Seduced by Success: How the Best Companies Survive the 9 Traps of Winning (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: legacy practices, cavity protection, legacy thinking, United States, Wall Street, Bank One (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Conversations about companies' "best practices" and "whodunitgood" have a flaw. There is more than a 50-50 chance that those companies cited as best-in-class won't make the list two years later. Herbold, former COO of Microsoft, is guilty not only of that issue but also of an overreliance on secondary research and an overfamiliarity with Microsoft and Procter & Gamble. Certainly, the latter is to be commended; P&G is a paragon of innovation, although Microsoft, insist a number of industry pundits, needs to overcome its 800-pound gorilla attitude. In essence, Herbold itemizes the nine deadliest sins of success, from neglect to confusion, and then evaluates antidotes and keys to sustainability. He points to Toyota and Fidelity, for instance, as leaders in reapplying what works, and to Southwest Airlines and GE as the masters of clarity, simplicity, and repetition. Other than some outdated examples, there's one more hitch: the author doesn't listen to his own advice to keep it simple. Barbara Jacobs
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Product Description

Don't let success put your company on the road to ruin

In Seduced by Success, Robert J. Herbold, the former Chief Operating Officer of Microsoft, shows you how to avoid the nine traps of success-the “legacy practices” that almost felled such giants as General Motors, Kodak and Sony. Herbold, a 26-year-veteran of Procter & Gamble who lived through each trap, gives you proven tactics for preventing arrogance, bloat, and neglect while capitalizing on your accomplishments, sustaining your momentum, and retaining your position in the marketplace.

The nine traps every successful organization must avoid are

• Neglect: Sticking with Yesterday's Business Model
• Pride: Allowing Your Products to Become Outdated
• Boredom: Clinging to Your Once-Successful Branding
• Complexity: Ignoring Your Business Processes
• Bloat: Rationalizing Your Loss of Speed and Agility
• Mediocrity: Letting Your Star Employees Languish
• Lethargy: Getting Lulled into a Culture of Comfort
• Timidity: Not Confronting Turf Wars and Obstructionists
• Confusion: Unwittingly Conducting Schizophrenic Communications

These mistakes cut your business legs off at the knees, destroying your ability to recognize and meet the need for change. Herbold shows you how to avoid these landmines by

• Continually revitalizing your brands and products
• Demanding new approaches to “proven” practices
• Maintaining speed and agility through strong leadership
• Making sure employees are empowered to achieve and not handicapped by bureaucracy
• Using an exciting new product to overhaul your culture

For each success trap, Herbold provides illuminating examples of top companies that were seduced by their success-as well as others that managed to maintain and even broaden their achievements. Seduced by Success is the best way to ensure your company sustains its success for the long term.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (March 7, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0071481834
• ISBN-13: 978-0071481830
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #768,205 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars There's a paradox inside this paradigm shift, May 2, 2007

By	Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

To me, one of the most interesting paradigm shifts involves a paradox: at a time when change is the only constant, precisely the same elements which result in a given company's success can often be the causes of its subsequent decline. That seems to be the core concept in this book in which Robert J. Herbold explains "how the best companies survive the 9 traps of winning." Conversely, many other of the best companies (however "best" may be defined) do not. The traps that Herbold identifies and examines are among the usual suspects whenever a company goes (invoking Jim Collins' terms) "from great to good" or "from good to mediocre":

1. Sticking with yesterday's business model
2. Allowing your products [or services] to become outdated
3. Clinging to your once-successful branding after it becomes stale and dull
4. Ignoring your business processes as they become cumbersome ands complicated
5. Rationalizing your loss of speed and agility
6. Condoning poor performance and letting your star employees languish
7. Getting lulled into a culture of comfort, casualness, and confidence
8. Not confronting turf wars, infighting, and obstructionists
9. Unwittingly providing schizophrenic communications

Of course, falling into and then remaining in any one of these "traps" can have serious, perhaps even fatal consequences. Moreover, failing companies are usually caught in several (if not most) of the nine. Finally, even if a given company escapes from one or more of them, there is no guarantee that it will not falling into one or more later. Hence a variation on the aforementioned paradox: Precisely the same elements which enable a given company to survive or to go "from mediocre to good" can often be the causes of its decline again.

Although all of the companies that Herbold discusses are major corporations (e.g. General Motors, Toyota, IBM, Sony, Wal-Mart and Microsoft), all organizations (including non-profits) can fall into one or more of the nine traps. Brilliantly, Herbold explains how to survive them or avoid them by understanding how others have survived them. To his credit, Herbold spends far less time on the "what" than he does on the "how" and "why" of doing so. Each of his key insights is anchored within a real-world context. For example:

How Toyota avoided "legacy" thinking and behavior
How IBM "tackles its vulnerabilities"
How Wal-Mart uses reapplication effectively
How Microsoft makes "well-analyzed big bets"
How Procter & Gamble stays relevant
How at Hewlett-Packard, "the key to speed and agility is leadership"

It remains for each reader to absorb and digest the material in this book, conduct a rigorous and thorough evaluation of her is his company's major vulnerabilities, select strategies and tactics from among those Herbold recommends, and then with appropriate modification, apply them to the specific needs of the given company.

In Chapter 29, Herbold concludes his narrative by examining the Apple culture within which "resting on your laurels is never an option!" Over the years, Apple has faced the same challenge which other highly successful companies have: How to prevent success from breeding a culture of lack of urgency, satisfaction, excessive pride, a and a protective attitude toward the way things have been done in the past. This is precisely what James O'Toole has in mind when referring to "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." Herbold offers two guidelines when challenging the status quo: When you are a winner, be as aggressive as you were when you were lagging behind. Also, develop a culture that constantly questions all practices at all times. To sum up, there can be no continuous improvement, much less continuous and sustainable success, without relentless skepticism.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Living a Questioning Attitude , January 7, 2008

By	Dennis DeWilde "The Performance Connection" (Cleveland area, Ohio USA) - See all my reviews

To present his list of the nine traps of success, former Microsoft executive Herbold uses a series of mini case studies to demonstrate the failures (which might all be summarized as leadership complacency) and to support his recommendations for correcting, which are summarized in the final chapter as the maintenance of a questioning attitude. The result is a book that is easy to review, but one which may leave the reader questioning its applicability.

Giving points for simplicity of structure, this book gets high marks. The seven, plus two, deadly sins are each the subject of nine separate sections, bookended by an opening discussion on the seduction of success, and the key to seduction avoidance in the last chapter. The nine traps are simple statements of failure to stay vigilant in pursuit of excellence:
1. Neglect: Sticking with yesterday's business model
2. Pride: Allowing your products to become outdated
3. Boredom: Clinging to your once-successful branding after it becomes stale and dull
4. Complexity: ignoring your business processes as they become cumbersome and complicated
5. Bloat: Rationalizing your loss of sped and agility
6. Mediocrity: Condoning poor performance and letting your star employees languish
7. Lethargy: Getting lulled into a culture of comfort, casualness, and confidence
8. Timidity: Not confronting turf wars, infighting, and obstructionists
9. Confusion: Unwittingly providing schizophrenic communications

However, simplicity is a double-edged sword, and overly generalized solutions are seldom useful. On a comparative basis, I preferred James Kilts' book, "Doing What Matters", both as a read and as an instructive manuscript.

Dennis DeWilde, author of
"The Performance Connection"

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well researched and insightful book. I highly recommend it!!!, April 16, 2007

By	Irma Yuhainis "A. Ithnin" (Singapore) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a very well researched and insightful book. I highly recommend it.

The author, who was Microsoft's COO for 7 years in the mid-late 1990's, analyzes 44 different companies, digging into whether they were able to sustain success. The reader learns why companies like Kodak, Sony, GM, and many others have had so much trouble remaining successful, while companies liked Toyota, Starbucks, P&G, and Fidelity Investments have been capable of sustaining their success. The author also reviews some companies, like Porsche, Harley Davidson, Apple, and Harrah's, that were successful, fell into some of the traps that success generates, and then fixed their problems and recovered. These rich and detailed examples are really fun to read, because there are tons of quotes from the business press on what was going on in these companies.

The basis of this book is a powerful and very important observation by the author: "Success is a huge business vulnerability. It can destroy and organization's or an individual's ability to understand the need for change and can also destroy the motivation to creatively attack the status quo."

He then goes on to explain the three human behaviors that cause this to happen and the nine business traps these behaviors generate. For each of the traps, several examples of specific companies are analyzed, and key lessons are emphasized.

Reading this book is like taking a terrific leadership and management course. It is powerful.