Continuing Study Books - view/print this page as a .pdf (Adobe Acrobat) document.
Participants are provided with these two books for continuing study following the program.
What the CEO Wants You to Know: Using Business Acumen to Understand How Your Company Really Works
From the book jacket notes:
Have you ever noticed that the business savvy of the world's best CEO's seems like a kind of street smarts? They sense where the opportunities are and how to take advantage of them. And their companies make money consistently, year after year.
How different is it to run a big company than to sell fruit from a cart or run a small shop in a village? In essence, not very, according to Ram Charan. From his childhood in India, where he worked in his family's shoe shop, to his education at Harvard Business School and his daily work advising many of the word's best CEO's, Ram understands business as few can.
The best CEO's have a knack for bringing the most complex business down to the fundamentals – the same fundamentals of the family shoe shop. They have business acumen – the ability to focus on the basics and make money for the company.
What the CEO Wants You to Know captures these insights and explains in clear, simple language how to do what great CEO's do instinctively and persistently:
- Understand the basic building blocks of a business and use them to figure out how your company makes money and operates as a total business.
- Decide what to do, despite the clutter of day-to-day business and the complexity of the real world.
Profitable Growth is Everyone's Business: 10 Tools You Can Use Monday Morning
From the book jacket notes:
For many, growth is about "home runs" – the big bold idea, the next new thing, the product that will revolutionize the marketplace. While obviously attractive and lucrative, home runs don't happen every day and frequently come in cycles. Products like Kevlar, Teflon, and the Dell business model for selling personal computers may be once-in-a-decade phenomena.
A surer and more consistent path to profitable revenue growth is through "singles and doubles" – small day-to-day wins and adaptation to changes in the marketplace that build the foundation for substantially increasing revenues. The impact of singles and doubles can be huge. They are not only the basis for sustained revenue growth but, in fact, the foundation for home runs. Singles and doubles provide the discipline of execution, an absolute necessity for successfully bringing a breakthrough technology to market or implementing a new business mode.
Inherent in this way of thinking is the revolutionary idea that growth is everyone's business – not solely the concern of the sales force or top management. Just as everyone participates in cost reduction, so must everyone be engaged in the growth agenda of the business. Every contact of each employee with a customer is an opportunity for revenue growth. That includes everyone from the people working in a company's call center handling customer inquiries and complaints to the CEO.
In this trailblazing book, Ram Charan provides the building blocks and tools that can put a business on the path to sustained, profitable growth.
For more than 25 years, Ram Charan has been working day in and day out with companies around the world. The ideas he has developed for solving the profitable revenue growth dilemma facing many businesses are based on personally seeing what works in real time. These are ideas that have been tested across industries and that deliver results, and they can be put to use starting Monday morning.
References
Charan, Ram. What the CEO Wants You to Know: Using Business Acumen to Understand How Your Company Really Works. Crown Business, New York, New York. 2001. 141 pages.
Charan, Ram. Profitable Growth is Everyone's Business: 10 Tools You Can Use Monday Morning. Crown Business, New York, New York. 2004. 206 pages.
Site last updated March 1, 2009