Think Big Act Small

Free Coaching Resources - Book Reviews

Jason Jennings. Think Big Act Small: How America?s Best Performing Companies Keep The Start-Up Spirit Alive, Penguin Group, New York New York, 2005 ISBN 1-59184-076-7

Reviewed by Matt M. Starcevich, Ph.D.

A practical, how-to book on building and maintaining a successful organization. The authors evaluated 70,000 companies from which 9 were selected as having increased their revenue and profits by at least 10% for ten years or longer. The ?Best Performing Companies? were:

- Cabela's

- Dot foods

- Koch Industries

- Medline Industries

- O'Reilly Automotive

- PetCo Animal Supplies

- SAS Institute

- Sonic Dirve-In

- Strayer Education

These 9 companies are among the top one-hundredth of 1% of all U.S. companies

Based on extensive study and interviews with the CEO?s of these organizations they distilled out the following 9 building blocks that these Best Performing Companies had in common.

Building Block 1?Down to Earth? The CEO?s are very humble people leading and managing equally humble enterprises?just a regular guy/gal?absolute genuineness and self-effacing personalities?egos are just not relevant at these companies.

Building Block 2?Keep your Hands Dirty. Leaders get in the trenches and stay there with employees, customers, and vendors.

Building Block 3?Make short term goals and long term horizons. A noted absence of inflexible long-term plans in these organizations.

Building Block 4?Let go. If something isn?t working, fix it, and if it can?t be fixed, then get rid of it.

Building Block 5?Have everyone think and act like an Owner

Building Block 6?Invent new businesses. It is not the strongest of the species that survive, or the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.

Building Block 7?Create Win-Win solutions. Take the adversarial sting out of sales?diagnosing the real needs of customers and craft win-win solutions.

Building Block 8?Choose your competitors

Building block 9?Build Communities of workers, customers and fans, make everyone an owner, hire right if they don?t fit you don?t want them even if they are high producers.

This overview should wet your appetite to buy this book, study and emulate the lesions contained, I highly recommend and endorse the findings.

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