Free, Perfect, and Now: Connecting to the Three Insatiable Customer Demands: A Ceo's True Story Book

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But, the internet case study is actually a downstream result of a tough and on-going transformational change process that Marshall has been going through since 1992. Back then, Marshall's business environment was changing faster than their top-down by the numbers and incentive plan culture could handle. So, instead of trying harder in out-dated ways the company decided to try to become a learning organization that would transform itself - an enormously tough and risky under-taking. Because so many other companies are currently in the same learn, die or sell-out situation, they need prescriptive help, and this book has an effective delivery style for the medicine.

The book is written in a first person, narrative style, which makes it an enjoyable, read, but more importantly Rodin has distilled good management theories down to a basic, comprehensible level grounded in a real story. Readers will, as a result, find particular problems described in ways that will strongly connect to their own similar problems. They will go on to borrow many of Rodin's analogies for getting the same messages across to their employees. I expect that a lot of managers will buy extra copies of this book for entire management teams to read.

A final reason for buying the book with eyes open are all of the other reviews posted here at Amazon.com - both the positive AND the negative! The positive ones support the good read, good theories, good grounded case example elements, and the bad ones from ex-employees illustrate the pain that learning companies doing transformations have to go through. Just because the top guy(s) have the right vision and work hard to implement it, doesn't mean that all of the managers really believe it or will do it even as they nod in agreement. Russia and China's attempts to go to free market economies are bigger current examples of how lots of people that are personally happy with the old order fight change.

One negative comment talks about how Marshall's stock has tanked, but so have all of the other publicly traded semiconductor stocks due to their tough environment. Marshall's 5 year average return on equity has been a little less than Arrow's and little more than Avnet's. The two larger firms have had better franchise lines to ride and have bought much more sales and earnings via acquisitions while Marshall has been forward investing in and expensing their transformational efforts and internet capability. Time will tell how this horse race will finally turn out. In summary, if your company is a top-down firm that plays "beat last year for bonus bucks" starring incremental, financial, tactical changes in the face of too much business environmental change. If you seem to be working harder and harder to get less results. If your customers want lots more value, customization and speed of response, then you need to start reading as many case studies on corporate change as you can find starting with this one.