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Summary: Learn to identify your company stalls
Review: There are two forms of courage in business. That which enables you to mentally put aside the old ways of doing things and think of new ways and the greater courage that you put to use when you execute the new strategies. Both are hard, and it all starts with learning ways to think differently. That is the primary point of this book, and the advice is solid and of great value.
The primary learning strategy is to identify what the authors refer to as "stalls". They are business strategies that somehow limit what can be accomplished. Most of the stalls are very simple. One of the simplest was a hotel where the room service delivery time for breakfasts was unacceptable. More people were added to cook and deliver the breakfasts without a significant reduction in the delivery time. Upon further investigation, they learned that housekeeping was changing the sheets at this time and the housekeepers were stopping the elevators to load and unload the carts. By changing the times when the sheets were changed, the breakfast delivery time was reduced to an acceptable one with a smaller staff. The tale is very illustrative, in that the "obvious" solution to a problem did not correct it. A more detailed analysis of the problem was necessary to solve it.
The advice offered in this book will not help unless it is implanted in a mind that is willing to think broadly and occasionally with some imagination. However, diligence is often more important than imagination. Most of the problems are ones where the solutions are obvious in retrospect. Nevertheless, even simple solutions can require the leaping of the reluctance to try new things hurdle, and that is where the courage of the second type is necessary.
While the book occasionally reads as a motivational pep talk, it does not happen often enough to overshadow the fundamental message. It is always possible to improve your business practices, and there are few businesses that will fail to find something of value in this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Too Much Fluff.
Review: A book with Don Mitchell and Carol Coles listed as two of the three authors grabs my attention automatically, since I gave high marks to their fine volume, The Ultimate Competitive Advantage. The 2,000 Percent Solution merits my praise also."The purpose of this book," the authors state, "is to shock you out of your complacency, to get you to think, and to get you to act." Why? Because "no matter how successful your organization is, it is performing way below its easily achievable potential. If your organization is like most, it is probably functioning below average in many important activities." The "2,000 percent solution" proposes that we can become twenty times more productive and efficient, whether we are operating a large corporation or an entrepreneurial venture with limited staffing. That's mind-boggling. . .not just doubling or tripling our results, but multiplying them twenty times over. During my twenty-three years in management, I encountered every "stall" the authors describe. Even worse, I created some of them myself. Too bad I didn't know about their "stall busters" then. In every chapter, the book reminds me of Socrates' teaching method. Like him, the authors ask probing questions, challenging readers to abandon comfort, lethargy, outworn traditions, and harmful habits. I consider The 2,000 Percent Solution an ideal book for a company's training session. The next time I direct one of my seminars, I will open with this quotation from chapter nine: "If your productivity rose by 15 percent this year, but you had the potential for 50 percent gains, you may have actually lost ground against current and future competititors." Mitchell, Coles, and West made me reexamine my goals. As a result, my "future best practice" has changed. Yours will too, after you read this provocative book.
Rating:
Summary: Aim for the Stars
Review: A preacher friend of mine told me his mother once counseled him to "aim for the stars." He said she added parenthetically, "that way you may make it over the back fence." Like my friend's mother, this book posits that no matter how successful you or your organization performs, you are probably functioning below your potential. We become creatures of habits. We approach daily challenges in predictable ways. In the authors' word, we are "stalled." We have developed habits that prevent us from achieving our full potential. The authors prescribe a simple, well-written eight-step process to overcome these personal and organizational obstacles. The goal is to institute new habits built around asking and answering new and better questions. Like an athlete, if the prescription is followed daily, you and your organization will learn to bypass the stalls that tap potential. Follow this inspired, yet commonsense approach, you may, indeed, "make it over the back fence."
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Summary: 2000 Solutions to help keep process moving.
Review: Being a creature of habit, I put the 2000% Solution on my bookshelf and thought about reading it. Without ever touching it, I was in a "stall". Finally, I read it! The 2000% Solution offers is an excellent book to help keep processes moving along- both organizationally and personally. In this very entertaining and well written book, Mitchell, Coles and Metz, offered very practical, creative, innovative and thoughtful ways to overcome both simple and complex obstacles. Chapters entitled "Manana" "where many cooks improve the broth", and "the square peg in the square hole" not only ring true in terms of issues I've encountered, but also provide the necessary and rigourous solutions to improve the inherent strength of corporate organizations. An added benefit is that the 2000% Solution also has real life, personal implications. It's true life skills for productivity an open capacity. An excellent book
Rating:
Summary: Ho Hum
Review: Everyone seems to love this book. Me, I find it long on theory and a bit short on examples. The writing style sounds like reasonable corporate management theory. However the examples are just not very memorable and even quite boring.
Truthfully the authors could have been better served by talking in a language that would reach a wider audience. They over-analyze this stall process like its a big part of organizations today. The big part of succesful organizations is those who encouragement teamwork. This is hardly emphasized here or if it is the dry writing style hides it quite well.
Some good theory yes, but overall The 2000 Percent Solution has a dull dry style that really only delivers at 40%.
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Summary: One of the great Life Skills works, a must read!!!!!!
Review: I have just finished another great Life Skills book "The 2,000 percent Solution" by Mitchell Coles and Metz whose 8 Steps does for Corporate Effectiveness what Covey's "7 Steps..." does for Personal Effectiveness. I read Covey's book many years ago and have been fortunate to take the seminar and workshop and still think of and utilize the 7 habits on a daily basis. I starting to utilize Mitchell and Coles 8 Steps approach in in my numerouse organizational involvements both in non profit and profit sectors and can sense the potential even at this early stage. Both of these books while entertaining and apparently simplistic in their approaches have succeeded in pulling together two complementary approaches that every person from child to elder should not only expose themselves to, but find a way to internalise and thereby help achieve his or her personal and corporate visions and dreams in a more positive and timely manner. The authors of both books have created easy to read reference books that are fundementally important contributions to the bank of knowledge in helping us all attain high achievement and progress at the corporate and personal levels.
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Summary: Practical help for leaders
Review: I have often recommended this book to my organizational clients who are frustrated with their inability to get their organizations to "go." This book provides practical, common sense tools to handling complacency in organizations. It isn't enough to want change to happen, or to "say it to happen;" you must DO some things. This book gives great examples and explanations that anyone in an organization can use.
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Summary: Practical help for leaders
Review: I have often recommended this book to my organizational clients who are frustrated with their inability to get their organizations to "go." This book provides practical, common sense tools to handling complacency in organizations. It isn't enough to want change to happen, or to "say it to happen;" you must DO some things. This book gives great examples and explanations that anyone in an organization can use.
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Summary: Different and provocative approach to organizational change.
Review: The authors have established that most organizations perform below their potential due to mind-sets that stall thinking and effective action. Applying "stallbusters" that unclog organizational thought processes, they show how companies can achieve 20 time 100 percent improvement. The first section examines seven causes for ways of thinking that stall organizations and describes stall-busting methods for overcoming these barriers so that an organization can move on toward change. Section two presents an eight-step process for making organizational change happen, aiming at achievable goals that are established to reach theoretical best practice-the most effective best practices that can possibly be accomplished. A different and provocative approach to organizational change. Recommended. Reviewed by Gerry Stern, founder HRconsultant.com, author of Stern's Sourcefinder The Master Directory to HR and Business Management Information & Resources, the CyberSpace SourceFinder, and the Compensation and Benefits SourceFinder.
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Summary: Evolution vs. Radical Mutation
Review: The nautre of organizational behavior (really individual behavior within the constraints imposed by organizational culture) is to seek incrementalist changes at the margins. Rarely do the well-entrenched want to leave those trenches to risk what they have in the fluidity of the uncretain. This is natural, since safety is something innately sought by most organisms most of the time. Short-term safety can be a good predictor of impending decline and death, as the old adage says: "Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give 40 Years of Success."
The authors propose that aiming for incremental, marginalist change is a "stall," a way of refusing to face or accept the need for real change. (Sometimes, the need for change can be misread or mismeasured, with New Coke being an example they give.) The authors offer a number of vingettes designed to illustrate "stallbuster" tactics that will impel the desired-for change. These vingettes are bite-sized case studies of how real-world organizations approached (or failed to approach) problems, and the results of their actions. These are compared, in terms of implicit values, with the formal values each company had adopted. The actioning of these values provides insight into where disconnects between policy and performance occur, with McDonalds' response to the infamous hot-coffee lawsuit and Odwalla's in dealing with food-poisoning problems being one example. Each company's colture at least partly pre-determines the range of responses that their leaders can imagine, with a corresponding range of predictable results.
In the tradition of Dr. Kurt Lewin ("Field Theory in the Social Sciences") the authors propose that breaking through stall-tactics requires more than a circumstantial, piecemeal approach: unfreezing organizational behavior ("stallbusters") and shifting focus to enable lock-in (for however short- or long-term fluid circumstances dictate)of more adaptive actions. This is a key to breaking out of the prepare-to-win-the-last war mentality, as well as the incrementalist mindset that curses mature firms in the cash-cow stage of growth, before radical change to survive drastic environmental shifts carries a Phyrric price for survival.
Measurement is an area of continuing focus: What we measure becomes how we measure success. Rejecting or supplanting traditional measurement concepts may be necessary so as to allow truly pertinent data to be collected. (One anecdote deals with a company priding itself on a 1% error rate for each process - without anyone recognizing that errors are cumulative, resulting in 80% of its' customers experiencing some form of product failure.) Time is one of the things that Mitchell, Coles and Metz believe has to be measured - especially in the more-nebulous disciplines, like financial analysis, where productivity has been more difficult to quantify. If outputs are hard to measure, them time spent on various tasks can show how much of a workday was productive, even if unquantifiable.
This work is not a by-the-numbers, how-to workbook with checklists. It should not be read that way. It is rather more Aesop-like, in that it uses stories to illuminate a few key points, which are them discussed in terms of broader application. Read as intended, this book can help to exercise the imagination of leaders who want to leave corporate Darwinism behind for radical mutation in a world loosed from its' fixed reference points by technological breakthroughs, geopolitical flux, demographic shifts, and culture-shock: In other words, the search for a 2,000 percent solution.
-Lloyd A. Conway
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