Business Builders Recommended Reading List

Change Management
	Chris Zook All companies must grow to survive-but only one in five growth strategies succeeds. In Profit from the Core, strategy expert Chris Zook revealed how to grow profitably by focusing on and achieving full potential in the core business. But what happens when your core business provides insufficient new growth, or even hits the wall?
	Getting Your Shift Together; Making Sense of Organizational Culture and Change : Introducing Cultural Due Diligence P. J. Bouchard, Lizz Pellet, Sally S. Stamp (Contributor), Andrew J. Riddell (Contributor), Sal Caputo (Editor) In today's business environment, changes come in staggering succession: mergers, acquisitions, rightsizing, downsizing, restructuring. As accountants, lawyers and executives scrutinize these changes for bottom-line impact, they pay little attention to how change will affect an organization's culture or how its culture will affect change. This dooms many corporate change initiatives before they even start. A whopping 75 percent of change initiatives fail within the first three years. Getting Your Shift Together: Making Sense of Organizational Culture and Change explains - in plain English - why companies need to conduct a cultural assessment like Cultural Due Diligence before embarking on any change initiative. Bouchard and Pellet say that nothing can be more deadly to an organization's long-term ability to sustain change and grow than a dysfunctional "incongruent" culture that depends on the old "do as I say, not as I do" method of leadership. An "incongruent" culture destroys morale, decimates productivity and encourages workers to resist and even sabotage change. Therefore, the authors offer techniques and tools, such as their own Cultural Due Diligence process, to measure the congruence of an organization's culture and to reshape it into a healthy - and successful - congruent culture. Back to Top
	John P. Kotter Harvard Business School professor Kotter (A Force for Change) breaks from the mold of M.B.A. jargon-filled texts to produce a truly accessible, clear and visionary guide to the business world's buzzword for the late '90s?change. In this excellent business manual, Kotter emphasizes a comprehensive eight-step framework that can be followed by executives at all levels. Back to Top
	Robert S. Kaplan, David P. Norton Putting Strategy at the Heart of the Organization: A Powerful New Approach to Performance Management from the Creators of the Balanced Scorecard In today's business environment, strategy has never been more important. Yet research shows that most companies fail to execute strategy successfully. Behind this abysmal track record lies an undeniable fact: many companies continue to use management processes-top-down, financially driven, and tactical-that were designed to run yesterday's organizations. Back to Top
	Jon R. Katzenbach, Douglas K. Smith Teams -- the key to top performance Motorola relied heavily on teams to surpass its competition in building the lightest, smallest, and highest-quality cell phones. At 3M, teams are critical to meeting the company's goal of producing half of each year's revenues from the previous five years' innovations. Kodak's Zebra Team proved the worth of black-and-white film manufacturing in a world where color is king.

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