By: Forbes India

Andrew Horne, MD, Xerox India, speaks about his favourite books

The key to any organisation’s success is its people. Execution: The Discipline Of Getting Things Done, by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, is a great source of learning about selecting and appraising the right people, and why it is important that this key task never be delegated. With the right people in the right jobs, a leadership pool is created to conceive the right strategy.

The book explains how being passionately engaged, having robust dialogues about strategy and operations, result in a business based on intellectual honesty and realism. It is extremely pragmatic, with examples of the way to set expectations and give feedback. 

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, by Marshall Goldsmith, provides great insight to every successful professional. The greatest learning has been not to rest on past laurels and to look at past success as a way to spur you onto the next level. It gives tremendous insights into leadership and personal behaviours that may inhibit you from continued development and learning.

It provides an insightful guide to mapping goals and identifying barriers  to personal growth. It also has very useful advice on how to better understand every individual’s capability in order to get the best out of them. 

‘Good is an enemy of Great’, the basic premise of Good to Great, by Jim Collins, is an exploding thought. We have seen in the past how great organisations have been dethroned from leadership positions by smaller ones with fresh ideas and innovative strategies.

This book teaches how to approach life through ‘larger than life’ situations. It has taught me to never become complacent, both as an individual and as a leader of an organisation. It has factual wisdom to help business and individuals grow. The book teaches great values of humility and the key to acknowledging weaknesses as the first step towards creating a great organisation.

(Co-ordinated by Neelima Mahajan Bansal)
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