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Practice What You Preach : What Managers Must Do to Create a High Achievement Culture

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The dust jacket suggests that David Maister is "widely acknowledged as one of the world's leading authorities on the management of professional service firms." That is indeed true. To me, his intellectual curiosity and reasoning skills resemble those of a highly-skilled anthropologist who has studied hundreds of cultures throughout the world inorder to understand why some are healthy and others are not. The results of his research are obviously of interest and value to professional service firms but also, in my opinion, of greater importance to organizations which are not (as literally defined) professional service firms. I presume to assert, moreover, that precisely the same values and principles which Maister affirms are those which characterize any healthy community. Specifically, one in which trust, respect, and integrity are cherished; in which there is an appropriate combination of fun and discipline; in which there is an uncompromising determination to achieve excellence; and one in which the development of each person is a shared commitment.

In this book, Maister shares the results of his study of 139 offices of 29 firms in 15 countries in 15 different lines of business. To the approximately 6,500 people who participated in this study, he asked "a simple question": Are employees' attitudes correlated with financial success? The answer is an unequivocal "Yes!" Maister already knows that the world's most highly admired companies (e.g. those at which competitors' employees seek employment) are also the most profitable and have the greatest cap value in their respective industries. "What is even more powerful, as the book shows, it is [employee] attitudes that drive financial results, and not (predominantly) the other way around. Why do so many people want to work for Southwest Airlines? The airlines' most frequent fliers know the answer: employee attitudes. It is no coincidence that Southwest Airlines has consistently out-performed all other airlines, financially and operationally, for more than 20 years.

Maister offers what he characterizes as "new evidence to support important, but perhaps familiar, conclusions. (Hence the significance of the book's title: the message is not to preach new things, but to practice what most managers and firms already preach.)...The summary is deferred until the latter portion of the book." As is his style, Maister urges his reader to be alert to "lessons" he (Maister) may have missed or failed to stress. He also urges the reader to judge for herself or himself which "lessons" are most important. For me, the most valuable material is found in Chapter 7 when Maister explains what he calls "The Predictive Package." He identifies and discusses nine key statements such as "Client satisfaction is a top priority in our firm." He suggests that affirmations of these nine statements "represent a great place to get started" and that is true IF everyone involved fully understands what the implications of each "key statement" are, especially insofar as each member of the organization is concerned.

In the last chapter, Maister observes: "People must believe that the manager has the courage to believe in something and, more importantly, the guts to stick with it. There is no greater condemnation of a manager than to say that he or she is expedient, and no greater commendation than to say that he or she truly lives and acts in accordance with what he or she preaches." I am reminded of the fact that Dante reserved the last and worst ring in Hell for those who, in a moral crisis, preserved their neutrality. The manager Maister describes so well in Chapter 20 is also a leader....a moral leader, with or without title or social station...whose values and behavior nourish the lives of others. Although Maister's most recent study has finite evidence to support his affirmations, we need only reflect on our own abundance of experience to appreciate those affirmations and, more to the point, to then live our lives accordingly.

David Maister has learned what so many managers have failed to understand. This book should be a staple in every manager's office from the day he enters the management field. As a teacher and counsellor in business management, I can attest first hand that Maister's approach works. Through the author's Path to Performance, he shows the importance of instilling trust and respect. This translates to productive and motivated employees, strong and successful management by objectives (as opposed to management by crises) and satisfied clients/customers. The end results: maximizing a company's full potential, increasing profitability and becoming recognized in the community as a respected corporate entity. I highly encourage anyone in management, whether it is a two or three person operation or a multinational corporation, to read this well-written book. There is always room for a company to grow no matter how successful you think you may be. Even some of the most historic, well-established, successful conglomerates have crashed and burned. Do you and your company justice by reading the book - there is always room to learn and grow!

Despite having a wide body of experience in business criticism and a credible approach towards analyzing business culture, David Maister exhibits far too many episodes of 'statistical ignorance' in his conclusions and statements to capture my attention or even allow me to finish reading the book.

Perhaps the audience was not engineers, mathmeticians, or anyone else who know their way around 'correlations' and 'significance' -- I frankly don't know. But I can assure you that David could have dealt himself a greater dose of credibility and 'statistical significance' if he'd had more experienced statisticians review his staggered conclusions.

I definitely credit him with opening my eyes to a handful of new 'culture management' techniques. But my eyes still sting from the idea that this gentleman has made a career out of mishandling simple correlational numbers and the science behind them. A simple example is the assertion on page 49 that 'positive' correlation is equivalent to 'significant'.

How many times have you heard or read leadership thinkers or managers talk about values or culture? How many times have you heard them dogmatically emphasize the importance of modeling the right example? How many times did they offer concrete statistical proof to support their statements? Author David Maister doesn't just talk about it...he proves it! The heart of Practice What You Preach is the result of an extensive worldwide survey Maister conducted in 139 offices throughout 15 countries in 15 types of businesses. Seventy-four questions were asked along with an analysis of financial information. Maister also conducted extensive interviews with the organizations managers and workers. In analyzing the top 20% of the most financially successful companies, he came to the conclusion that the behavior of managers played a large and powerful role. The survey demonstrates that employee attitudes are directly linked to financial success. Good managers effectively listened, demonstrated values, were trustworthy, good coaches, communicated well, treated others with respect and practiced what they preach! Maister also encourages managers to inspire their team by demonstrating and modeling the values they proclaim to others.

Practice What You Preach is interesting reading and sure to keep you engaged. Maister has a way of getting straight to the point with concise comments and points throughout the entire book. For those who desire to dissect the survey data, it is published at the end of the book in the appendices. Like pieces of a puzzle, Practice What You Preach reveals the results of the survey one point at a time and interweaves major lessons to be learned from a number of case studies. Building from the simplest analysis and lesson to the most complex, the impact of the book is cumulative. Maister also provides an excellent summary in the later portion of the book.

Rarely does an author of Maister's caliber offer personal detailed data to support his conclusions along with relevant case studies. Perhaps David Maister sums it up best when he passionately mentions that the "story is richer" than simply reading the chapters which discuss the main conclusions. He continues, "I hope that most readers will come with me as I recreate the journey of discovery that this research took me on."

It's a journey well worth taking and it will enrich your understanding of effective management and leadership.

...

Many books before this one have made the case for doing good business by treating people respectfully and in a trustworthy way. And several books before this one have preached courageous and long term oriented leadership. This book confirms these messages but does more: it presents convincing evidence to support these well known conclusions. Maister has done a very elegant yet sophisticated study which he very lucidly and accessibly explains throughout the book and which very clearly proves his point. But don't worry: the book isn't dull and boring. Maister illustrates his research conclusions with fascinating case stories. Of course the message of this book is very positive and hopeful. Like Maister says: "Making money by having high standards [respect, trustworthyness, courage, etc] and never compromising them. What a concept!" But, you might think, is this not all idealistic soft talk? Is this not too good to be true? Is it that easy? Not really! Practising what you preach requires courage and determination. What I found particularly interesting is the following: this book is more than anything about the difference in what you believe in and what you actually execute. And this is where courage comes in. For example the courage to say 'This far and no further!' when people show disrespect to others, or when other essential standards are violated. It also means saying 'no' to lucrative business which does not fit with your companies' vision/mission. And there is more, but you can read that in the book.
This book can inspire you to escape from the idea that you have to find the right balance between idealism and profitability; it invites you to be both highly idealistic and higly profitable. It can be done. Maister proves it.

This book has it all: a complete vision on managing a profitable business as we have come to know and expect from Maister; emperical evidence that focusing on people-issues (clients and personell) instead of money will do it; scientific back-up of the 'complex-approach' and true life stories that, again, prove the case. Not many books survive the hype. Maister's "Managing the Professional Service Firm" did, and this book certainly will. Any manager worth his/her paycheck should read this book and give themselves, and their subordinates, the chance of succes. I own many books, most of which came from Amazon, but if I were to select only five to rescue from a fire, this one would most certainly be among them.

Almost everyone will agree that professional firms must provide great service and terrific relationships to their clients. Some firms will provide these attributes at the expense of their own employees and others will not. Practice What You Preach establishes a quantified relationship to higher profitability in one publicly held marketing communications firm between those offices that nurtured their staffs as much as their clients. What made the difference? The attitudes and practices of the managers in the higher profit offices accounted for almost all of the variation.

General Schwartzkopf once said that you should "be the leader you want to have." That's the essence of the message of this book for achieving higher profitability. To make more money in pofessional offices, select and encourage leaders who will set high standards, serve as a good example, police the culture to improve it, and enable people to learn and make progress.

Few works about management and leadership have the superb quantifications involved in this book. The foundation comes in 5589 individual responses (to about 10,000 questionnaires distributed) in 139 offices of 29 firms owned by the same public company. Each office was characterized by four profit tests to establish a profit index. Then differences in employee survey responses were tested against the profit index. Taken in many different cuts, Mr. Maister tells you which questions best correlated statistically with higher profit index numbers for an office. Each key observation is supported by a case example of one office that did well in this dimension. First, he relates what the head of the office said about the office's success and culture. Then he provides a composite interview with the people who work in the office. By comparing the two sets of responses, he then points out the key intersections. It's a fine way of making statistics come to life.

He goes on to use more sophisticated statistical methods to establish which factors together are most significant, and how these factors appear to interact on one another. I was impressed by the quality and thoroughness of this work.

He goes on to drill down to find even more nuances. For example, testing how the youngest employees feel about their work, compensation, and opportunities is the acid test of how well you are doing. As you would expect, cultures usually work better in smaller offices where communication is less likely to become diffused.

The book ends with long lists of practices that seemed to have helped. If you want to know what to do, you should pay the most attention to the summary lessons in chapters 20-25. If you have trouble following all of the statistical analysis early on, just skip back to those sections. Then go back and read the case studies. At that point, you may be ready for the statistical chapters.

The only weakness in the study's design is that it failed to include a comparable set of surveys with clients of the offices. That would have made the richness of the conclusions greater and the persuasive value of the work higher.

How can you set high standards that delight clients and make everyone want to exceed those standards while enabling them to do so? You will find many excellent ideas in this impressive book.

Be the professional service firm you would like to hire!

David Maister's book "Practice what you Preach" describes the results of a statistical analysis of successful professional service firms. Maister concludes that the successful firms are those that commit to a strategy of teamwork, high standards of quality, and employee development. In summary, employee dedication leads directly to improved financial performance for the firm.

Besides the statistical arguments, Maister provides case studies of the firms to show how firms implement success on a tactical and micro-level. These case studies seem to demonstrate that the most successful managers are energizers of the workplace, able to encourage standards of excellence and develop excellence in their staff. Profit follows from this position, rather than the other way around.

The conclusion that integrity, excellence, and participation create a profitable firm seems reasonable and well argued. The question then becomes, why don't all firms appreciate this and enact policies that will energize the company in this way? The last chapter discusses this issue, and for this reason I found it the most interesting.

If the formula for success is so obvious, then why don't more firms enact it? Maister states that what these firms lack is courage, or more specifically the inability to choose long term work focused "on strategy" versus quick, short term profit. This conflict, Maister says, is inevitable. Coming up with good ideas for success is not the hard part - it is failure in execution and follow through of the strategy that dooms those plans.

The lesson Maister draws is that managers may believe that their greatest value is in creating a vision, and this is false. The greatest value of a leader is in implementing vision.

Heavy but invaluable reading, this book presents the results of author David H. Maister's study of 139 offices of 29 professional service - more specifically, marketing and communications - firms in 15 countries. His objective was to identify the attitudes that correlate most strongly with financial success. He found what's been known all along - that financial success correlates very strongly with the perceived good character and integrity of management. When employees believe that management practices what it preaches, they seem to give extra effort and get astonishing results. The idea that character counts as much as, or perhaps more than, structure and corporate policy will be hard for many to accept. It takes courage, commitment, faith and humility to become the kind of person this study recommends. But this information shows us that, to contradict baseball player Leo Durocher, nice guys finish first.

David Maister has learned what many business managers strive to attain and many never truly accomplish. Maister has learned that attitudes drive financial results; success is not dependent on a company's systems and policies, but on the character and skills of its manager. Financial rewards often come in proportion to the high standards set by the company. Many floundering companies have not yet learned that you invest in employees, and that if you must reduce expenditures, you cut in other areas of expense. Strong, well-trained managers have already learned that you treat employees with dignity and respect, pay them what they are worth, and provide a motivating, positive work environment. Employees should feel as if they are working with you to help the company achieve its full potential; they should not feel they are simply working for you to satisfy your personal demands and bring home a paycheck. If that is the case, either management has hired the wrong employee(s) in the first place, which is a lack of human resource management skills, or the employee is no longer being motivated. Top-notch managers know, as this author clearly advocates, that attitude means everything.

I have found from doing diagnostic assessments on thousands of businesses over the past thirty years that many companies crash and burn because managers actually believe they have adequate business knowledge and management skills, when in reality they do not. Other companies who have held on and achieved a measure of success, could greatly increase their profitability, with an attitude which fosters employee motivation and productivity. Any individual with the desire and commitment to improve their management skills will benefit from "Practice What You Preach;" it is an excellent, well-written book with a straight-forward approach. In business, one can never know enough; learning is an on-going life process for as long as you are part of the business. This book, along with Maister's other books, "Managing the Profession Service Firm" and "The Trusted Advisor" offer sound, practical advice and are highly recommended.