800-CEO-READ Blog

Jack Covert Selects - Business

Business: The Ultimate Resource from Perseus Publishing, 2208 pages, $59.95, Hardcover, August 2002, ISBN 0738202428

You’ve just gotta see this book. Perseus tells us that “Business is the most comprehensive single volume ever published on the way of work.” I’d say. With 200 contributors; 2.5 million words of text; 700 illustrations; 150 maps; 2208 pages. Incredible! There have been a number of strong reviews regarding this tome, reaffirming what I said above: This book is big!; It’s got everything!; It’s not a doorstop, it’s a useful reference book. And all of these things are true. However, I think that the best way for you to understand just how terrific this book is is for me to walk you through it.

Scenario: Let’s say you, like me, are introducing a change initiative in your company, but don’t know how to start it and make it stick. So, you pull Business off your reference shelf (watch you back!) and look into the issue. The first place you’ll visit is the “User’s Guide” to help you navigate through the seven sections of the book. Best Practices features practical business advice from business writers and thinkers; the Management Checklists and Actionlists provide a practical approach to your problem (Examples of the breadth of these checklists? “How to Make a Website Easy to Navigate” or “Preparing for Retirement with Dignity”); the Management Library will suggest the most relevant titles you will need to learn more about this issue; Business Thinkers and Management Giants presents biographies of the most influential people in business; the Dictionary will help you with terms and definitions; the World Business Almanac profiles the economic health of over 150 countries; and finally, (whew!), the Business Information Sources provides you with ways to continue gathering additional information, offering a listing of websites, journals and authoritative organizations.

Now that you understand the layout, you begin your research on change. The Best Practices section offers you: “Getting All Your People Committed to Change and Transformation” by John Smythe. In the 3 pages devoted to this topic, Smythe presents us with an “Executive Summary”, a discussion of the issues, a distinct guide to making it happen, as well as other info including books to read, websites to visit, and other areas within the book which address this topic. You are then led to a Checklist that offers a definition of the issue, advantages and disadvantages, an actual action checklist, dos & don’ts, thought starters (love these!), and more books and essays to read. You also get an Actionlist that will help you tackle change problems directly. Need More? In the Management Library, you’ll find a breakdown of The Change Masters by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the “authoritative work on the factors behind successful corporate change”. Then, follow your nose to pages 1008-1009 in Business Thinkers for a biography and vitae of Kanter as well as summaries of all of her books on change. This may then lead you to wonder if there are any Management Giants who were really successful at implementing change and you will read about the success with which Jack Welch introduced Six Sigma to GE. If you are not sure what exactly Six Sigma is, well then, page 1337 of the Dictionary should fill in your Six Sigma gaps, as well as the entry on “Change Management” will be helpful to you. By now, you are only about ½ of your way though the book, having not yet explored the informative economic data about Bangladesh (Did you know that the best buy in Bangladesh is “Rural handloomed cloth”?) or even each of the United States (Colorado’s average household income is $48,506, 9th in the US). And finally, if all of this hasn’t given you a headstart on implementing change in your company, then check out pages 1923-1925: 9 suggested books to read, 8 magazines & journals to subscribe to, 3 internet sites to log onto, and an organization to contact.

And to top it all off, at the bottom of each page, is a motivational quote. Wow, I’m exhausted--but exhilarated. All this, in one book. Frankly, I think they are selling this book too cheap - $59.95 for all the knowledge in the world (or at least where to find it). Makes a great birthday or holiday or graduation present, but it can also be a great investment for your business future.

Jack Covert Selects - The Cycle of Leadership

The Cycle of Leadership: How Great Leaders Teach Their Companies to Win by Noel Tichy with Nancy Cardwell, HarperBusiness, 358 Pages, $26.95 Hardcover, August 2002, ISBN 0066620562

Noel Tichy has written some of the seminal books available on leadership. Among them are The Leadership Engine, Every Business is a Growth Business, and Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will. This latest book by Tichy, written with Nancy Cardwell, is a real hands-on primer, and its authors’ mission is two-fold. First, they argue that only companies who think fast and build smart will survive the topsy-turvy nature of the current business climate, and in order to attain and sustain such an approach, those companies must become learning organizations. Then they tell us that in order to become such a company, hiring, supporting, fostering and promoting leaders who teach is imperative. Such a learning approach is exemplified in companies like Home Depot, Southwest Airline, Dell, Ford, GE, and 3M, among others, and how these leaders have developed their business knowledge into “teachable points of view”. The authors call this exchange a ‘virtuous teaching cycle,’ explaining early on:

What is new in this book is a critical insight about how leaders create and maintain teams (better teams with smarter people)… It is that creating organizations that get smarter and more aligned every day requires an interactive teaching/learning process. It isn’t hierarchical teaching. You teach me, and then I teach the people below me. It isn’t alternating roles. You teach me something, and then I’ll teach you something. Rather it is a process of mutual exploration and exchange during which both the “teacher’ and the “learner” become smarter. It is synergy. 1+1=3.

In our office, we have a communal “idea” board. Each employee is encouraged, daily, to write an idea, reminder, success, or notation that other employees can learn or get inspired from. When our manager perused this new book, she immediately wrote, from Tichy’s introduction, on the board: “Everyone teaches, everyone learns, and everyone gets smarter everyday.” Remarkably simple, but, a soon-to-be mantra that a small company like mine can use to bolster its position and excite its leaders and employees. It is also one that a large company can use for reorganization and strategic planning. How to start? Well, the authors tell us that “[i]t starts with a commitment to continuously improve yourself and others around you.” But if that isn’t inspiration enough, the final hundred or so pages of the book are a “handbook” to lead you through the process. I am often asked to recommend books about leadership and I have now found the leadership book with the most complete package for any size organization. This book is another classic from Noel Tichy and will be around for a long time, but don’t hesitate to buy it now and get the transformation started.

Jack Covert Selects - The Deviant's Advantage

The Deviant’s Advantage: How Fringe Ideas Create Mass Markets by Ryan Mathews and Watts Wacker, Crown Business, 280 Pages, $25.95 Hardcover, September 2002, ISBN 0609609580

The track record of an author can greatly assist me in the discovery of a great book. This book, The Deviant’s Advantage, is the CSN&Y (that’s Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young for those of you who are not music junkies) of business books. Watts Wacker, author of The 500 Year Delta and The Visionary’s Handbook and Ryan Mathews, author of The Myth of Excellence, such notable authors in their own right, have teamed up to write a superb book which premiered on the March 2002 cover of “Fast Company.” That said, there are innumerable books with similarly strong resumes that have never lived up to the hype. Not so here. This book is interesting from the get-go. It introduces us to examples of cultural deviance turned mainstream (The Beatles), explains the need for welcoming deviance/deviants in corporate culture (that kid in the mailroom with the nose ring who designs the little doohicky that will eventually make your company 10 million bucks) and shows us that deviance (read: innovation) is available for mining within each of us.

Don’t be put off by the implied recklessness or rebelliousness inherent in the word “deviant.” The authors are not implying that you need to hire criminals, lose control of your staff, or take up with a religious cult. Instead, they make it clear that “[t]he book champions the deviant impulse but is not championing all forms of deviant behavior. Of course, there is positive and negative deviance—the former a force for transformation, the latter a source of unspeakable evil. We’re concerned here with positive deviance, the kind of transformational change that takes fringe ideas and morphs them into mass markets.” The authors claim and demonstrate very effectively that deviance is the source of all innovation; thus, since innovation is imperative to growing your business, then deviance also is crucial to your business. Once a company’s culture embraces deviant (innovative) ideas, the next step is learning how to tell the difference between the deviant ideas that will succeed in entering the mainstream and those that are simply, well, deviant ideas.

Mathews and Wacker effectively show the journey a radical idea takes before becoming acceptable to the masses. First existing on the “Fringe,” the idea moves to the “Edge,” then to the “Realm of the Cool,” then to “The Next Big Thing,” and finally to “Social Convention.” From the art houses to the suburbs. This book is chock full of effective and entertaining stories using such heavyweights as Elvis, the WWF, Linus Torvalds, and Volkswagen to help us see how (good) deviant ideas emerge to take a conventional place in the mass market. Entertaining and important, this is The Tipping Point for the fall of 2002. The Deviant’s Advantage exceeds all expectations and I recommend it because everyone should walk on the wild side—at least once in awhile.