Main Idea
Accountability is one of the best written management books that advocate freedom and responsibility without control in managing business organizations that achieves sustainable results in sales growth and overall bottom line performance for many industries.

This advocacy professes the belief in granting individuals in a business organization the right and the freedom to make choices that allows people to be personally responsible in their jobs when they are allowed to design and own their jobs, and to create their systems. And for leaders to have faith in their people by believing that everyone wants to be great and that they be trusted to do great things.

Control based thinking asserts that controls establish accountability while freedom based thinking says that control stifles accountability and leads to cheating, shortcuts, and passive aggressive behavior to achieve results that in turn defeats accountability.

Whereas freedom based environment leads to more productive results in business enterprises since it offers "intrinsic" rewards that sustains accountability at all levels while control based environment offers "extrinsic" rewards that are themselves subtler forms of control to achieve results.
About the Author
Rob Lebow, named in 2005 among The Top 100 Thought Leaders worldwide, is chairman of LCI (Lebow Company, Inc.), an international training and research organization celebrating its 20th year in business. Additionally, in 2005, Leadership Excellence magazine named LCI one of The Top 10 Leadership Development Programs in the United States among small independent consultants. LCI¡¯s Shared Values Process¢ç, based on original research from over 17 million surveys conducted in 40 countries, is rated by Dunn & Bradstreet, through a client study, as one of the top training organizations in America. In 1989, the United States Patent Office officially recognized the Shared Values Process¢ç/Operating System as a unique training and cultural-change tool. Today, LCI has over 300 clients worldwide, has accumulated data from over 2,400 worldwide organizational sites, and has the largest database in the world on the cultural elements of values-based behaviors in the work environment.

Prior to developing the Shared Values Process and founding LCI, Rob spent nearly a decade in the fiercely competitive cosmetics industry, where he led one of Avon Products¡¯ most successful divisions. While at Avon, Rob was asked to join the elite mergers & acquisitions team that acquired companies such as Tiffany¡¯s. Rob¡¯s career then shifted to the software industry, where his team won the computer industry¡¯s prestigious DOS Product of the Year Award. Rob then joined Microsoft Corporation as director of marketing and corporate communications. In 1990, Harvard Business School wrote a case study highlighting Rob„äs ethical leadership at Microsoft after he was singled out in The Wall Street Journal for refusing to accept confidential information stolen from Lotus Development. While responsible for advertising and public relations at Microsoft, Rob helped bring Windows¢ç to the world and launch over 47 software and hardware products.

Published in 1990, Rob¡¯s first book, A Journey into the Heroic Environment, was a bestseller and sold over 300,000 copies in seven languages worldwide. The third edition of the Journey book was published in 2004. Lasting Change, published in 1997 with bestselling coauthor William Simon, was hailed as one of the best business books of the year for change-management practices. His third book, Accountability—Freedom and Responsibility without Control, coauthored with Randy Spitzer, has been recommended as a ¡°best book¡± by several of the leading social psychology and organizational development associations. In all, Rob has either published or is in the process of publishing six books focusing on the topic of Shared Values and&nbs