Bad Company Good Company A Leaders Guide

Cultural Dysfunction is a disease at epidemic levels in many organizations. No group is immune from the insidious onset and negative impact dysfunction brings to businesses, non-profits, health care, academia, and the public sector. In Bad Company/Good Company, A Leaders Guide: Transforming Dysfunctional Culture, veteran business executives Charles E. Williams and James T. Schultz offer proven processes and tactics they used over their 90+ years combined experience successfully transforming cultures of failure and underachievement in complex and resistant organizations in both the private and public sectors. Their realistic narrative provides an orderly roadmap how to recognize and cure cultural dysfunction and improve results in safety, employee engagement, customer happiness, financial performance, productivity, operational excellence, and overall stakeholder satisfaction. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY: Jim Schultz and Chuck Williams worked side by side as senior executives for a Fortune 200 company, jointly leading efforts to transform performance in safety, operations, and productivity. For example, they instituted and led programs that reduced worker casualties by 75 percent and workers' comp costs by more than 50 percent in just five years; instituted controls and protocols that saved more than $400 million in procurement costs on a $5 billion annual spend; and implemented a metric-driven process that improved productivity by more than 2 percent-bringing millions to the bottom line in both direct and indirect cost reductions. Today, Chuck and Jim continue to collaborate and team together in leadership consulting, keynote speaking, and coaching engagements in high-consequence industries.

The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? The Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't. The Findings The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap. “Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.” Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?

Jack Higgins's previous novels Edge of Danger and Midnight Runner put British intelligence agent Sean Dillon through "a lot of thrills [and] wild action" (Los Angeles Times). Now a new enemy has emerged with a dark secret from World War II--and a score to settle with agent Dillon.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.

Over the course of 2003 the post of Chief Executive Officer or CEO - effectively, the person at the top of the company - has become a notorious poisoned chalice for many incumbents, from Glaxo's Jean Paul Garnier to Marconi's Lord Morrison and Vodafone's Chris Gent. New government legislation offering shareholders the chance to vote on top people's remuneration packages has exposed some extraordinarily generous, even downright incredible, terms of employment, and triggered storms of protest. badly; bonuses triggered even when the company makes a loss; salaries that shoot up as fast as the share price plummets; vast share options, millions paid into pension plans, free dental care for your wife for life. All this plus a basic income into the high six figures for starters: being a CEO, it would seem, is nice work if you can get it. CEO. Why do we need him (almost always him)? What does he actually do? How did he come to be paid more even when the rest of the workforce is having to swallow a pay-cut and the closure of the final-salary pension scheme? Why, whatever the company's fortunes, does he always just get more? Would a company actually miss the CEO if it didn't have him at all?

The culmination of 30 years of management consulting and leadership coaching, this collection of tried-and-true tips will make you a better leader when you work to make them yours. Unlike other leadership coaching books, this is not a guide to help coaches improve their skills but to help leaders improve by folding coaching techniques into their leadership approach. It covers a wide variety of topics, from mindset to culture to change management, and each tip comes with a suggested action for executive, mid-level, and supervisory leaders, ensuring this book’s value regardless of your current leadership role within your organization. Each of the 101 tips is also accompanied by its “why,” Guru Guidance that outlines implications, and an Idea Crosswalk section that shows how each tip corresponds to other parts of the book to facilitate innovative thinking about how it can be best put to use. Enabling good leaders to become exceptional ones by incorporating coaching skills into their leadership practices, this clear and practical reference guide will become a go-to resource for current and future business leaders, coaches, and mentors, as well as executive education providers.

"Chronicles the life and career of the acerbic author, from his youth, through his experiences during the Civil War, to his 1913 disappearance in revolution-torn Mexico"-OCLC

Al Dunlap is an original: an outspoken, irascible executive with an incredible track record of injecting new life into tired companies. The business media have coined a new verb--"to dunlap"--when describing a fast company turnaround.

Each had what the others wanted, and before Roy Radin's decomposed body was found in a dry creek, Laney Jacobs, Robert Evans, and Radin, seemed destined for a successful partnership.

Forget Almost Famous, this is the true story of two awesome seventies rock supergroups.