Six Disciplines® Execution Revolution: Solving the One Business Problem That Makes Solving All Other Problems Easier
by Gary Harpst
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List Price: $12.95
Our Price: $3.19
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Manufacturer: Six Disciplines Publishing
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.401
EAN: 9780981641102
Format: Illustrated
ISBN: 0981641105
Label: Six Disciplines Publishing
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Date: 2008-07-01
Publisher: Six Disciplines Publishing
Studio: Six Disciplines Publishing
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Management 101
Comment: "After many years, I've finally come to view excellence as the enduring pursuit of balanced strategy and execution."
Content
Chapter 1: Business Excellence; the author exhibits a fairly nice model of business excellence balancing Strategy and Execution.
Chapter 2: The Biggest Problem in Business; author wrote, with some supporting information, that execution is the biggest problem.
Chapter 3: Why Is It So Difficult?; "Usually, it's easier not to do what we know we should" sums up the chapter.
Chapter 4: The Leapfrog Opportunity; you'll have the leapfrog opportunity if you invest in quality programs, business process best practices, personal productivity tools, business intelligence, strategy formulation, virtual community development, and coaching.
Chapter 5: Requirements for a Next-Generation Program
Chapter 6: The First Complete Strategy Execution; the authors state that the complete strategy execution requires the following four chapters (which are self-explanatory; and the rest are also self-explanatory)
Chapter 7: A Repeatable Methodology
Chapter 8: Accountability Coaching
Chapter 9: An Execution System
Chapter10: Community Learning
Chapter11: Making Solving All Other Problems Easier
Chapter12: An Enduring Pursuit
Read the chapter titles and you'll figure out what the book is about and that's it, that's all you need to know. If you insist, read the summaries in your favourite bookstore for 5-10 minutes and you'll understand everything.
I'll compare Six Disciplines Execution Revolution to the ideal "A business book that is easy to understand, distinct, credible, practical, insightful, and provides great reading experience."
Ease of Understanding: 7/10; the book is easy to understand, far too easy to understand because the concept is obvious, very obvious.
Distinction: 2/10; You have seen it all; there is absolutely nothing new in the book. 1 point to the Excellence Business Model in the back cover, you might think that it is not new! Yes, that's as far as distinction goes. The other point is from a paragraph about the character in the Bible.
Credibility: 4/10; I truly respect Gary Harpst for his successes but in this book, despite implementing 60,000 business management systems and with more than $20 million bucks and 100 man-years of research, I don't see one good example of success stories of his clients, there should be one, out of 60,000, there really should be any example of success that is relevant to the context. There are some stories about Solomon Software, the author's successful company. We need more; this book seems like hot air to me.
Practicality: 3/10; This is a book about "whats" not about "hows". The author stated the obvious goals but not a single useful method; I might exaggerate here but in Chapter11, just skip the first ten on how, the author wrote "we'll detail the how of this last point" but no, still no how.
Insight: 5/10; With too many issues to cover; Six Disciplines Execution Revolution failed to deliver insightful and thoughtful details or analysis of any specific issue. The author should focus on a specific issue rather than a small book for everything.
Reading Experience: 3/10: I felt like sitting in a university lecture, in modules like Management 101, and this book does not go beyond 101 class. I felt like taking a nap and having some snacks during the class waiting for it to end and go elsewhere.
Overall: 4/10; I'm not going to say this book is bad but it is far from ideal; it might be a good introduction to business and management practice. It might be a good idea to buy this book for your friend who does not normally read business books.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An excellent pick for anyone looking to make their business venture an enduring success.
Comment: How does one make their particular business excel past all their competitors? "Six Disciplines Execution Revolution: Solving the One Business Problem That Makes Solving All Other Problems Easier" is a thoroughly 'user friendly' and practical guide to help business owners answer that very question. Promoting 'The Excellence Business Model', which pushes balanced strategy and execution, successful entrepreneur and author Gary Harpst helps new business owners deal with anticipated and unexpected challenges as they occur and how they to avoid failure before such difficulties become an insurmountable problem. "Six Disciplines Execution Revolution" is a excellent pick for anyone looking to make their business venture an enduring success.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Holistic Approach Makes This A Winner
Comment: The principles for success in business are not unlike the principles that support and create success in many of life's endeavors. What Gary Harpst has tapped into, and what makes this book and the ideas behind it so unique, in comparison to others like it, is the bringing of a real world, dynamic involvment in everything that works its way toward effective strategy and "execution".
I have told people that the closest analogy I can come up with, to sum up my experience with Six Disciplines, is to reference a comparison of Bruce Lee to a classical Karate instructor. -- Where the Karate instructor would measure his talent by his ability to perform and display increasingly complex and difficult techniques, Bruce Lee would excel at becoming amazingly effective in the very simplist and most direct of movements. Bruce Lee was all about stripping away what is useless and absorbing what is useful and so, it seems, is Six Disciplines. The magic formula for success in Lee's makeup was his unwavering commitment to striving for excellence in the simple things that many other's tend to shrug off and take for granted as they search for the pursuit of excellence in complexity. That and Lee was a superb example of success through well balanced strategy and execution.
There's a vast amount of knowledge behind the scenes in this book and the good part is that Gary Harpst has managed to harvest the fruits of so much labor for all of us to benefit from, and in a way that can transform "pretty good" into "Great!"
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Great Book for a Struggling Business Environment
Comment: With our struggling economy, the crisis with rising prices in energy and the continual, increasing rise in food prices, a large percentage of American businesses are struggling. The timing of this book could not have been better.
This book details a strategy execution program for your organization. The guides in this book with will assist any manager at any level with moving into a proactive stance rather than reactive. Surprises - some small, some business killers - are around every turn. This book deals with these issues head on in an open and honest way.
The field testing that was performed along with the best practices of know organizations takes a lot of pressure off for those who wish to pursue the advice in this wonderful new book. I can assure you that you will not have buyer's remorse. Buy copies for all of your managers and leaders. Michael L. Gooch, SPHR Author ofWingtips with Spurs
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Persistence to Make the Hard Choices
Comment: In my book, Mastering The Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Non-profit, I urge leaders and managers to "Avoid Management-by-Bestseller Syndrome." That's why this book gets my high-five rating. It fits with my Management Buckets system--and it's all about execution. As Peter Drucker said, "Vision without execution is delusion." Plus, the author's recommended books (in the resource section) give you a synergistic context. The book won't take you off-course. It's a complementary tool to help you walk the next steps.
"The first premise of this book is that what most business leaders think is their greatest challenge really isn't," says Harpst, who implemented more than 60,000 business management systems. "In most of my 20-year tenure as CEO of Solomon Software, I was in react mode, moving from one crisis to the next." So he makes the analysis simple with four quadrants focused on strong or weak strategy, coupled with strong or weak execution. The four quadrants: 1) growth wave, 2) fire-fighting, 3) profit wave, and 4) balanced and predictable.
It's all about getting to his quadrant of excellence: balanced and predictable. "This sounds easy," he writes, "but most organizations don't have the framework, the will, or the persistence to make the hard choices it requires." He adds, "Sustainable excellence isn't possible unless an organization learns to systemically increase its capability to execute, and to do so faster than the rate at which its challenges are growing. It's ironic that the better an organization executes today, the bigger its challenges will be tomorrow." (Been there, done that, right?)
I appreciate his comment that excellence is "the enduring pursuit of balanced strategy and execution." Harpst also reminds us that excellence is the "journey that never ends." I agree.
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Editorial Reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: Management 101
Comment: "After many years, I've finally come to view excellence as the enduring pursuit of balanced strategy and execution."
Content
Chapter 1: Business Excellence; the author exhibits a fairly nice model of business excellence balancing Strategy and Execution.
Chapter 2: The Biggest Problem in Business; author wrote, with some supporting information, that execution is the biggest problem.
Chapter 3: Why Is It So Difficult?; "Usually, it's easier not to do what we know we should" sums up the chapter.
Chapter 4: The Leapfrog Opportunity; you'll have the leapfrog opportunity if you invest in quality programs, business process best practices, personal productivity tools, business intelligence, strategy formulation, virtual community development, and coaching.
Chapter 5: Requirements for a Next-Generation Program
Chapter 6: The First Complete Strategy Execution; the authors state that the complete strategy execution requires the following four chapters (which are self-explanatory; and the rest are also self-explanatory)
Chapter 7: A Repeatable Methodology
Chapter 8: Accountability Coaching
Chapter 9: An Execution System
Chapter10: Community Learning
Chapter11: Making Solving All Other Problems Easier
Chapter12: An Enduring Pursuit
Read the chapter titles and you'll figure out what the book is about and that's it, that's all you need to know. If you insist, read the summaries in your favourite bookstore for 5-10 minutes and you'll understand everything.
I'll compare Six Disciplines Execution Revolution to the ideal "A business book that is easy to understand, distinct, credible, practical, insightful, and provides great reading experience."
Ease of Understanding: 7/10; the book is easy to understand, far too easy to understand because the concept is obvious, very obvious.
Distinction: 2/10; You have seen it all; there is absolutely nothing new in the book. 1 point to the Excellence Business Model in the back cover, you might think that it is not new! Yes, that's as far as distinction goes. The other point is from a paragraph about the character in the Bible.
Credibility: 4/10; I truly respect Gary Harpst for his successes but in this book, despite implementing 60,000 business management systems and with more than $20 million bucks and 100 man-years of research, I don't see one good example of success stories of his clients, there should be one, out of 60,000, there really should be any example of success that is relevant to the context. There are some stories about Solomon Software, the author's successful company. We need more; this book seems like hot air to me.
Practicality: 3/10; This is a book about "whats" not about "hows". The author stated the obvious goals but not a single useful method; I might exaggerate here but in Chapter11, just skip the first ten on how, the author wrote "we'll detail the how of this last point" but no, still no how.
Insight: 5/10; With too many issues to cover; Six Disciplines Execution Revolution failed to deliver insightful and thoughtful details or analysis of any specific issue. The author should focus on a specific issue rather than a small book for everything.
Reading Experience: 3/10: I felt like sitting in a university lecture, in modules like Management 101, and this book does not go beyond 101 class. I felt like taking a nap and having some snacks during the class waiting for it to end and go elsewhere.
Overall: 4/10; I'm not going to say this book is bad but it is far from ideal; it might be a good introduction to business and management practice. It might be a good idea to buy this book for your friend who does not normally read business books.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An excellent pick for anyone looking to make their business venture an enduring success.
Comment: How does one make their particular business excel past all their competitors? "Six Disciplines Execution Revolution: Solving the One Business Problem That Makes Solving All Other Problems Easier" is a thoroughly 'user friendly' and practical guide to help business owners answer that very question. Promoting 'The Excellence Business Model', which pushes balanced strategy and execution, successful entrepreneur and author Gary Harpst helps new business owners deal with anticipated and unexpected challenges as they occur and how they to avoid failure before such difficulties become an insurmountable problem. "Six Disciplines Execution Revolution" is a excellent pick for anyone looking to make their business venture an enduring success.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Holistic Approach Makes This A Winner
Comment: The principles for success in business are not unlike the principles that support and create success in many of life's endeavors. What Gary Harpst has tapped into, and what makes this book and the ideas behind it so unique, in comparison to others like it, is the bringing of a real world, dynamic involvment in everything that works its way toward effective strategy and "execution".
I have told people that the closest analogy I can come up with, to sum up my experience with Six Disciplines, is to reference a comparison of Bruce Lee to a classical Karate instructor. -- Where the Karate instructor would measure his talent by his ability to perform and display increasingly complex and difficult techniques, Bruce Lee would excel at becoming amazingly effective in the very simplist and most direct of movements. Bruce Lee was all about stripping away what is useless and absorbing what is useful and so, it seems, is Six Disciplines. The magic formula for success in Lee's makeup was his unwavering commitment to striving for excellence in the simple things that many other's tend to shrug off and take for granted as they search for the pursuit of excellence in complexity. That and Lee was a superb example of success through well balanced strategy and execution.
There's a vast amount of knowledge behind the scenes in this book and the good part is that Gary Harpst has managed to harvest the fruits of so much labor for all of us to benefit from, and in a way that can transform "pretty good" into "Great!"
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Great Book for a Struggling Business Environment
Comment: With our struggling economy, the crisis with rising prices in energy and the continual, increasing rise in food prices, a large percentage of American businesses are struggling. The timing of this book could not have been better.
This book details a strategy execution program for your organization. The guides in this book with will assist any manager at any level with moving into a proactive stance rather than reactive. Surprises - some small, some business killers - are around every turn. This book deals with these issues head on in an open and honest way.
The field testing that was performed along with the best practices of know organizations takes a lot of pressure off for those who wish to pursue the advice in this wonderful new book. I can assure you that you will not have buyer's remorse. Buy copies for all of your managers and leaders. Michael L. Gooch, SPHR Author ofWingtips with Spurs
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Persistence to Make the Hard Choices
Comment: In my book, Mastering The Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Non-profit, I urge leaders and managers to "Avoid Management-by-Bestseller Syndrome." That's why this book gets my high-five rating. It fits with my Management Buckets system--and it's all about execution. As Peter Drucker said, "Vision without execution is delusion." Plus, the author's recommended books (in the resource section) give you a synergistic context. The book won't take you off-course. It's a complementary tool to help you walk the next steps.
"The first premise of this book is that what most business leaders think is their greatest challenge really isn't," says Harpst, who implemented more than 60,000 business management systems. "In most of my 20-year tenure as CEO of Solomon Software, I was in react mode, moving from one crisis to the next." So he makes the analysis simple with four quadrants focused on strong or weak strategy, coupled with strong or weak execution. The four quadrants: 1) growth wave, 2) fire-fighting, 3) profit wave, and 4) balanced and predictable.
It's all about getting to his quadrant of excellence: balanced and predictable. "This sounds easy," he writes, "but most organizations don't have the framework, the will, or the persistence to make the hard choices it requires." He adds, "Sustainable excellence isn't possible unless an organization learns to systemically increase its capability to execute, and to do so faster than the rate at which its challenges are growing. It's ironic that the better an organization executes today, the bigger its challenges will be tomorrow." (Been there, done that, right?)
I appreciate his comment that excellence is "the enduring pursuit of balanced strategy and execution." Harpst also reminds us that excellence is the "journey that never ends." I agree.
With all of the pressures successful business leaders have today, none is more urgent or challenging than learning the ability to execute strategy. While larger businesses have the luxury of budgets and resources to meet this challenge, it's the small and midsized businesses that now have a tremendous opportunity to level the playing field, leapfrog the expensive, outdated approaches of the past, and attack the challenge of execution in a revolutionary way. The key insights are: - Excellence is the enduring pursuit of balanced strategy and execution
- Planning and executing, while at the same time dealing with the inevitable surprises, is the biggest challenge in business
- Overcoming this challenge is what we mean by solving the one problem that makes all others easier
- Failing to solve the problem destines your organization to a reactive, fire-fighting future.
Based on breakthrough research, field testing and proven best-practices, the thought-leading vision described by Gary Harpst in Six Disciplines® Execution Revolution sets a new course for how small and midsized businesses can finally confront the never-ending challenge of executing strategy. As a follow-up to the success of Six Disciplines for Excellence, Harpst's new book, Six Disciplines® Execution Revolution, details the elements of a complete strategy execution program, clarifies how it could only have happened now, and explains why such a program will soon become a mainstream requirement for your business.
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