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During the past 20 years, the author has watch China move from being a developing country into an industrial superpower
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Illustration by Al Murphy
Jim Collins’s Good to Great is a dissection of 11 companies that made the leap to role-modelhood. It has sold 8 million copies since 2001 and is still in the top 10 despite a couple of blown-up Greats Illustration by Al Murphy
The Top 10 Business Reads Davies and Starr for Bloomberg Businessweek
Last year, Bob Lutz retired as vice-chairman of General Motors after a long and celebrated career in the auto industry. Earlier this summer he published a book titled Car Guys vs. Bean Counters. By mid-July it had climbed to No. 16 on the business bestseller list compiled by Nielsen BookScan, the source that book publishers themselves look to.
Car guys or bean counters—care to guess which Lutz identifies with? Yes, he is a car guy. He likes chrome, fine-grained interiors, big rims, and the “wonderful high-pitched wail” of a V-12 engine. He dislikes focus groups, “brand management,” and pointy-headed MBAs. By bean counters, Lutz isn’t just talking accountants: He means anyone who makes decisions based on research and calculation rather than feel and experience. It was the bean counters, he argues, who brought the American auto industry low, churning out uninspiring cars no one wanted to buy. Car guys, with their guts (the title of Lutz’s previous bestseller) and shoot-from-the-hip brio, are the salvation of the American automobile—and of American business itself. “It’s time to stop the dominance of the number crunchers, living in their perfect, predictable, financially projected world (who fail, time and again),” he writes.
Lutz had best not look around at his neighbors on the bestseller list. There were no other charismatic executive-authors in BookScan’s business top 20 the week of July 18. (After Lutz, the closest is Howard Schultz of Starbucks, at No. 27.) And the top 10 are shot through with number crunchers.
StrengthsFinder 2.0, by Tom Rath of the Gallup Organization, is the No. 1 book on the July 18 business top 10. It is also the second shortest. This may not be a coincidence. Who Moved My Cheese? (No. 9), a simple-minded parable about adapting to change, is one of the biggest bestsellers of all time and one of the shortest books anyone over the age of 7 will ever read. Frankly, it should be much shorter. But whereas Who Moved My Cheese? is meant to be read cover to cover—a task that can be accomplished, its dust jacket flap proudly points out, in less than an hour—StrengthsFinder 2.0 is more of a reference work. (Don’t waste time searching for a book called StrengthsFinder 1.0. There isn’t one.)
What 2.0 really is, though, is a delivery device. In a packet at the end of the book, hidden under scratch-off lottery-ticket wax, is a code that provides access to the StrengthsFinder website. This is where the StrengthsFinding begins. Visitors take a test to determine their five top strength “themes.” “Strategic,” “deliberative,” “individualization,” and “context” are a few of the options. The website then draws up a personalized guide with “strengths insights” and “ideas for action” such as: “Help others understand that your strategic thinking is not an attempt to belittle their ideas, but is instead a natural propensity to consider all the facets of a plan objectively.” There is no advice on what to do when your co-worker responds to this by trying to brain you with a stapler.
Ten years after it was first published, Jim Collins’s Good to Great is still lodged on the bestseller list at No. 10. Collins, a former lecturer at Stanford Business School, is a high lama of business guru-dom. He even lives in the mountains, in Boulder, Colo. Good to Great, a study of what it takes for a company to vault from the crowded ranks of perfectly good performance to the heights of greatness, has sold 8 million copies worldwide. Two years ago, Businessweek put him on its cover.
In Collins’s description, the techniques of great management have a cosmic perfection, like the music of the spheres. Here is how he describes the moment of afflatus when an organization figures out the one thing it can be best at—what Collins calls, after the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, the Hedgehog Concept: “When you get your Hedgehog Concept right, it has the quiet ping of truth, like a single, clear, perfectly struck note hanging in the air in the hushed silence of a full auditorium at the end of a quiet movement of a Mozart piano concert. There is no need to say much of anything; the quiet truth speaks for itself.”
