Wharton School Publishing presents three sets of authors who offer unique perspectives on how to create a meaningful life, realize an ideal business plan, and take your financial future into your own hands to build a lasting legacy of wealth.
Work Backwards to Move Forward
Idealized Design: How to Dissolve Tomorrow’s Crisis…Today
By Russell Ackoff, Jason Magidson, and Herbert J. Addison
What’s the best way to drive fundamental, transformative change within your organization? Envision your ideal solution, then work backwards to where you are. It’s called idealized design, and as executives in hundreds of organizations will testify, it’s one of the most powerful techniques you’ll ever use.
Authored by its legendary creator, Russell Ackoff, Wharton’s Anheuser-Busch Professor Emeritus of Management Science; leading practitioner Jason Magidson, director of innovation processes at GlaxoSmithKline, and consulting writer Herbert J. Addison, Idealized Design: How to Dissolve Tomorrow’s Crisis…Today covers every facet of this breakthrough methodology.
Organized to give you a roadmap for customizing the idealized design process for your own needs, you’ll learn how to prepare for it, organize it, and execute it from start to finish. The authors reveal the fundamental differences between idealized design and traditional process re-engineering, and show how idealized design eliminates many conventional obstacles to change.
They also demonstrate how to “dissolve” problems by designing systems that prevent them from arising in the first place. You’ll see idealized design at work in enterprises, not-for-profit organizations, and government; then learn how to use it to improve processes, design new facilities, increase productivity, even save lives.
“Applying idealized design can and does create breakthrough solutions, to both immediate problems and longer-term strategic goals,” says Andy Callopy, Business Marketing and New Markets Director, Downstream Procurement, BP.
The book includes three start-to-finish case studies: Energetics (Business Enterprise), Academy of Vocal Arts (Not-for-Profit), and the White House Communications Agency (Government). Plus, there is an extensive collection of real-world examples from hundreds of companies, non-profits, and government organizations, including the General Motor’s launch of the OnStar system. You’ll see how GM used idealized design to turn OnStar into a profitable, affordable system that increased its subscriber base from 30,000 (1998) to 300,000 (2005), and has now made it available to not only GM customers, but also select Lexus, Audi, Acura, VW, Honda, Subaru, and Isuzu models.
Idealized Design helps you clear your mind to identify the best possible outcome and get beyond the “can’t be done” attitude. It presents concepts through practice, not theory. The authors show you six steps to success that will help you bring your plan from idealization to realization. You’ll learn how to redesign systems to “dissolve” problems and prevent new ones. This is the book that will help you imagine your organization’s future and make it a reality.
Magnify Your Lifetime Impact
Success Built to Last: Creating a Life That Matters
By Jerry Porras, Stewart Emery, and Mark Thompson
Imagine meeting hundreds of people who’ve made a profound difference: not for weeks or months, but for decades. Imagine discovering what they’ve got in common, distilling it into a set of simple practices, and using them to transform your life. You’ve just imagined Success Built to Last: Creating a Life That Matters. Authored by three legends in leadership and self-help — including Jerry Porras, co-author of the best-selling Built to Last — this book challenges conventional wisdom at every step. The culmination of the world’s most thorough research project on lifelong success, this book draws on the experiences of hundreds of the world’s most remarkable human beings who have sustained personal success and fulfillment over a lifetime
The authors personally interviewed more than 300 extraordinary human beings, some famous, some not, who share powerful patterns of lifelong success. You’ll meet world-renowned leaders Nelson Mandela and President Jimmy Carter, television and movie personalities Barbara Walters and Sally Field, business leaders Michael Dell and Steve Forbes, philanthropists Carol Reinhart (Community Change) and Donna Katzin (Shared Interest for Africa), and many more inspiring individuals from all walks of life. You can learn their patterns of thought and patterns of action, and deliberately weave them into your life.
The book opens with a foreword from Senator John McCain, who says, Success Built to Last: Creating a Life that Matters provides practical wisdom drawn from the stories of hundreds of the world’s most remarkable and enduringly successful people who the authors actually interviewed. This is a book that will make a difference.”
Senator McCain isn’t the only already-successful leader who is impressed by Success Built to Last. Sir Richard Branson, Steve Forbes, Frances Hesselbein (Chairman and Founding President Leader to Leader Institute, Formerly the Peter F. Drucker Foundation), Greg Foster (President of IMAX Films), Herb Kelleher (Cofounder, Southwest Airlines), and dozens of other respected, successful leaders in business and in life have given their endorsement to this inspiring book.
The practical lessons you’ll learn from these interviews will help you discover how to harvest all your successes, failures, strengths, and weaknesses, and how to use them to live your passion for the rest of your life. No matter how you define success, this book can help you achieve it, keep it, share it…and gain the deep happiness that only comes from a life well lived
Your Roadmap to Financial Success
Wealth: Grow It, Protect It, Spend It, and Share It
By Stuart E. Lucas
More people are creating wealth today than at any time in history. Even with the market dip from 2001 to 2003, the number of people with at least a million dollars in net worth is growing at nearly a double-digit annual rate. The dollars that they accumulate are growing even faster. The top 10 U.S. wealth management firms already employ 44,000 advisors to oversee $2.8 trillion in assets.
America is also bracing for the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history. Reasonable estimates show an average of $1 trillion per year will be transferred from one generation of Americans to the next. With the ever-widening scrutiny that banks, brokerage houses, mutual funds, hedge funds, accounting firms, insurance companies, and other wealth management firms are facing, consumers are more confused than ever about who to trust for good advice on managing their wealth.
Wealth: Grow It, Protect It, Spend It, and Share It is the first book to integrate all of the essential components of wealth management into a coherent whole that leads to financial success Written by Stuart Lucas, CEO of Integrated Wealth Management LLC, and heir to the Carnation Company fortune, Wealth reveals the secrets of building and protecting wealth that lasts for generations.
As manager of his own family’s wealth, Lucas uses his own experiences and family history to explain the importance of identifying, retaining, and coordinating the right advisors to obtain the right advice as the first step to successful wealth management. He describes how to use his eight proven, easy-to-understand principles of integrated wealth management to guide every decision you make in managing your family’s wealth.
Lucas also presents his own approach to wealth management as an alternative to the flawed classic approach, in which people rush to retain wealth management advisors without analyzing how these advisors fit with their financial, personal, or family goals. His “Strategic Wealth Management Framework” is a more holistic approach that focuses on determining your interests first, and selecting a board of advisors second.
Your values, resources, and communication are at the center of the framework. Then, guided by the eight principles of strategic wealth management, you are able to set financial objectives, select the right advisors, and ultimately enable yourself, your family, and society. Working with this framework does take more time and effort to implement, but Lucas’s systematic approach will help you leave a lasting legacy for generations to come.
