Beat the Odds: Avoid Corporate Death and Build a Resilient Enterprise

Beat the Odds fills a crucial void in the current business literature. It clearly illustrates why great organizations slip from leader to follower to road-kill, and how organizations can Beat the Odds and avoid this fate. This is a concise must-read for senior executives, and for any manager interested in seeing his or her organization avoid corporate death and build for the future.Over the past 10 years, there have been more than 600,000 business bankruptcies in the United States. Research findings confirm that the odds are very slim for any organization to survive more than a few decades. Many books that purport to offer secrets of business success only study companies that are currently successful. Other books provide pieces that don't fit together to solve the puzzle in real-world practice. Beat the Odds evolved from a study of a broad pool of companies across a wide spectrum of performance over an extended period of time. The book presents a tested and comprehensive nine-part framework for understanding, building and ensuring long-term organizational success through the ups and downs of business cycles, competitive cycles and management cycles. Supported by real case studies, each of the nine framework elements includes a clear description of the underlying principles pertaining to both successful and dysfunctional behaviors. The assessment and diagnostic tools provided in this book are designed to give managers deep insights into their firm's underlying challenges and for performing their own gap analysis of where they are now, versus where they should be. It also features the factual basis for corrective action and prescriptive steps for immediate deployment of this framework.Key FeaturesPresents a tested and refined nine-part integrated and practical framework for understanding, building, and ensuring organizational success, regardless of changing economic, financial, regulatory and technology factorsIllustrates the validity, power, and value of the nine principles using numerous real examples, and shows the toxic effects of ignoring the principlesFeatures three "inside stories" (case studies) that illustrate how energized and aligned leadership teams can harness the framework to secure their organizations' long-term successProvides prescriptive steps for immediate deployment of this framework and its underlying principlesIncludes mini-case studies for readers to gain practice using the diagnostic tools and to test their understanding of the framework before applying it to their own organization