Book Review: Mastering the Rockefeller Habits
Posted on January 19th, 2008 by Paul McArdle – 1 Comment.
This book review was one of 3 book reviews I presented in our first shareholder’s meeting of 2008 (back in 19th January 2008). Hence, I have used artistic licence with the post date to put this into context.
Binary Review
Certainly worth the read:
|
The Book |
What we thought |
 “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits” by Verne Harnish |
 Not the best book I have ever read, but still worth a read |
| Full Disclosure – yes, that’s a tracked link to Amazon shown above. We buy quite a large number of books on a wide range of topics, all relevant to our business in some way. If you did happen to purchase the book from Amazon, they’d throw a few shekels our way, which would help us to buy (and hence publish reviews of) even more books. Hence, Karma would return the benefits to you… |
This book is one of the more useful ones I have read (obviously it must have been, if I discussed the lessons learnt from it during a shareholder’s meeting).
The core points in the book:
The book says that there are basically 3 fundamentals:
Fundamental #1) We need to identify what our #1 priority should be (in terms of business performance improvement) and focus on that one:
(a) The author related the story of Tiger Woods taking time out to re-inventing his golf swing – as a way of making the point that the priority should generally be the one that hurts the most.
(b) The author notes that the challenge normally fits into one of the following 7 categories:
1 – we’re not big enough
2 – we’re lacking a key player
3 – our economic engine is broken
4 – someone else is controlling our destiny
5 – we need a war chest to compete
6 – we can’t raise money until we grow
7 – we’ve got to scale back, or we won’t survive.
Fundamental #2) About data:
(a) Critical numbers (are focused on your short-term goal)
(b) Smart numbers (are focused on our long-term goal)
Fundamental #3) The book basically says there is not much point planning for an in-between horizon. It basically suggests to:
(a) Have a regular strategic planning session. For a normal company, this might be annual, but for fast-growing these sessions might be quarterly.
(b) Break the targets down and then have weekly meetings to focus on how we’re implementing the plan for the current year (or quarter) – with a focus on a single issue each week.
Can’t really do the book justice in this short summary, though.
[...] This is not dissimilar to the concepts espoused in “The Rockefeller Habits” about there not being too much point in making detailed plans for an in…. [...]