Peter Hartcher’s “The Sweet Spot” is a great read for 2012 for everyone who is interested in Australia’s history, politics, recent economic crisis and the future for our country. There is a silver lining!  And reading this book will change the way you think about Australia.

Hartcher writes that while Australia enjoys unprecedented prosperity, security and freedom, this has very little to do with luck, but rather, what transformed Australia from the world’s biggest prison into one of the most desirable countries in which to live was courageous and prudent governance.

I recently read a great article by Jim Collins (Author of Built to Last, Good to Great, and How the Mighty Fall) called “Aligning Action and Values”. For those unfamiliar with Jim Collins (we’ve got a link on our website and a couple of good book reviews) he describes himself as a student and teacher of enduring great companies. Over his 10 years of study he looks at how these ‘enduring great companies’ grow, how they attain superior performance, and how good companies can become great companies.

His books have been a fixture on the Business Week best seller list for more than six years, and have been translated into 29 languages. His work has been featured in Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Harvard Business Review, and Fast Company.

So what is the article all about? Most of us have at least attended one management workshop where the executive team labour over mission statements, vision statements, purpose statements and the like only to find a year later  the process starts all over again. In most cases there is no measurement of the companies success in meeting these values until the next year when the process starts all over again.

Jim clearly defines the word ‘vision’ ( an organisations fundamental reason for existence,  timeless & unchanging core values and aspirations for the future) but goes on to explain that the big difference between an organisation with a vision statement and a truly visionary organisation is the process of creating alignment. When alignment occurs a company’s core values and reason for existence are reinforced but there is an environment that continually stimulates progress towards its aspirations.

Jim states the alignment process comes in two parts – identifying and correcting misalignments and creating new alignments . Identifying misalignments involves a company asking itself what obstacles are getting in the way to achieving its fundamental reason for existence and undermining its core values. Creating new alignments looks at  ways the company can ensure your core values are supported and encouraged and that organisational policies  and practices don’t hinder your very reason the organisation is in business!

I found this article really aligned with the values where hold here at Culture Marketing – its pragmatic, real and usable advice and I recommend a quick read by all regardless of your discipline in the workplace.

Personal and Organizational Development in Entrepreneurial Ventures. Edited by Raymond W. Smilor and Donald L. Sexton. Prepared under the auspices of the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, Inc. 
 

Smilor and Sexton are experts in academia and business.  In Leadership and Entrepreneurship, they focus on successful leaders in high growth companies. They do this through assessing the entrepreneur’s views from a personal and organisational perspective.  

They take us on a journey to ascertain what really makes entrepreneurs tick–especially the successful ones, and how these unique individuals affect organizational development?  

They examine the entrepreneur from a personal, organizational, and multidimensional point of view. In addition, successful entrepreneurs from many different industries and successful organisations are covered; profit and not-for-profit firms, to bring a firmer understanding of the qualities that contribute to successful leadership in growth-oriented firms.  

This book emphasises what entrepreneurs actually do, how they do it, and what can be learned by examining the common themes or concepts that exist in the practice of entrepreneurship. These experts of leadership and entrepreneurship further examine three dimensions: 
 

• Personal Dimension: The Entrepreneur as Leader
• Organization Dimension: Shaping the Entrepreneurial Organization
• Multidimension: Building Valuable Companies

This is a great resource for those running a small business or those managing or leading in an entrepreneurial organisation. The multidimensional approach to entrepreneurship and leadership provides a solid pathway to sustainability. 

Definitely worth a read!

What is a “challenger brand”? Well according to the University of Newcastle, they are companies like, Apple, Virgin, Hertz, Swatch, Body Shop etc. Their ambitions outstrip their available resources. They are always looking for ways to do more with less.  

Challenger brands often challenge the establishment by coming up with innovative products and services and ways to market them. They have a clear sense of themselves and intensely and consistently project their point of view in everything they do. University of Newcastle also goes on to say that Challengers stand out from the competition by their intensity and confidence in themselves. 

Morgan suggests that being a Challenger Brand surrounds eight “credos”. 

• Break with the immediate past 
• Build a lighthouse entity
• Assume thought leadership of the category
• Create symbols of re-evaluation
• Sacrifice
• Overcommit
• Use advertising and publicity as a high-leverage asset
• Become ideas-centred rather than consumer-centred

In Eating the Big Fish, Morgan’s objective is to provide what he calls a “magnetic compass” for Small Fish which will enable them to compete successfully. 

What happens? Certain markets move from maturity to overcapacity and therefore there isn’t enough “food” to go around. The Big Fish threatens to eat the little fish. “The Big Fish is in fact more usefully defined as the central issue facing the growth, transformation, or survival of any given brand. There are 6 basic marketing challenges that Morgan uses to qualify a current brands position. 

Time and again, Morgan stresses the importance of ideas…actually, better ideas. Better ideas are engaging, provocative, and self-propagating. They help to create competitive advantages.  

Morgan implores the business imperative to break with the past: assume nothing, take no one and nothing for granted, and constantly ask “What if?” and “Why not?”.  
 

Morgan says “when people hear the term Challenger they often misconstrue its meaning. Challenger is in fact about a mindset, not a market position. Some of the world’s greatest market leaders have become, and remain, number one by thinking like a number two”. 

A Challenger brand has attitude. It thrives when underestimated. Better yet, when ignored. Big Fish know they are Big Fish. They have a tendency to become arrogant, complacent, and hence vulnerable.    

By breaking with the immediate past, the Small Fish is able to answer several critically important questions:  

• What is the core issue re Big Fish?
• What business are we in now?
• What business should we be in?
• What are our best opportunities?
• How can we implement a Challenger strategy to take full advantage of those opportunities?

Challenger brands should establish and then nourish an emotional rather than rational relationship with consumers. Sustainable customer loyalty, not temporary satisfaction, is the primary objective.  Moreover, there should be intensity in all communications with consumers. Finally, Challenger brands must attract attention to themselves.  

“Challengers need their own models of strategy and behaviour; that are entirely unlike the brand leader in position and resource and, consequently, need to find an entirely different set of rules of engagement.” Morgan explains how to write the Challenger program within Eating the Big Fish. 

The Challenger Program is organized within a four-stage process:

• Attitude & Preparation,
• Challenger Strategy,
• Challenger Behaviour, and
• Sustaining Challenger Momentum.

If there is one book that is a must read in business its, Eating the Big Fish…it is a must read for Small Fish as well as Big Fish. It will provide readers with much needed insight to start “doing things right” with a systematic approach to brand development on any scale.  

For Small Fish, the status quo is death. Period.

I have read many business books, mainly because I have been studying since I was a child! To be honest I find business books hard to read and remain engaged. Can I say how delighted I was when I read Jim Collins “Good to Great”, Publisher: Harper Business; 1 edition (October 16, 2001). There are many, many, many reviews of this book. They all say the same thing. That Good to Great is compelling reading for anyone in business. It is amazing that there are still many in the business world who do not understand the meaning behind Jim Collins work. 

CM recommend this book because: 

•  It is a tool for success for small to large business. No one can afford not to read it. Jim Collins clearly identifies the three critical factors to running a great business of any size.

• He develops a compelling profile of what it takes to be the leader of a great enterprise in the modern day.   I would hasten to guess those leaders you know that are most admired within your organisation may not necessarily possess the appropriate leadership style for sustainable success.

• He demonstrates the building of successful enterprises as a result of ethical behaviour rather than he perceived compromises ethical behaviour brings. This is an especially relevant issue in the current climate of corporate scandals.   
 

The following is adapted from the Barnes & Noble Editor’s Review:  

Summary

Jim Collins begins this book with a startling and counterintuitive claim: “Good is the enemy of great.” We’ve become so conditioned to think of performance as something that develops along evolutionary lines — from poor to good to outstanding — that it takes a minute to grasp the notion that competence can actually inhibit achievement.  

As Collins says, “The vast majority of companies never become great, precisely because the vast majority become quite good — and that is their main problem.”  

Based on an extensive five-year study conducted by Collins and a research team he affectionately refers to as “the Chimps,” Good to Great defines and analyses the practices that allowed 11 companies to make the rare transition from solid to outstanding performance.  

One of the first surprises of the book is the list of companies Collins focuses on. Some of the other revelations in the book concern the lack of correlation between executive compensation and corporate performance; the fact that technology did not in itself engender corporate transformation; and the scant attention that these upward-trending companies paid to such issues as managing change or motivating people.  

Collins’s philosophy is summed up in one noteworthy phrase from the book — “Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice  

The Challenge

Jim Collins’ previous boot, Built to Last, was a defining management study of the nineties. It showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?  

The Study

For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority?

And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

In what Collins terms a prequel to the bestseller Built to Last he wrote with Jerry Porras, this worthwhile effort explores the way good organizations can be turned into ones that produce great, sustained results.  

To find the keys to greatness, Collins’s 21-person research team (at his management research firm) read and coded 6,000 articles, generated more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts and created 384 megabytes of computer data in a five-year project.  

That Collins is able to distil the findings into a cogent, well-argued and instructive guide is a testament to his writing skills. After establishing a definition of a good-to-great transition that involves a 10-year fallow period followed by 15 years of increased profits. Collins’s crew combed through every company that has made the Fortune 500 (approximately 1,400) and found 11 that met their criteria, including Walgreens, Kimberly Clark, and Fannie Mae.  

These companies, often considered to be in “boring” businesses, achieved better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world’s “greatest” companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. To control the data, the research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?  

The Findings

The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:  

Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.

The Hedgehog Concept(Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.

A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results.

Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.

The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.

Some of the key concepts discerned in the study, comments Jim Collins, “fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.  

Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings? For me this is the second essential reading for business owners or business managers….today! 

The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice.

How many times have you seen marketing to culturally diverse groups mere tokenism…the inclusion of a non-anglo-saxon person in a photo shoot is supposed to represent a company’s in depth understanding of their multi-cultural target market. 

Well, an insightful book recommended to me by the Public Relations Institute of Australia ‘Race and Ethnic Relations’ by Dr Farida Tilbury Fozdar provides marketing and communications professionals with some essential tips for engaging culturally and linguistically diverse groups.
There’s a bit of theory that I didn’t really need to read before bed but the key messages are simple and should be re-read often to ensure marketers don’t slip into bad habits of generalizing and stereotyping.  I got hold of the book via the PRIA bookshop, here’s the link.

If you loved Who Moved my Cheese? you will love Peaks and Valleys. I read Who Moved my Cheese? eight years ago and since several times again. How people deal with change fascinates me. Peaks and Valleys is another uncommon common-sense parable set in a leadership context. Key points are recognising lessons, opportunities, and silver linings during bad times … and remaining humble during good times. Great business book on change!

Like in Who Moved My Cheese?, Dr. Johnson developed a short simple story to illustrate the common blocks to moving forward in life. These blocks can be event driven, or they can be triggered by changes in relationships or employment. There are many reasons to feel stuck and maybe even a little bitter. However, we all know that we do not want to stay there! How to get on with it? Read and find out.

At last! A book that understands both sales and marketing functions and how they work with each other and how they differ from each other. The Leaky Funnel is a marketing and sales strategy book that unites those two functions and shows the way for an integrated effort for business success. This book is packed with fresh, key arguments for a major change in the way businesses organise and manage their combined sales and marketing resources.

The central argument, that a new framework is needed for the integrated sales and marketing approach, is based on the author’s 20 years-plus experience, and has now been well proven in many leading businesses as a means of accelerating the effectiveness of their endeavours to earn more customers.

I recommend this book because it provides a practical solution on how to earn more customers by aligning sales and marketing to the way people and businesses buy. It addresses most important issue in any business – how to get sales and marketing working in concert rather than in conflict.

Further, in a useful and highly relevant way the book highlights what needs to change in a company so it can adopt to the modern customer-focused world.

Read more reviews of The Leaky Funnel at http://www.leakyfunnel.com/marketing-book-reviews.html.