Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I bought this book on the recommendation of a colleague whom I have known for twenty years, both of us members of the Silicon Valley Hackers Conference started by Stewart Brand and now managed by Glen Tenney. When I came to buy the book and saw all of the very short, very empty, largely negative reviews, I was surprised. Trying to understand this, and having looked up the author's history, I speculate that a bunch of folks bought this book because of who the author is (Microsoft's business rethink strategist and innovator), and then did not have the contextual background to appreciate the story line.
Of course the books suffers some from being a book-length expansion of a core idea originally published in the Harvard Business Review, "The Next Revolution in Productivity" (free online at Phi Beta Iota), but from where I sit, 47 of the 53 reviews miss the whole point, and I am not that thrilled with the remaining six, but they did help me.
POINT NUMBER ONE: Businesses are eco-systems within eco-systems. The industrial era has piled up a mish-mash of stovepipes, conflicting chains of command, etcetera etcetera. Until Web 2.0 (I'm working on Web 4.0) there was not much one could do about it, but now Information Technology (IT) has reached a point where it CHANGES EVERYTHING. Bare bone zero sum reviews are a priority.
POINT NUMBER TWO: The Cloud is the Context. Location is now generally irrelevant, knowledge and trust and reliability of performance are higher values, and in fact forcing individual performers to center on a fixed point (desk, secretary, coffee pot) is COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE. However, you cannot send them out as lone rangers without giving them a suite of software & services (S+S).
As some of the author's critics observe, the idea that we spend too much time on the how and not enough on the what is not new. In military circles (war college level) it is called "strategic decrepitude," when flag officers confuse growing staffs, more PowerPoint briefs (sorry, Tuft has it right on this one), and body counts to be "progress." They actually have no clue.
POINT NUMBER THREE: The existing business processes were established in earlier eras, the legacy systems represent earlier generations of everything, and if you do not drill down deep and wide, you will not identify the true costs of everything, nor the hidden values.
At this point I want to list ten books that I have reviewed with the suggestion that anyone unsure about the value of this book read my summaries of the other books first, and then decide. These other books provide a useful context for this book--saying it is incomprehensible or whatever is like saying that the Redskin Playbook is incomprehensible to someone who is not a Redskin. So what?
Reflexive Practice: Professional Thinking for a Turbulent World
Knowledge As Design
Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization
The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education
The Hidden Wealth of Nations
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism
The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business (Collins Business Essentials)
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Revised and Updated 5th Anniversary Edition: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits
Critical Path
So getting back to this review, here are some of my summative highlights:
+ Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) now being integrated, enhanced, and displaced by Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The critical point here is that IT generally and the Cloud specifically make possible multiple radical process changes that reduce true costs (not just internal financial costs) and dramatically enhance outcome including return on investment and retained profit.
+ The book resonates with me because the author diplomatically touches on the fact, across various case studies, that many "leaders" are actually administrators (this is true of the $75 billion a year secret intelligence community that I served for three decades), and rather out of touch with reality, context, facts, whatever you want to call it. Lest the reader doubt me, let me cite Ben Gilad, one of the top commercial intelligence officers in the English language. He writes, in Business Blindspots (and this chapter is free online, just search for the quote below):
"One of the facts that amazed me the most over the past eight years while helping American and European firms improve their ability to read their markets, was how insulated top executives were from competitive reality. This is because they secure their competitive intelligence (market signals regarding change) at best through a close circle of 'trusted' personal sources, or at worst through those one-page news summary clippings. Top managers' information is invariably either biased, subjective, filtered or late."
In my experience helping 66+ countries directly these past twenty years, the same is true in government, and in the other six of the eight tribes of "intelligence" (decision-support): academia, civil society, law enforcement, media, military, and non-profit.
I will put this another way. Russell Ackoff (along with Jan Warfield, his online Wandwaver Solution is a must read) emphasized how so many organizations get in a rut striving to do the wrong things righter. THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT OF THIS BOOK. You have to get a grip on the truth of what you do and why and to what end, and then start doing the right things cheaper faster better NOT the WRONG things cheaper, faster, better.
+ I have a note that if the industrial era was about time management, the information era is about systems management--EVERYTHING including especially time and energy inputs, true costs, and outputs including impacts on all others and "residuals" or cascaded impacts and benefits (or costs) down the line.
+ The author is focused on software and human productivity is somewhat silent, but I absolutely see that this is a human-centric book that strives to show how IT can change the definition of what it means to be productive or profitable. This is about a QUANTUM IMPROVEMENT meaning not just a change in the how but a change in the NATURE of what is done.
+ Very lightly the author observes that any organization that does not keep current on its software is losing productivity. Beckman, the CEO author of Knowledge-Driven Organization (I sought him out and he impressed me hugely) is of the view that one must replace all information technology every two years for all if possible, but certainly for the information-intensive employees at least. Although I am critical of software pigs that suck up every bit of hardware progress before the hardware hits the marketplace, the point is valid.
The case studies are a fast read, and I am sympathetic to those that found the writing too cryptic or breezy or whatever. Some of the core repetitive points:
+ Connectivity matters. MUST KNOW how everything is connected to everything else in all directions (suppliers, integrators, etc.)
+ Context matters. Cannot ignore weather, fast-changing global government compliance idiosyncrasies, etcetera.
+ Predictability is precious. Stupid organizations do not think through the consequences of their actions or lack of action.
+ ING DIRECT and ECLIPSE (which reminds me of Jim Fallow's superb book Free Flight: Inventing the Future of Travel) are both worth study outside the quick pass that this book offers. Vern Rayburn is quoted, and this is a key point:
"Innovation and disruptive technologies can create new value propositions."
Combined with TRUST, which one Nobel Prize winner demonstrated lowers the cost of doing business, and based on the transparency that IT makes possible today, we are on to something here....such as Green to Gold, Cradle to Cradle, Ecological Economics, Natural Capitalism, Ecology of Commerce, Sustainable Design--all book titles that Amazon rather annoyingly will not allow me to link here, so use the Phi Beta Iota version of this review (which leads back here) to get all the links).
The Cranium case study is noteworthy to me because the success story includes the death of advertising. They used Starbucks presence, disc jockeys, and Amazon plus Barnes and Noble to reach millions at no cost. I personally believe that now that we have true cost of goods increasingly available at point of sale via handhelds and bar code queries, we are going to start seeing the death of advertising and the movement of markets based on consumer access to real-time sensible information.
The Amazon case study was certainly of interest to me. I delivered a standing room only closing briefing to the Amazon developer's conference a couple of years ago (link...Read more›
Click Here to see more reviews about: Rethink: A Business Manifesto for Cutting Costs and Boosting Innovation
It's the trap that ensnares virtually every business. We focus on process: "how" we're doing the job. And we forget about the bigger issue: "what" we're doing and "why" we're doing it. That's why we're leaving so much value on the table. In Rethink, business architect Ric Merrifield exposes this problem with vivid examples and introduces breakthrough techniques for overcoming it. Merrifield shows how to rise above the clutter of your "hows" to expose what does and doesn't need attention in your organization. You'll learn to identify the activities most critical to success, as well as those that are borderline, redundant, or even counterproductive. Merrifield helps you get past the parochial, subjective viewpoints of ground-level participants...find more cost-effective ways to achieve core goals...capture better information for prioritizing investments...identify hidden sources of value...use technology-driven plug-and-play management to increase efficiency and agility...and reconfigure your company to ride nonstop waves of change. Along the way, Merrifield presents powerful case studies ranging from ING DIRECT to Amazon.com to Procter & Gamble.These diverse companies have learned how to cut costs, strengthen innovation, and profit from change all at the same time. Using the lessons in this book, you can, too. / Rise above low-level processes and narrow perspectives/ Step back, identify what really matters to the organization, and act accordingly/ Understand the hidden connections that can make or break your business/ Make profitable changes without setting off destructive chain reactions/ Expose activities where people, process, and technology matter...and, equally important, where they don't
Guest Review: Rita Gunther McGrath on RethinkEvery business leader eventually comes up against the dilemma that yesterday\'s competitive advantages and key operating practices erode in their value to deliver tomorrow\'s growth and productivity improvement.Some successfully address the challenge – jettisoning slow-growth or unproductive activities; channeling resources into higher growth areas; and redirecting their organizations to become more competitive in the longer term.Far more often, unfortunately, efforts to revitalize once-successful companies founder because leaders fail to ask the right questions (in time); get trapped into the tyranny of outdated practices or structures; or are simply unable to retool in time to remain viable.Today\'s global financial crisis promises to raise the stakes – rendering companies that can\'t figure out how to reorient their operations uncompetitive far more quickly than in the past.With this as background, it is truly refreshing to read about Ric Merrifield\'s work in Rethink:A Business Manifesto for Cutting Costs and Boosting Innovation.Ric insightfully hones in on a major reason that large, established companies have so much trouble getting out of their own way – they get trapped by the ‘hows\' of the way they do business and give far too little thought to the ‘what\'s\' of what they are really trying to accomplish.I\'m reminded of something I heard Brad Anderson (the CEO of Best Buy) observe at the recent World Economic Forum Annual Conference in Davos:\'Companies," he said, \'have a huge disadvantage in that they have habits.They will often choose those habits over survival!".Merrifield\'s book provides a nice point of departure for getting past the habits and the established processes to address the question of what a firm does that actually creates value.In eleven insightful chapters, Merrifield encourages business leaders to develop deep insight about the ‘what\' factors that they can use to drive productivity gains as well as innovation. Examples from companies as diverse as Procter & Gamble, ING Direct, Newman\'s Own food products and JetBlue provide instructive texture to his basic framework for identifying how your company creates value and how you might capture the same – or even more – value with a different business architecture.The results can sometimes be surprising – in one fascinating example, Merrifield details how one company found out that it was paying for the same Zip-code lookup data twelve times!Merrifield\'s approach can also help companies avoid the dangers of cost-cutting that actually destroys the fabric of the company\'s success (think Home Depot) while providing the framework in which a firm can innovate, even in these difficult times (think Amazon.com or Procter & Gamble).This is a thought-provoking and insightful tome, which I can highly recommend for your next business trip – tuck it in your carry-on and be prepared to get a really different take on what makes your company tick.Rita Gunther McGrath is best known for her breakthrough work on how companies can reduce risk and pursue growth, characterized by such best-selling works as her 1995 co-authored Harvard Business Review article, \'Discovery Driven Planning".She has co-authored three books, all published by Harvard Business Publishing, The Entrepreneurial Mindset (2000); MarketBusters (2005) and the newly released Discovery Driven Growth (2009).
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