About the Book
Moneymakers, that rare breed of business manager who consistently creates value, are the leaders whom investors seek to invest alongside and employees strive to work with. Their organizations excel because of them.
Over the years, as Anne-Marie Fink has studied these extraordinary managers and compared notes with her colleagues, she realized that the “rules” these moneymakers followed differ significantly from the “best practices” of management strategy and leadership. Yet these rules have regularly provided an edge to improve the performance, productivity, and profitability of businesses and to advance careers. They apply equally to CEOs and people entering the management ranks for the first time.
Illustrated throughout the book with firsthand, insider stories, these fresh but proven approaches to business success include:
- Shrink to grow. Why expanding a bad (low-return) business means you just have more of a problem, and how a step backward is often the best way forward.
- Good performance requires inefficiency and duplication. How maximum efficiency produces suboptimal results by stifling innovation.
- Don’t be a customer fanatic. When to listen to and when to ignore your customers. Customers don’t know your business, and what you should deliver, as well as you do.
- Economics always trumps management. Ignore bedrock economic laws – such as supply and demand – at your peril; it is akin to ordering the tides to stay in place.
- Business forecasts are as reliable as weather predictions. Planning too far into the future raises risk and lowers rewards. How to position yourself for the future to come to you, rather than actively pursue it.
- Why happy employees don’t make for high-performance workplaces.
- Simplify by focusing on whether or not your business makes an economic profit. Follow the money to know what is important and what is time-consuming details.
- Problems in business are like cockroaches – there’s never just one. How to catch problems before they infest your business
- Avoid the trap of profitless growth. Additional profit is an illusion if it consumes too much capital
- Megatrends start as ripples. How to position your business to ride long-term waves, not be swamped by them
- Don’t delay performance gratification since we’re all dead in the long run. Most bold transformations base their hopes on some mythic future. Go for them with incremental steps that bring home the bacon today.