Impact!

Here are some books that I liked recently

The Connected Company

A link to an article from this book was one of the most popular things in my previous newsletter, so I decided to do a full book review this time. The book has two key driving ideas. The first is that, with the emergence of modern urban areas and in particular with the Internet on the scene, the balance of power is shifting from companies to the networks that surround them, to customers and employees that are connected in powerful networks that can share knowledge and amplify voices. The second idea is that for many industries the focus will shift, or has already shifted, from products to services, and that such a shift requires a fundamental change in organisational design. One of the key arguments the authors make is that for many companies out there, the product is just a way to provide a service. Think Dropbox - the value isn't in the software for synchronisation, but in the service of universal access to files. Or think Amazon Kindle - the value isn't in the software package or the hardware device, but in the service of easy access to books.

The shift from products to services requires a different approach to customer interactions and organisational design. The authors argue that "unlike products, services are often designed or modified as they are delivered […] Services are contextual — where, when, and how they are delivered can make a big difference […] Services cannot be designed and manufactured in isolation, like products. They are co-created with customers and are interdependent with wider service networks and clusters […] Many services require some level of efficiency, but services are not production processes. They are experiences." One of the core things that services introduce, according to the authors, is variability. Introducing standards and optimising processes for predictability is damaging companies' capability to deal with variability. If this is truly a future shift for the IT industry, it will be interesting to see the impact on delivery processes. Scrum optimises for predictable delivery, Lean/Kanban optimises production effectiveness, both of which are according to the authors less important than providing a good experience to users. "A company with a service orientation cannot be designed and organised around efficiency processes. It must be designed and organised around customers and experiences," claim the authors. At the same time, they make the argument for self-organising cross-functional teams, very similar to what mainstream Scrum and Kanban literature advise, but pushing that to one level further - to self-management and self-coordination of teams with other teams in the wider organisation.

A fundamental tenet of connected companies is that in uncertain times, the faster you can learn and maneuver to seize opportunities, the greater your advantage. Instead of a top-down hierarchy or a matrix, making a modular organisation that is controlled from the top, the authors argue for almost self-sufficient mini-organisations called "pods", and a "podular" organisation with distributed control. Such organisations behave similar to networks, hence the idea of a "connected company" created out of a network of pods. The authors bring some interesting ideas from network research into the context of organisational design to suggest how connected companies can grow, learn and operate. Arguing that for thriving in a service marketplace companies have to shift focus from the production line to the front-line, authors suggest that a connected company learns and adapts by distributing control to the points of interaction with customers, where semi-autonomous pods pursue a common purpose supported by platforms that help them organise and coordinate their activities. This organisation allows companies to react to market changes fast, reorganise, stay ahead of the curve, and create an emergent strategy for the wider company. This has significant implications on the role of management and leadership, which shifts from control to providing situational awareness and the platform for pods to thrive in. "A leader in a connected company is a connector and system builder, not a controller," say the authors.

The most interesting idea from this book for me is the comparison between the growth of companies and the growth of cities. As companies get larger, the authors argue, productivity goes down. At the same time, as cities get larger, they attract even more talent and innovation and productivity goes up. The authors make a strong argument that large companies should be organised more like cities - and cities aren't controlled, but serviced. The role of a city government is to take care of public infrastructure and services so that the inhabitants can get on with their lives and work, and to ensure that one person or group does not endanger others. Along the same lines, the authors suggest that the role of the central company management needs to be to provide infrastructure to small, semi-independent mini organisations inside the company to get on with their work. "Facebook is a city, more than 20 times the size of Tokyo", say the authors providing compelling evidence that the success of Facebook has largely to do with different inhabitants of the city providing additional services and attracting even more citizens. The central city government also sets the ground rules for co-habitation, and this is the role that the authors argue should sit with the "platform", setting cultural and technical standards. Citing the example of Netflix, the authors say that different teams in the company have full autonomy to deal with their areas, but that the central infrastructure ensures that there is no single point of failure. ("Netflix has a kind of digital 'building inspector' they call the chaos monkey. Says Cockcroft: The chaos monkey…goes around killing things, killing services. The chaos monkey is the building inspector that makes sure that you followed the planning department’s advice and you built a safe building that won’t burn down. If you build something that’s fireproof, it doesn’t matter how much fire there is. It’s fireproof. The chaos monkey is our pet arsonist.")

The major downside of the book for me is that the writing style sounds too much like preaching, gut-feel without serious confirmation. Many sentences claim things from a perspective that they should be obvious, but without any research or case studies backing the claims. A typical example is "Make people feel good. Happiness is contagious. Happy employees create happy customers. Happy customers create happy shareholders". I'd like to believe that, but at the same time I'd also like to see some serious proof, which I could use to convince the skeptics. There are plenty of companies mentioned, mostly the usual suspects either from IT literature on innovation (Google, Apple, Amazon, Valve) or from the business literature on self-organising teams (Semco, Nordstrom, Morning Star), including big successes in past corporate transformations (Starbucks, IBM under Gerstner, GE under Welch). If you've been following Hacker News and reading HBR, most of this will sound familiar. I felt that a lot of these were more selective mentions to make a case in point, instead of a serious case study on what/how/why. The ending chapters have some interesting advice on how to start a transformation to a connected company, but this felt a bit too shallow to me. I guess this leaves space open for a more practical book on facilitating organisational change towards connected companies.

The Connected Company
Verdict:         
Author:Dave Gray and Thomas Vander Wal
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
ISBN: 978-1449319052
Pick it up from Amazon UK or Amazon.Com.

The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter

This is a strange one. It was recommended to me by several people for facilitating learning exercises, and I wanted to read it so much. I tried several times, but failed to get to the end. The topic is incredibly important, the solution presented in the book seems fantastically effective judging from the case studies, but I had huge problems paying attention to the book and ended up putting it down every time after a few pages. Granted, my attention span isn't the best these days, and there are some fantastic gems of knowledge buried in this book, but the signal/noise ratio is completely wrong.

The central assumption of the book (and the technique) is that people already have within them the wisdom and creativity to confront even the most difficult challenges, and that getting the knowledge out of the back of individuals' heads into the open through conversations, where patterns can be spotted, is one of the "key organizational means for achieving desired results". This reminded me of the famous idea by Lew Plat, the former CEO of HP, who said that "If only HP knew what HP knows, we would The book promotes a profound mind-shift from seeing conversation as a peripheral activity to considering conversations as one of the most valued assets of any organisation.

"Traditional meeting approaches focused on PowerPoint presentations and speeches are often ill-suited for enabling people to think together intelligently about complex challenges and questions," argue the authors and I don't think that anyone who ever participated in a death-by-powerpoint meeting would disagree. World Cafe is a facilitation technique that helps groups explore their hidden knowledge, connect the dots across different people, roles and experiences and utilise the wisdom of crowds. In its essence, the idea is incredibly simple which is why I like it: get people to discuss difficult questions in small groups, in a comfortable setting (laid out similar to a cafe), then after a time-box get most people to move other groups, while one person stays at each table to carry the context of previous discussions. After new groups form, the discussion starts again, with every person introducing not only his ideas, but the discussion that happened at his previous group. During discussions, individuals take notes on a piece of paper tablecloth, helping groups visualise ideas and spot patterns. After a few rounds of such discussions, because people switching groups cross-pollinate the room, knowledge and ideas spread and common patterns emerge. The authors provide plenty of case studies to show the effectiveness of this style of discussion. World Cafe conversations helped both corporations and communities discover new ideas, innovate and come up with answers to difficult questions, sometimes engaging hundreds of people in discussions at the same time. From that perspective, this approach scales better than anything else I've done or read about. This makes the book incredibly worth reading if your job is facilitating workshops, company discussions or community work.

At the same time, the book is in my opinion far too long for the ideas that it is trying to communicate. Different chapters explore crucial facilitation techniques, such as setting a context, ensuring a welcoming environment, exploring questions that attract collaborative engagement, encouraging everyone's contribution, cross-pollination and connecting different perspectives, listening together for patterns, insights and difficult questions and finally harvesting and sharing collective discoveries. Each chapter starts with a case study written by a different person, with an incredible amount of repetition from the previous chapters, and though each story has a gem or two of additional knowledge, I found myself struggling to read it, and I gave up half-way through. It feels as if they could have said everything with a book that was ten times shorter, and that would probably be much more effective.

So, the verdict is a mixed one. I think the ideas are important, and I'd still recommend reading this book to anyone whose role includes facilitating discussions or getting people to collaborate to discover answers to difficult questions, especially those working in organisations that slowly die as a result of boring powerpoint-fuelled meetings. My personal reading preferences clash with the style of writing, but your way of reading might be different, so try it. Important ideas, bad writing, 3 out of 5 stars.

The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
Verdict:         
Author: Juanita Brown, David Isaacs
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN: 978-1576752586
Pick it up from Amazon.Com, Amazon UK.