This is a smart and sharp look at what mostly bigger businesses can do to prepare for survival in the present uncertain economic environment.
Ram Charan, a management guru, usually focuses on growth, but he's in survival mode here, recommending ways to deal with our present circumstance urgently and efficiently.
Tighten the supply chain, reassess vendors, drop some customers, cut personnel, change the pay structure for your sales staff (good luck with that!), consider reducing or eliminating dividends and other smart but mostly unsurprising steps are what Charan counsels.
He also suggests sensitivity to and awareness of tone and careful management of perceptions: So put that private jet back in the hangar and shift your annual executive retreat from Bora Bora to Opa-locka.
One wonders if the bulk of what Charan advocates is really necessary to delineate. After all, most executives, at the very least, possess a firm grasp of the obvious, and urgency in dealing with these matters seems like a no-brainer. Yet we've all seen some of the boneheaded moves by that gilded crew of CEO-schnorrers during their congressional appearances, so maybe Charan is onto something by pointing out what's painfully apparent to the rest of us.
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Charan himself is a bit of an enigma. In addition to his writing, he's also a peripatetic consultant. Some published reports speculate that he is of no fixed abode and spends his days traveling from one client to the next, meeting, observing, proffering advice and flying off into the sunset for his next engagement.
It's an amusing notion, but if there's any criticism I'd have of him, or at least the persona conveyed by his writing, it's that he infrequently demonstrates empathy for the people who do the actual work.
Of course he could argue — convincingly, to be sure — that helping the bosses helps the little guys. I'm certain that's true, but Ram Charan at ground level, in the trenches with the rest of us poor slobs, would really be a profound revelation.
About the book
"Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty: The New Rules for Getting the Right Things Done in Difficult Times" by Ram Charan; McGraw-Hill, 160 pages ($22.95).