Books & studies

“Iconic – how to create a virtuous circle of success” is a unique management book on organizations like the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, elBulli, the All Blacks, Princeton, Gore-Tex and Johns Hopkins Medicine.

TURN YOUR ORGANISATION INTO AN ICON

What do the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, restaurant elBulli and the All Blacks rugby team have in common?

All three are iconic organizations that quickly became the admired leaders in their field, and did so for longer than deemed possible.

The vast majority of organizations never get there. Only a select few do, and when they do, do so for decades, a century or more. This begs the question why, and how do they pull this off?

Such iconic organizations create a virtuous circle of sustained success. A circle that is tricky to launch but very robust once established. It allows them to attract exceptional talent, makes the team much more than the sum of its parts, and drives it forward with absolute aspiration and passion over time – almost indefinitely.

The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, piano maker Steinway & Sons, the Johns Hopkins University Hospital, oil & gas company Shell, and other iconic organizations provide lessons on how they launched and sustained their virtuous circle of success.

Their stories reveal the often counterintuitive ingredients behind their centennial success. The personal testimonies of their people tell even more. It’s from the latter that we learn how iconic organizations institutionalize passions without killing it.

Iconic is published by LID Publishing (New York and London) and is available from Amazon and other leading online shops. The third edition of the Dutch version Toonaangevend was released this summer. A Japanese translation is also in preparation.