Mastering the Rockefeller Habits 20th Edition: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Growing Firm Paperback – March 1, 2002

After reading the book "Mastering the Rockefeller Habits" I was so impressed, I ordered five more copies for my management staff.At our weekly meetings we started going over various chapters in the book just to make sure everyone was on board. After a month or so customers started mentioning they were feeling a positive change in our company and had started recommending us more than ever. The best news of all is after a few years of our business doing very well we were able to buy out two of our competitors. I guess they didn't get the book.

What makes this book so helpful is that it gives a roadmap for companies at various stages of development on what steps to take to get to the next level.As long as you don't forget to keep you eye on the ball and keep core revenue generating activities going and central, spending the time to understand what your company needs to do to move up to the next stage is development may give you the pieces you're missing if you're struggling or stagnating or feeling in a rut. This book can give you practical steps in making the right changes. What's really important to remember, I think, is that companies need different habits at different stages of the growth cycle.But that kind of change is really difficult. If you've followed a certain formula to get to where you are today, and you developed and fine tuned that formula through twists and turns and many mistakes along the way, that formula becomes precious to you. So precious that if you hit a rut in growth, it might be incredibly hard to understand that those habits that served so well and took so much fine tuning are the very habits that need to be changed in order to kick start growth to another stage.Though it's a very strange analogy, and perhaps may not fit real well, I think it's a little like switching gears in a manual shift car. To get to the $100 million mark and beyond, you need to be in 6th gear. which is different from 5th, 4th, 3rd, 2nd and of course 1st gear where you're starting from nothing. But rather than thinking of each gear as just a different level of effort and fine tuning, I'd say each gear is more akin to a different set of habits.This book doesn't speak in these terms exactly, but many of their practical suggestions are just that, different work flows and different styles of planning at different stages of development.As an international business consultant in the IT industry, there are few books that I would recommend more highly than this one.

Enjoyed it and am implementing these process in and planning guides in our marketing agency. Back the 90's I was into the E-Myth books -- the Rockefeller Habits takes Michael Gerber's thinking and puts it on steroids!!

In this bestseller, Verne Harnish shares the business lessons to be learned from case studies of ten remarkably different organizations: Castek Software Factory, Express-Med, HRF Exploration and Production, The Lawrence Group, Logical Choice Technologies, Marlo Furniture, McKinney Lumber, Mostly Muffins, Orion International, and The Scooter Store. In fact, Harnish acknowledges that he learned three even more important lessons from Titan, Ron Chernow's brilliant biography of John D. Rockefeller, framed as questions:1. "Does the organization have objective Top 5 priorities for the year and the quarter and a clear Top 1 priority along with an appropriate theme?"2. "Does the organization have sufficient data on a daily and weekly basis to provide insight into how the organization is running and what the market is demanding?"3. "Does the organization have an effective rhythm of daily, weekly, quarterly, and annual meetings to maintain alignment and drive accountability?"These three questions suggest issues that leaders in any organization (regardless of size or nature) should regularly address with sufficient rigor and candor. Leaders in the ten exemplar organizations do so to ensure that (a) everything they do and are planning to do is of great importance to their current and prospective customers, and (b) everything they do or are planning to do will differentiate their organization from its competitors.In my opinion, this is one of the most practical business books written in recent years, offering material based on a wealth of real-world situations and filled with insights and suggestions that almost any leader can put to immediate use. Yes, it can help to increase the value of a growing firm as its subtitle suggests; it can also help those leading start-ups to avoid most (if not all) of the mistakes that doom most new enterprises. I also highly recommend it to those now preparing for a career in business or who have only recently embarked on one.