The Breakthrough Imperative

Acknowledgments

WE HAVE BEEN HUMBLED AND INSPIRED BY THE PROCESS OF BUILDING this book. Our initial idea—to codify the fundamentals of dramatic performance improvement and tell the stories of top managers who have put those fundamentals to work with resounding results—seemed straightforward enough.

But the process of analyzing a broad set of company results to identify top organizations and their managers became a revelation. Clearly, today’s general managers in all types of organizations are up against increasingly formidable odds when they tackle a turnaround or attempt to transform operations. Customer needs are changing faster than ever before. Globalization and geopolitics have added risk and complexity to basic decisions, such as where ...