Extreme Management

For over fifty years, the Harvard Business School's Advanced Management Program has put elite members of the business world through a rigorous training session, taking them to a level of excellence and success that sets them apart from all others. Here, for the first time ever, the invaluable lessons of this demanding $44,000, fourteen-hour-a-day, six-days-a-week program have been condensed into one comprehensive, easy-to-read volume. Presented by Mark Stevens, a leading marketing consultant and bestselling author, this "boot camp" for managers will help you acquire the skills you need to reach the top — and never look down. Learn how to:

• create a sustainable competitive advantage
• relax your grip to make your operation flourish
• establish enduring brand and corporate positioning
• resolve conflicts in the global marketplace
• master innovative, battle-tested negotiating tactics
• motivate subordinates to embrace change
• understand and harness the true powers of leadership

• Prologue
• Introduction: A History of the Advanced Management Program
• The Principles of the Advanced Management program
• About This Book
• The Inner Sanctum: Behind the Curtain of the Advanced Management Program
• The Advanced Management Program Regimen
• Weeks One and Two
• Weeks Three Through Eight
• Weeks Nine and Ten
• Conclusion of the Program
• A Typical Day in the Life of an Advanced Management Program Student

1. First Strike Leadership: Mastering the Art and Science of Making Decisions and Motivating People
• Avoiding the Trap of Management by Fashion Trend
• Private Lists Can Provide Road Maps for Managerial Action
• Good Leaders Rewrite the Rules of Their Leaders
• Micromanagers Beware: Self-Protection Is Really Self-Limitation in Disguise
• In Business, Even War Heroes Have to Put Away the Sword
• Moshe Levy's Five Steps to Powerful Team Building
• The Quest for Perfection Is a Sure Sign of a Small Thinker
• First Find Your Comfort Zone — Then Find a Way Out
• Enlightened Leadership: The Power of the Perpetual Student
2. Tuning the Straivarius: Building World-Class Organizations
• Leveraging the Change Equation: D x M x P >";" Cost
• Bottom-up Learning: How Employee Criticism Can Make You a Better Manager
• Place Yourself in a Fishbowl: Emerge a Better Leader with the Organizational Fitness Profile
• Your Organizational Fitness Profile Road Map
• Evolution + Revolution = Solution
• Leadership 101: The Jack Welch Way
• Six Rules for Successful Leadership from GE's Jack Welch
• James F. Lincoln's Observations on Management
• Three-Point System for Linking Strategy to Action
• Draw a Straight Line from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be
• Make Lists to Target Organizational Goals
• Motivate Subordinates to Embrace Change
3. The Mind Is Mightier Than the Sword: Competitive Strategies and Tactics That Win
• Quality Is Good — Strategy Is Better
• BMW's Legacy of Performance
• In the Art and Science of Negotiating, the Heavyweights Start at the End and Work Backward
• War Games Make Your Business Battle-Ready
• Leveraging the Power of Critical Opposites
• Competing the Hewlett-Packard Way
• The Power of Organizational Strategy: Mastering the 7-S Model
• Identifying Opportunities for Improvement: Using the 7-S Model
• Managing Change with the 7-S Model
• How to Pick and Manage Markets Competitors Can't Penetrate
• Sustaining Competitive Advantage, Bill Gates Style
• Industry Attractiveness Scorecard
• The art of Making Your Business Stand Out from the Crowd
• Action Plan for Leveraging the Power of Learning
4. The Discipline of SWAT Team Service
• The Ultimate Synergy: Leveraging the Service-Profit Chain
• In Poorly Managed Companies, People Are Problems … In Well-Managed Companies, People Are Problem-Solvers
• Intuit's Relentless, Out-of-the-Box Customer Passion
• How to Turn Angry Customers into Loyal Patrons
• The Paradox of the Satisfied Customer
5. Unlocking the Black Box of Finance
• Mastering the DuPont Formula and Other Tricks for Decoding Financial Statements
• Proportion
• Direction
• Exploring the Apple Tree Analogy
• When It Comes to Global Currency Hedging, the One Sure Way to Lose Money May Be to Insure Against It
• In Business, the Best Time to Perform an Autopsy Is When the Patient Is Still Alive
• Creating Successful Business Models: It's All in the Numbers
• Epilogue

• A Global Perspective — Recent Advanced Management Program Sponsoring Companies
• Advanced Management Program Commanders
• Sources

Describes Harvard's special course, but you will not learn anything without having participated in the course.