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The 2,000 Percent Solution: Free Your Organization from "Stalled" Thinking to Achieve Exponential Success (平装)
by Donald Mitchell and Carol Coles
| Category:
Business, Economics, Nonfiction |
| Market price: ¥ 248.00
MSL price:
¥ 218.00
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MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
A true, definitive guide for change, a must read for organizations of all types and sizes. |
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AllReviews |
  1 2 Total 2 pages 19 items |
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An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
I presume to suggest that you first read the authors' more recently published book, The Irresistible Growth Enterprise in which they explain how to achieve "breakthrough gains from unstoppable change." One of the key points in that book it is imperative to understand the nature and extent of such forces as they affect a given organization...then respond accordingly. Another key point stresses the importance of anticipating future changes which inevitably create problems. Each of these problems requires an effective solution. That is, a "2,000 Percent Solution" which enables an organization to get "20 times better and faster results from the same or fewer resources."
The subtitle of this book correctly suggests why the authors wrote it: To "free" organizations from "stalled" thinking so that they can achieve "exponential success." Note the words embraced by quotation marks. Most organizations (especially the larger ones) can easily become captive to basic assumptions and presumptions which are no longer valid...or at least appropriate. As a result, those involved feel obligated to defend the status quo. Their thinking is stalled. Managers become bureaucrats. Because they are defending the status quo, they resist and resent any suggested changes of it. Of course, change does occur: The organization deteriorates. The "best and the brightest" employees leave as do under-served customers.
The reference to "exponential success" is also very significant. The authors correctly believe that, in the absence of Divine Intervention, sustainable success can only be achieved exponentially: building a skyscraper one floor at a time, paving a road to Oz one yellow brick at a time, eating a whale one bite at a time.
Part One explains how you can free your organization from "mind-forged manacles." To do so, you must overcome:
The Stall Mind-Set ["If I ignore it, it will eventually go away."]
The Tradition Stall ["But we've never done it that way before."]
The Disbelief Stall ["I can't believe you suggested that."]
The Misconception Stall ["Wet highways cause rain."]
The Unattractiveness Stall ["It may work but it just doesn't look right."]
The Communications Stall ["I'll get back to you with some feedback when I can."]
The Bureaucratic Stall ["This is highly irregular."]
The Procrastination Stall ["Interesting. I'm going to give it the careful thought it deserves."]
The authors analyze each of these familiar stalls and evasions. Then in Part Two, they suggest (and explain in detail) "Eight Steps" by which to over- come them. This book is "primarily about what to do differently rather than how to do something better than you do it today." Pogo once observed, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Stalling and evading strategies are basic to human nature. We tend to employ one or more of them whenever we feel threatened or confused or inadequate...or because, like Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, we simply don't want to do what we are asked to do.
I highly recommend this book. The wealth of information and material is carefully organized and lucidly presented. The authors seem to have no illusions whatsoever as to the difficulty of implementing the "Eight Steps." The success of those initiatives will indeed be exponential. My guess is that organizations which have the greatest need for this book will be most resistant to its recommendations. Those involved in such organizations would be well-advised to "think small." That is, select a specific situation in which "unstalled thinking" can have an immediate, obvious, and quanti- fiable impact. Complete the "Eight Step Process." And then leverage that success to achieve other successes...one "2,000 Percent Solution" at a time.
Obviously, both this book and The Irresistible Growth Enterprise can be read separately and still have great value. As noted previously, I suggest that the latter be read first. I also presume to suggest that both books will have even greater value if read in combination with Peter Schwartz's The Art of the Long View.
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Bill Lampton (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
A book with Don Mitchell and Carol Coles listed as two of the three authors grabs my attention automatically, since I gave high marks to their fine volume, The Ultimate Competitive Advantage. The 2,000 Percent Solution merits my praise also.
"The purpose of this book," the authors state, "is to shock you out of your complacency, to get you to think, and to get you to act." Why? Because "no matter how successful your organization is, it is performing way below its easily achievable potential. If your organization is like most, it is probably functioning below average in many important activities."
The The 2,000 Percent Solution proposes that we can become twenty times more productive and efficient, whether we are operating a large corporation or an entrepreneurial venture with limited staffing. That's mind-boggling… not just doubling or tripling our results, but multiplying them twenty times over.
During my twenty-three years in management, I encountered every "stall" the authors describe. Even worse, I created some of them myself. Too bad I didn't know about their "stall busters" then.
In every chapter, the book reminds me of Socrates' teaching method. Like him, the authors ask probing questions, challenging readers to abandon comfort, lethargy, outworn traditions, and harmful habits.
I consider The 2,000 Percent Solution an ideal book for a company's training session. The next time I direct one of my seminars, I will open with this quotation from chapter nine: "If your productivity rose by 15 percent this year, but you had the potential for 50 percent gains, you may have actually lost ground against current and future competititors."
Mitchell, Coles, and West made me reexamine my goals. As a result, my "future best practice" has changed. Yours will too, after you read this provocative book.
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An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
This book can take you to another level of thinking if you are willing to go there. As with most new thinking there are barriers to our thought processes. The words of this book teach us about the methods we use to keep us doing things the way we have always done them. This work is worth another look, even if you have already read it. The insight and experience of Don Mitchell and Carrol Coles is encoded in each word as well as within the organiztion of the book. The "Roarschach" type images used at the beginning of each chapter realy do alow you to operate at new levels of cognition, if you are willing. This work is revolutionary in its approach to such topics as "stallbusting" and understanding that the only enemy we have is ourselves. The language and the symbology of the work is intrinsic to the message. The archetypes with which you will become familiar include powerful images which are common to us all. Captured by the language of Ugly Ducklings, Words Fail Me, Molassas, and Manana. We must move to an inner self which is the stuff of which business will be made in the coming century. This book is required reading. |
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An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
Ever since In Search of Excellence came out, it has been popular for business books to look backward at which companies were most successful in the past, and then to characterize what these differences have been. The problem with this approach is that businesses constantly get better, and new ideas need to be developed and implemented that go beyond what anyone is even thinking about, much less working on today. The 2,000 Percent Solution stands alone as a book that addresses how to stay ahead of the pack, no matter where the pack is or is trying to go in the future. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't study best practices. In fact, The 2,000 Percent Solution encourages you to do so. But it adds an important dimension - how to use what you learn to exceed the competition in serving not only your customers, but helping them serve their customers better and so on now and forever in the future. In that sense all of the best practice books like Profit Zone, In Search of Excellence, Customers.com, Innovator's Dilemma, etc. are really obsolete in the way that they approach helping you be a bigger winner, no matter what size your organization. I hope that more books will be written like The 2,000 Percent Solution in the future, in instilling timeless ways to be number one, rather than just the ways that have worked in the past. If you buy and apply the lessons of this book, you can eliminate the need to read most other business books. That, in itself, is a 2,000 percent solution (a way to get 20 times the benefit from the same resources or the same benefit in 1/20th the time). But the most important point is that this book can be used by anyone in your organization. Other books are typically aimed at people who graduated with honors from Harvard Business School. Yet even the Harvard Business School grads will probably find the work on innovation to be beyond what they learned in school. This book can be taught and shared throughout your entire organization, and it includes instructions for how to do that. If you believe that all of us can accomplish more than some of us, this is the book for you. This is the first book I have seen that is written by consultants that does not require you to hire the consultants to get the benefit. This is because the book is full of how to instructions, questions, and exercises that you can use to apply its lessons to your organization. Unlike books that tell you how to stop making mistakes, but then give you no way to hit home runs, this book helps with both getting rid of the mistakes and inspiring the innovation that will allow you to move forward very rapidly in the future. If you are looking for backward information on the best practices of 1995, however, this is not the book for you. You will have to read the other business books out there. If you sincerely want to be the best, this is the book for you. |
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An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
Even the sophisticated businessperson can learn a lot from this book. I thought that I had few hang-ups about making needed changes, but the questions in The 2,000 Percent Solution elicited some very fundamental beliefs that helped me understand why our organization does what it does now that holds us back. I found that the ideas in the book for replacing the bad habits that cost us are simple to understand. The 2,000 Percent Solution calls these bad habits, "stalls". The tradition stall (doing things the same old way, simply through habit) taught me that I must question everything we do today, because there are always better ways. The procrastination stall, such as putting off attacking old problems when I really think I should, comes back to a tradition stall of not wanting to spend money or upset people by dealing with problems unless absolutely necessary. And finally, many of us think it is so complicated to manage our companies that we don't believe we can do it well - We have been zapped by the The disbelief stall (believing something that isn't true that costs us opportunities). The authors show us, chapter by chapter and question by question, that we can manager and operate extremely well. There were some great, new ideas in the sections on helping you find ways to improve (such as putting combinations of best practices together in new ways), along with interesting examples to make it more real. With these tips, it is easy to do the thinking and improving yourself and make much more money. The last section hit home for me… the need to keep developing our new habits so that the company can improve and succeed in constantly- evolving ways. Regardless of your company's situation, The 2,000 Percent Solution is a warm, inviting, and exciting book that is full of great business ideas. By putting your stalls behind you, you can learn how to achieve 20 times what you thought you could. |
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Edgar (MSL quote), Columbia
<2007-01-11 00:00>
In a time in which the holistic tendency is not just a fashionable word, but a model many great organizations are trying to implement in the intent to obtain a sustainable growth, as it were, to preserve their life, The 2000 percent solutions is really one of the best choices for both those leaders of great corporations and the individual. And specially the individual, because paradigm shifts, STALLS, the new practical concept presented in this work, happen in the individual, and not in such an abstraction or whole, as a corporation. The corporation as a whole can be, in fact a sum greater than the sum of its parts, but it is the part, the individual the one that moves the whole thing. The 2000 percent solution is really a must-read, a must- practice for those individuals that make up that whole, called organizations. Easy-to-read and with so many practical solutions easy-to-practice that you will aprove it, because you already knew them., but this time they are presented by the authors in such an organized and methodological way, that it really moves the part to produce synergy, to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. |
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Jusuf Hariman (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
This book argues that ingrained habits, which often masquerade as efficient procedures (stalls) actually obstruct growth. The revolutionary nature of this book can be seen from the fact that it is primarily about what to do differently. This book is easy and fun to read. Instead of using the notions of "strategy" or "strategic management" that have not commanded general assent, the book concentrates on the term of "best practices". The result is a book on "competive advantage" par excellence, which is vastly superior to Michael Porter's book of the same name. |
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Oliver (MSL quote), Switzerland
<2007-01-11 00:00>
Take a basic system (i.e. your company), with an input and an output. This system is able to only take in a certain input or is only able to produce a certain output. Say now, that this system could be a lot more productive and indeed provide a much higher output than it would usually. You jusst don't know how to do it.
This book tells you how to, by providing ways to increase your output by 2,000 percent. In fact, if you use the techniques mentionned, you can increase your ouput by a lot more than a mere 2,000 percent.
The authors offer ways to increase your output, by making your organisation more efficient and by making the reader realise, that a lot of its inefficy starts in the minds of the people that work the organisation. Written in two parts, the first part analyses how and why companies are inefficient and the second part introduces the reader to a way by which the same company can eliminate its weaknesses by turning them into advantages: a 2,000 percent solution.
The principle of this solution is simple: either the input is decreased by factor 20 (whilst keeping the output at the same level) or the inverse (i.e. input stays the same, whist you manage to increase your output by factor 20) happens, or indeed a combination of the two.
I can recommend it to anybody running an organisation and wanting to increase its performance. The book is written in a very simple and straight-forward style, using a lot of interesting and well chosen examples, and is thus very accessible to anybody. I would even go as far as to saying that you could apply the ideas, the stallbusters, to yourself and increase your output at you work or in your life. I have created a 2'000 percent solution for a local company and can confirm that it works with an amazing success. Read it and find out for yourself!
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Singe Dayhoff (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
This psychologically astute how-to business book is more than a com- pendium of clever, useful, well-grounded methods to reverse unprofitable people situations (stalls). It is also a beautifully-written book that is a delight to read. It is a cross between A Kick in the Seat of the Pants and anything by Peter Drucker. Peppered with Rorschach-like drawings to jump-start a manager's creative problem-solving juices and expand her/his decision-making perspective, the book presents diverse, innovative, on- point, in-depth examples of proven methods to reverse stalls (stallbusters). What do "Tinkers to Evers to Chance," Tiger Woods, stand-up desks, and Grey Poupon have in common? Find out. But you don't have to be a manager to benefit from this book. The extra added bonus is that its principles and methods are universally applicable to our interactions with others in all aspects of our lives. But if you are a bottom-line conscious business person, The 2,000 Percent Solution is an absolute must-read. |
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1 2 Total 2 pages 19 items |
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