Breakthrough: How Great Companies Set Outrageous Objectives and Achieve Them Hardback - 2003 - 1st Edition

Breakthrough is a fact-based, practical guide that helps business leaders keep their success cycles turning with constant business innovation. Based on a landmark ten-year study of more than seventy bold, breakthrough companies-such as IBM, Countrywide, and American Standard-this book shows how the world's best companies stay on top. The secret these high-performing companies share: challenging themselves to achieve goals that seem unreasonable.

Breakthrough shows business leaders how to develop business goals that seem outrageous, and then foster the cutting-edge thinking, the focused effort, and the teamwork to achieve breakthrough results. Leaders of breakthrough companies do things differently: they develop master plans that integrate every area of the company and they understand their organization's core identity. Breakthrough requires more than just good ideas or extra effort-it comes from practical, real-world steps that lead to unbelievable results.

This book describes all the ways breakthrough companies separate themselves from their rivals, including:

• Starting and managing the success cycle
• Focusing on a single core strategy
• Understanding competitive realities and opportunities
• Innovating at the core of the company
• Following a framework for transformation
• Embracing program management techniques
• Tying employee compensation to transformation strategies
• Communicating effectively

Packed with case studies and revealing data, Breakthrough combines proven advice for aspiring leaders with practical strategies for effective business innovation. For market leaders and insurgent companies alike, the key to outrageous success is setting the outrageous goal-and using the power of Breakthrough to achieve it.