This year’s must-read business book … and by must-read I mean you must read it because every other manager is reading it … is Steven Spear’s Chasing the Rabbit (2008).

Fortunately, it would be worth your time to read, even if it wasn’t a must-read book. Like Jim Collins’s Good to Great (2001) and Joyce, Nohria and Roberson’s What Really Works (2004), Spear dug deeply into how several outstanding organizations (high-velocity “rabbits”) operate to extract common operating principles.

And came up with a different formula, proving once more that as someone once said, management science is to science as plumbing is to hydraulics.