Conventional Wisdom: How Today's Leaders Plan, Perform, and Progress Like the Founding Fathers [Hardcover]

Rebecca Staton-Reinstein (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2009

If you think today's leaders are the first to face devastating foreclosures, a credit crunch, pirates, foreign enemies, and even violence, think again. The courageous leaders who assembled in the summer of 1787 for the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia faced many of the same challenges that plague us today.
As an executive or manager facing these tough times, you don t have to figure it out all by yourself. You can learn from the constitutional framers and contemporary successful leaders. Conventional Wisdom: How Today's Leaders Plan, Perform, and Progress Like the Founding Fathers is a unique blend of history, business, and leadership strategy. Conventional Wisdom immerses you in the debates in the Constitutional Convention and present-day boardrooms. Present-day successful leaders share their strategic leadership secrets in the face of great challenges that echo the framers actions. In tough times, you must face reality and then look for the opportunities that will drive your organization.
Meet twenty CEOs and other executives from the private and public sectors who are adeptly practicing George Washington's leadership secrets, activating a Madison Factor to accomplish the impossible, and implementing Ben Franklin's innovative strategies to do well by doing good.
In addition to the framers, you will meet some of today's strategic business leaders: Greg Swienton, CEO of Ryder System, Ben Baldanza, CEO of Spirit Airlines, Clarence Otis, CEO of Darden Restaurants, John Zumwalt, CEO of PBS&J, Michael Howe, former CEO of MinuteClinic, Howard Putnam, former CEO of Southwest Airlines, and Stephanie Sonnabend, CEO of Sonesta Hotels.
You'll meet some remarkable city managers who turned around cities from Virginia to Florida including George Hanbury, John Stunson, and David Brown. Tim Winger, owner of Novelty Manufacturing, and Steve Tansey, COO of York Container, led efforts to bring family businesses into a new competitive era.
Bankers also broke the mold including Steve Hayworth, CEO of Gibraltar Private Bank and Trust, Tony Caron, former CFO of Gibraltar, Steven Hickman, CEO of Florida Shores Bank, and Ed Novak, former EVP at Bank of America. Former bank executive Evan Rees became a full-time fundraiser for the Boy Scouts and the homeless.
Donna Shalala returned to her career in academia becoming president of the University of Miami, after finishing her stint as Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Clinton administration. Alan Levine, now Secretary of Health and Hospitals for Louisiana, masterminded the turnaround of Broward Health. Luda Kopeikina, CEO of Noventra, pioneered a breakthrough decision-making technique for executives.
Their stories and those of the framers demonstrate how strategic leadership, planning, and execution work, day-to-day, to get results, grow organizations, and create a legacy of accomplishment. You can apply the wisdom of all these leaders, ancient and modern, to your own situation. You can become a more strategic leader -- the best way to make progress in tough circumstances.
Each of these leaders was tested in some way and each came through and moved his or her organization forward. However, none of these leaders, historic or contemporary, are perfect. They made mistakes. Conventional Wisdom demonstrates how smart people make colossal blunders, analyze them, and either correct or fail to correct them. You can learn to correct or even avoid your worst decisions.
Learn to harness your mission for smart daily actions, reframe your thinking to make the best decisions, and apply the wisdom of all of these leaders to create your own more perfect organization.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Your research into the planning sessions of the Constitutional Convention and the struggles that our framers of the Constitution faced has been cleverly weaved into the strategies of modern business. I am pleased to have your book. --Sandra Day O'Connor, Justice, U.S. Supreme Court, (Retired) March 3, 2009

Foreign governments plot against U.S. Disaster imminent. Credit crunch expands. Foreclosures increase. Inflation rampant. Violence spreads. Today's headlines? No! This was America -- in 1787.
So begins Rebecca Staton-Reinstein's introduction to her new book, Conventional Wisdom: How Today's Leaders Plan, Perform, and Progress Like the Founding Fathers.
Staton-Reinstein, the brains behind North Miami Beach consultancy Advantage Leadership, explores how the strategies of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin and other U.S. Constitution framers can be applied at modern corporations.
Recently at the Tower Club in Fort Lauderdale, Staton-Reinstein brought together some of the executives she interviewed for her book to talk about how they lead. The conversation was a reminder of how deceptively simple the steps to success can seem -- have a vision, respond rather than react...but actually making these platitudes work is quite another thing.
...Staton-Reinstein argues that the scariest crisis facing us is not the credit crunch or a mountain of foreclosures but a lack of the kind of strategic leadership practiced by Washington and gang. ----Lisa Gibbs, Business Editor, Miami Herald, April 6, 2009



The Founding Fathers are called ahead of their time for a reason, as much of their ideas and concepts still hold very well today. Conventional Wisdom: How Today's Leaders Plan, Perform, and Progress Like the Founding Fathers takes a look at how the wisdom of America's greatest leaders hasn't changed all that much in two hundred years. Showing how the economic policies of Madison, the leadership qualities of Washington, the diplomacy of Franklin are all key features in today's business, Conventional Wisdom takes a unique approach to explaining a successful business today. ----James A. Cox, Midwest Book Review, April, 2009

About the Author

Rebecca Staton-Reinstein, Ph.D., President of Advantage Leadership, Inc., works with organizations in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors that are ready to transform their organizations, get improved bottom-line results and engage employees. Her clients learn to benefit from the proven strategic leadership, planning, and execution approaches of the framers of the U.S. Constitution and contemporary successful executives. Her clients in industries as diverse as insurance, hospitality, manufacturing, shipping, banking, municipalities, education, and nonprofits see major improvements in reaching their goals more effectively and efficiently.
Dr. Staton-Reinstein's career spans the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, where she rose to positions of leadership. She founded her company, Advantage Leadership, Inc. in 1995 and has developed a track record of enabling her clients to achieve dramatic improvements.
She is a celebrated educator and has developed and delivered seminars not only for her clients and colleges but for institutions such as the American Management Association, Management Centre Europe, Mediterranean Management Centre, Lviv Institute of Management, Hong Kong Productivity Center, and St. Petersburg Institute of Informatics and Automation. She is a sought-after keynote speaker delivering both inspiration and practical strategies to her audiences around the world.
Her first book, based on her own corporate and consulting planning experiences, provides step-by-step procedures to create a robust strategic plan and then execute it successfully. Entitled Success Planning: A 'How-To' Guide for Strategic Planning, it has been widely adopted by companies, nonprofits, universities, and a war college.
Current book projects include a follow up to Conventional Wisdom: How Today's Leaders Plan, Perform, and Progress Like the Founding Fathers focused on the way in which organizations take on the personality of the leader, whether strong or weak. This book will examine the shadow of the leader, reflecting work originally contained in Dr. Staton-Reinstein's doctoral thesis. This will be updated and expanded with contemporary case studies and a continued examination of the leadership legacy of the founders and framers. She is also working on a new version of Success Planning for nonprofits that will include board and staff development guides as well as those for strategic leadership, planning, and execution.
She has served on the boards of a wide variety of nonprofits and been honored for her service to the community. She was selected as a foreign member of the St. Petersburg Engineering Academy for her work fostering the ideas of Dr. W. Edwards Deming in Russia. She is a Master Practitioner of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator(R) and has earned several professional certifications. She holds a B.S. from the College of William and Mary, an M.A. from Indiana University, and a Ph.D. from the Union Institute and University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: TobsusPress; First edition (April 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0971557837
• ISBN-13: 978-0971557833
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,725,522 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Rebecca Staton-Reinstein, Ph.D. and president of Advantage Leadership, Inc., says, "I hate to plan! But early in life I realized the old adage, Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail, was true. I figure if I can learn to plan effectively and carry out that plan to achieve my goals, so can you."

Rebecca works with organizations around the world to increase top- and bottom-line results while engaging employees and delighting customers. Focusing on getting results through strategic planning, leadership development, and process improvement, she works with clients to craft highly customized, successful solutions to complex business problems in a wide variety of economic sectors.

Rebecca's documented her results-driven methodology in "Success Planning: A 'How-To' Guide for Strategic Planning." The Guide is used across the globe by government, corporate, military, and NGO/nonprofit organizations to reach their goals and change the way they do business. She incorporated many of her coaching lessons in "30 Days to Building a Strategic Plan that Gets Results."

"My goal is to transform organizations and their results using my unique perspective based on strategic leadership as practiced by contemporary executives and the U.S. founding fathers." Rebecca documented the most important elements of those proven practices in "Conventional Wisdom: How Today's Leaders Plan, Perform, and Progress Like the Founding Fathers."

Rebecca and her husband live in Florida.

Rebecca's websites include:
http://www.AdvantageLeadership.com
http://www.ConventionalWisdomCenter.com
http://www.TobsusPress.com
Her blog:
http://ConventionalWisdomInstitute.blogspot.com