What Really Works - AchieveMax® Top Ten Book Review

If you watch television, read the newspaper and/or magazines, frequent the Internet, or simply move in any kind of a business circle, you must have, at one time or another, pondered the following:

Why do some organizations consistently outperform their competitors?

What do managers at the best companies know-and do-to keep their organizations on top?

When it comes to implementing management practices that can propel a company to lasting success ... WHAT REALLY WORKS?

Well, what better way to find out than a massive five-year study in which over fifty consultants and business school professors at top universities around the country analyzed ten years of data on 160 companies and more than 200 management practices? They called it the Evergreen Project and their goal was to correlate superior corporate performance with the companies' adherence to 200 commonly used practices.

Companies they identify as winners consistently followed successful practices in all four of the primary areas (strategy, execution, culture and structure) and any two secondary areas (talent, leadership, innovation, and mergers and partnerships).

Primary:

Strategy: Devise and Maintain a Clearly Stated, Focused Strategy

Execution: Develop and Maintain Flawless Operational Execution

Culture: Develop and Maintain a Performance-Oriented Culture

Structure: Build and Maintain a Fast, Flexible, Flat Organization

Secondary:

Talent: Hold on to Talented Employees and Find More

Leadership: Keep Leaders and Directors Committed to the Business

Innovation: Make Innovations That Are Industry Transforming

Mergers & Partnerships: Make Growth Happen with Mergers and Partnerships

The key to long-term success, they argue, is implementing effective programs in the six areas simultaneously. After analyzing the data, William Joyce and his colleagues concluded that a company following this "4+2" formula over the ten year period had a better than 90% chance of being a winner.

Anecdotes from the successful companies will interest general business readers, but the contrast with the experience of companies that stumbled should be particularly instructive. The detailed profiles of "winner" and "loser" companies were especially interesting. Replete with incisive discussions of various companies' approaches for each of the four primary and four secondary areas of practice, the book also offers summaries of the study results in table format. For managers who wonder how anybody can keep six areas of practice fine-tuned at the same time, the authors agree it may be a challenge but point to their wealth of success stories to show it isn't impossible.

"It is time for the first book identifying the fundamental practices that create business success?the ones that do indeed really matter."

More than 100 business book reviews written by Harry K. Jones are available at http://www.AchieveMax.com/books/.

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Harry K. Jones is a professional speaker and consultant for AchieveMax®, Inc., a firm specializing in custom-designed keynote presentations, seminars, and consulting services. Harry has made presentations ranging from leadership to employee retention and time management to stress management for a number of industries, including education, financial, government, healthcare, hospitality, and manufacturing. He can be reached at 800-886-2MAX or by visiting http://www.AchieveMax.com.

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