The 2000 Percent Solution.

• Author: Frey, Donald N.
• Position: Review

by Donald Mitchell, Carol Coles, and Robert Metz

Published by AMACOM, New York, 256 pages, $24.95

REVIEWED BY DONALD N. FREY

The 2000 Percent Solution is a brightly written, well organized, enjoyable and instructive book on how to revive companies that have "stalled out" (not growing, with shrinking market share and profits). The title refers to the exponential improvement that can be gained by getting companies out of a stall.

The first half of the book is organized around the most prevalent stalls (see box). For me, Chapter 2 - "Knuckle-busters and Sawdust: The Tradition Stall" - was particularly vivid. Having had the experience of taking Bell & Howell Co. out of the film-based movie camera business, in the face of the video age coming across the Pacific from Japan, I had to endure denunciations from long-term employees and shareholders alike for "destroying the very soul of the company." Indeed, movie cameras had been the soul of the company for 75 years, but I did not want to be the manager of the soul of a dead company! And, having spent my business career in large companies, I greatly enjoyed Chapter 7, "Molasses in the Works: The Bureaucratic Stall."

The second half of the book is organized around many wonderful examples of stallbusting in an eight-step guide to successfully breaking free. Being a longtime Chicago Cubs fan, the use of the "Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance" analogy for rapid execution of stallbusting was most appreciated.

I have only one small quibble with the book. The term "best practices" is used throughout to characterize stallbusting steps. Stallbusters range from "understand the importance of measuring performance" to "identify the theoretical best practice" to "identify the right people and provide the right motivation." I found the term "best practices" to be too limiting. The core of my complaint about best practices is found late in the book, in a passage on "Find the Best Change Leaders" This is an acute human resource problem better described, in my view, as "Find the Innovator(s)." Indeed, the second half of the book is mostly about innovation and innovators - a better description of the ongoing people issue in businesses, particularly in large bureaucratic ones.

In today's world, the paragons of stallbusting are our multitudinous start-up companies, the glory of our country's economic growth. Having been involved in large companies as an innovator and...