All in book review
This is a booklet that describes the process of thinking through a situation, using the TOC Logical Thinking Processes, to show how systems thinking plays an important role in really developing lasting solutions to problems, whether they bedevil the homeowner as in this example, or a business. Thinking is the key in any systems thinking approach!
The new book from Steven J. Spear and Gene Kim takes a look at what makes for winning organizations and develops what they call a new theory of performance management - why do some organizations really seem to fly year-over-year while others do not? Why is it that some organizations can really take advantage of the tricks and techniques of Lean or DevOps or Theory of Constraints or agile software development or <pick your approach>, while others never seem to find their footing? Wiring the Winning Organization attempts to answer these questions. The book takes the readers through three key areas that leaders wire up winning organizations: Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification.
We all make mistakes - big and small. But what do we do with them? How do we react? How do the people around us react? Mark Graban’s latest book, The Mistakes that Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation is an interesting combination of anecdotes from his My Favorite Mistake podcast along with guidance on developing the environment where making mistakes is an opportunity to learn and grow.
Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge by John Willis and Derek Lewis is the story of how W. Edwards Deming’s background, education and experiences inspired him to develop his System of Profound Knowledge. The book is sort of a biography, but very focused on those elements that led him to be the important figure in many circles.
Ayelet Fishbach’s Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation was an informative read, offering exactly what the subtitle suggests: interesting (surprising?) lessons from a variety of angles on what creates motivation (or not) for people.
Adam Lawrence’s The Wheel of Sustainability: Engaging and Empowering Teams to Produce Lasting Results is a practical primer on his concept for implementing Lean-oriented projects, primarily in a manufacturing and shop-floor environment.
Neil Rackham’s SPIN Selling was written back in 1988. Does it still make sense? The obvious thing for me in re-reading and discussing the book with some colleagues is that the concepts apply more broadly than only sales environments. In any large change project, the change agents are always selling - working to make the change happen and make that change become an embedded way of operating.
This reading’s key takeaway: Practice!
Efrat Goldratt-Ashlag has taken on the mantle of writing a business novel in the style of her father, Eli Goldratt. Goldratt’s Rules of Flow takes Eli Goldratt’s “Four Concepts of Flow” into project management environments and shows how some basic rules of flow can significantly reduce the chaos and improve results.
My review of David McRaney’s How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion, which I picked up on recommendation from a colleague. The simplest summary of the book is that “changing minds” is much more about opening people to new thoughts and experiences than it is berating them with new procedures or facts.
Dentistry with a Vision: Building a Rewarding Practice and a Balanced Life by Gerald I. Kendall and Gary S. Wadhwa is a Theory of Constraints business novel, this time focused on dentistry practice. As with many of these books, putting the story into novel form allows the ideas to develop and a “guru” to provide guidance in a more visceral form than one might get from a textbook or workbook.
The Myth of Multitasking: How “Doing It All” Gets Nothing Done by Dave Crenshaw is a nice, quick read and covers some familiar ground for people who talk about multitasking and the sorry effects of high work-in-process (WIP) for people and their businesses. The story is of working with a busy executive, rather than with a busy team, so it has some different takeaways than I have usually seen.
A Radical Enterprise: Pioneering the Future of High-Performing Organizations by Matt K. Parker is a curious book. It describes a vastly different way of working in organizations that enables significantly better outcomes - an exciting scenario. At the same time some of the stories and prescriptions made me either disappointed in my own ways of working or think that there is a deep canyon between my current ways of working and this radical new enterprise.
Jamie Flinchbaugh has a new book out about problem-solving, People Solve Problems: The Power of Every Person, Every Day, Every Problem. The basic setup is reasonable - we all solve problems all the time, how should we think about it? I like how this isn’t a set of specific directions for problem solving, but rather what any approach to problem solving should have from the individual contributors through to the leaders.
Graham Scott has written a nice, short book that feels like a conversation, incorporating the ideas of Theory of Constraints - focus and leverage: Practice Makes Profit: The small business owner’s guide to making more money by NOT working harder.
I picked up Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World just recently, though it came out last fall as a celebration of (at least) 21 years of the evolution of the Cynefin model. While I was hoping for some more insight into how people have applied the model, I appreciated most of the stories and the connections people made to using the Cynefin concepts in a wide variety of applications.
Noise: A flaw in human judgement by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein tells a damning story about how much variability there is in the assessments we make as experts in our field. They bring in examples ranging all around professional judgements - medicine, legal cases, laboratory assessments, hiring, forecasting, grading term papers, etc. etc. This noise has serious implications in all these arenas - false positive and false negatives cost time, money and lives. And while people often think that these variations might “balance out” the costs certainly do not.
Dan Heath’s Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen addresses a familiar challenge in our world: We seem to spend more time and effort fixing problems as they occur, rather than preventing them from occurring in the first place. The book travels familiar roads for people interested in “systems thinking” and it brings in some new-to-me examples. I like that the main focus of the book is on the challenges involved in moving upstream to resolve problems at their root.
The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth by Amy C. Edmondson book has been out for a couple of years, and the idea of psychological safety has emerged as a critical element of enabling change and growth in organizations. I enjoyed Edmondson discussion of how psychological safety plays a key role in learning, innovation and growth - and lack of it plays a role in limiting these elements. She also provides a high level structure to create and grow psychological safety in an organization.
Johanna Rothman’s new trio of books on Modern Management Made Easy is a nice, open way to think about management starting with the inside and then your teams and then the full organization. And it’s loaded with references to other interesting readings, along with practical advice and experiences.
I was pleased to receive a review copy of Jonathan Smart’s (Better Value) Sooner Safer Happier, as it was on my list after the DevOps virtual conference this October. The biggest element that jumped out to me the idea of ways of working - the behaviors (and patterns behind those behaviors) that we see in organizations. And one of the big takeaways that this reinforces is the culture we have is exactly the culture we create by the way we decide to work and operate. Our ways of working are our decision. The patterns reinforce some behaviors and diminish other behaviors.