Accountability

By: Randy Spitzer and Robert Lebow

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Synopsis: Using a wealth of real-world examples, this breakthrough book offers a new freedom-based management paradigm that radically improves every aspect of business-from how we hire, compensate, and motivate people to how we address quality issues, serve customers, review employees, and more. Accountability tells the story of Pete Williams, a hard-charging CEO, who meets Stan "Kip" Kiplinger, a retired businessman, during a cross-country train trip. Pete's manufacturing business is in critical condition; productivity is falling. He's tried all the popular management approaches, but he can't get his people to be accountable for meeting their goals. Kip points out that every management system Pete has used is ultimately based on controlling people. Rather than encouraging people to be accountable, control-based systems discourage accountability by destroying people's sense of ownership of their job. Kip introduces Pete to a new way of leading people based on freedom-giving people the freedom to make their own choices and to do it their way. This doesn't mean anarchy; it means leadership expects everyone to act like an adult and take responsibility for his or her actions and their outcomes. Accountability details how this new approach yields a consistent flow of creative innovations and organizational improvements impossible under the old, coercive systems.