Welcome to Cydcor Reviews, a website dedicated to recommending interesting and insightful books to business professionals wolrdwide.

About First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham and Curt W. Coffman

Managers come in all shapes and sizes, and everyone has their own style of doing things to reach their goals. No manager is the same as any other, but many managers share the same traits: the ability to break any past rules and try new ways of thinking to reach the results they want. Marcus Buckingham and Curt W. Coffman have put together a book based on a study by the Gallup Organization made up of 80,00 managers in 400 different companies. Their findings present an enormous, in-depth study of great management, including those who did well at turning employee talent into real performance.

The main point found in First, Break all the Rules is that the key to attracting and retaining the best employees is excellent management. This book explains how the best managers use the talent of employees to set the bar for skills and experience, create clear expectations, and motivate and develop people to their full potential.

Why Cydcor Reviews recommends this to future leaders:

Management is difficult to narrow down to a set of guidelines and best practices. Often, what works at one company doesn’t work everywhere else. This book presents a firm belief in an excellent principle of management that works: focus on the strengths of people to achieve the wanted results. Building a perfect team from scratch usually doesn't work because it’s difficult to find the right people for the right role. First-line managers are the key to an organization’s success. They are the vital link between company shareholders and employees. What separates a great manager from a mediocre manager is the ability to recognize and develop talented individuals right from the initial point of employment. Buckingham and Coffman do an excellent job of conveying their study’s findings in a way that is easy to understand but still insightful.

Our favorite part:

The essence of the data found in this book forms the four keys of great managers. These key points state that managers must find the correct match between talent and roles, turn talent into performance, concentrate on strengths and not on weaknesses, and assign roles to employees that give them the greatest chance of success. First, Break All the Rules also dives into the 12 questions that give organizations the information they need to attract, focus, and keep the most talented employees. The authors group these questions into various categories and explain why they are important to keep in mind.

About The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business:

Who would have thought that the most unexploited opportunity in modern business was organizational health? Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage is a daring proposal on why an organizational health focus can have a positive affect on your business. Lencioni’s writing style aids in making the case that businesses need to attack mixed messages within the organization while also cutting down on any dysfunctional politics. There are too many leaders today who still focus on looking for advantages in marketing, strategy, and technology. However, Lencioni is quick to point out that there is a potential gold mine that is in plain sight. Instead of trying to become smarter than the competition, Lencioni believes that leaders and organizations need to focus on becoming healthier. It’s important that they tap into the more-than-sufficient intelligence and expertise they already carry.

Why Cydcor Reviews recommends this to future leaders:

Lencioni argues that the key to success in any organization is to make sure it’s healthy. To express his point of view, he walks his readers through a process in which we can assess the health of our own organizations and take steps to improve it. When putting Lencioni's tips and exercises to use, any organization can see noteworthy progress in each of the key areas of health that he names. The majority of organizations today have more intelligence, experience, and knowledge than they need to be successful. The health of an organization is neither attention grabbing nor quantifiable, and that's probably the reason why more people aren’t taking advantage of it. However, improved health will not only create a competitive advantage and better bottom line, but it also can boost morale within the organization.

Our favorite part:

Lencioni introduces four basic steps to organizational health: building a unified leadership team, creating clarity, over-communicating the clarity, and reinforcing the clarity. Through examples of experiences he and others have faced, Lencioni addresses the behaviors that he looks for in a healthy organization. These include a cohesive team, solid peer-to-peer accountability, handling office politics and bureaucracy, and how organizations need to strive to improve people’s lives. With the right modifications, this model for organization business can have great value for leaders in any company, whatever its size.

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Since retiring from General Electric in 2001, Jack Welch has stayed busy. Welch led the company for forty years, challenging the competition and learning the best ways to run a large company successfully. With Winning, Welch has written the bible of business, examining the answers to the most difficult challenges people run into on the job and in their personal lives. Welch's words speak to people at every level of business, no matter the size of the company or the importance of the role. Welch's optimistic, no excuses, get-it-done mind-set keeps readers engaged. Winning offers deep insights and solutions to the problems that many people in business face today.

Why Cydcor Reviews recommends this book to future leaders:

Welch begins Winning with an introductory section called "Underneath It All," which describes his business philosophy. He explores the importance of values, candor, differentiation, and voice and dignity for all. Those interested in the human side of great leaders will find this last section especially appealing. In it, Welch answers the most interesting questions that he's received in the last several years while traveling the globe addressing audiences of executives and business school students. Perhaps the funniest question in this section comes at the very end, posed originally by a businessman in Frankfurt, who queried Welch on whether he thought he'd go to heaven (we won't give away the ending). Welch's down-to-earth writing style that helps you understand these timeless principles in a fresh way. As you're reading, you can almost picture him speaking the words in some business school auditorium or a Fortune 100 management retreat.

Our favorite part:

The bulk of Winning is devoted to real situations that many run into while working in business, and it’s split into three sections. The first section analyzes the company, from leadership to choosing employees who can make change happen. The second section looks outside at the competition, with chapters on different strategies that work. The final section of the book, arguably the most important, is about taking your career to the next level. This includes finding the perfect job and achieving a solid work-life balance.

Here is Cydcor's review of Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors by Michael E. Porter:

About Competitive Strategy: Published in 1980, Michael Porter’s book still resonates with many individuals today and is the basis for much of what is taught in MBA programs regarding Business Strategy. In fact, the author himself is a professor at Harvard Business School and is a lead authority on the subject. The book has nearly sixty printings in English, has been translated into nineteen languages, and has transformed the theory, practice and teaching of business strategy throughout the world.

Why Cydcor Reviews recommends this to future leaders: Competitive Strategy is fantastic in its simplicity, and the analyses provided can be used as powerful competitive tools and examples on how one can being structure to the task of strategic positioning.

Porter provides the framework for predicting competitor behavior and has given rise to the newer discipline of competitor assessment. It’s a must read for managers, consultants, students and those in business who wish to take up leadership roles in businesses—big or small.

Our favorite part: While the first chapter alone is worth the cost of this book, Cydcor recommends it for the wisdom contained in its entirety. The chapters are organized into three parts: General Analytical Techniques, Generic Industry Environments, and Strategic Decisions.

Porter, being an expert on competition, analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of businesses in the very first chapter. His focuses are the threat of new entrants, pressure of substitute products, bargaining power of buyers, bargaining power of suppliers and the intensity of rivalry among existing competitors. These five forces are the roadmap for determining the competitiveness of individual companies, and are truly eye opening.

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