Rating: 
Summary: Familiar stories, great execution strategies
Review: What do you do if your company has been a high performer but then hits the wall? The economy may have slowed down, your product innovation has dropped off, growth has been too fast, or execution has been ineffective. According to Amir Hartman, what your company needs is ruthless execution (a term Hartman coined with John Sifonis while working with Hewlett-Packard). This consists of the method and strategies that Hartman's research suggests business leaders have employed to break through performance walls. Ruthless execution consists of strategies organized into three categories: leadership, governance, and critical capabilities, each of which contains several practices. Hartman does not guarantee success in breaking through the wall if you use any of these strategies. But these approaches are common to those who have succeeded in the past and were used in the order presented in the book. When troubled or uncertain times arrive, leaders typically but fruitlessly adopt either the "Run-and-Gun strategy" or the "Slash-and-Burn" strategy. According to Hartman, a third approach of ruthless execution works far better for most business leaders. In this book, he has no interest in identifying the major causes of companies hitting the wall. No matter what the cause it is an inability to focus and execute that is at the core of the problem. By studying a diverse set of industries and companies of all sizes, using surveys, company documents, research reports, publicly available financial data (10-Ks), and interviews with key business leaders, Hartman believes he has discovered the practices used by those companies who succeeded in breaking through the wall. Much of the book consists of overviews of these efforts, many of them familiar to business readers, including Jack Welch's time at GE, Louis Gerstner's turnaround of IBM, Larry Bossidy's famous execution at Honeywell, along with Baxter, Novartis, and Cisco. Ruthless execution proceeds through the stages of leadership, governance, and critical capabilities. The first part of the leadership aspect is strategic recalibration: the act of validating the direction and focus a company is going to take. This involves rearranging the portfolio of business initiatives (Hartman offers four rules for portfolio management), assessing how resources are allocated to initiatives, and setting a course while finding a healthy balance between performance and growth efforts. After strategic recalibration, the second leadership practice is devising a business philosophy. Hartman prefers "business philosophy" to "organizational culture" because a culture may endure over generations but he is referring to the view that comes from the top and typically is identified with the CEO. He holds up Jack Welch as exemplifying the creation and promulgation of a business philosophy. The second part of ruthless execution is governance. This consists of: Accountability - using a set of "alignment" strategies; Performance management system - using a small number of critical financial, strategic, and operating metrics (10 principles are offered); Discipline - communicating messages that are consistent, straightforward, and easily comprehended. The final part of ruthless execution is critical capabilities: These are the specific actions that executives drive to break through the wall. They are the three critical skills and delivery capabilities with which business leaders need to be equipped: Productivity management - cost and working capital management, productivity management inc. technology-driven productivity improvement (which is aimed at optimizing, reconstructing, inventing and for which Hartman outlines six principles); Talent management - hiring the best talent and getting rid of underperformers; Focused corporate transactions - mergers and acquisitions, and divestitures. The final chapter introduces a Ruthless Execution Index intended to help executives who want to understand where to improve their ruthless execution. While some executives will find much of the material familiar, the book gathers and organizes many aspects of the execution so vital to continuing and recapturing success.
Rating: 
Summary: Clear and Concise Business Advice
Review: With the frenetic pace of today's global market, companies must recognize upcoming "walls" before they hit them and be able to proactively and ruthlessly recalibrate their focus and their organization. While so many authors are happy to tell you why companies fail, Ruthless Execution offers clear, concise insight into how the most resilient companies of our time have experienced downturns and excelled where others have failed. Leadership, Governance and Critical Capabilities; the triad of Ruthless Execution, is relevant to companies large and small. Hartman takes you through each and with the use of case studies and interviews provides real world, practical advice on how to lead your company through revitalization and into a more strategically focused direction to support growth and prosperity. This book provides a view into some of the most recognizable companies of the 20th century, interviews with the CEO's responsible for guiding these companies through the rough patches and invaluable insight into how companies of all shapes and sizes can "hit the wall" and survive to tell the tale.
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