Riding the Blue Train: A Leadership Plan for Explosive Growth.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: BookSHELF - Bart Sayle, Surinder Kumar - Brief article - Book review

Riding the Blue Train: A Leadership Plan for Explosive Growth. By Bart Sayle and Surinder Kumar. Portfolio, 228 pages. $24.95.

At the heart of this book is a powerful but more than slightly simplistic concept: companies that want to grow need to climb on a "blue train" of empowerment, enthusiasm and teamwork, and reject a "red train" of defensiveness, defeatism and stagnation.

What company wouldn't want that? It turns out that authors Sayle, CEO of a London-based consultancy, the Breakthrough Group, and Kumar, chief innovation officer at the William Wrigley Co. and a longtime leader at consumer products companies, are really arguing that companies need to build people. They have to unleash creativity from the bottom up, and get people excited about a common goal, listen to ideas and focus their energy on achieving that goal.

Nothing terribly novel there. And in examining the transformation at Warner-Lambert Co. before its acquisition by Pfizer Corp., the authors write extensively about how "Empowering Beliefs" triumphed over "Limiting Beliefs." It doesn't sound that different...