Thirty-one Amazon customers loved Kiss Theory Good Bye: Five Proven Ways to Get Extraordinary Results in Any Company
Prosen set out to provide answers and tools to help business leaders overcome barriers to success. Drawing on 25 years of consulting experience, and on the self-ratings of some 66 leaders, Prosen claims to have found five crippling habits that prevent success and five attributes of successful organizations.
Unless you just crawled out of a cave (sorry Geico), you already know what it takes to succeed:
- Superior leadership
- Sales effectiveness
- Operational excellence
- Financial management
- Customer loyalty.
You need to read many books, watch many leaders in action, and try many things yourself to really understand each of these. Prosen devotes between 14 and 24 pages to each one. That's just not enough to give you any new insights or ideas.
If I were you, I'd turn to these books instead:
For general leadership insight, look to Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters to Get Things Right
(reviewed here) and 12: The Elements of Great Managing
(summarized in my e-book here).
For sales effectiveness, turn to Strategic Customer Care: An Evolutionary Approach to Increasing Customer Value and Profitability
and Delivering Profitable Value : A Revolutionary Framework to Accelerate Growth, Generate Wealth, and Rediscover the Heart of Business.
For operational excellence, your focus should be on increasing value-adding activities and eliminating non-value-adding activities. (This isn't the same as Prosen's cost-control focus.)
Here I recommend two books that explain Lean thinking: Lean Thinking : Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated and The Toyota Way Fieldbook.
The best source on financial management I've read is Financial Intelligence: A Manager's Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean (my review is here).
For customer loyalty, you can't go wrong if you pick up Lean Solutions: How Companies and Customers Can Create Value and Wealth Together
