Forward How to Get the Most Value From This Book Unlike most business books, The 2,000 Percent Solution is primarily about what to do differently rather than how to do something better than you do it today. Its purpose is to focus your attention on important tasks that your organization should be, but probably is not, working on now. The book's fundamental premise is that no matter how successful your organization is, it is performing way below its easily achievable potential. If your organization is like most, it is probably functioning below average in many important activities. For example, if yours is a public company, the price of your stock may have grown more slowly than the Standard & Poor's 500 stock average in the last five years--an average that you can easily exceed by adopting actions that stockholders strongly prefer and that make sense for your company. Complacency is the primary reason for this frequent, significant gap between potential and achievement. Here are three reasons why: 1. At best, complacency causes you to be satisfied with far less than your personal and organizational best. If your company is not accelerating its rate of improvement, you are probably resting on your laurels--something that often occurs when compensation and promotion are associated with easy-to-beat budgets. 2. Complacency also keeps you from seeing and acting on your organization's best opportunities. You may achieve gains by measuring costs that involve spending money, but if you neglect to measure what happens when you do not pursue certain large, excellent opportunities, the reduced results may offset the former gains. For example, Walt Disney's accounting records indicate how much it costs to operate its theme parks, but they say nothing about lost profits as a result of not opening more parks or by having allowed another company to develop the Japanese version of Disneyland. 3. At worst, complacency fools you into falling behind others, triggering predictable crises. However, those crises may cause you to act to restore your organization's effectiveness and vitality to a portion of its former competitive level. For example, IBM once dominated the market for all kinds of computers. That dominance slipped, and for years little effective action was taken until profits, cash flow, and the balance sheet were really in trouble. Then the company began to take meaningful action to improve itself under Lou Gerstner's leadership. The 2,000 Percent Solution is easy and fun to read, with many more anecdotes than most books. Hopefully, you will see yourself in the examples. But don't let the anecdotes tempt you to read it as a discussion about how successful companies got that way. Use them as examples of new things you must do, and be encouraged as you see the types of results that can follow from asking the right questions. This book has a serious and important purpose: to make you and your organization vastly more successful by having you ask and answer new questions. The authors are trying to shock you out of your complacency--to get you to think and to act effectively on the basis of these new thoughts--and we ask you four new questions that are critical to your organization's future: 1. Of all the things you do now, how do you know what works for you? 2. Where is complacency costing you the most in light of what you could accomplish? 3. What do you need to know and do that is different from and more successful than what you know and do now? 4. No matter how successful you are in what you do, how can you improve a lot where it will be worth a great deal? Ernest Hemingway's famous novel The Old Man and the Sea (Scribner 1952) can be read from several different perspectives. For some it is merely an adventure story about catching a fish. For others it is also about "mankind versus nature." For still others, the novel is about mankind's indomitable spirit. Similarly, The 2,000 Percent Solution can be read in many different ways, each of them rewarding. There are six ways you can and should read this book to benefit you and your organization. The book offers: 1. Stories of problems that many have found difficult to overcome 2. Stories of solutions to these same problems, located later in the same chapter, called stall erasers 3. "How to" steps to implement solutions for these problems in your organization, at the ends of the chapters, called stallbusters 4. A call to set objectives and plans to achieve well beyond the best of what someone will soon implement as tomorrow's best practice for your key activities 5. A call to go for the maximum result that can be achieved in your most important activities with reasonable risk and resources--always much greater than merely exceeding tomorrow's best practice 6. A way to create economic relations between your organization and your customers, employees, suppliers, partners, shareholders, and the communities in which the organization operates that will create much more effective and affluent results for all these stakeholders To make it easier for you to appreciate and see all the perspectives, you will find a few sentences at the beginning of each chapter that put the material you are about to read into one or more of these perspectives. This material is printed in italics to remind you that they serve as road signs to the meaning of the material that follows. The 2,000 Percent Solution has another important meaning for you and your organization. It contains a new thought process to help you achieve large benefits that can be applied to a broad range of issues, both organizational and personal. In essence, you have an opportunity to adopt a way of thinking that can help you in everything you do. Instead of adding specialized thinking that fragments your organization, The 2,000 Percent Solution will add valuable thinking that will unify and direct your organization into new and more effective ways of operating. Be sure to read the Afterword. In it, you will find a call to action that will focus you on what you must do now. Quotes / Reviews || Excerpt || About Us || Speaking for You || Services || Buy the Book || Master Process || Stall Reports || Newsletter || Job Search || E-Mail a Friend || Contact Us || Mitchell On Tour || 2000 Percent Puns || Home Copyright 1999, 2000 Mitchell and Company Mitchell and Company Developed and maintained by Interactive Media Advertising Group, Inc.