Amazon.co.uk Review
Applicable to any position from staffer to senior executive, the principles are: Check Your Ego at the Door (to develop an open, united atmosphere), Create Curiosity (to uncover new options), Move off the Solution (to clarify the issue), Get Evidence (to clarify the problem), Calculate the Impact (to weigh investment against return), Explore the Ripple Effect (to view the big picture), Slow Down for Yellow Lights (to watch for obstacles), and Discover the Cause (to understand underlying truths). Each element is fleshed out in one or more chapters that showcase them in identifiable real-world situations. The combination adds up to a logical, feasible program that virtually everyone can follow. --Howard Rothman
Review
“…Full of sound, useful advice…” (Long Range Planning, No.36, 2003)
Long Range Planning, No.36, 2003
Review
"businessThink...could very well, in my opinion, qualify as the 8th Habit of Highly Effective People. The book is simply brilliant...a true leader′s roadmap in leveraging and maximizing the intellectual capitalism of today′s business person." —Pete Beaudrault, President and CEO, Hard Rock Café International.
"businessThink is every person′s MBA for the real world. It takes straight aim at the decades of dysfunction in business and hits the mark with a real–world "degree" of pragmatic, new thinking for new times." —Tom Curley, CEO–Publisher, U.S.A. Today
"Thinking is hard. Thinking creatively is harder. Thinking creatively about business is hardest. This book not only enlightens you from hard to hardest but does it with profound simplicity." —Warren Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Business Administration, University of Southern California, Author of Managing the Dream
This is a great book and an easy read. It enhances the productivity of everyone who follows the advice given in it. It will release the energy of people in organizations. It is a must for every leader to have everyone in his organizations practice the principals in this book." —Dr. Ram Charan, Author of What The CEO Wants You To Know
"businessThink focuses on where success starts: with the thinking process. In simple straightforward language authors Dave Marcum, Steve Smith and Mahan Khalsa present a process to transform the way people think about business. A must read for everyone." —Stedman Graham, Author of You Can Make It Happen, Chairman and CEO S. Graham & Associates
"Intelligence and attitude are the only things you need to get ahead in the business world. You can′t do much about your intelligence, but you can read businessThink which will do wonders for your attitude." —Al Ries, Co–Author, Positioning
"businessThink is a practical, pragmatic guide to better business decisions. Managers should read the book the book with their teams and use it in leading team implementation of the wisdom it contains." —Bill Hitchcock, Global Director, EDS Digital Learning Services and SmartExecutive E–learning, Executive of the year for 2001
"Lucidly presented, the authors′ rules of engagement will unearth the hidden psychology that keeps companies from succeeding despite – –or maybe because of – – their best ideas." —Larry Downes, Co–Author – Unleashing the Killer App.
"businessThink skillfully outlines fundamental business principals for the successful business organization. It offers practical concepts and progressive thinking. Read it for your success!!! (Unless you are comfortable with business as usual – looking forward to playing politics, flexing your ego and pounding your way up the corporate ladder...)" —Horst H. Schulze, Former Vice Chairman, The Ritz– Carlton Hotel Company, LLC
"What makes this book so useful is that it offers a heavy dose of something important but in short supply in business today—common sense." —Jack Trout, Author, Differentiate or Die
"businessThink is insightful, wise, and easy to grasp. I recommend this book to anyone interested in exploring effective problem solving solutions." —Rich DeVos, Co–Founder, Amway Corp., Owner and Chairman, NBA Orlando Magic
"Surveying people on their driving skills. No one admits to less than good practices yet crashes – both business and vehicle — prove otherwise. businessThink is a deceptively simple, yet insightful reference book, which if honestly applied, has the potential to impact that critical space between think and action or {inaction}. For those who apply the learning′s from businessThink, there is as much to be gained in the Public Sector as in the Corporate Community. —Patricia Pelton, CEO, Northern Lights Regional Health Authority, Fort McMurray, Alberta
"This book is needed today more than ever before, in this business climate where every employee in every organization must businessThink, businessAct, and businessWork like they are the CEO!" —Gregory Coleman, Executive Vice President of North American Operations, YAHOO!
"Occasionally there comes a book that doesn′t "descend" from on high in academia, but arises from the blood, sweat, and tears of the trenches of reality and makes such a powerful sense that it opens our eyes to how our businesses really should be run. businessThink is that book." —Dr.Charles Roadman, CEO, American Health Care Association, Former Surgeon General United States Airforce
"The lessons of businessThink are understandable and actionable. If your organization– like ours–wants to be recognized as the best, this book should be required reading for all current and future business leaders and managers." —William G. Parrett, President and Managing Partner, Deloitte & Touche LLP
"In today′s competitive business environments, businessThink should be required reading for employees at all levels . it describes how to take responsibility for where you′re going and how to get there, relevant for all facets of your life.... businessThink goes places other business books are afraid to go." —Dave Gregory, President and CEO, First Calgary Savings
Product Description
businessThink is a revolutionary new method that bridges the monumental gap between the results businesses and people want and the failure they often get. This book is the only business training that tomorrow′s leaders will need to consistently create effective solutions and take themselves and their associates into the zone of optimum performance.
businessThink transforms readers into businessthinkers with provocative new rules for accelerating work while revitalizing the enterprise. With rules like "Check Your Ego at the Door," "Move Off the Solution," "Get Evidence," and "Create Curiosity."
businessThink promises to significantly increase results by delivering hard core business thinking and fusing it with high intuition and emotional intelligence that open up, rather than shut down, thinking and collaboration. Effectively blended, these skills become the new business intelligence that is needed to get it right–no matter what.
FranklinCovey is the world′s premier leadership development organization, whose client portfolio includes eighty–two of the Fortune 100 companies and more than two–thirds of the Fortune 500 companies. With 45 offices in 38 countries, FranklinCovey employs 3,500 associates.
Dave Marcum has a unique blend of management experience with positions ranging from VP of Sales & Marketing, to Chief Operating Officer in the publishing industry, to Business Transformation Leader at FranklinCovey, a 500 million dollar company. Dave is a respected authority in complex sales and has worked with companies across the globe like EDS, Andersen, Microsoft, and Accenture.
Steve Smith has two degrees in management and psychology. He has been a human resources manager inside a Fortune 500 company, an entrepreneur starting his own consulting firm, and head of development of FranklinCovey′s The 4 Roles of Leadership. He has presented management programs to clients such as Nike, Hard Rock Cafe, and the U.S. Air Force.
Mahan Khalsa is a world–renowned expert in business development, whose clients include Arthur Andersen, Microsoft, and Walt Disney. He graduated with honors in economics from UCLA and has an MBA from Harvard. Mahan is Vice President of the Sales Performance Group at FranklinCovey Co.
From the Inside Flap
–– Dr. Ram Charan
Author, What the CEO Wants You to Know
Over fifty percent of all business decisions fail; eighty–two percent of businesses go under before their tenth anniversary and eight out of ten new products fail. In direct contrast, research also shows that ninety–one percent of all businesspeople are as confident as ever in making decisions. Decision confidence is up. Success is down. While we are an inventive, entrepreneurial society, an innovation explosion has also been marked by a business implosion.
To improve the odds for success, the authors of businessThink deliver a revolutionary new method that bridges the monumental gap between the results businesspeople want and the failure they often get. The rules of businessThink provide tomorrow′s leaders with the ability to create effective solutions and take themselves and their companies into the zone of optimum performance. businessThink transforms "workers" into businesspeople with provocative, powerful new rules that will help you:
∗ Make winning strategic business decisions
∗ Have colleagues trust your judgment and leadership
∗ Leverage and utilize your talents
∗ Become highly influential and relevant
∗ Create business value
With rules like "Check Your Ego at the Door," "Move Off the Solution," "Create Curiosity," and "Get Evidence," businessThink goes where other business books are afraid to go and promises to significantly increase results by delivering hard–core business thinking and fusing it with high intuition and emotional intelligence to get it right––no matter what!
From the Back Cover
"businessThink introduces a powerful, yet simple, framework for achieving breakthrough results. . . . businessThink breaks the old ′business as usual′ rules, which we′ve too often blindly followed or lazily accepted. Then, through a sequential process of disciplined thinking, this new framework teaches us how to get it right–– no excuses. Never before have I seen a framework that so disciplines our mindset and heart to balance logic and pragmatism with intuition and idealism."
–– From the Foreword by Stephen R. Covey
author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
"businessThink is a gem. Its ′common sense′ is in fact very uncommon sense. Follow the Eight Rules the authors derived from their research and consulting, and you′ll dramatically up the odds of success–– and the joy that flows from work well done."
–– Tom Peters
"businessThink is every person′s MBA for the real world. It takes straight aim at the decades of dysfunction in business and hits the mark with a real–world ′degree′ of pragmatic, new thinking for new times."
–– Tom Curley, CEO and Publisher, USA Today
"Thinking is hard. Thinking creatively is harder. Thinking creatively about business is the hardest. This book not only enlightens you from hard to hardest but does it with profound simplicity. "
–– Warren Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
The University of Southern California; author, Managing the Dream
"The lessons of businessThink are understandable and actionable. If your organization–– like ours–– wants to be recognized as the best, this book should be required reading for all current and future business leaders and managers."
–– William G. Parrett, President and Managing Partner
Deloitte & Touche LLP
"In a world that demands single–minded focus and disciplined, fact–based decisions at warp speed, businessThink provides a commonsense, jargon–free return to the core concept of creating real value in business."
–– Gary Crittenden, Chief Financial Officer
American Express Company
"businessThink . . . could very well, in my opinion, qualify as the 8th Habit of Highly Effective People. The book is simply brilliant . . . a true leader′s road map in leveraging and maximizing the intellectual capitalism of today′s businessperson."
–– Pete Beaudrault, President and CEO
Hard Rock Cafe International, Inc.
About the Author
Steve Smith has two degrees in management and psychology. He has been a human resources manager inside a Fortune 500 company, an entrepreneur starting his own consulting firm, and led development of FranklinCovey′s The 4 Roles of Leadership. Smith is an entrepreneurial thinker and works with clients like Nike, Hard Rock Cafe, and the U.S. Air Force.
Mahan Khalsa is a world–renowned expert in business development, whose clients include Arthur Andersen, Microsoft, and Walt Disney. He graduated with honors in economics from UCLA and has an MBA from Harvard. Khalsa is a Vice President at FranklinCovey.
FranklinCovey is the world′s leading learning and performance solutions firm whose client portfolio includes eighty–two Fortune 100 companies and more than two–thirds of the Fortune 500 companies. FranklinCovey has forty–five offices in thirty–eight countries.
E–mail the authors at businessThink@hotmail.com
Excerpted from BusinessThink: Rules for Getting It Right--Now, an D No Matter What! by FranklinCovey. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Innovation Explosion
Every day, innovative people breathe life into new ideas, and with great hope (and anxiety) start companies. Every minute existing companies take action on their ideas and research, pioneering products and services that can potentially change lives. For example, bio-tech companies are changing the face of medicine and science. Through genetic discoveries, once incurable diseases may now be wiped out with cures we've never before imagined. Similarly, technology that used to require an office building now fits in the palm of your hand. The world is more innovative than ever. Clearly businesspeople are tapping into the power of their thinking. Not surprisingly, research shows that decision confidence is extraordinarily high.
The Business Implosion
Note the contrast between that confidence, and the diametrically opposed results. Every day, defeated entrepreneurs go out of business (also with great anxiety.) Every minute companies must admit poor financial performance, layoffs, and unfortunate new products that are quietly and quickly killed. There is an unrivaled proliferation of bad ideas. An innovation explosion doesn't guarantee an "Open for Business" sign on the front door. In spite of the fact that we can generate great ideas, our success rates aren't getting any better. Research shows that every time we start one new thing, nearly four fail. The most amazing asset in business (the human mind) isn't being equipped with a method for successfully leading the business. What gives?
Thinking: The Nucleus of Business
We believe the most profound dilemma in business today is in the way people are taught to think (or how not to think). The results you get are driven by the activities you invest in every day; the projects you manage, the priorities you cheek off on your "to-do" lists, and sometimes the results flow as much from the things you don't do, and should, or the things that you actually do, and shouldn't. Your energy, activities, and priorities are driven by the decisions you make about what to work on (or not), and it's your thinking (or lack thereof) that ultimately drives those decisions. Thinking is the nucleus of business that drives what gets created and launched. It's the "big bang" that sets everything else in motion.
Lessons from the Street
We've been where many of you are now, in the trenches of business. We've worked as "rank and file" employees, started our own companies, experienced failure and success, battled egos (often our own), and plowed through politics. As consultants we have been in and out of companies, large and small, around the world over the last two decades. We've found that some people and organizations are doing some very cool, innovative things, and some are doing?uh, er?stupid things! We've been apart of phenomenal meetings where everyone was "on" crafting brilliant strategy, thinking clearly, communicating openly, and innovating ideas that lifted the enterprise to a new level. We've also watched our own companies, and our clients, miss big opportunities, live with chronic business problems that went unsolved, and see organizations that never wake up to what was causing the gap between what they want and what they get. We've seen confusion and brilliance working with companies like Nike, !
Microsoft, Hard Rock Cafe, EDS, William M. Mercer, and city and state governments across the country. It is in the contrast between the good and the great that made us all the more passionate about what emerged as businessthink.
The thinking that happens inside the heads of businesspeople can be studied through interactions in strategy meetings, on team projects, and the dialogue of team conversation. What is revealed is what works and what doesn't. We've captured what we believe are the new rules for businessthinking. We've applied the rules of businessthink in a wide variety of roles and settings; everything from sales and consulting, to marketing, to project implementation, to running a business unit.
As consultants with Franklin Covey we've taught these rules in over forty countries around the world, and the rules hold true. Even though the rules have been shared with businesspeople of different languages and cultures, they produce the same results; increased leverage of time, better allocation of resources, strategic decisions, mapping products and services to targeted business results, increased business acumen, solving critical problems, and choosing the right priorities.
If you apply the rules, they become the acid test for every product researched and developed, idea funded, alliance formed, merger contemplated, operational overhaul implemented, management theory espoused and strategy adopted. While we realize nobody's perfect in living the rules, we've seen pockets of brilliance in application, and the rewards of simply trying. We've enjoyed epiphanies that can come from living the rules, and we know it's possible for you to take a big step forward by applying them.
Eight Rules, New Instincts
Our hope is that these eight rules will be the seeds of revolution needed in business and will cultivate a fundamentally new way to think, communicate and decide in business. Businesspeople like you are constantly bombarded by the pressure to "get it right;" make the right decisions, fund the right projects, land on the right strategy, or hire the right person. You've been expected to get it right even though you've lacked all the tools you needed.
businessthink will give you the business tools to ultimately transform what you think about, the sequence by which you think through problems or opportunities, and how you communicate. It will help you decide what you should be doing, and eliminate the distraction of what you could be doing.
Just because you can doesn't mean you should! In business, coulds are the sworn enemies of the shoulds, and kill results.
You are not only expected to think your way to results, part of your task is to increasingly build the capacity of people inside your organization. You can help them to think sharply, fluently, and comprehensively about getting answers on their own without losing sight of both the bigger picture, and their own contributing role……
