Customer Reviews

Breakthrough: How Great Companies Set Outrageous Objectives and Achieve Them

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
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Breakthrough is an outstanding book. Davidson gives first-hand experiences with numerous successful breakthrough companies and synthesizes practical principles on how to craft and achieve the "Outrageous Objectives" of your company's next success cycle. I disagree with the reader below. While Good to Great is also an excellent book, Breakthrough provides deeper insights into the essential ingredients of breakthrough and gives more valuable, real world examples to illustrate them.

This book contains an extraordinary amount of very valuable material in a short and readable format. There are several new ideas in here that capture critical emerging trends in management. The idea of enterprise strategy, and the leadership model that goes with it, is a key, contrarian take on what works in the world of business. The depth of research underlying the
book gives great weight to what might otherwise be dismissed because it challenges our prevailing assumptions. There are many

powerful examples descibed in detail, and the author brings you inside a number of fascinating organizations, with a close-up, real-time view of leaders in action. There are also two very useful frameworks - one for strategy formulation includes some new thinking on the difference between segments, niches and mainstsream markets that sheds new light on strategic positioning. The author summarizes the experience of dozens of successful breakthrough companies in an AIM, Ready, Fire framework that captures their best practices. The final chapter on leadership also gives new thoughts on what it takes to lead a breakthrough company.

This book aims to show CEOs how to achieve the impossible. Based on a study of 70 companies that managed to accomplish incredibly ambitious goals, it offers a straightforward and, for the most part, lucid set of guiding principles to reach breakthrough success. Author Bill Davidson anchors his prescription in the experiences of real companies and illustrates each point with copious anecdotes. Although he strays now and then into the jargon of the academic tribe, these digressions are rare and excusable. His case histories and tactical advice offer something of value to every CEO or senior manager. We recommend this book to executives whose companies are trapped in strategic dead-ends and desperate to blast out, or to executives who would rather act before a crisis really blossoms.

Thank you for the book. It came in good time and was in good condition.

I disagree with the reader below who says it's the next Good to Great, one of the all-time best business books (my copy is totally dog eared, and I loan it out all the time). I didn't find anything new in this book, and I worked at two of the companies the author "studied" in his research. I say there's no need for a new Good to Great (it's timeless, in my opinion) and certainly no need for an also-ran like this one.