The Advantage

January 16, 2012
Consulting executive Lencioni (The Five Dysfunctions of a Team) has an answer for floundering businesses—aim for organizational health. In other words, businesses that are whole, consistent, and complete, with complementary management, operations, strategy, and culture. Today, the vast majority of organizations have more than enough intelligence, experience, and knowledge to be successful. Organizational health is neither sexy nor quantifiable, which is why more people don’t take advantage. However, improved health will not only create a competitive advantage and better bottom line, it will boost morale. Lencioni covers four steps to health: build a cohesive leadership team, create clarity, overcommunicate clarity, and reinforce clarity. Through examples of his own experiences and others’, he addresses the behaviors of a cohesive team, peer-to-peer accountability, office politics and bureaucracy and strategy, and how all organizations should strive to make people’s lives better. This smart, pithy, and practical guide is a must-read for executives and other businesspeople who need to get their proverbial ducks back in a row. Agent: James Levine, Levine Greenberg Agency.

March 1, 2012
It is best not to dismiss Lencioni's latest book (previous books include The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, 2002) as just another human-resources practicum. His focus is the CEO, in an honest and transparent manner, demonstrating how to rid a company of politics, confusion, low morale, and high turnover. In fact, before laying out the details of what he calls the four disciplines, Lencioni specifically addresses possible barriers to adoption of these disciplines, namely sophistication, adrenaline, and the need for quantification. The rest of the book zeroes in on the disciplines themselves: building a cohesive leadership team, creating clarity, overcommunicating clarity, and reinforcing clarity. Each section features disguised examples (good and bad) and recommended processes and systems. Summaries and extra proofs of concepts follow each discipline, a signal that he indeed practices his third disciplineovercommunicating clarity. In a business world increasingly focused on numbers and metrics, this is one equation that resists calculation. But, says Lencioni, it's a nonformula that mirrors what the best of human institutions can offer their employees, customers, suppliers, investors, and other groups.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)