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| The Breakthrough Company: How Everyday Companies Become Extraordinary Performers | 
 enlarge | Author: Keith R. Mcfarland
Publisher: Crown Business
Category: Book
List Price: $27.50
Buy New: $13.25
You Save: $14.25 (52%)
New (35) Used (23) from $10.97
Avg. Customer Rating:  20 reviews
Sales Rank: 5062
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 0307352188
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.401
EAN: 9780307352187
ASIN: 0307352188
Publication Date: January 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The vast majority of small businesses stay small—and not by choice. Only the most savvy and persistent—a tiny one tenth of one percent—break through to annual sales above $250 million. In The Breakthrough Company, Keith McFarland pinpoints how everyday companies become extraordinary, showing that luck is a negligible factor. Rather, breakthrough success turns out to be associated with a clearly identifiable set of strategies and skills that anyone in any business can emulate—from small startup to industry leader.
Encouraged by experts such as business legend Peter Drucker and Good to Great author Jim Collins to identify the drivers that enable a company to push past the entrepreneurial phase, McFarland spent five years building and analyzing the world’s largest growth-company performance database and interviewing more than 1,500 growth-company executives on four continents. His goal was simple: to identify the secrets of breakthrough.
The Breakthrough Company is the result. Winnowing a study pool of more than 7,000 companies down to nine that have made the transition to major-player status, McFarland highlights real-world tools and myth-busting insights that can be used by anyone wanting his or her business to join this exclusive circle. Among the book’s takeaways:
• Common wisdom holds that the founders and core entrepreneurial leaders of a company must step aside for the business to reach the next level. Not true—as long as founders “crown the company” instead of themselves.
• It’s not reckless to make ever-escalating bets on your company’s future, even going nose to nose with competitors many times your size. In fact, it turns out that the only safety comes in constantly upping the ante in exactly this way.
• A Business Bermuda Triangle does exist, gobbling up companies on the verge of breakthrough. Presented here are three ways to navigate this potentially deadly hazard successfully.
• However good you are—or think you are—you can’t do it alone. Learn how to surround your company with networks of outside resources, aka “scaffolding,” and how to enlist the aid of “insultants”—people who are willing to question a firm’s existing assumptions and ways of doing business.
With powerful and specific action steps concluding each chapter—and invaluable advice on virtually every page from business leaders who’ve taken their companies to extraordinary levels of growth and profitability—The Breakthrough Company is one of the most provocative, inspiring, and instructive business books you’ll ever read.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 15 more reviews...
 This Will Be One Of 2008's Best Books January 16, 2008
10 out of 12 found this review helpful
Just as Jim Collin's "Good to Great" became a must read for all business professionals, Keith McFarland's "The Breakthrough Company" is destined to be the bible for those who care about finding ways to help their companies succeed.
He does a great job of showing the reader a road map for taking a mid-sized company and making it "POP" to the next level. I know that business owners and managers will all benefit from the advice of this book if they can swallow the bitter with the sweet. His words are not fluff...but instead a strong lesson on how to check your ego at the curb and take your good company to greatness.
My prediction is that this book will be a classic best seller for years to come.
Buy it. Read it. Live it.
Powerful And Practical Text January 18, 2008
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
The book is the result of an ambitious research effort on the characteristics of middle market firms that crossed over to high levels of sustained financial performance. In contrast to texts like In Search of Excellence or Good To Great, the book focuses on the practices and capabilities necessary for non-behemoth firms to achieve success.
The concepts contained in the book have had a substantive impact on my approach to strategy formulation. The insights can be put to immediate use - versus theoretical constructs with little practical application. By way of example, McFarland explores the dynamic of moving from a founder/leader centric organization to one with shared responsibility for accomplishment.
I was pleased by how well each chapter offers an insiders perspective of the challenges of a entrepreneurial business. And, delighted by the power of the insights to evolve a leadership team toward greater health.
In summary, McFarland has crafted an excellent book for business leaders. I highly recommend it.
 In Search of Credibility! June 14, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Ever wonder why the successes of companies featured in books like "In Search of Excellence," "Good to Great," and "Built to Last" are so ephemeral? The authors almost always violate basic principles of statistical analysis, and so does Keith McFarland.
A major problem is that not all important determinants of organizational performance can be objectively measured - eg. employee morale, organizational leadership, strategy, competitors actions (or lack thereof), etc. Instead, the subjective impressions that are used are strongly influenced by the company's current financial success - creating spurious correlations and invalid conclusions.
Additional significant problems include determining cause vs. effect in correlation data (helped through longitudinal studies - unfortunately these are infrequent), forgetting that the real importance of measured factors may be overstated through correlation with non-measured factors, the "delusion of connecting the winning dots" (studying only successful firms will not identify how they differ from the unsuccessful), and forgetting that useful performance measures identify relative (not just absolute) performance.
Global competition, increasing financial market demands, and much more rapid technological change create enormous pressures to identify the "secrets" of business excellence. This demand has created bookshelves and magazines full of case studies, some seemingly quite thorough and sophisticated. ("The Breakthrough Company," unfortunately, is one of the worst.) Unfortunately, lack of statistical rigor frequently reduces their value to that of bedtime stories. There is no substitute for good strategy and execution, and in my opinion those lessons are best learned from studying the work of Jack Welch, Larry Bossidy, and Lou Gerstner.
 Useful but repetitive repetitive repetitive February 7, 2008
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
Did I say this was repetitive? Its repetitive. Obnoxiously so. I'm not sure why.
Other than that, the book was decent. It gave eight or ten insights into organizational behavior, generating certain responses from leadership behavior and rallying around a given mission.
I'm not sure it is quite as prescriptive as the author may intend even if the chapters were oriented to do so; however, there are some good stories about different organizations and how they achieved growth.
An exceptional and crisp business book January 26, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
The Breakthrough Company: How Everyday Companies Become Extraordinary Performers by Keith R. Mcfarland
Keith McFarland's The Breakthrough Company, is an astute analysis of what makes the difference between companies that become stars and the `also-rans' we never hear about. Based on solid field-research, this book is already ranked as a best seller by the Wall Street Journal. The spirit and style of writing kept my attention. Keith, a one-time Associate Dean in the Pepperdine School of Business and Management, had a reputation for easily establishing rapport and trust. He does this with the reader. McFarland does not take a `flavor of the month' approach to leadership. The book is based on a five-year study of some 7,000 growth companies. While every page conveys important information, the tone is like a candid conversation over a cup of coffee.
I appreciated the well chosen and insightful vignettes which compared two companies with very similar beginnings, in which one became an exceptional performer and the other just survived. One example that is worth the price of the book is the story of how the executives at Intuit bested Microsoft in the small business accounting market. In another vignette, one might wonder how two companies in the same business located a few hours drive apart could have such different performance records. From his face-to-face interviews and careful analysis, McFarland `teases-out' the critical factors.
McFarland's chapter on `Building Company Character' caused me to rethink my understanding of corporate culture. The Breakthrough Company does not claim to be about leadership or ethics, but it is. There is no special section on ethics. The author's discussion of the roots of the word `charisma' is inspiring! He is not referring to the glitter-based charisma of celebrities. Drawing on the writing of the early twentieth-century sociologist Max Weber, charisma is "a devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism, or exemplary character of an individual person." Then McFarland writes "character is sacred." It was at this point half-way through the book that I decided to make it a required reading for all of my MBA students. "Character cannot be faked." He writes that the one characteristic common to all the breakthrough CEOs studied was charisma. "Charismatic leaders inspire us with their character."
A very full index and extensive reference notes will satisfy the academic reader. That McFarland conveniently provides a summary of key ideas at the end of chapters will help my students! I am recommending this book to my executive clients and friends.
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