Results - Keep What's Good, Fix What's Wrong And Unlock Great Performance

Every company has a personality. Does yours help or hinder your results?

Just as you can understand an individual's personality, so too can you understand a company's type—what makes it tick, what's good and bad about it—and what can be done to improve it.

In the book RESULTS: Keep What's Good, Fix What's Wrong, and Unlock Great Performance, Gary Neilson and Bruce Pasternack reveal why some organizations are well-oiled machines that quickly bounce back from bumps in the road while others, stocked with equally talented people, can't seem to get ahead.

The authors and their colleagues at Booz Allen Hamilton have developed a framework, "Organizational DNA," to explain the distinct combinations of factors that largely define an organization and predict its ability to perform. They have researched the organizational DNA of hundreds of companies in industries ranging from high-tech to financial services to industrial equipment, and incorporated survey responses from more than 50,000 managers and business professionals. Their approach and findings, which form the foundation of this book, were named one of Harvard Business Review's "Breakthrough Ideas for 2005."

Now, everyone from seasoned CEOs to middle managers can benefit from their extensive examination into what really makes a company tick. RESULTS includes additional research based on the authors' in-depth knowledge of hundreds of companies from their 50 years of combined consulting experience, including specific examples of how Caterpillar, FedEx, Cargill, Nissan, 7-Eleven and many more were able to improve their performance. Ultimately, the book will help you to identify the type of company you work for and reveal the ways you can change its DNA so that both individual business units and the company as a whole can achieve peak performance.

Furthermore, the authors show how even the most dysfunctional organization can be turned into a healthy and profitable one — if you take the all-important first step to understand its starting point. One of the unique contributions of this book is helping businesses avoid the "copy cat trap" — taking ideas from well-known and admired companies and installing them without understanding how their situation may be different. Neilson and Pasternack show why one-size-fits-all formulas can only take you so far; instead, RESULTS enables readers to develop custom, actionable solutions based on their specific problems and issues.

About the Authors

Gary Neilson is a Booz Allen Senior Vice President and has 25 years with the firm. Bruce Pasternack is President and CEO of Special Olympics and spent almost thirty years at Booz Allen.

story posted October 18, 2005