STAGNATION ASSASSIN

Hagopian offers a series of sharply conceived tactics for improving business performance.

The aim of this “manifesto,” writes the author, a longtime business veteran, is to destroy the “comfortable delusions” that most businesses are sold by consulting firms. “Recognize that stagnation, not competition, not market conditions, nor bad luck, is the true enemy killing your business,” he cautions. Modern businesses should stop believing that additional analysis will save them, Hagopian writes; stagnation is a choice, per the author, and he condemns the cycle in which companies “implement the same approaches competitors have already deployed and expect different results.” The author assures readers that he won’t sugarcoat reality to make them comfortable—he strongly advocates strategic ruthlessness, which involves “killing good things to do great things and refusing to work on lower priorities no matter how much people complain.” Virtually everything the author advises lines up with his intention to eradicate stagnation, which he sees as the deadly enemy of progress in business; comfort, he writes, has destroyed more businesses than competition ever could. Hagopian characterizes the various elements of his manifesto as the only practical guidance a corporation needs, requiring only the will to implement them and “the discipline to maintain that choice when resistance intensifies, enthusiasm wanes, and comfortable mediocrity beckons.” At every stage, he warns readers against accepting easy answers or pat routines.

Hagopian writes with unflagging energy from the first page to the last, clearly reveling in the tone of a no-nonsense truth-teller as he urges readers to ask themselves uncomfortable questions in order to gain potentially profitable insights (such as “What do we assume customers value that we’ve never validated,” or “What would we do if starting fresh with no legacy constraints?”). The terrific forward momentum he imparts to his prose is sometimes slowed by the sheer profusion of directives he offers; readers will be bombarded with questions and discussions of subjects like Environmental Misalignment Genes and Cognitive Blindness Genes in addition to more methods, matrices, and models than they’ll be able to keep straight without a scorecard. Fortunately, the author’s bedrock of long experience cuts through the tangle of interlocking systems; he’s at his strongest when he’s simply imparting hard-won bits of wisdom. “Customers reveal which orthodoxies need smashing through compensating behaviors, not articulation,” he observes. “They can’t tell you how to smash orthodoxies but watch what they struggle with.” While this sentiment may show traces of the disdain for customer intelligence that infects so many business management books, it also reveals the seemingly counterintuitive thinking that is this book’s greatest strength. Hagopian alludes to his long career of increasing value for companies that have adopted his methods, which gives him the confidence to rally readers to confront the “comfortable ignorance” that he clearly sees as the underlying enemy of business progress. (Don’t wait for perfect data or 95% certainty, he insists—speed is often necessary.) His zeal is bracing, even if some readers will be put off by his all-or-nothing approach; for instance, many of his proposed methods call for the summary firing of significant percentages of personnel. The author’s vividly rendered vision is surgically precise.

A brusque and powerfully worded call to combat corporate stagnation.