NOT a Guide–A Coffee Table Book, Lots of Photos, No Stats, September 3, 2008
Mark Silva
This book is on sale in supermarkets, and I spent time with both this book and its counterpart for Barack Obama.
I recommend both books as coffee table books, lots of great photos and general information about the individuals, but this book is NOT a guide.
There are no statistics, no tables, no comparisons, no meaningful GUIDE to who the candidate is and what they really stand for based on their actual behavior, votes, known acquaintances, etcetera.
What would be extraordinarlily valuable, if the publishers want to do a fast make-over, is a SINGLE book that compares all four candidates On the Issues and on their Values and what it all means for the federal government's future, the budget's future, and the country's future.
For an idea of what I am talking about, look online for “On the Isuses,”
and see especially the way they plot on a map relative differences.
NOT a Guide–A Coffee Table Book, Lots of Photos, No Stats, September 3, 2008
Michael Tackett
This book is on sale in supermarkets, and I spent time with both this book and its counterpart for John McCain.
I recommend both books as coffee table books, lots of great photos and general information about the individuals, but this book is NOT a guide.
There are no statistics, no tables, no comparisons, no meaningful GUIDE to who the candidate is and what they really stand for based on their actual behavior, votes, known acquaintances, etcetera.
What would be extraordinarlily valuable, if the publishers want to do a fast make-over, is a SINGLE book that compares all four candidates On the Issues and on their Values and what it all means for the federal government's future, the budget's future, and the country's future.
For an idea of what I am talking about, look online for “On the Isuses,”
and see especially the way they plot on a map relative differences.
Superb, Needed by the 90% of Leaders Who Don't Read, August 26, 2008
Yves Doz
Minus one star for publisher being lazy about using Amazon tools to help readers see the table of contents and otherwise “look inside the book,” and for lack of deeper reference to externalities that deeply impact on emerging business models, including natural capitalism, moral capitalism, and transcendent capitalism.
I found the content engrossing, while on every page I realized that with every word, the authors are describing precisely what 90% of the “successful” leaders refuse to do–and especially those in the secret intelligence community that I know so well.
The authors blend deep strategic experience with Nokia and at INSEAD among many other qualifications, and I recommend this book be read together with two others that I recently reviewed:
Book's bottom line: leaders must create and nurture counterintuitive blending–sustained constant blending, of the following:
+ Strategic sensitivity
+ Collective commitment
+ Resource fluidity
+ Management depoliticization
They summarize the challenge early on: “interdependent opportunities in the world of convergence and fuzzy enterprise boundaries and of rapid emergent systemic change in environment.”
Before summarizing the really compelling points made by the authors, I want to skip ahead to their appendices and list the thirteen toxicities that define most successful businesses today, as well as government agencies and most especially secret government agencies that are, in the words of one Defense Intelligence Senior Leader (DISL) cited in Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon: “institutionalized lunacy.”
The thirteen toxicities (buy the book for these pages alone):
– Tunnel vision
– Tyranny of core business
– Strategic myopia
– Dominance mindset
– Snap judgment and intellectual laziness
– Imprisoned resources
– Business system rigidity
– Ties that bind
– Management mediocrity and competence gaps
– Management divergence
– Heady charm of fame and power (or in secret world, lack of accountability for failing to deliver anything truly valuable)
– Expert management (making operational decisions instead of strategic)
– Emotional apathy
In the book in you are looking at it in a bookstore, pages 124-126 are a priceless inventory of the drivers, consequences, and toxicities that undermine strategic sensibility, collective commitment, and resource flexibility. Any CEO or Board of Directors can use these three pages alone to fail just about any company, right now, across the board.
Now here are the gems I pulled from this worthy offering:
STRATEGIC SENSITIVITY
+ Casting a wide net (as I suggested to AGSI in 1994)
+ Multiple levels of analysis (see image–threat and opportunity change depending on the level of analysis)
+ Including understanding of one's creeping and binding “lock ins”
COLLECTIVE COMMITMENT
+ Keep the top level meetings focused on strategy
+ Create culture of holistic accountability instead of silos
+ Make time for full information sharing and interaction
+ Treat personal objectives and concerns as critical inputs
+ Have a FAIR process that allows for needed UNEQUAL resource allocation
RESOURCE FLUIDITY
+ Some resources are more fluid (money, brand) than others (key people, fixed inputs, special relationships with clients)
+ Challenge is cognitive and political rather than procedural or financial
+ Generative growth (on the edges) is key–one reason I hate tethered devices like the X-Box or the iPhone
+ Must MAXIMIZE knowledge SHARING with OUTSIDE parties
+ Experiment
MANAGEMENT DEPOLITICIZATION
+ “Most top teams are, for natural reasons, collections of independent individuals with strong opinions rather than inspiring and innovative teams.” Page 79 citing Teams At the Top. In my own experience and that of Ben Gilad, author of Business Blindspots (order from UK Infonortics), the INFORMATION reaching most managers is biased, late, incomplete, filtered, and poorly focused–thus making opinions even more dangerous.
+ Authors feel strongly that teams need to be organized for mutual interdependencies, with incentives to match.
+ “Cognitive diversity is a key precondition to high-quality internal dialogs.”
+ Use young rising leaders as a shadow management team focused on the future
+ Have an OPEN strategy process
+ Leaders must learn to ASK and ADAPT rather than to DECIDE and TELL.
Other key points that grabbed me and are memorable:
+ Strategy now is continuous
+ Strategy now is less about foresight (still important), more about insight across every domain
+ Agility is the key ingredient, means being able to think and act differently (so much for most leadership teams)
+ Emotions matter–people not products innovate, learn to use this
I put the book down (at the beach, in Rohoboth) with three ideas bringing this encounter to a close:
1) Mature *successful* businesses die of strategic paralysis and the thirteen toxins
2) Three core values the authors use to conclude are
+ Dedication to EVERY client
+ Innovation that matters to both the company and the world
+ Trust and personal responsibility in ALL relationships.
3) Strike three for the US Intelligence Community and the US Government.
I had something to do with the last two and hope I can be forgiven for including them–it is not possible to perform as a smart company in the context of a dumb nation, nor is it possible to co-create value without recognizing that the gold standard now consists of meeting individual needs without social or environmental costs being externalized.
Excellent book. Buy it–this review is a taste, not the meal.
Value Priced, Superb Overview, Isolated from Other Literatures,August 28, 2008
Peter M. Senge et al
At the end of this review following the links to other recommended books, I specify why this book receives four stars instead of five. Shortly I will load several images that will augment my written review, a couple of them recreated from this book, a couple my own original work.
I found this book absorbing, and while I recognized many many areas where the authors could have identified and respected the work of others more explicitly, I also found this to be the single best book for a manager of any business, any non-profit, any educational institution, any citizen advocacy group, with respect to the changing paradigm of business from industrial era obsess on profit and waste wantonly, to the information era of integrated full life cycle with total transparency of all costs (social, environmental, and financial) and ZERO footprint on Earth and society. There is ample original work from the authors, and this book is priced just right as a vehicle for energizing groups of any kind.
Following from my extensive notes:
+ A handful of top global businesses “get it” and have been pioneering footprint free zero waste business model: BP, GE, Coca-Cola, Dupont, even Nike.
+ Non-governmental organizations (NGO) know more about local needs and the emerging marketplace (four billion of the five billion poor, I am very disconcerted to see the business world “writing off” the one billion extreme poor) than any market “intelligence” firm.
+ With credit to Jared Diamond, I read for the first time about the unreal financial reality “bubble,” and the “real real” world bubble that is catching up with it. See John Bogle's book below for a deeper explanation of how the financial mandarins have stolen one fifth of the value and misdirected the Main Street economy while doing so.
+ Although I have read Stewart Hart's work, this book helped me appreciate in detail his Sustainability Value Matrix.
+ Other “big ideas” by others that are integrated into this book include that of civil society stakeholders; ethical consumerism, stabilization wedges (Palala and Socolow),ladder of inference (an anthropological practice), peacekeeping circles, requisite organization, and law of limited competition (Daniel Quinn)
PROBLEM STATEMENT:
1. Industrial Waste (USA wastes 100 billion tons a year, 90% of inputs)
2. Consumer/Commercial Waste & Toxicity (of 8B/year, 5B not absorbable)
3. Non-Renewable Resources in Sharp Decline
4. Renewable Resources down 30-70% and in some cases close to extinction tipping point (fresh water, topsoil, fisheries, forests)
THREE GUIDING IDEAS:
1. No viable path neglects future generations
2. Institutions matter
3. Real change must be grounded in new ways of thinking (see Durant below, capstone lessons from their ten volume history of civilization was that the only real revolution is in the mind of man, and that morality has a strategic value of incalculable proportions).
THREE AREAS OF BUSINESS CONCERN:
1. Energy & Transportation
2. Food & Water
3. Material Waste & Toxicity
THREE PRE-REQUISITES FOR NEW THINKING:
1. Seeing Systems Within Systems (Full Cycle Closed Earth)
2. Collaborating Across Boundaries (No one has it all)
3. Creating & adjusting instead of problem solving in isolation
SIX BASIC IDEAS:
1. Natural system encloses social and economic systems
2. Industrial system must operate in that context
3. Regenerable resources have harvest limits
4. Non-renewable resources are finite.
5. Waste is a cancer on the Earth
6. Socio-cultural community is the vessel for change
THREE SKILLS FOR CREATING THE SUSTAINABLE FUTURE:
1. Convening diversity of viewpoints
2. Listening to all, avoiding advocacy
3. Nurturing relationships over time and above money
EXPLICIT INCENTIVES FOR GOING GREEN:
1. Save dollars internally
2. Make dollars externally
3. Provide customers with competitive value
4. Sustainability as point of differentiation
5. Shape the future of your industry, win market share
6. Become a preferred supplier for giants like Home Depot
7. Change image and brand for better (70%+ of market value)
The book is full of examples of successful change implementation, and includes a number of “toolbox” pages that could be made into a protable booklet or distributed broadly across corporate networks.
I was struck throughout the book with the value of this work in identifying specific personalities and specific companies who could be drawn into the broader holistic work of emerging meta-strategic networks such as Reuniting America, the Transpartisan Institute, and Earth Intelligence Network. Two women in particular jumped out as future global leaders on the order of Lee Kuan Yew and Nelson Mandela:
1. Vivienne Cox of BP
2. Lorraine Bolsinger of GE
I put the book down deeply impressed with its concluding sections, and thinking to myself: China, CHINA, CHINA! That is the center of gravity for getting right on a massive scale in the near term.
I resolved to rate this book as a four for the following reasons, in relative order of annoyance:
1) Crummy index for what could have been a brilliant REFERENCE book, not just an orientation book for leaders that do not read a lot. This index is SO BAD it fails to list all the individuals mentioned, and completely blows off numerous key phrases (e.g. sustainability wedges) that would be in any properly created professional index.
2) No literature search and total isolation from the major literatures of Collective Intelligence, Wealth of Networks, Organizational Intelligence, Integral Consciousness, Closed Systems Engineering, Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, and so on.
3) Understandable use of the iconic name of the lead author, but in all probability actually written by the other four authors.
4) Really marginal reference section and no bibliography (even more valuable would have been an annotated bibliography).
5) Absolutely clueless on the means of visualizing and using world-class visualization to create compelling multi-dimensional mental images (this is not to say I am any better, just that they missed a chance to be “the” reference work for the next seven years).
Bottom line on the deficiency: I read very broadly, and am increasingly distressed at the continuing isolation of authors from one another's work. It's time every work of this importance do a proper job of connecting to other works.
Internet is NOT a Great Leap Forward in Reinventing Knowledge, August 28, 2008
Ian F. McNeely
Edit of 29 August 2008: Am adding a couple of images to help clarify the importance of actually understanding new ways of creating, sharing, and leveraging knowledge. YES, the Internet has led to an order of magnitude or more knowledge creation and sharing but NO, it has not led to a dramatic change in the definition of knowledge or the role played by knowledge.
With a tip of the hat to SALON and book reviewer Laura Miller, whose review can be found at the URL in the comment, I want to add this book to those I recommend for the growing body of citizens who are truly skeptical of the Internet as a panacea, and suspicious of Google and other “snake oil” vendors.
Use the “see inside the book” feature just under the book cover above to examine details provided by the publisher.
Bottom line: we are entering a period when the “wealth of networks” may reinvent knowledge, but having read and reviewed The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals And Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World only to be stunned at the end with its discussion of how many non-human primates are learning 500-1000 human words in sign language, I am now convinced, from a system of systems perspective, that the next big leap in reinventing knowledge will be not the emergence of smart mobs, armies of davids, the power of us, but rather, when Pierre Tielhard de Chardin's noosphere becomes a reality, and all living things have co-equal standing “in communion” with one another.
The nicest thing I can say about this book, other than to recommend it, is to link to other books that support the thesis the book presents: the Internet is NOT the big leap forward.
This book, a paperback, should not be costing more than $25.00. Authors need to start shunning publishers that prevent their knowledge from reaching the world at an affordable (honest) price. I will find this author's knowledge online rather than buy this book at this exhobitant price.
NOT a Guide–A Coffee Table Book, Lots of Photos, No Stats, September 3, 2008
