Read about our pricing and services
List Price:
| Price | Quantity |
| $23.96 | 1-24 |
| $20.97 | 25-99 |
| $19.47 | 100-499 |
| $18.87 | 500+ |
Bulk discounts are non-returnable. | |
Customize It
Hardcover
336 pages
ISBN 9780470548684 Published Oct. 2010
Jossey-Bass
See all formats
Tweet
Posted Jan. 10, 2011 8:50 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
It's been a while since we linked up a Friday afternoon, and since I didn't get the chance to do it last Friday, I thought I'd do so today.
➻ Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus, contributed an article to the current issue of Foreign Affairs about The Political Power of Social Media. You'll need to purchase the full length article ($0.99) if you're not an active subscriber, or you can read about how Shirky squares the circle (and a little about Evgeny Morozovover's new book, The Net Delusion) over at The Economist. From that review:
For wizened cyberpunks, it is a seemingly timeless debate: does the internet inherently promote openness and democracy, or can it just as easily strengthen the hand of authoritarian regimes? A decade ago Andrew Shapiro's book The Control Revolution argued the former, while Shanthi Kalathil's and Taylor Boas's tome Open Networks, Closed Regimes dissented. This week sees the publication of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov, which sides with the pessimists. [...] Between the cyber-utopians and cyber-pessimists, Mr Shirky has articulated an astute framework and found a sensible middle ground.
Head on over to The Economist's review of the argument to read more about Shirky's "three principal contributions to the debate."
➻ Our dear friend and former colleague Daniel Goldin, now the proprieter of Boswell Book Company on Milwaukee's East Side, was featured on NPR's Morning Edition last month with Stusan Stamberg to pick his favorite books of 2010 and answer the question, "Where's the craic?" (You have to actually listen to the story to get the answer to that question, but Daniel is the first bookseller to speak in the story, so you don't have to wait too long.)
➻ 2010 might have been the year of the e-reader, but Alexander Chee focused more on I, Reader is his essay at The Morning News in late November. Talking about his first experience in e-book reading—reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea on the train with the Kindle app on his phone—and it's effect on him, he writes:
Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, made a big splash this year, presenting an elegant argument about the way we’re being disarrayed. The problems are structural, he argues: This is our brain; this is our brain on the internet. One favorite quote: “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” Yes, I thought. Me too.
When his book appeared, I’d more or less accepted that this had also somehow happened to me, my brain remapped by the internet. But now with my phone-sized e-reader that sometimes took calls, now that I was walking and reading again the way I did as a child, reading fiction, not news, I noticed during the Gulf oil spill I no longer cared quite as much about the latest shitty thing happening in American politics that was out of my control (and that also made me feel paralyzed by it). Instead, there I was on the train, reading about a giant glowing non-gasoline-burning submarine and wondering why the scientists who borrowed inspiration from science fiction never thought of using that as a tech model.
It's not an entirely rose-tinted reflection of e-readers, but Chee's essay is a reminder that, as a reader, no matter how you get them, "There is always going to be a book that saves you."
➻ Steve Denning, author of The Leader's Guide to Storytelling and The Leader's Guide to Radical Management, has written a great, lengthy review of Umair Haque's New Capitalist Manifesto. In it, Denning writes:
Haque believes in firms that have a philosophy, particularly “a philosophy that emphasizes the first, fundamental principle of value creation, rather than planning planning a strategy focused on value extraction.” There is thus a shift from an overriding preoccupation with financial value and costs to instilling real values that create the basis for generating thick value that makes a difference in people’s lives.
The New Capitalist Manifesto was released by Harvard Business School Press last week.
➻ It's a bit old now, but just in case you missed it, The New York Times Sunday Book Review picked 100 Notable Books of 2010. The books on the list that I feel could fit in the business category (some loosely) are:
- All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis by Bethany McLean & Joe Nocera, Portfolio
- Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership by Lewis Hyde, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley, Knopf Publishing Group
- Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory by Peter Hessler , Harper
- Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg, The Penguin Press
- Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent, Scribner Book Company
For those interested, there are many quality titles on the list that are not business books, as well. It's worth a gander.
➻ Bethany McLean, coauthor of All the Devils are Here—the only book in the list above that fits neatly into the business category—wrote an Op-Ed last week asking Who Want a 30-Year Mortgage?
It turns out a lot of people do, but banks aren't particularly keen on them. McLean looks at the promises coming from both sides of the aisle in Washington and tries to square them with reality, writing:
Almost certainly, any 30-year product would be offered on a more limited basis and at a higher price than it is today. How much higher, it’s hard to say. In the pre-crisis days, Fannie used to argue that its guarantee enabled consumers to pay one quarter to one half of a percentage point less in annual interest on their mortgages; today, [William] Gross, [the co-founder and managing director of the investment firm Pimco], says that mortgages without a government guarantee would cost at least several percentage points more. If his numbers are right, then mortgages—and 30-year mortgages in particular—would be far more expensive, and the pool of American homebuyers would shrink.
This may well be the right long-term answer. After all, other countries manage fine without the widespread availability of 30-year fixed-rate mortgages. But is there an American politician alive who would accept responsibility for depressing the housing market further?
I think she's implying that the answer is "no," but that rhetorical question is not the end of her point.
➻ Our next article came to life after Bhob Rainey "was recently asked by a student to submit an op-ed column for the Loyola New Orleans student paper, The Maroon." For such a sanguine-sounding publication, Rainey chose a (seemingly) rather blue topic—boredom. Writing that "A radical boredom could remind us that reality is much more vast and exciting than common sense allows," he sums up his article with a brilliant (and creative?) quote from Kenneth Goldsmith:
Creativity is such a bankrupt concept in our culture… such an over used cliché, and yet something held so highly esteemed, still, that in order to truly be creative and truly find a way out of that we need to employ a strategy of opposites—we need to be uncreative, we need to be boring, we need to be everything that the culture claims creativity isn’t.
How boring.
➻ "Try to ride on waves of activity... in every direction" —Junip (Jose Gonzalez/Elias Araya/Tobias Winterkorn)
An Excerpt from The Leader's Guide to Radical Management
Posted Nov. 2010 9:51 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
We chose Stephen Denning's book, The Secret Language of Leadership, as the best book on leadership in our first annual business book awards in 2007. We first met him in 2008, when we were fortunate enough to have him come speak at our author pow-wow. We were so impressed by the talk he gave that, when we were planning this year's gathering, there was no question as to whether or not we'd invite him back. (And, yes folks, you can still sign up to join us in Milwaukee at the award-winning Iron Horse Hotel on December 7th and 8th to connect with other authors and publishing types (and us)—people you'll want to spend the next few decades working with.)
Stephen's second book is The Leader's Guide to Storytelling and, below, we have an excerpt from the introduction to his new book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management.
Given the deep change that has taken place in both the marketplace and the workplace, should we be surprised that we need different management today?
In the marketplace, what worked yesterday—satisfying customers by offering average products or services with zero defects—is no longer good enough. Absence of defects is expected and lacks luster. Unless clients are delighted, they can—and will—go elsewhere. The bar has been raised.
To ensure long-term growth, firms must forge relationships with their customers and turn them into long-term supporters and advocates of the firm’s goods and services. They must continually find new and economical ways to provide goods or services that are differentiated, noteworthy, surprising, or remarkable. They need constant innovation.
Delighting clients goes beyond reconfiguring the marketing department. It means committing the entire organization, and everyone in it, to delighting clients as the firm’s principal goal and putting in place the management principles and practices needed to accomplish that goal.
‘‘Management was originally invented,’’ management theorist Gary Hamel has noted, ‘‘to solve two problems: the first—getting semiskilled employees to perform repetitive activities competently, diligently, and efficiently; the second—coordinating those efforts in ways that enabled complex goods and services to be produced in large quantities. In a nutshell, the problems were efficiency and scale, and the solution was bureaucracy, with its hierarchical structure, cascading goals, precise role definitions, and elaborate rules and procedures.’’
With the continuing shift from semiskilled work to what economists call knowledge work, hierarchical bureaucracy is no longer a good solution. Its consequences are well known. It results in the talents, ingenuity, and inspiration of the workforce not being fully tapped. Only one in five workers is fully engaged in his or her work. For the organization, this means that the energies and insights of four out of five people in the workplace are being needlessly squandered. When the firm’s future depends on what knowledge workers can contribute, leaving talent unused becomes a serious productivity problem.
For the customers of these organizations, the situation is similarly grim: a firm full of people who are not fully engaged in their work is not much fun to deal with. Although firms talk about customer service and responsiveness, they are more often engaged in one-way communications.
The recorded message might say, ‘‘Your call is important to us,’’ but customers know that it isn’t.
I argue in [The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management] that the problems of today’s workplace are not the personal fault of the individual managers. They are largely the fault of the system they are implementing, which relentlessly constrains the capacity of people to contribute, limits the firm’s productivity, and practically guarantees that clients will be dissatisfied. The mental model of management that these companies are pursuing, with interlocking attitudes and practices, methodically prevents any individual management fix from permanently taking hold.
… I introduce a very different way of managing. I offer one extraordinary example after another: software developers, car manufacturers, house builders, staff in a call center, and songwriters, among others. And I will show people having serious fun in their work and becoming steadily better at doing it.
The emerging approach to managing is proving to be not only more productive than traditional management. It also liberates the energies, insights, and passions of people. It creates workplaces that enable the human spirit. It delights clients and creates shining eyes among the people doing the work.
This is not about firms becoming more productive by having people work longer hours or by downsizing or outsourcing. It’s about deploying energies differently. In some areas, managers have to do more. In other areas, they need to do less. Overall they will have to act on the basis of principles that are quite different from those of today’s traditional managers.
The seven principles I describe form a self-reinforcing sequence (see the figure below). Radical management begins by getting the goal right: the purpose of work is to delight clients, not merely to produce goods or services or make money for shareholders (Principle #1).
Focusing on client delight leads to self-organizing teams, because client delight requires continuous innovation, and a self-organizing team is the management arrangement most likely to generate continuous innovation (Principle #2).
This leads to working in client-driven iterations, because delighting clients can be approached only by successive approximations. And self-organizing teams, being life forms that live on the edge of chaos, need checkpoints to see whether they are evolving positively or slipping over the edge into chaos (Principle #3).
Similarly, client-driven iterations focus on delivering value to clients by the end of each iteration. They force closure and enable frequent client feedback (Principle #4).
Self-organizing teams that are working in an iterative fashion both enable and require radical transparency (Principle #5) so that the teams go on improving of their own accord (Principle #6).
An underlying requirement of all of these principles is interactive communication (Principle #7). Unless managers and workers are communicating interactively, using authentic narratives, open-ended questions, and deep listening, rather than treating people as things to be manipulated, none of the other principles work.
When self-organizing teams are set up and supported by implementing these principles, they naturally evolve into high-performance teams that are significantly more productive than the norm and deeply satisfying to workers.
Together the principles constitute a radical shift in the practice of management and an approach that is well adapted to meet the challenges of the twenty-first-century organization.
These principles comprise the seven most important elements of radical management. At the end of each chapter, I describe a large number of practices—more than seventy of them in total—that offer some of the ways to go about implementing the principles. Some practices support more than one principle.
The principles are more fundamental than the practices. If you think about the principles enough, you should be able to deduce the practices from them. If you keep the seven principles steadily in mind, you shouldn’t go too far wrong.
Thus, in implementation, it’s important to focus on the spirit of radical management and not get lost in the fine print. Even if you’re not doing all of the seventy-plus practices yet are living the seven principles, that’s still radical management. However, if you are doing lots of the practices but not living some of the principles, then you should probably ask yourself whether you still have at least one foot in the land of traditional management.
[The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management] is not a book about praising famous firms or the current media darlings. Instead I discuss how ordinary people become extraordinary and how every firm can continuously reinvent itself. Rather than talking about prodigies or celebrities, I describe a way of working that is broadly available to all.
The organizations that I cite in the book have embarked on journeys. They are all at different stages of the journey, and none of them has in any permanent sense ‘‘arrived.’’ We will see more than one company that implemented the principles for a period and then lost its way. Implementing the principles requires constant energy and attention. I rarely use Japanese terms like kanban or kaizan, although Japanese firms have made an enormous contribution to management thinking and practice. My goal is to communicate certain truths that transcend any particular country or culture.
I also make sparing use of the terminology that is widespread in software development, under the labels of ‘‘Agile’’ and ‘‘Scrum,’’ with terms like scrum-masters, product owners, burndown charts, and sprints. Software developers deserve credit for advancing some of the thinking described in this book to its fullest extent. Their terminologies were deliberately chosen to differentiate this way of developing software from the roles and practices of traditional management. The terminology has been helpful in software development. My goal here is to explain in plain language how the underlying managerial principles and practices have roots in many different fields and apply to all sectors of the economy.
Some critics will say that the principles and practices I describe are not possible, that they embody an unbelievable utopia, or that they have already been tried and shown not to work. They will give a thousand reasons that we have no choice but to keep on managing the way we always have, with stunted productivity, dispirited workers, and frustrated customers.
It would be easier to accept that version of events if scores of organizations were not already practicing the principles of radical management and achieving extraordinary performance.
[The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management] is intended for:
- Leaders and managers who want to reinvent the workplace and inspire extraordinary productivity, continuous innovation, deep job satisfaction, and client delight—all simultaneously
- Leaders and managers who want to lift their game and create organizations that buzz with extraordinary energy, excitement, innovation, and genuine high performance
- Leaders and managers who want to run established organizations with the energy and innovativeness of a start-up
- Anyone trying to understand how software developers practicing Scrum and Agile or manufacturers implementing lean production achieve extraordinary gains in productivity, and how to apply what they do to general management
- Anyone who wants to make leadership storytelling an integral part of the culture of an organization.
In short, this book is intended for those who wish to enjoy a life filled with passion, excitement, and productivity and create that for others. This is about taking charge of your life and experiencing the spirit and the exhilaration of extraordinary performance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Denning is a leading writer who consults with organizations in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Australia on leadership, management, innovation, and business narrative. In 2009, he was a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University, U.K. He is the author of The Secret Language of Leadership—a Financial Times selection in Best Books of 2007, and a 800-CEO-READ selection as the best book on leadership in 2007.
Excerpted from The Leader's Guide to Radical Management by Stephen Denning.
Published by Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint.
Copyright © 2010 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
