Customer Reviews

Know-How: The 8 Skills That Separate People Who Perform from Those Who Don't

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Why does a gifted person tagged for a leadership role fail when he/she gets there? And how does a leader with little or no education succeed? Best selling author and acclaimed management philosopher, Ram Charan, provides an answer to this paradox in his latest offering, "Know How" by focusing on the critical linkage - know-how - that separates leaders who perform from those who do not.

In the book, Charan details eight critical know-hows observed in the most successful leaders, discusses real life examples of success and failure, and provides a checklist, "Questions to Ask Yourself" for the reader. Charan, relying on his 45 years of observational research, constructs a more complete theory integrating know-how with personality traits, psychological orientation and cognitive architecture. He shows how these know-hows and individual personal traits are interlinked and reinforce each other.

Every leader Charan has known has mastered the nuts and bolts of one or more know-hows early in life and has used these skills over and over again to learn all of the critical know-hows. ...And this is how real leaders are really made.

The eight critical Know-Hows include:

1. Will the Dogs Eat the Dog Food? Positioning and Repositioning the Business to Make Money. Shaping and reshaping the value proposition to meet the needs of an ever changing external landscape. The quality of the leader depends on the ability to sort out so many elements of the complexity of the business and connecting them with the money making formula.

2. Before the Point Tips: Connecting the Dots by Pinpointing and Taking Action on Patterns of External Change. The need to look at the big picture and then work through the messy details. We are in uncharted waters. Relatively linear, continuous, and predictable are not the norm. Do you have the broad lens? Section on how to detect points before they tip.

3. Herding Cats: Getting People to Work Together by Managing the Social System of Your Business. Getting people to align their efforts is a lot like herding cats. Understanding the social system of a business is the best way to get a handle on the otherwise mysterious subject of managing and changing how people work together to meet ever-changing business requirements. Have to establish and enforce what behaviors are acceptable and which are not.

4. Leaders Are Made, Not Born: Judging, Selecting, and Developing Leaders. Discovering and developing a person's natural talent.

5. Unity Without Uniformity: Molding a Team of Leaders. Making a team more than the sum of its parts.

6. The Buck Starts With You: Determining and Setting the Right Goals.

7. It's Monday Morning, Now What"Setting Laser-Sharp Dominant Priorities.

8. Driving on Brokeback Mountain: Dealing with Forces Outside Your Control. Knowing how to anticipate and prepare for issues outside constituencies raise and judging the risks they pose to the business model.

Charan closes "Know-How" with a letter to a future leader, Michael, in which he advises that "given the transparency of today's world, any shortcoming in his know-hows, personality traits, or character will be revealed very quickly." He encourages Michael to be self-reflective; speed his progress through learning by experience, through others; be open to new ideas, people, situations, and problems; embrace fear and disappointment: and to focus on the know-hows of business.

While written for business, "Know How" will serve as an excellent guide for all who aspire to be successful leaders whether in the private, public, or non-profit sectors. It joins Dotlich's "Head, Heart, and Guts" (Wiley, 2006) as a perfect bookend to all that has been written on what makes a successful leader. These two books are unique, covering critical leadership attributes previously un-addressed.

In an era of constant change, there is a crying need for leadership. Although change is a constant, today's magnitude, speed and depth, is unlike previous renditions. Multibillion dollar businesses emerge from nowhere. Highly-valued institutions and organizations are rendered impotent over-night.

Yet, many cling to choosing future leaders on the basis of superficial personal traits and characteristics. How many times have you heard an anointed future leader described as "intelligent," "a commanding presence," "a great communicator," "having a bold vision," or "a born leader?"

Ram Charan, a consultant with a Harvard Business School MBA and doctorate, has identified, eight skills - he calls them "know-hows" - essential for leadership success:

1. Positioning and Repositioning. The ability to find an idea for the organization that meets customers' demands and makes money.
2. Pinpointing External Change. The ability to identify patterns that place the organization on the offensive.
3. Leading the Social System. The ability to get the right people with the right behaviors and the right information to make better decisions and business results.
4. Judging People. The ability to calibrate people based on their actions, decisions and behaviors and matches them to the job's non-negotiables.
5. Molding a Team. The ability to coordinate competent, high-ego leaders.
6. Setting Goals. The ability to balance goals that give equal weighting to what the business can become and what it can achieve.
7. Setting Priorities. The ability to define a path and direct resources, actions, and energy to accomplish goals.
8. Dealing with Forces beyond the Market. The ability to deal with pressures you cannot control but affect your business.

Citing case studies from his consulting practice, Charan identifies personal traits of leaders that help or interfere with the know-hows.

1. Ambition. The drive to accomplish something but not win at all costs.
2. Tenacity. The drive to search, persist and follow through, but not too long.
3. Self-confidence. The drive to overcome the fear of failure and response, or the need to be liked and use power judiciously but not become arrogant and narcissistic.
4. Psychological Openness. The ability to be receptive to new and different ideas but not shut other people down.
5. Realism. The ability to see what can be accomplished and not gloss over problems or assume the worst.
6. Appetite for Learning. The ability to grown and improve know-hows and not repeat the same mistakes.

Charan reduces the concept of business leadership to essential qualities. Know-How is readable and insightful. By linking personal attributes and business success, he delivers a vital message to a society starving for true leadership.

I'm thoroughly disappointed with this book. It's like the elementary school guide for recognizing someone who does things well. It might as well say, if your company makes a lot of profits, it's a good business. There is not a single revolutionary concept or idea in the book's 262 oddly sized pages. Go figure, aligning your business with the market, putting together a good team, setting goals, and anticipating and responding to forces beyond the market are strong traits in a leader. I wish I could include a more in-depth analysis, but there's nothing significant here to analyze. He doesn't go out on any limbs that can be criticized.

That said, I think this book might be of some value as someone's 1st book on leadership because it does a good job of presenting the foundations of a leader (that many other authors have already written volumes about) in a condensed form.

I'm often amused to read descriptions of the responsibilities of corporate boards: "To represent shareholder interests" and "replace the CEO" are two of my favorites. Most boards do everything possible to learn as little as they can about what shareholders favor. Boards are more likely to keep a CEO on too long than they are to find a good replacement.

Dr. Ram Charan takes dead aim at lousy hiring of leaders by sharing many examples where CEOs and other leaders made a great impression during interviews, but didn't have a clue about how to run the company better. You'll probably find yourself scratching your head, for example, about why a former CFO, CEO Rick Wagoner of General Motors, chose to gamble the company's limited financial resources on a foolish charge to gain market share that left the company virtually crippled. CEOs make those kinds of mistakes every day.

What solution does the blunt Dr. Charan propose: It's simple; find people who already know how to do what needs to be done as leaders. He explores this subject at all levels of a large company, which makes the book all the more relevant and interesting.

If boards don't know what CEOs need to know, what are those factors? I've paraphrased Know-How's key points below:

1. Pick a useful direction where the organization can succeed and help your executives to understand why that's the way to go.
2. Stay ahead of the curve on emerging changes in your business and environment by paying attention to new shifts.
3. Turn your individual stars into effective team players so that you can pull together in the right direction.
4. Develop leaders who will have these same skills.
5. Create effectiveness while encouraging candor about where you might be wrong.
6. Set goals that will stimulate improved performance by having people work on the right things.
7. Establish and stick with the right priorities to meet your goals.
8. Keep track of what public opinion is and be prepared to engage those views in constructive ways whether these are the views of citizens, consumers, customers, or shareholders.

The book's format is easy to follow. Each chapter begins with a longer example that helps you get a sense of what he's describing and then fleshes out the concept with sub-points and smaller examples. It's a nice combination of theory and practice.

The book strongly praises Charan clients like Bob Nardelli, former CEO of Home Depot; Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE; and Ivan Seidenberg, CEO of Verizon. The subliminal message is "Follow the GE way." That's a point worth considering because Mr. Nardelli didn't keep his job long after this book was written. Why? He did a poor job of improving stock price, despite Dr. Charan's assurance that Mr. Nardelli had made peace with shareholders. Also, a lot of the public criticisms of Mr. Nardelli's early days at Home Depot (such as getting rid of his most knowledgeable aisle people) don't make it into the book. Be cautious about how seriously you take the positive examples. To some extent, they are there to cover clients and Dr. Charan in glory.

The negative examples are much more interesting and informative. Look closely at those.

Think of this book as raising the bar once again for all of the things that a CEO leader must do. Even Superman only had to be faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Other researchers like James Collins in Built to Last and Good to Great, are skeptical of the view that the CEO has to be the most competent person in the company in all kinds of areas. The contrary view is that the CEO's job is to make the company competent with a management system that builds valuable insights and actions from all directions, but especially from the bottom up. Mr. Charan, however, is of the top-down school . . . and only encourages hearing from others to you can decide to promote them or not and to coach them on how to improve (but if the CEO is really wrong, once in a while you can tell the leader).

The skills described are primarily those developed and employed by corporate planners, human resources executives, and communications consultants. That's food for thought, because those disciplines are not held in high regard in most companies today.

My own view is that successful companies need only be adept at continual business model innovation, a task that isn't included what leaders need to be doing. The omission isn't surprising: CEOs have limited roles in defining and creating new business models. CEO ideas of what to do in business model innovation are frequently wrong except when the CEO was a founder of the company and has been through that process many times. Not surprisingly, the top business model innovating CEOs appear nowhere in the book.

How relevant is the book for a smaller company's leader? Less so, I think. The list will be a good reminder of tasks to work on, but you probably won't get the amount of detail you need to learn what to do. This book will, therefore, be of most value to those who already know how to do these tasks . . . but just need to be reminded to focus on them.

But as a statement of where the GE CEO concept has evolved, this book is well done.

What a joy to read. I really loved this book. I don't read books on leadership all that often because they usually are full of fluff or mumbo-jumbo trying to smooth-talk their readers. I just read and reviewed one of those books yesterday. Know-How is well-written and easy to follow. It takes a reasonable subject and breaks it down into 8 points before eloquently discussing each.

The 8 skills a manager/leader with P&L responsibility must have to be successful are:

1. Dealing with Forces beyond the Market.
2. Pinpointing External Change.
3. Positioning and Repositioning.
4. Setting Goals.
5. Setting Priorities.
6. Leading the Social System.
7. Judging People.
8. Molding a Team.

My favorite chapter was the one on "positioning and repositioning." For me it was the most important concept in the book. As recently as 1995 the topic would not have been particularly relevant. But since 1995 the business world has been changing by leaps and bounds. People with P&L responsibility must by necessity be adept at positioning and repositioning their company in order to be profitable. So many companies today are failing because their leaders are not good at doing this.

The rest of the book was an important side-show to the positioning and repositioning topic. Clearly one has to deal with forces beyond the market and pinpoint external change BEFORE a need for positioning and repositioning can be pinpointed. And to position and reposition requires that goals be set and priorities made. And an organization is nothing without its people being well managed, i.e., topics 6-8 cited above.

I enjoyed the recaps at the end of each chapter. I highly recommend this book for anyone who has a need for doing strategic planning for their organization. 5 stars!

The only exciting thing about this book is its title. Neverthless, it does not tell you "how" in any practical way. It is merely a series of stories of CEOs who turned large companies around. What the auther failed to do is to extract the basic principles and present it in an applicable way to the avarage reader with a small business. The book was a great disappointment, after forcing my self to listen to more than half the CDs, I had to cut my losses and at least get to save my time.

I am so surprised by the high percentage of five star ratings. Are they influenced by the overwhelmingly positive comment by the many top excecutives of those you-know-which gigantic corps, or the Harvard background of the author, or the past success of "Execution"? God knows. No matter what, I find the writing of the author dry, repetitve and shallow. There's no new insight, nor simply anything new and exciting at all. The eight knowhows (readily available in many other reviews) are just common sense, though one may argue common sense is not that common amongst CEOs. IMHO, one may learn much more from most work of Drucker (or even Welch) than this. In short, not recommended.

After waiting anxiously 3 days for this book,I set myself apart from my family, and it wasn't worthy of reading 15 minutes. Nothing new, nothing to use on Monday. It is a disguised rewriting of some of them most common known by All trues. It was like yelling to me, YOU NEED LEGS TO WALK, YOU NEED EYES TO SEE, IT'S YOUR HEART THAT KEEPS YOUR BLOOD FLOWING.The author I think better fits to a political party. I wish somebody to post what is worthy in reading it, I found little value in reading it.

Author Ram Charan has developed a holistic approach to what executives and managers must do and be to become successful leaders. According to Charan, leadership is a messy phenomenon because there are a number of things that influence it. Therefore, he has identified the skills, personal traits, and emotions that are required by today's business leaders.

Here is a breakdown of the eight know-hows:

1. Positioning and Repositioning: Finding a central idea for business that meets customer demands and that makes money.
2. Pinpointing External Change: Detecting patterns in a complex world to put the business on the offensive.
3. Leading the Social System: Getting the right people together with the right behaviors and the right information to make better, faster decisions and achieve business results.
4. Judging People: Calibrating people based on their actions, decisions and behaviors, and matching them to the non-negotiables of the job.
5. Molding a Team: Getting highly competent, high ego leaders to coordinate seamlessly.
6. Setting Goals: Determining the set of goals that balances what the business can become with what it can realistically achieve.
7. Setting Laser-Sharp Priorities: Defining the path and aligning resources, actions and energy to accomplish the goals.
8. Dealing With Forces Beyond the Market: Anticipating and responding to societal pressures you don't control but that can affect your business.

Command of the eight know-hows, according to the author, enables you to diagnose any situation and take appropriate action, lifting you out of your comfort zone of expertise by developing skills that prepare you to do what the situation requires, not just what you've traditionally been good at. The know-hows do not, however, stand alone. There are a million things that can block human beings from making sound judgments and taking effective action. That's where personal traits, psychology and emotions enter the leadership picture. Furthermore, the eight know-hows are especially influenced by a handful of personal traits that can affect leadership: ambition, drive and tenacity, self-confidence, psychological openness, realism and an insatiable appetite for learning.

I found this book too basic and common-sense. Is it because I have read so many business management books in the last year that I have come to expect more? Take for example the following statements:

"The true test of your positioning is the real world. If people like what you have to offer and you can sell it at a profit, you'll make money. If they're confused about what your business provides or they don't like it, you won't." (Is this too basic or just me?)

"The frequency, depth and abruptness of change in the world today means that you will be frequently shaping and reshaping your business so that it fits with the ever-changing landscape in a way that delivers your moneymaking aspirations." (Is it all about making money? Many management gurus will disagree with this last remark.)

"Selecting the right set of goals is the ultimate juggling act. The goals have to be of the right type and magnitude to be both achievable and motivational." (Again, too basic or just me?)

I personally found the book too basic for a manager at the helm of a big company. I think this book will appeal more to students in a 101 course on management and leadership. The stories of CEOs who turned large companies around make excellent case studies in a classroom environment.

On page 3, Ram Charan establishes a rapport with his reader which he then sustains throughout his brilliant book: "You will be constantly tested for your know-how to lead your business in the right direction. Will you be able to do the right things, make the right decisions, deliver results, and leave your business and the people in it better off than they were before?" Note his use of direct address. By intent, this is Charan's most personal book by far. With all due respect to his earlier works (e.g. Profitable Growth Is Everybody's Business as well as Execution which he co-authored with Larry Bossidy), I think this is also the most valuable book he has written thus far. Charan is a relentlessly pragmatic business thinker who, with all the skills of a master raconteur, anchors each of his insights concerning productive leadership in a real-world context.

The material is carefully organized within nine chapters, followed by a "Letter to a Future Leader" and a brief review of the eight "know-hows" on which his narrative has focused. It would be a disservice to Charan as well as to those who read this brief commentary, were I to list the "know-hows." They are best revealed within the context that Charan establishes for each of them. I commend Charan on his provision of several reader-friendly devices. For example, he concludes Chapters 2-9 with a checklist of key points, each of which specifies an action to be taken or an issue to be addressed. I also appreciate Charan's probing and instructive analysis of several leaders whose "know-how" produces exceptional results. Here are three brief excerpts:

"Palm's designs became more customer oriented not because the CEO [i.e. Todd Bradley who is now president of Hewlett-Packard's personal systems group, competing successfully and profitably against Dell] said they should, but because he got people oriented toward well-functioning operating mechanisms. He was careful in selecting the people in charge of them, and he tracked their progress and output with consistency and appropriate frequency. He worked backward from the desired business results - products that exactly met consumers' needs - to the business activities that drive them and the critical intersections of people and perspectives."

Steve Jobs "has an unusual ability to imagine things that don't yet exist and win people over to his vision. The Mackintosh brought life back to Apple and set the standard against which the rest are compared. Then, with Pixar in the movie-animation business, and most recently in the music industry, Jobs has shown that he has a firm hold on the realities of the marketplace. His successful launch of the iPod was based on a combination of detecting a need, imagining a new way to satisfy that need, thinking through the specifics of what it would take to make it fly in the real world, and then repositioning the company."

"Jeff Immelt spends 30 to 40 percent of his time on coaching, training, and managing people at GE, and for people at the highest levels, he says, `Everything we do is a performance review of some sort. Every touch point becomes a way to talk about that set of people. I'm thinking about this group every day.' Leaders with this know-how simply make the time because they grasp the importance."

I agree with Charan that know-how separates leaders who perform - who deliver results - from those who don't. Of course, he fully understands that some business leaders delivered results that proved disastrous for companies such as Adelphia Communications, Arthur Andersen, Enron, Global Crossing, and WorldCom. In this book, Charan views know-how in terms of "what you must both do and be." He respects ambition but not at all costs, drive and tenacity but not stubbornness driven by pride, self-confidence but not becoming arrogant and narcissistic, psychological openness rather than shutting others down, being realistic rather than glossing over problems and assuming the worst, having an appetite for learning rather than repeating the same mistakes.

Obviously, I think highly of this book for various reasons indicated. Will those who read it immediately possess the skills that separate those who perform from those who don't? Of course not. But Charan's book can -- and will -- help those who read it to gain a much better understanding of what they need to KNOW as well as a better understanding of HOW to gain and then apply that knowledge productively.

Presumably Ram Charan approves of my suggestion that those who now suffer from what Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton characterize as a "knowing-doing gap" carefully consider what Thomas Edison once observed: "Vision without execution is hallucination."