For alumni, if you could recommend one book to them, what would it be and why?

I guess it would be Good To Great by Jim Collins. It's built on some principles that have really helped me and the executive team. Make sure you pay attention to what you are good at. Make sure you pay attentions to what drives the economic engine of the organization. You have to think about what you rally have a passion for.

One of the principles that was key early on [and in Good To Great.] was the Stockdale principle: "You never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end--which you can never afford to lose--with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be." That may be a little negative, but it's real.

Here's a passage from the excerpt:

It's easy to break a promise. It's even easier to forget the price of breaking it. After all, who can measure that price? Few would deny that a broken promise lowers the morale of your employees, but what's the real dollar cost--the bottom line impact? Or what is the payoff of keeping a promise? It should be simple to align your words and actions in a way that employees can see. But if it's so simple why do most employees say their managers do not do it? Maybe it is not so simple.

Consider how two executives described to me the benefit of an impeccable word--and the cost of lacking one:

Good leadership is, 'Whatever I say I'm going to do, I'm going to do.' That means I have to know what my limitations are and what I'm capable of delivering. As a leader if you don't fulfill your commitments, I can't think of anything that can hurt you more than that.

--Frank Guidara, President and CEO, Uno's Chicago Grill

If your staff see you cutting corners, then they're not going to take you seriously. And then they're not going to take the values that you're trying to instill seriously. Because you're not taking the values seriously.

--Deirdre Wallace, President, The Ambrose Group

Like these successful executives, you, too, most likely want be an honest and respected leader. But this book is about more than being respected. As its title says, it's about The Integrity Dividend--and why and how keeping your word as a leader pays off on the bottom line. One thing that sets this book apart from others that discuss the importance of integrity is that it tells how I have been able to accurately measure its positive dollar impact. As you will see more in later chapters, successful executives I talk to recognize the dividend, too, but until now it has not been well measured.

I am not asking you to be motivated by any intrinsic payoff, though I think there are several. Integrity, for me, is about being more effective, because people see you as consistently following through on your word and demonstrating the values you profess: more effective as a leader, because you more readily capture the hearts of your followers; as a communicator, because people know you mean what you say; as a partner, because you can be counted on; as a customer because you complete business transactions more efficiently; as a supplier, because buyers can know what they will get; and as a brand, because you keep your promises--and promises are all that a brand is. Integrity contributes hugely to executive effectiveness.

Check out the full excerpt here: 800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/008504.html

That's the answer WSJ Golf Journal writer John Paul Newport got from Ryder Cup captain Paul Azinger after asking how he managed to take the twelve person squad minus Tiger Woods and break the Americans nine year losing streak.

Azinger says he was inspired by the Navy Seals 13-man units and their smaller sub-units constructed for specific missions. The profile matched perfectly with the composition of Ryder Cup team.

The U.S. captain also tapped his life coach Ron Braund. Braund, a psychologist, is a fan of the DISC personality assessment (see his 1995 book Understanding How Others Misunderstand You) and used that methodology to construct teams of similar temperaments. Aggressive players like Phil Mickelson and Justin Leonard were put together while "steady-eddie, unflappable players" like Steve Stricker and Stewart Cink shared the course.

The article ends with this thought:

"There was no guarantee all this strategy would work out, of course, In fact, a final part of Mr. Azinger's strategy was to shift the need for a team victory and more toward his personal commitment to help each player perform at his best."

This described shift is more than a nuance. Notice where the manager's action is placed.

Focusing on the team on a shared victory makes the goal amorphous and intangible for the members.

When focusing on the individuals and creating a situation where each can succeed, superior team performance (and the subsequent victory) is merely a byproduct.

Here are a few creative activities to get the group started:

Quotes

This is...
> A meeting starter in which participants share their favorite quotes with the group.

Use it to...
> Help the group warm up as well as get to know each other better.

Best group size...
> Up to about 20.

Materials you'll need...
> No materials are necessary for this activity.

Here's how...
1. Before the meeting, tell participants to bring their favorite quote (either written down or memorized).
2. In the meeting, have participants share their quote and then explain why it is important to them.

For example...
> "'To thine own self be true' is my favorite quote. When I was in my early 20s I realized that I was trying to be what others expected or wanted of me. I wasn't happy. When I came to terms with who I am, and then lived true to that, I found great joy as well as inner peace."

Tips for success...
> You go first to demonstrate how much detail you want them to go into. It doesn't have to be an actual quote, it could be a "saying" or "words to live by."

Try these variations...
> Make this more difficult by not giving participants advance warning. Allow them to paraphrase their favorite quote if they can't remember it word for word.
> Rather than a quote, have participants share their favorite saying or lesson learned from their parents while growing up.
> Divide larger groups up into smaller teams of 8 to 20 members to use this activity.

Map It

This is...
> An activity in which participants form a human map based on where they live.

Use it to...
> Help groups visualize their proximity to each other outside of work.

Best group size...
> Unlimited.

Materials you'll need...
> No materials are necessary for this activity.

Here's how...
1. Gather the group in a larger, open space.
2. Have participants create a map by standing relative to one another based on where their homes are.

Tips for success...
> Place something in the middle of the space to represent where they are now. All points should be relative to that point.
> Beyond that, don't help or guide anyone; let the group figure it all out. Don't be surprised if someone else steps up and starts to lead, though.

Try these variations...
> Have participants map where they were born, where they last went on vacation, where they plan to retire, or where their favorite restaurant is.
> Have participants map where their work locations are. Afterward, discuss what impact geographic diversity has on the work they are about to do, if any.

Find more lively activities in Quick Meeting Openers for Busy Managers: More than 50 Icebreakers, Energizers, and Other Creative Activities That Get Result.

One of his many legacies is the New York-based Leader to Leader Institute, an organization that focuses on developing leadership in the social sector. The Institute has updated and reissued a book that was written for non-profits originally but works for any organization.

In the early 1990's, Drucker and the then Drucker Foundation published a self-assessment tool titled "The Five Most Important Questions". In writing why he created the tool, Drucker said:

Although I don't know a single for-profit business that is as well managed as a few nonprofits, the great majority of the nonprofits can be graded a "C" at best. Not for a lack of effort; most of them work very hard. But for lack of focus, and for lack of tool competence."

Let's not be fooled. Business needs plenty of help too.

Drucker's questions are simple, but as is always found in Drucker's writings, the simplicity is deceiving and the clarity of the questions forces you to reexamine your assumptions.

• What is our mission?
• Who is our customer?
• What does the customer value?
• What are our results?
• What is our plan?

The new book is titled The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization and the Leader to Leader Institute has enlisted some big names to expanded on Drucker's original message. Jim Collins, Phil Kotler, and Jim Kouzes along with Judith Rosen and Kasturi Rangan each provide an essay that follows one of five questions.

The book is a quick read; I was able to finish it during a flight back from the West Coast.

It's the answers to the questions that I am still working on.

WHERE ARE THE GREAT COMPANIES?
By Jim Champy

For years I have been searching for great companies. What I have found is that there are none. Greatness is an aspiration - a very honorable one. But no company is perfect, even if it performs well year after year.

Greatness, like, many objectives, is in the eye of the beholder. One simple test for greatness is how a company is experienced by its constituents - its customers, its associates, its owners, and business partners. In my most recent research, I looked at over a thousand high-growth companies and found many companies that are very good. They treat all of their constituents well and, in their own unique ways, aspire to greatness.

My search was driven by a desire to find companies that have new business models, delivering new products and services to customers and executing in new ways. I have written about my discoveries in OUTSMART!, my latest book. Although I could find no single formula for what creates a good - or great - company, I did find some shared characteristics.

Ambition: The leadership team of every good company has a great ambition for the company - usually one that addresses an unmet customer need. The ambition is not one of personal greed; it's about building a company that delivers on its promise and does it with a unique quality. My experience over the years is that it takes a great ambition to create even a good company. I was inspired in my research by a company called Minute Clinic, whose ambition is to change how healthcare is delivered, for the benefit of everyone involved in the healthcare system.

Customer: Every good company begins by meeting a customer need. That need is often deeply understood by the company's founder because they, themselves, experienced the need - and saw how that need was not being well met. Sometimes the founder hands off the leadership of the company to someone else who operationalizes the idea. But that wasn't the case in the example of Sonicbids, a company that saw the unmet needs of thousands of independent musicians and performers and whose founder has led the company to a unique position in the music business. This music business for independent performers is a 13 billion dollar a year market, that no one saw or had the appetite to organize until Sonic bids came along.

Focus: Good companies stay focused on what they know and can do well. When companies search for new ideas, they often drift into unknown territory and get in trouble. Good companies just keep growing and expanding into familiar territory. Shutterfly is a wonderful example of a company that's growing, but it grows by expanding within the social expressions business, helping communities of people share photographs in hundreds of ways. Niches can be very large markets.

Execution: Satisfying a customer requires relentless attention to execution. Building a company's capability to deliver makes the difference between turning a great idea into a business or failure. But execution is not just about delivering a product. It's also about service. Over the years, I have observed that technology companies are particularly bad at recognizing and responding to the service needs of their customers. Counter intuitively, high-tech requires a lot of high-touch. Partsearch is a company that knows what it's doing with customer service, helping customers find what they need in an ocean of millions of parts and accessories for consumer electronic products. Partsearch has tamed chaos in its industry.

Inspiration: Smart companies engage all of their associates in building the business, from idea creation though delivery. Ideas don't just come tops-down; they also come bottoms-up and from every other direction. Everyone in the company feels that they own a piece of the action and are accountable for how the company performs. The inspiration for a company starts at the top, but good leadership drives that inspiration deep into the company by engaging people broadly in decision-making. People are more than mechanical parts of the enterprise, and the more they are allowed to see customers, the better their business sensibilities.

These are some of the behaviors that I have found in the good companies I have studied. My ultimate test of the quality of a company is whether I would like to work there. The good news: I see many high growth companies where I would work. They are smart companies, in multiple industries, that are operating quite brilliantly.

Author Bio
Jim Champy is one of the leading thinkers in business. His first book, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, helped transform the corporate world. For more information, please visit www.jimchampy.com.

Check out Outsmart!: How to Do What Your Competitors Can't!

We were saddened to hear Michael Hammer died this week at age 60.

The best way we can think of to acknowledge his impact is by announcing the inclusion of Reengineering The Corporation in our upcoming book. Here are the opening paragraphs to our review of Reengineering the Corporation, which give perspective to the work that Hammer and Champy started fifteen years ago:

"Reengineering became the magic managerial term of the 1990s. Cover stories in business magazines touted Michael Hammer and Jim Champy as the strategic gurus of the moment. Companies like Deere, Ford, and Duke Power all found huge success using the concepts. Even Lou Gerstner in his autobiography, Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?, calls out reengineering as having played a role in his turnaround of IBM. The trouble with every fad is the ridicule that follows.

In the 1990s, the term "reengineering" became an easy substitute for the prior decade's "reorganizing,""restructuring," "delayering," "downsizing." The popularity of the term gave embattled executives needed cover when faced with media scrutiny and stock market pressure. The mere mention of a new reengineering initiative acknowledged the severity of a problem and indicated to shareholders that proper steps were being taken. But the actual results varied widely, and business leaders and journalists were quickly off to find and report on the next silver bullet. What's left is general ambivalence for one of the most important business concepts in the second half of the 20th century."

This bring ups the whole question of the author Jim Collins' suggested methodology and whether it's one business leaders should be following. There are plenty of great comments on Levitt's post to go read on this. The same criticisms are leveled against Collins' prior book Built To Last and the classic In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled By Randomness and Phil Rosenwig's The Halo Effect are both cited for their critical views of predictable methodologies.

This has always been my belief: all of these books are directional correct. The principles they describe for success are all worth pursuing. We get a little stuck on the empirical side of the debate. It is true that these authors hang their hats on the research to give their findings legitimacy, but we can't completely dismiss everything they have to say every time a highlighted firm falters.

Click here to learn more about the seminar and to sign up if you're interested.

Here's the description of the event:

Virtual Seminar Overview In this era of ever-tougher competition, your company's greatest asset is its managers. Why? They've got stellar ideas for new strategies that will leave rivals scrambling; for innovative products that will wow customers; and for fresh ways of doing business that will attract top talent, slash costs, and burnish your bottom line. But even the best idea won't make a difference if a manager can't "sell" it--can't get people to embrace it, remember it, and act on it. Let bestselling author and communication thought leader Dan Heath show your managers how to make their ideas "stick" for maximum business impact. Dan reveals the six principles that distinguish ideas that thrive from those that die:

• Simplicity-strip the idea to its core, without turning it into a silly sound bite
• Unexpectedness-capture and hold people's attention
• Concreteness-help people remember the idea
• Credibility-get people to believe your idea
• Emotion-persuade people to care about your idea
• Stories-get people to act on your idea new solutions

For each principle, Dan provides a wealth of examples of how real people have made great ideas sticky--in endeavors as diverse as business, entertainment, public health, and education.

Don't let your managers miss this opportunity to capture critical insights for crafting--and communicating--high-impact ideas.

Each participant receives a copy of the book Made to Stick, an executive summary of the book, and a comprehensive study guide.

The story begins:

More than 20 years have passed since Steve Jobs and John Sculley's much-publicized breakup at Apple. Yet it still serves as a cautionary tale. In two short years, their celebrated camaraderie turned into an antagonism so great it escalated hostilities between divisions, put the firm at risk of a takeover, and sent Steve Jobs into a 12-year exile, from which the firm has only recently recovered. How these leaders went from soul mates to adversaries in such a short time shows how relationships, even those touted as a perfect match, can self-destruct under pressure, leaving a firm to pay the formidable price of a failed relationship.

This case study is one of many found in Divide or Conquer. From the publisher: "Smith shows us how to build work relationships that are flexible and strong enough to survive the toughest challenges... This book will break the myth that relationships are too mysterious to decode and too difficult to change. It offers powerful tools that can help anyone, from new recruits to CEOs."

Here's a direct link to the excerpt: http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/008261.html

Anyway, this post is really about the first chance I have had in months to spend the morning looking through books. I promise more posts in the coming weeks, but here is what has caught my eye this morning.

• The Word of Mouth Manual Volume II - Dave's new book is worth a look. You can download it for free or buy it printed on paper.
• I am reading The Breakthrough Imperative. This is a book from Bain & Company. I have read enough of their partners' work to finally say that I like their message. I am just getting started, but I think this is a culmination work for the company combining the ideas of Fred Reichheld, Chris Zook, and others. More on that soon.
• There is a new second edition to The Age of Heretics by Art Kleiner. Too many people have told me that I have to check this out. I am going to read the book and then have Art on for a podcast.
• I am a huge fan of the Memo To the CEO series, which we post the Jack Covert Selects for on Friday. Check them out.

Enough for now. And I promise again to get back to writing more here.

One of the stories Mike shared is that of touring an office building. The woman giving him the tour boasted having the longest group of cubicles west of the Pentagon! This city of cubicles was the breeding ground for Scott Adams' Dilbert comic strip. His former cube is memorialized by a serial number.

That lead into the question of "Is your goal to get the most of people or to get the best out of people?"

My guess is you would agree that it's to get the best out of people. That takes an environment and a culture that supports that mission. Easier said than done. I'm paraphrasing Mike here, two suggestions:

Do More on Less. It's easy to keep pushing more on the plates of your best employees. Stop. Take projects off their plates so they can spend more time on fewer projects. They'll be able to dedicate the time necessary to grow and complete the project. You (the boss) will be more satisfied with the results, as will be the employee.

Delete "buy in." There's this corporate idea of getting people, employees, to "buy in." Buy into an idea, a strategy, whatever change needs to happen. Many times companies wait to implement top-down structures and don't engage employees until after the process is implemented. Instead, work up front on engagement. Involve everyone from the beginning of a new change. Then when you reach the back end, there's no need to sell the idea to anyone in the company and everyone can focus on executing the change.

I'm hoping to have some video footage from the event to post here soon. Todd interviewed Mike on the process of writing the book. I hear Mike's on board for a ChangeThis manifesto. Stay tuned! In the meantime, jump over to Mike's blog.

Mike, thanks for coming!

A technology pundit told Collins that, "'We live in an era when nothing can be built to last. Everything is in flux; nothing can sustain.'"

When looking at the Fortune 500 facts presented in the piece, that seems to be true:

* Of the 500 companies that appeared on the first list, in 1955, only 71 have a place on the list today. (The 1955 list included industrial companies only, whereas today's list also includes service companies.)

* Some of the most powerful companies on today's list--businesses like Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Dell, and Google--grew from zero to great upon entirely new technologies, bumping venerable old companies off the list. Robert Noyce invented the integrated circuit in 1958, three years after the first Fortune 500. Dozens of companies on this year's list did not even exist in 1955.

* Some of the most celebrated companies in history no longer even appear on the 500, having fallen from great to good to gone from the list--companies like Scott Paper, Zenith, Rubbermaid, Chrysler, Teledyne, Warner Lambert, and Bethlehem Steel--most often because they gave up their independence, and sometimes because they outright died.

Jim counters those points with proof of endurance: P&G, started before the American Civil War, continues to succeed; as does Johnson & Johnson whose roots were planted back in 1886 and GE which has been around for over 100 years. Then there's Nucor Steel who rose from near bankruptcy to the 151 spot on the Fortune 500 list (its story can be found in the out-of-print book, American Steel). Or Xerox which turned over profits of over $1 billion in 2007, a mere seven years after suffering losses of over $300 million.

Jim's underlying message is that the environment is not responsible for a company's success or failure. He points out that success or failure "depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you."

The full article is available here.

As a general manager, your job is to devise a strategy for performance improvement. Insight into your customers' preferences and behaviors, and into how those preferences and behaviors might change over time, is essential. It can help you take full advantage of your competitive position. It may even give you the ability to counteract the advantages of leaders who are farther down the experience curve and thus move up (or over) the ROA/RMS band.

Here's a direct link to the excerpt: http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/007896.html

And, if you missed it, here's a link to the excerpt Dylan put up yesterday, from The Quest for Global Dominance:
http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/007892.html

Holden and Burton show you how you can get everyone in your firm to feel 100% confident in your pricing--no matter what customers are saying or how fierce the competition. By following the 10 simple rules outlined in Pricing with Confidence, you will be able to hold steady or even raise prices while your customers experience increased value for every dollar they spend. The result? Increased revenues and profits.

Pricing with Confidence is a roadmap for senior leadership in sales, marketing, finance and pricing to work together to outperform competition. Pricing with Confidence is organized into ten simple and practical rules to help senior leaders tackle rampant price discounting, negotiate with poker-player like customers, and protect the value a company works so hard to create.

Read about the authors' ten rules here: http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/007768.html