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Excerpts

How to Use This Book

The book is written for the practicing manager. I have tried to write the text in plain language, and defer all statistical language and presentation to the appendices. Those who wish to investigate the supporting data in depth can look there. However, if you choose, you should be able to read straight through the book without referring to the appendices.

Whatever contribution this book makes lies less in innovative conclusions than in the fact that I have tried to present new evidence to support important, but perhaps familiar, conclusions. (Hence the book's title: the message is not to preach new things, but to practice what most managers and firms already preach.)

Accordingly, the book is built around the evidence, quantitative and anecdotal, that I obtained. It unfolds slowly, presenting the results of analyses one at a time, building up from the simplest to the most complex. Similarly, rather than open the book with the major lessons learned from the case studies as a whole, I invite you to read each of the case studies one at a time, and experience them as I did, with (I hope) growing cumulative impact. The summary is deferred until the latter portion of the book.

For those who do wish to get the book's main conclusions right away, there's a relatively simple way to do it. Skim chapter 1 then jump straight to chapter 7 (The Predictive Package); chapter 9 (The Path to Performance); and Chapters 20 to 23 (Lessons). These chapters summarize the most important statistical and case study evidence in the their most essential form.

However, the story is richer than those chapters alone, and I hope that most readers will come with me as I recreate the journey of discovery that this research took me on.

Keep an eye out for lessons in the evidence that I may have failed to stress! While I will provide summaries and tell you what I think the lessons of the evidence are, you may want to keep a yellow highlighter pen handy to mark the lessons you deem to be the most important.

Copyright © 2001 by David H. Maister