Seduced by Success: How the Best Companies Survive the 9 Traps of Winning

By Robert J. Herbold and Robert J. Herbold

Robert Herbold reveals the nine success traps that managers must avoid - from allowing a brand to get stale and losing agility to permitting subpar performance and letting processes run the business. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0071481834
• ISBN13: 9780071481830
• Release Date: March 2007
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.1" x 0.9" x 6.2"

Customer Reviews

Seduced by Success Review

Robert Herbold once again demonstrates his understanding business leadership in Seduced by Success. The former COO of Microsoft and VP of Marketing from P & G reveals the pitfalls of success and what businesses need in order to stay great. Success can be blinding. General Motors, Kodak and IBM are examples of top companies that embraced their hubris nature and paid the price of complacency. The nine biggest success traps include: Neglect: Sticking with yesterday's business model Pride: Letting products and services become second rate Boredom: Clinging to your once successful branding Complexity: Letting processes run the business Bloat: Losing agility Mediocrity: Allowing sub par performance to persist Lethargy: Nurturing a retirement home culture Timidity: Permitting turf battles and infighting Vagueness: Schizophrenic communication

Herbold does it again

Bob Herbold's "Seduced by Success" is a very intesting read packed with practical lessons for any business person. Lots of well researched stories of once successful companies who became testimony to the old Biblical adage that "Pride comes before the fall." Robert C. Wallace, CEO, Wallace Properties, Inc.

There's a paradox inside this paradigm shift

To me, one of the most interesting paradigm shifts involves a paradox: at a time when change is the only constant, precisely the same elements which result in a given company's success can often be the causes of its subsequent decline. That seems to be the core concept in this book in which Robert J. Herbold explains "how the best companies survive the 9 traps of winning." Conversely, many other of the best companies (however "best" may be defined) do not. The traps that Herbold identifies and examines are among the usual suspects whenever a company goes (invoking Jim Collins' terms) "from great to good" or "from good to mediocre": 1. Sticking with yesterday's business model 2. Allowing your products [or services] to become outdated 3. Clinging to your once-successful branding after it becomes stale and dull 4. Ignoring your business processes as they become cumbersome ands complicated 5. Rationalizing your loss of speed and agility 6. Condoning poor performance and letting your star employees languish 7. Getting lulled into a culture of comfort, casualness, and confidence 8. Not confronting turf wars, infighting, and obstructionists 9. Unwittingly providing schizophrenic communications Of course, falling into and then remaining in any one of these "traps" can have serious, perhaps even fatal consequences. Moreover, failing companies are usually caught in several (if not most) of the nine. Finally, even if a given company escapes from one or more of them, there is no guarantee that it will not falling into one or more later. Hence a variation on the aforementioned paradox: Precisely the same elements which enable a given company to survive or to go "from mediocre to good" can often be the causes of its decline again. Although all of the companies that Herbold discusses are major corporations (e.g. General Motors, Toyota, IBM, Sony, Wal-Mart and Microsoft), all organizations (including non-profits) can fall into one or more of the nine traps. Brilliantly, Herbold explains how to survive them or avoid them by understanding how others have survived them. To his credit, Herbold spends far less time on the "what" than he does on the "how" and "why" of doing so. Each of his key insights is anchored within a real-world context. For example: How Toyota avoided "legacy" thinking and behavior How IBM "tackles its vulnerabilities" How Wal-Mart uses reapplication effectively How Microsoft makes "well-analyzed big bets" How Procter & Gamble stays relevant How at Hewlett-Packard, "the key to speed and agility is leadership" It remains for each reader to absorb and digest the material in this book, conduct a rigorous and thorough evaluation of her is his company's major vulnerabilities, select strategies and tactics from among those Herbold recommends, and then with appropriate modification, apply them to the specific needs of the given company. In Chapter 29, Herbold concludes his narrative by examining the Apple culture within which "resting on your

Well researched and insightful book. I highly recommend it!!!

This is a very well researched and insightful book. I highly recommend it. The author, who was Microsoft's COO for 7 years in the mid-late 1990's, analyzes 44 different companies, digging into whether they were able to sustain success. The reader learns why companies like Kodak, Sony, GM, and many others have had so much trouble remaining successful, while companies liked Toyota, Starbucks, P & G, and Fidelity Investments have been capable of sustaining their success. The author also reviews some companies, like Porsche, Harley Davidson, Apple, and Harrah's, that were successful, fell into some of the traps that success generates, and then fixed their problems and recovered. These rich and detailed examples are really fun to read, because there are tons of quotes from the business press on what was going on in these companies. The basis of this book is a powerful and very important observation by the author: "Success is a huge business vulnerability. It can destroy and organization's or an individual's ability to understand the need for change and can also destroy the motivation to creatively attack the status quo." He then goes on to explain the three human behaviors that cause this to happen and the nine business traps these behaviors generate. For each of the traps, several examples of specific companies are analyzed, and key lessons are emphasized. Reading this book is like taking a terrific leadership and management course. It is powerful.