Profitability or growth? Results today or tomorrow? More synergy or better stand-alone performance? Ask managers which they want and most will tell you both. But they will also tell tou that more progress on the other. It's like squeezing a ballon in one place only to find that it expands elsewhere.
Based on four decades of experience working with some of the world’s best-known companies, authors explore three tension every company faces and how to overcome them. They draw on groundbreaking reseach into the 20-year performance of more than 2,000 companies and on in-depth discussion with 20 chairmen and CEOs of corporations such as Alcan, Barclays, BP, Cadbury Schweppes, Cardinal Healt, Dow Jones, Gillette, Reuters, Roche, Textron, and Xerox.
The authors put forward a radical new way to assess company performance: batting average--a measure of how often competing objectives are achieved at the same time. They show how this matters more than any othe single measure of operating performance. And they explain how you can raise your batting average to unlock better performance. (text cited from the book flap)