Introduction There's gold in them thar hills. -- Forty-Niner Expression Have you ever fallen behind the competition? Wondered why great opportunities for your organization remain untapped? Wanted to add new strengths to your organization, but could not? Grown frustrated by persistent problems that have been around for decades in your company? If so, this is the book for you. It focuses on the bad habits, what we call "stalls," that cause these problems and tells how to overcome them. Whether you are a leader, problem solver, trainer, or educator, you will find answers in The 2,000 Percent Solution. What Is Stallbusting? Weigh Your Choices Consciously Where It Counts Learning not to give in to stalls creates the opposite result. The potential for progress, personal and professional, can be astonishing when we apply better habits of thinking. With conscious thought to challenge our habits, we can eliminate stalled thinking and move on to opportunities that have major payoffs, opportunities that our habits have been steering us away from. What Is a 2,000 Percent Solution? Shoot for the Moon When It Counts We often do a task the way we always have even though a vastly better alternative is available to us. And often that better way is a 2,000 percent solution. For example, a semiconductor manufacturer spends seven months designing its own chips. But a supplier can design the chips more than twenty times faster, in less than ten days. This is an enormous benefit to the manufacturer because having new products available to its customers sooner is worth millions in extra sales and profits. Using the outside supplier here is a 2,000 percent solution, which simply means creating twenty times more benefit or doing something twenty times faster than the manufacturer's normal, 100 percent solution. In this example, the outsourcing alternative is both twenty times (2,000 percent) more beneficial and faster for the semiconductor manufacturer. What Is the Key to Exponential Success? Focus Like a Laser The basic problem that every organization faces is how to decide what to pay attention to and what to spurn. As a culture, we suffer from information overload. At any particular moment, individuals and organizations automatically ignore 99 percent of the data that are being sensed. It is a curious fact that the information we need is always out there somewhere, but mind-set stalls cause us to ignore or dismiss the pertinent information needed for the 2,000 percent solution. By reading The 2,000 Percent Solution, you will learn the stallbuster's approach to uncovering the major opportunities being delayed unnecessarily by stalled thinking, and thus discover the key to exponential success. Chapters 1 through 8 include organizational and personal examples and sample solutions that you will be able to use to explain to others in your organization what its problems are, what stalls are, and how you can overcome them. Each chapter can be read as a stand-alone essay and also includes stallbusters, or action guides, at the end to help you apply the lessons to your organization. First review the chapters applicable to your own important issues. Then visit the other chapters for additional ingrained stalls that you may not yet perceive. Part Two presents an eight-step process that lays out an even better way to overcome the obstacles and caused by stalls and to solve these problems to the 2,000 percent level by establishing a new set of habits built around asking and answering new and better questions. The easiest way to retrain the mind is to teach it to ask better questions and in the right order, and to develop skill in answering the same questions over and over again, like an athlete practicing his or her sport daily. By repeating the process, you can build your organization's skill at bypassing stalls. Although the chapters in Part Two can be read and used as individual essays too, you will get more out of the section if you read and use Chapters 9 through 16 together. The ideas build on each other to take you to a more valuable result, in the same way that the stories of a building take you to a higher elevation and a better view. Each chapter also has an action guide, called Stallbusters. The Epilogue provides a brief case history of how one company used several elements of the stall-busting approach to cut costs, double its market share, and make many of its shareholders wealthy. 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.