Best Book, 2005!

My choice as my favorite Biz Book of 2005 is Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, by Larry Bossidy (& Ram Charan). Fact is, it’s a 2002 book, but I just read it word-by-word this year as I prepared to do a gig with Bossidy. Amazingly it is, as I see it, the 1st & only book wholly devoted to “getting things done,” and the 1st and only book that suggests that there is a describable, “systematic” “discipline” (and “culture”) of getting things done. I’m doing a seminar on change in a few weeks, and when the Client asked me for a pre-reading assignment I bypassed my books and recommended Bossidy/Execution.

(I’m not fully into dissing myself. I arrogantly think that our 1999 “Work Matters” troika—The Project 50, The Brand You 50, The Professional Service Firm 50—are far more relevant, and still inadequately appreciated & implemented, than in 1999. We are all under attack—”There is no job that is America’s God-given right anymore”/Carly Fiorina—and the reason is summed up exquisitely in this terse quote: “‘Disintermediation’ is overrated. Those who fear disintermediation should in fact be afraid of irrelevance—disintermediation is just another way of saying that you’ve become irrelevant to your customers.”/John Battelle/Point/Advertising Age/07.05. Answer—”the” answer?—to the “irrelevant” question: Cool Projects from Insanely Great, Value-adding PSFs which are stocked with Imaginative-Entrepreneurial Brand You Talent.)