Customer Reviews

The Breakthrough Company: How Everyday Companies Become Extraordinary Performers

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Did I say this was repetitive? Its repetitive. Obnoxiously so. I'm not sure why.

Other than that, the book was decent. It gave eight or ten insights into organizational behavior, generating certain responses from leadership behavior and rallying around a given mission.

I'm not sure it is quite as prescriptive as the author may intend even if the chapters were oriented to do so; however, there are some good stories about different organizations and how they achieved growth.

The Breakthrough Company does for smaller businesses that want to improve growth and profitability what Good to Great did for larger businesses. Keith R. McFarland has mostly duplicated the Good to Great research methodology except to look at those companies which have broken-out among smaller firms.

Like Good to Great, The Breakthrough Company focuses on leadership style and company culture. A number of the findings seemed no different from Good to Great, but different titles were used in this book.

The book suggests six fundamental transitions:

1. From having the leader be sovereign to putting the company's development ahead of the leader's interests.

2. Rather than making incremental improvements in response to market changes, make a few large bets that offer huge potential rewards.

3. Instead of having the company's culture be determined by whoever is there, build a company around an integrity-filled commitment to doing a good job.

4. Go from succeeding by being small and agile to succeeding because of proprietary advantages you develop.

5. Stop relying solely on internal ideas by getting help from wherever you can.

6. Encourage people internally to challenge assumptions in constructive ways rather than blindly following a narrow vision.

If you like your information compact, each chapter is summarized in detail at the end. You could get an overview of the book that way in about 30 minutes and decide if you want to read more.

So what is he really describing? To me, it all sounded like continuing business model innovation . . . an area I've studied and written about for 30 years. Yet, the book doesn't describe the business model innovation literature. That's the biggest surprise and missing element.

I thought that the cases were mostly pretty interesting, but some are presented in such a fragmentary way that I didn't really get a sense out of what made their performance special in the market place. The ones that I didn't get enough of a feeling for included Chico's FAS, Express Personnel, and The Staubach Company. Intuit, Polaris, and Paychex are the best described cases.

I also would have liked to have seen a comparison between these companies and the Good to Great Companies. That would have made it more obvious how the smaller companies face different issues and challenges than the larger ones.

If you like case studies of top performers, you'll like this book. Take a look.

Ever wonder why the successes of companies featured in books like "In Search of Excellence," "Good to Great," and "Built to Last" are so ephemeral? The authors almost always violate basic principles of statistical analysis, and so does Keith McFarland.

A major problem is that not all important determinants of organizational performance can be objectively measured - eg. employee morale, organizational leadership, strategy, competitors actions (or lack thereof), etc. Instead, the subjective impressions that are used are strongly influenced by the company's current financial success - creating spurious correlations and invalid conclusions.

Additional significant problems include determining cause vs. effect in correlation data (helped through longitudinal studies - unfortunately these are infrequent), forgetting that the real importance of measured factors may be overstated through correlation with non-measured factors, the "delusion of connecting the winning dots" (studying only successful firms will not identify how they differ from the unsuccessful), and forgetting that useful performance measures identify relative (not just absolute) performance.

Global competition, increasing financial market demands, and much more rapid technological change create enormous pressures to identify the "secrets" of business excellence. This demand has created bookshelves and magazines full of case studies, some seemingly quite thorough and sophisticated. ("The Breakthrough Company," unfortunately, is one of the worst.) Unfortunately, lack of statistical rigor frequently reduces their value to that of bedtime stories. There is no substitute for good strategy and execution, and in my opinion those lessons are best learned from studying the work of Jack Welch, Larry Bossidy, and Lou Gerstner.

The book is the result of an ambitious research effort on the characteristics of middle market firms that crossed over to high levels of sustained financial performance. In contrast to texts like In Search of Excellence or Good To Great, the book focuses on the practices and capabilities necessary for non-behemoth firms to achieve success.

The concepts contained in the book have had a substantive impact on my approach to strategy formulation. The insights can be put to immediate use - versus theoretical constructs with little practical application. By way of example, McFarland explores the dynamic of moving from a founder/leader centric organization to one with shared responsibility for accomplishment.

I was pleased by how well each chapter offers an insiders perspective of the challenges of a entrepreneurial business. And, delighted by the power of the insights to evolve a leadership team toward greater health.

In summary, McFarland has crafted an excellent book for business leaders. I highly recommend it.

This book is a must read for anyone that is truly committed to taking an already successful company to the next level. By focusing on companies like fastenal, Polaris, and intuit mcfarland shows us how ordinary companies CANachieve "breakthrough" status. Mcfarland's book and subsequent Rapid Enterprise Development has given our company the focus and alignment that we need to take our company to the next level.

A must read!

GREAT; as a betting man myself, i loved Chapter 4 'Upping the Ante'. It covers the psychology of betting, why gambling gives betting a bad name and physics of bets, types of bets (i.e. market bets, process bets) and the art of linking bets together to build reald advantage over your competitors.

GOOD; The author chose companies from the Inc 500 list in order to analyze the key features of success, i.e. becoming a breakthrough company. Here the author chose well since most of the books concentrate either on very small companies or very large companies while neglecting the Inc 500.

BAD; Examples of successful companies/case studies suffer from two BIG problems. One, the selection problem. Do you want to find a business case where betting big and capturing market share, despite losing money was successful? Sure, no problem. We can find causes to support our theory. Do you want to find a business case where betting big and capturing market share while losing money leads to failure? Again, we can find it. No matter what business philosophy, we can select companies supporting our theory. Two, the attribution problem. What we attribute success may not be correct at all. The very same attribute might lead to failure in an another company.

If you enjoy case studies, this might me a good read for you. I don't. Chapter 4 on betting saved the book my four star rating.

The Breakthrough Company: How Everyday Companies Become Extraordinary Performers by Keith R. Mcfarland

Keith McFarland's The Breakthrough Company, is an astute analysis of what makes the difference between companies that become stars and the `also-rans' we never hear about. Based on solid field-research, this book is already ranked as a best seller by the Wall Street Journal. The spirit and style of writing kept my attention. Keith, a one-time Associate Dean in the Pepperdine School of Business and Management, had a reputation for easily establishing rapport and trust. He does this with the reader. McFarland does not take a `flavor of the month' approach to leadership. The book is based on a five-year study of some 7,000 growth companies. While every page conveys important information, the tone is like a candid conversation over a cup of coffee.

I appreciated the well chosen and insightful vignettes which compared two companies with very similar beginnings, in which one became an exceptional performer and the other just survived. One example that is worth the price of the book is the story of how the executives at Intuit bested Microsoft in the small business accounting market. In another vignette, one might wonder how two companies in the same business located a few hours drive apart could have such different performance records. From his face-to-face interviews and careful analysis, McFarland `teases-out' the critical factors.

McFarland's chapter on `Building Company Character' caused me to rethink my understanding of corporate culture. The Breakthrough Company does not claim to be about leadership or ethics, but it is. There is no special section on ethics. The author's discussion of the roots of the word `charisma' is inspiring! He is not referring to the glitter-based charisma of celebrities. Drawing on the writing of the early twentieth-century sociologist Max Weber, charisma is "a devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism, or exemplary character of an individual person." Then McFarland writes "character is sacred." It was at this point half-way through the book that I decided to make it a required reading for all of my MBA students. "Character cannot be faked." He writes that the one characteristic common to all the breakthrough CEOs studied was charisma. "Charismatic leaders inspire us with their character."

A very full index and extensive reference notes will satisfy the academic reader. That McFarland conveniently provides a summary of key ideas at the end of chapters will help my students! I am recommending this book to my executive clients and friends.

The Breakthrough Companies author really helps the personal who is trying to get their struggling organization to change and why it should change. It is hard to discribe or being specific on what you might get out of this book, as their are some many areas that are addressed.
My organization has used this book with their clients to aid them in some part of disfunction, that they may preceive that they have. We actually hired their organization as consultants to review our group. I would put this book right up there with "Good to Great", when it comes to a good read.

Keith discusses the traits of organizations that are able to make the leap from small enterprises to mega corporations. Based on his study of a carefully selected subset of the Inc's 500 fastest growing companies list, Keith boils down the requisites of organizational change for exponential growth.
The book addresses quite an important subject matter. I am sure it will take me some more time to internalize the important points.

Keith provides us with terrific anecdotes that formulate fundamental functions for management vision & strategy. Definitely a must read for anyone venturing from small to big. Trust me cause everything here is fact based not rhetoric.