Ed Whitacre, the former CEO of AT&T and GM, teams up with writer Leslie Cauley on this entertaining, informative autobiography. Under Whitacre’s management, Southwestern Bell became AT&T, and GM traveled from bankruptcy to profitability within 16 months. Filled with anecdotes and asides, this is no ordinary business book. Pithy phrases defining his basic management principles […]
Category Archives: Management
Book Summary: Ackoff’s Best His Classic Writings on Management by Russell L. Ackoff
This book collects provocative, insightful essays by Russell L. Ackoff, architect turned city planner turned behavioral scientist turned professor. True to his convictions about systems thinking, his pieces form a coherent whole. Like a successful system, the whole of this book is greater than the sum of its parts. And what parts: the roots of […]
Article Summary: The Modern Supply Chain Is Snapping, The coronavirus exposes the fragility of an economy built on outsourcing and just-in-time inventory
Can’t find your favorite shampoo or toothpaste in the store anymore? Blame the modern supply chain. Indeed, the coronavirus crisis has revealed how fragile our global supply chains have become. Find out why so many Western manufacturers today are left scrambling to find crucial ingredients and components for their products in today’s summary:
Report Summary: A Structured Approach to Strategic Decisions by Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony
Discipline and structure have improved the process of hiring at Google, Amazon, and McKinsey. Now Nobel Prize-winning cognitive scientist Daniel Kahneman – the originator of the structured interviewing process these companies used – believes a similar method could enhance strategic decision making, too. Kahneman and his co-authors, business strategy experts Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony, […]
A Simple, Objective Process for Better Strategic Decisions
McKinsey colleagues Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, and Sven Smit challenge strategic planning’s conventional wisdom by pointing out that it hasn’t worked in 50 years. They urge leaders to acknowledge the social and emotional dynamics at play in any strategy session – egos, status, risk aversion, and the like – and remove these biases. Replace them […]
Dive into the effective implementation and use of objectives and key results
This thorough guide will help you decide whether to use objectives and key results (OKRs), and will teach you to do so effectively. OKR gurus Paul Niven and Ben Lamorte provide details, definitions and examples, as well as the types of objectives, the right number of key results, how to score and grade your progress, […]