With so many options and data available, how do you decide to do what really matters? Whether you are the CEO of a multi-billion dollar international company, the brand manager for a product, a manger of human resources, an entrepreneur starting a new business, or someone just starting a career, the biggest impediment to success is the failure to understand what really matters. Jim Kilts started his business career over three decades ago and has moved from his initial job of product manager to become the CEO of several of the world's best-known companies. His success has been based on his ability to separate myth from fact, cut through the fog of conflicting opinions, do what matters and ignore the rest. When you inherit, as Kilts did, a sales force at Nabisco that had just gone through a $50 million reorganization, but was on a trajectory to crash and burn, you have to know what matters so you can make the right decisions before the moment of impact. Or when you walk into Gillette as CEO facing a company with flat sales, declining market share and missed earnings estimates for 15 straight quarters, action is needed and you'd better be right.

Kilts shows how in situation after situation he probed, prodded and identified what matters: the right customers to target, the dynamics of the market that were the most important, how to uncover a different reality from the conventional wisdom. As a young product manager he tells how he refused to see the Country Time brand as just a nice product extension but as a huge opportunity, one that became a robust brand and a half-billion dollar annual business. Or how, as a seasoned CEO, he broke through decades-long conventional wisdom that a red razor would never work.

What Kilts provides in this audiobook is a useful, down-to-earth complete system for success that has worked for him and for the many hundreds of people who have worked for him. It includes a focus on personal attributes (such as intellectual integrity, emotional engagement and action orientation), the management processes and ways of doing things that make all of the difference (such as selecting the right team, what you need to do on your first day on the job) and vision and long term planning (how to select the right roadmap for your business, how to prevent a circle of doom from happening or work your way out of one).