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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

The book describes the outcome of interviews of 27 CEOs of very large corporations, conducted at the request of William Johnson, CEO of Heinz, in an attempt to find better ways of preparing CEOs for their roles. Each respondent was asked a range of questions relating to his or her experience in taking on the role of CEO and what a successor would need to know if being mentored. The responses were collated into a number of categories, and these are presented together with the comments of the authors.

Things identified as being most helpful in preparing well for the job included:

• International experience
• Board exposure and experience
• Experience in running a business
• Mentoring from a boss or coach
• Functional experience or business rotations
• Use of leadership development resources and experiences

Many of the respondents’ comments are repeated in multiple chapters because of their relevance to multiple topics, and this detracts slightly from the readability of the book. The book is more a report of research findings than a comprehensive manual for training prospective CEOs. Nonetheless, it contains many insights that will be useful to any senior business leader. The interview subjects were all CEOs of very large corporations, but nearly all of the insights will be equally relevant to leaders of mid-sized enterprises.

An organization’s culture consists of the assumptions, values, beliefs, behaviours, artefacts, measurements and actions that determine how things get done in the organization. It influences both the way in which an organization’s strategy is created and the way in which it is implemented. Strong cultures have a significant influence on performance, but not necessarily positive; culture has a positive influence on performance over the long term only if it is an adaptive culture.

The book considers the cultures of numerous companies and analyses their positive and negative aspects. Walmart and Southwest Airlines have strong cultures which have positively influenced their economic performance. Goldman Sachs has had a strong culture but its core values were not held strongly enough to keep it out of trouble in recent years. Service Master, IBM, General Motors, ING Direct, and Illinois Toolworks are amongst the other companies discussed.

In addition to describing in detail the author’s culture cycle framework, the book considers the relationship between culture and innovation, how culture may or may not assist in handling adversity, organizational culture in a multinational context, special culture considerations for non-profit organizations, and the relationship between leadership and culture. One of the appendices contains an interesting survey for measuring the health and strength of a culture.

Given the substantial influence of leadership style on organizational culture, I was a little surprised to see leadership being treated as something separate from culture. Further, the small sample size used by the author in attempting to quantify aspects of culture made the results appear less rigorous although the reasoning behind them appeared sound.

Although organizational culture is very important to the success of any enterprise, it is often poorly understood and therefore limited to a consideration of core values during strategic planning. In my opinion this book remedies this problem by providing a language with which leaders can analyse and rectify some of the key aspects of culture.

The new model proposed by the authors consists of four interrelated sets of leadership activities:

• Setting direction, which involves articulating the firm’s objectives and how the work of professionals relates to those objectives
• Gaining commitment to the direction, which is necessary to make professionals feel involved and included
• Execution, which involves follow-through and accountability to ensure that financial goals are met and people do what they promise to do
• Setting a personal example, which requires the leader to embody the firm’s stated values and goals

While I thoroughly agree with the importance of these four sets of activities, I am left wondering whether there is anything particularly new about them. I would have thought that these have always been important activities for successful leadership of a professional services firm.

The book contains chapters on why professional service firms require a different style of management from that required by product-producing businesses, using segmentation to respond to commoditisation pressures, the importance of strategic differentiation, how to motivate and develop high achievers, and the important role played by professionals who are “solid performers” rather than stars.

The book’s title refers to the fact that professionals are often not well equipped for leadership in a firm. It is often quite confronting for a newly-promoted professional to be faced with the demands and opposition of erstwhile friendly colleagues. I expected the book to deal more extensively with this problem, including in particular how to identify the best candidates for leadership positions and how professionals can work towards acquiring a suitable range of leadership skills.

Notwithstanding these minor issues, in my opinion the book makes a valuable contribution to the field of professional services firm management, and is useful reading for anyone in or aspiring to a professional services firm leadership role.

Some of the key ideas contained in the book:

• Market segmentation and product augmentation, while attempting to create differentiation, have actually led to meaningless distinctions.
• Competitive analysis and comparative metrics have generated conformity and resulted in competitive herding, with all competitors blurring together in the mind of the customer.
• One way of creating effective differentiation is to subtract features from the offering, creating difference by stripping away the superfluous.
• Another way of creating effective differentiation is to create polarization, so that some people hate your offering while others love it.
• Another way of creating effective differentiation is to transform an offering into a different category in the perception of customers.

The book is written in a discursive manner, rather than being constructed according to a clearly defined plan. This works quite well because of the author’s engaging writing style. I found most of the author’s arguments to be quite persuasive. The book is not, and does not purport to be, a definitive manual on the subject of differentiation, but it does in my view provide a good introduction to many aspects of differentiation which are not yet widely understood.