Gridiron Leadership: Winning Strategies and Breakthrough Tactics Review

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(More customer reviews)Gridiron Leadership is an excellent book! In every corporate environment, success or failure boils down to two things, the quality of your plan and, more importantly, your execution of that plan or early recognition of plan change. As in a football game, you can have the best play book, with great plays on offense and great defensive schemes, but if they are continuously executed poorly by unmotivated players, you will not win. If, as a leader/coach, you fail to recognize and make adjustments to your plan in a timely fashion, you will not win. Finally, "attitude is a reflection of leadership", if your team is unwilling to follow you, it doesn't matter how good they are, your likelihood of winning is non-existent. Gridiron Leadership provides the executive reader, fundamentals through vignettes and stories that enforce the lessons learned in this book. These stories discuss sense of purpose, teamwork, trust, communication, moral integrity, giving 110%, not letting your brother down, and playing to win. Effective leaders are always learning and improving. In my opinion, this book is a must read for all aspiring leaders.

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Gridiron Leadership: Winning Strategies and Breakthrough Tactics uses real moments from the worlds of professional and college football, as well as a wide range of evocative football metaphors, to dissect the craft of leadership and communicate essential management lessons. With so many leadership and strategy books sending the same messages in the same ways, this fresh approach is truly groundbreaking, using a familiar frame of reference to capture and understand the concepts and practice of leadership, strategy, and execution.



The language of sports is already common vernacular among today's successful leaders. Gridiron Leadership uses the accessible, recognizable terminology of sports in a thoughtful, systematic way, making the connection between the culture of football and the kinds of organizational and leadership situations encountered everyday. It covers the full range of modern organizational issues, including human resources, crisis leadership, ethical leadership, strategic decision making, and organizational change. With topics covering everything from building a winning team to analyzing the needs of stakeholders, this is the playbook today's leaders have been waiting for.

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Chinnovation: How Chinese Innovators are Changing the World Review

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(More customer reviews)When I embarked on reading Chinnovation, I was expecting to learn lessons on how to compete with the Chinese entrepreneurs. I realized that this book is not just for me, rather it is also for the millions of aspiring Chinese entrepreneurs who need a framework or process to help them navigate through the muddy waters of starting businesses. It is comforting to know that there is little "magic" in ensuring entrepreneurial success even in China. Yinglan has the perfect narrative to convey the message that entrepreneurship requires one to be thoughtful and observant, when spotting opportunities, and disciplined in the business execution. It also demonstrates the fact that there are many innovative startups, not just "copycat businesses". The innovation comes when adapting to a rapidly changing and uncertain environment. Chinnovation is a highly readable and enjoyable book and once started, is difficult to put down, despite its 500 plus pages! Narrative after narrative, the case stories take me to the world and circumstances of each entrepreneur. How they confront their challenges, turning "problems into opportunities" will guide and teach the future entrepreneurs in China. As an investor and the non-Chinese reader, the key lesson is to be a more effective business partner to the Chinese entrepreneur in their own markets.
I met the author, Tan Yinglan, recently at a conference in Shanghai. His presentation was top notch and was the key motivating factor in me getting this book to help navigate shark filled waters

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Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want Review

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This is the latest in a series of several books (notably The Experience Economy: Work is Theater and Every Business a Stage and Markets of One: Creating Customer-Unique Value through Mass Customization) in which James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine focus on what Peter Drucker once identified as one of the greatest challenges any business faces: How to get and then keep profitable customers? Their thesis in this latest volume is that marketers need to address the problem of managing "the perceptions of real or fake held by the consumer's of [an] enterprise's output - because people increasingly make purchase decisions based on how real or fake they perceive offerings. These perceptions flow directly from how well any particular offering conforms to a customer's self-image."
In this volume, Gilmore and Pine examine "the authenticity of economic offerings, not the authenticity of individuals in personal relationships, something people also greatly desire but the subject of many other tomes." They cite two exemplars in particular - Disney and Starbucks - because no company "has more affected our collective view of what is real and what is not" than has Disney. As for Starbucks, no other company "more explicitly manages its perception of authenticity, making direct appeals to authenticity in every way" Gilmore and Pine define this new discipline.
Here are some of the specific issues they address with rigor and eloquence:
1. The appeal of "real"
2. The drivers of the new consumer sensibility
3. Three axioms of authenticity
4. Five genres of authenticity
5. Two "time-honored standards" of authenticity
6. Ten elements of authenticity
7. How to be what you say you are
8. How to continue to be "true to self"
9. The nature, extent, and interaction of five key "real/fake polarities"
10. How to sustain the authenticity of what is offered
Decision-makers in any organization (regardless of its size or nature) are provided a comprehensive, cohesive, and cost-effective program by which to address and resolve these and other issues. Of course, even if Gilmore and Pine were in residence, actively involved in the design and implementation of such a program, assistance, it cannot succeed unless the given offering is and remains inherently authentic, That is, it fully meets (if not exceeds) the given consumer's perceptions of the benefits claimed for it.

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Marketing Strategy Review

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(More customer reviews)This text makes for very interesting, up to date reading. A great textbook for my Marketing Management Course. It is also excellent as the examples used are from some of the most recent times and so one is able to identify with the information. Two thumbs up!

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Thoroughly revised and updated, MARKETING STRATEGY, 5e continues with one primary goal: to teach students to think and act like marketers. Packed with cutting-edge coverage, current examples, new cases, and--for the first time--photographs, the fifth edition delivers a practical, straightforward approach to analyzing, planning, and implementing marketing strategies--helping students learn to develop a customer-oriented market strategy and market plan. Students sharpen their analytical and creative critical thinking skills as they learn the key concepts and tools of marketing strategy. Continuing in the text's signature student-friendly style, the fifth edition covers essential points without getting bogged down in industry jargon--all in a succinct 12 chapters.

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Winston Churchill (Penguin Lives Biographies) Review

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(More customer reviews)This is one of several volumes in the Penguin Lives Series, each of which written by a distinguished author in her or his own right. Each provides a concise but remarkably comprehensive biography of its subject in combination with a penetrating analysis of the significance of that subject's life and career. I think this is a brilliant concept. My only complaint (albeit a quibble) is that even an abbreviated index is not provided. Those who wish to learn more about the given subject are directed to other sources.
When preparing to review various volumes in this series, I have struggled with determining what would be of greatest interest and assistance to those who read my reviews. Finally I decided that a few brief excerpts and then some concluding comments of my own would be appropriate.
On Churchill's values: "His beliefs had very simple origins, in the piety and goodness of his beloved nanny, Mrs. Everest; in the code of schoolboy fair play; in the ethic of manliness learned at the Royal Military College (RMC) at Sandhurst and in his regiment; in the strictures of the Commandments, preached in the Old Testament language that was to be one of the strongest of influences on his own, in Harrow School chapel. From all of those sources Churchill derived an undoubted sense of sin; his horror of wrongdoing was to inform his political life, particularly as it brought him eventually to confront the crimes of the dictators." (page 11)
On Sir John ("Jackie") Fisher, as First Sea Lord, an early supporter of Churchill's career: "Fisher was that rare but valuable bird, a creative eccentric. Brave beyond question, a seadog to his fingertips, he had no truck with the settled order of things and was forever in search for a better way, a faster ship, a deadlier weapon....His nature was as passionate as Churchill's, his mind as quick; it was inevitable that the two should quarrel, but their differences were soon made up." (page 79)
On Churchill and England during their "darkest hours": "Churchill privately confessed to depression. The sinkings of British merchant shipping...particularly lowered his optimism....[and yet according to Edward R. Murrow] one of Churchill's greatest achievements as wartime prime minister was to have 'mobilized the English language and sent it into battle'...[as when addressing the House of Commons he insisted] 'We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools and we will [in italics] finish the job!'" (Pages 142-143)
On what inspired Churchill to become a great war leader: "...he listened to himself....he listened to the version of British history he had constructed in his head as a subaltern in his hot, dreamy Indian afternoons; he listened to his own apotheosis in the biography of his ancestor [the first duke of Malborough]; he listened to his retelling of the First World War as an epic of of world crisis and eventual triumph; he listened to his recollections of his own youth and acquaintances then retold in his lives of Great Contemporaries (1937); his listened to his own version of American history as an equal epic to Britain's in the championship of liberty." (pages 190-191)
Of special interest to me was Keegan's brilliant analysis of the many paradoxes which define Churchill the man. For example: "Companionable, he had few friends. Quick to display emotion, he evoked little personal affection outside his immediate family. A devoted husband and father, he was, by the account of his favorite and deeply loving daughter, Mary...difficult at home, often impossible." Whether despite or because of his paradoxical nature, however, Churchill led his nation to eventual victory at a time when probably no one else could. Following his death in 1965 at the age of 90, his coffin was buried in a churchyard of the little Oxfordshire village of Bladon, near his birthplace at Blenheim Palace. However, Keegan suggests, "Churchill's real burial place is in the hearts of human beings."
As is also true of the other volumes in the "Penguin Lives" series, this one provides all of the essential historical and biographical information but its greatest strength lies in the extended commentary, in this instance by John Keegan, arguably the greatest of 20th century military historians. He includes a substantial list of "Sources"" for those who wish to learn more about Churchill. I hope these brief excerpts encourage those who read this review to read Keegan's biography. It is indeed a brilliant achievement.

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