Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The charismatic, accessible, and down-to-earth CEO of Dunkin' Brands (Dunkin' Donuts, Baskin-Robbins) shows how positive pushback--the discipline of "questioning everything without trashing anyone"--provides a unique results-oriented way to lead an organization to prosperity. We live in a world where the move from success to failure can happen in a flash. Customers, competition, changing societal mores, and technology can bring on existential crisis. But as Dunkin' Brands Chairman and CEO Nigel Travis shows in
The Challenge Culture, businesses can cope with change and go on to thrive by instituting a culture that supports positive pushback: questioning everything without trashing anything or anyone.
The ability to get colleagues to break out of conformity--especially when it means upending a culture of fear and authoritarianism--is a rare skill, one Nigel (everyone calls him Nigel) has been developing for decades. In a distinct, authentic, and authoritative voice, Nigel draws from a wide range of personal experiences--including the way Blockbuster dawdled in the face of the Netflix challenge, his early days at Dunkin' Donuts, and his recent foray into owning a UK soccer team--to show how a challenge culture is necessary to provide a human-oriented, results-driven blueprint for building a prosperous future.
To keep up with the times and grow, people need to be allowed to speak up and question the status quo, talk in a civil way about difficult issues, debate across disciplines, disagree about strategies and tactics in order to successfully move forward together.
Synopsis
The executive chairman and former CEO of Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin Robbins reflects on the unique, results-oriented discipline he's developed over decades of leadership, which provides a blueprint for any organization to achieve prosperity. We live in an era in which successful organizations can fail in a flash. But they can cope with change and thrive by creating a culture that supports positive pushback: questioning everything without disrespecting anyone.
Nigel Travis has forty years of experience as a leader in large and successful organizations, as well as those facing existential crisis-such as Blockbuster as it dawdled in the face of the Netflix challenge. In his ten years as CEO and chairman of Dunkin' Brands, Travis fine-tuned his ideas about the challenge culture and perfected the practices required to build it. He argues that the best way for organizations to succeed in today's environment is to embrace challenge and encourage pushback. Everyone-from the new recruit to the senior leader-must be given the freedom to speak up and question the status quo, must learn how to talk in a civil way about difficult issues, and should be encouraged to debate strategies and tactics-although always in the spirit of shared purpose. How else will new ideas emerge? How else can organizations steadily improve?
Through colorful storytelling, with many examples from his own career-including his leadership in turning around the fear-ridden culture of the London-based Leyton Orient Football Club, of which he is part owner-Travis shows how to establish a culture that welcomes challenge, achieves exceptional results, and ensures a prosperous future.