I finished this book in July 2024. I recommend this book 07/10.
Why you should read this book:
This is a business leader's reference book; you will not read this book from cover to cover. Instead, I recommend that you go through and narrow down the ten areas you think are most important or specific areas of leadership improvements you need. Then, using the book reference lists, you can dive deeper into each topic.
Get your copy here.
🚀 The book in three sentences
67 competencies of business knowledge references
Narrow down to the ten most important
Watch out for old book references
🎨 My selected competencies:
Strategic Agility
Intellectual Horsepower
Planning
Organizational Agility
Total Work System
Command Skills
Perspective
Managing and Measuring Work
Delegation
Developing Direct Reports and Others
📝 My notes and thoughts
P343 Strategic Agility:
Become a strategic activist. Pick one distinctive competence or driving force. That's what the mediocre companies who became successful over time did in James Colin's latest research. Create a strategic plan for your unit around one distinctive competence—include breakthrough process and product improvements; justify your conclusions by pointing to hard data that points toward your conclusions. Have a plan reviewed by people you trust. Form a consortium with three other individuals or companies; each of you will present a strategic issue and a plan backed up with data and rationale. Agree to review your thinking every three months with this group and write down lessons learned. Analyze three business/organizational success stories in your area and the same number of failures. What did each have in common? How would these principles apply in your situation? What was common to the failures that were never present in the success?
Following the logic of the Balanced Scoreboard and strategy mapping approaches of Kaplan and Norton, strategy should be everyone's daily job. If you can't demonstrate how a job aligns with the strategy, why do you have it? All teams should be able to answer what the implications are for daily work. As Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad have argued in their strategy work, most of what spells success need to be found outside the organization one is in, and it must be hunted and used by as many people as possible. What they call the democratization of strategy is necessary in all jobs: Look outside the box, don't try to fit all knowledge into neat categories, and spend the hard time necessary to come up with plans and visions to implement something new and different.
P183. Intellectual Horsepower:
Take time to think. Many of us are very action-oriented. It's the famous fire-ready-aim. Many mistakes we make would not have happened if we had taken the time to think things through. Try to add one minute to your thinking time. Go through a mental checklist to see if you have thought about all the ramifications of the problem or challenge. Go into any learning event with a goal. Ask questions about what you read. Chunk up what you learn. Put it in categories that make sense to you. Other research has shown that the first thing or solution you think of is seldom the best choice. Usually, somewhere between the second and third choices, turns out to be the most effective. If you are an action junkie and jump at the first option, you will be wrong much of the time.
Jump start your mind. There are all kinds of mental exercises to increase use of whatever intellectual horsepower you have. You can create checklists so you don't forget anything. You can do pro's and con's. You can visualize. You can diagram a problem. You can practice seeing how many patterns you can see in something or how many ways you can mentally organize it. These and many other practices will be in any text on problem solving.
Learn to separate your opinions from facts you know. Help others do the same. Read Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats to learn more about this technique. Opinionated people are seldom clear thinkers and good problem solvers.
Think systems. Subscribe to the System Thinker. This group dedicated to finding out how things works and why they work that way.
Visualize. Try to picture problems and challenges in the form of pictures or flows. Buy a flowcharting software that does PERT and GANTT charts. Become an expert in its use. Use the output of the software to communicate the elements of a problem to others. Use the flow charts in your presentations to explain the problems you've solved.
P279. Planning:
Lay out tasks and work. Most successful projects begin with a good plan. What do I need to accomplish? What are the goals? What's the timeline? What resources will I need? How many of the resources do I control? Who controls the rest of the resources—people, funding, tools, materials, support—I need? Lay out the work from A to Z. Many people are seen as lacking a plan because they don't write down the sequence or parts of the work and leave something out. Ask others to comment on ordering and what's missing.
Set the plan. Buy a flow charting program to does PERT and GANTT charts. Become an expert in its use. Use the output of the software to communicate your plans to others. Use the flow charts in your presentations.
Set goals and measures. Nothing keeps projects on time and on budget like a goal, a plan, and a measure. Set goals for the whole project and the sub-tasks. Plan for all. Set measures so you and others can track progress against the goals.
Manage multiple plans or aspects of big plans. Many attempts to accomplish complex plans involve managing parallel tracks or multiple tasks at the same time. It helps if you have a master plan. Good planning creates the changes you will lose control by spreading yourself too thin.
Manage efficiently. Plan the budget and manage against it. Spend carefully. Have a reserve if the unanticipated comes up. Set up a funding timeline so you can track ongoing expenditures against the plan.
Vision the plan in process. What could go wrong? Run scenarios in your head. Think along several paths. Rank the potential problems from highest likelihood to lowest. Think about what you would do if the highest likelihood things were to occur. Create a contingency plan for each. Pay attention to the weakest links which are usually groups or elements you have the least interface with or control over. Stay doubly in touch with the potential weak links.
Set up a process to monitor progress against the plan. How would you know if the plan is on time? Could you estimate the completion or percent finished at any time? Give people involved in the implementing the plan progress feedback as you go.
P231. Organizational Agility:
Who are the movers and shakers in the organization? How do they get things done? Who do they rely on to expedite things through the maze? How do you compare to them? Who are the major gatekeepers who control the flow of resources, information, and decisions? Who are the guides and the helpers? Get to know them better. Who are the major resisters and stoppers? Try to avoid or go around them.
P373. Total Work System:
Be customer-driven. In a free-enterprise system, the customer is king; those who please the customer best win. The same is true with internal customers; those who please them most will win. Winners are always customer-oriented and responsive. Pleasing the reasonable needs of customers is fairly straightforward. First, you need to know what they want and expect; the best way to do that is to ask them and then deliver that in a timely way at the price/value that's acceptable to them. Get in the habit of meeting with your internal or external customers on a regular basis to set up a dialogue; they need to feel free to contact you about problems, and you need to be able to contact them for essential information. Also, get out in front of your customers; try to anticipate their needs for our products and services before they even know about them; provide your customers with positive surprises—features they weren't expecting; delivery in a short time; more than they ordered.
Always design your work and manage your time from the customer in, not from you out. Your best efforts will always be determined by your customers, not you. Try not to design and arrange what you do only from your own view; always try to know and take the viewpoint of your customer first; you will always win following that rule. What would you have to take care of so the phone wouldn't ring from outside? If you and your customer worked for the same business, what would you do differently?
Be open and flexible. Meeting customers needs with the best work designs possible involved a lot of people. You can never do it all yourself. You need to set up a process to solicit suggestions and comments from customers and the people working with you. You must set the tone for two-way dialogue. An idea missed is the one you didn't hear. The research is filled with examples of employee-driven work designs and suggestions that have a big payoffs to the organization.
Create an environment for experimentation and learning. One principle of these techniques is to drive for continuous improvement. Never be satisfied. Always drive to improve all work processes so that they deliver zero-defect goods and services the customers want. Don't be afraid to try and fail.
According to Oren Harari, watch out for:
Focusing on processes rather than results.
Driving for zero defects is just one small piece of the package. It's about products and services the customer wants.
Creeping bureaucracy.
Delegating quality to the experts rather than real people. The leads to discounting the importance of employee input and customer complaints.
Cramming Total Quality Management into the same old structure. Quality improvement involves flattening, freeing up managers and employees, and the blasting away of functional silos. Empowered, cross-functional teams are the answer.
Jerking your suppliers around. Suppliers must be treated as partners to improve quality.
Using Total Quality Management as a substitute for innovation. Innovation requires risk and mistakes and putting out products that are not yer big free, as Microsoft does.
P49. Command Skills:
Leading is riskier than following. While there are a lot of personal rewards for leading, leading puts you in the limelight. Think about what happens to political leaders and the scrutiny they face. Leaders have to be internally secure. Do you feel good about yourself? They have to please themselves first that they are on the right track. Can you defend to a critical and impactful audience the wisdom of what you're doing? They have to accept lightning bolts from detractors. Can you take the heat? People will always say it should have been done differently. Listen to them, but be skeptical. Even great leaders are wrong sometimes. They accept personal responsibility for errors and move on to lead some more. Don't let criticism prevent you from taking the lead. Build up your heat shield. Conduct a postmortem immediately after finishing milestone efforts. This will indicate to all that you're open to continuous improvement, whether the result was stellar or not.
Selling your leadership. While some people may welcome what you say and want to do, others will go after you or even try to minimize the situation. Some will sabotage. To sell your leadership, keep your eyes on the prize, but don't specify how to get there. Present the outcomes, targets, and goals without the how-to's. Welcome their ideas, good and bad. Any negative response is a positive if you learn from it. Allow them to fill in the blanks, ask questions, and disagree without appearing impatient with them. Allow others to save face; concede small points, invite criticism of your own. Help them figure out how to win, keep to the facts and the problem before the group; stay away from persona clashes.
Develop a philosophical stance toward failure/criticism. After all, most innovations fail, most proposals fail, most efforts to lead change fail. Anything worth doing takes repeated effort. Anything could always have been done better. Research says that successful general managers have made more mistakes in their careers than the people they were promoted over. They got promoted because they had guts to lead, not because they were always right. Other studies suggest really good general managers are right about 65% of the time. Put errors, mistakes, and failures on your menu. Everyone has to have some spinach for a balanced diet.
One-on-one combat. Leading always involves dealing with pure one-on-one confrontation. You want one thing; he/she wants something else. When that happens, keep it to the facts. You won't always win. Stay objective. Listen as long as he/she will talk. Ask a lot of questions. Sometimes, he/she will talk him/herself to your point of view if you let him/she talk long enough. Always listen to understand first, not judge. Then restate his/her points until he/she says that's right. Then, find something to agree with, however small that may be. Refute his/her points, starting with the one you have the most objective information on. Then move down the line. You will always have points left that didn't get resolved. Document those and give a copy to your opponent. The objective is to make the list as small as possible. Then, decide whether you are going to pull rank and go ahead.
Cutting line. When all else fails, you may have to pull someone aside and say, "I listened to all your objections and have tried to understand them, but the train is moving on. Are you on or off?" Always follow the rules of dealing with conflict. Depersonalize; keep it on the problem not the person; try one last time to make your case; note the person's objections but don't concede anything; be clear; now is not the time for negotiation; give the person a day to think it over. Worst case, if the person is a direct report, you may have to ask him/her to leave the unit.
P273. Perspective:
Read Management Challenges for the 21st. Century by Peter Drucker, any of the Megatrends books by John Nasibitt, The Popcorn Report by Faith Popcorn, or The Futurist, the journal of the World Future Society. For example, Drucker raises issues such as what does it mean that the birth rate is collapsing in the developed world? By 2030, it is estimated that half of Japan's population will be 65 or older. Much of the same is true in the rest of the developed world. Will the retirement age go up? Will we treat workers more like volunteers as they opt out of larger organizations? Leisure spending may go down since more time off is not likely. Education and health care will grow. Immigration? Even in the wake of terror attacks, we may have to import immigrants to maintain workforces. The average career of an employee will far outlive their employers (most corporations last about 30 years). Second and third "careers" will be standard. The means of production have largely become knowledge. Outsourcing is up-knowledge is increasingly specialized, expensive, and difficult to maintain. Is this a harbinger of more outsourcing and alliances? What are the trends at play, and how do they affect your organization going forward?
Read the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek and write down three to five interesting things that have a parallel or an effect on your organization. Learn to connect what's out there to what's in here.
P213. Managing and Measuring Work:
Set goals. You should set goals before assigning projects, work, and tasks. Goals help focus people's time and efforts. It allows people to perform more effectively and efficiently. Most people don't want to waste time. Most people want to perform well. Learn about MBO—Managing by Objectives. Read a book about it. While you may not be interested in a full-blown application, all of the principles of setting goals will be in the book. Go to a course on goal setting.
Focus on measures. How would you tell if the goal was accomplished? If the things I asked others to do were done right, what outcomes could we all agree on as measures of success? Most groups can easily come up with success measures that are different from, and more important to them than, formal measures. Ask them to do so.
Clarity. You need to be clear about goals, how they are going to be measured, and what the rewards and consequences will be for those who exceed, just make, or miss their goals. Communicate both verbally and in writing if you can.
Visualize. Set up a process to monitor progress against the goals. People like running measures. They like to gauge their pace. It's like the United Way Thermometer in the lobby.
Feedback. Give as much in process feedback as you have time for. Most people are motivated by process feedback against agreeed upon goals for three reasons.
First, it helps them adjust what they are dong along the way in time to achieve the goal ;they can make midcourse corrections.
Second, it shows them what they are doing is important and that you're eager to help.
Third, it's not the "gotcha" game of negative and critical feedback after the fact.
Set goals for yourself in your job and your career. Get used to measuring yourself. Ask your boss's help in setting goals and providing you continuous feedback. That way, you know better what effect the goals have on others.
Measure activity (in addition to measuring outcomes and results). Say you bought some equipment. How many people are needed to run it? How much time will this take? Repairs? How much time? Activity-based accounting measures the cost of doing or not doing a task. By looking at work carefully in terms of time, core and non-core (those less important because the time spent isn't worth it), tasks can be determined. Using this method, a group of nurses doubled their productivity.
P107 Delegation:
How to delegate? Communicate, set time frames and goals, and get out of the way. People need to know what it is you expect. What does the outcome look like? When do you need it by? What's the budget? What resources do they get? What decision can they make? Do you want checkpoints along the way? How will we both know and measure how well the task is done? One of the most common problems with delegation is incomplete or cryptic up-front communication, leading to frustration, a job not well done the first time, rework, and a reluctance to delegate the next time. Poor communication always have to take more time managing because of rework. Analyze recent projects that went well and didn't go well. How did you delegate? Too much? Not enough? Unwanted pieces? Major chunks of responsibility? Workload distributed properly? Did you set measures? Overmanage or abdicate? Find out what your best practices are. Set up a series of delegation practices that can be used as you're not there. What do you have to be informed of? What feedback loops can people use for mid-course corrections? What questions should be answered as the work proceeds? What steps should be followed? What are the criteria to be followed? When will you be available to help?
More what and why, less how. The best delegators are crystal clear on what and when and more open on how. People are more motivated when they can determine the how for themselves. Inexperienced delegators include the hows which in turns the people into task automations instead of an empowered and energized staff. Tell them what, when, and how long, and let them figure out how on their own. Give them leeway. Encourage them to try things. Besides being more motivating, it's also more developmental for them. Add the larger context. Although it is not necessary to get the task done. People are more motivated when they know where this task fits in the bigger picture. Take three extra minutes and tell them why this task needs to be done, where it hits into the grander scheme, and its importance to the goals and objectives of the unit.
What to delegate? Delegate as much as you can, along with the authority to do it. Delegate more whole tasks than pieces and parts. People are more motivated by completing tasks. Delegate those things that others can do. Delegate those things that are not things you do well. Delegate tactical; keep strategic. Delegate short term; keep long term. One simple and effective way is to ask your people: "What do I do that you could help me with? What do I do that you could do with a little help from me? What do I do that you could do by yourself? What do you do that I could do faster and more effectively (re-delegation)?" You certainly won't agree with everything, but if you are now a poor delegator, they will help you improve by 50%. Pick one or a few things each time and let go.
Mixing and matching. All of your people have differing skills and capacities. Good delegators match the size and complexity of the delegated task with the capacity of each person. Delegation is not an equal, one-size-fits-all activity. Equal opportunity delegators are not as successful as equitable delegators. Most people prefer stretching tasks to those they could do in their sleep, so it's OK to give each person a task slightly bigger than his/her current capabilities might dictate. Engage each person in the sizing tasks. Ask them. Most will select wisely.
Monitoring delegated tasks. Do you micromanage? If you're constantly looking over your shoulders, you're not delegating. A properly communicated and delegated task doesn't need to be monitored. If you must monitor, set time-definite checkpoints by the calendar every Monday, by percentage, after each 10% is complete, or by outcome, such as when you have the first draft. Be approachable for help but not intrusive. Intervene only when agreed-upon criteria are not being followed or expectations are not being met. This focuses on the task, not the person. Let people finish their work.
Delegation as development. People grow by being assigned stretching tasks that contain elements they have not done before. Seventy percent of development in successful managers comes from doing stretch tasks and jobs. One bind of the poor delegator—my people aren't good enough—won't be solved until they are good enough. Doing most of the work yourself is a poor long-term development strategy and will never solve the problem.
P113. Developing Direct Reports and Others.
You have to invest some time. For most managers, time is what they have the least to give. For the purpose of developing others beyond today's job, you need to allocate about eight hours per year per direct report. If you have a normal span of seven direct reports, that's 7 of 220 working days or 3% of your annual time. Two of the eight hours are for an annual in-depth appraisal of the person in terms of current strengths and weaknesses and of the competencies he/she needs to develop to move on to the next step. Two of the eight hours are for an in-depth career discussion with each person. What does he/she want? What will he/she sacrifice to get there? What is his/her own appraisal of his/her skills? Two of the eight hours are for creating a three- to five-year development plan and sharing it with the person. The last two hours are to present your findings and recommendations to the organization, usually in a succession planning process, and arrange for developmental events for each person. Start thinking of yourself as a coach or mentor. It's your job to help your people grow.
Appraisal. You can't help anyone develop if you can't or aren't willing to fairly and accurately appraise people. Sound appraisal starts with the best picture of current strengths and weaknesses. Then, you need to know what competencies are going to be necessary going forward. You can find this out by looking at a success profile for the next possible job or two for the person. If there are no formal success profiles, you can ask the Human Resources group for assistance or ask someone you know and trust currently in that next job what he/she uses to be successful.
Feedback. People need continuous feedback from you and others to grow. Some tips about feedback:
Arrange for them to get feedback from multiple people, including yourself, on what matters for success in their future jobs; arrange for your direct report to get 360-degree feedback about every two years.
Give them progressively stretching tasks that are first-time and different for them so that they can give themselves feedback as they go.
If they have direct reports and peers, another technique to recommend is to ask their associates for comments on what they should stop doing, start doing, and keep doing to be more successful.
You have to be willing to be straight with your people and give them accurate but balanced feedback. Give as much real-time feedback as you have time for. Most people are motivated by process feedback against agreed-upon goals for three reasons. First, it helps them adjust what they are doing along the way in time to better achieve the goals—they can make mid-course corrections. Second, it shows them what they are doing is important and that you're there to help. Third, it's not the "gotcha" game of negative and critical feedback after the fact. If there are negatives, they know the negatives as soon as possible.
Development planning. You need to put together a development plan that, if followed, actually would work. At least 70% of reported skill development comes from having challenging, uncomfortable tasks/assignments. Development means that you do the new skills, or fail at something important to you. Tasks that develop anything are those in which not doing it is not a viable option. Another 20% comes from studying and working with others to see useful behavior and get feedback. This can take the form of studying a role model, working with a developmental partner, keeping a written summary of what's working and not working, or preferably a formal assessment, like a 360-degree process. Without this continuous feedback, even the best developmental plans fail. About 10% of development comes from thinking differently or having new ways to think about things. Typically, these come from coursework, books, or mentors; the lion's share is learning from tough tasks and the learning from other people that comes from feedback. A good plan would have 70% job and task content; 20% people to study, listen to, and work with; and 10% courses and readings.
Delegate for development. Brainstorm with your direct reports all the tasks that aren't being done but are important to do. Ask them for a list of tasks that are no longer challenging for them. (You can also use parts of your own job to develop others. Take three tasks that are no longer developmental for you but would be for others, and delegate them.) Trade tasks for assignments between two direct reports; have them do each other's work. Assign each of your direct reports an out-of-comfort-zone task that meets the following criteria: the task needs to be done, the person hasn't done it or isn't good at it, and the task calls for a skill the person needs to develop. Remember to focus on varied assignments—more of the same isn't developmental.
Remember, meaningful development is not the stress-reduction business. It is not cozy or safe; it comes from varied, stressful, even adverse tasks that require we learn to do something new or different or fail. Real development involves real work the person largely hasn't done before. Real development is rewarding but scary. Be open with your people about this. Everyone won't want to be developed in new areas. Some are satisfied to do what they do, even if it limits their career options. While you should advise them of the consequences, all organizations need strong performers dedicated to skill-building in their current area only. Don't imply that a pure tactician must become a strategist to be valued. Instead, create more ways for people to excel and get status recognition. For most of us, this is a powerful need—some studies show that people in prestigious jobs are less likely to get seriously ill, regardless of their personal habits. If a person wants to be a customer service representative for life, recognize that as critical and help the person develop in every way possible within that area—coaching, training, and networking with other experts.
Do you help your people learn by looking for repeating patterns? Help them look for patterns in the situations and problems they deal with. What succeeded and what failed? What was common to each success or what was present in each failure but never present in a success? Focus on the successes; failures are easier to analyze but don't in themselves tell you what would work. Comparing successes, while less exciting, yields more information. The bottom line is to help them reduce insights to principles or rules of thumb that might be repeatable. Ask them what they have learned to increase their skills and understanding, making them better managers or professionals. Ask them what they can do now that they couldn't do a year ago. Reinforce this and encourage more of it. Developing is learning in as many ways as possible.
Selling development. Part of developing others is convincing people that tough, new, challenging, and different assignments are good for them. In follow-up studies of successful executives, more than 90% report that a boss in their past nearly forced them to take a scary job assignment that turned out to be the most developmental for them. The peculiar thing about long-term development is that even ambitious people turn down the very assignment they need to grow. They do not have the perspective to understand that. Your job is to help convince people on the way up to get out of their comfort zone and accept jobs they don't initially see as useful or leading anywhere.
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