Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

After many years in which most of the bestselling business books focused on strategy, in the past couple of years we’ve seen some crackerjack titles focused on the nuts and bolts of execution. The prime example of this — as its title and sky-high sales figures would suggest — is Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. I haven’t read the book myself*, but it has earned broad currency in the business world for its nuts-and-bolts focus on how to get things done in the business world. As a long-time consultant to some of the world’s top companies, Charan is an acute student of business phenomena; Bossidy earned his stripes in decades as an operations whiz at General Electric before taking the reins at AlliedSignal (which later merged into Honeywell, which Bossidy also ran).

These men and their book have now been joined by James Kilts, former top executive at Kraft, Nabisco, and most famously Gillette (now part of Procter & Gamble), and his book Doing What Matters. I particularly like this Wall Street Journal review of the book, which kicks off with this quote from Harold Geneen, who built ITT to the peak of its glory in the 1960s and 1970s:

“In business, words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises, but only performance is reality.”

Amen, brother. As the review points out, when Kilts took the top job at Gillette, “People were being rewarded for effort; performance, under Mr. Kilts’s regime, became the new measure.” This is too often the case throughout corporate America, and while books alone can’t solve the problem (”words are words”), good books like these can help.

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* I should say I haven’t read it yet: this is something I keep planning to do . . . but haven’t, uh, executed.