The Northbound Train: Finding the Purpose, Setting the Direction, Shaping the Destiny of Your Organization

Is your company on a clear track to the future, with a defined goal that sets its direction and with determined employees powering its engine? Or is it stumbling toward whatever comes next, dragged along by circumstance, or "staying the course" out of fear?
Karl Albrecht, renowned business thinker and co-author of the bestseller Service America!, challenges today's business leaders to embark on a journey on The Northbound Train. His northbound train is a metaphor for achieving a focused vision of the direction your company must take to succeed and then moving inexorably toward that goal. And as Albrecht shows, this vision must always be based upon an understanding of what will create value for your customers.
In The Northbound Train Albrecht provides a step-by-step guide to soul searching, strategy setting, and customer wooing. Using insightful, real-world examples of effective and ineffective processes, he helps you map out a path - a strategic success model - that your company must follow to find out what makes its business unique. He illustrates how to formulate a reality-based vision; define your company's core values and philosophy; create a company mission statement that is accurate, concise, and inspiring; evaluate your competitive strategy to see if it's based on real strengths; reach a unified concept for creating value for your customers; and distill these decisions, finally, into a few critical areas of focus.
Of course, all this thinking and planning is useless if the people in your organization are not "on board." Albrecht explains that "the leader must help people in the organization understand and commit to the vision. And the leader must help them learn to do what it takes to make the vision a reality." The author provides advice for exactly how to lead your company (or your portion of the company) in the right direction and how to reward employees based on their real, verifiable contributions to that end-of-the-track goal.
Is your company ready to board the northbound train? The trip requires just three things: the eagerness to ask fundamental business questions, the courage to listen to the answers and face what must be done, and the stamina to keep at it until the necessary changes take place. The Northbound Train will stock you with the provisions you need to be successful: the inspiration of a great business thinker and a process for keeping on track.

Give consultant Albrecht credit for an arresting metaphor, but not much else, in his latest excursion into the well-trodden bourns of organizational theory and practice. Using the widely publicized woes of General Motors, IBM, Kodak, Sears, and other corporate leviathans as a departure point, Albrecht (coauthor of Service America, 1985) asserts, reasonably enough, that every enterprise, great or small, should have a clear idea of where it is going and how to get there, i.e., a ``northbound train.'' Having quickly reached the arguable conclusion that an accelerating rate of change in the global marketplace has caused many, if not most, commercial concerns to lose their way, he offers generic advisories on how best to deal with putatively new imperatives. The perplexed are invited to eschew business planning in favor of an advanced (albeit hitherto unheralded) approach dubbed ``futuring'' (which will strike some observers as very like contingency planning). The author goes on to provide slick, largely unexceptionable counsel on the creation of mission statements, leveraging resources, core values, structural options, and strategic success models. He also addresses such previously unidentified (or ignored) phenomena as corporate chastity belts (in-house sanctions that stifle individual initiative), historicizing (examining past accomplishments for clues to any competitive edge they could afford in times to come), bifocal vision (assessment of the longer-range as well as near-term outlook), environmental intelligence (a detailed picture of what's going on in a company's primary outlets), and executive evangelism (leadership that persuades subordinates to work toward common customer-oriented goals). For all its colorful coinages, an essentially conventional, cut-and-paste guide that won't tell management professionals a whole lot they don't already know. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.