The 80/20 CEO

July 15, 2024
Canady takes a pragmatic, no-nonsense look at running and in some cases salvaging a business, providing a methodical sequence of real-life examples, basic business principles, copious tips and pointers, and a fierce belief in “process.” How did Canady, who came from humble roots in hardscrabble rural North Carolina, lift his life into a true, rags-to-riches story? Here, he reveals the story while offering lessons from his experience—about vision, missions, growth through simplification, the distinction between divergent and convergent thinking—about what it takes to build a business. Canady recounts receiving virtually no guidance as a young man and, after serving a term with the U.S. Navy, taking a series of seemingly dead-end sales jobs. Fortunately, he met some good people who helped guide him as he made a series of fortuitous decisions.
As Canady peels back the curtain on his rise from sideline observer to a key business-world broker, The 80/20 CEO lays out a clear, encouraging roadmap for running, building, or turning around a medium- to large-scale operation. Canady offers practical steps to strategizing, crafting an action plan, and more, though the emphasis throughout is on the highly adaptable principle of the title, also known as the Pareto Principle. It posits that, for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes. The trick is to identify the truly valuable 20% and get the rest of the enterprise to perform similarly.
Canady peppers lessons with examples from familiar leaders; more illuminating are his applications of the 80/20 principles and, in the book’s second half, his discussions of other factors, intangible and tangible, that have to happen in order to achieve success, such as the power of leadership, teamwork, and the ability to listen and learn before launching a turnaround strategy. The advice is sharp, fresh, clear, and presented with polish.
Takeaway: Encouraging roadmap for building or running an organization.
Comparable Titles: Simon Sinek’s Start with Why, Frances Frei and Morriss’s Move Fast and Fix Things.
Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A

April 15, 2024
Canady offers a guide to perfecting a profitable business through better management. In this nonfiction debut, the author, who's the CEO of OTC Industrial Technologies and Arrowhead Engineered Products, breaks down the philosophy and practical elements of a solid "profitable growth operating system," or PGOS. He writes that he learned the basics of leadership in the U.S. Navy; began his post-military career in the heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) field; earned an MBA at the University of Chicago in the early 2000s;and joined an unnamed "global tech company" with the aim of rising to its upper echelons: "The fact that the company had urgent problems gave me a greater opportunity to climb faster and establish myself sooner," he notes, quipping that "you can't fall out of a basement." He moved into private equity, where he repeatedly observed the wisdom of the Pareto principle, from which he takes the title of his book: "Just 20 percent of what you do or spend generates 80 percent of your revenue." (He sardonically adds, "Don't get too happy, though, because the other 80 percent of what you spend generates just 20 percent of your revenue.") In a series of chapters liberally broken up with bullet points, key takeaways, and colored insets, Canady lays out the workings of the Pareto principle as it applies to everything from meetings to workflow. At every stage, he employs a pitch-perfect combination of common sense and wit, clearly informed by long experience. When discussing the essential need to simplify in business procedures, for instance, he notes that his own candidate for the greatest authority in that area would be the great naturalist writer Henry David Thoreau, although he admits that "you probably wouldn't want him as a customer." ("In fact," he adds, "you probably couldn't get him as a customer because he bought almost nothing from anybody.") Canady not only effectively demonstrates that the 80/20 principle is "the single most important assumption" in management; he also entertains his readers at every step along the way. A brisk, enjoyable management manual to help CEOs develop "a bias for action."

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