Systems & Planning Books - Page 2

Book Yourself Solid: The Fastest, Easiest, and Most Reliable System for Getting More Clients Than You Can Handle Even if You Hate Marketing and Selling

Michael Port

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 116 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Much more than the title implies. 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I purchased Book Yourself Solid because I was interested in expanding my therapy practice. But when I got to the part where the author asked what I would say if someone asked what I did I realized that this is much more about who I am and what inspires me than about selling generic counseling. Instead of saying that I'm a therapist who works with individuals and couples, I'm telling people that "I help couples rekindle the magic of their relationships." And "I help victims of violence feel safe again - and it happens very quickly."

This book is tightly written, every chapter is short, concise and builds on the last. As I read I did the exercises and by the time I had finished reading I was already marketing myself in a new way and it didn't feel like marketing. In fact, I had a different sense of myself and my work because my work more reflects who I am.
Whatever you are doing, or starting, or thinking about starting, if it's a one on one service business, get this book.

I supervise beginning therapists and I'm recommending this to all my supervisees. (And no, they can't borrow my copy.)

Editorial Review:

Book Yourself Solid-now in paperback-is a complete instructional guide for startingn and growing a successful service business. It gives you simple, yet effective techniques for creating relentless demand and endless leads. It includes more than 200 proven marketing strategies for attracting new clients, earning more referrals, and building profitable, long-lasting professional relationships. If you want to take your service business to the next level, start here and Book Yourself Solid.

Billion-Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years

Paul B. Carroll, Chunka Mui

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Welcome to Business Failure 101

In the 1960s, IBM CEO Tom Watson called an executive into his office after his venture lost $10 million. Watson asked the man if he knew why he’d been called in. The man said he assumed he was being fired. Watson told him, “Fired? Hell, I spent $10 million educating you. I just want to be sure you learned the right lessons.”
In Billion-Dollar Lessons, Paul Carroll and Chunka Mui draw on research into more than 750 business failures to reveal the misguided tactics that mire companies again and again. There are thousands of books about successful companies but virtually none about the lessons to be learned from those that crash and burn.

Lesson One: The Cold Hard Facts

Between 1981 and 2006, 423 major publicly held U.S. companies with combined assets totaling $1.5 trillion filed for bankruptcy. Hundreds more took huge write-offs, discontinued major operations, or were acquired under duress. Again and again, companies follow the same wrong-headed strategies that brought down businesses in the past. The sub-prime mortgage crisis that cost companies tens of billions of dollars in 2007 and 2008 echoes the ill-conceived strategies that pushed Green Tree Financial and Conseco into bankruptcy years earlier. Tom Watson’s executive’s $10 million lesson seems cheap by comparison.

Lesson Two: Failure Patterns

Carroll and Mui found that the number one cause of failure was misguided strategy—not sloppy execution, poor leadership, or bad luck. These strategic errors fall into seven categories, including:
* Pursuing nonexistent synergies: Quaker Oats’ purchase of Snapple was supposed to capitalize on distribution synergies but instead led to a $1.7 billion write-off.
* Moving into an “adjacent” market that isn’t really adjacent: Avon decided its “culture of caring” qualified it to operate retirement homes. Subsequent write-offs totaled $545 million.
* Buying more problems than efficiencies through misguided consolidation: Despite pioneering the discount department store years before Sam Walton came along, Ames Department Stores flubbed consolidation efforts, landing in bankruptcy twice before eventually liquidating.

Lesson Three: Avoid Making the Same Mistakes

But there’s light at the end of the tunnel: Billion-Dollar Lessons provides proven methods that managers, boards, and even investors can adopt to avoid making the same mistakes. While there’s no way to guarantee success, this book draws on vivid, off-the-beaten-track examples to help you avoid failure by showing you how to thoroughly assess potentially disastrous strategies before they bring your company down.

Required Reading

Think of Billion-Dollar Lessons as the flip side of Good to Great, but just as eye- opening and essential as that business classic. There’s enormous value in learning from companies that lost millions (if not billions) in pursuit of strategies that led to spectacular flameouts. Everyone makes mistakes, but why make the same mistakes over and over?

Execution Premium

Robert S. Kaplan, David P. Norton

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In a world of stiffening competition, business strategy is more crucial than ever. Yet most organizations struggle in this area--not with formulating strategy but with executing it, or putting their strategy into action. Owing to execution failures, companies realize just a fraction of the financial performance promised in their strategic plans.

It doesn't have to be that way, maintain Robert Kaplan and David Norton in The Execution Premium. Building on their breakthrough works on strategy-focused organizations, the authors describe a multistage system that enables you to gain measurable benefits from your carefully formulated business strategy. This book shows you how to:

Develop an effective strategy--with tools such as SWOT analysis, vision formulation, and strategic change agendas

Plan execution of the strategy--through portfolios of strategic initiatives linked to strategy maps and Balanced Scorecards

Put your strategy into action--by integrating operational tools such as process dashboards, rolling forecasts, and activity-based costing

Test and update your strategy--using carefully designed management meetings to review operational and strategic data

Drawing on extensive research and detailed case studies from a broad array of industries, The Execution Premium presents a systematic and proven framework for achieving the financial results promised by your strategy.

The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)

CK Prahalad

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 62 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The world's most exciting, fastest-growing new market is where you least expect it: at the bottom of the pyramid. Collectively, the world's billions of poor people have immense untapped buying power. They represent an enormous opportunity for companies who learn how to serve them. Not only can it be done, it is being done--very profitably. What's more, companies aren't just making money: by serving these markets, they're helping millions of the world's poorest people escape poverty. C.K. Prahalad's global bestseller The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, now available in paperback, shows why you can't afford to ignore "Bottom of the Pyramid" (BOP) markets. Now available in paperback, it offers a blueprint for driving the radical innovation you'll need to profit in emerging markets--and using those innovations to become more competitive everywhere. This new paperback edition includes eleven concise, fast-paced success stories from India, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela--ranging from salt to soap, banking to cellphones, healthcare to housing. These stories are backed by more detailed case studies and 10 hours of digital videos on whartonsp.com.Simply put, this book is about making a revolution: building profitable "bottom of the pyramid" markets, reducing poverty, and creating an inclusive capitalism that works for everyone. Preface xi About the Author xix Part I: The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid 1 Chapter 1: The Market at the Bottom of the Pyramid 3 Chapter 2: Products and Services for the BOP 23 Chapter 3: BOP: A Global Opportunity? 47 Chapter 4: The Ecosystem for Wealth Creation 63 Chapter 5: Reducing Corruption: Transaction Governance Capacity 77 Chapter 6: Development as Social Transformation 99 Part II: Business Success Stories from the Bottom of the Pyramid 113 Financing the Poor 115 Aravind Eye Care--The Most Precious Gift 131 Energy for Everyone 137 Agricultural Advances for the Poor--The EID Parry Story 149 Retail for the Poor 159 Information Technology to the Poor 169 The Jaipur Foot Story 187 Health Alerts for All 191 Transparent Government 201 The Annapurna Salt Story 213 Homes for the Poor--The CEMEX Story 221 From Hand to Mouth--The HHL Soap Story 235 Part III: On the Web at Whartonsp.com Video Success Stories Casas Bahia CEMEX Annapurna Salt Hindustan Lever Jaipur Foot Aravind Eye Care ICICI Bank ITC e-Choupal EID Parry Voxiva E+Co/Tecnosol Andhra Pradesh Full Success Case Stories in pdf format The Market at the Bottom of the Pyramid Known Problems and Known Solutions: What Is the Missing Link? Known Problems and Unique Solutions Known Problems and Systemwide Reform Scaling Innovations Creating Enabling Conditions for the Development of the Private Sector The EID Parry Story Biographies of the Researchers/Writers of the Success Case Stories from The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid 247 About the Video Success Stories 255 Index 257

The Brand Bubble: The Looming Crisis in Brand Value and How to Avoid It

John Gerzema, Edward Lebar

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 63 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

How to use brands to gain and sustain competitive advantage

Companies today face a dilemma in marketing. The tried-and-true formulas to create sales and market share behind brands are becoming irrelevant and losing traction with consumers. In this book, Gerzema and LeBar offer credible evidence--drawn from a detailed analysis of a decade's worth of brand and financial data using Y&R's Brand Asset Valuator (BAV), the largest database of brands in the world--that business is riding on yet another bubble that is ready to burst--a brand bubble. While most managers still see metrics like trust and awareness as the backbone of how brands are built, Gerzema asserts they're dead wrong--these metrics do not add to increased asset value. In fact, by following them, they actually hasten the declining value of their brands.

Using a five-stage model, The Brand Bubble reveals how today's successful brands--and tomorrow's--have an insatiable appetite for creativity and change. These brands offer consumers a palpable sense of movement and direction thanks to a powerful "energized differentiation." Gerzema reveals how brands with energized differentiation achieve better financial performance than traditional brands have. Plus, Gerzema helps readers develop energized differentiation in their own brands, creating consumer-centric and sustainable organizations.

Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life

Avinash K. Dixit, Barry J. Nalebuff

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 41 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Shallow analysis of many real life situations 1 out of 5 stars.
2 of 10 people found this review helpful.

I apologize to all those who liked this book, but I felt the authors were playing with a tool that was new to them thinking they had found a "Holy Grail". They sorely missed the critical elements of numerous examples. You cannot break down the Cuban Missile Crisis in to elements of chance nor Ted Williams batting style. Being successful in negotiation or business is based on truly understanding your customer, your vendors and your competition. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a clash of cultures that was solved when protagonists actually talked to each other and realized that they were really on the same page but had stumbled into a situation as a result of years of non-communication. This was not game theory. The solution had nothing to do with odds but had everything to do with Kennedy and Khrushchev coming to know each other and each understanding that the other wanted a non-apocalyptic solution that satisfied each's home political realities. The solution developed over the 13dys and the odds changed drastically as the protagonists communicated. The authors missed in this example and many others the value of dynamic complex person-to-person communication and reduced all to absurdly simplistic discussion of game theory and percentage of outcomes. This book was in short a grave disappointment.
"To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

Key Performance Indicators: Developing, Implementing,and Using Winning KPIs

David Parmenter

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

KPI Usability Review 3 out of 5 stars.
10 of 16 people found this review helpful.

I found this book to be reasonably helpful. There are lists and lists of key performance indicators in the back of the book. There was one story in particular (won't give it away for all of you who want the book) that was particularly good and I have started sharing that example in my work (Six Sigma). All in all, I think I am looking for more of the "how to do it," which I found this book to be a little light on. . . . . .

Filling in the Scorecard Gaps 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 10 people found this review helpful.

As we know from another business author, the 'Knowing - Doing Gap' can be difficult to close. For Balance Scorecard fans, KPI consultant David Parmenter fills that gap. Written as an instruction manual for implementing performance measurement in any organization, this easy to read guide provides both context and content for a 'just do it'' approach; implementing a successful performance measurement system this is, in any business sector.

Among the many things this book does well, the most important may be: Setting the context for key implementation steps. In addition to his 12 step process, Parmenter presents 5 critical aspects of a KPI system.

One, he open's the dialogue by providing all important distinctions between; Key Results Indicators (KRIs), team Performance Indicators (PIs), and leadership's Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). He says these should be balanced 10/80/10. This is foundational to successful implementation.
Two, he links these to strategy thru a clear understanding of well thought out (and few in number) Critical Success Factors (CSFs) - one of the most critical and hardest parts of for making measurement effective at a working level.
Three, he exposes the 'best practice' myth; rightly acknowledging that the goal is the continuous adaptation of 'better' practices and not a misguided belief in the redemptive qualities and often misapplication of someone else's "best practice".
Four, he stresses the importance of understanding measurement as a constantly evolving process and not a one-time establishment of the "right" measures.
And, five, he places performance measurement within the overall context of organizational development. A part of the whole, but not the whole.

The approach is pragmatic, the steps are clear and doable, the materials don't give the answer, but they provide a well-defined space in which to write your own business particulars. This book does not belong on any manager's book shelf; it belongs on their working table. This one is a winner for those who want doing and not just knowing.

Dennis DeWilde, author of "The Performance Connection"

Editorial Review:

Breathtaking in its simplicity and profound in its impact, Key Performance Indicators (KPI) distills the balanced scorecard process into twelve logical steps, equipping users with an implementation resource kit that includes questionnaires, worksheets, workshop outlines, and a list of over 500 performance measures. Author David Parmenter provides you with everything you need to master and implement a KPI-driven strategy.

Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution

Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, David Robertson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 29 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Great Book 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Our company is big on this book. our IT CIO has distributed several copies of it to several key people in the organisation.

Well deserved 5 stars 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 2 people found this review helpful.

The book is really great and deserves 5 stars.

I am an Application Architect working for one of the biggest financial companies in the world and we are using this book as a starting point for improving our Enterprise Architecture.

I whish this book was thicker or maybe had a second volume.

Editorial Review:

Enterprise architecture defines a firm's needs for standardised tasks, job roles, systems, infrastructure, and data in core business processes. Thus, it helps a company to articulate how it will compete in a digital economy and it guides managers' daily decisions to realise their vision of success. This book clearly explains enterprise architecture's vital role in enabling - or constraining - the execution of business strategy. The book provides clear frameworks, thoughtful case examples, and a proven-effective structured process for designing and implementing effective enterprise architectures.

Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat (Agora Series)

Michael Masterson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 64 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Exaggerations, Over-Simplifications and Ego 2 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Exaggerations can make a point. Simplification can speed things up and to run a 100 million dollar company there is going to be.... The problem with the this current crop of marketing book authors is that they are so busy with self-promotion that they don't think the marketplace, you and I, the customers are worth treating with respect.

Mr. Masterson has maybe done what he claims but this book is only telling us the good part of his story. If you read some of the on-line forums that comment on his business, you get a much different picture. And the most favorable reviews here on Amazon are written by his cohorts.

There is very useful information in here but it was hard for me to get past his ego and the very ego driven delivery of it all.

I did like his break down of the 4 different levels from infancy to beyond 100 million dollars. But only a copywriter like Masterson puts a title on his book that says you could do it "in no-time-flat." Really, Mike?

Proceed with caution my fellow marketers and entrepreneurs, he has good information tucked in this book but keep a snorkel close while reading. It gets deep after the drop-off.

Editorial Review:

Whether you’re thinking about starting a new business or growing an existing one, Ready, Fire, Aim has what you need to succeed in your entrepreneurial endeavors. In it, self-made multimillionaire and bestselling author Masterson shares the knowledge he has gained from creating and expanding numerous businesses and outlines a focused strategy for guiding a small business through the four stages of entrepreneurial growth. Along the way, Masterson teaches you the different skills needed in order to excel in this dynamic environment.

Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business

Jeff Howe

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

“The amount of knowledge and talent dispersed among the human race has always outstripped our capacity to harness it. Crowdsourcing ­corrects that—but in doing so, it also unleashes the forces of creative destruction.”
—From Crowdsourcing

First identified by journalist Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired article, “crowdsourcing” describes the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few. Howe reveals that the crowd is more than wise—it’s talented, creative, and stunningly productive. Crowdsourcing activates the transformative power of today’s technology, liberating the latent potential within us all. It’s a perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race, education, and job history no longer matter; the quality of work is all that counts; and every field is open to people of every imaginable background. If you can perform the service, design the product, or solve the problem, you’ve got the job.

But crowdsourcing has also triggered a dramatic shift in the way work is organized, talent is employed, research is conducted, and products are made and marketed. As the crowd comes to supplant traditional forms of labor, pain and disruption are inevitable.

Jeff Howe delves into both the positive and negative consequences of this intriguing phenomenon. Through extensive reporting from the front lines of this revolution, he employs a brilliant array of stories to look at the economic, cultural, business, and political implications of crowdsourcing. How were a bunch of part-time dabblers in finance able to help an investment company consistently beat the market? Why does Procter & Gamble repeatedly call on enthusiastic amateurs to solve scientific and technical challenges? How can companies as diverse as iStockphoto and Threadless employ just a handful of people, yet generate millions of dollars in revenue every year? The answers lie within these pages.

The blueprint for crowdsourcing originated from a handful of computer programmers who showed that a community of like-minded peers could create better products than a corporate behemoth like Microsoft. Jeff Howe tracks the amazing migration of this new model of production, showing the potential of the Internet to create human networks that can divvy up and make quick work of otherwise overwhelming tasks. One of the most intriguing ideas of Crowdsourcing is that the knowledge to solve intractable problems—a cure for cancer, for instance—may already exist within the warp and weave of this infinite and, as yet, largely untapped resource. But first, Howe proposes, we need to banish preconceived notions of how such problems are solved.

The very concept of crowdsourcing stands at odds with centuries of practice. Yet, for the digital natives soon to enter the workforce, the technologies and principles behind crowdsourcing are perfectly intuitive. This generation collaborates, shares, remixes, and creates with a fluency and ease the rest of us can hardly understand. Crowdsourcing, just now starting to emerge, will in a short time simply be the way things are done.