Some Great Books from 2011

Here are some great books from last year that helped me think about Social Business, Business Strategy, Leadership, and how the way we think affects our ability to succeed with them. If you haven’t read them yet, you might want to check them out.

Strategy

The Essential Advantage: How to Win with a Capabilities-Driven Strategy by Paul Leinwand and Cesare R. Mainardi

I read this early in the year after reading the authors’ Strategy+Business article, “Do You Have the Right to Win?” (registration required.) This main point of the book is that unless your business strategy, portfolio of products and services, and your workforce capabilities are coherent, your business will suffer. This problem is very pervasive in business due to factors stemming from growth for growth’s sake without enough consideration given to whether it amplifies and leverages existing strengths or not. The book is not an epiphany on this topic by any means, but it does present a well-thought out framework for helping a business achieve this coherence in a shorter period of time. There are several interesting, real-world examples given to make the process more real and believable.

The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World by Walter Kiechel

I owe a big thanks to my colleague Craig Martell, who recommended this book, which was referenced in The Essential Advantage. Craig had read TEA on my recommendation, read Lords of Strategy and said it was a very interesting read. I agree – TloS brings a historical context to the evolution of Strategy, following the rise of Boston Consulting Group, Bain, and McKinsey as well as the major waves (Position, Process and People) of focus in thinking about gaining advantage. The history covers not only the consulting firms themselves and the way they approached making money from their models and services, but also how academia puzzled over, studied, adopted, and contributed to the thinking around business strategy.

Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters by Richard Rumelt

I had read a McKinsey article, “Strategy’s strategist: An interview with Richard Rumelt” (free registration required) a while back and was impressed by Rumelt’s matter-of-fact, no-nonsense approach to Strategy. Good Strategy Bad Strategy is written in that same style; that Strategy is key and that the problem is that many people mistake the wrong things for Strategy and/or think that since the world is changing so fast that something static like a Strategy that took two years to formulate and is now obsolete is a pointless task. Rumelt shows the error of that thinking and describes what constitutes a real and good Strategy (rather than a Mission, or Values Statement or a Financial Goal that is often mistaken for or substituted for Strategy.) He emphasizes how what really matters is the rigorous thinking that goes into developing your Strategy (at whatever level in the organization), how that thinking is tested and corrected, and then adapting your Strategy as a result. Rumelt provides a simple framework that helps guide that process.

Thinking

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer

I owe a big thanks to my colleague and co-blogger Steve Hughes, who recommended this fascinating book about how we remember things and how that affects who we are and how we think. It’s written to follow the author’s year-long efforts to train his memory and learn techniques to compete in a memory championship. Along the way (which includes some very memorable characters who mentor him), he shares interesting scientific cases and studies. This includes the journalist with the real photographic memory (and the very mixed blessing that it presented) as well as the man with literally no ability to develop further memories past a particular date (and the touching story of his wife’s care of him for many years.) The book provides understanding and insights about memory (and expertise!) such as how our experiences and our malleable and sometimes faulty memory of those experiences shape how we think and vice versa (see next review.)

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Kahneman is most known for his work in behavioral economics (winning a Nobel for that work) and the notion that maybe economic models make too simplifying of an assumption when saying that participants in markets act rationally in their own self-interest. While this book has a fair amount in it that’s been published before in one form or another, nothing beats it for bringing the most important findings and their implications together in one tome. It’s a pretty big book, but you don’t have to read it from front to back. Yes, there are many other books out there that also cover this material, but having one of the foundational thinkers in this field (who also keeps working in it) reflect on how far it has come over the last few decades actually makes it fresh, since he both brings perspective as well as constantly questions what’s next to learn about the way we think. A good companion to “How We Decide” and “Nudge” (and Moonwalking, of course.)

The Jobless Recovery

Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee

This is a short eBook that you can read in one (somewhat long) sitting. To oversimplify a bit, it addresses the real concern many express over whether there are ever going to be enough “middle class” jobs going forward. The book is timely in the context of another jobless recovery after the Great Recession (and its subsequent dips). The authors discuss the various arguments put forth to explain the frustratingly slow decrease in unemployment as well as the concurrent increasing disparity in the standard of living among the population. They introduce their argument that a lot of the slow recovery also has to do with the longer-term, increasing replacement of jobs that were previously thought to be safe from automation, by computers and robots. There are no pat answers, but the book does take a hopeful outlook on our ability to work through the issues; it’s whether policy makers will make it a shorter or longer period of suffering for those hit hard by these changes in the job market. It’s an important contribution to the thinking around the most crucial humanitarian crisis of our time.

Leadership

The Leader’s Checklist: 15 Mission-Critical Principles by Michael Useem

Here’s another short eBook that captures well the essentials to effective leadership. Useem presents both the checklist of 15 core principles as well as three real world examples of “leadership moments” that demonstrate the application of some of these principles (“The Leadership Moment” is a well-regarded book by Useem from a while back that uses the same technique to great effect. These “moments” capture both the context within which leadership is demonstrated or not, along with the essence of either the demonstration of effective leadership or the utter lack of it.) The list contains nothing you haven’t seen in one or another book on leadership: articulating vision, thinking and acting strategically, expressing confidence in those you lead, bias for action, decisive action, simple and clear communication, appreciate the diverse and distinct motivations of those you lead, delegate authority as appropriate, build leadership in others, manage relationships, help folks understand the impact your vision and strategy will have on their work, act with integrity, be alert for and discourage unwarranted hubris and risk, build a diverse top team, and place common interest first, personal self-interest last. What Useem does in a very succinct manner is help you get your head around that list and address how some items might have higher priority depending on the situation (i.e. your role, the company, culture, or country, the current crisis, etc.) This is where examples like the Chilean mine cave-in and the bail-out of AIG help you see how that works (or didn’t, as the case may be.) There are thousands and thousands of leadership books out there, so it’s good to find ones like this that give solid, practical guidance with examples.

Social Business

The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees by Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald

This book has been getting excellent reviews for bringing together and addressing just about every question people have about how to view social media risks and benefits. It’s a great source and reference for anyone who is wrestling with issues like policy, effective use, where to apply it and how, factors to consider when doing so, etc. It’s very thorough and is again one of those books you don’t have to read from cover to cover. It’s pretty well organized to help you find the areas you want to address. Most importantly for me, while it addresses many details that matter regarding successful implementation, it emphasizes that the most important factor is to identify the purpose of your efforts. What is your objective? How will you measure the achievement of that objective?

The Hyper-Social Organization: Eclipse Your Competition by Leveraging Social Media by Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran

I met co-author Ed Moran through Deloitte and picked up his book to get a better understanding of his thinking on how social tools can enable organizations to truly compete in ways they haven’t been able to before. Most importantly, this book puts the people first and recognizes that the technologies are simply what enable people to do what has been more difficult previously. It takes a forward-looking, imaginative look at how people using these tools can revolutionize your organization and your approach to doing business. A good portion of the book focuses on engaging with customers in what they characterize as “Tribes” – reflecting a sociological approach. Combined with a view of employees in the same way, it amplifies the social aspects and focuses your thinking on that perspective vs. thinking solely about how to apply the new technologies, but from a viewpoint that is closed to these new ways of thinking. Includes many useful cases.

The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media by Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner

I ran into co-author Marcia Conner when we were both attending a Social Learning panel at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara. Marcia informed me she “wrote the book” on Social Learning and I have to say that she and Tony did a terrific job. This book starts off with some very intelligent observations on what really makes the “New” Social Learning so uniquely valuable to organizations. Why is it “New”? The authors emphasize that much if not all learning that truly changes you is “social”, so “new” social learning is about applying the new social tools to learning. The result is knowledge transfer and creation through natural, work-related connections (e.g. the enterprise social network), more and better-informed decision-making, and a better understanding of the context of work. I found a lot in here that reminded me of the “Flow of Knowledge” discussion in “The Power of Pull.” The best kind of knowledge transfer results in both the provider and recipient of knowledge increasing their knowledge. The “New” Social Learning helps a lot in making that happen.

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Some Great Books From 2010

Looking back at 2010, I found some excellent books that helped me to think about things in new ways or see them from new perspectives. Here are some of the best and if you haven’t read them yet, you might want to check them out. The list is of books published in 2010 that I read (except for “The Design of Business” which just fit in too well with its topic, so I had to include it.) Enjoy!

Thinking About Thinking

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

Our friend Jake has written a couple of posts about this book already here and here. The posts show practical applications of what Lehrer writes about, which is the latest understanding about how our minds work at the neuroscience layer. This is not cold science by any means, but rather the latest in explaining why it is, for example, that at times it’s best to go with your gut and not with your head, sometimes the opposite, and sometimes you have to step back and weigh each and come up with some new thinking right on the spot. The book is filled with exciting stories that set the stage, followed by what research has found is going on in our brains to help understand what happened and how we can make better decisions as a result.

The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely

I liked this book a little more than Ariely’s previous (and very good) book, “Predictably Irrational”, which Amy and Ken have written about. The first part, which focuses on work, is especially interesting as it taps into how the way we structure jobs can severely hamper motivation (particularly by destroying meaning, which we’ll get to later.) It also shows how external incentives can have escalating negative consequences on performance, particularly if the work involves a lot of thinking (which connects well with Lehrer’s book.) Mark McDonald has a very helpful review of the book, and he recommends reading “Predictably Irrational” first. I think you’d be okay not having done so if you don’t have the time or have read books like Lehrer’s. But if you have any doubts, it’s worth it to read both.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath

If you’ve read “Made to Stick” by the Heath brothers, you know they write very well about extremely useful topics about thinking. The same is true here, where they help you understand why it is that it’s so hard to make change happen and provide you with practical guidance on what to do to increase your chances of success. The thinking is based on the long-held (as in Ancient Greece) and fairly well-known concept of our minds having two major systems, which they call “The Rider,” or rational, and “The Elephant,” or emotional (some have referred to them as “Homer” and “Mr. Spock.”) It shouldn’t be any surprise that these two systems don’t always see eye to eye. What the Heath’s have done is develop a framework for addressing each system differently so that they are better aligned and work together to more effectively get the change you want.

Understanding Work and Strategy in the Big Shift

The Why of Work: How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win by Dave and Wendy Ulrich

Meg wrote about an HR Happy Hour with Dave Ulrich, talking about his book. She captured the main takeaway from the talk and from the book very well with this quote – “When we achieve meaning through our work, we succeed beyond our wildest dreams.” This echoes what Ariely wrote about and leads nicely into what Hagel, et al and Merchant wrote about. This book does a great job dealing with a very squishy subject. It presents a set of seven questions, with practical examples for each, to help you get your employees truly engaged by finding purpose, connection, identity, value, positive culture, growth, and delight in their work. Jon Ingham wrote an excellent in-depth review of this book.

The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger Martin

I included this 2009 book because it does a great job laying out a framework for thinking about how much of business has generally evolved over time. It helps us better understand the prior forces that shaped so much of how business thinks about growth and profit, starting from an idea and then typically ending up as a large-scale machine that holds efficiency above most everything else. Martin uses this framework primarily as a vehicle for explaining why innovation becomes so hard as companies mature (those who’ve read Innovator’s Dilemma/Solution will find this familiar, but this book brings its own value.) We can use this framework for other purposes as well, and I found it very helpful for thinking about Ariely’s concerns as well as points made in both “The Power of Pull” and “The New How”. There’s a great review here by Debra Dunn.

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison

We’ve written several times about the new way of thinking about business in this book and what it means for work, talent, knowledge, and collaboration. The upshot is that the overall business environment and many sectors specifically are seeing the rate of change in technology, business, geopolitics, economics, and sociological forces increasing. It’s at a rate that in many cases is surpassing the ability of the classic models of experience curves and scalable efficiency to sustain profits to keep pace. It is also making obsolete the similar thinking that efficiency and scale from market share could also serve as a barrier to new entrants. This tightening vise of (generally) increasing customer and employee power through choice and information means companies have to rethink their current “push” model. Wally Bock has a great, in-depth review here.

The New How: Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy by Nilofer Merchant

The problem of successful execution of strategy is well-known by many, many companies. This book focuses on how the divide between those who formulate the strategy and those who must execute it (“The Air Sandwich”) is core to this issue. Those who formulate the strategy are not familiar enough with the real capabilities of those who must execute it, and those who must execute it frequently don’t understand the real intent of the strategy, let alone the big picture that it must work in. The proposed solution centers around a collaboration between these previously distinct entities that addresses many of the problems encountered by companies who have attempted this unsuccessfully. Check out Steve Shu’s excellent review here.

Simple, But Not Too Simple

One Page Talent Management: Eliminating Complexity, Adding Value by Marc Effron and Miriam Ort

The main title of this book can lead some to think it either presents a magic solution to your talent management process issues or is just a gimmick. The author even jokes that his approach does not consist of using a very tiny font in order to get all your talent management documents to fit on one page. The thinking of the book is best represented by the subtitle – focus on the value you get from each thing you incorporate in your talent management and stop when the complexity costs of adding it exceeds the value it contributes. That logic acts as a constraint, which in turn leads you to focus on which talent management practices are backed by science that confirms they really contribute the best value. The book itself practices what it preaches and is simple without being simplistic and Kris Dunn has written a terrific review.

On the Stack

I’m currently reading Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead by Charlene Li and Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler. Charlene and Josh collaborated on Groundswell, one of the best books from 2008. So far, both books are terrific.

Next on my list is The New Polymath: Profiles in Compound-Technology Innovations by Vinnie Mirchandani. This book has received rave reviews.

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Some Great Books from 2009

Here are some very good books and if you haven’t read them yet, you might want to check them out. The list is restricted to books published in 2009 that I read (there are several others published in 2009 that I still have on my reading list). The list is grouped somewhat by topic. Enjoy!

Enterprise 2.0 / Collaboration

Driving Results through Social Networks: How Top Organizations Leverage Networks for Performance and Growth by Rob Cross and Robert J. Thomas

I referred to this book in Not One of Us, When More Isn’t Always Better, and Is Bacon at the Center of the Universe? It covers the whole range of scale from individual performance and productivity impact of collaboration to the impact of collaboration on organization innovation, projects, and processes as well as the impact of organization culture and strategy on collaboration. There are many solid use cases provided. Cross focuses on social network analysis as a way to understand how information flows through an organization, how it goes into decision making, etc. I wrote about his work being done through manual surveys at Fortune 500 companies prior to leveraging social networking software two years ago in Finding Value in Enterprise Social Networks.

Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results by Morten T. Hansen

I wrote about this book in When More Isn’t Always Better. It is primarily focused on large-scale collaboration and paints it in the starker colors of “good vs. bad” collaboration, highlighting the hidden costs of collaboration without some kind of business purpose and understanding of tradeoffs. Hansen lays out the hidden traps companies fall into with collaboration, identifies the barriers to collaboration, and three levers to avoid the traps and overcome the barriers. It has many use cases as well. Oliver Marks has a great post about this research and our colleague Christine found this great Economist article about the book. Hansen recently wrote about collaboration failure in the intelligence community due to persistent issues regarding incentives, workforce mix, and talent mobility in this Harvard Business Review article.

Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges by Andrew McAfee

McAfee coined the term “Enterprise 2.0” a while back as a way to identify not just the technologies of Web 2.0, but the way in which organizations would use them to get improvements in productivity, innovation, etc. I wrote about McAfee’s work two years ago in Finding Value in Enterprise Social Networks. McAfee has a great way of presenting four different, real business value based use cases that were not being addressed adequately by existing (pre Web 2.0) collaboration technologies (i.e. “Groupware” and “Knowledge Management”), then sort of leaves you hanging (a great “sticky idea” mechanism), then introduces the concepts of Web 2.0 in an accessible, non-techy way, and finally comes back around to show how the four use cases were successfully addressed by various Web 2.0 tools. Furthermore, each of the use cases focuses on a particular level of interaction from close-knit workgroups out to people with shared interests who may not even know each other.

Social Media at Work: How Networking Tools Propel Organizational Performance by Arthur L. Jue, Jackie Alcade Marr, and Mary Ellen Kassotakis

I wrote about this book being published in Talking about OraTweet in Social Media at Work. This book is similar to McAfee’s in that it is less about the technologies themselves as it is about how companies can best adopt and exploit them to gain competitive advantage through increased productivity, innovation, and engagement. This book is also loaded with relevant, real-life use cases that demonstrate how Web 2.0 tools were able to address a tricky problem, trigger innovation more rapidly, etc. It also addresses the organizational adoption issues head-on, such a threats to power and status quo and offers advice on how to tackle those issues.

Risk

The Failure of Risk Management: Why It’s Broken and How to Fix It by Douglas W. Hubbard

I referred to this book in HR: Why Improve Your Analytical Intelligence? and HR: Why Broaden Your Risk Perspective? Hubbard’s book is an eye-opener about how badly most companies are handling risk, due in large part to misguided comfort in following supposed “best practices.” Hubbard pulls no punches and is especially vehement in targeting “fluffy” risk analysis approaches that use things like “heat maps” that are based on “scoring.” His main objection is that these approaches have no way to be really tested as to whether they work because there really isn’t a testable measurement being used. He refutes those who object by saying that some things just aren’t measureable by providing examples of how to do it (some of which are taken from his previous book, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business.)

The Flaw of Averages: Why We Underestimate Risk in the Face of Uncertainty by Sam L. Savage

I also referred to this book in HR: Why Broaden Your Risk Perspective?. It’s a great companion book to Hubbard’s but takes a lighter approach. The first thing that Savage does is dispense with the arcane terms used so often in statistics that drive most people away. He correctly identifies that as a leading cause for why so many people miss out who could benefit from actually understanding what statistics really has to say about uncertainty and risk. He then goes into a whole series of examples to show what he means about how people get themselves into trouble. The book weighs in at 360+ pages, but it’s divided into 47 bite-sized chapters, some of which he signals can be skipped if you don’t want to do math.

Workforce Strategy

The Differentiated Workforce: Transforming Talent into Strategic Impact by Brian E. Becker, Mark A. Huselid, and Richard W. Beatty

I wrote about this book in HR: Why Improve Your Analytical Intelligence? It is a continuation of their “HR Scorecard” and “Workforce Scorecard” books, although reading them is not a prerequisite, nor is the book a rehash of the previous material. Instead, it introduces enough of the basics from them and expands on them to focus on how to best invest in your workforce so as to maximize its impact on your strategic success. In many ways, I saw this book as a companion to Beyond HR: The New Science of Human Capital by John W. Boudreau and Peter M. Ramstad. Between the two, you’ll have an excellent framework from which to construct or modify your HR strategy.

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