by Martin Kihn
Consulting Pedigree: Began as an internal McKinsey study when the authors worked at the firm, the best-selling book (three million copies) by McKinseyites ever. (Peters started his own consulting firm; Waterman stayed at McKinsey.)
Core Values: “Good management practice today is not resident only in Japan.”
1-word summary: “Open.”
10-word summary: “Spartan settings, open doors, fewer walls, fewer offices. Less layering.”
100-word summary: “Conventional business leads to obsession with cost, not quality. People are not very rational; we desperately need meaning in our lives. Actions speak louder than words. Top companies… experiment more, encourage more tries. A bias for getting things done. High degree of informal communication. Organizational fluidity. Excellent companies really are close to their customers. Service obsession. Quality with quixotic zeal. Better listeners. Radical decentralization and autonomy. Treat people as adults. Intense rah-rah. Spartan settings, open doors, fewer walls, and fewer offices. More qualitative statements of corporate purpose. Pursue diversification yet stick close to their knitting. Small is almost beautiful.”
Reengineering the Corporation:
A Manifesto for Business Revolution
Michael Hammer and James Champy (New York: HarperBusiness, 1993)
On the Cover: “May well be the best-written, most well-reasoned business book for the managerial masses since In Search of Excellence.”—John Byrne, Business Week
Consulting Pedigree: Cambridge-based CSC Index became the most profitable boutique consulting firm in the U.S. in the early- and mid-1990s due solely to its “reengineering” service offering.
Core Values: “We believe that… the difference between winning companies and losers is that winning companies know how to do their work better.”
1-word summary: “Re-creating.”
10-word summary: “If… re-creating this company today… what would it look like?”
100-word summary: “If I were re-creating this company today, given what I know and given current technology, what would it look like? Companies today consist of functional silos, or stovepipes, vertical structures built on narrow pieces of the process. Reengineering… start[s] with the needs of the process customer and work[s] backwards from there. Many formerly distinct jobs or tasks are integrated and compressed into one. Eliminating handoffs means doing away with the errors, delays, and rework that they engender. [Also, get rid of] ‘standardization.’ Segment your customers. Get suppliers to do your work. Outsource. Make an operational ‘vision statement’ focused on customers.”
Built to Last:
Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras (New York: HarperBusiness, 1994)
On the Cover: “Built to Last… is one of the most eye-opening business studies since In Search of Excellence.”—USA Today
Consulting Pedigree: Collins is a McKinsey alumnus who met Porras while teaching at Stanford’s business school; he runs his own consulting firm based in Colorado and earns some $3 million per year in speaking fees.
Core Values: “The only truly reliable source of stability is a strong inner core.”
1-word summary: “Goals.”
10-word summary: “Big hairy audacious goals, cultlike cultures, more demanding home-grown management.”
100-word summary: “Building a visionary company absolutely does not require either a great idea or a great and charismatic leader. Shift from seeing the company as a vehicle for the products it makes to seeing the products as a vehicle for the company. [There is no] specific ideological content essential. Highly ideological and highly progressive at the same time. Big hairy audacious goals—tangible, energizing and highly risky. Cultlike cultures—pervasive mythology of ‘heroic deeds.’ Corporate songs. Try a lot of stuff and keep what works—unplanned progress. Promote from within to preserve the core.68 Good enough never is—relentless self-improvement. More demanding.”
Great books inspire thought, and so you start to think: Wouldn’t it be great to write a great book? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a best-selling compendium of truisms sit atop the curricula of, say, all the B-schools that rejected your application while you sleep with the comely wives of their deans and… no, that would not be great. But the book—the book—that’s the idea…
Your next book—In Search of Last!—is more than just an exercise in hitting the shift-1 key, that is, the “!”. Don’t care what critics think. It is an honest attempt to do what every ambitious entrepreneur and serious student of business is supposed to do: make money. Lots of money. Millions. Not Euros, not dinars or lire or francs—but dollars, baby—millions and millions of dollars, so you can finally do what you’ve been wanting to do but somehow can’t afford. What that is you have no idea, but heck—give you the money and you’ll figure it out. Honest!
But seriously. There appear to be seven immutable laws of business, and they are outlined here in “The Ultimate Business Book.” These laws hold true through the decades, so there is no reason to believe they will be entirely outmoded by 2006—twelve years after Built to Last and right around a clear moment of need. Every twelve years, apparently, the average American business manager decides to buy a book—and you fully intend to meet that decision with a product.
One full of truth, or something.
The Ultimate Business Book or, Why In Search of Excellence and Built to Last Are Actually the Same Work, Plus a Preview of the Best-selling B-book of 2006—In Search of Last!
Concept 1982 In Search of Excellence calls it… 1994 Built to Last calls it… 2006 In Search of Last! calls it…
• Don’t just stand there, do something
• Bias for Action
• Try a Lot of Stuff and Keep What Works
• JUST DO IT!
• The customer is never happy—even when she’s smiling
• Close to the Customer
• Good Enough Never Is
• KEEP ON KEEPIN’ ON!
• “Keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars!”—Kasey Casem
• Autonomy & Entrepreneurship
• Simultaneous Loose-Tight Properties
• Big Hairy Audacious Goals
• AIM HIGH!
• You have to drink your own Kool-Aid
• Productivity Through People
• Cultlike Cultures
• GET YOUR GROOVE ON!
• Business is about more than just making money—honest
• Hands-on, Value-driven
• More Than Profits
• KEEP IT REAL!
• You are what you are; it is what it is
• Stick to the Knitting
• Preserve the Core, Stimulate Progress
• EYES ON THE PRIZE!
• Nurture your winners and beware of bloat
• Simple Form, Lean Staff
• Home-grown Management
• GROW YOUR OWN!
Outline of In Search of Last! by Martin Kihn—the best-selling business book of 2006:
Ch. 1 “Just Do It!”: No business ever got mojo by sitting on the couch watching life go by. The only way to seize the day is with your two hands and a map. So what if you don’t have any idea what you’re supposed to do? Who invented “supposed” anyway? Some Greek philosopher? You did! As they say in the program, only you can help you—so be you and help you.
Ch. 2 “Keep on Keepin’ On!”: It turns out the nuns and priests were right: Everything you do is wrong. Whatever you do or make—it just isn’t cutting it! Sorry. People don’t like you, yet. Sure, they’re falling over themselves to write you get-well cards, but that’s because they’re sneaky little bastards who are sleeping with your wife. Do not listen to them! Are you hearing me? Helloooooo… You are not good enough, you were not good enough, you will not be good enough… not ever. But don’t give up.
Ch. 3 “Aim High!”: That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bang your he
ad against the concrete wall of dreams and bark your shins on the doorjamb of hope. That doesn’t mean your notions and leaps don’t deserve to be leg-upped out of their cat boxes, if only for the weekend. Be alive, be free, be afraid… oh, wait, no, don’t be afraid. Forget that. That’s the voices talking. Don’t listen to the voices.
Ch. 4 “Get Your Groove On!”: Listen to this: Ommmmmm. Ommmmmmm-a-a-a-a-a-a-oommmmmmhhhhh… sound familiar? Well, it shouldn’t. It’s just some letters on a page, not a sound at all. You’ve got to think of your company as a festive little toga party amid a larger whole, a dark and mysterious body teeming with waterborne amphibious life forms from the rim of Planet Delta Phi. Wear a white sheet and be brief. Jump for joy and let her go… okay, an old joke, but you get the point, don’t you? Remember, it ain’t a “cult” if nobody gets arraigned!
Ch. 5 “Keep It Real!”: There is more to life than just punching the clock, jumping the gun, looping the loops in the parking lot outside the deli; there is more, much more down here than walking the walk, toeing the line, dotting the i’s and marking the mark. There is infinitely largely more than there seems when you’re ambling the road, ankling the pact, or lining the drawer. There is. What?
Ch. 6 “Eyes on the Prize!”: People ask you what they should do with their lives. You get this question a lot. “What should I do with my life?” As if there were an answer to such a vague and open-ended question. As if there could ever be an answer to such a meaningless pretentious line of words. “What does it matter?” you want to reply. “What do I care? They say everybody can do something really well but I’m not so sure. I have yet to see anybody I work with do anything really well, even once.”
Ch. 7 “Grow Your Own!”: As a nation we are morphing into a grotesque pendulous gelatinous cake of soap; we are inevitably becoming a residue of the kumquat and vapors we ingest. Soon there will be nothing to show of ourselves but a closet full of empty smocks and a notebook full of lies. Can such a state of torpor feed itself forever? Of course it can. Just leave some room for dessert.
You are drifting now from your real purpose. This began as a paean to truth and evolved in a state of real rage. But now the soft curtains of months have been closing, muffling up the sound, shorting the paean. What was so clear and honest has devolved into impressionistic streams of thought. Perhaps this is the truth. Perhaps this is the ending you deserve.
Case Study—Reengineering for Nonengineers
You a consultant?”
You arrive one day in your Matador Red Ford Taurus ill-prepared for danger. But there is danger in the parking lots and the parking lots are not marked, and they have secret identities. One is for the engineers on their missions of safety. The other—vastly larger and in front—is for the suits. Everybody drives a car from a single manufacturer, a customer and a semibankrupt.
The third parking lot is around the side, is full, and is for you.
This is a company in the Midwest that makes parts for automobiles. It does not make the whole automobile and it never has. Its humbler mission is to outfit the car, truck, or van with a good set of form-fitting headlights, brake lights, front and rear bumpers, gas tanks, fluid tanks, emergency brakes, instrument panels, and CD player/radios. This company is quite large and sells its array of parts mainly to one of the big three U.S. automakers, but also to others.
This company is in serious trouble.
Nobody knows why, but it is. Management blames the unions; union members blame the management; engineers blame the systems people; IT turns around and blames the software vendors. It is hard to hear in its headquarters building at times for the cacophony of blame ricocheting off its reinforced concrete walls.
“You a consultant?”
After you have dwelled long enough to earn a space you make the long walk to the long, low building that reminds you of dental office clusters in your suburban Midwest grow-up town. The building is brown with kelly green shrubbery. A highway houghs across the way and the sun spits down.
The young woman with the firearm behind the circular greet desk takes you in quite quickly: “You a consultant?”
“Yeah.”
“Who you here for?”
Now—this, you don’t know. They didn’t tell you who the client was, or where you were to go. It’s the same old story, so it won’t detain us here.
Except to linger for a moment in the lobby—there is a life-size mock-up of a large American-type car. Except it is missing many things. Wheels for one. And brakes. And a windshield—any windows, in fact—and a body and doors and seats. It has see-through Plexiglas to “stand in” for these missing parts… it’s like a skeletal car, with vivid brake fluid lines and a gorgeous off-black ten-gallon gasoline tank—gorgeous! A desiccated car-thing like what might be left in a desert to die after a terrible war.
“Where’s the rest of it?” you ask a woman with a cafeteria tray and one Pop-Tart walking past, and she says nothing to you.
You’re in your home state now—Michigan, where you grew up, went to high school, kept your virginity, started to drink—you’re in Michigan, and you find yourself quite bold with strangers. They remind you of someone.
“You look like a consultant,” says your new client, bobbing her head.
You are disappointed she is plain, but she’s a woman. Her office has a view of the engineers’ parking lot. Turns out she was an engineer, a mechanical engineer, which in your experience means she is good with her hands. Probably fixes her own car.
She’s skinny and blonde and sounds like a Michigander. She will all but end your career, though you don’t know it yet.
“I’m Marty,” you say. “I’m from [your top-tier firm].”
“I know.” She smiles. “You look like a consultant.”
“What do we look like?”
“Kind of out of place.”
You know enough to shut up here.
“So sit down. Tell me what you’re gonna do for us. I’m Tina.”
“Well,” you say, sitting down in her guest chair. The guest chair is at one end of a very long work table; she sits at the other end. You two are like characters from a scene in Citizen Kane, peering at one another in the distance.
“Well,” you continue, “we are part of a bigger team here, as you know—”
She interrupts, “Where’s the other guy?”
“What guy?”
“You said ‘we’—so there’s another guy somewhere, right? Or not?”
“Well,” you say. “I guess not specifically for this part. But there’re other people—”
“You’re working alone?”
“Of course not. There’s—”
“But no one’s coming to this meeting, right? Nobody else? Like, backup?”
“No.”
“I got confused when you said ‘we’ before.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Do you want a doughnut? Did you grow up in Michigan, or Ohio?”
“Michigan, yes. How’d you know?”
“I’m great with accents. I can totally tell. What’s your city?”
You tell her, then turn down a doughnut. Her assistant, Tamara, brings in a plate of Krispy Kremes that do not, frankly, appear to be fresh. And Tamara is of the proportionality indicating she is indeed no stranger to doughnuts, and worse. She has a sweet smile. She has a pendant with a little tiny golden Buddha, a fat man, cushioned in her gelatinous boobies.
“Okay,” says Tina after the smallest talk in the world, “listen to me. Here’s the plan. Get up.”
You get up.
“Let’s get out of here.”
You go to a country club somewhere out in Livonia, or maybe it’s Novi. The whole state is foreign to you now, it’s been so long. You never went to Livonia, or Novi—or Dearborn, for that matter—when you lived there, except maybe to a mall or on the way someplace better. This is blue-collar Michigan, not your collar.
It is very hot and there is no one playing golf. Maybe because directly across the street t
here is a large factory that makes doors and trim. It says so on a sign on the small lawn out front. The country club has tried to limit its view of the factory with a line of trees, but the trees aren’t doing the job; they’re scraggly and kind of runty, maybe from the fumes wafting over from the door and trim factory across the street.
What is trim, exactly?
You scramble to catch up to Tina, who is already through the big wood doors and into the main hallway. Then she’s talking to some men, big men, very big men. There are four of them and as you get closer you notice the place has the feel of a church; a medieval cloister, with carved wood detail at the edges of the ceiling and the wall seams and stained-glass windows.
“What’re you up to, you bastard!” she says.
“Hey, Teen. I can’t kiss you, right?”
“Not unless you want to get fired.”
“Or promoted,” says one of the others.
“Depends on the kiss,” she shoots back. And it’s pretty clear she and these big, big guys go way, way back. It’s also pretty clear you’re not getting introduced, so you hover, then you disengage… and then you’re wandering around this weird religious country club in blue-collar Michigan feeling disoriented.
The place is filled with enormous men in work shirts with Blackberry pagers, one or two degrees removed from the factory floor. And there’s a vibe about them makes you think they might be in sales—it’s the volume, the sheer amount of noise, as the big boys work the halls and hidden recesses. Nobody seems to quite meet your eye.
You walk through a door and end up in a quiet garden. It is miraculous, for a moment…
“Can I help you, sir?”
“I just wanted to come down and tell you guys what a… great job I think you all did on twenty-one-twelve. It was a real… difficult time for all of us and the lines really had to come together. We used fourteen of the plants for this rollout which is the second-biggest—I think—that’s ever, that we’ve ever tried. Isn’t that right, Mitch?”