Reading List: Confronting Reality, Doing What Matters to Get Things Right By Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan

Bossidy and Charan followed up their hugely successful Execution with Confronting Reality. Bossidy and Charan focus on the business model as a framework for a company’s path to the future. Their business model calls for an in-depth look at the external realities for a company, its financial targets, and internal activities. By regularly repeating this exercise, you come up with tested, actionable models for the business.

Confronting Reality’s examples include EMC, Cisco, Home Depot, and the Thomson Corporation. The authors describe how these businesses transformed themselves by recognizing threats and changes in their external markets, and altering their internal activities to reach new financial targets. Bossidy and Charan emphasize aggressive information gathering and vision of the industry’s direction—advice with which we heartily agree. A must read for CEOs and those advising them.