cover image Heads Up: How to Anticipate Business Surprises and Seize Opportunities First

Heads Up: How to Anticipate Business Surprises and Seize Opportunities First

Kenneth McGee. Harvard Business School Press, $29.95 (288pp) ISBN 978-1-59139-299-6

These days it seems like a company's problems don't surface until the CEO is led away in handcuffs. But according to this illuminating primer on the fashionable Real-Time Enterprise management model,""surprises"" like parts shortages, earnings disappointments, business downturns and, yes, indictments are always preceded by ample warning signs. McGee, a vice-president with the consultant group Gartner, Inc., insists that with the right information technology and methods, companies can monitor in real time the crucial five percent of business data that will give them insight into both trouble spots and unrealized opportunities. Writing in stolid but readable prose supplemented with a plethora of charts, he presents a reasonably coherent conceptual framework for following the causal chain of business mishaps back to their sources, spotting the often obscure red flags that allow managers to respond in time to head off catastrophe, and focusing on the key performance and economic metrics to monitor. He illustrates these ideas with lucid post-mortems of a number of disasters in and out of the corporate world, as well as instructive examinations of how companies like General Motors have used real-time tracking to improve a variety of business functions, including inventory, production scheduling and sales. McGee is rather sanguine about the predictability of the world, and he too easily dismisses the danger that a flood of real-time business information could prompt executives to concentrate even more narrowly on the here and now and indulge in an orgy of micromanagement. But managers looking for ways to improve their understanding of the businesses they run will find much valuable information here.