Aligning The Stars: How To Succeed When Professionals Drive Results

Introduction

Aligning the Stars: How to Succeed When Professionals Drive Results was written by Jay W. Lorsch and Thomas J. Tierney. They discuss how to succeed in a professional service firm. They teach CEOs how to turn talented employees into star employees, how to guide your brightest stars or your potential leaders, and how to align your own star. The difference in this book versus other books is that this book focuses on your star employees versus all employees. Throughout this critique I plan to summarize the authors main points using the three keys to success explained in the text and analyze them through my own interpretation.

Turning Talented Employees Into Star Employees

The first key to long-term success is to turn talented employees into star employees. A common misconception among businesses is they believe rainmakers are what drive their successes. After all, they are the ones who develop good relationships with employees and develop profitable and strong relationships with clients. It is thought that making and developing rainmakers is the key to long-term success. However, there is a more important type of employee. That is a star maker, or the star employee. Developing stars is more important than developing rainmakers, because star makers are a more wise investment. The difference between a star and a rainmaker is a star is interested in the long term. Stars see the future and have vision. Rainmakers are only interested in making the most money today and not tomorrow. Stars develop long-term plans for success and act more like leaders. Stars are basically people that will be leading the company in the future. They state in the book that investing in future stars is very hard work. It is hard to guess at who is going to keep motivated, and who will not.

Guiding Your Brightest Stars

The second key to long-term success is how to guide your brightest star. After the process of finding your talented employee and making them into a star, the goal is to guide them to help the firm or business succeed over a long period of time. These skills cannot be taught, but they can be attained through experience over long periods of time and through experience in many situations. After the stars have been introduced to all of these situations they should be able to take the reins. Although they might feel ready, it is a very challenging process. One reason the challenge is so great is the varieties of needs and priorities that come with every role they must take on. This is called the three-hat challenge. The three different hats include producer, manager, and owner. The star must be able to flourish in all of these aspects, and they must be able to take them over at any point and time. After these series of tests, they are considered to be well on their way to becoming stars.

Aligning Your Own Star

The last key to long-term success is being able to align your own star. Many people step back and take frequent looks at themselves, and some don't. The key to great success is being able to evaluate or align yourself frequently. It is a constant challenge when guiding other potential stars as it is, and when the main star isn't up to par there is much room for error. Lorsch and Tierney spend a great deal talking about self-evaluation as being the key to success. They feel if the leader is confident, the followers will be. If the leader is not confident or he is elderly and not regularly re-informed, the business could make it easier for competitors to obtain their clientele. Also, Lorsch and Tierney state that being well aligned isn't just being successful. It can be defined as being well rounded as well. They mention that to be successful at one aspect of life, you must be successful at the rest as well. Stars know they will never be aligned, and they are always aligning. Stars unlike non-stars feel there is always something new to learn, and believe they will never know it all. Stars play vital roles in successes within a firm and are great assets as well.

Afterthoughts

The author's main points in the book were established very clearly. They included the three keys to success and how they built stars from these keys. Throughout this text I felt Jay W. Lorsch and Thomas J. Tierney are very credible authors. They state many times that this book wasn't based upon an experiment, but through endless research projects and years of experience. They talk heavily on how they live to help people thrive in professional settings, and I feel if they live for it then they must be passionate. Passion to me is a very important key to success and I was disappointed it wasn't mentioned more frequently throughout the text. Although passion wasn't mentioned, they did talk heavily on self-evaluation. This leads me to believe they had a bias towards the third key to success. I agree to some extend, but the other two are just as important to me. To my surprise they rarely mentioned customers and their part in the role of success. I was always under the impression that the customer was the most important part to success. If the customer is drawn to the business, then it will flourish. If the customer is not, then there is no business. Although a few important aspects weren't included, I feel even without them the authors still got their point across. In my opinion they did a superb job of giving understandable examples to readers who are unfamiliar to there given topics of discussion. They really have a gift of keeping the reader engaged, and that is a very admirable trait.