NEW BOOK
“Wrestling With Success: Developing a Championship Mentality,” by Nikita Koloff and Jeffrey Gitomer, John Wiley & Sons, $24.95
What you’ll learn: Koloff, wrestling’s Russian Nightmare turned motivational guru, and Gitomer, chief executive salesman at BuyGitomer Inc., tag team to write a book about the “Three Ds” of success: desire, dedication and discipline. With Koloff’s wrestling experiences as their backdrop, the theme is: There are no shortcuts to success.
You must plan, adjust and follow through. You must learn from negative outcomes, learn from others and share your knowledge with them.
–Jim Pawlak, BizBooks
NEW BOOK
“The Power of Strategy Innovation,” by Robert Johnston Jr. and J. Douglas Bate, Amacom, $29.95
What you’ll learn: Creating innovation is the Holy Grail of every business. The authors have developed a five-stage method that creates innovation and integrates it into a firm’s strategic plan and short-term tactics.
The five stages are: staging, aligning, exploring, creating and mapping. Staging and aligning are the most important because they create the template for the other stages.
–Jim Pawlak, BizBooks
WORTH REVISITING
“Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done,” by Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan and Charles Burck, Crown Business, 2002, $27.50
What you’ll learn: Bossidy, a tenured executive who served at General Electric, Allied Signal and Honeywell, and Charan, who taught at the Harvard and Kellogg business schools, collaborate with editor and writer Burck to make the case that execution–linking a company’s people, strategy, and operations–is what determines success in the business world.
Bossidy and Charan argue that execution is a discipline integral to strategy, that it is the major job of any business leader hoping to dominate a market, and that it is a core element of corporate culture.
Each author addresses specific topics in paragraphs that begin with either “Larry” or “Ram,” and this easy style adds to the appeal of a very readable book.
–Tribune staff
