Contagious Success: Spreading High Performance Throughout Your Organization

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Summary: Annunzio delivers the best business book within a generation
Review: Contagious Success is a brilliant book - eye-opening, meaty, and brimming with valuable advice that can be readily applied to the real business world. Annunzio rigorously and insightfully identifies the factors that distinguish high-performance workgroups, with findings drawn from her team's comprehensive, worldwide study of 3,104 knowledge workers in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Australia. (A knowledge worker is defined as a full-time manager, professional, or technical expert who holds at least a bachelor's degree and whose earnings are within the top 10% of his or her country.) Annunzio proves that three main factors distinguish high-performance groups: valuing people, optimizing critical thinking, and seizing opportunities. While skeptics might suggest that these factors are not completely surprising, what is genuinely surprising is the mountain of conventional wisdom that Annunzio debunks along the path toward these results. For example, Annunzio found that pay ranked fifth in terms of what makes high-performance groups effective - behind values, teamwork, people, and planning. Another insight is that 40% of respondents could show no evidence at all that their workgroups are doing something tangible. (Remember: these are college-educated professionals in the top 10% income bracket - folks who are at least theoretically rewarded for high performance.) A third revelation is that a mere 10% of workgroups qualify as high performing (high performance is defined by demonstrable revenue/profit improvement as well as product or service innovations). A final key revelation is that most knowledge workers confuse performance with productivity -- a vestige perhaps of the industrial revolution, yet a nugget of wisdom worth remembering in this day of Blackberries, cell phones, and the other accoutrements that offer up a false sense of success simply by making us feel busy. While I was thoroughly impressed with the originality of these insights, what impressed me more was the way Annunzio shows how to apply these insights to the real business world in order to improve profits. Here is a sampling of what I would describe as Annunzio's "Roadmap for Profits"... Rule #1: The best way to achieve performance growth is to increase the performance of your best workgroups. (Most companies focus on hacking off the bottom tier.) Rule #2: Respectfully communicate (always assume good intent, try to understand a person's logic), since a failure to do so makes us run the risk of missing out on brilliant ideas. Rule #3, 4, and 5: Encourage risk-taking, create an environment in which people see mistakes as opportunities for learning, and give employees "amnesty" to speak openly about unspeakable subjects. Only through such open-mindedness do knowledge workers have a fighting chance of pushing their businesses to the next frontier. Annunzio provides many other executable ideas, and her numerous examples and citations will help offer a much richer, more nuanced understanding than I could ever provide in a brief review. DEFINITELY THE MOST INTERESTING BUSINESS BOOK TO COME ALONG IN A LONG, LONG TIME!!!

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Summary: Surprising Findings
Review: Contagious Success offers surprising findings about the actual effectiveness of the highest paid and best educated employees around the world. Annunzio's research shows a definite and compelling perceptual gap between those who consider themselves high performing and those who actually are. This should force companies to take a long, hard look at their current business units. Environmental factors are critical to increasing revenues and profits, according to Contagious Success, because individual performance is influenced by the environment. Annunzio offers practical solutions on how companies can create a working environment that fosters innovation and growth, which will ultimately affect the bottom line. I really enjoyed this book and have already found ways to apply its theories to my working environment.

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Summary: International Implications for Mulinational Organizations
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed reading Contagious Success as it provided a unique and different perspective on the evolving role of global knowledge workers. The author, Susan Lucia Annunzio, Chairman and CEO of the Hudson Highland Center for High Performance, has through her global in-depth research and analysis provided a useful managerial roadmap of how knowledge workers around the world contribute to accelerating high performance for their corporations. It is a must read for seniors managers working in the international arena who want another important perspective into understanding global competitiveness and multinational mergers and acquisitions. Traditionally, multinational corporations and international development agencies have paid little focus on the importance of valuing people.

Annunzio has skillfully demonstrated the key factors of success: (i) valuing people, (ii) optimizing critical thinking, and (iii) seizing opportunities. Annunzio's comprehensive analysis has provided for the necessary analytical underpinnings to the conventional skeptics and soothsayers. What was most telling of her analysis is that only 10% of the global knowledge workers could provide evidence that their working group was profitable and was adding value to the corporation as a whole. A shocking disconnect for a segment of the workforce that are generally the highest paid and best educated workers in the world.

It would be very interesting to see Annunzio and her team continue to expand and refine the scope of their research in this field to include: (i) the work force that are not necessarily knowledge workers, (ii) the differences in behavior of the knowledge workers between public and privately owned companies; and (iii) the differences in behavior among knowledge workers based on the nationality and cultural leadership of the senior management.

Anil Kapur, former Private Sector Specialist, The World Bank, Washington, D.C.



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Summary: How to manage obsession with quarterly earnings
Review: I thought that this book offers common-sense approach to business leaders striving to attain profitable growth in an age of cost-cutting. The author's thought-provoking commentary on the global state of underperformance is a wake up call for management and employees alike. Lessons about creating an environment that inspires employees to high performance are accessible, attainable and well documented with interesting case histories about companies who are doing it right. It is an enjoyable read with solid lessons for rethinking the current business mentality obsessed with quarterly earnings.