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The Outsiders
book

The Outsiders

by William N. Thorndike
October 2012
Beginner
240 pages
5h 7m
English
Harvard Business Review Press
Content preview from The Outsiders

Introduction An Intelligent Iconoclasm

It is impossible to produce superior performance unless you do something different.

—John Templeton

The New Yorker’s Atul Gawande uses the term positive deviant to describe unusually effective performers in the field of medicine. To Gawande, it is natural that we should study these outliers in order to learn from them and improve performance.1

Surprisingly, in business the best are not studied as closely as in other fields like medicine, the law, politics, or sports. After studying Henry Singleton, I began, with the help of a talented group of Harvard MBA students, to look for other cases where one company handily beat both its peers and Jack Welch (in terms of relative market performance). It turned ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781422187586