By Building Performance Group

Here at last is the definitive source of robust data on the durability and maintenance requirements of mechanical and electrical plants.

This unique manual provides much-needed guidance on the whole-life performance of building services components - which often account for 60% of a building's running costs. Service lives of components are explained - from control valves to hydraulic lifts, and are ranked according to recognized quality benchmarks, with adjustment factors for differing environments, use patterns and operating regimes. Summaries of typical inspection and maintenance requirements are given, along with specification guidance and references to further detailed sources of information.

This comprehensive durability manual provides essential data for whole-life costing and maintenance planning exercises by explaining:

• service lives of the most common components
• key durability issues
• whole-life performance benchmarks
• the most frequent failure modes 

The research for this manual was carried out by Building Performance Group Ltd (BPG), under the sponsorship of Defense Estates, an executive agency of the UK Ministry of Defense.

Over the last ten years BPG has worked in the field of component durability, embracing component data from condition surveys, defects investigation and involvement with latent defects insurance for Housing Association Property Mutual and Building LifePlans Ltd (BLP). It is under the aegis of BLP, which utilizes the component durability data to support its long-term insurance products for commercial buildings, that this manual has been published. 

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By  Jim Collins

Amazon.com
This analysis of what makes great companies great has been hailed everywhere as an instant classic and one of the best business titles since In Search of Excellence. The authors, James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, spent six years in research, and they freely admit that their own preconceptions about business success were devastated by their actual findings--along with the preconceptions of virtually everyone else.

Built to Last identifies 18 "visionary" companies and sets out to determine what's special about them. To get on the list, a company had to be world famous, have a stellar brand image, and be at least 50 years old. We're talking about companies that even a layperson knows to be, well, different: the Disneys, the Wal-Marts, the Mercks.

Whatever the key to the success of these companies, the key to the success of this book is that the authors don't waste time comparing them to business failures. Instead, they use a control group of "successful-but-second-rank" companies to highlight what's special about their 18 "visionary" picks. Thus Disney is compared to Columbia Pictures, Ford to GM, Hewlett Packard to Texas Instruments, and so on.

The core myth, according to the authors, is that visionary companies must start with a great product and be pushed into the future by charismatic leaders. There are examples of that pattern, they admit: Johnson & Johnson, for one. But there are also just too many counterexamples--in fact, the majority of the "visionary" companies, including giants like 3M, Sony, and TI, don't fit the model. They were characterized by total lack of an initial business plan or key idea and by remarkably self-effacing leaders. Collins and Porras are much more impressed with something else they shared: an almost cult-like devotion to a "core ideology" or identity, and active indoctrination of employees into "ideologically commitment" to the company.

The comparison with the business "B"-team does tend to raise a significant methodological problem: which companies are to be counted as "visionary" in the first place? There's an air of circularity here, as if you achieve "visionary" status by ... achieving visionary status. So many roads lead to Rome that the book is less practical than it might appear. But that's exactly the point of an eloquent chapter on 3M. This wildly successful company had no master plan, little structure, and no prima donnas. Instead it had an atmosphere in which bright people were both keen to see the company succeed and unafraid to "try a lot of stuff and keep what works." --Richard Farr --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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By Andrea Shapiro

Creating Contagious Commitment: Applying the Tipping Point to Organizational change is essential to anyone interested in the process of organizational change. It builds on the diverse resources in the Tipping Point computer simulation, which builds on lessons from public health, systems thinking and organizational theory. 

Creating Contagious Commitment simultaneously provides a solid foundation and helps the reader to think out-of-the-box to create contagious, sustainable change. Illustrations and examples of change initiatives bring the concepts to life and make it easy for the reader to apply them immediately to his or her own change initiative. 

By Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan, Charles Burck

Amazon.com
Disciplines like strategy, leadership development, and innovation are the sexier aspects of being at the helm of a successful business; actually getting things done never seems quite as glamorous. But as Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan demonstrate in Execution, the ultimate difference between a company and its competitor is, in fact, the ability to execute.

Execution is "the missing link between aspirations and results," and as such, making it happen is the business leader's most important job. While failure in today's business environment is often attributed to other causes, Bossidy and Charan argue that the biggest obstacle to success is the absence of execution. They point out that without execution, breakthrough thinking on managing change breaks down, and they emphasize the fact that execution is a discipline to learn, not merely the tactical side of business. Supporting this with stories of the "execution difference" being won (EDS) and lost (Xerox and Lucent), the authors describe the building blocks--leaders with the right behaviors, a culture that rewards execution, and a reliable system for having the right people in the right jobs--that need to be in place to manage the three core business processes of people, strategy, and operations.

Both Bossidy, CEO of Honeywell International, Inc., and Charan, advisor to corporate executives and author of such books as What the CEO Wants You to Know and Boards That Work, present experience-tested insight into how the smooth linking of these three processes can differentiate one company from the rest. Developing the discipline of execution isn't made out to be simple, nor is this book a quick, easy read. Bossidy and Charan do, however, offer good advice on a neglected topic, making Execution a smart business leader's guide to enacting success rather than permitting demise. --S. Ketchum

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