Issue No. 180 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting highlights one of the top best-selling business books of all time—and it’s 28-years-old! And this reminder, check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.
Excellence X 4
C.S. Lewis said, "It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between."
Ken Blanchard urges leaders to read a book four times to bridge the chasm between knowing and doing. (See my review of Know Can Do! Put Your Know-How into Action.)
Last year I reviewed The 100 Best Business Books of all Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You. Co-authors Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten write, “In Search of Excellence marked a turning point in the evolution of business books, and so it makes the appropriate starting point for our recommended books on strategy. Prior to its 1982 release, historians and academics controlled the discussion about the organization of business, and to no one’s surprise, their reportings were often dry and outdated.”
Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, Jr. changed the discussion—and the vocabulary—for business when they wrote In Search of Excellence. Last week, I pulled this 28-year-old treasure off the shelf and paged through hundreds of underlined pages. Blanchard is right—every book deserves four readings.
Even if you read it in the 1980s it’s even more relevant and helpful today. If you’ve never read it (or perhaps were born in the 1980s) it’s a must on your Top-100 book list. Let me try to tempt you with just some of the underlined gems in my copy:
“The complaints against American management seem to fall into five main categories (1) the business schools are doing us in; (2) the so-called professional managers lack the right perspective; (3) managers don’t personally identify with what their companies do; (4) managers don’t take enough interest in their people; and (5) top managers and their staff have become isolated in their analytic ivory towers.”
“Today’s version of rationality does not value experimentation and abhors mistakes. The conservatism that leads to inaction and years-long ‘study groups’ frequently confronts businessmen with precisely what they were trying to avoid—having to make, eventually, one big bet.”
“The systems in the excellent companies are not only designed to produce lots of winners; they are constructed to celebrate the winning once it occurs. Their systems make extraordinary use of non-monetary incentives. They are full of hoopla.”
“Most acronyms stink. Not KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid!”
“Many of these companies eliminate paperwork through their use of quick-hit task forces, and among the paperwork fighters P&G is legendary for its insistence on one-page memos as the almost sole means of written communication.”
“Rene McPherson, when he took over at Dana, dramatically threw out 22 ½ inches of policy manuals and replaced them with a one-page statement of philosophy focusing on ‘productive people.’”
There’s more—hundreds of gut-check insights and quotable lines. Our leadership and management lexicon owes much to Peters and Waterman. If you don’t know the background of “stick to the knitting,” or “a bias for action,” or “close to the customer” or “skunk works,” read the book. If you don’t know why IBM’s Tom Watson, Sr., was famous for “his ubiquitous use of butcher paper on a stand,” read the book. If you still have four-person break room tables, instead of long rectangular tables, read the book!
To order this book from Amazon, click on this title:In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies, by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) In the authors’ chapter on “A Bias for Action,” they write, “‘Do it, fix it, try it,’ is our favorite axiom. Karl Weick adds that ‘chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction.’” So…on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being a bias for action and 1 being orderly inaction), how would you rate our organization?
2) In the chapter on “Autonomy and Entrepreneurship,” the authors describe how many leading companies have a core value for “tolerating failure.” They quote General Johnson, J&J’s founder, who championed the belief that “If I wasn’t making mistakes, I wasn’t making decisions.” So…today let’s discuss whether or not we have a permission-giving environment for tolerating failure.
Owning the Strategy - Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit
One of the big ideas in the Strategy Bucket, Chapter 3, in Mastering the Management Buckets, is to be strategic about strategic planning.
In Ram Charan’s excellent book, Owning Up: The 14 Questions Every Board Member Needs to Ask, he asks, “Does Our Board Really Own the Company’s Strategy?” Charan writes, “The financial crisis of 2008 laid bare a long buried truth: that many boards do not really own the strategy of their company.” He adds, “There is nothing more important for a CEO than having the right strategy and the right choice of goals, and for the board, the right strategy is second only to having the right CEO.”
Gut check: does your board own the strategy?
For more resources from the Strategy Bucket, including a link to helpful books, such as 101 Mission Statements from Top Companies, click on my website.
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