Description
This new book from the co-author of the all-time business bestseller In Search of Excellence explores the fundamental secrets of success of some of the world's most admired companies. Waterman's purpose is simple: to discover, in depth and at first hand, the reason that these organisations (including a school in the Bronx) do so well.
Robert Waterman reveals that firms at the new frontiers of excellence organise around their own people and in ways that meet and anticipate customer needs. They empower their staff, give them something to believe in, challenge them, provide them with recognition, and are committed to continuous learning and innovation, to change and to total customer relationships.
Waterman's crisp case studies give us an insider's view of why these firms are so good. For example, we learn how Procter and Gamble gets a productivity advantage of 30-40%, through a work force that's essentially self-managing. (Procter and Gamble developed this system over thirty years and considered it so strategic that they wouldn't talk about it until now.) We see how a set of strongly-held, shared values, not strategy, built the AES Corporation from a start-up eleven years ago to a company whose market value today is close to $1.7 billion.
Waterman also gives us an in-depth look at how companies such as Merck, Motorola and Rubbermaid maintain a strategic edge through raw innovation. In 1993 low-tech Rubbermaid invented 365 new products, one for every day of the year. How did they manage it?
Waterman's incisive, anecdotal book also has other fascinating and surprising insights:
- Companies that set profits as their number one goal are actually less profitable in the long run than people-centred organisations
- American competitiveness far outstrips Japan, Germany, France and Britain
- Organisation is strategy
The book adds a very human dimension to the principles laid down a decade ago by Robert Waterman and Tom Peters and is certain to spark debate over the need to radically re-think core values and core business practice; 'what makes the best firms the way they are' Waterman writes 'cannot be attributed to such things as exclusive technology, a bright idea, a strategic asset... or even - especially slavishly following the guidelines laid out in In Search of Excellence.
ISBN:9781857880403
