Breakthrough: How Great Companies Set Outrageous Objectives and Achieve Them - Hardcover

Davidson, Bill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0471454400 ISBN 13: 9780471454403

Publisher: Wiley, 2003

Synopsis

Breakthrough will help executives lead their teams to peerless, unsurpassed performance by helping them define a grand goal and engage the organization to pursue and achieve that goal, no matter how difficult the challenge seems. Based on a ten-year landmark study of more than seventy bold, breakthrough companies such as IBM, Dayton-Hudson, Progressive Insurance, EMC, American Standard, Charles Schwab, and Dell Computer, the book shows how these remarkable companies adopted outrageous objectives and then did what it takes to achieve remarkable results.

About this title

About the Author

BILL DAVIDSON was a tenured professor of management at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California from 1985 to 1998. He is the author of several other books on management, including The Amazing Race and 2020 Vision (with Stan Davis), which was selected as Best Business Book of the Year by Fortune magazine in 1992. He is Chairman of MESA Research (www.mesaresearchgroup.com), a strategy and leadership services group.

From the Back Cover

"Teams that embrace bold goals and breakthrough strategies can accomplish remarkable results. This book will be invaluable to anyone embarking on that path."
Bart Butzer
Executive Vice President, Target Corporation

"Yellow s continued industry leadership will result in large part from embracing Bill Davidson s philosophy and approach."
Bill Zollars
CEO, Yellow Corporation

"Strategic change is a high-risk, high-return proposition. Davidson s framework provides a sure, firm foundation for success."
Roger MacFarlane
CEO, UTi Worldwide

"This is a serious piece of work which should be required reading for all business leaders. If you plan on remaining or becoming number one in your industry, have your top management team read this right away."
Bob Herson
CEO, Executive Focus International, Inc.

"I could not put it down stunning insights into corporate strategy and tactics."
Randall Lunn
General Partner, Palomar Ventures

From the Inside Flap

Every corporate success story begins with a breakthrough business model that triggers superior performance and rockets a company to a leading position. But unless a company continues to challenge itself to do more and do it better, success can be the beginning of the end for market leaders who rest on their laurels.

Breakthrough is a fact-based, practical guide that helps business leaders keep their success cycles turning with constant business innovation. Based on a landmark ten-year study of more than seventy bold, breakthrough companies such as IBM, Countrywide, and American Standard this book shows how the world s best companies stay on top. The secret these high-performing companies share: challenging themselves to achieve goals that seem unreasonable.

Breakthrough shows business leaders how to develop business goals that seem outrageous, and then foster the cutting-edge thinking, the focused effort, and the teamwork to achieve breakthrough results. Leaders of breakthrough companies do things differently: they develop master plans that integrate every area of the company and they understand their organization s core identity. Breakthrough requires more than just good ideas or extra effort it comes from practical, real-world steps that lead to unbelievable results.

This book describes all the ways breakthrough companies separate themselves from their rivals, including:

• Starting and managing the success cycle
• Focusing on a single core strategy
• Understanding competitive realities and opportunities
• Innovating at the core of the company
• Following a framework for transformation
• Embracing program management techniques
• Tying employee compensation to transformation strategies
• Communicating effectively

Packed with case studies and revealing data, Breakthrough combines proven advice for aspiring leaders with practical strategies for effective business innovation. For market leaders and insurgent companies alike, the key to outrageous success is setting the outrageous goal and using the power of Breakthrough to achieve it.

Reviews

Walking in the footsteps of Jim Collins's business bestseller Good to Great, Davidson (The Amazing Race) offers a prescription for corporate greatness based on his study of more than 70 high-performing companies. But while Good to Great focused on lesser-nown firms, this volume looks to blue chips like IBM, Dell, Schwab, Caterpillar and ADS. Davidson's premise is that "breakthrough" companies achieve what they do by setting outrageous objectives and pursuing them with single-minded intensity. The go-for-broke, swing-for-the-bleachers approach that he favors means that there are plenty of intriguing innovations on display. For example, Progressive Insurance vowed to deliver the fastest claim resolution to auto policyholders and-taking that idea to its "outrageous" conclusion-broke the industry mold by putting claims agents in vans, ready to go at a moment's notice to meet a customer at the scene of an accident. However, the emphasis here is not on storytelling but on building a case for the "breakthrough" approach that can apply to the reader's own business. What's most impressive is that the companies cited are by and large established players who've radically transformed their operations, rather than startups that begin with a "clean slate." Overall, Davidson's argument is credible and logical; the trouble is, it's a little too familiar. So much has been written about corporate transformations through technology or re-engineering during and after the Internet bubble that it's hard to muster a sense of excitement or discovery. In the end, this is a worthy title, but one that lacks the "breakthrough" spark of visionary thinking to take it to the next level.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This research project began in 1992, when 18 of IBM's senior executives met for their annual strategy review. IBM had just completed an enormously successful decade, but the team was struggling with the fact that the current business cycle was coming to an end. As part of its effort to adapt to the rapid changes occurring in technology, Big Blue hired Davidson's consulting firm, MESA Research, to conduct a study of how other businesses had achieved successful transformation. The core tenet of Davidson's research is that success is based on innovative breakthroughs that focus the energy needed to achieve outrageous objectives. Breakthroughs on an enterprise scale can be significant enough to reshape entire industries as the insurgent business overturns the entrenched incumbents. During a 10-year period, MESA studied 70 companies that transformed their industries, including Progressive Insurance, Countrywide Mortgage, Southwest Airlines, Dell Computer, and Amazon.com. Davidson maintains the reader's interest by keeping the theory brief and focusing on the dynamic real-life stories of success and failure. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0471454400
• ISBN 13: 9780471454403
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256