Rating: 
Summary: After China, India, and the Philipines now what?
Review: This book is a must read for Boards of Directors. Most American Industrial companies are in the middle of a ten year program of moving jobs offshore. It started with with manufacturing, then call centers, back office work, and currently engineering and design. At the end of that process, what will todays corporate leaders do to "create value"?
Jason Jennings book presents a compeling alternative with well articulated case studies. When you've finished his expose, I think that you'll agree that real corporate value is created differently. I found this book inspiring.
Rating:
Summary: You Can Successfully Be a Corproate Leader
Review: This book is an excellent example of the types of practices and procedures almost any company can follow to be successful both financially and ethically.
Jennings cites numerous companies who have carved out success while still remaining true to their customers, their employees and their values.
Not surprisingly, few of these companies are ones that so called pundits regularly review.
As the other reviews have noted, these companies are very successful financially, but they get there by asking the really pertinent business questions, and not by hiding behind an air of executive invulnerability. The leaders are real leaders, more focused on growing the company, serving customers, and doing right by employees.
What vividly differentiates these companies from the "name brands," is that in the "name" companies, executives are more concerned with their own compensation, preserving their own existence, and with profits at all costs, than long term success.
The questions you should ask yourself after reading this book are, "Where have all the leaders gone?" and "Why don't all companies follow many of Jennings' researched best practices?
After that, I would run, not walk, to one of these companies and see if you can start at the bottom and learn what it's like to work in a real company.
Rating:
Summary: Great fun and great sense!
Review: This book is just plain fun to read. Jason Jennings is a great story teller; the fact that you gain great insights into business is a bonus. Yes, some of the concepts have been talked about before (Simple BIG Objectives are similar to Jim Collins' BHAGs) but the stories illustrating each point are invariably on topic and extremely well written. The chapter on Compensation alone is worth the price of the book. "In companies without a culture, money frequently becomes the culture by default." WOW!
This book will be the "In Search of Excellence" of the 2000s.
Rating: 
Summary: Insightful !
Review: This is not just another book about the secrets of famous companies. It is, instead, a book about the secrets of somewhat obscure but great companies. The principles that author Jason Jennings propounds are familiar enough, but most of his examples will not be familiar to the general reader. That is no drawback. Although some of these companies are less well known, they have all achieved great business success (if not fame) by applying some of the most tried, true and proven axioms of management. Treat people with respect, pay them for performance, focus on one clear and understandable mission - there is nothing new about these principles, except that they keep proving their efficacy even in the unlikeliest places. Do not look for a deep examination of management here. The book provides frustratingly scant background information about the companies themselves. But we assure those seeking a handbook of solid if venerable management advice that you will not go wrong with this interesting little book.
Rating:
Summary: Less is More
Review: This is one of the best books on what makes a great company great that I have ever read. Jennings has hit on an area that no other business author has ever really attempted. Less is More is a very well organized book that is easy to read and not just a lot of unrelated ideas , but a clear concise outline of how to make your company more productive. After reading Jason Jenning's book, any business owner or CEO, no matter how large or small their company, should be able to grasp on to some of these words of wisdom to make his or her business a lot more productive and therefore a lot more profitable. I know that it is going to help me.
Rating:
Summary: One Paradox of Productivity
Review: This is the second of two books by Jennings which I have recently read, the other being It's Not the Big That Eat the Small...It's the Fast That Eat the Slow. His focus in this volume is on eight companies which "use productivity as a competitive tool in business." He set out to learn how they got that way and which lessons can be learned from them which "any company could follow." He and his research associates examined more than 4,000 companies, settled on a short list of 100, and then reduced it to the top eight outstanding performers. The criteria for evaluation and selection included revenue per employee, return on equity, return on assets, and operating income per employee. Next, questions were posed such as "Has the company been overexposed?" and "Might this company pull an Enron?" Prior to the final selection, several pit bulls (cleverly disguised as CPAs) sank their teeth into the companies' public data with the admonition to "take it apart, put it back together again, and provide as much assurance as possible that each of the companies was strong and likely to endure." Here are the eight: IKEA, Lantech, Nucor, Ryanair, SRC Holdings, World Savings, Yellow Freight, and The Warehouse. When discussing them, Jennings focuses with meticulous on issues such as these: • Tactics which are most effective when selling "the BIG idea" (strategy) to an organization (pages 23-35) • Action steps which will "drive a stake through the heart of bureaucracy" (pages 66-68) • The undesirable consequences of balancing the books by resorting to layoffs (pages 84-86) • The meaning of WTGBRFDT and why effective use of it is essential to the success of any organization (pages 106-113) • The proper role of the accounting and financial reporting functions (pages 115-121) • How to "systematize everything" (pages 127-132 NOTE: While being interviewed by Mike Litman, Michael Gerber (author of various "E-Myth" books) observes that Ray Kroc and other entrepreneurs such as Fred Smith created "an absolutely impeccable turnkey system that would replicate the results [he and they] wanted no matter how many stores he opened up. No matter how many trucks Federal Express has got out there in the street...The real work is to create a system through which your company can absolutely differentiate itself from every other company in the world because it's able to do what it does impeccably, infallibly, every time." • Principles which highly productive companies employ to achieve continuous improvement (pages 147-153) • "Ruthless and strict" criteria by which to evaluate technological initiatives (pages 182-184) • Sequential initiatives which to permanently motivate a workforce (pages 200-204) • Traits required for a leader of a highly productive enterprise (pages 215-227) • "Twelve Rules for Doing More with Less" (pages 234-235) These are not checklists. On the contrary, each of these passages consists of a probing and eloquent analysis. By this process Jennings reveals the "lessons" to which I referred earlier. All of these lessons are directly relevant to all organizations (regardless of size and nature) and can effectively applied IF (huge "if") those who read this book select an appropriate course of action from among the four options Jennings identifies on page 232. If nothing else, each reader can model herself or himself after the principles and traits of the most productive companies and their leaders. Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to Jennings' previously published book as well as Bossidy and Charan's Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, Coffman and Gonzalez-Molina's Follow This Path, and Kaplan and Norton's The Strategy-Focused Organization.
Rating: 
Summary: How do you define Productive?
Review: This little book provides a different prospective on productivity than one typically learns in MBA school or management grooming programs. Without going through the diatribes that many other reviews have opted to write (all very good mind you), his book can be summarized in one statement: "cut out the fat (everywhere) in order to become efficient". Jennings spends time cutting the fat with regard to the management team, communications, organizational structure, decision making, internal processes, analytics/measurements, education/training, and finance (to name but a few). His recipe is to build a vision, get people on board with that vision, document processes, improve them, focus on the customer, and count those things which matter. Definitely not rocket science on the surface, but his analysis of the 10 most productive companies really shows how many of them implemented unorthodox approaches towards recreating their organization. Further, he provides commonalities between these seemingly unrelated companies (different industries, sizes, customer focuses, etc) which he believes elevates these companies above the rest. According to the financial analysis he provides in the second edition, it is hard to dispute his findings. Time will tell if his methodologies is the silver bullet to eliminate waste and drive MEANINGFUL productivity.
Rating:
Summary: How do you define Productive?
Review: This little book provides a different prospective on productivity than one typically learns in MBA school or management grooming programs. Without going through the diatribes that many other reviews have opted to write (all very good mind you), his book can be summarized in one statement: "cut out the fat (everywhere) in order to become efficient". Jennings spends time cutting the fat with regard to the management team, communications, organizational structure, decision making, internal processes, analytics/measurements, education/training, and finance (to name but a few). His recipe is to build a vision, get people on board with that vision, document processes, improve them, focus on the customer, and count those things which matter. Definitely not rocket science on the surface, but his analysis of the 10 most productive companies really shows how many of them implemented unorthodox approaches towards recreating their organization. Further, he provides commonalities between these seemingly unrelated companies (different industries, sizes, customer focuses, etc) which he believes elevates these companies above the rest. According to the financial analysis he provides in the second edition, it is hard to dispute his findings. Time will tell if his methodologies is the silver bullet to eliminate waste and drive MEANINGFUL productivity.
Rating:
Summary: On the lean culture of cost leadership firms
Review: This spring, I had a night-flight from Houston to Europe. I never got any sleep due to this book. It reads like a fiction novel while the focus is very much on the softer issues of productivity businesses. The well-written behind-the-wall stories and interviews with successful top executives give us insight to many issues that usual case stories do not explain.
Business magazines often glorify top executives by telling about the grand strategic plan behind the success. This little book shows us a different story. It provides insight to the many seemingly small traits of the lean culture that only works because they taken serious by the organization and used in combination. These are the 11 traits required for the leader of a highly productive enterprise: attention to detail, high moral fiber, embracing simplicity, competitiveness, long-term focus, disdain for waste, coach leadership, humility, rejection of bureaucracy, belief in others, and trust.
I'm sure you're really not impressed of this list. Neither am I. But try challenging some of the advice. Humility? When was the last time you saw a big company using this as a standard. When you hear the story of many head offices visited in this book, you'll understand humility. Often you'll find a very simple and humble office building for a huge company. No art on the walls! No lavish entrance hall! In these companies, you don't find huge corporate staff creating immense bureaucracy and all sorts of information requirements from their operating companies or business units. These organizations do actually "walk-the-talk" on lean - unlike many fad-driven major firms who's paying lip service to a lean culture.
PERSISTENCE is a word missing from the 11 traits, though attention to detail and long-term focus do include some of it. They never lose sight of their BIG idea or focus. It includes their performance measurement. "Everyone who works for SRC gathers once a week in their respective lunchrooms and takes part in a review of the business's financial performance for the previous week. By DOING IT WEEK IN WEEK-OUT FOR MANY YEARS the exercise has also become a system".
Okay, I'm sure that the book's research on productivity could have been better. And some of the firms reported on may experience difficulties, though most are still flourishing. But don't read this book for the hard stuff. Read the soft issues that over time usually turn out to be the hardest to beat.
I agree that it resembles "In Search of Excellence" to some degree, but remember that this book is on the lean culture of Cost Leadership firms (my interpretation, not the author's).
Peter Leerskov,
MSc in International Business (Marketing & Management) and Graduate Diploma in E-business
Rating:
Summary: More than a business book
Review: What a book! The most interesting FACT is that Jason and his team did a superb research around the world and gave us a refreshing look of what the word PRODUCTIVITY means in all the context, not stories, not bio's, but hard to swallow information neccesary for each of us in ANY business, it's a great book worth your time and money.
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