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The agenda: nine powerful and practical business ideas for today’s world of fierce competitors and even fiercer customers.
These are tough times for business. Pressures from all sides are greater than ever. The old solutions don’t work anymore, and the silver bullets of the late 1990s are actually hollow. Serious businesspeople know there is absolutely no simple solution, no answer. They need a whole tool kit of new ideas and new techniques. That’s what The Agenda delivers.
Michael Hammer, author of Reengineering the Corporation, the defining business book of the 1990s, has uncovered the secrets of today’s best companies. He spent some time working long and hard to recognize how these companies consistently out-execute their competitors, and he reveals what he has learned in The Agenda. This breakthrough book spells out an action plan for the twenty-first century. Here’s a sampling:
* Make life easy for your visitors. Your customers’ biggest gripe isn't that your products are bad, but that it is too tough to order, receive, and purchase them. In short, you are a royal pain to work with. You need to have a hard look at how you operate from your customers’ viewpoint and redesign how you work to save lots of them time, money, and frustration. In other words, run your business for their convenience, not yours.
* Become a process fanatic. Process is the Clark Kent of business ideas. Seemingly mild and unassuming, process is a revolutionary thought process about work in customer terms. It blows away overhead and cost, confusion and delay. It is the discipline that makes outstanding performance a matter of design rather than luck. Process is the way to make both customers and shareholders happy and keep them this way on the sustained basis.
* Measure as if you mean it. Most business measurements are worthless. They let you know what happened before (type of), but offer few if any clues about how precisely to make things better in the foreseeable future. To come up with useful measurements, you will need to create a model of your business that ties overall goals to the things you truly control. You need to measure these (and only these) things carefully and base your actions on what you learn. Measure to boost, not merely to measure.
* Don’t just talk teamwork–live it. You expect teamwork and cooperation from leading lines, and you will need to demand the same from yourself as well as your colleagues. The times of the proudly independent business manager owning a sharply defined unit are over.
* Link companies together through the web. Break down the walls that separate you from others, walls that induce huge amounts of inefficiency and overhead. Change your distribution channel from a series of resellers into a community that works together to serve the ultimate customer. Redesign your functions in tandem with those of your suppliers and customers. Stop seeing yourself as a self-contained unit that creates a product on its own, and get used to the idea of virtually integrating with others.
The Agenda will forever change how you think about business.
