So how do you go about creating the necessary amount of change without destroying your business? The author’s advice includes:

• The leadership of a business is responsible for building a culture of change and growth, which includes keeping, growing and rewarding the right people, and finding, keeping and growing more customers.
• Before you can embrace change, you have to be willing to let go of practices which might have been helpful in the past but which are barriers to innovation.
• Reinvention starts with choosing a clear destination.
• Try a large number of small bets on innovations, rather than trying big bets, because most successful strategy is discovered by taking lots of small bets.
• Companies which succeed through change employ people who have basic smarts, are eager lifelong learners, have a good work ethic, like the company, want to climb some mountains, are optimistic, think like the owner, and feel like they belong.
• Frugality spurs ingenuity, and companies which successfully embrace change have a disdain for waste and indulgence.
• Successful reinvention works best by systematizing everything: determining the best way to do things step-by-step, making sure everyone does things the same way, and using the system as a baseline for continual improvement.

The book is filled cover to cover with stories of companies which made changes or failed to make changes, and these make it very readable and highly engaging. Some types of business are changing more rapidly than others, but all types of business seem to be changing more rapidly today than was the case a few decades ago, so this book will be a very useful resource for most business leaders.

The problem with all this is that, while some people crave the limelight, many others do not feel comfortable putting themselves forward. They would prefer to lead an obscure life and let the quality of their work speak for itself. Unfortunately, however, good work does not stand on its own anymore. To be successful in today’s environment you need to have not only a compelling product but also a significant platform.

The book goes on to describe how to create a compelling product which exceeds market expectations. Your product needs to have a memorable name and an attractive style. You need to accept personal responsibility for launching your product; this is not something you can delegate to others; and you need to secure endorsements and develop an online media kit.

Most of the author’s advice relates to starting, developing and expanding a blog. Is blogging the major way to build a platform today? I can certainly see how it has worked for the author, but most people do not have the same level of writing skills. Further, only a minority of people spend much time reading blogs, so a blog-heavy approach to platform development limits the potential audience size. Notwithstanding these issues, the book very helpfully and clearly describes an achievable way of getting noticed amongst the many competing messages on the Internet.

The author goes on to provide a number of chapters or “action topics” on acting and thinking strategically, creating strategy, winning with strategy, and making strategy work, ending with a “tool kit” consisting of numerous well-known strategic models and tools. Each “action topic” is set out in a concisely structured format, including “objective”, “context”, “challenge”, “success”, “pitfalls”, “checklist”,  and “related ideas” sections.

It is apparent from the videos on the author’s website that he is a “T-shirt and leather jacket” kind of business consultant, rather than “suit and tie”. However, this does not translate into any lack of clarity in his writing, which is extremely logical and easy to understand. Rather than trying to provide a new all-encompassing strategy model, the author takes the pragmatic approach that most businesses will benefit from using multiple strategy models and pursuing multiple sources of competitive advantage. Accordingly, the book is a survey of existing knowledge in the field of business strategy, rather than an original contribution to that field.

Readers who have already read a number of books on business strategy may find the early parts of the book to be fairly basic, but there is plenty of interesting content in parts 4 (“Winning with strategy”) and 5 (“Making your strategy work”). I would have preferred a more detailed investigation of many of the topics covered and more detailed stories about the companies given as strategic examples, but on the whole I think that this book is a very useful textbook on business strategy.

Strategy is frequently a difficult issue for a professional services firm. The firm’s management may try to set strategy in one direction, but if the partners and key operators pursue individual strategies which do not align with that set by management, the official firm strategy gets overruled. Because of the high degree of autonomy enjoyed by professionals, managing partners typically have very little coercive power, and managerial success requires a much higher set of people skills than is required in more hierarchical workplaces.

One aspect of the culture of a professional services firm which is critical to future success is the development of talent. Young potential stars need to encounter appropriate challenges and receive sufficient feedback and mentoring along the way. Mediocrity needs to be stamped out, or the best performers might be tempted to leave for higher-performing firms. Senior professionals need to be cajoled into diverting time and resources away from serving clients to training colleagues.

The book offers significant insights into many of the key issues facing professional services firms, including organizational structure and culture, leading without being able to control, designing and implementing people management systems, and managing your own professional career. This is one of the most helpful books I have read on professional service firm management, and I highly recommend it.

The first six of the eight chapters of the book give an historical perspective explaining how and why the extent of powers enjoyed by leaders have been diminishing. Confucius’s ideal leader was a “gentleman”; Plato’s ideal was a philosopher-king. In the Middle Ages, royalty ruled on earth and God, through the Catholic Church, ruled the kingdom of heaven. The introduction of printing technology enabled Martin Luther to challenge the authority of the Catholic Church, and since then the absolute powers of leaders have been receding, as followers have become more empowered to communicate with each other and co-operate to resist tyranny.

In the workplace, concepts such as bottom-up control, employee activism and corporate democracy started coming into vogue in the 1970s. Command-and-control management theory gave way to cooperation and collaboration. Chief executives became servant-leaders and team players. The personal lives of prominent leaders are now examined publicly, and through social media leaders are subjected to streams of criticism and vitriol. The leader’s ability to control his or her environment has largely disappeared as the result of advances in communication technology.

The author offers a range of criticisms of the leadership industry: it is poorly policed and not objectively assessed; leadership as an area of intellectual inquiry remains thin; and the evidence for whether it is even possible to teach how to lead wisely and well is scant. In my view these criticisms are well taken: there are useful skills that can be taught, and it is possible to teach about the importance of character attributes such as courage, integrity and resilience, but it may not be possible to actually change a person’s character to supply essential attributes that are lacking. What is really needed is verifiable data comparing people’s leadership performance before and after undergoing leadership training programs.

The author also criticises leadership training for being leader-centric, and failing to teach followership skills such as how to engage, how to collaborate and compromise, how to serve and support good leaders or challenge bad leaders, and how to speak truth to power. In my opinion this criticism is overstated. I cannot comment about leadership programs in general, but I am certainly aware of useful leadership resources dealing with all of these topics.

I also felt that the author’s criticism of the leadership industry for its failure to stop bad leaders was overstated. Leadership trainers do not normally have control over who holds leadership positions or how they behave. Organisations are responsible for the selection and performance management of their own staff including their leaders.

Notwithstanding my disagreement with many of the author’s ideas, I found the book highly engaging and usefully provocative. The historical perspective on the changing nature of leadership is a helpful one, and many challenging questions raised by the author are in need of answers.

The book goes on to provide detailed ideas for business environment analysis, finding and selecting appropriate growth strategies, developing scenarios to cater for multiple alternative future eventualities, use and cultivation of innovation, decision-making practices, leadership methods and techniques, dynamic execution of business strategies, and key features of corporate culture and organizational change.

Much of the material contained in the book reads like a compilation of key ideas from works by other business book authors, and in some parts I would have preferred a more detailed exploration of the issues particularly as they relate to business model renewal. Each chapter ends with a “guest lecturer” appearing by way of written interview, and while I can see that guest lecturers are helpful within a classroom context I felt that some of their contributions tended more to interrupt the flow of the book than to add significant value. There are numerous links to YouTube videos. Once again, I am sure that such videos improve the classroom lecturing experience, but they interrupt the flow of reading the book.

The author has chosen a topic which has considerable importance for most business leaders today. Business as usual is not working as well as it used to, and most businesses seem to be in a decline which cannot be blamed solely on the financial crisis. Permanent strategic change is needed, but it is hard to know where to find it. This book could provide a useful starting point for those seeking the elusive answer, given that it covers a wide field and contains extensive references.

Healthy organizations are ones in which there are minimal politics, minimal confusion, high morale, high productivity, and low turnover. The author’s model of organizational health involves four steps: build a cohesive leadership team, create clarity, overcommunicate clarity, and reinforce clarity. At first glance this looks like just two steps, with the second being repeated two times, but in reality the step of creating clarity is about the leadership team defining what the organization stands for, the step of overcommunicating clarity is about ensuring that everyone in the organization understands what the organization stands for, and the step of reinforcing clarity is about applying the agreed organizational philosophy to recruiting and performance management.

A key aspect of organizational health involves having a cohesive leadership team. Members of the leadership team need to trust each other while at the same time engaging in appropriate levels of conflict. All members of the team need to commit to the team’s decisions, and they need to focus on results and hold each other accountable. To be effective, most teams are likely to require more meetings rather than less, but these meetings need to be engaging and productive.

Although the author’s ideas of “creating clarity” bear some resemblance to aspects of conventional strategic planning, they focus more on the people-related issues rather than on strategy and positioning. Most leaders of organizations assume that if they get the strategy right, everybody will just fall into line and harmony and prosperity will result. The author makes a convincing argument for why it is critically important to address the people and behavioural issues as well as the strategy issues, although in my view he has not actually proved that organizational health is the “single greatest advantage any company can achieve”. Some highly successful companies appear to have poor organizational health.

In my opinion this is a very useful book and I highly recommend it to any leaders interested in achieving greater organizational success and making their workplaces more fulfilling for employees.

Rather than using empirical research, the authors use stories from 12 different organisations to illustrate their thesis. Part One contains stories about participative problem solving processes from NASA, a home-building company, and McKinsey & Company. Part Two contains stories about the use of technology and analytics to aid decision making, from a health-care organisation, a technology company and a school system. Part Three contains stories about organisational culture guiding decision-making, from ancient Athens, the Vanguard Group, and EMC. Part Four has stories about leaders with participative decision-making styles, from a media company, a philanthropic organisation and a niche product company.

It may well be a lot more difficult to make an interesting story out of a participative decision-making process than out of a decision made by a lone hero, but I personally found some of the stories unconvincing. For example, the NASA story relates to a decision with a positive outcome, contrasting with earlier NASA decisions with disastrous outcomes. However, the bad and good decisions all seem to have been reached through participative processes; the difference seems to be more in the weight given to different opinions than in the participative nature of the processes. On the other hand, I found the stories about strong organisational culture and participative leadership styles both more interesting and more persuasive.

There are various objections that could be made to the authors’ thesis. It would be useful to see some sort of empirical evidence. Some decisions are clearly better because of a consultative process, but others are clearly worse, either because of groupthink or because an individual decision maker knows better than anyone else (e.g. Steve Jobs and the iPad). The high cost of participative decision processes can outweigh the benefits; for example, the Athenian style of democracy in which every man got to vote has long since been abandoned as impractical.

Notwithstanding these objections, in my opinion there is a lot of merit in the ideas raised by the authors, and the book provides a useful challenge to the thinking of organisational leaders.

The book goes on to discuss the characteristics of a successful adviser, the importance of balancing detachment with dedication, the use of empathy to understand what clients really mean, the advantages of growing a broad general knowledge rather than just a narrow field of expertise, the significance of big-picture thinking rather than just concentrating on the details, developing good judgment, having a strong set of personal values, creating trust through integrity, and how to avoid common pitfalls in client relationships.

Because the book aims to be relevant to a very broad range of professionals, from lawyers to advertising executives to sales executives, the nature of the advice given seems very general. Whilst there are some similarities between lawyers and sales executives when it comes to building client relationships, there are also many important differences. Notwithstanding the generality of the book, most professionals would find considerable benefit in reading it. The technical skills involved in providing expertise to clients are usually very different from the relational skills required to keep clients loyal, and the book refocuses professionals on the importance of those relational skills.

Thinking is great, but nothing in the real world actually changes until you act. So the authors recommend two different ways of acting which complement each other. Use the well-known Prediction way of approaching problems where the outcome is reasonably predictable, but use the “Creaction” way for problems where the outcome is not predictable. Creaction involves taking a “smart step” in the way you want to go, then learning from the outcome of that step, then building off that learning and taking another step.

Other advice given by the authors includes:

• The desire to do something is a very important element in successful creaction.
• Successful entrepreneurs act quickly using the resources which they presently have.
• It is important to decide what an acceptable loss might be, and limit your investment to that amount.
• In most cases greater success arises when you can attract other people to your cause.
• Creaction can be used not just in business situations but also in many other life situations.

A cynical reader might characterise the content of the book as not much more than Nike’s famous tagline. However, in the current unpredictable economic environment it is often very difficult to get any initiative started at all, because of the fear of failure. What this book does is provide a detailed and yet simple plan to address that fear of failure in small steps. I recommend it to any business leader who is stuck in an unpredictable context.