Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters to Get Things Right - Hardcover

Bossidy, Larry; Charan, Ram

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400050847 ISBN 13: 9781400050840

Publisher: Crown Business, 2004

Synopsis

Confronting Reality will change the way you think about and run your business. It is the first book that shows how to connect the big picture of the new era of business with the nitty-gritty of what to do about it. Through a completely new way to understand and use the business model as the primary tool for confronting reality—a breakthrough that will become the management innovation of this decade—you’ll know sooner rather than later whether your fundamental business premise is under assault, where your best opportunities lie, what you should change and what you should leave alone, and how to realistically plan the future of your business.

The fundamentals of how a business makes money are being rapidly and permanently altered by sweeping structural changes. With their extraordinary depth and breadth of experience, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan are the ideal guides for everyone—entrepreneur, mid-level manager, or CEO—about what is to be done so you can get things right in this challenging, radically changed world. They start by showing you how to understand the most fundamental element of any business: whether you can realistically make the money you hope to in the game you’re playing.

Bossidy and Charan show how to use the business model to develop a robust, reality-based process for thinking about the speci?cs of your business in a holistic way. They show how to tie together the financial targets you must meet, the external realities you face, and internal activities such as strategy development, operating tactics, and selection and development of people.

Through the lens of the business model, as well as the skillful use of initiatives and development of people with the right leadership characteristics, you’ll see how Robert Nardelli at Home Depot, Jim McNerney at 3M, Dick Harrington at the Thomson Corporation, Michael Wisbrun at KLM, Joseph Tucci at EMC, and John Chambers at Cisco confronted reality. Whether they faced crisis or opportunity, all made the right kinds of changes through a combination of business savvy (the art of understanding the fundamentals driving a business) and business model thinking.

About this title

Review:

In their 2002 bestseller, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan identify why people don’t get results: they don’t execute. Bossidy and Charan are back with another stellar study on organizational behavior that shows how companies can succeed if they return to reality and examine every part of their business. Confronting Reality is based on a simple concept, but many companies approach strategy and execution in a surprisingly unreal manner and even the simplest of measurement methods, like the business model, are not applied correctly.

Cisco, 3M, KLM, Home Depot, and the Thomson Corporation are just a few of the companies that Bossidy and Charan examine. To demonstrate how to examine a business using the business model, Bossidy and Charan map out external variables, financial targets, internal activities, and an iteration stage (defined as a time to "make tradeoffs, apply and develop business savvy") to prove how a dynamically evolving business model will help improve performance.

"The version of the business model we have developed is a robust, reality-based process for thinking about the specifics of your business in a holistic way. It shows you how to tie together the financial targets you must meet, the external realities of your business and internal activities such as strategy development, operating tactics, and selection and development of people."

Larry Bossidy, retired chairman and CEO of Honeywell International and Ram Charan, author of What the CEO Wants You to Know and Profitable Growth Is Everyone's Business, have once again shed industrial-strength light on how to run a successful business. --E. Brooke Gilbert

Amazon.com Exclusive Content

Amazon.com Interview: Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan

Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan are back with Confronting Reality to show how companies can succeed if they get back to reality and examine every part of their business. Amazon.com senior editor E. Brooke Gilbert interviewed Bossidy and Charan to discuss the current business climate, their new book, and future projections.
Read the interview.

Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan Discuss the Airline Industry

Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan discuss the airline industry's failure to confront reality based on a recent Wall Sreet Journal article and their new book as a backdrop.
Read their comments.

About the Author:

LARRY BOSSIDY is the retired chairman of the board and CEO of Honeywell International, a global $24 billion advanced technology, controls, and manufacturing company. He began his career at General Electric, where he served in a number of executive and financial positions, including COO of GE Capital, executive vice president and president of GE’s Services and Materials Sector, and vice chairman and executive officer. In 1991 Mr. Bossidy joined AlliedSignal Inc. as chairman and CEO and merged the company with Honeywell in 1999.

RAM CHARAN is a highly acclaimed business advisor, speaker, and author, well known for his practical, real-world perspective. He was a Baker Scholar at Harvard Business School where he earned his MBA degree with Distinction, as well as his DBA. Dr. Charan is also the author of What the CEO Wants You to Know, Profitable Growth Is Everyone’s Business, The Leadership Pipeline, and Boards at Work. His articles have appeared in Fortune and Harvard
Business Review.

About this edition

• Publisher: Crown Business
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1400050847
• ISBN 13: 9781400050840
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272