The Achiever Newsletter

Top 10 Books - Edition 9

Encouraging our clients to read books has always been an integral part of our business. As a result, we’d like to periodically share 10 books that we feel should be included in your business and/or personal library. These books are not listed in order of sales, popularity, or recommendation. The numbers are used only for reference purposes. 

#1
Good to Great
Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... and Others Don't
by Jim Collins

If you read, enjoyed, and benefited from Built to Last, and you should have, you'll be anxious to get your hands on Jim Collins' latest contribution to Managers and CEO's everywhere. In that previous classic, the result of a six-year research project, the author revealed Successful Habits of Visionary Companies.

In his latest effort, Collins sets out to answer the question, "Can a good company become a great company and if so, how?" He and his 21-person research team began their quest by sorting through a list of 1,435 companies, looking for those that made substantial improvements in their performance over time. They read and coded 6,000 articles, generated more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts and created 384 megabytes of computer data in a five-year project. The author's ability to distill the findings into an interesting and easy-to-understand guide is a testament to his writing skills. After establishing a definition of a good-to-great transition that involves a 10-year so-so period followed by 15 years of increased profits, Collins' crew combed through every company that has made the Fortune 500 (approximately 1,400) and found 11 that met their criteria. In taking a closer look at that 11–including Fannie Mae, Gillette, and Wells Fargo–they discovered common traits that challenged many of the conventional notions of corporate success.

Making the transition from good to great doesn't require a high-profile CEO, the latest technology, innovative change management, or even a fine-tuned business strategy. At the heart of those rare and truly great companies was a corporate culture that rigorously found and promoted disciplined people to think and act in a disciplined manner. Although you may not have expected findings like this, I think you're going to read and hear much more along these same lines in the very near future. It was a pleasure to discover that many of Collins' perspectives on running a business are amazingly simple and commonsense. Peppered with dozens of stories and examples from the great and not so great, the book offers a well-reasoned road map to excellence that any organization would do well to consider. Like Built to Last, Good to Great is one of those books that managers and CEOs will be reading and rereading for years to come.

#2
Business Masterminds
Roads to Success–Put Into Practice the Best Business Ideas of Eight Leading Gurus
by Robert Heller

Here we have a book that may very well pose a few problems for you. First of all, it's expensive as business books go — $40 suggested retail ($28 if ordered from the link on our website). Here's still another problem: It's extremely difficult to put this book down once you get into it. Why is that a problem? It's contains 864 pages! This masterpiece will rival any "coffee table" book you may now possess as it offers a wealth of information graphically enhanced by hundreds of beautiful multi-colored photographs, tables, charts, diagrams, and graphs.

In this enlightening volume, best-selling business expert Robert Heller presents the ideas and innovations of eight of the world's most successful business leaders. Charting each guru's rise to the top, Heller analyzes the factors that contributed to each one's phenomenal success. Heller then shows you how to make their strategies work for your own success.

The eight leading business and management gurus chosen for this masterpiece are:

Comprehend the strategies Bill Gates uses to focus on his goals, forge key collaborations, hire the best brains, make solid decisions, and dominate the market place.

Understand why Stephen Covey advocates widening circles of influence, developing "abundance mentalities," exercising self-leadership, and optimizing personal capabilities.

Discover why Jack Welch will enter the history books as America's greatest manager of all time.

Realize why Tom Peters' management strategies enable businesses to exploit "perpetual revolution" and live with chaos in a commercially volatile world.

Discover the ideas of Peter Drucker on managing by objectives, achieving innovation, and focusing on customers.

Learn how Warren Buffet identifies strong brands, minimizes risk, recognizes ideal business acquisitions, and values hard work and honesty.

Grasp the methods Andrew Grove uses to manage innovation, drive performance, and master revolutionary change.

Appreciate how Charles Handy sees businesses as communities, challenges dogmas, makes groups work, and lives by the "doughnut principle."

This "Business Bible" should adorn the shelves of every corporate library in the country. It will educate and inform you and yours for years to come. You do the math, all of these leaders are the top of their segments in business and innovation, and Robert Heller has captured what business students, managers, and CEOs need. Each subject has developed model approaches to how business is done and will be done in the future. A great read and well worth your investment.

#3
How They Achieved
Stories of Personal Achievement and Business Success
by Lucinda Watson

If I were given three wishes, I'm certain one of them would provide me with the opportunity to sit down and chat with outstanding men and women who have reached the peak of their professions. This group would include legendary CEOs, celebrated entrepreneurs, and social and cultural visionaries. I would ask them to reveal how they discovered their life's passions, how they pursued their goals, and how they overcame adversity. I'd strive to distill those special qualities of personality that separates such unique winners from the also-rans. I would then author a best-selling book followed by an equally successful audio tape that would lead to a whirlwind tour of national keynote appearances allowing me to share this valuable insight with those interested in personal growth and success.

Well, for me that happens to be one of three wishes I'd love to have granted. However, for Lucinda Watson, it's a proud reality. She did exactly what I just described as one of my three wishes. In fact, it was relatively easy for her to accomplish this admirable feat. Her father and grandfather turned IBM into "Big Blue." Now an accomplished scholar in her own right, Watson grew up surrounded by the greatest business leaders and thinkers of the twentieth century. Her unique access to these top-level achievers combined with her own training and expertise make her especially qualified to obtain their fascinating inside stories. Featured are the stories of such well-known achievers as; John Sculley (Former CEO of Apple Computer), Faith Popcorn (Futurist), and Donald Kendall (former CEO of PepsiCo).

This is an intimate look at what motivates people to become high achievers. The stories are organized around three types of people and what drives them: entrepreneurs fueled by risk taking and the need to create something out of nothing; CEOs/executives driven by the desire to succeed in an already established structure; and visionaries motivated by societal concerns and wanting to make a difference in people's lives. Those interviewed remember their heroes and mentors, relive their most difficult decisions, and explain how they overcame inner demons such as fear and insecurity.  What are the qualities that enable certain extraordinary individuals to transcend self-doubt and stiff competition to reach the pinnacle of success? Can these qualities be learned and emulated by others? The message they deliver is that self-confidence and self-esteem — both key ingredients for success — are not natural gifts but can be learned, developed, and strengthened.

The author discovered that strength of character, passion and hard work are the most important components to a successful business career and happy life. She brings her subjects to life, and leaves the reader with the impression of really knowing these super-achievers at a very intimate level. How They Achieved is a badly needed antidote to the Internet generation's belief of overnight success.

#4
Thriving in 24/7
Six Strategies for Taming the New World of Work
by Sally Helgesen

In this new book, Sally Helgesen warns that too many people are being forced to choose between "having it all" and "having a life." She has done a remarkable job of illuminating the ways the workplace has infringed upon our lives. She uses the pop-speak phrase 24/7 to symbolize the transformation of our sense of time through technology and the blurring of boundaries between work and home. The author details changes including the shift from an industrial economy to a "knowledge economy"; the technology that has spawned a sleepless business culture; the leaner organizations with longer job descriptions; and the domestic drama of over-scheduled children and over-managed health care and finances.

Far from making life and work easier, new technologies are imposing demands on us that we do not know how to say no to. Borrowing a military acronym, Helgesen also describes the new world of work with an acronym, VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity), named for the factors that have developed with the advent of technological breakthroughs. In addition to the new technologies, other current complexities include increased globalization, increased pressure to work long hours, breakdown of traditional barriers between work and home, and the increased work involved in maintaining personal lives and leisure time.

Helgesen doesn't simply describe the challenges to our public and private lives. She has determined that there is no "one-size-fits-all answer" so she offers six smart strategies we can adopt in order to improvise individual responses. She urges us to "start at the core, learn to zigzag, create our own work, weave a strong web of inclusion, build a clear brand, and practice the rhythm of renewal." Her artful balance of observations and suggestions creates an insightful and practical guide for pursuing what she calls "elegance and simplicity in all our decisions and taking advantage — or resisting — what technology has wrought."

#5
The Leadership Pipeline
How to Build the Leadership Powered Company
by Ram Charan, Steve Drotter, and Jim Noel

As a consultant, I have the opportunity to work closely with a wide variety of organizations across a great number of industries. I'm constantly amazed at the lack of focus, time and energy dedicated to developing tomorrow's leaders from today's current staff. Every time a leadership slot avails itself, it seems as though there is no one "ready" or qualified to fill it. I hear a variety of excuses such as current workload, unexpected chaos, and simply "no time." When I hear excuses like these, I have to wonder if this particular organization will ever reach the level of developing their own internal pipeline of leadership talent.

One of management's biggest challenges today is finding new leaders, and one of the questions that arises in this quest is whether to bring in "new blood" and fresh ideas or take advantage of "home-grown" experts already acclimated to an organization's corporate culture. At a time when more and more companies are relying on headhunters to bring in leaders and management turnover is soaring among young talent, "growing your own" leaders is about to become a necessary core competence for the future. The current labor shortage and a greater willingness by younger workers to change jobs have only added to this challenge.

Written by three genuine experts in management development (one of them helped design GE's deservedly famous succession-development process), this book finally shows organizations how to undo the knots and clogs in their in-house "leadership pipeline" so they can constantly groom the best people at every level to move up to the next rung of leadership.
Not only do the authors identify the six transition phases, or "turns," of the pipeline — they describe each with remarkable insight; these six levels of leadership growth, for example, exist at the base of every mid-size or large organization regardless of how each structures its individual hierarchy.

With each, they take care to point out both the new skills and values (there is a difference) one must acquire before making a turn, as well as how to measure whether someone has them before moving them along. They also show how to determine whether candidates are embodying those skills and values once they've made the transition, and how to groom them for the next level right from day one. The result? Not just one potentially qualified in-house candidate for a top leadership position but a whole generation of them, not to mention younger generations to succeed them. The book includes sample scenarios (from both fictional and real-life organizations), definitions, checklists and charts that break down and illustrate its main points in every chapter.

#6
The Myth of Excellence
Why Great Companies Never Try to Be the Best at Everything
by Fred Crawford and Ryan Mathews

"Tired of business drivel? If you are ready to step beyond platitudinous mission statements and strategies cooked up in distant boardrooms that have no connection to the trenches where business battles are actually being fought, this is the book for you. It is grounded, readable, and honest.

Fred Crawford is the managing director of a consumer products, retail, and distribution practice, and Ryan Mathews is a futurist specializing in demographics and lifestyle analysis. To research purchasing behavior, they surveyed 5,000 consumers, but the responses they got surprised them. The authors "discovered" that:

1. It is better to be the best at something and pretty good at most other things that customers like than to be pretty good at most things customers like and the best at what they don't care about;
2. Some customers operate with a product quality model that says, if you're not at least this good, you don't count, but if you ARE at least this good, you are good enough;
3. Price isn't always everything; and
4. Neither is any other single thing.

Crawford and Mathews's initial inquiries eventually grew into a major research study involving more than 10,000 consumers, interviews with executives from scores of leading companies around the world, and dozens of international client engagements. Their conclusion: Most companies priding themselves on how well they "know" their customers aren't really listening to them at all. Consumers are fed up with all the fuss about "world-class performance" and "excellence." They found that values (respect, honesty, trust, dignity) were more important to consumers than value. This discovery led the pair to develop a new model of "consumer relevancy." They explain in detail the importance of price, service, quality, access, and experience for the consumer. They then suggest that for companies to be successful they need to dominate on only one of these five factors. On a second of the five they should stand out or differentiate themselves from their competitors; and on the remaining three they need only to be at par with others in their industry.

With dozens of examples, Crawford and Mathews demonstrate the validity of their premise. They argue that successful businesses are those that excel in one of these areas, are good in another, and are at least average in the rest. Wal-Mart, they say, is dominant on price and maintains a good selection of products, while Target excels at product selection and makes price its secondary attribute. The authors conclude that it is both uneconomical and probably impossible to be excellent in all areas. Instead, Crawford and Mathews suggest that companies engage in Consumer Relevancy, a strategy of dominating in one element of a transaction, differentiating on a second, and being at industry par (i.e., average) on the remaining three. It's not necessary for businesses to equally invest time and money on all five attributes, and their customers don't want them to. Imagine the confusion if Tiffany & Co. started offering deep discounts on diamonds and McDonald's began selling free-range chicken and tofu.

Today's customers are leading a revolution against business as usual: They are demanding that companies recognize them as individuals and conduct business on their terms. In The Myth of Excellence, Crawford and Mathews provide proven strategies for meeting the demands of today's empowered customers, who are crying out to be treated with respect, dignity, and courtesy.

After describing the importance of the five key attributes, the authors explain how a company might evaluate itself to see how well it is doing. The authors' clear writing style and copious use of examples and case studies make their ideas understandable to a wide readership.

#7
When Faster-Harder-Smarter Is Not Enough
Six Steps for Achieving What You Want in a Rapid-Fire World
by Kathryn D. Cramer

Again, we find an author who is focusing on the importance of learning to manage your time and deal with the growing number of stressors in your life. Do you ever feel over-extended and that demands on your attention exceed the amount of time and energy you have to cope with them? Is your in-box overflowing as your unanswered e-mail list continues to grow? We are living in a time of unprecedented stress. In order to accomplish more, we try to do things faster, harder, and smarter, using our intelligence, organizational skills, and determination. However, our responsibilities accumulate faster than we can work!

Now Dr. Kathryn Cramer has come along to wake us up. Faster, harder, and smarter sometimes works in the short term, but for the long haul we need to rethink our whole agenda. Tackling the world's largest "to do" list is not really a life plan. Using Dr. Cramer's six steps, we can shape a compelling vision of what we want to achieve, so that everything we do fuels - and is fueled by - this greater purpose. Instead of faster, harder, and smarter, we learn to live richer, deeper, and wiser. Dr. Cramer shows us how to recognize our deepest desires and how to tap into our greatest capabilities. By infusing our lives with meaning, we can let go of frustration and irrelevant tasks, and instead focus on what we need to do to achieve a future that will bring us joy and satisfaction.

A quick glance at her six steps will reveal a game plan that taps the inner strength and creativity needed to achieve long-term fulfillment.

1. Take Your Blinders Off (How to see What You Don't See)
2. Be Outrageously Optimistic (How to See Potential, not Problems)
3. Make the Future Happen Inside You (How to Walk Your Talk)
4. Get Others on Board (Build Strong Alliances — Communicate to Motivate)
5. Stack the Odds in Your Favor (How to Build Momentum)
6. Celebrate Every Victory, Large and Small (How to Leverage Your Success and Wake Up to What's Next)

Good, practical guidance for those ready to make changes. This book won't supply you with breathless tips for squeezing 25 hours out of each day or provide you with no-nonsense guidelines for achieving what you want no matter what the cost. Instead, this enlightening, life-affirming book discusses the many ways in which you can learn to succeed and grow amidst the worry, stress, and pressure of today's rapid-fire world, and become energized — instead of overwhelmed — by the pressures and anxieties of life.

#8
Drive Your People Wild Without Driving Them Crazy
Leadership Lessons For A Chaotic World
by Jennifer White

I'm beginning to see more and more authors focus on the importance of "balance." It obviously affects the peace of mind, progress and productivity of their employees. However, more and more leaders are recognizing the impact of employee balance on the bottom line as well.

Under pressure, some leaders become dictators believing that they have to drive performance from their people. What do they get? Long hours, more stress, more chaos, and mediocre performance. Jennifer White has created a unique seven part process that will help business leaders produce the right results when it matters the most, show them how to inspire their employees to be high performers even if the economy is slowing, and convince them that it is possible for everyone to make it home in time for dinner without sacrificing company results.

In this revolutionary book, Jennifer White helps leaders marry two apparently conflicting ideas, success at work and success at home, with the aim of creating profitable companies that retain top-producing employees. Chapter titles alone set the tone for this comprehensive, realistic, and user-friendly manual for entrepreneurs, managers, and CEOs alike!

If you are interested in your growth as a leader and are up to the challenge presented by Jennifer and her team of coaches, this book should be on your shelf. You'll be challenged by the exercises and educated by the case studies, quizzes and common sense approaches to a long-time challenge for anyone trying to lead people. Yes, you will be asked to be honest with yourself and, if you are, you'll benefit greatly.

#9
Focal Point
A Proven System to Simplify Your Life, Double Your Productivity, and Achieve All Your Goals
by Brian Tracy

Brian Tracy is one of the world's most successful speakers and consultants on personal and professional development. Each year he addresses some 450,000 people in the United States and abroad. His corporate clients have included IBM, McDonnell Douglas, Arthur Andersen, The Million Dollar Round Table, and dozens more. He is also the best-selling author of Maximum Achievement; Advanced Selling Strategies; The 21 Success Secrets Self-Made Millionaires; Eat That Frog!; and the The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success. I share this information for those of you who have not yet had the pleasure of hearing Brian Tracy speak or the opportunity to read any of his previous best-sellers. For those of you who are familiar with his work, you may experience a little DejaVu as he has combined the basic principles of career success and life balance he has advocated in the past with anecdotes for inspiration.  The book proposes a unified approach to simultaneously achieving improvement at work and at home.

When our "ordinary" neighbor, colleague, or cousin suddenly rockets to success, most of us chalk up their good fortune to pure luck, politics, or backbreaking work. But in most cases these factors have nothing to do with it. Author Brian Tracy lets us in on the true secret of high achievers: They know how to find their focal point — the one thing they should do, at any given moment, to get the best possible results in each area of their lives.

In this powerful guide, Tracy brings together the very best ideas on personal management into a simple, easy-to-use plan. Focal Point helps readers analyze their lives in seven key areas and shows them how to develop goals and plans in each. Tracy provides timeless truths that have been discovered by effective people throughout the ages. He shows how to develop absolute clarity about who you are, what you want, and exactly how you can move quickly toward accomplishing those goals that bring you the highest level of personal satisfaction. Readers who follow these simple steps will accomplish more in the next couple of years than most people achieve in a lifetime!

#10
The Future of Leadership
Today's Top Leadership Thinkers Speak to Tomorrow's Leaders
by Warren Bennis, Gretchen Spreitzer, and Thomas Cummins

From time to time we're offered an accumulation of great thoughts by great minds. The Future of Leadership would certainly fall into that category. Here is a collection of provocative insights on leadership from a "who's who" of leadership thought including: Tom Peters, Charles Handy, and Jim Kouzes. A stellar cast of the world's foremost leadership gurus comes together in one place to offer their thoughts on leadership in the new economy. Edited by renowned leadership expert Warren Bennis, the book addresses issues that Bennis identifies as the ones that "keep CEOs up at night," including why we tolerate bad leaders, why leadership is everyone's business, and how ethics will play into new leadership.

With contributions from Charles Handy, Tom Peters, Barry Posner, Jim Kouzes, and Warren Bennis, no other book includes the caliber of authors and the range of thinking found in The Future of Leadership.

Essays such as "The Future Has No Shelf Life," written by Bennis, addresses some interesting questions. For example: What will the "world of organizations" look like in 2010? What will the New Leaders look like and where will they come from? What will (by then) have happened to so-called "high involvement" organizations? How will disparities in talent be resolved? Indeed, will they be? What will prove to be the impact of important demographic changes (e.g. ageism) now underway? What about the social contract between employers and employees, "that hollow implicit contract," that usually offered some form of loyalty and responsibility to both parties? How do we keep our eyes and ears open to potentially disruptive inflection points? Finally, what is the proper role of business education for the next generation?

A total of 21 people (including Bennis himself) address several of these and related questions. Their primary audience consists of tomorrow's leaders: in 2001, some are infants; others are completing college or have recently embarked on careers; and still others now occupy middle management levels. Think of the book as a "literary time capsule." Those of us who examine the contents now can re-examine them in 2010. It will be interesting to learn which observations prove important and which do not.

The material is carefully organized within six Parts: Setting the Stage for the Future, The Organization of the Future, The Leader of the Future, How Leaders Stay on Top of their Game, Insights from Young Leaders, and Some Closing Thoughts. It remains for each reader, of course, to determine which essays have the greatest value. All are so well-written that, I suspect, each will have special relevance at some point between now and 2010. And perhaps beyond. Essays include Handy's "A World of Fleas and Elephants," Kouzes and Posner's "Bringing Leadership Lessons from the Past to the Future," Lipman-Blumen's "Why Do We Tolerate Bad Leaders?" O'Toole's "When Leadership Is an Organizational Trait," and Spreitzer and Cummings' "the Leadership Challenges of the Next Generation." All of the essays are outstanding. Whatever the "future of leadership" proves to be, it will have been guided and enriched by Warren Bennis as well as by those who honor him with the essays assembled in this book.