Curiosity
by Harvard Business Review Press
Suffice it to say, I was curious about this anthology of 11 short articles about curiosity. Topics include creativity and exploration, managing complexity, professional relationships, listening, and corporate culture.
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The Deviant’s Advantage: How to Use Fringe Ideas to Create Mass Markets
by Watts Wacker and Ryan Mathews
“Deviance is the source of all true innovation, growth, and indeed our collective survival. Deviance is defined by time, place, and circumstances.”
“Without deviance there would be no art, no scientific breakthroughs, no technological advances… Physical evolution is perhaps the perfect example of deviance in action. Without mutation—essentially deviance from an established DNA pattern—nature would remain static.”
“Don’t let the words deviant and deviance scare you. They’re being used in their purest definition—something or someone operating in a defined measure away from the norm.”
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Understanding Organizations Finally! Structuring in Sevens
by Henry Mintzberg
The four forms of organization are Personal (autocracy), Programmed (bureaucracy), Professional (meritocracy), and Project (adhocracy). Respectively, the coordinating mechanism of each form is direct supervision, standardization of work, standardization of skills, and mutual adjustment.
That last term should be defined before going further, as Mintzberg uses it throughout the book. “Coordination and control are two different concepts. Mutual adjustment is coordination without control… Currently, the literature of management gives considerable attention to teams, task forces, and networks, all manifestations of mutual adjustment.”
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The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong
by Laurence J. Peter (1919-1990) and Raymond Hull (1919-1985)
For anyone who is frustrated with the dysfunction of a bureaucracy, this satirical study of hierarchiology—the social science of hierarchies—will shed some light. The Peter Principle states, “In a hierarchy, everyone tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
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Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace
by Gordon MacKenzie
This book is about maintaining creativity within bureaucratic environments. Gordon MacKenzie worked as an artist at Hallmark Cards for 30 years, culminating in a role titled Corporate Paradox.
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The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization
by Peter M. Senge
Senge writes, “I believe that, the prevailing system of management is, at its core, dedicated to mediocrity. It forces people to work harder and harder to compensate for failing to tap the spirit and collective intelligence that characterizes working together at their best.”
The subtitle is about the learning organization, but the book is also very much about systems thinking.
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The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work
by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer
“Inner work life influences people’s performance on four dimensions: creativity, productivity, work commitment, and collegiality… Inner work life matters for companies because, no matter how brilliant a company’s strategy might be, the strategy’s execution depends on great performance by people inside the organization.”
“To a great extent, inner work life rises and falls with progress and setbacks in the work. This is the progress principle and, although it may be most obvious on the best and worst days at work, it operates every day.”
The Progress Principle is the result of primary research by two psychologists who studied 238 knowledge workers from 26 teams in 7 companies representing 3 industries over the course of a team project—generally about 4 months. Participants submitted daily diary forms to the researchers confidentially. The authors cite some positive and negative scenarios, using pseudonyms to disguise the individuals and their employers.
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Excellence Now: Extreme Humanism
by Tom Peters
Nearly 40 years after the publication of the über-bestseller In Search of Excellence, Tom Peters has written his 19th book. His insights on organizational effectiveness (and dysfunction) are as relevant as ever.
“In In Search of Excellence, we defined Excellence in terms of long-term performance. But that begs a/the question. How do you achieve that long-term super-effectiveness? … Excellence is not an ‘aspiration.’ Excellence is not a ‘hill to climb.’ Excellence is the next five minutes.”
Given that Peters has two engineering degrees, an MBA, and a PhD in business, you might be surprised by his findings. “Enterprise excellence is about just two things: People. Service. Excellence = Service. Service to one’s teammates, service to one’s customers and vendors, service to our communities.”
Continue reading “Excellence Now: Extreme Humanism”An interview with Mark C. Crowley
author of Lead from the Heart:
Transformational Leadership for the 21st Century
December 16, 2020 — 63 minutes — Book Review — Amazon
Transcript
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Eat, Sleep, Innovate: How to Make Creativity an Everyday Habit Inside Your Organization
by Scott D. Anthony, Paul Cobban, Natalie Painchaud, Andy Parker
My grandfather used to tell me I was full of beans when I was being rambunctious. In contrast, this book is full of BEANS—behavior enablers, artifacts, and nudges—which are ways to encourage a new behavior.
The book is about developing a culture of innovation—not just for engineers and scientists, but throughout the organization. Three of the co-authors are with Innosight, a consulting firm co-founded by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen (1952-2020), who wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma. Paul Cobban is Chief Data and Transformation Officer at DBS Bank, the largest bank in Singapore.
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The Key Point 