Results-Based Leadership (Hardcover)

by Dave Ulrich (Author), Jack Zenger (Author), Norman Smallwood (Author) "THE QUEST TO BECOME a more effective leader will neither begin nor end with this work..." (more)
Key Phrases: competitive anchors, engender organizational capability, mobilize individual commitment, General Electric, People Express, Jack Welch (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
It's possible to look like a leader, say all the right things to shareholders, make employees feel good about themselves, and still not produce the sorts of results everyone expects and wants from your company. A previous generation might have called this winning the battle but losing the war.

Directing employees is harder than it looks, since past performance isn't really an indication of how a leader will do in the future. As the authors say, "The half-life of knowledge grows ever shorter in most professions, requiring even high performers to unlearn what they know and do."

The authors--a university professor and two heads of consulting firms--divide leadership priorities into four areas: employees, organization, customers, and investors. A company head generally has to focus on one responsibility over the other three, but can't get away with ignoring any of them for very long. They explain each of these four priorities in depth--noting, for example, that keeping employees committed and productive means "mass customizing" the workplace to fit individual employees' needs while keeping everyone working toward the same goal. That customization may require adjustments unheard-of a few years ago--allowing an employee to work from home in a different city, for example--but pays off in the retention of valuable human assets that would otherwise take their training, experience, energy, and creativity to other companies, possibly competitors.

People who already have leadership positions in their companies can certainly find a lot of important information, but the book may be even more valuable to those who want to move into management roles. It certainly shows what challenges to expect. --Lou Schuler

From Library Journal
The authors argue that most business leaders lack insight when responding to the simple question, "What is your business about?" Usually, the response focuses on the company's product affiliation, for example "We're in plastics." In order to get good business results, the authors say, leaders need to understand fully what makes their organization tick at the "elemental level." The authors, a business educator and two company directors, draw on their business experience as well as the work of other business leaders and illustrate with specific strategies and charts how to achieve "results" in four specific areas: employees, the organization, its customers, and its investors. Here we also learn about the leadership attributes of successful companies, information that readers can use as a guide to hone their own leadership skills. A notes section offers additional readings. Recommended for specialized business collections, company executives, business managers, and human resource people. (Index not seen.)ABellinda Wise, Nassau Community Coll. Lib., Garden City, NY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 234 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business School Press; 1 edition (April 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0875848710
• ISBN-13: 978-0875848716
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #246,302 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Leadership is all about results.", August 8, 2001

By	Turgay BUGDACIGIL (Istanbul, Turkey) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

"The quest to become a more effective leader will neither begin nor end with this work. However, we want to shift how to think about and become a better leader. It is faddish to think of leaders as people who master competencies and emanate character. While agreeing with this perspective, we believe that it falls short of assuring that leaders lead. Leaders do much more than demonstrate attributes. Effective leaders get results. This book refocuses and reframes the search for effective leadership by connecting attributes to results...By so doing, this book makes a bold statement about the next generation of leadership thinking. This does not mean less attention to the leader's attributes, but it does mean making sure that leaders understand and commit to the results they must produce-and how they are produced" (pp.1-23).

In this context, D.Ulrich, J.Zenger, and N.Smallwood suggest the following fourteen specific actions described in Chapter 7 can help leaders make results a major part of their leadership equation, at whatever level they function in their companies:

1. Begin with an absolute focus on results.

2. Take complete and personal responsibility for your group's results.

3. Clearly and specifically communicate expectations and targets to the people in your group.

4. Determine what you need to do personally to improve your results.

5. Use results as the litmus test for continuing or implementing leadership practice.

6. Engage in developmental activities and opportunities that will help you produce better results.

7. Know and use every group member's capabilities to the fullest and provide everyone with appropriate developmental opportunities.

8. Experiment and innovate in every realm under your influence, looking constantly for new ways to improve performance.

9. Measure the right standards and increase the rigor with which you measure them.

10. Cnstantly take action; results won't improve without it.

11. Increase the pace or tempo of your group.

12. Seek feedback from others in the organization about ways you and your group can improve your outcomes.

13. Ensure that your subordinates and colleagues perceive that your motivation for being a leader is the achievement of positive results, not personal or political gain.

14. Model the methods and strive for the results you want your group to use and attain.

Ulrich, Zenger, and Smallwood argue that these suggestions which may be implemented right now by any leader occupying any position, will modify behavior and improve performance- all without a month-long absence from work or expenditures of large sums of money.

Highly recommended.

35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding presentation, January 25, 2000

By	David Lemoyne (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews

The authors have done a wonderful job in advancing the position that results -- not just characteristics -- matter. This bottom-line approach to management, as explained well in the text, is a boon for customers and employees alike. Congrats for a well-written work.

As a companion to this must-have book, I recommend a couple that I recently read and use extensively (even though they advance leadership from a different angle): the original "Seven Habits" and the newer "The Leader's Guide: 15 Essential Skills."

53 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Simplistic argument; useful tables, December 7, 1999

By	Bill Godfrey (Mt Stuart, TAS Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Working with other co-authors, Ulrich has produced a book that is rich in tables that bring together areas that require managerial or leadership attention, identify the key points for attention and suggest measures of success. Little of the content is particularly new or surprising and there are some notable gaps (see below), but the book may be worth getting for the frameworks, tables, figures and 'instruments' alone. The authors have worked hard to produce a book that is thoroughly user friendly without being simplistic, and they have succeeded well. It is however, somewhat 'slick' for my taste and it definitely belongs to the world we are leaving rather than the world to which we are moving.

I have three criticisms.

There is a strong whiff of setting up a 'straw man' so that they can knock it down while building their case. I do not have any sense that other writers have unduly neglected results in writing about leadership attributes and the authors' insistence on that alleged failure gets a bit tedious. A related aspect of the same issue is that the author team is at least as good at marketing gimmickry as it is at building tables and figures. "Leadership" and "results" are two words of known selling power and they are used to the point of distraction. For this reader, the resulting 'hard sell' style casts a bit of a shadow over the authority of the work as a whole and contributes to the excessive glorification of 'leaders' as the source of all success that seems to be endemic at present.

Much more important is a major gap in the range of leadership concerns covered. They devote a chapter to each of four major groups of stakeholders: employees, the organisation, customers and investors. There is no mention at all of society, the community or the environment as stakeholders, yet any substantial organisation ignores that very important group of stakeholders at their peril.

Similarly there is little direct mention of other critically important areas for leadership attention, for example their role in nurturing the supply chain, or in managing the technologically driven step changes so well described in Baghai et al: The Alchemy of Growth. While there is some brief discussion of alternative processes for developing strategies the essential leadership role of developing strategic direction is also treated very cursorily.

The third criticism is more subtle. Concern with results necessarily means concern with measurement or assessment. The authors in general deal quite well with the issue of establishing measures of results across a range of areas concerning their four chosen groups of stakeholders and recognise the importance of qualitative as well as quantitative measures. I think they should have given more attention to the associated risk of giving inadequate attention to things that are hard to measure just because measurement is difficult. One of the great societal questions at the moment is how we value things - like the environment and community harmony - that can not easily be expressed in terms of money. Defining and measuring balanced results is getting much harder, not easier, whether at a societal or an organisational level. It involves wisdom, not just skill, and any book that seeks to relate leadership to results should directly recognise that and directly address it.

So what you have is a book that solves the problems of the 80's and 90's rather than one that addresses the dominant concerns of the next century. But within its own framework, the book does quite a good job.