Product Description

In this stunning follow-up to his best-selling book, The Five Temptations of a CEO, Patrick Lencioni offers up another leadership fable that's every bit as compelling and illuminating as its predecessor. This time, Lencioni's focus is on a leader's crucial role in building a healthy organization--an often overlooked but essential element of business life that is the linchpin of sustained success. Readers are treated to a story of corporate intrigue as the frustrated head of one consulting firm faces a leadership challenge so great that it threatens to topple his company, his career, and everything he holds true about leadership itself. In the story's telling, Lencioni helps his readers understand the disarming simplicity and power of creating organizational health, and reveals four key disciplines that they can follow to achieve it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2281 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 184 pages

Amazon.com Review
Allegories and parables have long been effective ways to impart serious bits of knowledge and wisdom without getting too pedantic, and business readers seem increasingly receptive to sensible management theory that employs this lively age-old literary technique. Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, a "leadership fable" by Patrick Lencioni, continues the trend with a solid prescription for organizational health--aiming for less politics, lower turnover, more productivity, and higher morale. Presented as a fictional tale of two technical consultants and their competing companies, the story is structured in a fashion that recalls his previous book (The Five Temptations of a CEO, whose main character and firm are even slipped into this narrative). Lencioni uses this hypothetical setting to show how his concepts might look and work in the real world. In this case, his "four disciplines at the heart of making any organization world class" are revealed and explained through the philosophy and behavior of Rich O'Connor of Telegraph Partners. Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team, create organizational clarity, communicate organizational clarity, and reinforce organizational clarity through human systems. Through his tale of Telegraph and its rival Greenwich Consulting, Lencioni illustrates how these principles can be beneficially employed--and how an organization can be stymied when they're missing. The story moves quickly and is followed by a comprehensive analytical summary, which includes self-assessment tools and suggestions for putting the ideas into practice. --Howard Rothman

From Booklist
This fictional tale by a screenwriter and head of a consulting firm that specializes in organizational development is billed not as a novel but as a "leadership fable." Just like Lencioni's earlier The Five Temptations of a CEO (1998), this new "fable" serves as a vehicle to illustrate the author's philosophy of management. The story is short and simple, but its lesson is large. Organizations must not only be smart; they must be healthy. For one thing, healthy companies can make themselves smarter, but unhealthy organizations squander intellectual advantage through infighting and cross-purposes. To drive home his moral, Lencioni follows his story with a discussion that explicitly sets down his four "actionable steps," or disciplines, that are the hallmark of a healthy organization--build a leadership team, create organizational clarity, communicate that clarity, and then reinforce it through human systems. Lencioni offers concrete examples of steps to take to establish these disciplines and suggests ways to assess whether they have been effective. David Rouse
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Another great page-turner from Lencioni! As fun to read as it is insightful." -- John J. Donahoe, worldwide managing director, Bain & Company, Inc.

"Another homerun by Lencioni! This will be the first book we give to the thousands of executives who take part in our program." (Verne Harnish, founder, Young Entrepreneurs' Organization; CEO, Gazelles, Inc.)

"This is a wonderful book--a compelling story with a significant message for executives. The lessons here are substantial, and the style of writing is succinct, thorough, and very entertaining." (David S. Pottruck, president & co-CEO, The Charles Schwab Corporation)

"Since implementing these ideas within our company, I've seen morale and productivity increase dramatically. Lencioni encourages us as managers to deal with human issues that are not quickly quantifiable in a spreadsheet or a quarterly report." (Glenn Kiser, vice president and general manager, Skywalker Sound, Lucas Digital LTD.LLC)

"Another great page-turner from Lencioni! As fun to read as it is insightful." (John Donahoe, worldwide managing director, Bain & Company)

"Pat's formula, while elegantly simple, has profound implications for leaders in all sectors. It's right on the mark." (Paula VanNess, president & CEO, Make-A-Wish Foundation of America)

"The four disciplines are the foundation of my company and should be required reading for all start-up ventures." (Mark Weidick, president and CEO, Cymerc Exchange, Inc.)

"This is a powerful model for any organization, large or small. Lencioni knows his stuff." (Mark Hoffman, chairman & CEO, Commerce One)

"Another homerun by Lencioni! This will be the first book we give to the thousands of executives who take part in our program." -- Verne Harnish, founder, Young Entrepreneurs' Organization; CEO, Gazelles, Inc.

"Lencioni encourages us as managers to deal with human issues that are not quickly quantifiable in a spreadsheet or a quarterly report." -- Glenn Kiser, vice president and general manager, Skywalker Sound, Lucas Digital LTD.LLC

"Pat's formula, while elegantly simple, has profound implications for leaders in all sectors. It's right on the mark." -- Paula Van Ness, president & CEO, Make-A-Wish Foundation of America

"This is a wonderful book- a compelling story with a significant message for executives." -- David S. Pottruck, president & co-CEO, The Charles Schwab Corporation; coauthor, Clicks and Mortar

Customer Reviews

Interesting View of a "Healthy Organization"
Patrick Lencioni, utilizing his engaging fable-as-lesson writing style, covers his view of the four "Disciplines" of a healthy organization in "The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive." The fable...and the "Model" underlying the fable...stresses the importance of clarity in a healthy organization.

As in a number of Lencioni's other books, the simplicity of the framework covered in this book is stressed...as is the difficulty in actually implementing the framework.

I found this book a worthwhile read due to its simplicity, its straightforward messages and its blending of a story with managerial ideas. Furthermore, I appreciated the fact that the principles espoused in the book are laid out in a manner that directly connects the managerial ideas to actions that can be taken within an organization.

Did the extraordinary executive get it wrong?
Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive is Patrick Lencioni's second book written in 2000, again it is a fiction as well as a management book. The readers would be eager to know the obsessions of that very successful person. CEO is supposed to be rational and sensible. It is curious to note that such a person could be obsessed with anything. In fact, on very important issues, we had better be obsessed rather than let them off the hook lightly.

The story looks like a novel involving commercial spies. It is a tale of two companies, similar in the industry they were in, their niche, their strength, their customers, their size, their strategy. It is a matter of management style which made differences in their culture and organization health. The story evolves around a virus which attacked a company. It set off suspicion and created a crisis. The story told the strength of a cohesive team of good organization health and how it fought off the virus. The virus revealed the secret of the obsessions to the CEO of the rival company who thought otherwise. You will guess the ending about the future of these two companies.

The interesting part is the virus, who is the VP of HR, kind of like a very capable EO specializing in our professional area. The problem with him was that he did not participate actively in discussions, was not willing to share his views, and not wholeheartedly merged with the management team. He liked to hide himself and revealed his opinion last, and in a non-committal way. He appears to me as having the attributes of some civil servants. The virus was exposed as not being able to align with the culture of the company. I wonder if this is a sin for civil servant for not being able to align with the culture of the government, or the department, or the grade.

The thrust of the story is the obsessions. They are actually very simple and concern the organization culture, its core values, its identity, direction, strategy and objectives. The obsessions are how the CEO took these in mind and action. He was obsessed with being cohesive, being clear, over-communicating and reinforcing. These are the four disciplines to be upheld.

1st discipline: Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team - We all know that it is desirable to have team members working happily together. But the obsession went a step further of letting team members know one another's unique strength and weakness, openly engaging in constructive ideological conflict, holding one another accountable for behaviours and actions, and committing to group decisions. As a result, the cohesive and healthy team was able to fight off the virus which tried to contaminate the team spirit.

2nd discipline: Create organizational clarity - Writing up vision and mission statements is a common practice in setting up the identity of the company and its long term goal. It was trendy a few years ago and everyone did it. The CEO of the rival company said it was mentioned in Build to Last which all management people knew well and could readily recite. But these statements are just empty slogans only fit for display as decoration on the wall. The obsession is to make these organizational identity, culture, strategy and responsibilities very clear, that action plans could be formed without confusion based on them.

3rd discipline: Over-communicate organizational clarity - Over-doing anything is an obsession. But for issues as important as the organizational clarity, there is no thrift in over-communicating them. The obsessed CEO conveyed messages on organization clarity repeatedly on every occasion, using simple language to eliminate confusion and inconsistency, using multiple media to meet different level of reception, and cascading the messages down the ranks until the message was heard by all.

4th discipline: Reinforce organizational clarity through human systems - At the end of the day, it is human that preserve or undermine culture. The CEO was obsessed with sustaining the health of the organization by making sure that the human systems were used to reinforce organizational clarity. All staff were tested and reinforced of their alignment with the organizational culture through the recruitment process, performance management, rewards and recognition, and dismissal.

We all claim that culture is hard to change. But the reality is that culture is also hard to maintain. When the CEO found a culture that was good for the company, he was obsessed to preserving it, or seen the other way round, obsessed to changing the behaviour of the staff to align with the culture. Or you may say that he was changing other cultures or sub-cultures to align with his culture. This is very hard to do, and it really takes an obsessed CEO to keep the company on the track.

A Great Companion to Good to Great!
Although The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive: A Leadership Fable was published in 2000 it is still the very best companion to Jim Collins' Good to Great. Lencioni's parable illustrates better than any other book the simple but powerful principles of building and maintaining a cohesive leadership team, creating organizational clarity, the importance of over-communicating organizational clarity, and reinforcing that clarity through human systems. This is a book that I read every year. It is one of my most "marked-up" books (the front and back flyleaves are covered with notes and quotes). If you haven't picked this one up you've missed one of Lencioni's very best.