Flight of the Buffalo: Soaring to Excellence, Learning to Let Employees Lead

In Search of Excellence influenced the managers of the last decade. Now, a new book gives leadership insights to meet the unprecedented demands of the 1990s.
Ralph Stayer is a courageous, pioneering CEO and the hero of Tom Peters' management video "The Leadership Alliance." James Belasco is a visionary, renowned consultant and author of the groundbreaking business book Teaching the Elephant to Dance. Together these two authors inspire you with far-sighted, revolutionary concepts and guide you with nuts-and-bolts prescriptions ... as they show you how to rise above the old ways of 1980s to soar to new levels of business success in the tough times ahead.
Belasco and Stayer explain why executives are unable to change their organizations quickly enough. Weighted down by old leadership paradigms, managers act like head buffalo, charging blindly ahead in fits and starts, urging the herd to follow. But hard-driving managers and their herds suffer the same fate as the buffalo of the plains: they are outmaneuvered by the more nimble, quick-thinking competition and predators in today's fast-paced global economic landscape.
Drawing upon their own highly successful business careers, Belasco and Stayer detail the new leadership role for executives. They call their managerial ethic Leading the Journey. In their model of the new, highly flexible organization, everyone is focused on delighting customers. The manager learns and grows while responding to changing circumstances. Instead of a herd, people become more like a flight of self-directed geese flying in formation. Everyone knows the common direction, is willing to assume leadership when necessary, and can rearrange the structure when the needs of the customer demand it. Individuals start to do their jobs better not because some leader orders it, but because they want to excel. In other words, letting employees lead produces new levels of excellence that benefit everyone.
Then Flight of the Buffalo demonstrates how this new leadership model can be applied directly to the most pressing business decisions. From two people who have actually done it you learn how to set value-added prices, identify and dominate profitable niche markets, anticipate the future and prepare for it, and set up bonus and profit sharing plans that really motivate and measure productivity in even the most difficult times.
Far removed from today's gimmicky how-to business books, Flight of the Buffalo is a mature work from two extraordinary business minds - a book meant for those who are ready to enter a new era of business success.

James A. Belasco is a professor, writer, consultant, and entrepreneur. Ralph C. Stayer is the former CEO of Johnsonville Foods, and author of the influential article 'How I Learned to Let My Workers Lead' for the Harvard Business Review.