The Game-Changer

How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation

By: A. G. Lafley, Ram Charan

Narrated by: Marc Cashman

Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins

Publisher's summary

How you can increase and sustain organic revenue and profit growth...whether you’re running an entire company or in your first management job.

Over the past seven years, Procter & Gamble has tripled profits; significantly improved organic revenue growth, cash flow, and operating margins; and averaged earnings per share growth of 12 percent. How? A. G. Lafley and his leadership team have integrated innovation into everything P&G does and created new customers and new markets. Through eye-opening stories A. G. Lafley and Ram Charan show how P&G and companies such as Honeywell, Nokia, LEGO, GE, HP, and DuPont have become game-changers.

Their inspiring lessons can help you learn how to:

• Make consumers and customers the boss, not the CEO or the management team
• Innovate to grow a mature business
• Develop higher growth, higher margin businesses
• Create new customers and new markets
• Revitalize a business model
• Reach outside your own business and tap into the abundant brainpower and creativity of the world
• Integrate innovation into the mainstream of your managerial decision making
• Manage risk
• Become a leader of innovation

We live in a world of unprecedented change, increasing global competitiveness, and the very real threat of commoditization. Innovation in this world is the best way to win - arguably the only way to really win. Innovation is not a separate, discrete activity but the job of everyone in a leadership position and the integral, central driving force for any business that wants to grow organically and succeed on a sustained basis.

This is a game-changing book that helps you redefine your leadership and improve your management game.

©2008 A. G. Lafley and Ram Charan (P)2008 Books on Tape

Critic reviews

"A. G. Lafley has made Procter & Gamble great again." (The Economist)

"Of all the firms on the 2007 ranking of the World's Most Innovative Companies, few are more closely associated with today's innovation zeitgeist than...Procter & Gamble...now famous for its open approach to innovation." (BusinessWeek)

“Lafley brought a whole lot of creativity and rigor to P&G’s innovation process.” (Fortune magazine)

Worth every sec of your time!

Very interesting facts, the narrator is great, worth every penny! I heard the book in two weeks while driving my car...its interesting how someone can use this wasted time that way. The book also mentions aloot about Nokia, Starbucks, & even more. ENjoy!

Advanced Management Book

If you are a new manager or leader, this book will take you a few reads to understand the concepts but your effort, hard work and dedication into it will pay off.

This book is filled with very helpful information that will help you build trust, communication and inspiration in your team.

The Customers/Clients are Boss. You have two types of them, internal clients and external clients. Both have a saying.

Excellent work!

Excellent Information and Strategy Development

This is a hard read that’s heavy on detail, but the details are the defense for the claims made by the authors. Another great work with Ram Charan’s collaboration with a captain of the consumer products industry, AG Lafley.

Every aspiring leader who’s organization does or will serve the consumer needs to read this book until it is thoroughly digested.

Low on substance

What didn’t you like about Marc Cashman’s performance?

Marc Cashman is grueling to suffer through as a reader. If he isn't enthused or fascinated by what he's saying, how are we supposed to be as listeners? The guy has no intonation. And on top of that, he takes strange pauses in the middle of thoughts.

Any additional comments?

AG Lafley clearly didn't put much effort into writing this, which is a huge disappointment considering he has a lot of great stories to share that could be useful. Ram Charan just continuously makes a series of general statements that are just too general to be useful. Together they make a couple of weak storytellers.

Staggeringly Bad

There is legitimate and fascinating dialog which surrounds the topic of innovation and the companies such as P&G which have embraced it. This book is largely written by and about Procter & Gamble, and P&G's overt and intentional application of "innovation as a process" as to how they have succeeded in their markets. With those expectations in my mind, I was shocked to find how almost intentionally bad this book is. Half way in I have found it to be a painful regurgitation of their required SEC filings denoting their acquisitions and brand changes, grossly over-saturated with the word "innovation." Apparently the primary author was of the mind that saying the word "innovation" was a reasonable substitute for describing any applied process for bringing innovation into another company or environment.

I would strongly encourage anyone who is interested in the topic of innovation to look for OTHER sources, such as books by the team at IDEO (Consider "The Art of Innovation" and "Ten Faces of Innovation") The author and publisher of this book ought to be ashamed, and I am very sorry I purchased it much less spent the time to listen.