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| Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End | 
| Author: Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Publisher: Crown Business
Category: Book
List Price: $27.50
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (43 reviews)
Sales Rank: 207604
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.4
ISBN: 1400052904
Dewey Decimal Number: 650.1
EAN: 9781400052905
ASIN: 1400052904
Publication Date: August 31, 2004
Release Date: August 31, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
From the boardroom to the locker room to the living room?how winners become winners . . . and stay that way.
Is success simply a matter of money and talent? Or is there another reason why some people and organizations always land on their feet, while others, equally talented, stumble again and again?
There?s a fundamental principle at work?the vital but previously unexamined factor called confidence?that permits unexpected people to achieve high levels of performance through routines that activate talent. Confidence explains:
? Why the University of Connecticut women?s basketball team continues its winning ways even though recent teams lack the talent of their predecessors
? Why some companies are always positively perceived by employees, customers, Wall Street analysts, and the media while others are under a perpetual cloud
? How a company like Gillette or a team like the Chicago Cubs ends a losing streak and breaks out of a circle of doom
? The lessons a politician such as Nelson Mandela, who resisted the temptation to take revenge after being released from prison and assuming power, offers for leaders in both advanced democracies and trouble spots like the Middle East
From the simplest ball games to the most complicated business and political situations, the common element in winning is a basic truth about people: They rise to the occasion when leaders help them gain the confidence to do it.
Confidence is the new theory and practice of success, explaining why success and failure are not mere episodes but self-perpetuating trajectories. Rosabeth Moss Kanter shows why organizations of all types may be brimming with talent but not be winners, and provides people in leadership positions with a practical program for either maintaining a winning streak or turning around a downward spiral.
Confidence is based on an extraordinary investigation of success and failure in companies such as Continental Airlines, Seagate, and Verizon and sports teams such as the University of North Carolina women?s soccer team, New England Patriots, and Philadelphia Eagles, as well as schools, health care, and politics.
Packed with brilliant, practical ideas such as ?powerlessness corrupts? and the ?timidity of mediocrity,? Confidence provides fresh thinking for perpetuating winning streaks and ending losing streaks in all facets of life?from the factors that can make or break corporations and governments to the keys for successful relationships in the workplace or at home.
Amazon.com Review
Rosabeth Moss Kanter will convince you that the goal of winning is not losing two times in a row. In her view, success and failure are not events, they are self-fulfilling tendencies. "Confidence is the sweet spot between arrogance and despair--consisting of positive expectations for favorable outcomes." says Kanter, a Harvard Business School Professor and author of The Change Masters. She applies the literature of cognitive psychology (dissonance, explanatory models, learned optimism) to explore the winning and losing streaks of a diverse lineup including the BBC, Gillette, Verizon, Continental Airlines, the Chicago Cubs, and Target. The result is a brilliant anatomy lesson of the big decisions and the small gestures that build and restore confidence. Three cornerstones are clearly detailed: "Accountability," the actions that involve facing facts without humiliation; "Collaboration," the rituals of respect that create teamwork, and "Initiative/Innovation," the "kaleidoscope thinking" that unlocks energy and creativity. A standout chapter describes how Nelson Mandela created a culture of confidence in South Africa. Some readers may wish for more strategies about positive habits of mind in individuals. Others will search for a quick fix. Instead, Moss Kanter?s in-depth examples and ideas about resilient organizations will become required reading. They add up to a persuasive and informed optimism. --Barbara Mackoff
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| Customer Reviews: Read 38 more reviews...
 A waste of time and money December 1, 2007
This was an impulse buy that I now regret. In retrospect I wish I had first gone to Amazon to check the unusually high number of 1-star reviews this book has received.
The core message is that winning leads to more winning by attracting resources and talent and building confidence. Likewise, losing leads to more losing by detracting resources and investment and eroding team confidence. A losing organization can turn itself around by building up the three pillars of confidence: accountabilty, collaboration, and iniative/innovation.
The book's message could have been expressed in 1/3 of the space. Instead you have to wade through one repetitive story after another, mainly from high school and college football, ad nauseum.
My advice is to save your money and look for something better.
 A life explained September 19, 2007
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
This book is about me, you, my company, you company and our countries. Rosabeth details with exact science why we experience highs and unfortunately the lows. What you will learn is how to stop the lows from continuing, pulling them round and start back on an upward path. I loved this book because of the frank and direct way the author tells her stories and research. Anyone that has ever experienced emotions on both sides of the scale ought to read this for an explanation why they happened and how you can stop them ever happening again. A great book!
Gary May
Author: SELLING: Powerful New Strategies for Sales Success
 Great concept! Wish it had been a better read. April 24, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I'm torn in this review... LOVED the high points and the premise - intriguing and powerful... the concepts are tought provoking and the illustrations on point. In between the strong points are redundant, nauseating passages that preach the obvious, as if trying to create a sense of framework, but doing it unnecessarily. Reads like long winded Tom Peters. A shorter book without those passages would have been much better. It's worth reading for the good parts. Darn, wish she'd had a tougher editor and better writing because the concept has the potential for 5 stars.
The Dynamics of Success March 23, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
With the recent surge in books about presidential politics, national intelligence failures, international terrorism, the testimonies of present and past military heroes, and Iraq, it is refreshing to read a book that is enormously informative and has no political agenda. "CONFIDENCE: HOW WINNING STREAKS AND LOSING STREAKS BEGIN & END" analyzes the underlying mechanics, often self-imposed, which cause a company or sports franchise to spiral down into the Inferno of the "Circle of Doom."
"CONFIDENCE: HOW WINNING STREAKS AND LOSING STREAKS BEGIN & END" by Rosabeth Moss Kanter is a fascinating look at how companies, sports franchises, banks and governments rise and fall or struggle against repetitive patterns of losing.
Whether you are a baseball fan or not, most people were captivated by the dramatic unfolding story of the Chicago Cubs during last year's 2003 pennant race. You may remember it. The Chicago Cubs were up 3 games to the Florida Marlins 2 games in the National Championship. Late in the game, a fly ball out to left field drifts into foul territory, a long-time Cubs fan wearing a hat and headphones reaches out over the railing to catch a major league baseball. At the same moment, the left-fielder Moises Alou drifts over, straddles the wall, and leaps up to make the catch. The fan inadvertently knocks the ball out of Moises Alou's glove. Instead of two outs in the 8th and a probable trip to the World Series, the breaking of a "demon curse" and the end losing streak that spans decades, Luis Castillo walks to first base. That moment begins the Florida Marlin offensive. The Chicago Cubs lose, and turn the fan Steve Banter into a pariah. Author Rosabeth Moss Kanter states that there was something else far deeper in the losing mentality of the Chicago Cubs. You don't throw off decades of losing in one season. It is a long struggle that takes time and the correct approach.
This brief incident encapsulated universal understandings and feelings which people have for their own plights, i.e. breaking out of bad luck cycles, being labeled a continual underdog, losing no matter what you try to do and how hard you work, or struggling to regain any semblance of financial control and mirrored reward over your life. It is universal, compassionate and instinctive. At a human and emotional level, this is what "CONFIDENCE: HOW WINNING STREAKS AND LOSING STREAKS BEGIN & END" by Rosabeth Moss Kanter is about. Though the book presents the emotional and financial, even desperate, needs that people and their teams have for winning, whether corporate or sports, whether public or private, whether new or old, it spells out how losing deteriorates the human spirit and will, and more importantly what you can do to change your loss and regain your dignity and your confidence. CONFIDENCE is about far more than just anecdotal stories about success and failure.
Rosabeth M. Kanter is an Ernest L. Arbuckle professor of business administration at Harvard University. Author of 16 books, she specializes in strategy, innovation, and leadership for change. She has been hired by major international corporations and governments for her organizational expertise. She is a senior adviser to IBM's award-winning Reinventing Education initiative. Between the years 1989 to 1992, she also served as Editor of the Harvard Business Review. Professor Rosabeth Kanter has received 21 honorary doctoral degrees and was ranked in the 100 most important women in America and the 50 most powerful women in the world.
In her book "CONFIDENCE: HOW WINNING STREAKS AND LOSING STREAKS BEGIN & END", Professor Kanter examines in detail the collective strategies and behaviors of a myriad of corporations and sports franchises. The author traveled around the world to interview the leaders of great companies, and observe the companies at their basic levels in action. With the discipline of a gifted surgeon who discovers, analyzes, and excises a cancerous tumor from a body, she presents in strategies of great leaders, who turn around powerful failing corporations. She outlines and highlights the universal operatives which lead companies and teams into a spiraling out-of-control spins into the realm which she calls the "Circle of Doom." She explains why certain intervention techniques worked to not only save a losing company, but also to make it thrive as a winner. At the root of each company and team, confidence is made or broken.
If you are a college student studying business administration, a charismatic CEO forged by years of discipline and hard work, an aspiring sole-proprietor of a small graphics or telecommunications company, the athletic director or coach of a college football, basketball or soccer team, or merely a weekend couch-potato watching every play of his Philadelphia Eagles hoping that, since their turnaround, this is the year that they win the Super Bowl, then this book is for you.
In a chapter called "The First Stone: Facing Facts and Reinforcing Responsibility," Professor Kanter traces the history of the Gillette Corporation, a global company whose name is a household word in over 200 countries, bitut Gillette took a financial plunge in the early 1980's, "a near-death experience." It recovers at the end of the decade to significant profits and regained pride, only a few years later to slip again into another downward spiral. However, Kanter explains how with a team mindset, Gillette opened communications and dialogue, national and international managers admitted and took responsibility for their problems, and simultaneously developed an innovative shaving system called Venus, as well as the marketing and advertising other products and companies. Gillette turned around.
In this revealing and informative book, Kanter tells story after story detailing the dynamics of diverse groups, lessons in the struggles of life. Nelson Mandela, of Jeffrey Lurie, who bought a losing Philadelphia Eagle franchise, signed Donovan McNabb against even the mayor of Philadelphia's protests. Kanter discusses the building of the NovaCare Complex, the investment in the players by showing confidence in them. Kanter subtitles one part of the Philadelphia Eagles story as: "Culture Change: A Long Road to Success."
Great companies have great vision. Great leaders have great vision. "CONFIDENCE: HOW WINNING STREAKS AND LOSING STREAKS BEGIN & END" gives you an inside look at the dreams and visions, the courage and work, the strategies, the failures and disappointments, and the most importantly and on a basic level how we lose, how we win, and how to reverse a losing streak. It does not matter if you are interested in business, in government systems, in sports teams, in the arts, in public or private education, or your major concern over the day-to-day downward struggles you experience in your family, "CONFIDENCE: HOW WINNING STREAKS AND LOSING STREAKS BEGIN & END" is worth your time and your money.
John M. Weiskopf
author, "THE ASCENDANCY"
[...]
"patience" --needed to read this book from begin to end December 28, 2006
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
I had great expectations of this book as it started out OK. But soon (within a couple chapters) I realized that the author had run out of new things to say. While there are some non-fiction authors that can captivate and entertain an audience with a single concept (ie... Gladwell w/"Tipping Point/Blink"), this author's writing style seems unusually laborious and repetitive -- languishing in incomprehensible detail. Sad to say, but I think I would have been better off just reading a synopsis of this book.
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