What Really Works

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View books by William Joyce, Nitin Nohria, Bruce Roberson.

Really? - Rated
When they wrote the introduction to the first edition of this book the authors referred to the embarrassing fact that their predecessors in the field of identifying corporate winners had, without fail, chosen companies that had subsequently turned out to be anything but. The explanation as to why they themselves would avoid this trap was that their research was 'statistically rigorous'. So it may have been, but their champions have been exposed as having feet of clay even more quickly than usual. It may have seemed shrewd to choose Home Depot as their examplar in 2003, but with hindsight perhaps it wasn't.
So what's the book like? Pretty poor. There are one or two good points, but nothing you won't find better covered elsewhere. As usual all the examples are from the US and a more cynical man than me might detect a predetermination on the part of the writers to find that 'free market', low security - indeed low wage - labour relations are a prime cause of corporate success. They also have a touching faith in the 'great leader' theory. The arrival of one man (and of course they are all men) and his firing of most of the previous executive team seems to be both necessary and sufficient to turn around most failing businesses.