Confronting Reality was awful. The celebrated authors of this book – Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan – should consider confronting the reality that the world does not need yet another tepid, uninspired business book that tries to create a “simple” construct (in this case, the notion of – tada – a “business model”) to “confront reality” and improve you business. The construct is lame. The examples, while somewhat interesting (EMC, Cisco, Sun, Home Depot, 3M, and Thompson) and by far the best part of the book, are still incredibly light weight stories of the transformation these companies went through recently.
I don’t know why I keep buying and reading business books like this. They are usually such a profound disappointment. I got suckered into this one because my favorite quote from Atlas Shrugged is “Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.” Unfortunately, this time Bossidy and Charan faked me out.