The Culture Map by Erin Meyer

Review by Sue Scott.

When I think of maps, I think borders, boundaries, heading off into the unknown, getting lost and turning the map upside down so that the road faces my direction of travel. Apparently, lots of people turn maps upside down, its something to do with spatial awareness, but it never fails to get a tsk from my husband who would prefer me to read maps like a rally co-driver.

My relationship with maps is not the only reason I was reluctant to pick up The Culture Map, by Erin Meyer. The other reason is that after years of working in a global organisation, it is really important to me that I don’t make assumptions about people based on their culture. Yes, I admit when I started reading this book, I was deeply prejudiced. What could a white American woman from Minnesota teach the world about living and working with diverse cultures?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Erin Meyer is a professor of management practice in the Organizational Behaviour department at INSEAD. Her book is a map to navigate the complexities of working across multiple cultures in the business context. I think anyone working in a global organisation, working in a business that operates across borders or leading a multi-cultural team should read this book and take notes. 

The book is split into different areas of business communication, including how different cultures evaluate performance, influence, lead, make decisions, build trust and manage conflicts and it revealed some rather surprising things for me. For instance, I have always thought of Americans as very direct, however when it comes to one-to-one performance feedback, the French get straight to the point, being explicit on exactly what needs to improve. The Americans by contrast, tend to couch negative feedback between some motivating positive stuff. We Brits are the same, judging by all the reminders at appraisal time about how to give constructive feedback!

Since leaving the corporate world I have been learning how to communicate effectively about my fledgling coaching business on social media and the important marketing technique of ‘rinse and repeat’. Saying the same thing over and over in different ways to stand out. I think Erin Meyer might describe this approach as reflecting the low context language that Americans and British share. Our communication is ‘precise, simple and clear, and repeated to clarify’. Let me repeat that…. 

High context languages found in France, China, Japan are ‘sophisticated, nuanced and layered. Messages are implied and not plainly expressed’. This gave me a fresh perspective of what it must be like for someone with a high context language in meetings with Americans and English and our tendency to repeat things we think are important! It must be pretty boring.

When it comes to persuading and influencing, the cultural differences can lose your audience in a heartbeat, for instance by providing the detailed analysis up front to Americans and British when the preference is to get straight to the conclusions and actions. Conversely, if you don’t provide the analysis first, when presenting to a German, French or Russian audience the presentation could be derailed with challenges to the presenter on how he or she came to their conclusions. 

A practical manifestation of these two styles is in how we author emails. Long emails that set out the entire debate might not get the attention of a British or American reader – the entire email needs to fit on an iphone screen to have the biggest impact. Try layering that over everything you have learned about communicating effectively on LinkedIn!

There were certain aspects that felt a bit counter-intuitive to me. For example, the Japanese have a hierarchical leadership approach, but tend to make decisions as a group with unanimous agreement. This can mean getting to decisions is quite slow. By contrast, US is egalitarian on the leadership side, but tends towards top-down decision-making. This means quick decisions but can change as new facts or points of view emerge. Is this what we mean by Agile I wonder? Netherlands is both egalitarian in leadership and seeks consensus for decisions, so a Dutch person might be demotivated by their British or American boss making all the decisions.

The chapter on building trust made me think about the endless debates my old Anti-Bribery & Corruption team had with business users of the gifts and entertainment system. The cultural map divided countries into Task-based and Relationship-based. China, Russia, Nigeria, Mexico and India all build trust through relationships. They do this through sharing meals, evening drinks and getting to know each other over an extended period of time. Countries like UK, US, Netherlands, Australia and Germany are task-based and therefore build trust through business-related activities, and relationships can be picked up and dropped quite easily.

It struck me that our Gifts and Entertainment process was an example of a clash of culture, where the US and UK regulatory expectation is to limit gifts and entertainment and keep things focused more on business and task. This must seem quite rude in China and India when trying to get to know your business partners and build long-term relationships. Interesting to note also that a number of the countries that are listed as building trust based on relationships, score high on the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index. The twist in this tale is that when you look at the big cases of bribery, its often businesses from task-based cultures who are initiating the bribery….

I also thought it was funny to think that despite how much the British love a piss up in the pub, for the Japanese, social drinking after work is a way to build strong teams and business relationships and share what you are really thinking. And, yes, what goes on tour stays on tour…

The Cultural Map paints a complex territory and there is a lot to learn from this book. As a leader, navigating cultural differences effectively means developing an awareness of these perspectives, encouraging others to do the same and integrating diversity into how we do business.

~~~
Sue Scott is a Leadership Coach, Mentor & Advisor
You can contact Sue at ssensecoaching.com

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Reviewed by Sue Scott

I know it is a cliché but growing up I wanted to be a writer. Instead, I became a Compliance Officer and more recently a Leadership Coach. More on that some other time, but what piqued my interest in the introduction to Atomic Habits was James Clear’s explanation of how he came to write Atomic Habits.

He began by writing notes on his experiments with habits and then publishing regular articles which led to an email subscribers list growing to 100,000 in two years. In setting up my business in March this year, I have had to learn all about marketing, using social media and how to grow a subscribers list (still on the ‘to do’ list). James Clear developed the habit of writing, then regularly publishing, which eventually led to a book deal for Atomic Habits, published 2018. The book ‘grew’ out of a habit of ongoing experiments! 

For any aspiring writer, this book is a framework for how to write a book, for everyone else, it’s a guide to creating a better set of habits in your life.  Clear sets out his four-step model of cue, craving, response, reward, to explain how our habits work. The book then divides these up in to the ‘four laws for making changes’: make it obvious; make it attractive; make it easy and make it satisfying. Take note dear reader: this book is about the slow process of making small sustainable changes, tweaks to your daily routine rather than a crash diet to lose a stone in ten days.

My key takeaways from this book:

Focus on who you want to become rather than what you want to achieve and then work on the process (habits) that support the new you.  For example. ‘the goal is not to read a book, it is to become a reader’.  This is music to my ears, after years of doing pointless and soul-destroying annual objective setting at work.  In my corporate life, the focus was always on achieving some task or project goal. The behavioural element was the backup - the cherry on top for a top performer, or the stink bomb to move to the exit for the poor performer. I do wonder what impact there might be on culture and conduct if the corporate world flipped the prevailing model and put role model behaviour as a prerequisite for achieving a good performance rating?

The model starts with a cue or trigger – the thing that signals to the brain the potential for a reward of some kind. It can be a positive or negative cue, but it is the thing that happens before the behaviour. This made me think about how a significant proportion of my coaching is helping clients to notice their negative internal dialogue, and to stop its influence on behaviour. Noticing what sets off the internal dialogue is key to choosing a change to something more positive. The cues or triggers are set through past experience and are the starting point for all our good and bad habits. So, the first step is to notice what those cues are.

Atomic Habits sets out a framework, for how to build in better habits, or change or remove bad habits, using the four laws referred to above. I liked the approach; it appealed to the list-making planner in me, so I downloaded the Habit Stacking Template, becoming yet another subscriber (I find freebies irresistible).  My aim is to do an audit of my good and bad habits. I have not yet started the audit, but I definitely want to; I just need to get out of the habit of procrastinating first….

Sue Scott is a Leadership Coach, Mentor & Advisor based in the UK. 
Website: ssensecoaching.com  (Company Website)

The Customer Copernicus by Charlie Dawson and Seán Meehan

A few years ago, I helped organise several offsites and strategy workshops for senior executives in large well-established companies.  Typically, the newly enlightened CEO would press the senior team to have more of a focus on the customer, rather than the internal machinations of the firm.  The recurrent customer-led theme was all the rage, with numerous presentations on customer centricity, customer insight and the importance of “outside-in” thinking.  We cheered the video clip of the CEO’s appearance on ‘Back to the Floor’, fixing boilers and stacking shelves on the front-line of the brand-customer nexus.  When we finally were convinced that we had “got it”, we sat bemused while a different guru told us it was nothing to do with brilliant service, or products, of after-sales, but that “customers don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

Deep into the workshop, huddled around flipcharts, we would nod sagely at how easy this customer mission sounded and we would depart later with “Putting the Customer at the heart of everything we do” emblazoned on our collective minds and branded gift-bags. Unfortunately, in my experience, few of these workshops, or tactical initiatives (however well done) did much to change anything fundamental in the firms I worked with.  The more common senior team obsessions were already deeply ingrained and they were internal, organisational, or political. This ought not to have been a surprise, because companies that are truly and manifestly customer-centric are so very rare in the first place, and rarer still is the organisation that manages a successful transition from self-obsession to being customer obsessed. 

Helpfully, a new vivid and entertaining book, The Customer Copernicus, unpacks the ingredients, values and mindset of those rare organisations that are not only customer-led, but also stay that way.  The authors come from different disciplines; Charlie Dawson is the founding partner of a London based consulting firm and Seán Meehan is a Professor of Marketing at IMD in Switzerland.  They have spent some time (several years in the development) in producing their book, curating and exploring several compelling stories to illustrate their core idea. They start in behemoth territory, quoting Jeff Bezos’ advocacy for customer focus as a “Day 1” fundamental at Amazon, and the CEO of Wells Fargo saying something equally unequivocal about his customers, but then presiding over a mis-selling scandal impacting millions.  

To be truly customer focused they argue is like being Copernicus, heretical, odd, and baffling to others, with your face set against the prevailing wisdom and the many stronger claims for the soul and belief of an organisation; be they colleagues, shareholders, stakeholders, communities, or regulators.  Dawson and Meehan may have discovered the secret sauce behind this rare focus and adherence to the customer, which they describe as “moments of belief”. These moments are uncovered in a humble setting such as Timpsons’ repair shops, as well as sophisticated services firms like Handelsbanken and Sky, and are evidenced not just in terms of business outcomes but also how it “feels” to be part of an organisation that acts differently.

The book has a refreshing ‘first-hand’ take on its cases; not just relying on fancy aerial shots, but getting close to the people, arguments, dilemmas, and lessons learnt amidst the subject firms. Organisations like Sky often reside in the commentator’s mind more for the politics around the Murdoch family’s ownership than the inside story. Here they explain CEO Jeremy Darroch’s brand vision to ‘Believe in Better’ and how the internal culture of the firm spawned exponential growth, as well as new platform innovation like NOW TV.  Copernicus-like, Sky thrived because of its difference to the establishment thinking deeply ingrained within the incumbents BBC and ITV.  Because Sky took belief from making things simple, it programmed according to customers’ desires, rather than editorial preferences, and guided by Darroch’s belief that acting or behaving like those incumbents would be a “death warrant”.

Being different is a challenging route to maintain and not everything is so rosy as they tell the tales of O2 and Tesco, who purposely grew with such a focus but meandered (or risked malfeasance) when that focus was lost.  They head to Sweden’s Handelsbanken for a more sustainable story of continued deep-rooted (and localised) focus on customers.  Across each of the case studies they highlight discernible patterns, where organisations lead with strategy, ideas and services that are grounded in these moments of belief; or as they see at Handelsbanken in the run up to Brexit in the UK, an organisation determined to stay on course by relying on a deep heritage of a “continual flow of moments of belief”. 

Because this steadfastness is rare and the forces of conventional thinking are so strong, they conclude with a call to be bold; noting that “when the chips are down, outside-in companies are brave.”  They tell the Lego story (unfamiliar to me) born as we know it today, out of the disruption of the Wall Street Crash and a devastating fire in the 1930’s, which meant a pivot from using wood to plastic bricks; creating a “new and better way” for customers.  By being brave (and proved right) their critical Moment of Belief created decades of growth and prosperity.  Then in the early 2000’s, Lego’s disastrous losses precipitated an extraordinary and ruthless downsizing and re-focus of its sprawling businesses.  In a time of crisis, where did Lego find its focus? Where did they draw their fundamental beliefs from?  Right back at the beginning, from their core customers – boys and girls aged 5 – 11. 

Dawson and Meehan have done something refreshing and admirable with this book; providing clarity and conviction about an area of business thinking that is so often infused with jargon and waffle. Their distinctive “moments of belief” idea is clearly articulated and substantiated and provides food for thought for leaders and managers wrestling with how to re-anchor and renew the purpose of their firm.  They encourage us to consider that when companies have lost their way, they could do a lot worse than adopt Darroch’s approach and believe that sustainable growth comes from serving the customer better. 

John Dore

You can find out more here: www.thecustomercopernicus.com

ALIEN Thinking: How to Bring Your Breakthrough Ideas to Life - Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux & Michael Wade

A colleague once sent me a mocked-up invite to a Conference called ‘Using NLP for VUCA times in BRIC Markets.’ We had been talking about the trend for just about any idea of value or interest to quickly morph into a TLA. Perhaps like me, you feel obliged keep up to speed with these acronyms, not just in business life, but as an essential way of understanding a text message from your kids, who will only TTYL after their BFF, LOL.  As I write, the MSM are full of stories about a new craze for investing in NFTs, after a JPG file sold for $69million. IMHO, the world has gone mad.  So, it was with some wariness I approached a smart new business book called ALIEN Thinking.  

The authors, Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux & Michael Wade are all Professors at IMD Business School and their aim in this entertaining and very accessible book, is to study people who have made “quantum leaps of creativity”.  They regard these rare individuals as ALIENS, as they exhibit five codified patterns of behaviour that lead to breakthrough ideas: Attention, Levitation, Imagination, Experimentation and Navigation.  Although this a book mainly about business innovation, the authors start with two stories; one about a critical care doctor volunteering amidst an Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and the other about an ex-prisoner pioneering re-employment solutions for other ex-offenders.   The attribution of the “ALIEN” framework to these two case studies seemed to me somewhat thinly made, but we are quickly off down a more familiar path of household entrepreneurs and innovative firms (James Dyson, Cambridge Analytica, Lego, etc).  The authors source some great stories and in looking at Experimentation, they feature British entrepreneur Lawrence Kemball-Cook, who invented a power-generating pavement (called ‘PaveGen’), a terrific example of an Imaginative leap, though since that first leap was installed in 2012, he remains deeply frustrated that his great idea has never really scaled. The authors have been proactive in trying to ignite such innovation and they describe some rather enviable “discovery tours” with executives heading to Bangalore, Seoul, Tokyo and Taipei; trips that that sound suitably ambitious in scope and, I guess these days, are somewhat nostalgically remembered.

The section on Levitation (“the act of stepping back to regain perspective”) reminded me of a senior colleague, advocating what he calls “curious wandering”.  It’s something that I think academics are actively encouraged to do; taking time out, working elsewhere, blocking distractions, a sabbatical from routine, but it is rarely the norm in corporate life, unless you’re an already exhausted Partner in a professional services firm. While we might not all have the time and scope for such Levitation, it made me think of the ‘What-If’ recommendation, that however busy you are, you should at least “take a different route to work” once in a while, or Cal Newport’s practical approach to carving distraction-free space for what he calls Deep Work.  

There is not room here to do justice to all the five dimensions, though I took most value from those that have the best stories attached, or where those stories were less familiar, for example, their take on What3Words or Swisscom.  The section on Navigation seems though the most important; that the spark of ideas (borne out of what other frameworks might label as curiosity, creativity and exploration) is important, but essential is navigation: actively drawing insights in from outside the normal frame and making things happen within the organisation, where inertia, internal opposition and scepticism abound.  If you are an ALIEN thinker with a great idea, it does not mean the organisation will be any more receptive or responsive; you still need strong personal and political skills, as well as huge amounts of resilience, to make anything actually happen.  To illustrate they revisit the familiar Kodak story, failing to execute a pivot to digital, but this time their spotlight shines on Steven Sasson, who made a breakthrough innovation he called “filmless photography’ (digital to you and me) but used a toxic combination of words within Kodak. Sasson won a Presidential award for innovation, but scored “nil point” for navigation.  Helpfully, the authors aid the ‘navigation’ of their own case with a series of re-caps, “key takeaways” and diagnostic sheets.  

ALIEN Thinking covers some familiar innovation territory, while making a compelling and distinctive case for leaders to particularly embrace levitation to engender creativity, and navigation, to make those ideas land. While the book has an ‘out of the world’ title, it is essentially grounded in dozens of interesting real-world stories that substantiate the framework. ALIEN Thinking should be of interest to anyone wanting to know more about the required mindset, organisational environment and sheer hard graft needed to bring breakthrough ideas to life.  

 John Dore

Some notes on acronyms used:

1. ‘Using Neuro-Linguistic Programming in Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous times in Brazilian, Russian, Indian and Chinese markets’.

2. TLA: “three letter acronym”, or contraction, such as IMD; International Institute for Management Development.

3. They will only talk to you later, after their best friend forever, laughing out loud.

4. A non-fungible token called “Everydays — The First 5000 Days,” by the artist known as Beeple, set a record for a digital artwork in a sale at Christie’s.

The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter The Earth’s Resources by Javier Class and Jack Farchy

Prior to diving into this weighty tome, I had two pertinent insights into the world of commodity trading.  First, was from a friend called Ernie (not his real name) who went into Sugar Trading soon after graduating.  We would often meet up for drinks when he had just got back from Mogadishu, Tashkent, or some other place I had never heard of, having spent three weeks trying to negotiate the release of some mega-shipment of cane on a ship ‘delayed’ off the coast of East Africa. At that time, I was working for an Accountancy firm, hiring trainees, so I struggled to make my recruitment ‘milk-round’ travails have the same sense of adventure and glamour as his. Ernie told me that one year while travelling extensively, he had claimed more in laundry expenses than he had earned that year in base salary.  I was, of course, doubtful until he told me that he sometimes flew Business Class with his mother’s curtains and bath-towels in his excess luggage.  The second pertinent insight was from the movie Trading Places with Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd, which featured irritating people becoming (or ceasing to be) profoundly rich by making predictions about what would happen with the “Russian harvest”, or the market for “Pork Bellies.”  On the basis of these two key insights, Javier Blas and Jack Flashy (both journalists at Bloomberg News) did not need to serve up much in their new book to improve my smarts. Thankfully, they did so much more.    

This book is terrific, well-told, engaging, deeply disturbing and somehow titillating all at the same time.  Imagine if Robert Harris and Frederic Forsyth teamed up to write a business book?  This is it.  International trade, covert crime, dastardly villains, exotic locations, super-yachts and unimaginable wealth form the back-drop to a series of stories about a handful of powerful people and organisations you may have never heard of.  It even has a Bond style Swiss headquartered super-villain with a non—ironic name; Mark Rich.  While we might berate the CEOs of public listed companies for their multi-million bonus, we may well have missed reports that the 13 partners at Glencore were worth 29  billion dollars.  We can easily revile, or rejoice in the genius, of Musk or Zuckerberg or Gates, but they are at least huge public-profile figures, hauled before Senate Committees, examined to death in the business media, while their personal lives are fodder for the tabloids and gossip columnists.  But could I name any one of the dozen of so billionaires featured here who control the vast majority of the world’s resources, precious metals and food-stuffs?   Not one of them.  

This is a book as much about geo-politics, social upheaval and the causes and consequences of war, as it is about business and commerce.  After a while, it becomes wearying in the scope of these traders machinations; the Arab Spring, the collapse of the Soviet Union; the burning oil-fields of Iraq.  I almost expected a Chapter on these guys being responsible for global warming and COVID-19.  If nothing else, my sense of geography improved as I hopped from Libya to Cuba to Russia and Kurdistan. It paints a picture of commodity trading like a perverse dystopian global silk road, trodden by an unknown elite of super-smart, opaque in their moral compass and enviably brilliant at the same time.  The sequence which covers the collapse of the Soviet Union which had three outcomes; massive social upheaval, the emergence of power oligarchs and the enrichment of the traders to levels never dreamed of even a decade earlier.  The fact that one of them is unceremoniously shot in a Russian airport is almost only mentioned as a footnote.  An extraordinarily good book which should be best consumed in the First Class lounge of a far-flung airport (when that kind of indulgence is allowed again).

John Dore

Humanocracy - Creating Organisations As Amazing As the People Inside Them, by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini

I first met Gary Hamel over 20 years ago at a Human Resources conference in Harrogate, UK.  When I say “met”, I was sat some distance away in the plenary audience, with about 3,000 other delegates, so met is probably stretching the point.  It was though one of those keynotes that made the hair on your neck stand-up.  He was passionate, incisive, armed with real-world data and seemed angry with me personally for working for an organisation which had failed so miserably to inspire and engage the vast majority its people.  Hamel memorably said “Most organisations are not getting the passion, creativity and initiative out of their people. They get intelligence, diligence and obedience – but you can get that from a cocker spaniel.”  Two decades later, I have had the pleasure to meet and work with Professor Gary Hamel at London Business School, and his verve, conviction and way with words remains undiluted.  

Humanocracy, co-written with Michele Zanini, is a hugely impressive book and a manifesto for a radically different kind of organisation, management style and approach; one so far beyond the common experience of many employees, it could risk reading like a fantasy utopian piece.  But then having made the case for WHY organisations need to change (the sapping burden of bureaucracy, the untapped innovation and creativity, the patently moral case for making work more engaging, not dispiriting and de-humanising), Hamel begins to substantiate his case in the real world, and it becomes not only believable, but compelling.  He cites Morning Star, Newcor and South West Airlines in the US, Vinci and Michelen in France, Haier in China, Handelsbanken in Sweden and Buurtzorg in the Netherlands.  These are the exceptions that prove the rule, a new vanguard of organisations (and leaders) who have adopted a series of protocols and an approach to engaging and unleashing their people that is profoundly different.  

The essence of this difference takes some detailed exploration and Hamel codifies the common attributes though a series of guiding principles; Ownership, Markets, Meritocracy, Community, Openness, Experimentation and (a more challenging section on) Paradox.   The depth and breadth of the concepts take some consuming, but this is serious stuff – not a flippant skim over the issues, but explored with real rigour and insight, challenge and grounded context.  The section on Experimentation is practical, clear and concise and the tools in the second half of the book – wittily sign-posted ‘Start Here’ - on how you can personally ‘detox’, build an experiment, design a Hackathon, and build some coalition around fresh ideas, is really good and its worth wading through the tougher Principles section to get to the varied toolkit he provides.   

Hamel is one of the leading strategy, management and enterprise leadership writers, teachers, thinkers and consultants on the planet, so there are no surprises here; he has written (another) great book.  The cover of the book is suitably adorned in eloquent quotes from some of the greatest minds in business thinking and leadership – including, Stanley McCrystal, Marc Benioff, Adam Grant and Amy Edmondson, so there is little doubt we’re in thoughtful, hard to impress company here. The book is likely to grow in popularity as Gary hits the speaker circuit again – as beyond his, there are a paucity of radical ideas about management around, and this is a powerful manifesto which CEO’s, HR Directors and leaders with an interest in innovation will benefit hugely from reading. 

The more interesting thing though is that the book is only part of the story.  Gary is determined to make smart thinking more accessible. It’s in keeping with one of his Humanocracy mandates, that all companies should educate their employees about business and value creation, so they act and think more like owners.  So, with the book you also get access to a great free online course, with hours of materials, videos, models, exercises and detox scoresheets.  And that ‘gift’ of outreach is in turn part of a bigger initiative he describes as The Human Movement – a new global collaborative effort to transform our thinking and approach to management; “the organizational equivalent of the Human Cell Atlas or the International Brain Laboratory”. His ambition is unashamedly bold, and he argues, the movement starts with every reader of the book, to seize in themselves the opportunity to behave like a “post-bureaucratic” leader.  When I finished Humanocracy, I was back in that cavernous hall in Harrogate, feeling again, personally responsible for making something happen. 

John Dore

Organising for the New Normal, by Costas Markides

Business literature is often populated with the ignominy of failure.  The stories are many; the demise of Kodak and Blockbuster, the blinkered chipmakers at Intel who failed to adapt to mobile, the destructive avarice of greedy bankers and the misguided bets that come back to haunt charismatic CEOs doubling-down on strategies that have no counter to disruption.

The alternative to these tales is often the heroic visionary, who builds a trillion-dollar enterprise from his garage, through sheer determination, much genius and a desire to make a dent in the universe.  Three hefty tomes have recently been published about Amazon, and now its founder Jeff Bezos, is reportedly freeing up his schedule to pen his own memoir. These deep dives into an extraordinary enterprise can be illuminating but, by definition, their perspective is narrow.

In his new book, Organising for the New Normal, Markides takes a different path, reassuringly and densely populated with a myriad of well-told stories of different leaders and many varied organisations.  He includes some well-known names, but also some unsung change-makers, who somehow managed to make organisational change happen, pivot to new markets and survive the seismic shocks of disruptive innovation and increasingly fickle consumers. 

At the heart of Markides’ new book is a positive thesis; that disrupted organisations can change and thrive again and that there are definitive, actionable strategies that leaders can adopt that will enable and accelerate that response. The trick is not knowing the things that need to be done, but actually doing them and, crucially, doing them well. For example, leaders may know that they need to instil an urgency for change, or create the right environment for innovation, but there is a clever way to do it and a stupid way; and unfortunately, most organisations, when faced with disruption, respond in the wrong way. Markides’ new book guides us through this minefield, to find the right way.

He starts with a familiar story of doing it right, with Satya Nadella’s transformation of Microsoft since 2014.  But the problem for Microsoft (and for all enterprises) he argues, is that the nature of accelerated disruption means “it barely has time to take a breath” before the next wave of “even more radical disruption” hits and the future becomes unpredictable again.  So how do mature organisations get ready to adapt and respond to these continuous waves of radical change?

At first sight, many of the approaches Markides advocates do not seem particularly radical or extraordinary (clarity of vision, experimentation, a sense of urgency, the right mindset, etc), but what he shines new and compelling light on is the importance of making these things so much more visible, tangible and emotionally engaging to the wider organisation.  He tells a neat story about the CEO of the Belgian bank KBC, Johan Tjhss, who does not just talk about his “digital strategy” as some far-off horizon event but, in response to the threat of Google and Amazon entering local banking, launches a digital Personal Assistant app, so his employees and customers could instantly sense, touch and see where KBC’s strategy was heading.

Markides tells us what we surely already know; that organisational change is enormously hard to initiate and almost impossible to sustain.  But rather than leave us there to flounder, he argues that understanding immutable behaviours is key to forming strategies and approaches that take people with you.  For example, leaders should learn from the best deployments of deep emotional engagement (as used in the best consumer advertising) for their internal change communications, not just rely on rational data presentations, or corporate speak.  It is this fusion of behavioural cues and strategic thinking that makes the book a rich resource.  But Markides is also brutally honest about the difficulty leaders face in trying to change “behaviours”. To illustrate, he starts one section not with a business anecdote, but with two real-life stories that show the appalling human response to a deadly hit and run and a young woman’s murder. 

An early segment deals with external disruption and why this should be treated as both an opportunity and a threat.  The subtle magic here of the “and” is easily missed, but for Markides it’s a crucial attitudinal issue, which if grasped, is fundamental to how organisations should respond. The organisations that succeed in their response to disruption should adopt a dual strategy of defence and attack.  He cites the pivot of Auto Trader in the UK (originally a print publication that has become a digital platform worth over £4billion), Walmart’s move to leverage its extensive location infrastructure (rather than close stores) to provide a fast, localised distribution network to compete with Amazon, and TAG Heuer’s innovation of sophisticated “modular” elements to compete with the Apple Watch. 

One of the joys of this book is the sheer breadth and depth of ideas covered, while told with such brevity and clarity. Each chapter is framed around a particular question; for example, “How do you know your strategy is a good one?”, so it suits dipping into, depending on which dilemma is front of mind.  No chapter though out-stays its welcome and true to one of the change maxims that Markides advocates, he uses ‘variety’ as a tool, making the journey more interesting as the book unfolds.  As such, he saves the best to last with an elegant and simple illustration of what he calls the Why, What and How (in that order) of Strategic Transformation, which someone should make into a desk-tidy, or fridge-magnet for every CEO.  

In a world where we can easily see the gloom of many corporate failures, Markides is candid and realistic about the challenge of continual radical disruption. But by illuminating his argument with an array of memorable stories, as well as numerous tools and proven approaches that work, he provides a hopeful prognosis for tackling the challenges of the new normal. 

John Dore

DEEP WORK: Four Rules for Focused Success in a distracted world by Cal Newport

Cal Newport’s 2018 book has been hugely popular, but until recently neglected by me. My misconception was that this was a more grown-up version of one of those personal productivity  manuals like Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Work Week. It’s more thoughtful than that, and in a way, without the get-rich premise, more realistic. Newport mainly focuses on smart strategies and techniques for making you more focused and productive in a work context but his very readable book (appropriately deeply consumed in a couple of sittings) is also highly relevant if you are interested in teaching, learning, or instructional design.  While reading, I imagined Cal has one of those rich deep voices used for big budget action movie trailers (clears throat); “Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity.”  If that sounds a bit ominous and over the top, he helpfully puts it more simply this way; “To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.  To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work.” Cal explains the profound value that can be found when you create space and distraction-free time for ‘deep work’. 

His argument goes something like this: deep work is hard, therefore it is rare, and such scarcity is highly valuable; so, if you become accomplished at deep work, your personal value will be enhanced exponentially. The problem is that in the twenty-first century, we are wired 24-hours a day to be actively distracted, allowing us little room for depth.  The act of ‘carving out’ time for deep work is a tough undertaking in itself, which needs planning, discipline and much determination.

Cal cites a few examples of Deep Work in action; Bill Gates writing the first code for Windows, Mark Twain writing Tom Sawyer in a remote shed, Woody Allen producing 44 screenplays in 47 years (using the same Olympia SM3 manual typewriter); JK Rowling holed up in a suite of a smart hotel, writing the seventh Harry Potter book; prolific science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson’s habitual aversion to the black hole that is social-media. Cal’s thesis reminded me a lot of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, where he tells the stories of extraordinary personal achievement; from rock stars to professional athletes, software billionaires and scientific geniuses.  There are many factors behind their success, but he argues that the common denominator was not talent, or innate ability, or intelligence; but actual time invested: often 10,000 hours, or more, of absolute dedication to a craft. As my Yorkshire heritage might have described it: great talent also knows how to put a shift in.  Gladwell’s most famous example is The Beatles, who performed live in Hamburg over 1,200 times from 1960 to 1964, amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time; laying the foundations in their craftsmanship for the masterpiece recordings later in their career.

The second half of the book goes into more practical, pragmatic (and in a way more challenging) territory providing a series of ideas for carving out time for Deep Work, and generating personal and professional value. His section on ditching social media is particularly enjoyable. A lot of the executives I get to work with feel almost obligated to use a myriad of social media platforms - and not just to keep up with their teenage kids (an impossible task), but to be seen to be active, connected and relevant online by their peers. Rather than accumulate ephemeral “contacts” and connections, he advocates an alternative to Facebook: “maintain close and rewarding friendships with a group of people who are important to you.” His approach to improved work-life balance is simple enough; embrace boredom, quit social media, schedule every minute of your day, clear space (physical and cognitive) for Deep Work, and, in particular, tackle the tyranny of email [send fewer and simply ignore those that aren't easy to process]. I read Newport’s book and recently sent a copy to a small exec-ed class attending LBS. The book seemed to be received well, being read by most and one exec said that she had bought a copy for her CEO and top team. She paid forward a business book, which made my day!

John Dore

The Phoenix & The Unicorn: The Why, What and How of Corporate Innovation by Peter Hinssen

Peter Hinssen is one of the world's leading experts on radical innovation, leadership and the impact of digital on society and business.  He is also great company, as I found when I had the pleasure to be sat on a bus with him a few years ago.  Hinssen was acting as our ‘tour guide’ for a group of senior executives visiting a group of fast-growing start-ups in Silicon Valley. On the microphone, Peter regaled the group with stories of the billionaires hidden in the mansions of Atherton, of the deals brokered at Buck’s Diner in Woodside, of the logo-less Amazon buses plowing down the 101 and the suburban garage in Palo Alto, where Hewlett and Packard started out.  Peter is a proud Belgian and European, but he is completely in his element amongst the disruptive start-ups of Silicon Valley, or, his other well-trodden route, amidst the limitless innovation found in Guangzhou and Shenzhen.  

The surprise then here, in his new book, is that his focus is less the disruptive entrepreneur, trying to make some new dent in the universe and instead some of the biggest most established companies in the world, wrestling with change and transformation.  He even humbly admits that this is not his comfort zone and he apologises upfront for being so pragmatic, including practical exercises built into each chapter called “Your Turn”.  

Ten years ago Hinssen wrote The New Normal, about what happens in a world where digital stops being special and just becomes the norm. In 2017, he wrote The Day After Tomorrow, which was a clarion call to executives to focus on technology, innovation and the forces that would shape the future, rather than be mired in the backward-looking burden of the typical management agenda. 

In his new book, he starts out by encouraging leaders to embrace the “never normal,” an environment where things are constantly changing and triggered by what he calls “seismic shocks”.  The book continues with a number of neat models, which avoid becoming weary graphics straining to make a point, but are instead memorable and relatable.  He revisits the ‘Day After Tomorrow’ concept, but applies it with a particular area of required focus; what he calls the ‘The Hour Glass’ model. Here the leader’s focus should be on the top of the glass, with a wide-lens on opportunities, prioritising, selecting, experimenting and testing, but then, crucially, making sure the capabilities and resources are made available to scale and run with new ideas.

The central section covers four different types of Innovation; Product, Market, Service and Model.  Nothing new there you may think, but he then explores the reality of these innovation types; providing vivid illustrations and examples, from the hi-tech world with like SpaceX and Starlink, finance innovators like ANT Financial and Revolut and household names like Amazon and Lufthansa. He even takes a hilarious diversion into a story about Colgate and its bizarre foray into “Kitchen Entrees”.  He then maps the four categories to the huge enterprise that is Disney, showing how their approach and reach [notable for a one hundred- year old business] has been revitalised enormously by innovation across these four dimensions.   

Hinssen is clear and generous in the second half of the book, building out his Phoenix manifesto with some models adopted from colleagues at London Business School [where he has been a guest Lecturer for a decade], elegantly citing the late Sumantra Goshal’s talk to the World Economic Forum about “Calcutta in the summer and Fontainebleau in the spring”.  He also adopts Costas Markides’ succinct model of successful change leadership, retrospectively applying these principles to his ‘exemplar Phoenix’ - Walmart, an organisation whom he has advised for a number of years.  The formula is straightforward enough; building urgency, having a clarity of vision, shared mindset, shared direction and proper execution support, but he adds the essential and rare ingredient, which is not a strategic requirement, but a leadership one; to do these things means you need to be “fearless”.  

By now, he has stopped apologising for being “pragmatic” and leaves us with “10 Questions to Spark your Inner Phoenix”.  The compelling case made, in this terrifically readable and entertaining book, is that your organisation will not be able to avoid any of these tough questions, if you are ever to hope to rise from the inevitable ashes. 

John Dore

The Bank That Lived A Little: Barclays in the Age of the Very Free Market, by Philip Augar

I will declare an interest.  As a modern history of Barclays in the late 1990s to the present, a large chunk of my early career was coincidental with Philip Augar’s well-researched timeline.  Essentially, from about page 49 to page 153 of this fascinating and entertaining book, I walked the same corridors, used the same lifts and frequented many of the same urinals as the cast of characters that populate this story.  Yet despite being central, dare I say, pivotal to much that happened in the upper echelons of this quintessentially British Bank during that time, I do not merit a single mention. Augar undertook over 400 hours of interviews with 100 insiders to research his story, but never rang me.  I am though not bitter; the riches he has uncovered here are a marvel to behold and read like a blow-torch of illumination compared to the flickering candle of my hazy memories of 10,000 hours spent amidst these banking gods and monsters.  For those who have worked for Barclays, the cast of characters will be etched in their minds; the brainy FT columnist Martin Taylor who blazed a trail and then imploded, the American HR tour-de-force, Sally Bott, the ennobled Chairman Sir Peter Middleton, the grumpy cricket loving CFO Oliver Stocken, the charismatic and colourful Canadian import Matthew W Barrett, the career banker turned bank saviour John Varley, and the aggressive Gordon Gekko caricature that was Bob Diamond and his crew of henchman investment bankers cutting-up rough. The book is an absolute gem; funny, captivating, full of twists and ‘seismic shocks’; the Big Bang, the financial crisis, the Lehman purchase, the LIBOR scandal, the internecine war between traditional bankers and their avaricious Capital markets cousins.

Unusually for a book about banking, Augar does not dwell on the sheer sums of money earned by the Barclays Capital and BGI business leaders [often the same people], but makes the over-enriched protagonists seem urbane and relatable. Diamond’s protege Rich Ricci appears fully formed as a free-wheeling, bruising enforcer, who despite making many millions from the sale of Barclays Global Investors, is photographed at Walthamstow Dogs and buying a lottery ticket in a Canary Wharf newsagent. When Bob Diamond loses the confidence of the Board (after the Bank of England had decided he had lost the confidence of the Barclays Board), the Chairman and another Director turn up at his house, while he is working at his kitchen table. This moment, like much of the way the book is written, appears like a diary entry, episodically, like a scene from a film, or TV drama. Even the quoted line from one of the most ferocious bankers of his generation, is off the pages of a script. No histrionics, “I must speak to my family” is all he can muster.

I have written elsewhere about my time working at Barclays. There was a frisson and energy to the place that I have never found elsewhere and a creativity and licence given to talented people, which is a testimony to the brilliance of many of the colleagues there and the mode set by Matt Barrett and John Varley; two of the best leaders I ever witnessed. (Helpfully, Varley’s total exoneration, after the SFO senselessly pursued him for keeping Barclays independent, is mentioned in the paperback edition). Where so many writers could easily adopt a cynical tone and find the place rank with discord, politics and banality; Augar somehow makes it so much more elevated and entertaining than that; a glimpse into the halcyon age of bankers and banking and a powerful insight into the sheer all-encompassing life-sapping energy and commitment it takes to make any impact at the top of a major business. Augar’s tale of Barclays at its heights, as well as plumbing its depths, is one the best business books you could read. There, I’ve said it.

John Dore