The Breakthrough Company: How Everyday Companies Become Extraordinary Performers

by Keith R. Mcfarland

Book Overview

McFarland successfully tackles the ever-present question for ambitious entrepreneurs: just how do you go from small to big--and prosper?--Steve Forbes.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307352188
• ISBN13: 9780307352187
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: Crown Business
• Length: 271 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Perfect!

This book is a must read for anyone that is truly committed to taking an already successful company to the next level. By focusing on companies like fastenal, Polaris, and intuit mcfarland shows us how ordinary companies CANachieve "breakthrough" status. Mcfarland's book and subsequent Rapid Enterprise Development has given our company the focus and alignment that we need to take our company to the next level. A must read!

The Good to Great book for small businesses

Breakthrough Companies is a great book that is the "Good to Great" book for small businesses. It talks about how small businesses became breakthrough companies by taking actions. I highly recommend this book Here are the major things Keith talks about in his book Crowning the company Build something bigger than themselves. A Breakthrough company worries first about the company before any one person. They use the following table to show the differences Upping the Ante Breakthrough companies are willing to place big bets on investments that can over time tip the odds in a company's favor. Like poker they need to focus on (i) Understanding the game (ii) Calculating the odds (iii) Understanding his competitors (iv) Understanding himself and his company Building Company Character Great quotes used in the book "A man's character is his fate" - Heraclitus " People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character" - Ralph Waldo Emerson A company's view of people is an unmistakable reflection of its organization character. If it sees people as selfish, lazy, and unmotivated - that's the kind of people it will attract. If it believes in the potential of people to do great things, and has competent leadership, its people will rise to the occasion. Breakthrough companies pride themselves on finding ways to cut costs in areas that don't matter much, but generously ladle resources into areas they know will give them an edge. Breakthrough companies are built on a bedrock of company character. Values refer to what people in a company purport to believe, while character refers to how people in an organization really operate All breakthrough companies followed the following characteristics (i) Give folks a fair deal (ii) Believe in people (iii) Be strategic miser (iv) Make your word count Navigating the business Bermuda triangle Small companies, by virtue of their size, often have three major advantages. As a company grows, it must transform the characteristics that gave it its small-company edge into sustaining advantages. By definition, small companies tend to be lean, nimble, and close to the customer. The question is how to sustain these advantages and build on them as they grow? Breakthrough companies eventually transition from "save the customer" organizational heroics to robust systems designed to constantly monitor and enhance the value they are providing their customers. Four key "compass headings" for navigating this transformation (i) Understand that to build in structural cost advantages, you often have to spend some money. (ii) Avoid premature diversification of product lines: Companies often move on to the next product before fully mastering the ones they've already got. (iii) When it's time to diversify products or markets, let your customers be your guide (iv) Nothing kills speed, hurts customer satisfaction, and erodes a cost advantage faster than unnecessary layers of management

A True Differentiator

Keith is a man who can tell a story. Unlike other books which seem to lecture, The Breakthrough Company moves with the ease of an easy tale. Keith paints pictures and uses concrete examples which put one in the shoes of the entrepreneur and make us empathetic to their challanges. An interesting and wonderful read. You will find yourself paraphrasing or quoting from this book in the future.

Leadership Lessons for Continuing Business Model Innovators Among Smaller Companies

The Breakthrough Company does for smaller businesses that want to improve growth and profitability what Good to Great did for larger businesses. Keith R. McFarland has mostly duplicated the Good to Great research methodology except to look at those companies which have broken-out among smaller firms. Like Good to Great, The Breakthrough Company focuses on leadership style and company culture. A number of the findings seemed no different from Good to Great, but different titles were used in this book. The book suggests six fundamental transitions: 1. From having the leader be sovereign to putting the company's development ahead of the leader's interests. 2. Rather than making incremental improvements in response to market changes, make a few large bets that offer huge potential rewards. 3. Instead of having the company's culture be determined by whoever is there, build a company around an integrity-filled commitment to doing a good job. 4. Go from succeeding by being small and agile to succeeding because of proprietary advantages you develop. 5. Stop relying solely on internal ideas by getting help from wherever you can. 6. Encourage people internally to challenge assumptions in constructive ways rather than blindly following a narrow vision. If you like your information compact, each chapter is summarized in detail at the end. You could get an overview of the book that way in about 30 minutes and decide if you want to read more. So what is he really describing? To me, it all sounded like continuing business model innovation . . . an area I've studied and written about for 30 years. Yet, the book doesn't describe the business model innovation literature. That's the biggest surprise and missing element. I thought that the cases were mostly pretty interesting, but some are presented in such a fragmentary way that I didn't really get a sense out of what made their performance special in the market place. The ones that I didn't get enough of a feeling for included Chico's FAS, Express Personnel, and The Staubach Company. Intuit, Polaris, and Paychex are the best described cases. I also would have liked to have seen a comparison between these companies and the Good to Great Companies. That would have made it more obvious how the smaller companies face different issues and challenges than the larger ones. If you like case studies of top performers, you'll like this book. Take a look.

An exceptional and crisp business book

The Breakthrough Company: How Everyday Companies Become Extraordinary Performers by Keith R. Mcfarland Keith McFarland's The Breakthrough Company, is an astute analysis of what makes the difference between companies that become stars and the `also-rans' we never hear about. Based on solid field-research, this book is already ranked as a best seller by the Wall Street Journal. The spirit and style of writing kept my attention. Keith, a one-time Associate Dean in the Pepperdine School of Business and Management, had a reputation for easily establishing rapport and trust. He does this with the reader. McFarland does not take a `flavor of the month' approach to leadership. The book is based on a five-year study of some 7,000 growth companies. While every page conveys important information, the tone is like a candid conversation over a cup of coffee. I appreciated the well chosen and insightful vignettes which compared two companies with very similar beginnings, in which one became an exceptional performer and the other just survived. One example that is worth the price of the book is the story of how the executives at Intuit bested Microsoft in the small business accounting market. In another vignette, one might wonder how two companies in the same business located a few hours drive apart could have such different performance records. From his face-to-face interviews and careful analysis, McFarland `teases-out' the critical factors. McFarland's chapter on `Building Company Character' caused me to rethink my understanding of corporate culture. The Breakthrough Company does not claim to be about leadership or ethics, but it is. There is no special section on ethics. The author's discussion of the roots of the word `charisma' is inspiring! He is not referring to the glitter-based charisma of celebrities. Drawing on the writing of the early twentieth-century sociologist Max Weber, charisma is "a devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism, or exemplary character of an individual person." Then McFarland writes "character is sacred." It was at this point half-way through the book that I decided to make it a required reading for all of my MBA students. "Character cannot be faked." He writes that the one characteristic common to all the breakthrough CEOs studied was charisma. "Charismatic leaders inspire us with their character." A very full index and extensive reference notes will satisfy the academic reader. That McFarland conveniently provides a summary of key ideas at the end of chapters will help my students! I am recommending this book to my executive clients and friends.