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High Performance with High Integrity (Memo to the Ceo) (Memo to the Ceo) (Memo to the Ceo) (Memo to the Ceo) (Memo to the Ceo)
written by Ben W., Jr. Heineman
Studio : Harvard Business School Press
by Harvard Business School Press
Publisher : Harvard Business School Press
Released : 2008-05-28
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9781422122952
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 6 reviews)
List Price : $18.00
Our Price : $10.88
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Product Description |
Our free-market capitalist system is the world's greatest driver of prosperity, but it has a dark side. Under intense pressure to make the numbers, executives and employees face temptation to cut corners, fudge accounts, or worse. And in today's unforgiving environment, such lapses can be catastrophic. Fines and settlements have amounted to billions of dollars. Careers and companies have imploded.
In High Performance with High Integrity, Ben Heineman argues that there is only one way for companies to avoid such failures: CEOs must create a culture of integrity through exemplary leadership, transparency, incentives, and processes, not just rules and penalties. Heineman, GE's chief legal officer and a member of both Jack Welch's and Jeff Immelt's senior management teams for nearly twenty years, reveals crucial "performance with integrity" principles and practices that you can begin applying immediately, and shows how you can drive performance by integrating integrity systems and processes deep into company operations. Such principles and practices also create affirmative benefits: inside the corporation, in the marketplace and in society.
Concise and insightful, this book provides a much-needed corporate blueprint for doing well while doing good in the high-pressure global economy.
From our new Memo to the CEO series--solutions-focused advice from today's leading practitioners. |
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Integrity is not something that has to be sacrificed for success |
Integrity is not something that has to be sacrificed for success. "High Performance with High Integrity" is a guide for business owners who want to be successful, but don't want to be a cutthroat at the same time. Advice on structuring a business to meet this level of morality while maintaining success, and how to keep one's employees going with the same beliefs and values, makes "High Performance with High Integrity" a seminal guide to the honest businessman. A must for any community library business collection.
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It's both winning and how you play the game |
Ben Heineman Jr., the former longtime general counsel of General Electric, summarizes his point nicely in this brief and thoughtful book: It's both whether you win or lose AND how you play the game that matter.
In this handbook for the CEO's of the twenty-first century, Heineman rejects both the facile notion that corporations exist only to maximize profit and the similarly superficial idea that corporations should worry less about the bottom line and more about their impact on society. To Heineman, high performance and high integrity are equally important and are indeed inseparable.
What sets this book apart from other business how-to books is the specificity of Heineman's writing and of his examples. In his twenty years at GE, employees who demonstrated lack of integrity were routinely disciplined and fired, and Heineman explains why and for what. GE didn't just talk the talk. Values and integrity mattered, and the company was the better for it.
This would have been a five-star review were it not for the fact that Heineman repeats himself too much. This short book would have been better had it been even briefer. |
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Essential Reading |
"I am certain this will become a classic. It is central message is important, new, crystal clear, compelling and I think inspiring. It is a mature and forceful book. The key points are driven home by understandable examples (which are sometimes themselves a wake up call e.g. the reference to "side letters" as "red flags" in financial deals). The recommendations are practical and actionable. Somehow it manages to be a theoretical treatise on the need for change and a practical, and reasonably short, handbook for how to change. I can not recall a recent book which was able to accomplish so much in such a compelling way in such a short space. No one can read this book and not come away with a list of "to do's" that will improve their lives. That said the capability of GE as revealed in the text can, or will soon be, matched by only a few. The issue is enormously complex and there are very few Ben Heineman's around who can grasp the issues and clearly understand how to approach them pragmatically.
The messages here are important not only for business but for governments (and universities, particularly the scientific and medical research departments) as well. The problems in some corners of the world can only be solved through the Heineman methods. I hope they see it, hear it and read it."
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Valuable Tips |
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I would have given this book a 5 but a lot of it is full of corporate speak which may be the language of choice in mega corporations like GE but does litle to help the rest of us. When the book drills down to the mechanics of infusing performance with integrity it excels. Some of the excellent ideas: have employees report the more palatable(to them) "concerns", not illegal conduct and you will get more information on what may be going wrong in the corporation; ID employees at risk of corruption of ethics violations(such as those in overseas assignments or in purchasing etc) and focus customized training on them; explain to employees not only what to do but give them "red flag" examples of dangerous situations so they know if they are cruising off course; use case studies because a story teaches more than a lecture. One other insight: when a company confronts a crisis, one thing needs to be said asap to the corporate crisis team: we will be judged by what we do from this moment on. |
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Clear Fascinating Business Book for Everyone |
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High Performance with High Integrity is not only a vital subject for modern corporations--and for life--but also a description of this comfortably-sized book by Mr. Heineman, former Chief Counsel of GE. I am writing these comments both as a layman and as a former executive in a biotech venture capital firm, and I can vouch for the accuracy of the description of the problem, and the usefulness and clarity of the solutions the author offers. It's rare to have anyone be so concise and yet thorough, and what makes it come alive is the author's writing so elegantly about his own experience, not only with GE but with other areas of business, both in American and internationally. I found the trans-national/cultural analysis especially interesting. Heineman seems to have been everywhere and done everything. His concise points about both performance and integrity, and the nexus of them, are quite brilliant and extremely helpful to anyone who wants to move his or her company toward that integrated (and integrative) goal. Given the business climate in this country, everyone should want that! And it is of a size to fit into one's pocket. Bravo. |
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