How do companies like Microsoft and Wal-Mart rise to the top of their industries and dominate year after year, while others like People Express and LA Gear burn out after promising starts? In Changing the Game, Eric Flamholtz and Yvonne Randle, two leading management consultants, reveal that the key to success lies in how you transform your organization. Virtually all organizations face critical transition points in their life cycle, when they must change how they play the game, or perish. Flamholtz and Randle focus here on three critical moments: the move from entrepreneurial to professional management, when a firm reaches a stage of growth where it can no longer operate in an informal, unstructured way; the revitalization of an established business that is losing ground to competitors; and a radical change in a business vision. The authors show, for instance, how American Century Investors made the transformation from a $50 million entrepreneurship to a professionally managed company with a market value of $2 billion; how IBM, one of the great American corporations, was forced by the proliferation of PCs in the 1980s to overhaul its business to survive; and how Starbucks Coffee, originally a Seattle coffee-bean store, was inspired by Milans romantic coffee bars to recreate itself and transformed an entire industry. The book concludes with a look at how one company--Bell Carter Olive Company--pulled together all the concepts and tools presented in the book and successfully changed the game. Changing the Game provides a comprehensive framework and a set of tools for the strategic management of organizational transformation. It will help managers meet the challenges of an increasingly competitive business environment.

Changing the Game: Organizational Transformations of the First, Second, and Third Kinds

Business & Money

Yvonne Randle

Eric G. Flamholtz

Howard Schultz

Economics

Oxford University Press

Growing Pains: Transitioning from an Entrepreneurship to a Professionally Managed Firm

Management & Leadership

Jossey-Bass

Organizational culture is a quiet, but driving, influence on our perception of a company, whether as a consumer or as an employee. For instance, we know Southwest Airlines as laid back and friendly. We think of Google as innovative. To almost every well-known company we can assign a character. It is now well recognized that corporate culture has a significant impact on organizational health and performance. Yet, the concept of corporate culture and culture management is too often tantalizingly elusive. In this book, Flamholtz and Randle define culture, identifying and explaining the five key dimensions that determine it: a customer orientation; a people orientation; a process orientation; strong standards of performance and accountability; innovation and openness to change. They explain why culture is a critical factor in organizational success and failure―a key determinant of financial performance. Then, they provide a theoretically sound, highly practical, and field-tested method for managing corporate culture―presenting a set of international and domestic cases that show how actual companies have leveraged culture as the ultimate source of sustainable competitive advantage. In addition to well-known companies such as Starbucks, Ritz-Carlton, American Express, IBM, and Toyota, the text presents lesser known culture stars, such as Smartmatic and Infogix. While other titles on culture have focused too heavily on the organization as a psychological being, or on academic studies of culture as a business lever, Corporate Culture draws on empirics to present a go-to, must-read guide for leveraging corporate culture as a source of competitive advantage and as a means of impacting the bottom line.

Corporate Culture: The Ultimate Strategic Asset (Stanford Business Books (Hardcover))

Eric Flamholtz

Business Culture

Stanford University Press

Describes ten common ineffective styles of management and offers guidance on avoiding these styles and becoming psychologically ready to manage people

The Inner Game of Management: How to Make the Transition to a Managerial Role

Amacom Books

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Books by Yvonne Randle