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The Pursuit of Prime: Maximize Your Company's Success With the Adizes Program

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Explains how to determine where a company is in the cycle of corporate life and offers advice on achieving and maintaining maximum productivity

282 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

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113 people want to read

About the author

Ichak Kalderon Adizes

40 books138 followers
Ichak Adizes is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading management experts. Over the course of more than 40 years, he has developed and refined a proprietary methodology that enables corporations, governments, and complex organizations to accomplish exceptional results and manage accelerated change without destructive conflicts. Leadership Excellence Journal named him one of the Top 30 Thought Leaders in the United States, and Executive Excellence Journal put him on their list of the Top 30 Consultants in America.

In recognition of his contributions to management theory and practice, Dr. Adizes has received 14 honorary doctorates, is a Fellow of the International Academy of Management and has been made an honorary citizen of two Eastern European countries. He also received the 2010 Ellis Island Medal of Honor, which is awarded by the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations Foundation for contributions to humanity.

Dr. Adizes has served as a tenured faculty member at UCLA; was a visiting professor at Stanford, Tel Aviv and Hebrew Universities; and taught at the Columbia University Executive Program. He also served as Dean of the Adizes Graduate School for the Study of Leadership and Change, and is currently an academic advisor to the Graduate School of Management of the Academy of National Economy of the Russian Federation.

Dr. Adizes is founder and president of the Adizes Institute, based in Santa Barbara, California, an international consulting company that applies the Adizes Methodology for clients in the public and private sectors. In 2011, the Adizes Institute was ranked as one of the top ten consulting organizations in the United States by Leadership Excellence Journal.

In addition to consulting to prime ministers and cabinet-level officers throughout the world, Dr. Adizes has worked with a wide variety of companies ranging from startups to members of the Fortune 50. He lectures in four languages, and has appeared before well over 100,000 executives in more than 50 countries.

He has written 14 books that have been published in 24 languages. His book, Corporate Lifecycles: How Organizations Grow and Die and What to Do About It (subsequently revised, expanded and republished as Managing Corporate Lifecycles) was named one of the Ten Best Business Books by Library Journal.

Dr. Adizes lives in Santa Barbara, California, with his family. In his leisure time he enjoys folk dancing, playing the accordion, and practicing meditation.

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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
Profile Image for Book Princess (Anastasia).
429 reviews78 followers
November 22, 2018
Корисний нон-фікшн для всіх власників бізнесу. Адізес дає поради, дає інструменти, завдяки яким можна визначити етап, на якому знаходиться компанія, а також як вийти на рівень Розквіту і залишатися там. Зміни - це неминуча складова на шляху до розквіту. Ще Адізес розвінчує різні міфи щодо керування компанією і дає дієві поради, як уникнути занепаду та смерті бізнесу. Професійно, конкретно, мотиваційно. Книга має стати настільною літературою кожного підприємця.

З мінусів (для мене) - орієнтована більше на власників бізнесів, ніж на тих, хто хоче почитати книгу заради загального розвитку.

Як професійна література книга чудова.
Profile Image for Jason Braatz.
Author 1 book68 followers
September 18, 2022
Dr. Adizes looks at the company's lifecycle much differently than, say, Michael E. Porter as written in Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors . Whereas one style is that there's a business cycle with a beginning and and end, the author makes a great business case of why a business can actually exist forever and how it's achieved.

This was written well before the success of Apple, and given that it's also referenced in this book (only when the company was much different) demonstrates his interesting thesis. If a company were in a mode of "always-innovating" (think 3M) and reversing direction when it's harvesting too much, it stays in this state of Prime. Prime isn't perfection, it's the notch before it. That makes empirical sense; when a business becomes routinized, it becomes stale quickly thereafter and it's hard to recover. On the other hand, when things are still in the mode of being innovated through, the employees and partners to the organization give it a much stronger effort than they would otherwise.

This is as applicable to a Mom & Pop shop as it is a Fortune 500 company. In fact, had some Fortune 500's from years back understood Dr. Adizes's premise, they wouldn't be in failure-recovery mode (like Kodak, Xerox, etc.)

The only bad part is this: the author tries to make it a little easier to read with interjections of humor (which are indeed actually funny) here and there, but it's still a business book, and that sometimes gets in the way of the point being made. Outside of that, I believe Dr. Adizes's Institute still exists, but more importantly, this should be required reading for anyone in a leadership position or someone setting up to become an entrepreneur.
Profile Image for Olha Boiko.
12 reviews3 followers
November 13, 2023
Дійсно чудова книга для менеджерів. Концепція життєвого циклу організацій, яка тут представлена, може допомогти розібратись з кризами, через які проходить ваша. Більше користі для бізнесів, але громадським організаціям теж дуже релевантно.

Це точно не "чергова книжка з купою води, яка могла би бути статтею". Хоча прочитати статті про життєвийцикл оррганізацій теж можна, це буде краще ніж нічого.
Profile Image for Guillermo.
81 reviews
June 9, 2014
A great book that clearly states how there are not magic bullets in the world of management. What could make a company be in a prime position differs based on where it is on its lifecycle. What may be healthy a healthy approach to develop a startup, may on the other hand kill a mature organisation. Unfortunately few people understand this, whatever is the latest and greatest management approach, should not be consider as the ultimate solution for every company on every situation, at least not before an outside in intervention done the right way.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews

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