The Breakthrough Imperative, by M. Gottfredson and S. Schaubert
I picked up The Breakthrough Imperative: How the Best Managers Get Outstanding Results as an advance reader at my bookstore. It should be coming out in March. There were some printing errors, but that happens with all readers, I think.
I have recently been on a business kick, something that the person I was a few years ago would have been slightly incredulous about. My work at a small startup led me to take the “Entrepreneurship” class I am in now, which has led me to consider reading books like this, which previously I would have shunned. But the essence of life is change, or so I hear.
My overall impression is that this book is not for me. It is not for anyone I know. Though the blurb on the back says “essential guide for team leaders in any setting”, the book is really aimed at general managers in large organizations, ideally with a manufacturing or production focus. As someone interested in small, beginning businesses, I found little applicable to my situation.
That is not necessarily a fault of the authors, though. Their focus is on large, conventional business and how to do more of the same, but a little cheaper and maybe a little better. They propose 4 “laws”, that if followed, will presumably allow you to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.
The first law is “Costs and prices always decline”, which irks me. If I may engage in baseless stereotyping, business advice books always do this, and this is a perfect example. This is a statement that bothers my logical brain. It is basically Moore’s law extended out perpetually. It isn’t sustainable. Acting as if resources were infinite will only get you so far, and rules like this only exacerbate the problem. What they MEAN is that costs and prices will decline as long as the energy to do so is present. That is a caveat that is not mentioned.
Most of the book’s advice can be summed up as “Be number one. If you can’t be number one, try to be bought by them.” The goal is to dive down the “experience curve” as fast as possible, so your costs and prices will be lower than everyone else, and you will get more market share. How do you do this? Be number one!
I did find some good advice in the later sections. A frank appraisal of the average tenure of a CEO leads them to propose “Points of arrival” and “departure.” A 3 year plan, beginning with the current situation and expected outcomes and the end of the timeline, is something that I think many managers would find helpful. The idea of “experience curves” could be fleshed out into its own work, with more details on how they interact with decision making processes.
The Sum-up: This book was not for me, but I think that it may be applicable to high-level managers looking for a formal book to give them arguments to make decisions they already wanted to make.