Six Disciplines® Execution Revolution: Solving the One Business Problem That Makes Solving All Other Problems Easier
November 28th, 2009 | 
Author: 
- ISBN13: 9780981641102
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Product Description
With all of the pressures successful business leaders have today, none is more urgent or challenging than learning the ability to execute strategy. While larger businesses have the luxury of budgets and resources to meet this challenge, it’s the small and midsized businesses that now have a tremendous opportunity to level the playing field, leapfrog the expensive, outdated approaches of the past, and attack the challenge of execution in a revolutionary way. The key… More >>
Posted in Strategic Business Planning | 
Tags: Budgets, Business, Business Problem, Disciplines®, Easier, Execution, Leapfrog, Makes, Midsized Businesses, Opportunity, Problem, Problem Solving, Problems, Product Description, Remainder Mark, Revolution, Shipping Prices, Six Disciplines, Solving, Successful Business Leaders
This book seemed like one or two good ideas filled out into lots of pages. Repeated graphics – non engaging writing. I’m sure the author may have brilliant ideas – but the manner in which he conveys them doesnt make for an exciting read. I couldn’t get through it. Take my review of actual content and theory for granted – but if you want an easy read where you’ll learn some solid business advice. This isnt the place.
Rating: 2 / 5
In my book, Mastering The Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Non-profit, I urge leaders and managers to “Avoid Management-by-Bestseller Syndrome.” That’s why this book gets my high-five rating. It fits with my Management Buckets system–and it’s all about execution. As Peter Drucker said, “Vision without execution is delusion.” Plus, the author’s recommended books (in the resource section) give you a synergistic context. The book won’t take you off-course. It’s a complementary tool to help you walk the next steps.
“The first premise of this book is that what most business leaders think is their greatest challenge really isn’t,” says Harpst, who implemented more than 60,000 business management systems. “In most of my 20-year tenure as CEO of Solomon Software, I was in react mode, moving from one crisis to the next.” So he makes the analysis simple with four quadrants focused on strong or weak strategy, coupled with strong or weak execution. The four quadrants: 1) growth wave, 2) fire-fighting, 3) profit wave, and 4) balanced and predictable.
It’s all about getting to his quadrant of excellence: balanced and predictable. “This sounds easy,” he writes, “but most organizations don’t have the framework, the will, or the persistence to make the hard choices it requires.” He adds, “Sustainable excellence isn’t possible unless an organization learns to systemically increase its capability to execute, and to do so faster than the rate at which its challenges are growing. It’s ironic that the better an organization executes today, the bigger its challenges will be tomorrow.” (Been there, done that, right?)
I appreciate his comment that excellence is “the enduring pursuit of balanced strategy and execution.” Harpst also reminds us that excellence is the “journey that never ends.” I agree.
Rating: 5 / 5
I really enjoyed this book. I purchased several copies and gave them out to customers as gifts for the holidays. If you are looking for a book that gives you a formula and helps you put together a strategy and keep on task with that strategy, then this is for you. With execution of any strategy, losing focus is the main issue. This will keep you on track, and focused.
Rating: 5 / 5
How does one make their particular business excel past all their competitors? “Six Disciplines Execution Revolution: Solving the One Business Problem That Makes Solving All Other Problems Easier” is a thoroughly ‘user friendly’ and practical guide to help business owners answer that very question. Promoting ‘The Excellence Business Model’, which pushes balanced strategy and execution, successful entrepreneur and author Gary Harpst helps new business owners deal with anticipated and unexpected challenges as they occur and how they to avoid failure before such difficulties become an insurmountable problem. “Six Disciplines Execution Revolution” is a excellent pick for anyone looking to make their business venture an enduring success.
Rating: 5 / 5
The principles for success in business are not unlike the principles that support and create success in many of life’s endeavors. What Gary Harpst has tapped into, and what makes this book and the ideas behind it so unique, in comparison to others like it, is the bringing of a real world, dynamic involvment in everything that works its way toward effective strategy and “execution”.
I have told people that the closest analogy I can come up with, to sum up my experience with Six Disciplines, is to reference a comparison of Bruce Lee to a classical Karate instructor. — Where the Karate instructor would measure his talent by his ability to perform and display increasingly complex and difficult techniques, Bruce Lee would excel at becoming amazingly effective in the very simplist and most direct of movements. Bruce Lee was all about stripping away what is useless and absorbing what is useful and so, it seems, is Six Disciplines. The magic formula for success in Lee’s makeup was his unwavering commitment to striving for excellence in the simple things that many other’s tend to shrug off and take for granted as they search for the pursuit of excellence in complexity. That and Lee was a superb example of success through well balanced strategy and execution.
There’s a vast amount of knowledge behind the scenes in this book and the good part is that Gary Harpst has managed to harvest the fruits of so much labor for all of us to benefit from, and in a way that can transform “pretty good” into “Great!”
Rating: 5 / 5