Beat the Odds—Avoid Corporate Death and Build a Resilient Enterprise

Beat the Odds fills a crucial void in the current business literature. It clearly illustrates why great organizations slip from leader to follower to road-kill, and how organizations can Beat the Odds and avoid this fate. This is a concise must-read for senior executives, and for any manager interested in seeing his or her organization avoid corporate death and build for the future.Over the past 10 years, there have been more than 600,000 business bankruptcies in the United States. Research findings confirm that the odds are very slim for any organization to survive more than a few decades. Many books that purport to offer secrets of business success only study companies that are currently successful. Other books provide pieces that don't fit together to solve the puzzle in real-world practice. Beat the Odds evolved from a study of a broad pool of companies across a wide spectrum of performance over an extended period of time. The book presents a tested and comprehensive nine-part framework for understanding, building and ensuring long-term organizational success through the ups and downs of business cycles, competitive cycles and management cycles. Supported by real case studies, each of the nine framework elements includes a clear description of the underlying principles pertaining to both successful and dysfunctional behaviors. The assessment and diagnostic tools provided in this book are designed to give managers deep insights into their firm's underlying challenges and for performing their own gap analysis of where they are now, versus where they should be. It also features the factual basis for corrective action and prescriptive steps for immediate deployment of this framework.

Robert A. Rudzki is a former senior corporate executive, who is now President of Greybeard Advisors LLC, a firm that assists enterprises improve their near-term financial performance and long-term business viability. He is also a director of a privacy and security software company, and is an Advisory Board member of several companies. Previously, Bob was Senior Vice President and Chief Procurement Officer at Bayer Corp., where he led a nationally recognized transformation effort. Prior to that, he was an executive of Bethlehem Steel Corp. In the course of his career, he has held various executive management positions, which included finance, accounting, procurement and logistics, business development and P&L responsibility. As a result of his career assignments, he has had the unique opportunity to interact with hundreds of executives and companies, and to study first-hand their efforts at achieving success or creating failure. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and management meetings, and is the co-author of the supply management best-sellerStraight to the Bottom Line.