Playing for keeps

About this book

"In this eye-opening book, Frederick Harmon takes a hard look at the factors that most contribute to a company's profitability, and he comes to some surprising conclusions. With compelling logic, he shows how a company's core values are often the true determinants of its overall success or failure. New strategies, reorganization plans, management techniques, important as they are, depend, in the final analysis, on a foundation of basic values that influence even the most routine acts. "Managers manage neither results nor numbers," he concludes. "They manage the quality of individual acts." In this authoritative book, Harmon explains how to define and implement core values in an organization, and how to measure their effect on the "individual acts" and, therefore, on the bottom line." "Drawing on decades of experience as a consultant to major corporations, as a senior executive of the American Management Association, and as a writer for The Wall Street Journal, Harmon focuses first on the dynamic characteristics of values-driven leadership. He analyzes the different styles of leadership, how they culminate in a "new management synthesis," and how managers can use carefully defined values to energize an entire organization."--BOOK JACKET.