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Playing For Keeps: How the World's Most Aggressive and Admired Companies Use Core Values to Manage, Energize, and Organize Their People, and Promote, Advance, and Achieve Their Corporate Missions
Frederick G. Harmon
Hardcover. Wiley 1996-03.
ISBN 9780471598473
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Publisher description
"The small individual act is the basic cell of all performance . . . The
secret behind outstanding companies, departments, or contributors is simply
that they work harder at adding value to their individual acts. " -Frederick G.
Harmon In this eye-opening book, Frederick Harmon takes a hard look at the factors
that most contribute to a company's profitability, and he comes to some
surprising conclusions. With compelling logic, he shows how a company's core
values are often the true determinants of its overall success or failure. New
strategies, reorganization plans, management techniques, important as they are,
depend, in the final analysis, on a foundation of basic values that influence
even the most routine acts. "Managers manage neither results nor numbers," he
concludes. "They manage the quality of individual acts. " In this authoritative
book, Harmon explains how to define and implement core values in an
organization, and how to measure their effect on the "individual acts" and,
therefore, on the bottom line. Drawing on decades of experience as a consultant to major corporations, as
a senior executive of the American Management Association, and as a writer for
The Wall Street Journal, Harmon focuses first on the dynamic characteristics of
values-driven leadership. He analyzes the different styles of leadership, how
they culminate in a "new management synthesis," and how managers can use
carefully defined values to energize an entire organization. In the central section of Playing for Keeps, Harmon delineates six specific
proactive steps executives can take to build a truly "values-driven" company.
Beginning with a firm commitment to new ideals and values, moving through
implementation, and concluding with ways of measuring and recognizing success,
Harmon shows how to bring about a "commonplace miracle" in any organization,
large or small. The final section, "Values in Action: Applications," enables managers to
match specific values to the different phases of a company's growth and
development, including entrepreneurial, turnaround, and global values. With
actual case studies, Playing for Keeps shows how a broad range of aggressive,
successful companies, including GE, Walt Disney, American Express, Levi
Strauss, and Intel have implemented values projects to help them maintain a
competitive advantage. For managers, executives, and entrepreneurs, Playing for Keeps is an
invaluable guide to unlocking greater profitability through values
implementation; it is an invitation to "look behind the numbers, and core
values will appear like gold nuggets on the ground. " "Playing for Keeps is for
businesspeople who are interested in harnessing the potential of people. "
-William Pollard, Chairman The ServiceMaster Company "An insightful look at the
way strong corporate values provide a framework for management's actions. The book underscores the important role that values play in the development
of a successful company. " -Donald J. Schuenke Retired Chairman and CEO The
Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company "At a time when so much-indeed, too
much-has been written at the rarified academic level, Fred Harmon's new book,
with its practical, commonsense, 'real world' approach, is like a breath of
fresh air. " -Domenico Fanelli, President American Management Association
International Better values mean bigger profits Playing for Keeps shows how company
values have an extraordinary but often overlooked impact on the small
"individual acts" that add up to success or failure for an entire organization.
With compelling logic and numerous real-world examples, this invaluable guide
demonstrates how managers, executives, and entrepreneurs can unleash the
dormant power of these values within their companies. It offers a complete
program for choosing, defining, and implementing sets of values that help
advance the goals of any organization, large or small, and shows how to measure
the effects of a values implementation program on the bottom line. This work takes a hard look at the factors that most contribute to a
company's profitability. It shows how a company's core values are often the
true determinants of its overall success or failure.
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Playing For Keeps: How the World's Most Aggressive and Admired Companies Use Core Values to Manage, Energize, and Organize Their People, and Promote, Advance, and Achieve Their Corporate Missions
Book reviews » Playing For Keeps: How the World's Most Aggressive and Admired Companies Use Core Values to Manage, Energize, and Organize Their People, and Promote, Advance, and Achieve Their Corporate Missions
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