EclecticLip

In The Responsibility Virus (volume 20 of the book club reading list) Roger Martin discusses the tendency of Boards of Directors to become powerless yes-men, when faced with a domineering CEO.  This is in contrast to their intended role as wise greybeards, advisors or even coaches who keep the Chief Executive on the sraight and narrow.

This seems vaguely analogous to what happened to the Roman Senate as their Empire declined; instead of keeping the Emperor in check, they had to curry favour for fear of their personal safety (and probably family fortune, too: I imagine more than one Senator got his possessions confiscated).

It would be interesting to know whether the advisory influence of large corporations’ Boards of Directors tends to be weaker at firms where the CEO is paid more.  The Wall St. Journal recently carried an article reaffirming that power corrupts; in their context, as people gain power, they act more like jerks.  Transposing this lesson historically, maybe if Marc Antony had won, Caligula would’ve ended up as a very polite cobbler…

Much has been made of emergence recently — how complex systems develop / exhibit behaviours based on the interaction of simpler individual components.  An example might be how extraordinarily complex economies can develop, through the interaction of thousands or millions of individual “agents” in an economy, buying or selling as per their individual whims.

It occurred to me that the phases of nature (solid, liquid, gas, plasma — or “earth”, “water”, air”, “fire” for any Aristotelian holdouts) are themselves emergent phenomena. 

An individual molecule can’t be solid or liquid: these stuctures require the coming-together of a bunch of molecules, either into a lattice structure (solid) or a continuous-but-not-as-ordered one (liquid). 

Gases consist of molecules floating about freely (unbonded and unconstrained to each other) but if you only had a single molecule in a vacuum… there would be a distinct lack of other atoms by which to assess which phase it belongs to.

And since plasmas are gases where some fraction of molecules are ionically charged… i imagine you need a multiple number of molecules to assess whether they could be termed a plasma or not.  (If a lone molecule was present, and it was charged, one would presumably call it an ion, not a plasma.)

I’ll check in with a physics professor on this topic.  Hopefully I’m correct. 

We read The Human Side of Enterprise recently, wherein Douglas McGregor (that’s McGregor, not MacArthur!) contained the wisdom nugget that:

“management gets the labour relations it deserves”.

I doubt McGregor coined the expression — it’s the kind of pithy phrase that floats around for years before being credited to a famous person — but it rings no less true. 

The general theme is a karmic one: if management mistreats labour, labour will eventually form a feisty union.  And contrarily, if management treats its employees well, union relations will tend to be amicable (if there even is a union).  Furthermore, while trust and respect grow slowly over time (like pearls!), bad memories have a way of lingering for a very. long. time.

In that context, I wonder if management in the West is still paying for the bad karma it earned during the Industrial Revolution.  If the explosion of industrial wealth was shared more equitably, or barons weren’t so slow to improve working conditions / recognize workers’ rights, perhaps labour unions wouldn’t've become so militantly anti-management.  Heck, maybe Marx and Engels wouldn’t've even been inspired to write their little pamphlet!

I’m perfectly unfamiliar with labour relations / extent of union militancy in other countries, but it would shock me if the Nordic economies (or Japan, with its fairly egalitarian corporate pay scales) have similarly confrontative labour relations.  After all, it’s difficult to have a class struggle if the different “classes” of employees (management, labour) enjoy reasonably equitable pay, and decent working conditions.  And I’d expect that economies with a heritage in the British Industrial Revolution tradition (US, UK, Canada, Australia) would have more confrontative unions.  After all, those union traditions would’ve been born in a desperate context of obscene wealth and even-more-obscene squalor.

So it would seem reasonable to consider militant unions a form of karma — a carryover from the bad ol’ days (correction: the very bad old days) of the Anglo economic tradition, when owners really should’ve cared more about their employees.  And given how long it can take for bad karma to dissipate, I imagine confrontational labour relations will be a feature of industry in these cultures, for a long time to come.

Roger Martin’s The Responsibility Virus was the book club’s 20th selection, marking a return to the theme of organizational dynamics, previously visited in First Break All The Rules (book 12).

Though the author makes strained analogies to the laws of physics, the book offers dead-on insights as to the process by which individuals abdicate or usurp responsibility for workplace initiatives.  Examples might be how employees buy out of a management initiative (as opposed to buying into it), or how a supervisor might meddle intrusively in a struggling subordinate’s project.

Fortunately, the book offers suggestions — born from Martin’s experience as a consultant — to resolve these issues.  And more fortunately still, the methods are of the “ensuring everyone’s concerns are met” variety, as opposed to the ever-popular “manipulate others’ behaviour” type.

As always, if you enjoy the book summary, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 

- - - - - -

The Responsibility Virus - summary

Not originally intended as a book club selection, the insights of John Michael Greer’s The Ecotechnic Future on biological succession in the natural environment, seemed to effortlessly explain trends in the energy sector.  On these grounds, its arguments and speculations were deemed highly relevant to company employees, given the firm’s involvement in high-tech energy systems.

In brief, Greer argues that deforested areas are likely to be dominated at first by weeds, which reproduce rapidly.  Over time, however, efficiency counts more than growth rates, and so such areas tend to return to forest, which cycle nutrients more effectively.  In the short run, speed wins; in the long run, efficiency counts.

The energy technology parallel could be that fossil fuels have held a key advantage for centuries, on account of their being ease of exploitation.  (As with weeds, their inefficiency with respect to GHG emissions could have been a small weakness relative to their scalability.)  Energy technologies currently being pursued offer better efficiency (lower “carbon intensity”) but are generally unable to scale rapidly.  Solar panels, wind turbines, fuel cells and even nuclear power plants generally require a much larger up-front investment of energy and money, than their fossil-fuel counterparts.

As always, if you enjoy the book review, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 

- - - - - -

The Ecotechnic Future - summary

David Allen’s personal productivity guide Getting Things Done was chosen as the 18th book club selection.  An invaluable guide to navigating a world awash in email, it is to the past decade what The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People was to the 1990’s.  But while Steven Covey’s opus provides an overarching framework for being more effective at work, Allen’s book is an SOP from a guru of desktop jiujitsu.

Earlier in my career, I implemented several of Covey’s ideas — without success.  In the end, I found my four “quadrants” (a 2×2 matrix of important and urgent tasks) got bogged down with a torrent of ideas.  In the past couple years, I’ve enjoyed sustained success with the ideas from Getting Things Done.  Particularly useful were the “waiting for” folder for tasks where I was waiting a response, and the “next actions” folder, for items awaiting my next move.  Prefacing each item with a due date has allowed me to avoid a sense of overload, as I can pre-schedule activities months in advance, knowing that their presence on the list is okay, because they’re post-dated.

As always, if you enjoy the book review, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 

- - - - - -

Getting Things Done - summary

Jim Collins’ Good to Great was selected as the seventeenth book for the book club.  A monster best-seller, it popularized the idea that companies should be “hedgehogs” — focusing only on areas where they could beat their competitors.  It was commendable for trying to pair great companies with mediocre counterparts, in an attempt to discern those characteristics that distinguished the two. 

The book has also come under fire.  Not all of the eleven “good to great” companies maintained their market-outpacing greatness in the decade following publication (being 2000 to 2010) — indeed, three of them went bankrupt or needed bailouts.  As a nod to the critics, for its 21st volume, the book club covered The Halo Effect.

Despite its flaws (and indeed, what human endeavours lack them?) the book represents an earnest attempt to study corporate success, and some of its insights — e.g. that “stop doing” lists are as important as “to do” lists — disclose a valuable wisdom.

As always, if you enjoy the summary, please consider supporting the author by purchasing a copy of the book. 

- - - - - -

Good to Great - summary

The final book in the book club’s (first?) energy trilogy was Peter Tertzakian’s A Thousand Barrels a Second.  The book came on the recommendation of a colleague, and the author’s metaphor of an energy evolution cycle seemed particularly relevant given the firm’s positioning in the clean tech / clean energy sector.

In addition, the book seemed complementary to Jeff Rubin’s Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller — it was thought that exposure to a second perspectives would add significant value and context for book club members who don’t ordinarily trawl the “energy” section of bookstores, libraries, or the web.

As always, if you find the summary useful, please consider supporting the author by purchasing a copy of the book. 

- - - - - -

A Thousand Barrels - summary

My attendance at a (pricey) lecture Peter Senge gave on The Necessary Revolution in 2009 was the germinal cause which led to a spate of business reading, and eventually the idea of creating a business book club at work.  As such, it was natural to eventually return to that text, in the course of book club readings.

Like other tomes in the “business adventures in sustainability” genre, Senge discusses DuPont’s 70% reduction in GHG emissions from 1990 to 2005, and Xerox’s redesign of a new copier design for 93% refurbishability, and 97% recyclability.  He supplements these with suggestions on how coalitions can be built from the bottom up, to drive organizational behaviour and develop system-wide solutions.

The book mentions Darcy Winslow, a past Director of Sustainability at Nike, who led the charge to eliminate SF6 (the most potent greenhouse gas known to man!) from the air pockets of “Nike Air” footwear.  In private correspondence, she explained the importance of reframing designers’ perceptions of the need to remove SF6: they initially perceived it as a legislative burden they didn’t want to work on, but she was able to get buy-in for the project by pushing it as a proof point of Nike’s design genius — devising a harmless alternative would prove yet again that they were the world’s best shoe designers.

As always, if you enjoy the summary, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 

- - - - - -

The Necessary Revolution - summary

Saw this at a friend’s house — a combination hammer / screwdriver.  With a gratuitously beautiful floral print.  (I blew the image up to show the pattern better, like what they do on the outside of cookie boxes.)

It’s part of an ingenious product line (”Pretty Useful Tools” — get it?).  Offering drab-free functionality for handymen and handywomen near you!

- - - - - - -