John Gibbs Notary Public

Although we say we value openness, honesty, integrity, respect and caring, we act in ways that undercut these values, and this leads to us getting trapped by our own behaviour, according to Chris Argyris in his book Organizational Traps: Leadership, Culture, Organizational Design. Rather than being open and honest, we say one thing in public and do another in private. Then we deny that we are doing this, and cover up our denial.

The problem arises from a fear of confrontation. We would rather keep the peace than be honest, but there is a very high price to be paid. Organizational traps significantly impair the effectiveness of our organizations. The book contrasts defensive reasoning (Model I) with productive reasoning(Model II). Defensive reasoning, which is what people almost universally adopt in practice, has the following values:

• Be in unilateral control
• Win and do not lose
• Suppress negative feelings
• Behave rationally

Productive reasoning, which many people espouse but almost no-one actually adopts in practice, has the following values:

• Seek valid (testable) information
• Create informed choice
• Monitor vigilantly to detect and correct error

I found the author’s arguments convincing, but by the end of the book I was pessimistic about the prospect of ever successfully overcoming organizational traps. The vast majority of the book is devoted to examples of people who failed to overcome organizational traps and explanations of why the different types of advice offered by leadership experts will not help. The author concludes by saying that changing to reduce organizational traps will not be easy, but we have no other choice.

Only about 9 percent of global companies have been able to achieve more than a modest level of sustained and profitable growth over the course of the last decade, according to Chris Zook and James Allen in their book Repeatability: Build Enduring Businesses for a World of Constant Change. Enduringly successful companies maintain a for a simplicity at their core by adhering to a consistent set of principles which the authors describe as “great repeatable models”.

The research used by the authors provides the following significant findings:

• 80 percent of variation in financial returns among all businesses in the world is accounted for by their performance relative to other companies within their industry, as opposed to their choice of market.
• New growth initiatives—organic or by acquisition—have success rates of only about 20–25 percent, much lower than most executives realize.
• The odds of success (surviving and re-establishing a profitable trajectory) in redefinition are extremely low, less than one in ten.

A significant majority of the companies which were successful over the long term had “great repeatable models” , and the three most important design principles for such models were:

• A strong, well-differentiated core, involving unique assets and deep competencies
• Clear non-negotiables involving a common understanding of the company’s core values and the key criteria used to make trade-offs in decision making
• Systems for closed-loop learning, for driving continuous improvement across the business

In my view this book makes a key contribution to the field of business strategy. The business environment has changed permanently over the past decade and it is now much more difficult to create sustained profitability. The three key design principles identified by the authors do seem to be very important for future success. I found the authors’ reasoning compelling, and I highly recommend the book to anyone involved in devising organizational strategy.

Outthinkers step outside of the accepted paradigms in which thinkers operate, acting differently because they see the world differently, according to Kaihan Krippendorff in his book Outthink the Competition: How a New Generation of Strategists Sees Options Others Ignore. Ordinary thinkers at first dismiss the outthinkers, then they ridicule them, and then they try to copy them. But it is too late if the outthinkers have gained a sustainable advantage.

The secret to success for outthinkers, then, is to make a few strategic choices to which your competition will not be able to respond effectively. Examples of companies which have done this to their competitors include Google, Netflix, Sohu.com, Research in Motion, Intuitive Surgical, eBay, Apple, Southwest Airlines, Dell and Home Depot. In each case, the company seized a strategic option that others were ignoring.

The basis of competition between companies is shifting from an economies-of-scale environment to a free-flow-of-information environment. Improved communications are driving middlemen out of business. The pace of competition is accelerating. Self-organized citizens and customers are seizing control. A small number of outthinkers are succeeding, but the majority of businesses are treading water or going backwards.

The author goes on to describe the “new playbook” (consisting of key strategies which outthinkers follow), the “habits” of outthinkers, a step-by-step process for applying outthinking to any organization, and the phases involved in rebuilding an organization from within.

While the book relied a little too much on ancient Chinese military strategy for my taste, I found the author’s arguments about the changing business environment convincing and his analyses of successful companies compelling. Business really has become more difficult and customers more demanding; in my opinion this book provides some very useful tools for envisioning ways of adapting to succeed.

Workforce analytics answer a simple but often overlooked question: what do we need to know about our organization and workforce to run the company more effectively, and how do we turn that knowledge into action, according to Carl Hoffmann, Eric Lesser and Tim Ringo in their book Calculating Success: How the New Workplace Analytics Will Revitalize Your Organization. Four key areas in which analytics can effectively be employed to improve workforce productivity are:

• Identifying the work that needs to be done and the processes, structures and roles needed to accomplish the organization’s strategy
• Determining how effectively the human capital supply chain is filling those roles with people capable of doing the work at the quantity, quality and cost required of the business model
• Discovering how engaged and motivated the workforce is to meet or exceed performance standards
• Detecting the need for change, testing innovations, and disseminating them throughout the organization.

The authors go on to describe their six-step approach to addressing workforce challenges, involving first understanding what has to be done and then turning that knowledge into action.

In some ways, workforce analytics appears to be a reincarnation of Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management”. One of the key examples is Qantas Airways, which used scorecard analytics to drive workforce productivity increases, echoing the way Taylor used time-and-motion studies to squeeze more work out of labourers. On the other hand, workforce analytics is more about identifying problems with processes than it is about forcing employees to work harder. In one of the other examples, workforce analytics helped demonstrate that high employee turnover was attributable to poorly organized management incentives.

While the book describes a broad approach to diagnosing and treating workplace problems, it does not go into much detail about specifics. Every problem may be different, but I would have thought that there might be a range of standard analytics which are useful in most situations. The examples described throughout the book are interesting, but by the end I had no more than a very general idea of what workforce analytics could achieve.

Surveys show that the most frequently used management tools – benchmarking, strategic planning, mission statements, customer relationship management, outsourcing, and the balanced scorecard – all have dismal satisfaction ratings, according to Jeremy Hope and Steve Player in their book Beyond Performance Management: Why, When and How to Use 40 Tools and Best Practices for Superior Business Performance.

Most management tools are either badly chosen or poorly implemented, according to the authors. The book aims to re-examine and re-present 40 different management tools and practices for a new management age. The tools and practices are grouped into five categories: strategic planning, shareholder and customer value, lean cost management, performance measurement and performance evaluation. For each of the tools and practices, the authors provide a description and assessment of effectiveness, an explanation of the possible benefits, and a list of actions that you should and should not take to maximise the potential of the tool or practice.

The authors list positives and negatives for each of the tools and practices, so it is hard to pin down their specific preferences. However, I gained the strong impression that they feel that “command and control” style management is bad, “empower and adapt” is good. Strategic planning is past its use-by date because it is “command and control” and the world moves too quickly nowadays, but the balanced scorecard is good provided it is used to “empower and adapt” and not to “command and control”. Lean anything (manufacturing, services, accounting) and rolling forecasts are good, but budgets and Enterprise Resource Planning systems are bad. Executive bonuses are bad, but profit-sharing schemes are good.

Most managers who have experience with a range of the tools and practices covered in the book will find some areas of disagreement with the authors. Perhaps inevitably because of the scope of the book, those interested in investigating a single tool may find that the book does not cover it in sufficient depth. Nonetheless, the book provides a very useful and interesting overview.

There are things you can do to help you succeed even in challenging times, and they are in fact the same things that you should do regardless of whether conditions are good or bad, according to Mark Sanborn in his book Up, Down or Sideways: How to Succeed when Times are Good, Bad or in Between. The things that you can do can never guarantee success, but they do increase the odds in your favour.

The book is divided into three sections titled “See”, “Think”, and “Do”. The first section discusses how to see opportunities in daunting waves; the second discusses mindsets that help deal with challenges and take advantage of opportunities; and the third discusses things which can be done to create sustainable success, including:

• Create products, services, experiences and ideas that other people value
• Keep your pipeline filled with relationships, valuable projects and potential customers
• Take care of the people you value and who value you
• Keep learning as much as you can about the people you serve and those who serve you
• It is not enough to be different; you need to be different and valued
• Protect what you value by building reserves
• Practise gratitude, which is the antidote for negative thinking
• Embrace discipline and consistently act on your intentions

Like the author’s other books, this one is short, entertaining and easy to read. There is nothing particularly surprising about most of the advice given, but much of it relates to the things which we tend to forget or neglect to do in the busyness and stresses of daily life. In my view the book is a handy and helpful source of inspiration for dealing with opportunities and challenges.

All mistakes are not created equal; it is possible to design for brilliant mistakes – those that accelerate learning and lead to breakthrough innovation – and to avoid tragic ones, according to Paul Schoemaker in his book Brilliant Mistakes: Finding Success on the Far Side of Failure. Some mistakes have high cost and offer little learning value, but others cost little and produce deep valuable insight. Those are the ones which need to be embraced and fostered.

Some of the insights contained in the book:

• To learn from mistakes, it is important to separate the decision process (which you control) from the outcomes (which are usually influenced by external factors
• Humans have a tendency to seek confirming evidence, whereas the whole truth can often only be discovered by deliberately seeking disconfirming evidence
• To make better decisions, we must adopt a humble view on how much we know about the world around us; we must frequently challenge and test potentially outdated assumptions
• Organizations should identify their assumptions and deliberately set up experiments to challenge some of them where there is low risk and high potential gain
• It is wise to establish a varied portfolio of potential failures to increase the chances of some turning out to be brilliant mistakes

While I do not particularly like the term “brilliant mistakes”, I found the author’s arguments persuasive. Beneficial innovations can only arise as a result of doing something differently, and that usually involves challenging the established wisdom of departing from the established procedures. Often such deviations will be based on the contrarian “hunch” of an individual and so are deliberate although established wisdom might view them as mistakes. This book is suitable for leaders of all types of organizations, not just those who aim to be innovators, because all organizations benefit from a decision-making process that takes into account the role of mistakes.

Great presenters realize that people make decisions emotionally; they will rationalize decisions based on all the facts and figures, using the objective to help them justify the decisions they made subjectively, according to Peter Coughter in his book The Art of the Pitch: Persuasion and Presentation Skills that Win Business. It is critical to make the audience feel that what you are suggesting is the best thing for them.

According to the author, the elements of an effective presentation include:

• It’s a conversation, only you’re doing most of the talking.
• Be yourself: what audiences want is authenticity.
• Tell stories: we all love stories that grab our attention and hold it all the way to the end.
• Know your stuff: don’t memorize the presentation, but know the underlying ideas thoroughly.
• Relax and be personable: it’s the audience that really counts, so don’t worry about yourself.
• Teamwork counts: in great presentations, teams present as if they really like one another.
• Make it personal: a level of intimacy builds credibility and makes a connection.

The book is written from the perspective of an advertising agency executive, but the principles described are applicable to the marketing of any professional services, or more broadly to any form of public speaking or private presentation. In accordance with his own advice, the author provides numerous engaging stories of business won through persuasive presentations, and the book includes brief insights from a number of experienced presenters.

Many of the key points are reinforced by being repeated several times in the book. There is detailed advice on how to organize a presentation, how to use PowerPoint-type slides if they are suitable for your type of presentation, the importance of extensive rehearsal, and the effective use of silence, volume, pitch, tone of voice, facial expressions and other forms of “punctuation”. Anyone who wants to become a better presenter is likely to find some useful tips in this book.

The power of knowing how others make decisions and lean towards choices can help us influence connected behaviours for mutual good, according to Harrison Monarth in his book 360 Degrees of Influence: Get Everyone to Follow Your Lead on Your Way to the Top. Effective influence relies on our understanding of why people resist change even when an idea or opportunity serves their interests.

The book goes on to discuss:

• Different kinds of intelligence, including social intelligence and emotional intelligence, and how you can improve your personal influencing skills
• Different types of resistance to new ideas, and how to overcome them
• Empathy, and how to listen actively and discover what really motivates people
• Decision making processes and how to avoid common decision-making traps
• How to use context and structure complex choices to influence decisions in a positive way
• How to understand an organization’s political culture and use political influence to achieve organizational goals
• Executive presence and the art of persuading bosses to accept you way of thinking
• Gender differences in leadership styles and gender-related influence challenges
• Public relations and management of organizational reputation
• Framing issues and telling stories which paint clear and powerful images
• Personal branding

In summary, the author has provided a useful compilation of information relating to influence, gathered from a number of different sources. There is plenty of helpful information in this book for anyone who is seeking to acquire greater influence. Although those wishing to use influence for purely selfish motives will find some assistance here, the book is primarily directed towards the use of influence for ethical purposes.

What if we stopped thinking of economics as a negative paradigm – the art of removing problems such as barriers to commerce – and started thinking of it as a positive paradigm, involving maximizing potential? That is a question which Umair Haque asks at the start of his book Betterness: Economics for Humans. What if commerce can make us better off in bigger and more human ways than simply “having”?

The fundamental assumptions of business as we know it include shareholder value creation, mass production, hierarchical management, and disposable goods made for consumers. The jobs that most organizations offer most people seem unfulfilling. The “visions” that companies have are typically unexciting. We measure a country’s prosperity in terms of industrial output, GDP, but we ignore more important things like the emotional, social, intellectual, physical and ethical growth of humans.

The book goes on to suggest a better path to future prosperity, consisting of:

• Eudaimonia: a good life, which is meaningfully rich – with relationships, ideas, emotion, health, fulfilment, great accomplishment and enduring achievement.
• Poeisis: generating new wealth, and multiplying the Common Wealth, as opposed to net-destructive forms of competition such as rent seeking.
• Arête: virtue – habits and patterns of behaviour that seed and nurture eudaimonia, replacing “vision-mission-strategy-objectives” with “ambition-intention-constraints-imperatives”.
• Kairos: critical junctures, when opportunities emerge and unexpected, unimagined, transformative new paths can be chosen.

The author’s enthusiasm for his vision of the new future probably exceeds that of his average reader, but his diagnosis of the malaise of the present certainly resonates. Something is definitely wrong when people need to be encouraged to consume more useless stuff quickly to help governments balance their books. The author’s entertaining writing style makes this a pleasant starting point for the reader in imagining his or her own vision of a better future.