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ISBN 9781591842477 Published April 2009
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Posted May 10, 2012 11:43 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
The once vital Main Streets of America are all but out of business, boarded up or filled with antique stores shopping the delights and detritus of another era. Jason Jennings visits the main street of his own abandoned hometown at the beginning of The Reinventors to use it as a metaphor for “what will happen to you, your job, and your business unless you become a reinventor completely committed to constant radical change and growth.”
Jennings’ previous books, Less Is More, Think Big, Act Small, It’s Not the Big That Eat the Small … It’s the Fast that Eat the Slow, and Hit the Ground Running all made a case for business agility in one way or another. This new book does so as well, and then takes it one step further by stressing the need for business model agility. According to a 2010 IBM Global Study:
It turns out that 67 percent of worldwide leaders think their current business model is only sustainable for another three years, while another 31 percent believe their current model might have as long as five years.
So The Reinventors should find a home on many executives’ desks, as the time is now to begin the process of serially reinventing your business, to highlight companies that are good at it, and to teach other leaders how to master the skill. The history of business has always been one of churn, of quick rises and dramatic falls, and smart leaders know that they are but temporary stewards in that history and must transition their companies through that change.
Your job as you know it and your business as it is currently run will eventually change. The only chance any of us have for prosperity is to constantly reimagine, rethink, and reinvent everything we do and how we do it in order to remain relevant. We must all become reinventors, and we’d better do it quickly.
If you made it though the recession with your job or business intact, everything may seem more stable now that you are on the other side of it. But remember that the world under your business is still silently shifting, and you are going to have to shift with it. Jennings is not going to give you a new business model to do that with in this book, but he will teach you how to figure it out for yourself, how to be more aggressively innovative, how to become a serial reinventor.
Links from Across The Business Book Web
Posted April 8, 2009 10:59 a.m. by todd-sattersten
In Lists - 800 CEO Read Blog
There are a number of cool, quick items to point you to:
- Dan Schawbel's Me 2.0 came out yesterday. You can preview the book at Scribd for the next week or so.
- Joel Comm is offering the first two chapters of his new book Twitter Power for free. You can download it for at http://twitterpower.com/free/.
- For the current economic times, look for a new Dr. Suess book next week called "Suess-isms for Success: Insider Tips on Economic Health from the Good Doctor." I just saw this in USA Today, so when we have a little more info, we'll pass it along.
- The Street.com has a quick rundown of nine new books that writer Marc Kramer says contain "recession-worthy insights." Problem-Solving 101, Unlocking Opportunities for Growth and Hit The Ground Running are among the selections.
- Jay Ehret from The Marketing Spot has a post called Change Your Future (and Fortune) by Reading a Business Book. He talks about different kinds of business books, how to read them, and shares the results from a survey he ran about how people use business books.
Jack Covert Selects - Hit the Ground Running
Posted March 13, 2009 4:00 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
Hit the Ground Running: A Manual for New Leaders by Jason Jennings, Portfolio, 256 Pages, $25.95 Hardcover, March 2009, ISBN 9781591842477
Jason Jennings has been a favorite of mine for a long time. He writes the kind of books I like. They are research based, with interesting examples to support that research. I found his first book, It's Not the Big That Eats the Small... It's the Fast That Eats the Slow, especially fun to read because, like he does with this book, the people and companies represented are new and interesting--not the usual business-book fodder of Warren Buffett or Steve Jobs or FedEx.
What Jennings and his researchers did for this book was study the Fortune 1000 companies, looking for new CEOs who created the most shareholder value in the first years of their time on the job. Jennings then interviewed the ten best performing CEOs. What Jennings' team found was that these CEOs, on average, doubled revenue, doubled profit margins and more than tripled earning per share during the past decade. Some of the companies represented are Smuckers, Staples, Humana and Goodrich.
During the interviews, Jennings discovered that what these leaders have in common is their ability to quickly size up the situation when they arrived, stop the bleeding, assemble the right people and achieve remarkable results. Jennings also identified ten rules that new leaders need to apply in a new position. Rules like: Ask for Help; Gain Belief; Be Accountable and; Find, Keep and Grow the Right People. Each one of the ten rules is the basis of a chapter, and he has a corresponding company history to support every rule. Now, I understand that, chances are, you're not going to be a CEO. But, most likely, you are going to start a new job, or get transferred to a different position, sometime in your life. Just as Michael Watkins does in his classic, The First 90 Days, Jennings shows you how to best make that transition.
Jason Jennings' books are always very narrative-driven. Jennings is, in the truest sense of the word, a storyteller. All his books start with solid research base to support a premise and Jennings uses stories and connective tissue to support the team's findings. It is a great way to learn.
