to allocate resources to solution projects?

3. From Declining to Growing Distribution Channels: What service outputs will the new channel provide?; How will the relative importance and power of existing channels change?; Which competitors will enter the new channel?; What changes in channel incentives to existing members will competitors try? What new competences do we need to enter the new channel?

4. From Branded Bulldozers to Global Distribution Partners: Have we identified our most valuable clients on a worldwide basis?; Are there single points of contact for global customers?; Have we optimized our supply chain for global efficiency?; Have we harmonized pricing structures?

5. From Brand Acquisitions to Brand Rationalization: Which brands are contributing to our profits?; What needs-based segments exist in each category?; How much sales revenue would we risk by deleting non-core brands?; What is the role of the corporate brand?; How will we articulate our program to stakeholders?

6. From Market-Driven to Market-Driving: Are new ideas routinely imported from the outside?; Do we tolerate failures and have processes in place to learn from failures?; Do we mix people on teams to generate new ideas?; Do we ensure that radical ideas do not lose resources to incremental ideas?

7. From Strategic Business Unit Marketing to Corporate Marketing: How does the organization rate on customer focus in processes, including new product development, order fulfillment, customer relationship management?; Is the organization organized around customers?; Are metrics and rewards related to impact on customers?; Does the organization systematically learn about customers?

Read this important new book to learn how to live up to today's pressing challenges of identifying new markets, keeping prices up and retaining customers. ... Read more

Amazon.com

"After conducting fourteen formal studies and more than a thousand interviews, directly observing dozens of executives in action, and compiling innumerable surveys, I am completely convinced that most organizations today lack the leadership they need," contends John P. Kotter, the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School. "And the shortfall is often large. I'm not talking about a deficit of 10%, but of 200%, 400%, or more in positions up and down the hierarchy," he writes in the opening essay to John P. Kotter on What Leaders Really Do, a collection of his most notable articles on the topic for the Harvard Business Review. Kotter isn't known to pull punches, and these pieces--falling into two categories, those concerned with "Leadership and Change" and those focusing on "Dependency and Networks"--are no exception. The articles in the book sensibly point out the difference between management and leadership; they advocate setting a direction rather than planning and budgeting, and motivating people rather than controlling them. They are tied together effectively by the aforementioned new essay, in which Kotter presents his "Ten Observations About Management Behavior" to summarize the concepts he has developed over a 30-year career. --Howard Rothman ... Read more

Reviews (9)

Kotter Knows
John knows his stuff. I've worked for P&G, M&M/Mars and The NutraSweet Company and I know the halls, people and thinking Kotter discusses. He is spot on in his examination of what good leaders really do, something that can often seem like a mystery. I found it interesting that people were evenly split on this book between raves and pans. So much of what you get out of a book like this is related to personal experience. I don't know if I changed my paradigm after reading What Leaders Really Do, but I increased my empathy and understanding. Always a good thing, no?

The Same Old Stuff!
Please retire, or get some new ideas!

A MUST Read for Anyone in Management
I bought this book on second thought because I was also buying "Leading Change" by Kotter. However, I picked up this book and could not put it down. As a long-time leader, this book validates much of what I already know and do. However, it also brings a lot of insight into the differences between leadership and management. The author really analyzes the complexity and interdependency and interrelationships that are faced by, and must be overcome or managed by leaders and managers. I liked what and how Kotter says it in this book that I bought one for each of my managers (I'm a CEO). I am hoping that this easy-to-read, and understandable book brings a lot of insight to them. I highly recommend this book to all current leaders and managers, and anyone hoping to go into leadership or management or both.

Insightful and Relevant
This is a well-researched and cutting-edge book that shows what leaders are made of, what habits they have in common, and from where they come. Mr. Kotter blends well the facts we need to know with human-interest stories of several successful managers. Great book.

Also recommeded: The Leader's Guide: 15 Essential Skills

Almost completely non-informative
This book contains John Kotter's usual dose of platitudes and blindingly obvious insights. Anyone that gets anything useful out of this book is far too dumb to lead anything at all, except perhaps a hollow and meaningless life.

How he has gotten the world to swallow this nonsense book after book, each one a rehash of his previous mishmash of meaningless business speak ("energizing your employees") and vague, unfollowable axioms about, for example, "having vision," is beyond me. But perhaps I just haven't achieved my full alignment potential. ... Read more

Book Description

The Harvard Business Review paperback series is designed to bring today's managers and professionals the fundamental information they need to stay competitive in a fast-moving world. Here are the landmark ideas that have established the Harvard Business Review as required reading for ambitious businesspeople in organizations around the globe. Harvard Business Review on Leadership gathers together eight of the Harvard Business Review's most influential articles on leadership, challenging many long-held assumptions about the true sources of power and authority. ... Read more

Reviews (4)

Very insightful.
Gives an insightful view of a manager's job. It enunciates traits and behaviors of leaders and managers very well, and explains how it is important for a manager to have both traits. The material triggers a manager to look within to understand one's leadership and managerial styles. If one wishes to change or develop leadership and managerial skills this material is a great beginning.
It also points out that organizations and academic institutions are good at developing organizational specialists but not at training managers. The author thinks that these institutions should provide management programs that also focus on developing leadership and managerial skills. But to do that it's important to understand what managers and leaders really do.
Overall a very good read for a traditional manager to be introspective and effective.

We need now true leadership
I felt that the first three writers were the strongest. Mintzberg promotes an idea that leader is just a role in his advocated all mighty manager. Zaleznik brings this down with his idea that managers and leaders are different kind of people and talk about managerial mystique. But maybe best advice how to solve present leadership dilemma comes from Kotter, who says that companies should pick up talented individuals and then put them to grow into leaders through tough challenges.

Harvard Business Review on Leadership
Excellent book with eight fantastically different views on Leadership. Describes fundamental differences between leadership and Management and brings forth thought process which can help professionals in all fields. Contents are 1) The managers Job (folclore and fact), 2) What leaders really do, 3)managers and leaders (are they different), 4) The discipline of building Character, 5) the ways CEO's lead (5 different ways gathered from study of 160 CEO's),6)The human side of management, 7) the work of leadership, 8) whatever happened to the take-charge manager, also contains brief background about the contributors. Each chapter is from a different contributor

EIGHT ORIGINAL, SIGHTFUL PERSPECTIVES ON LEADERSHIP
Looking for some informative, original and clear thinking about leadership? This book is a great choice! The eight articles in this work cover: the role of leadership, differences between managing and leading, and ways chief executives lead. Each article begins with an executive summary which, for the fast-forward crowd, is a big plus.

So many books are merely ONE GOOD ARTICLE embedded in a thicket of verbiage. Chopping away through such a jungle of verbosity for the gist-of-it-all often proves tedious and disappointing. (Blessed are the laconic!) This book, on the other hand, just serves up a bunch of 'gists' -the pure meat and potatoes of ideas. Happily, the HBSP has published several other collections of this sort on such topics as knowledge management, change, and strategies for growth. Each of these is collection of first-rate 'gists'. Reviewed by Gerry Stern, founder, Stern & Associates, author of Stern's Sourcefinder The Master Directory to HR and Business Management Information & Resources, Stern's CyberSpace SourceFinder, and the Compensation and Benefits SourceFinder. ... Read more

Download Description

This is an enhanced edition of HBR article 94403, originally published in July 1994. HBR OnPoint articles include the full-text HBR article plus a summary of key ideas and company examples to help you quickly absorb and apply the concepts. Is your company a rule maker or a rule follower? Does your company focus on catching up or on getting out in front? Do you spend the bulk of your time as a maintenance engineer preserving the status quo or as an architect designing the future? Difficult questions like these go unanswered not because senior managers are lazy--most are working harder than ever--but because they won't admit that they are less than fully in control of their companies' future. In this adaptation from their upcoming book, Hamel and Prahalad urge senior managers to look toward the future and ponder their ability to shape their companies in the years and decades to come. Creating the future, as Electronic Data Systems has done, for example, requires industry foresight. Since change is inevitable, managers must decide whether it will happen in a crisis atmosphere or in a calm and considered manner. Too often, profound thinking about the future occurs only when present success has been eroded. ... Read more

Reviews (27)

Largely an academic waste of time
If your really want to understand how to compete for the future, read Crossing the Chasm, following by Inside the Tornado (Geoffrey Moore). Competing for the Future will largely waste your time. It is a 100 page book crammed into 300+ pages. The authors spend lots of time repeating fuzzy feel good ideas, and criticizing current managers, but say little that would actually help you compete for the future. They continually cite Apple as the poster child for Competing for the Future (ignoring the fact that the Mac was created in a skunkworks -- a concept they poo-poo.) Yet you can see from Apple's plight today that Hamel and Prahalad have certainly not found the most important thing for long term success. Companies that spend too much time looking 20 years out will never see it, as Apple will not. The truth is that top management can certainly ask themselves "What will competition mean in 20 years?", but they will most certainly be wrong. We live in chaotic times, and the best companies know how to turn on a dime and exploit current emerging markets (Microsoft is great at this). Hamel and Prahalad's books is destined to sit on many shelves, looking very impressive but doing nothing for its readers.

Competing for the Future
The Business Strategy text written by Hamel and Prahalad delivers mind opening advice and insight that I consider to be helpful for all managers and professionals services consultants.

The text describes and recommends a shift in business strategy. More importantly, the negative impact of not shifting is illustrated by an abundant sample of real life situations (i.e. Xerox, General Motors).

In the past, and even still to this very day, senior managers in the U.S. are betting the ranch on reengineering and restructuring efforts as a means of staying competitive in the future.

Hamel and Prahald disagree with the continued touting of such efforts. While not completely against reengineering efforts, the duo write a convicing argument detailing that managers must shift from the old tools and invest more time and resources into innovation. The value of a company will not reside in how lean and efficient the operations are, it will reside in the company's capability and resources to create new businesses and get to the future first.

Resouces, capabilities, and processes under the new paradigm must and will operate in a state of constant change. Grasping on to the old business model will represent the company's death blow.

Companies under the new paradigm must develop an open environment by which the company can easily exploit new busineses quickly; hence, taking full advantage of the benefits of being first to market (dictating the market in contrast to following the market represents substantial profits).

Ronnie O'Dell

Division Marketing Executive Canon Astro Business Services, CANON USA Calabasas, CA

An important book to read
Few companies that began the 1980s as industry leaders ended the decade with their leadership in tact and undiminished. Many household name companies saw their success eroded or destroyed by tides of technological, demographic and regulatory change and order-of-magnitude productivity gains made by nontraditional competitors. "Do you really have a global strategy", the first HBR article by Hamel and Prahalad, developed the theme that small companies could prevail against larger, richer companies by inventing new ways of doing more with less. Differences in resource effectiveness could not be explained by efficiency, labor or capital, but by amazingly ambitious goals that stretched beyond typical strategic plans, raising the question how such incredible goals could get past the credibility test and be made tangible and real to employees? Frequently the small challengers rewrote the rules of engagement; flexibility and speed were built atop supplier-management advantage, built atop quality advantages. Companies made commitments to particular skill areas a decade in advance of specific end-product markets. How did executives select which capabilities to build for the future? Some managers were foresightful, others imagined and gave birth to entirely new products and services. These managers created new competitive space while laggard companies protected the past rather than creating the future. Existing theory throws little light on what it takes to fundamentally reshape an industry and the gap provoked this book in which the goal is to enlarge the concept of the industry and not just the organization. Being incrementally better is not enough because a company that cannot imagine the future won't be around to enjoy it. This book is about strategy and how to think by drawing on the experience of companies that have overcome resource disadvantages to build positions of global leadership. It is about companies that escaped the curse of success to rebuild industry leadership a second or third time. It has been written for companies that believe that the best way to win is to rewrite the rules; it is for those who are not afraid to challenge orthodoxy, for those who prefer to build rather than cut, for those committed to making a difference and staking out the future first.

We need to ask ourselves eight questions:
- does senior management have a clear and broadly shared understanding of how the industry may be different in ten years time? Is management's view of the future clearly reflected in short-term priorities?
- How influential is my company in setting the new rules of competition within the industry? Is it regularly defining new ways of doing business and setting new standards of customer satisfaction?
- Is senior management fully alert to the dangers posed by new, unconventional rivals? Are potential threats to the current business model widely understood? Do senior executives possess a keen sense of urgency about the need to reinvent the current business model?
- Is my company pursuing growth and new business development with as much passion as it is pursuing operational efficiency and downsizing? Do we have a clear view of where the next revenue growth will come from?
- What percentage of our improvement efforts focuses on creating advantages new to the industry, and what percentage focuses on merely catching up to our competitors? Are competitors as eager to benchmark us, as we are to benchmark them?
- What is driving our improvement and transformation agenda - our own view of future opportunities or the actions of our competitors? Is our transformation agenda mostly offensive or defensive?
- Am I more of a maintenance engineer keeping today's business humming along or an architect imagining tomorrow's businesses? Do I devote more energy to prolonging the past than I do to creating the future?
- What is the balance between hope and anxiety in my company; between confidence in our ability to find and exploit opportunities for growth and new business development and concern about our ability to maintain competitiveness in our traditional businesses; between a sense of opportunity and a sense of vulnerability, both corporate and personal?

These are not rhetorical questions. We are told to get a pencil and rate our company because these questions go unanswered in many cases. Such questions challenge the assumption that top management is in control or even that their knowledge and experience may be irrelevant or wrong-headed for the future. The urgent drives out the important and the future goes largely unexplored; the capacity to act is considered to be more important than the capacity to imagine. A capacity to invent new industries and to reinvent old ones is a prerequisite for getting to the future first and a precondition for staying out in front. Gaining an understanding of how to accomplish this most difficult task is the central mission of this book.

What must we do to ensure that the industry evolves in a way that is maximally advantageous for us? What skills and capabilities must we begin building now if we are to occupy the industry high ground in the future? How should we organize for opportunities that may not fit neatly within the boundaries of current business units and divisions? The answers are to be found in this book. Armed with this information, a company can create a pro-active agenda for organizational transformation and can control its own destiny by controlling the destiny of its own industry. No company can escape the need to reskill its people, reshape its product portfolio, redesign its processes, and redirect its resources. There is not one future but hundreds; there can be as many prizes as runners; imagination is the only limiting factor. In no way does the success of one preordain the failure of another. What distinguishes leaders from laggards, and greatness form mediocrity is the ability to imagine what could be. If your senior management did not do well on the eight questions, then your company may not be around a decade from now. There are few who would not profit from reading this book.

1990s thought leadership
Hamel and Prahalad brought two ideas to the forefront of management in the 1990s: Creating a strategic intent that dominates corporate thinking, and then understanding the core competencies that the organization requires to get there. Rather than create numerous 5 year plans, communicate the direction and insure you have the skills to get there.

The impact of this was felt across corporate Americas. As companies struggled in reacting to changing times, they would talk more of core competencies instead of certainy of the future. Well run companies could also articulate their vision and what they're good at. (Example GE: "We are #1 or #2 in every business we run. We get there by rigorous management and continuous improvement.") These ideas are here to stay.

Is it all so simple? In Consulting Demons, Lewis Pinault takes issue with Prahalad and his consulting practice at Gemini. He asserts that the ideas can be misapplied to fuel a consulting boom, and that Prahalad's missionary zeal was better for generating consulting fees than for corporate bottom lines.

Bottom line - the book is a good introduction to some important strategic concepts. Although it is no longer required reading at top consulting firms, it is still relevant and important. Just take the ideas (like all pop management ideas) with a grain of salt.

A retrospective on a 1994 breakthrough management guide
Corporate strategy texts are notorious for their short shelf lives, but it is instructive to revisit them during business downturns and understand what they contributed and also where they fell short.

Now that the future has happened - nine years after this book was published - what would the authors say about the dot.com bust and the collapse of erstswhile visionary corporate giants such as Enron and Global Crossing?

In 1994, the authors wrote that the goal of competition QUOTE is not to simply benchmark a competitor's products and processes and imitate its methods, but to develop an independent point of view about tommorow's opportunities and how to exploit them. UNQUOTE By this criterion, how exactly did the dot.com dwarfs or giants of the late 1990s, many of which were hailed as exactly the kind of visionary enterprises the authors encourage, fail to leave a lasting legacy?

Certainly, other breakthrough management guides have not been exempt from the harsh judgment which the benefit of hindsight might impose only a few years after these books come out. Such a fate befell one of the renowned predecessors to this book, In Search of Excellence, half of whose most admired corporations ran into serious difficulties within a few years of publicaiton of the book.

None of this undercuts some important contributions this book does continue to make about how organizations should anticipate, manage and thrive amidst rapid change. The single most important idea in this book is that of leveraging core competencies, so that a business continually focuses on what it can do best and most profitably, rather than on what it is currently doing. If nothing else, the authors have left a legacy of language which remains helpful as a common currency among business leaders who need to understand the importance of industry foresight and to shed obsolete competencies.

And the authors did rightly suggest that appropriate public policies are also needed, althought this prophetic message was unfortunately given only a fleeting mention prior to the dot.com bust QUOTE We are not arguing for a set of policy measures that in any way discriminates in favor of large companies. The goal is not to keep dinosaurs alive at any costs. However, society pays a heavy price when, through , managerial malfeasance,a company richly endowed with resources and talent self-destructs. The goal is not to embalm dinosaurs throguh subsidies, protectionism and preferential procurement policies - as European governments have too often done - but to ensure that large companies don't become dinosaurs in the first place UNQOUTE ... Read more

Reviews (9)

must read for 21st century human
Alvin Toffler has indicated customization is future trend. He is(was) right.

The future of competition shows what, why, and how ( sometimes, who) about the future of product and service. What a corporation must do in order to integrate cusomter's experience into their production process and how to organize the company in order to do it. A must read book for 21st century human, why? because any interaction is an experience and if you extend the metaphor of product, any interaction is a 'product'. If you have been of good reputation, you will 'sell' well on whaterver you say or do. Because people 'buy' it.

a real disappointment
I was left with the feeling that all of this has been said before in one form or another, Where it was ' new' there are other who have already explored the space ( eg The Suport Economy by Shoshana Zuboff) There are two many big words hidding little concepts. The case studies are simplistic and look to the past rather than casting light on the future. This will be another 'fad" and like all fads find its place in the dustbins of business books

A transforming and revolutionary wealth of insights
Co-written by C. K. Prahalad (Harvey C. Fruehauf Professor of Business Administration, University of Michigan Business School) and Venkat Ramaswamy (Michael R. and Mary Kay Hallman Fellow of Electronic Business and Professor of Marketing, University of Michigan Business School), The Future Of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value With Customers offers readers a stimulating look at a fascinating shift away from the firm-centric view of value creation, toward the possibilities opened by new technologies that allow consumers themselves to interact with and directly add value to their chosen product. Drawing upon real-life examples, and focusing on the key foundations of co-creation - dialogue, access, risk assessment, and transparency, The Future Of Competition offers a transforming and revolutionary wealth of insights into commercial and marketplace trends of the present and the near future.

Content good, style weak
The content of this "text" is rich with pointers for those who will format strategic decisions in the future. However, it would seem to challenge the reader to probe the true value of the writers. As the reviewer from Dallas infers, the message is there but the packaging leaves something to be desired. As a university professor who teaches strategic thinking, I see this book as one of the reasons that executives and MBA students resist reading academic pieces: the task is greater than the payoff!!

New framework, new jargon, but nothing else is new
The future is here. Competition is getting tougher and customers are more difficult to please. On the other hand everything is connected, objects are embedded with sensors and software and information flows instantly to all corners of the world , thanks to the communications revolution. This book essentially looks at a networked world where customers and companies are inseparable and are constantly in interaction. In this paradigm, the framework of DART - Dialogue, Access, Risk Assessment and Transparency is introduced and the book proceeds to explain each of these in detail.

The word Co-creation will get included in your daily vocabulary sooner than you expect. Lots of diagrams and case studies are thrown into every chapter. But frankly, there is no concept that is radically different from some of the pioneering works on similar topics already published. To list a few :

-Customer.Com by Particia Seybold
-How to Grow when Markets Don't by Adrian Slywotzky
-The Innovator's solution by Clayton Christensen
-Adapt or Die : Turning your Supply Chain into an Adaptive Business Network by Bob Betts , Claus Heinrich
-Experimentation Matters: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for Innovation by Stephen Thomke
-Priceless: Turning Ordinary Products into Extraordinary Experiences by Diana Lasalle, Terry A. Britton
-The Agenda: What Every Business must do to Dominate the Decade by Michael Hammer

Most of the case studies in this book are repetitions from these or are similar in concepts or processes in creating value for ( or along with) the customer. The authors have duly acknowledged and referred to an elaborate list of books and articles under "Aids to Exploration". But my point is that after going through some of the key works listed above, this book fails to impress on originality.

Towards the end of the book, Knowledge Management is brought in as one of the strategic tools that can be integrated into the co-creation framework.

It is certainly interesting to go through the book though it is a combination of old ideas in a new packaging. Young MBAs will find lots of new jargon that can be put to profitable use in job interviews. ... Read more

Book Description

An Insightful Model for Understanding Industry Change

From Xerox to K-Mart to Sotheby's, great companies have failed to translate extraordinary innovation into better profitability. Why does this happen?

Anita M. McGahan argues that great companies fail to profit from investments in innovation when they break their industries' rules for how change can take hold. In this book, she shows how to develop a strategy that is aligned with the rules of industry change. By understanding and operating within the rules, executives can better appreciate the tradeoffs that are unique to each company's evolutionary path-and consequently improve performance by making smarter, more profitable strategic bets.

How Industries Evolve is based on extensive statistical studies of 700 global industries and more than twenty-five case studies. McGahan identifies four models of industry evolution-progressive, creative, radical, and intermediating-and shows how a company can diagnose which model most closely describes the trajectory of change in its industry. The book then explains how company strategists can use their understanding of this model to carefully coordinate choices about R&D, alliances, internal venturing, leadership style, compensation, modularization, and time-to-market.

By supporting executives' efforts to recognize and respond to shifts in industry structure, this book will ultimately help companies to achieve and sustain superior performance.

... Read more

Book Description

The Harvard Business Review paperback series is designed to bring today's managers and professionals the fundamental information they need to stay competitive in a fast-moving world. Here are the landmark ideas that have established the Harvard Business Review as required reading for ambitious businesspeople in organizations around the globe. The works collected in Harvard Business Review on Measuring Corporate Performance--including the three groundbreaking articles on the balanced scorecard by Kaplan and Norton--offer managers practical guidance for measuring their intangible assets (customer relationships, internal business processes, and employee learning) and aligning corporate strategy accordingly. ... Read more

Reviews (4)

Good compilation of articles - but repeat information
If you have read The Essential Drucker, Balanced scorecard etc. , the book essentially has the same information repeated under a different title. Recommend Essential Drucker, Balanced Score card which is more comprehensive than this title.

The ABC's of Balancing Your Scorecard...
This collection of eight articles from the HBR is a must IF AND ONLY IF you want the only highlights of some of the new management tools and theories out there. If you've ever wondered what Activity-Based Costing (ABC) is or what Kaplan's "Balanced Scorecard" is all about, this may be just the introductory text for you. I mention these two tools first since 2 out of 8 articles deal with ABC, either in whole or in part, while another 3 deal specifically with the balanced scorecard. So, if you've got ABC and the balanced scorecard already firmly laid out in your head, this may be a bit redundant.

The remaining three articles are still worth a quick read though. I found in one article, "How the Right Measures Help Teams Excel," ideas that I hadn't seen anywhere else (for example, the team "dashboard"). And, the "How High is Your Return on Management?" article might give managers a moment of reflection on whether or not they have a good ROM and what they can do to improve it.

As I stated before, much of this is merely highlights though. Do not expect to be able to use this book as a primary source to implement any of the measures. It's a tease that gets you excited (at least it did me), but doesn't provide much of a game plan for bringing it all about.

Still, if what you want is a quick overview and a few case studies where these principles and tools have been applied, by all means, read this. It's worth at least that much.

THIS BOOK MEASURES UP TO THE BEST ON THIS SUBJECT.
Looking for some informative, original and clear thinking about measuring performance? This book is a great choice! This is a collection of eight outstanding articles selected from past editions of the HBR. The articles cover such subjects as activity-based costing, the use of nonfinancial criteria, and tools executives require to generate the information needed. Each article begins with an executive summary which, for the fast-forward crowd, is a big plus.

So many books are merely ONE GOOD ARTICLE embedded in a thicket of verbiage. Chopping away through such a jungle of verbosity for the gist-of-it-all often proves tedious and disappointing. (Blessed are the laconic!) This book, on the other hand, just serves up a bunch of 'gists' -the pure meat and potatoes of ideas. Happily, the HBSP has published several other collections of this sort on such topics as knowledge management, change, and strategies for growth. Each of these is collection of first-rate 'gists'. Reviewed by Gerry Stern, founder, Stern & Associates, author of Stern's Sourcefinder The Master Directory to HR and Business Management Information & Resources, Stern's CyberSpace SourceFinder, and the Compensation and Benefits SourceFinder.

very useful book
This is a vey useful books as a reprints of HBR and catagorized on the corporate reviews of companies, with big part on the famous balanced scoeboard, and a nice section on team performance. But this is not suiatble for small companies review system which i m looking for. If what you r looking for is a way of seeing hhow company performs and you r in big corporation, this is an exellent books as other HBR reprints books that now availabe at many formats... definitely 5 stars.

tanadi santoso ... Read more

Book Description

The business world seems to have given up on loyalty: many major corporations now lose-and have to replace-half their customers in five years, half their employees in four, and half their investors in less than one. Fred Reichheld's national bestseller The Loyalty Effect shows why companies that ignore these skyrocketing defections face a dismal future of low growth, weak profits, and shortened life expectancy. Reichheld demonstrates the power of loyalty-based management as a highly profitable alternative to the economics of perpetual churn. He makes a powerful economic case for loyalty-and takes you through the numbers to prove it. His startling conclusion: Even a small improvement in customer retention can double profits in your company. The Loyalty Effect will change the way you think about loyalty, profits, and the nature of business. ... Read more

Reviews (20)

A great, non-preachy business book
While many authors of business books seem to be really just selling their consulting services, Mr. Reicheld paints a picture of what businesses need to do to retain customers while adding VALUE to those customer relationships. Reicheld talks about his experience as a consultant, but I never felt he was trying to sell me on his services. The Loyalty Effect is a must read for anyone who is mystified at why their profits aren't as high as their competitors while everyone seems to have about equal margin.

The most valuable business book I've ever read
Reichheld lays out both why loyalty matters, and why difficulty in measuring the impact of loyalty has made managers undervalue it in the past. He shows how loyal relationships with employees, suppliers, customers and investors all contribute to a company's long term success.

His insights are profound for anyone building a company. We have used his insights to build our business, and have benefited enormously from the viewpoints expressed in this book.

Superb
Simply the best business book I've read in years. An invaluable framework for long-term success.

Substantiating soft efforts for loyalty with hard figures
“Loyalty is dead” begins this classic about loyalty. But after you’ve read this book, you'll know that pursuing loyalty pays off. The authors show you many ways to measure the profit of loyalty. Not only is employee loyalty important but also the loyalty of customers and investors. The first step is to build up a set of values for your company. This core task can't be delegated; it must be done by CEOs themselves. Loyalty can't be managed; it must be earned. The book contains many examples of how large companies have done this. What I like most about this book are the hints for substantiating “soft̶