Product Description
Are employee attitudes correlated with financial success? Unequivocally yes! according to consultant and bestselling author David H. Maister. Based on a worldwide survey of 139 offices in 29 professional service firms in numerous lines of business, Maister proves that companies perceived by their employees to practice what they preach in matters of client commitment, teamwork, high standards, and employee development are more successful than their competitors. Put simply, employee dedication causes improved financial performance. Through in-depth interviews, Maister explores the crucial role of the individual manager in promoting high morale among employees. Practice What You Preach boasts specific action recommendations from the managers of these "superstar" businesses on how to build an energized workplace, enforce standards of excellence, develop people, and have fun -- all in the name of profit. As a result, Practice What You Preach can help any manager increase profitability, and provides proof that great financial rewards come from living up to the standards that most businesses advocate, but few achieve.
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Amazon.com Review
David H. Maister, a specialist in the management of professional service firms, surveyed 29 firms in 15 countries to determine whether positive employee attitudes really correlate to corporate success. In his consultancy and previous books, he has suggested they do, and in Practice hat You Preach he is able to show that in many companies it truly is "attitudes that drive financial results, and not (predominantly) the other way round." On a pragmatic level, this allows him to demonstrate how a energized workforce will provide top-quality client service--the key component in any service-oriented business. Overall, Maister recommends managers instill trust and respect, develop a high morale, and serve as "coaches" rather than "most valuable players." He offers detailed case studies of survey respondents, and amalgamates their replies into an explicit Path to Performance as well as four chapters with specific lessons that should be transferable to other enterprises (i.e., effective managers allow others to get deserved credit, ensure workers believe management is not only out to make a lot of money for itself, and understand employees are looking for help in growing their careers). Practical and accessible, it also includes survey specifics for those who care to analyze them on their own. --Howard Rothman
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 The courage to gamble on an articulated strategy ( aaronmcdonald )
David Maister's book "Practice what you Preach" describes the results of a statistical analysis of successful professional service firms. Maister concludes that the successful firms are those that commit to a strategy of teamwork, high standards of quality, and employee development. In summary, employee dedication leads directly to improved financial performance for the firm.
Besides the statistical arguments, Maister provides case studies of the firms to show how firms implement success on a tactical and micro-level. These case studies seem to demonstrate that the most successful managers are energizers of the workplace, able to encourage standards of excellence and develop excellence in their staff. Profit follows from this position, rather than the other way around.
The conclusion that integrity, excellence, and participation create a profitable firm seems reasonable and well argued. The question then becomes, why don't all firms appreciate this and enact policies that will energize the company in this way? The last chapter discusses this issue, and for this reason I found it the most interesting.
If the formula for success is so obvious, then why don't more firms enact it? Maister states that what these firms lack is courage, or more specifically the inability to choose long term work focused "on strategy" versus quick, short term profit. This conflict, Maister says, is inevitable. Coming up with good ideas for success is not the hard part - it is failure in execution and follow through of the strategy that dooms those plans.
The lesson Maister draws is that managers may believe that their greatest value is in creating a vision, and this is false. The greatest value of a leader is in implementing vision.
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 The bible
this book is so good for you that guide you to management the company to A+.
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Highly Recommended! ( rolfdobelli )
Heavy but invaluable reading, this book presents the results of author David H. Maister's study of 139 offices of 29 professional service - more specifically, marketing and communications - firms in 15 countries. His objective was to identify the attitudes that correlate most strongly with financial success. He found what's been known all along - that financial success correlates very strongly with the perceived good character and integrity of management. When employees believe that management practices what it preaches, they seem to give extra effort and get astonishing results. The idea that character counts as much as, or perhaps more than, structure and corporate policy will be hard for many to accept. It takes courage, commitment, faith and humility to become the kind of person this study recommends. But this information shows us that, to contradict baseball player Leo Durocher, nice guys finish first.
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 Managers can skim for value, but probably not worth the time ( larsberg12 )
While there's definitely some value in the things he says about the relationships between work environment and client respect, it was hard to say that his use of statistics matched what I remember from college. It would've been worth either eliding the high-level use of statistics entirely or just subjugating larger sections on the correlations and significance to a detailed appendix -- like papers on new type systems, people want to know that the semantics are sound in detail, but don't necessarily want to see every proof of every lemma interspersed with the text.Additionally, it wasn't clear how to turn this into anything other than personal action items. It was easy to understand that you should change things in your company, but there wasn't a ton of advice around how to actually make the changes suggested.
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 Statistical Ignorance ( jamesryankenny )
Despite having a wide body of experience in business criticism and a credible approach towards analyzing business culture, David Maister exhibits far too many episodes of 'statistical ignorance' in his conclusions and statements to capture my attention or even allow me to finish reading the book.Perhaps the audience was not engineers, mathmeticians, or anyone else who know their way around 'correlations' and 'significance' -- I frankly don't know. But I can assure you that David could have dealt himself a greater dose of credibility and 'statistical significance' if he'd had more experienced statisticians review his staggered conclusions. I definitely credit him with opening my eyes to a handful of new 'culture management' techniques. But my eyes still sting from the idea that this gentleman has made a career out of mishandling simple correlational numbers and the science behind them. A simple example is the assertion on page 49 that 'positive' correlation is equivalent to 'significant'.
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