The Agenda: What Every Business Must Do to Dominate the Decade - Softcover

Hammer, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1400047730 ISBN 13: 9781400047734

Publisher: Crown Business, 2003

Synopsis

New rules for the new game:
the ideas that every business needs to win in the customer economy

In The Agenda, Michael Hammer shows companies how to prosper in today’s world of slow growth, fierce competition, and enormously powerful customers. The winners in this extraordinarily difficult environment—companies like IBM, Duke Power, Progressive Insurance, and GE—succeed through superior operations. Their costs are lower and their quality higher than their competitors’; they get new products to market faster and they provide better customer service. How do they do it? Through near-fanatical attention to the basics of business, and by managing these basics in new and creative ways.

The Agenda teaches the ideas and techniques that any company—large or small, service firm or manufacturer—can use to out-execute and out-innovate its competitors. Businesses that follow these principles will grow by taking market share away from those that do not. While others decline, your company can thrive. The Agenda will show you how.

About this title

Review:

"Suddenly," writes Michael Hammer in the opening to his confidently but aptly named new book The Agenda, "business is not so easy anymore." He then sets out an ambitious plan for righting what many businesses are doing wrong, much as he did a decade ago in his bestselling Reengineering the Corporation. This time, however, he retreats from the overarching "big idea" promulgated in his earlier book to present a system that incorporates nine ideas geared for an environment where customers really do rule. Hammer unveils these aligned-but-individual ideas, which relate to process and customer orientation, along with measurement, management, connecting via the Net, and eventual positioning as "components of virtually extended enterprises" rather than "self-contained wholes." He goes on to explain why they represent improvements over past procedures and cites examples of them in practice. (While discussing measurement, for instance, he shows why most companies use their carefully compiled statistics for little more than affirming what has already happened; he then tells how one firm matched fixed goals in customer retention, employee retention, and product distribution with actual performance requirements that could be tracked and changed.) The final two chapters offer specific implementation suggestions, all filtered through the eyes of an engineer who never went to business school and peppers his writing with references to the Grateful Dead and the Jack Palance character in City Slickers. In all, another provocative and practical tract that will surely attract old fans as well as new believers. --Howard Rothman

From the Back Cover:

“A recipe for winning in today’s fast-moving, hypercompetitive world.”
-- Dave Pottruck, president and co-CEO, The Charles Schwab Corporation

“I’ve long admired Michael Hammer’s insights into what’s wrong with businesses and his prescription for improvement. Dr. Hammer is absolutely on the mark about how growth has to be created, not just harvested, and that makes management among the most difficult, risky, and precarious of human endeavors. Today with dot-coms turning to dot-bombs and even long-established businesses being upset by upstarts, The Agenda provides a series of valuable lessons for anyone seeking success in the consumer-dominated economy. Read this book -- and hope your competitors do not.”
-- Joseph Nacchio, chairman and CEO, Qwest Communications

“Michael Hammer has once again forged ahead of the pack with a practical, specific, easily understood, and prophetic view of what’s ahead. As world business competition continues to intensify, CEOS will do well to listen to Hammer.”
-- Larry Bossidy, chairman and CEO of Honeywell International

“Like Dr. Hammer’s previous books, The Agenda articulates a new and important business sea change, the emergence of a customer-centric economy. His practical road map–for those who are willing to rise to the challenge–is a wake-up call rallying business leaders to start thinking like customers. From the boardroom to middle management, this is a must-read for every company executive. Your company’s future depends on it.” -- Mackey J. McDonald, CEO, chairman, and president, VF Corporation

About this edition

• Publisher: Crown Business
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1400047730
• ISBN 13: 9781400047734
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288