Relentless: The Forensics of Mobsters’ Business Practices

All types of organizations, for profit, not-for-profit, lawful, and unlawful, must be relentless in highly competitive, and constantly evolving environments. Every day iconic brands like Sears, Kodak, and Blockbuster vanish. Managers in lawful companies face disruptive technologies, groundbreaking new products, and competition from new entrants. Every organization must manage its way through a rapidly shifting world, or else fail. Yet some organized crime syndicates last decades despite massive law enforcement efforts and rival gangs directed at their daily demise.

The American Mafia, which burgeoned during Prohibition in the 1920s, still operates in the twenty-first century. The Sinaloa Cartel remains the largest smuggler of drugs into the US, despite jailing its leader, El Chapo Guzmán, in a US supermax prison. How do these criminal syndicates survive, and even thrive? They apply fundamental economic principles to devise management practices that channel their heinous members' self-interest to achieve the syndicates' objectives.

Relentless uses the most unexpected organizations, crime syndicates, to elucidate essential economic concepts that allow all leaders to build stronger, more robust companies. These concepts align the organization's business strategy and employee empowerment, incentives, and corporate culture. These principles attract the right people to create resourceful, market-obsessed, and relentless high-performance teams. Understanding the management practices devised by mobsters illustrates the economic concepts that lawful managers also must heed. While lawful managers cannot simply follow the business practices of mobsters, they must apply the same fundamental principles described in Relentless.

Jerold L. Zimmerman is a globally recognized business professor and author of seven books. Accounting for Decision Making and Control is in its 10th edition and Managerial Economics and Organizational Architecture is in its 7th edition. He has taught organizational economics, accounting, and finance at the University of Rochester's Simon Business School for more than forty years. He has consulted with numerous clients, including Fortune 500 companies and management advisory firms, to demonstrate how the principles of organizational economics can improve a firm's culture and eventually its performance. As an expert witness, he testifies on questions of organizational control, profitability, and performance measurement. Zimmerman has served on public-company boards of directors and has been a visiting scholar at several international universities. His fifty published studies and books include textbooks on economics and accounting and a popular book about designing organizations that create value. Numerous leading international universities use his textbooks. The American Accounting Association and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants have recognized Zimmerman's research with several prestigious honors. He is a founding editor of the Journal of Accounting and Economics, one of the most highly referenced peer-reviewed journals in economics. He earned a PhD in business administration from the University of California, Berkeley, after receiving a BS in finance from the University of Colorado.

Daniel P. Forrester is the founder of THRUUE, Inc., an expert consultancy that assists leaders in bridging the gap between corporate culture and corporate strategy. Forrester was deeply influenced by Jerold Zimmerman and the economic models he was exposed to during his time at the Simon Business School. He works with CEOs, boards of directors, and c-suite leaders, helping them align around a clear strategy while understanding reputational and cultural risk. He implements methodologies to quantify culture and integrate it into each organization's mission, vision, and core values and behaviors so that the company achieves its strategic priorities. Daniel has spent the past twenty-five years successfully building consulting practices in the financial services, telecommunications, and public services sectors, utilizing his entrepreneurial approach to strategy. With the explosion of data and hyper connectivity, Daniel's curiosity led him to research how leaders have responded to the onslaught of available data and to publish his first book, Consider: Harnessing the Power of Reflective Thinking in Your Organization, about the role reflection can play in dramatically changing corporate outcomes. Daniel holds an MBA from the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester, after receiving a BA from the Catholic University of America.