What It Takes: Seven Secrets of Success from the World's Greatest Professional Firms

Written by Charles D. Ellis

Narrated by Bernard Clark

What It Takes is the distillation of lessons learned during nearly half a century of working backstage with the leaders of major professional firms as a trusted adviser on strategy and management, observing a few firms rise deliberately to leadership while many others with comparable hopes could not. Over and over again, in dozens of private meetings with firm leaders, the core questions were: Why do some firms rise to leadershipand why do most not make it? What does it take to excel? Perhaps even more important, what does it take to sustain excellence over years and decades, through success and adversity? Experience teaches that in a competitive market, organizations can rise to acknowledged leadership only by excelling in several specific areas: defining a compelling organizational mission and developing a strong complementary culture; consistently recruiting clearly superior people and training them intensively; organizing and motivating them to work in effective teams devoted to serving important clients on their most important problems; and continuously finding new and better ways, both large and small, to deliver distinctive value for clients. The extensive research for this book is based on decades of studying the success and failure of hundreds of professional firms in North America, Europe and Asia, and on over 300 formal interviews with the past and current leaders of the five extraordinary professional firms that exemplify the elements of durable excellenceMcKinsey in consulting, Cravath, Swaine Moore in law, Goldman Sachs in investment banking, Capital Group in investment management and Mayo Clinic in health care.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ascent Audio
• Release date: Jul 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781663701572

Reviews for What It Takes

[jpsnow · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This thoroughly researched analysis describes what makes professional service firms successful for the long term. Ellis explains these key points through the history of successful firms like the Mayo Clinic and McKinsey Consulting, and through the downfall of Arthur Anderson. It has a powerful moral and it's thorough, but it's a long read if you're not really into service firms.