During the past few years I have taken time to advance through reading a significant number of management books that inspired me to change my focus and to do the things that I am currently doing and enjoying. Most recently I started to read The Critical Few by Jon Katzenbach, James Thomas & Gretchen Anderson.
I realized that these books represent more than an infinite amount of wisdom of their collective authors, they represent deep learning and invaluable experience and observations from how business has evolved during the past two decades.
All-in-all, my top 25 in management books (listed in alphabetical order) that I have gained a lot from (and these books only represent a ‘scratch on the surface’ of the vast amount of management and leadership literature available – a never ending deluge it seems) are listed below. I encourage everyone to read a least some of the titles that resonate well for you.
1. Beyond Performance by Scott Keller & Colin Price
2. Breakthrough Imperative by Mark Gottfredson & Steve Schaubert
3. Conscious Business by Fred Kofman
4. Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
5. Good to Great by Jim Collins
6. Immunity to Change by Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey
7. Leadership at Scale by Claudio Feser, Michael Rennie & Nicolai Chen Nielsen
8. Leading Change by John P. Kotter
9. Mastering Leadership by Robert J. Anderson & William A. Adams
10. Mindset by Carol S. Dweck
11. Riding the waves of culture by Fons Trompenaars
12. Senior Leadership Teams by Ruth Wageman, Debra S. Nunes, James A. Burruss & J. Richard Hackman
13. Start with Why by Simon Sinek
14. The Blue Line Imperative by Kevin Kaiser & David S. Young
15. The Critical Few – Jon Katzenbach, James Thomas & Gretchen Anderson
16. The Culture Map by Erin Meyer
17. The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
18. The Hedgehog Effect by Manfred P. Kets de Vries
19. The Set-up-to-Fail Syndrome by Jean-Francois Manzoni & Jean-Louis Barsoux
20. The Seven Habits of highly Effective People by Stephen M.R. Covey
21. The Speed of Trust by Stephen M.R. Covey
22. The Values-Driven Organization by Richard Barrett
23. The Wisdom of Teams by Jon R. Katzenbach & Douglas R. Smith
24. Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
25. Victory through Organization by Dave Ulrich, Wayne Brockbank, Mike Ulrich & David Kryscynski
Top 5 summaries
Let me share some of the key takeaway snippets that I took from reading my top 5, all gems of management literature (and listed in alphabetical order):
Beyond Performance by Scott Keller & Colin Price
McKinsey & Company consultants Scott Keller and Colin Price draw on their extensive research to explain how companies can achieve superior business performance in the long run while maintaining their organizational health. Organizational health is “the ability of an organization to align, execute and renew itself faster than the competition so that it can sustain exceptional performance over time.” Executing your financial goals is vital, but sustaining that success requires always being mindful of organizational health. Firms that pay as much attention to their organization’s health as to its functionality are almost three times more successful than firms that focus only on performance.
To do well in the future, companies must keep evolving in the face of new challenges even as they pursue top results in the present. The strongest, most viable firms work to become competitive and to stay competitive. They excel in the short term and the long term. The ability to adjust to new market dynamics is vital. Companies that cannot handle change today will be extinct tomorrow.
The Five Frames of Performance and Health
Leaders can directly control the health of their organizations by using a carefully planned process to “transform performance and health in an integrated manner.” To embark on this process, ask five questions: “Where do we want to go?” “How ready are we to go there?” “What do we need to do to get there?” “How do we manage the journey?” And “how do we keep moving forward?” Answering these questions means facing five challenges: the five frames of performance and organizational health, also called the “5As.” These challenges are not a straightforward checklist. Instead, they set a direction for sustained profitability and an enduring culture:
1. Aspire: Where Do We Want to Go?
On the performance side, determine how to establish a vision for change and strategic objectives. On the organizational health side, figure out what constitutes a strong organization within your existing framework. Set goals for the medium term – not the long term – regarding the flexibility and change necessary to achieve solid performance and sustainable organizational health. Do your research and base your plans on hard facts about your market dynamics, competition, future special opportunities, and so on. Avoid wishful thinking. Involve all of your firm’s leaders in setting its goals. All your goals should be ambitious but achievable. Your organizational health goals need to be as explicit as your performance goals.
2. Assess: How Ready Are We to Go There?
On the performance end, evaluate your organization’s opportunities and resources for attaining its vision and goals. Make sure your firm has the “strategic capabilities” to fulfill its performance objectives. Consider the strategic capabilities of two famous firms: IBM’s “consultative sales force” and Coca-Cola’s brand. In terms of corporate culture, seek out “root-cause mind-sets” to figure out why the diligent, hard-working people on your team behave the way they do. Your employees’ mind-sets shape their behavior and, in turn, determine your organizational health. When you inspire staffers to think positively about the firm and its activities and goals, your performance and organizational health improve. Focus groups can help uncover what your employees really think.
3. Architect - What Do We Need to Do to Get There?
The business challenge in this area is planning initiatives to enhance performance. The organizational health challenge is reorganizing your workplace environment to promote healthy mind-sets. Develop a “portfolio of initiatives” to enable your firm to reach its goals. For performance, include “customer productivity” (increase sales), “cost productivity” (reduce costs) and “capital productivity” (raise operational efficiency). To improve health, you need to trace issues back to the behaviors that shape them, and then go further still, to their root cause in shared mind-sets.
For organizational health, use McKinsey & Company’s “influence model” to make a positive change in how your people think about your firm. Create a strong story about your change initiative; connect performance and organizational health improvements to rewards and incentives; develop the skills your employees need for change, perhaps by hiring externally; and select inspiring leaders or role models to drive the initiative.
4. Act: How Do We Manage the Journey?
This phase may take years to accomplish. To achieve profitability, decide how to move ahead on each initiative. To activate your initiatives, “test, learn and scale up.” Conduct a pilot program to discover what works. Then run a second program to provide “proof of feasibility.” For organizational health, inspire energy among employees to carry out your change initiatives and implement your program throughout your organization.
5. Advance: How Do We Keep Moving Forward?
The performance challenge consists of implementing your change initiatives on a continuous basis. The health challenge is to manage and direct transformation itself. Once you have achieved your desired performance and organizational health objectives, you must sustain them by planning and implementing a “continuous improvement infrastructure.” This consists of four elements: establishing a system to share information and knowledge among employees; developing methods to capitalize on improvement opportunities; organizing learning on a continuous basis; and setting up a special team to monitor and manage the continuous enhancement of performance and organizational health. For all of this to work, you need managers who are resilient, willing to change and interested in striving to become better leaders.
Mindset by Carol S. Dweck
This book has a simple premise: The world is divided between people who are open to learning and those who are closed to it, and this trait affects everything from your worldview to your interpersonal relationships. Author and psychology professor Carol S. Dweck has scoured research papers and news clippings to extract anecdotes about the pros and cons of both mindsets. She explains that you can have a closed mindset in regard to some traits and an open mindset in regard to others. The thought-provoking insight comes from learning when you need to adjust your mindset to move ahead. People who believe their personal qualities are unchangeable have a fixed mindset. People who believe they can improve or change their personality traits over time have a growth mindset. People with a growth mindset believe that the future presents an opportunity to grow, even during challenging times.
Mindset has significant implications, although most people are very inaccurate at estimating their own capabilities. People with a fixed mindset tend to take each failure personally. They interpret any setback, from being fired to being spurned romantically, as a message of rejection. Feeling unwanted exacerbates their low self-esteem. People with fixed mindsets work hard to hide their weaknesses, but they believe that their relationships, their traits and their partner's traits are all unchangeable.
In contrast, people with growth mindsets believe they can change their personality traits. They think their abilities can grow. They are more likely to build on their talents. They love to learn and they feel frustrated when they are not developing their potential. Having a growth mindset helps people cope with stress.
Mindset also determines leadership qualities. Good leaders have a desire to learn. Studies found that there is no such thing as a "natural leader." People become leaders by changing themselves. Instead of trying to identify future leaders by their "natural talent," companies should distinguish leadership candidates based on their individual development potential and then give them openings to learn new skills. In fact, when companies give employees new opportunities to learn, they enable individuals to advance, to earn more and to become better prepared for life's challenges.
The Blue Line Imperative by Kevin Kaiser & David S. Young
The Blue Line Imperative is about creating value in every decision that is made. Value creation is “an evolutionary force of nature”, necessary for humanity to avoid extinction, and far from easy to sustain. According to the authors, many businesses, government agencies and non-profits pursue misguided definitions of value, and make decisions that destroy value rather than create it. To create value, you need to figure out how to give customers what they want at a reasonable price, and you need to earn a competitive return relative to the world’s other uses of the invested capital and resources.
The core of this book is about present value discounting. For many, the very nature of net present value can be confusing. The Blue Line Imperative illustrates how to develop an unbiased forecast of the cash flow expected from an investment, as well as how to deduce the appropriate discount rate. Frequent examples and a well-presented case study help drive these points home.
The book also endeavours to demystify and celebrate finance. It describes how medieval Europe eventually gave way to an era where ever larger numbers of people were able to join the elite in the pursuit of life-style improvements and pleasures – in other words “happiness”. This pursuit was enabled by the evolution of an independent and unemotional financial market that provided the requisite investment capital.
An intriguing thread of business philosophy runs throughout the book. The authors describe “blue line” thinking – a focus on essentially intangible factors such as a culture of fairness, trust, and learning – that leads to value creating decisions on a sustained basis. They contrast this with “red line” thinking that is focused mainly on the delivery of tangible short-term metrics such as share price and growth targets, which ultimately destroy value through various distorting factors (including creating an environment where employees tend to lie).
The authors offer excellent guideposts for how to move toward “blue line” decision-making and how to detect the encroachment of “red line” behaviours. They acknowledge how top-down “red line” demands can squelch blue-line practices lower in the organization – a relatively normal consequence of the constant external pressure for short-term performance.
The Values-Driven Organization by Richard Barrett
Note that this book deals with a wholly different “value” than the previous quoted book. Values-driven organizations are the most successful organizations on the planet. This book explains that understanding employees' needs - what people value - is the key to creating a high performing organization. When you support employees in satisfying their needs, they respond with high levels of engagement and willingly commit their energies to the organization, bringing passion and creativity to their work.
This new edition of The Values-Driven Organization provides an updated set of tools to assess corporate culture, new case studies on cultural transformation and additional materials on sustainability, measuring cultural health at work and the specific needs of the millennial generation.
The responsibility of leaders is to enhance, harness and direct the capacity and energy of their people toward virtuous and valuable ends. To achieve long-term success, the organization needs to have a solid foundation built on principles and values that act as a center of gravity. In business, you get what you target, design, measure, provide incentives for and are passionate about. This applies equally to principles and values, which need to be nurtured and directed through an effective whole-system approach and values-management framework. Author Richard Barrett shows how business is learning to develop a more integral or holistic approach to organizational evolution.
The books provides learning:
· How to build a values-driven organization.
· How the process of values management can be used to support continuous improvements in organizational performance and develop long-term sustainability.
· How new leaders can become new agents of change.
· How leadership can become the key to cultural transformation.
· A blueprint for whole-system change.
Victory through Organization by Dave Ulrich, Wayne Brockbank, Mike Ulrich & David Kryscynski
Based a research spanning the course of three decades, the authors conducted seven “HR Competency Studies” (HRCS) involving more than 32,000 survey respondents worldwide. Their work yielded valuable insight into the nine crucial competencies that HR professionals as well as HR departments must master. Only then will effective HR teams be able to drive business results, not just HR or employee results. Three basic competencies come first, with six other core skills following, we will focus on the core basic competencies here only:
1. Credible Activist
Effective HR professionals gain acceptance and respect by being Credible Activists who articulate a perspective, share it and develop trusting relationships with others. You must earn an invitation to the conversation before you can affect the business, but then you must know what to add. Develop your perspective – how do you believe HR can and should affect business results? Share your opinions and ideas; build trust by getting out and talking to business leaders.
2. Strategic Positioner
When you earn entry to the conversation, participate in it wholeheartedly. In decision-making settings, HR professionals excel at Strategic Positioning, the long-term thinking that firms need to succeed. Know your stuff and be alert as to when to speak up.
3. Paradox Navigator
To get results, HR professions work through change as Paradox Navigators. They manage complexity and bring stakeholders together, despite diverse or opposing interests. Individuals who can navigate paradoxes can have the greatest impact on business performance. Recognize paradox, embrace it and learn to manage it. This ability conveys advanced intelligence and agility, and it contributes to personal and organizational success.
But the real learning and message that comes out of the book is the power and impact of organizational cohension, integration and alignment. Cohesive, integrated HR departments beat competent HR individuals resoundingly – a strong team beats strong talent. Organizati0ns, if they fulfill the criteria as flagged by the authors, can make the real difference! Dave Ulrich’s way of concisely and clearly tabulating and overviewing his summary findings, makes also this book a delight to read.