EclecticLip

Phil Rosenzweig’s The Halo Effect was the 21st book covered by the book club, and was deliberately chosen to complement (and contrast with) Good to Great, read some weeks prior.

Rosenzweig’s contribution to management literature has been to illuminate the irrigourous thinking that underlies much business/management popular wisdom and their associated memes.  More precisely, his contribution has been to write a popular book on the subject (no doubt many perfectly-obscure authors pointed this out before him).

In a business context, the “Halo Effect” for which the book is named is the phenomenon of observing successful businesses / business people, and concluding the common traits are what make them successful.  A more perspicatious researcher would test whether these common traits are present in unsuccessful companies, and whether these traits are quantifiable or merely qualitative.  Business writers also tend to succumb to a steady-state fallacy — the assumption that success can be codified into permanence — when mean reversion happens to even the best companies, given sufficient timeframes.

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

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The Halo Effect - summary

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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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The Necessary Revolution - summary

Energy Shift was chosen as a book club selection for much the same reason as Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller: the company is in the alternative energy field, and so would benefit from employees knowledgeable about the energy sector.

As a policymaker-oriented volume, the book wasn’t as detailed or analysis-driven as I’d hoped.  An example comes in Chapter 2, which repeats the common refrain that energy demand will continue to rise by 2% per year for the foreseeable future.  It would seem to me that the developed world is likely to continue experiencing several years of economic malaise, in light of the debt overhang and worsening demographics.  Reduced consumer demand could somewhat dampen economic growth in developing economies as well, with a commensurate effect on energy demand.

None the less, the book was highly valuable, if only to know the kind of advice being given to movers and shakers.

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

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Energy Shift - summary

This Dilbert cartoon was too good to pass up, in light of the fact that the book club covered The Halo Effect at the end of June, for its 21nd book — since the book argues that this is in fact how “serious” business authors write their books.

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A story caught my eye on July 7, about how IBM has a microchip assembly and testing facility — in Quebec.  (That’s high-cost-of-labour-environment Quebec — not low-cost-of-labour-environment China.)

The reason it’s able to do so, is because of the relentless kaizen (continuous improvement) practised there: they’re able to compete in what should be a largely outsourceable industry, through innovation.  Kaizen was one of the underpinnings of earlier book club selection, The Toyota Way.
 
While innovation won’t insulate you fully from arbitrage of labour prices, I think this example shows that (innovative, high-cost labour) can compete better than most people think, against (non-innovative, low-cost labour) and especially (non-innovative, high-cost labour).  Some excerpts from the article include:

The factory, 75 kilometres east of Montreal, started out in 1972 making Selectric typewriters. It has worked its way up to become IBM’s biggest facility for testing and assembling advanced microchips. Its products go into the planet’s most popular video-game consoles and fastest supercomputers…

“We don’t compete on labour rates, we compete on skill, on innovation, on time to market,” said Mr. Leduc, a veteran from the typewriter days, who was appointed last year to be a part-time adviser to Canada’s National Research Council…

While Canada’s productivity has crept ahead by only about 0.7 per cent a year during the past decade, managers at Bromont say their ability to harness the creativity of their work force has allowed some units to boost productivity by an impressive 10 per cent or more a year… 

“One of the greatest competitive edges a company can give themselves, especially these days, is getting each staff member to see their role in contributing to positive change,” Mr. Reid said. “There’s a massive difference between just doing the job and being a high-performance culture.”

Note: that emphasis there was my editorial contribution. 

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I suspect there’s a valid analogy to be made in the economic sphere.  An economy stocked with a million entrepreneurs, each trying to improve their business’s success, is probably going to do better over time than one where a small group decides what’s to be done and how.  That’s the basic difference between a market economy and a command economy (”central planning” is a case where the aforementioned small group is the government). 

The Koreas provide a great example.  As chronicled in Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans, back in the day North Korea was richer; it was the industrial area.  South Korea exported seaweed.  Over a few decades, the South Korean government used a market economy to become unimaginably richer than its northern rival.  (Note: like virtually every other industrialized country, its government supported target industries — a practise known as indirect planning — but it let the homegrown competitors fight it out in the marketplace.)

Pulling back from global economics to the corporate level, I’d bet that — just as South Korea ultimately surpassed North Korea, despite its initial disadvantage — companies where ideas for improvement bubble up from all levels, will tend to enjoy more success, longer, than their “everybody just doing the job” counterparts.

Which sort of goes to the root of the book club.  I see it as a way I can suggest improvements, to help myself and others be that little bit more effective; speaking only for myself, I’ve got a lot of “just doing the job” years to make up for.