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Kiss Theory Good Bye: Five Proven Ways to Get Extraordinary Results in Any Company (精装)
by Bob Prosen
| Category:
Career development, Career guide, Professional success |
| Market price: ¥ 228.00
MSL price:
¥ 208.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Finally someone has written a "how to" manual that advises what actions one can take to maximize business results. |
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AllReviews |
1 Total 1 pages 5 items |
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Publishers Weekly (MSL quote), USA
<2008-03-19 00:00>
Prosen, head of a business training center affiliated with the University of Texas in Dallas, begins his book with six pages of endorsements from an assortment of CEOs, professionals and nonprofit managers and another six pages of self-praise. Unfortunately, his "five attributes of high profitable companies" are utterly familiar. They include "superior leadership, sales effectiveness, operational excellence, financial management, and customer loyalty." Prosen offers equally prosaic advice for achieving them. For example, the secrets of "superior leadership" include hiring smart people, fostering a healthy corporate culture and communicating clearly-no breakthroughs there. Because the book attempts to cover the entire range of management skills in less than 200 pages, the discussions offer information that practically any business person should already know. (Will any sales or marketing professional be surprised to learn that the Internet and industry conferences can be useful sources of competitive intelligence, as chapter three patiently explains?) Prosen would have served his readers better by choosing one management skill at which he truly excels and providing in-depth, original insights into that topic.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Jim Pawlak, Biz Books, USA
<2008-03-19 00:00>
Mr. Prosen provides more than clues. He provides a battle plan that’s focused on planning, achievable targets and execution. |
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From the Publisher, USA
<2008-03-19 00:00>
It is exciting to publish a book that gives leaders everywhere what they have been searching for. Kiss Theory Good Bye by Bob Prosen is the real "how to" book on business execution. The journey began with Jim Collins’ book Good to Great that explained Why some companies did well. Shortly thereafter, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan co-authored EXECUTION that told What some companies did well. Now we have the third and final component, Kiss Theory Good Bye, which shows How Your Company can rapidly increase performance and profits.
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From the Author, USA
<2008-03-19 00:00>
I wrote this book to give you proven strategies and techniques to consistently accomplish your goals profitably and ethically.
Whether you are the leader of a Fortune 1000 company, the owner of a privately held business, the leader of a not-for-profit organization, or a manager or supervisor within a department, top leaders share a set of common goals. We want to be part of a successful organization that consistently achieves its objectives. We want to make our work easier and more fulfilling. We want all of our employees working collaboratively to achieve the organization’s objectives, have fun, react less, and be proud members of an enterprise that is respected and admired.
We all want to be part of a company where employees look forward to coming to work and being part of a bigger mission. We want to create an environment where everyone’s ideas and talents are sought after and respected, where trust is high, politics are kept to a minimum and people are fulfilled.
Profitability enables organizations to have the freedom of choice. Organizations that operate with integrity and consistently achieve their financial and operating objectives are respected and admired. Their performance allows them to take better care of employees, customers, and shareholders. Profitability in and of itself is not the ultimate objective. It’s only the enabler. The real goal is to have choices. Their reputation allows them to attract top leadership, employees, and board talent. They are also able to give back to society to help make the world a better place.
This book is about doing. It actually shows you how to work smarter, not harder. Doing it right is a fulfilling, empowering, rewarding, and deeply gratifying experience. I am honored to share this information with you and it is my sincere belief that it will allow you to achieve results that count.
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William B. Sweetland , USA
<2008-03-19 00:00>
I've just finished reading Bob Prosen's book, "Kiss Theory Good Bye: Five Proven Ways to Get Extraordinary Results in Any Company." I've also read Mr. Kent M. Blumberg's review of Prosen's book, and I fear that some Amazon customers might get the wrong impression of "Kiss Theory Good Bye" from Mr. Blumberg's thumbs-down judgment. I'd like to reply to Mr. Blumberg's review.
When I read Mr. Blumberg's take on Prosen's book, I said to myself, "Blumberg is either (a) a pretentious consultant, or (b) an adjunct professor of management at a third-rate community college."
I wasn't wrong. On his Web blog site, Mr. Blumberg calls himself "a professional and executive life coach," whatever that may be. That's one difference between Prosen and Blumberg: It would never occur to Mr. Prosen, a successful management consultant himself, to describe what he does in language so high-falutin', so vague and voguish.
Blumberg is the type of consultant who is impressed by business books that carry conventionally edgy, smart-ass, offbeat titles. It's a device borrowed from academic publishing. I call them "Cute two-part titles." A cutesy metaphor separated from its explanation by a colon. You know the kind I mean: "Talk to the Elephant in the Room: Dealing with Corporate Failure," or "The Hieroglyphics of Crisis and Change: How to Defeat Fear in Your Company." (No, the title of Prosen's book does NOT fit this pattern. "Kiss Theory Good Bye" is not used metaphorically.)
Here are three actual titles taken from the book review part of Blumberg's Web log:
(1) "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable."
(2) "The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)"
(3) "CIRQUE DU SOLEIL THE SPARK: Igniting the Creative Fire That Lives Within Us All."
Mr. Blumberg has a large appetite for books of this sort. Mr. Prosen offends him by relentlessly sticking to the point, forswearing the current business-book chic, cloudy, smarmy pseudo-inspiration that so impresses Mr. Blumberg, and insisting that doing business successfully is hard unglamorous work. I agree with Mr. Prosen.
According to Blumberg, you need to read $300 worth of specialized 400-page books to get the full story of what Mr. Prosen teaches. Baloney! This is simply the whining of an envious consultant who wishes he had the powers of summary and synthesis and imagination that Mr. Prosen displays throughout "Kiss Theory Good Bye."
Mr. Blumberg says there's nothing new in Prosen's book. In a certain limited sense, this holds water. But in the larger sense, Blumberg couldn't be more wrong.
In Blumberg's words (he's speaking of Prosen's five attributes of successful organizations): "Unless you just crawled out of a cave, you already know what it takes to succeed." This is just more Blumberg-consultant blather. Many business leaders DON'T know what it takes to succeed. Prosen proves this again and again in "Kiss Theory Good Bye" with examples from his distinguished career.
Mr. Prosen's book is full of new formulations of tried-and-true maxims, unconventional restatements of old ideas that work. Even when his formulations sum up ancient wisdom, he still finds fresh things to say.
For example, this gem:
"Today's most prevalent business challenge is. . .planning in lieu of action. . .it's the issue of execution that remains in question. . . What separates the winners from those who struggle. . .is the ability to execute a plan. It really is that simple."
So true. Planning as an excuse for doing nothing is the curse of large organizations. Planning in place of action occupies far too many intelligent people, wastes far too much time, in 90 percent of corporate America. How many elaborate, expensive plans lie dormant, forgotten, useless, laid to rest in bulky ring binders on the CEO's shelf! But who has reminded business executives as powerfully as Prosen that the acid test remains action, action, action?
Or these insights from Prosen on sales:
"Recruit great salespeople; don't teach great people how to sell."
"The president gave me the go-ahead, yet I still had one question: Would he remain supportive if the plan I designed allowed someone [a top-flight salesperson] several levels below him to make more money than he did? He was very willing. Many members of top management have trouble with this concept."
Yeah, I'd say that 999 out of 1000 of the business-school graduates from Stanford, the University of Chicago, Wharton, and Harvard would have a great deal of trouble with that concept.
And that brings me to another of Prosen's basic but brilliant observations: He stresses again and again that he's surprised by the number of executives who ignore or don't know the fundamental ideas he lays out in his book. How can this be?
Good question. It's one you won't find an answer to by reading Mr. Blumberg or the business thinkers Mr. Blumberg admires. And reading Prosen's book, and being shocked by the business ignorance of the American executive, brings up another question: What are we teaching our business school graduates? Why do so many of them know nothing about the basic realities of what they do?
Why are so many of them so touchingly ignorant about how to communicate with other senior execs, other managers, and front-line employees about things these groups absolutely must know to be effective? Why? What are we getting for the $200,000 we spend on educating these M.B.A.- and Ph.D.-degreed ignoramuses in how to run a corporation?
Prosen's book is packed full of suggestive ideas, old and new. Here are a few more of these ideas just on the subject of "costs" (I can't possibly give you all of them):
"All too often leaders become slaves to their financial accounting systems and wait too long before taking action. If you don't completely understand your cost structure. . .Take whatever steps are necessary to get the information you need. There is no excuse for not knowing."
"It's amazing how many companies struggle to accurately determine their true cost of doing business."
"I can't tell you how often I've worked with companies that don't know their cost of doing business in sufficient detail to support their business decisions." [Prosen then gives an amazing example of this inexcusable ignorance from his experience as a consultant. Read the book.]
"Another great way to reduce costs is to periodically challenge why every report in your company is required. . . I applied this seemingly simple strategy inside a Fortune 1000 company and the savings was extraordinary."
"Poor quality and rework can quickly render [a company] non-competitive. With all the investments made in quality processes over the years, you would think this issue would be very well managed. Yet when I ask company leaders how many of them have defined processes in place to reduce inefficiencies and rework, very few do."
"Another great way to focus on problem elimination is to hold recurring operations reviews. The process I like best makes the leader who is responsible for each operating area stand up and present his or her results in front of colleagues and senior management."
"Run leaner than you would prefer--even in good times. It's always a better alternative to budget cuts and layoffs."
Dear readers, Prosen's whole book is packed with insights and sayings and warnings and summaries as valuable as these. Yes, Prosen is relentless. Yes, he pounds home his lessons again and again. Yes, much of what he preaches is superficially obvious. But you know what? All great practical teachers do exactly that. These reflections make me wonder whether Mr. Blumberg actually read "Kiss Theory Good Bye." He certainly didn't read it carefully, or with the least imagination.
I urge you to read "Kiss Theory Good Bye." Don't pay any attention to Kent Blumberg. There isn't a wasted word in "Kiss Theory Good Bye." It's all business. Maybe that's why it offends Mr. Blumberg. It's too practical, too down-to-earth. It insists too much on the necessity of changing what you're doing now by working hard and continuously at what must seem to Mr. Blumberg to be grubby, dull, mean little particulars. Prosen offers no neat but chicly paradoxical inspirational formulas for achieving business utopia instantly.
Here's what I think: If Mr. Prosen had been aware of Kent Blumberg's existence and cared about pleasing him when he wrote his book, he would have chosen a different sort of title. Something like, "Who Melted My Cheese: The 12 Things You Must Do Differently to Keep Your Company on Top." Yeah, that probably would have done it.
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1 Total 1 pages 5 items |
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