The Why! Company

   Good to Great - Jim Collins

Five years ago, Jim Collins asked the question, "Can a good company become a great company and if so, how?" In Good to Great Collins, the author of Built to Last, concludes that it is possible, but finds there are no silver bullets. Collins and his team of researchers began their quest by sorting through a list of 1,435 companies, looking for those that made substantial improvements in their performance over time. They finally settled on 11--including Fannie Mae, Gillette, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo--and discovered common traits that challenged many of the conventional notions of corporate success. Making the transition from good to great doesn't require a high-profile CEO, the latest technology, innovative change management, or even a fine-tuned business strategy. At the heart of those rare and truly great companies was a corporate culture that rigorously found and promoted disciplined people to think and act in a disciplined manner.

   Built to Last - Jim Collins

What makes a visionary company? This book, written by a team from Stanford's Graduate School of Business, compares what the authors have identified as "visionary" companies with selected companies in the same industry. The authors juxtapose Disney and Columbia Pictures, Ford and General Motors, Motorola and Zenith, and Hewlett-Packard and Texas Instruments, to name a few. The visionary companies, the authors found out, had a number of common characteristics; for instance, almost all had some type of core ideology that guided the company in times of upheaval and served as a constant bench mark. Not all the visionary companies were founded by visionary leaders, however. On the whole, this is an intriguing book that occasionally provides rare and interesting glimpses into the inner workings and philosophical foundations of successful businesses.

   The Fifth Discipline - Peter M. Senge

Peter Senge, founder of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT's Sloan School of Management, experienced an epiphany while meditating one morning back in the fall of 1987. That was the day he first saw the possibilities of a "learning organization" that used "systems thinking" as the primary tenet of a revolutionary management philosophy.

Using ideas that originate in fields from science to spirituality, Senge explains why the learning organization matters, provides an unvarnished summary of his management principals, offers some basic tools for practicing it, and shows what it's like to operate under this system.

   Principle Centered Leadership - Stephen R. Covey

The great "angst" of life has seemingly gripped us all, and there seems to be no limit to the number of writers offering answers to the great perplexities of life. Covey, however, is the North Star in this field. Following his successful Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (S. & S., 1989), Covey now responds to the particular challenges of business leaders by applying his natural laws, or principles, of life to organizations. Covey explains these laws (security, guidance, wisdom, and power), and discusses how seven-habits practice and focus on these principles will result in personal and organizational transformation. He reminds us that personal and organizational success is hard work, requires unwavering commitment and long-term perspective, and is achievable only if we are prepared for a complete paradigm shift in our perspective.