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Summary: A breakthrough in leadership development systems.
Review: Successfully integrates and builds on the best of balanced scorecard objective setting and leadership competency development practices. Recognizes the criticality of aligning organization systems with desired results to establish an environment within which leaders can excel. An innovative conceptual framework combined with practical implementation guidelines. Best current thinking on what it takes to create and strengthen a leadership brand that achieves superior business results.
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Summary: Good focus on results
Review: The authors do a good job of showing how to focus on results rather than activity -- an important issue in today's corporate environment. However, if this is a concern, then I think it's also valuable to read RESPONSIBLE MANAGERS GET RESULTS, by Gerald Faust et. al. Taken together these two books provide both an informative and entertaining look at the challenges of producing results.
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Summary: Good focus on results
Review: The authors have done a wonderful job in advancing the position that results -- not just characteristics -- matter. This bottom-line approach to management, as explained well in the text, is a boon for customers and employees alike. Congrats for a well-written work.As a companion to this must-have book, I recommend a couple that I recently read and use extensively (even though they advance leadership from a different angle): the original "Seven Habits" and the newer "The Leader's Guide: 15 Essential Skills."
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Summary: Outstanding presentation
Review: The authors have done a wonderful job in advancing the position that results -- not just characteristics -- matter. This bottom-line approach to management, as explained well in the text, is a boon for customers and employees alike. Congrats for a well-written work. As a companion to this must-have book, I recommend a couple that I recently read and use extensively (even though they advance leadership from a different angle): the original "Seven Habits" and the newer "The Leader's Guide: 15 Essential Skills."
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Summary: Finally a Leadership Book that Gets Results
Review: The authors provide valuable insights on the true nature of being an effective leader. The ability to show the linkage of results and attributes provides a substantial move forward for the leadership field. This book is an important read for leaders at all levels organizations from senior executives through team leaders. It will enable these leaders to find a strategic line of sight for their leadership actions and get results.
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Summary: Leadership is Results X Attributes.
Review: The notion that leaders need to get results seems obvious. This "obviousness" has eluded our writing and our practice of building leadership capability over the last ten years. Many of us seem to have been stuck in a mindset that hopes for results while we focus on building character (attributes). The result of this oversight has led to leaders who get results without apparent character(e.g.Clinton and our current economy)or leaders who have lots of character but don't deliver results (e.g.former CEO Kay Whitmore of Kodak). For us, leaders must score high on both attributes and results (e.g.Colin Powell or Jack Welch). Companies that consistently produce great leaders (think GE) build a "leadership brand" that is differentiated by defining the critical few attributes that drive consistent results. We wrote this book to build the bridge between attributes and results. It's not about maximizing either results or attributes, it's about weaving together the right attributes to deliver the desired results. That's what leaders who have left a legacy have always done in the past and that's what they need to do if they're to create a legacy for the future.
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Summary: Outstanding description of leadership.
Review: This book is an outstanding description of what it takes to become a leader in the business world today. Business executives have too long overlooked focusing on results and what it takes to reach them. Great examples are used of successful leaders and some of the challenges they have met. Recommend all aspiring leaders read at least twice.
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Summary: One of the best books on leadership & implementation...
Review: Together with Kotter's "Leading Change" and Fogg's "Implementing Your Strategic Plan," this is one of the best books ever written on leadership and strategy implementation. Contrary to what an earlier reviewer stated, this book only mention's Enron on two pages (out of 234). And, in each instance, is very specific about what can be learned from the ill-fated company (this book is far from a "cheerleading session" for Enron). Instead, the book focuses on the mechanics of leadership and strategy implementation. As a strategy consultant, I find myself recommending this book to clients again and again. I believe it should be a part of any serious manager's business library -- particularly if you are a senior manager. Overall grade: A/A+.
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Summary: Simplistic argument; useful tables
Review: Working with other co-authors, Ulrich has produced a book that is rich in tables that bring together areas that require managerial or leadership attention, identify the key points for attention and suggest measures of success. Little of the content is particularly new or surprising and there are some notable gaps (see below), but the book may be worth getting for the frameworks, tables, figures and 'instruments' alone. The authors have worked hard to produce a book that is thoroughly user friendly without being simplistic, and they have succeeded well. It is however, somewhat 'slick' for my taste and it definitely belongs to the world we are leaving rather than the world to which we are moving. I have three criticisms. There is a strong whiff of setting up a 'straw man' so that they can knock it down while building their case. I do not have any sense that other writers have unduly neglected results in writing about leadership attributes and the authors' insistence on that alleged failure gets a bit tedious. A related aspect of the same issue is that the author team is at least as good at marketing gimmickry as it is at building tables and figures. "Leadership" and "results" are two words of known selling power and they are used to the point of distraction. For this reader, the resulting 'hard sell' style casts a bit of a shadow over the authority of the work as a whole and contributes to the excessive glorification of 'leaders' as the source of all success that seems to be endemic at present. Much more important is a major gap in the range of leadership concerns covered. They devote a chapter to each of four major groups of stakeholders: employees, the organisation, customers and investors. There is no mention at all of society, the community or the environment as stakeholders, yet any substantial organisation ignores that very important group of stakeholders at their peril. Similarly there is little direct mention of other critically important areas for leadership attention, for example their role in nurturing the supply chain, or in managing the technologically driven step changes so well described in Baghai et al: The Alchemy of Growth. While there is some brief discussion of alternative processes for developing strategies the essential leadership role of developing strategic direction is also treated very cursorily. The third criticism is more subtle. Concern with results necessarily means concern with measurement or assessment. The authors in general deal quite well with the issue of establishing measures of results across a range of areas concerning their four chosen groups of stakeholders and recognise the importance of qualitative as well as quantitative measures. I think they should have given more attention to the associated risk of giving inadequate attention to things that are hard to measure just because measurement is difficult. One of the great societal questions at the moment is how we value things - like the environment and community harmony - that can not easily be expressed in terms of money. Defining and measuring balanced results is getting much harder, not easier, whether at a societal or an organisational level. It involves wisdom, not just skill, and any book that seeks to relate leadership to results should directly recognise that and directly address it. So what you have is a book that solves the problems of the 80's and 90's rather than one that addresses the dominant concerns of the next century. But within its own framework, the book does quite a good job.
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