Kiss Theory Good Bye: Five Proven Ways to Get Extraordinary Results in Any Company

NEW BUSINESS BOOK GIVES TEXTBOOK THEORY THE BIG KISS OFF!

Business Expert Writes the Playbook on 'How To' Rapidly Increase Performance and Profit in Any Company.

Bob Prosen cuts like a laser through the fog of political correctness and business-as-usual in his new book, Kiss Theory Good Bye: Five Proven Ways to Get Extraordinary Results in Any Company.

Prosen says he's had enough of the business books that tell readers what to do rather than how. "Forget the platitudes and feel-good anecdotes from a few CEOs and business gurus. Get to the point, the how-to details that can actually help leaders get the results they need in the companies they run," Prosen counsels.

With the same genius that he used to turn around inherited, underperforming operations within 12 to 18 months in some of the world's most prominent companies including AT&T, Sprint, Hitachi, NCR, and Sabre, Prosen delivers a straightforward, no-nonsense, battle proven guide to accelerate performance and profits in any organization.

"A smart business leader can achieve unprecedented bottom-line results by forsaking abstract discussions and vague textbook theory, shutting down endless excuses, killing off company politics, holding people accountable, and simply doing things that clearly work," says Prosen.

Kiss Theory Good Bye shows you how to quickly and consistently achieve extraordinary results in leadership, sales effectiveness, operational excellence, financial management, and customer loyalty.

Packed with easy to follow, step-by-step instructions, this book will show you how to

*Achieve consistent results, quarter after quarter
*Align your entire workforce to meet the organization's top objectives
*Increase accountability so you get the results you need
*Attract and retain top talent
*Beat your competition and lock in customer loyalty
*Reduce costs while increasing quality
*React less and have more time to plan
*Make your job easier and your organization run more smoothly

Contrary to the book's seemingly corporate focus, readers quickly point out that his business execution principles apply equally to not-for-profit organizations. As Los Angeles Unified School District Business Manager Michael A. Eugene reports, "Kiss Theory Good Bye is a compelling read, offering a toolbox to public- and private-sector managers alike to help establish clear focus, increase accountability, effective management, and measurable outcomes."

While other business books try to tell you what to do to run your business better, faster and for greater profit, Bob Prosen's Kiss Theory Good Bye gives you the tools and step-by-step directions to make it happen. For leaders who demand superior results, Kiss Theory Good Bye delivers the goods for taking immediate, and lasting, action.

My goal for sharing my knowledge and experiences is to give you the answers you need to immediately enable your enterprise to achieve its full potential. Leaders want their ideas and initiatives consistently carried out without hassle and rework. They want accountability, and value results over theory. I wrote Kiss Theory Good Bye with two principles in mind. First, theory would be replaced with proven tools, tactics, and answers that get results. Second, all of the information must be relevant and directly applicable to today's business challenges without the need for translation.

Until now this information has only been available piecemeal, leaving you to find, assemble, and translate it to fit your business. You might have gathered some of it through mentors, by trial and error, or by surviving the "school of hard knocks." But by the time you finish reading Kiss Theory Good

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Kiss Theory Goodbye, 2008-05-02
Bob Prosen has nailed it with this practical methodology for achieving results in businesses. His easy to read style with honest, truthful, practical points make this a handy tool for those days when we can find outselves stuck in the mire. Bulleted points and checklists make this volumn easy to go back to time and time again for refreshers. Whether you are a process oriented manager, or a "gut-check" leader you will find important ideas presented to keep you moving forward.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

A success guide for small and mid-sized businesses, 2008-03-28
Kiss Theory Goodbye by Bob Prosen is divided into three parts. Part I is titled: The Big Win: Maximum Profitability and Results. It begins with the Introduction which opens with the following

"What are your top three objectives and how do you know you're achieving them? This may seem like a simple question, but I usually get vague generalities when leaders respond to it."

That short excerpt tells you what this book is about and why it's going to be good. Only someone with real hands-on experience improving business results would know the importance of that question. And a book devoted to sharpening answers to questions like that is sure to be valuable.

The publicity material for this book says it's the next step in the chain of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't and Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. For once, you can believe the hype. Bob Prosen has written a book about how to execute and aimed it squarely at the small to mid-sized companies that need it most.

In the first chapter called Stuck in the Status Quo: Five Crippling Habits that Attack from Within, Prosen lists five things that companies do over and over and then make excuses for. Here's the list.

Absence of clear directives
Lack of accountability
Rationalizing inferior performance
Planning in lieu of action
Aversion to risk and change.

Sound familiar? If you're like many CEOs I know, the list will provide several shocks of recognition.

Having driven his stake about the situation at many companies firmly into the ground, Prosen moves on to Part II to tell you how to do better. This part is called the Five Attributes of Highly Profitable Companies. There's a chapter devoted to each one. I've noted the chapter number in parenthesis

Superior Leadership (2) is about what you need to do to prepare yourself and your people to improve. Prosen zeros in on the gap between the leaders' perceptions of how things are and their employees perceptions, noting that:

"70 percent of business leaders say their company's top objectives have been clearly defined and articulated. Yet only 48 percent of employees say they understand the organization's strategy and goals."

All of the chapters in this part have the same, helpful structure. Prosen begins by outlining "Strengths and Weaknesses" in the subject area, based on research. He follows that with solid and practical advice.

At the end of each chapter in this part there are three short, helpful sections. One gives you questions to determine whether you "Measure Up" on the issues covered in the chapter. A second lists "Very Important Lessons" from the chapter. And a third suggests "Actions to Take Now." These three sections make it easier for you to move from reading to doing.

Sales Effectiveness (3) is filled with advice for building the top line. Operational Excellence (4) gives you tools and suggestions to maintain margins.

The chapter on Financial Management (5) says that financial management is "traffic control" for your business. Prosen notes that this is often an untapped resource. In my experience, he's absolutely right.

Many C-suite executives in smaller companies lack financial sophistication that would help them do a better job. Many operating executives see finance as a kind of arcane trivia that distracts them from the "real" job of managing. That's reason enough that this chapter should be must reading, even if you skip other parts of the book.

The chapter on Customer Loyalty (6) was the weakest of the five core chapters. Prosen calls loyalty, "the gift that keeps on giving." He's right about that and he has lots of good things to say and suggest.

However he does not discuss Net Promoter Score (NPS) in any way. NPS is based on the The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth, Fred Reichheld's excellent book. Since companies that have used NPS in some form have gotten great value from it and since it is a hot topic in customer service these days, its absence here is one of the few weaknesses in the book.

Part IV is Execute for Results, which starts with the chapter on Bridging the Gap (7). That chapter, in turn, begins with a wonderful quote.

"At the beginning of the day, it's all about possibilities.
At the end of the day, it's all about results.'

Substitute "the end of the book" for "the beginning of the day" and you've got this section in a nutshell. This part of the book is about going from ideas, goals and good intentions to results. These chapters all end with "Actions to Take Now" and they're definitely worth a review.

Chapters on Be Your Competitor's Worst Fear (8) and The Critical Path to Getting Things Done (9) have lots of good advice. Measure what Matters Most (10) gives you ways to assess how you're doing on Prosen's Five Key Attributes. Maintain the Gain (11) shares a look at how companies often get off track.

If you are part of a small to mid-sized company, Kiss Theory Good Bye will help you improve just about every area of your business. Here's summary of the my review.

How this book is different:

This is a solid practical handbook that is aimed at helping small to mid-sized businesses execute better and build long term competitive advantage and profitability. It picks up where books like Good to Great and Execution leave off.

Strengths:

Solid, practical advice from a consultant who's actually worked with the businesses he writes for.

Great organization and clear writing. The chapters on the Five Attributes of Highly Profitable Companies have a structure that begins with Strengths and Weaknesses of most companies based on research. This anchors the advice that follows. The chapters all end with analysis questions, key learning points, and suggested action steps.

Warnings:

There are lots of places in this book where the author drops bits of bait to get you to check out his services or other products. On page 81, for example, he outlines a technique, and then tells you it's one of several that he teaches in his workshops.

Sometimes his ideas of what to do are more exhortations than practical advice.

Bottom Line:

If you're involved in business this will be a good, insightful read.

If you're in a small to mid-sized company this should be a must-read.




1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Kiss Theory Good Bye, 2008-01-27
I've just finished reading Bob Prosen's book, "Kiss Theory Good Bye: Five Proven Ways to Get Extraordinary Results in Any Company." I've also read Mr. Kent M. Blumberg's review of Prosen's book, and I fear that some Amazon customers might get the wrong impression of "Kiss Theory Good Bye" from Mr. Blumberg's thumbs-down judgment. I'd like to reply to Mr. Blumberg's review.
When I read Mr. Blumberg's take on Prosen's book, I said to myself, "Blumberg is either (a) a pretentious consultant, or (b) an adjunct professor of management at a third-rate community college."
I wasn't wrong. On his Web blog site, Mr. Blumberg calls himself "a professional and executive life coach," whatever that may be. That's one difference between Prosen and Blumberg: It would never occur to Mr. Prosen, a successful management consultant himself, to describe what he does in language so high-falutin', so vague and voguish.
Blumberg is the type of consultant who is impressed by business books that carry conventionally edgy, smart-ass, offbeat titles. It's a device borrowed from academic publishing. I call them "Cute two-part titles." A cutesy metaphor separated from its explanation by a colon. You know the kind I mean: "Talk to the Elephant in the Room: Dealing with Corporate Failure," or "The Hieroglyphics of Crisis and Change: How to Defeat Fear in Your Company." (No, the title of Prosen's book does NOT fit this pattern. "Kiss Theory Good Bye" is not used metaphorically.)
Here are three actual titles taken from the book review part of Blumberg's Web log:

(1) "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable."
(2) "The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)"
(3) "CIRQUE DU SOLEIL THE SPARK: Igniting the Creative Fire That Lives Within Us All."

Mr. Blumberg has a large appetite for books of this sort. Mr. Prosen offends him by relentlessly sticking to the point, forswearing the current business-book chic, cloudy, smarmy pseudo-inspiration that so impresses Mr. Blumberg, and insisting that doing business successfully is hard unglamorous work. I agree with Mr. Prosen.
According to Blumberg, you need to read $300 worth of specialized 400-page books to get the full story of what Mr. Prosen teaches. Baloney! This is simply the whining of an envious consultant who wishes he had the powers of summary and synthesis and imagination that Mr. Prosen displays throughout "Kiss Theory Good Bye."
Mr. Blumberg says there's nothing new in Prosen's book. In a certain limited sense, this holds water. But in the larger sense, Blumberg couldn't be more wrong.
In Blumberg's words (he's speaking of Prosen's five attributes of successful organizations): "Unless you just crawled out of a cave, you already know what it takes to succeed." This is just more Blumberg-consultant blather. Many business leaders DON'T know what it takes to succeed. Prosen proves this again and again in "Kiss Theory Good Bye" with examples from his distinguished career.
Mr. Prosen's book is full of new formulations of tried-and-true maxims, unconventional restatements of old ideas that work. Even when his formulations sum up ancient wisdom, he still finds fresh things to say.
For example, this gem:

"Today's most prevalent business challenge is. . .planning in lieu of action. . .it's the issue of execution that remains in question. . . What separates the winners from those who struggle. . .is the ability to execute a plan. It really is that simple."

So true. Planning as an excuse for doing nothing is the curse of large organizations. Planning in place of action occupies far too many intelligent people, wastes far too much time, in 90 percent of corporate America. How many elaborate, expensive plans lie dormant, forgotten, useless, laid to rest in bulky ring binders on the CEO's shelf! But who has reminded business executives as powerfully as Prosen that the acid test remains action, action, action?
Or these insights from Prosen on sales:

"Recruit great salespeople; don't teach great people how to sell."

"The president gave me the go-ahead, yet I still had one question: Would he remain supportive if the plan I designed allowed someone [a top-flight salesperson] several levels below him to make more money than he did? He was very willing. Many members of top management have trouble with this concept."

Yeah, I'd say that 999 out of 1000 of the business-school graduates from Stanford, the University of Chicago, Wharton, and Harvard would have a great deal of trouble with that concept.
And that brings me to another of Prosen's basic but brilliant observations: He stresses again and again that he's surprised by the number of executives who ignore or don't know the fundamental ideas he lays out in his book. How can this be?
Good question. It's one you won't find an answer to by reading Mr. Blumberg or the business thinkers Mr. Blumberg admires. And reading Prosen's book, and being shocked by the business ignorance of the American executive, brings up another question: What are we teaching our business school graduates? Why do so many of them know nothing about the basic realities of what they do?
Why are so many of them so touchingly ignorant about how to communicate with other senior execs, other managers, and front-line employees about things these groups absolutely must know to be effective? Why? What are we getting for the $200,000 we spend on educating these M.B.A.- and Ph.D.-degreed ignoramuses in how to run a corporation?
Prosen's book is packed full of suggestive ideas, old and new. Here are a few more of these ideas just on the subject of "costs" (I can't possibly give you all of them):

"All too often leaders become slaves to their financial accounting systems and wait too long before taking action. If you don't completely understand your cost structure. . .Take whatever steps are necessary to get the information you need. There is no excuse for not knowing."

"It's amazing how many companies struggle to accurately determine their true cost of doing business."

"I can't tell you how often I've worked with companies that don't know their cost of doing business in sufficient detail to support their business decisions." [Prosen then gives an amazing example of this inexcusable ignorance from his experience as a consultant. Read the book.]

"Another great way to reduce costs is to periodically challenge why every report in your company is required. . . I applied this seemingly simple strategy inside a Fortune 1000 company and the savings was extraordinary."

"Poor quality and rework can quickly render [a company] non-competitive. With all the investments made in quality processes over the years, you would think this issue would be very well managed. Yet when I ask company leaders how many of them have defined processes in place to reduce inefficiencies and rework, very few do."

"Another great way to focus on problem elimination is to hold recurring operations reviews. The process I like best makes the leader who is responsible for each operating area stand up and present his or her results in front of colleagues and senior management."

"Run leaner than you would prefer--even in good times. It's always a better alternative to budget cuts and layoffs."

Dear readers, Prosen's whole book is packed with insights and sayings and warnings and summaries as valuable as these. Yes, Prosen is relentless. Yes, he pounds home his lessons again and again. Yes, much of what he preaches is superficially obvious. But you know what? All great practical teachers do exactly that. These reflections make me wonder whether Mr. Blumberg actually read "Kiss Theory Good Bye." He certainly didn't read it carefully, or with the least imagination.
I urge you to read "Kiss Theory Good Bye." Don't pay any attention to Kent Blumberg. There isn't a wasted word in "Kiss Theory Good Bye." It's all business. Maybe that's why it offends Mr. Blumberg. It's too practical, too down-to-earth. It insists too much on the necessity of changing what you're doing now by working hard and continuously at what must seem to Mr. Blumberg to be grubby, dull, mean little particulars. Prosen offers no neat but chicly paradoxical inspirational formulas for achieving business utopia instantly.
Here's what I think: If Mr. Prosen had been aware of Kent Blumberg's existence and cared about pleasing him when he wrote his book, he would have chosen a different sort of title. Something like, "Who Melted My Cheese: The 12 Things You Must Do Differently to Keep Your Company on Top." Yeah, that probably would have done it.



1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Its all about the result, 2008-01-23
Bob Prosen wrote a great book called Kiss Theory Good Bye - Five Proven Ways to Get Extraordinary Results in Any Company.

The goal of the book is to provide a definitive how-to-book on business execution. It is a first person account of how Bob Prosen has helped lead major companies.

I like the simplicity of the book and the rules. I particularly like the chapter summaries that make it an easy read.

Chapter one talks about one of my favourite topics, habits. Although the focus of the chapter has a lot of bad habits and I prefer to focus on good habits. Clearly habits are the first step in any good company. This chapter also talks about doing walk-abouts.

Chapter two talks about leadership. It talks about having no politics. I would modify this to say any company is going to have politics so can they be positive politics. This ties into culture which is one of the main topics that any leader should involve themselves in.

Chapter three talks about sales effectiveness and how to manage a sales force as well as what the difference is between a good and bad sale.

Chapter four talks about operational excellence. Clearly operational excellence is where it all begins and has to do with such things as cost structure, accounting, and just good old fashion execution. It also talks about processes.

Chapter five talks about financial management where information is power. One of SYNNEX's top values is visibility and this chapter talks all about visibilities so you know your costs and where the profit is and where you are making money and where you are not.

Chapter six jumps back to the customer and talks about customer loyalty the one that keeps on giving. This is tied closely to sales but potentially talks more about branding and execution.

Chapter seven starts with a great quote, At the beginning of the day it is all about possibilities; at the end of the end of day it is all about results. This chapter talks about getting results and are you really doing it.

Chapter eight is titled Be Your Competitors' Worse Fear. It starts with, Your competitors' biggest fear is not so much your bright ideas but your ability to turn those ideas into bottom line results. That requires an accountability based culture relentlessly focused on achieving clear goals.

Daily Checklist

End indecision, increase your productivity, kiss theory good bye and get the results you need.

THESE SEVEN STEPS EVERY DAY TAKE:

Give clear directives. Be short, be definitive, and get to the point.

Require accountability. Focus on results, not activity.

Never rationalize poor performance.

Avoid overplanning. When a plan is in place, execute.

Embrace change. Search out opportunities to improve your organization and your results.

Help every member on the team win.

At the end of every day, ask yourself, Did my actions today help move the organization closer to meeting its objectives?

THE LEADER'S ROLE - MAKE EVERYONE WHO REPORTS TO YOU WIN!

Clearly define everyone's objectives, establish quantifiable metrics, and measure performance.


Have each person identify the top three barriers to achieving his or her objectives.


Agree on specific actions, responsibilities, and time frames to remove or minimize the barriers.

Hold everyone accountable for results and disproportionately reward those who achieve their objectives.

Remember, you win when everyone on the team wins!

Chapter nine, The Critical Path: this talks a lot about communication. Clearly nothing happens without proper communication.

Chapter ten, Measure What Matters Most: This not only goes to the accounting and financial measurements which were discussed earlier, but gets into counting what is right. I have always been a big believer of every business having a dashboard and believe each business is dashboard and what should be measuring and looking at differs.

Chapter eleven talks about how you continue with the execution and keep it going.

The Epilogue Beyond Profitability: Doing Good and Doing Well



The old adage is true: You can do good and do well. With the attributes I've outlined, you don't have to cheat to become highly profitable. There's no need to color your reporting or cook the books to achieve great success.





0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Required Reading for MBA Students, 2007-09-23
From the moment I read Prosen's book, I knew it had to be required reading for the MBA class I'm teaching. Because my day job puts me in the trenches with organizations of all sizes, I knew that this book hit the nail on the head. While other books make the case for getting from "good to great" this book creates the roadmap for HOW to achieve it. With relevant examples, usable tools, and a down-to-earth common sense approach, Prosen provides a timeless tool of common sense for senior leaders of organizations. He also provides applicable reasons for addressing the "nay sayers" in the organization. If you're tired of books that provide a lot of fluff with little take-back-to-your-desk-application, then get this book. My MBA students have assured me that they are keeping this book in their library.

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