Plain Talk : Lessons from a Business Maverick

Rating:
Summary: simple, effective framework for a profitable company
Review: Ken details the mechanics of a simple, effective, decentralized framework that aligns the goals of the employees, management, and customers. Base salaries are below industry median. The bonus of a manager depends on the return on equity (capital + equipment + human) that s/he generates. Each team's bonus is tied directly to what they produce.

The higher up the manager (there are four layers including CEO), the higher the proportion of of paycut during down times.

Has simple effective metrics to monitor the health of each decentralized unit (half a dozen including sales, productivity, expenses).

A good mechanism to set goal and measure performance for a business generating tangible goods. Not sure how this could be applied to more intangible value added activities such as IT and software engineering

Rating:
Summary: In Headlong Pursuit of a Shared Purpose...
Review: Ken Iverson has truly earned the right to be called a "Business Maverick". In this book he explains how the culture he created at Nucor became "60% of their competative advantage". He explains how breaking down hierarchy and opening the lines of true communication in all directions can propel a business to success.

His unique, but successful, techniques at time agree with, and at times flies in the face of, McGregor, classical management theorists, and others who have studied management, communications and human resources.

In chapters entitled, "A Higher Cause", "Trust Your Instincts", "Destroy the Hierarchy", "A Simple Stake in the Business", "The Virtues of Smallness", "Ethic Over Politics", and others Mr. Iverson relates how you too, if you are willing to work hard enough at it, can "turn a confused, tired old company on the brink of bankruptcy into a star player...", while learning that "many of the so-called 'necessary evils' of life in corporate America are, in fact, not necessary".

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: This is a fantastic and priceless book, by a man who turned an almost bankrupt company around, to a company doing over $4 billion a year in business, with much profit. It's an inspiring book, that gives you faith in human nature...all you have to do is appeal to peoples' best impulses to get them to perform well and enthusiastically (the MANAGERS had to rescue a union organizer from the WORKERS, who wanted nothing to do with unions. Imagine that! WORKERS being hostile to the union representative, and MANAGERS, rescuing him from a hostile group!) This may be the greatest business book ever written, frankly!! I'm almost loath to recommend it, God forbid my competitors should read it!....