A fool can learn from his own experience, the wise learn from the experiences of others. | ||
| --Democritus | ||
If you read this book, then you know what is coming. It should be clear that understanding how the world operates and the changes it undergoes remains essential to your professional success. It is also essential to the survival of the organizations in which you work. The process of keeping current, of learning from your experience and studies, is constant at both the personal and institutional levels. But this short essay is less about the organization and more about the individual. Whether a CEO of a large company or a freshly minted university graduate, the lessons of the wise and those who do well in periods of change remain as they always have, lessons of timeless quality. The strategy is simple to describe, but like a good diet, one that we must get in the habit of practicing. The discussion following is broken into two pieces: the practice and some great reading.
There are essentially three topics about which one always has to be current and, therefore, any reading, research, or reflection should focus on these issues. First, the nature of management, leadership, and work is rapidly changing as new techniques and tools are constantly introduced. Keeping up with these, even if you do not choose to use them, is essential. Second, general economic trends, changes in one's industry and markets, and how your firm is perceived in the marketplace are equally dynamic and therefore require that you be a student of them, not merely a participant within them. Third, identifying new ways of connecting ideas or patterns that result in increased value in what you offer the enterprise must come from outside-the-box thinking and knowledge. Increasingly, all three issues require that you participate in your work, be a student of that work, and be curious about what others do both in and outside your industry.
While seminars and internal corporate reading materials can be helpful, these are not enough. You have to methodically acquire information on all three issues on a fairly regular basis. The best way to do this is to do three things in various degrees each week, time permitting. Over time they have a cumulative effect, creating an ever-changing view of management, work, industry, the economy, and ways to make a business or government agency successful. If nothing else, the effort is a confidence builder; at a minimum the result is an understanding of the obvious and the basics of your work.
First, read books and magazines on these topics, rotating through all three one at a time but constantly. Books on management are an excellent choice, while magazine articles are often more current on business and industry trends.
Second, read and watch television programs that deal with the general world around you. I recommend focusing on economic and political history, science and technology themes, and on current events. But always read or view these with a third person's distance, asking yourself, "I wonder how this information might be applied to my work?" The key is to search for links between what you do and what you are learning. Also, bookmark sites on the Internet that have information of use to you. About a half dozen well-chosen ones from outside your organization should do the trick.
Third, expand your circle of friends, associates, and people you meet to include those in other industries and organizations. Ask them constantly what they are doing, where their organizations are headed, what new initiatives they are taking, and why. Connections begin to pop up all the time, but you have to be curious.
Since much of the best thinking about management and work in the Information Age is best explained these days in books, what might be a good reading list? Everyone has their own favorites, these are mine that I have found thoughtful and relevant. I do not think it unreasonable to expect that eventually you would have read most of these if you are serious about deeply understanding the world you are working in today.
On the role of management, almost everyone begins with Peter F. Drucker. His latest book, Management Challenges for the 21st Century (New York: HarperBusiness, 1999), distills many of the key elements of management in contemporary terms and is a very quick read. The number of great books available on leadership is staggering, but I want to suggest one written by a scientist of the mind, rather than by a business professor: Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership (New York: HarperBusiness, 1995), by Howard Gardner, in which he describes what leaders do who come from many walks of life. Read one of his books and you will want to find others (he has published about 15).
A central element of today's work mantra is the voice of the customer, and on that topic there are also hundreds of books, many of them superficial. However, two are essential, maybe even perfect. For over two decades, a cultural anthropologist, Paco Underhill, has studied how people buy and sell, summarizing his fascinating discoveries in a short, well-written book: Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, by Paco Underhill (Simon & Schuster, 1999). Read it to know what you do, as well as what your clients, customers, and colleagues do. The second book discusses how to weave the voice of the customer into the internal operations of an organization, moving from "you should" to "here's how," without being a cookbook. Harvey Thompson provides a sober, tested set of strategies for doing this in The Customer-Centered Enterprise (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000).
Those who have been serious students of service have long been fans of Leonard L. Berry, the professor who has written so extensively on the subject. For a strategy on service, the book to read is his On Great Service: A Framework for Action (New York: Free Press, 1995).
The whole issue of how enterprises change is slowly becoming a sub-field of its own. The subject is changing because how we transformed organizations in the early 1990s, for example, is very different from how that was being done at the start of the twenty-first century. To understand how that process has changed and to what, there is a collective study of the subject written by a team of change experts, James W. Cortada and Thomas S. Hargraves (eds.), Into the Networked Age: How IBM and Other Firms Are Getting There Now (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). A well-kept secret in the business literature is a book by James F. Moore, The Death of Competition (New York: HarperBusiness, 1996), in which he sets forth the impact of integrated approaches to work and the marketplace, a fascinating book. One of the most current, useful guides on managing organizations and change through process is The Horizontal Organization, by Frank Ostroff (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Finally, remember that innovation causes change, and the great classic on the subject, still relevant, and still a great read, is Richard N. Foster's Innovation: The Attacker's Advantage (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986).
Knowing how it is all working led to many new ways to measure the performance of organizations, and resulted in over a dozen excellent book-length accounts of what to do and why. However, there are two that cover the subject well. Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton took their notion of the Balanced Scorecard and wrote a book explaining all its attributes and how to implement it in The Balanced Scorecard (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996). For an effective overview of other measurements systems, there is nothing better than Measure Up! Yardsticks for Continuous Improvement, by Richard L. Lynch and Kelvin F. Cross (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
Technology has become the subject of many excellent books that read well and are informative for people at all levels of an organization. James M. Utterback, in Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1994), combines historical case studies and contemporary experiences to describe how to best leverage technologies in general, not just IT. For the dark side of that story with lessons learned, see Clayton M. Christensen's well received book, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail(Boston: Harvard Business School, 1997).
What should you read about information technology? Begin with Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, who, in Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (Boston: Harvard Business School, 1999), show how fundamental business practices are applied in a networked era. Then, read a book by Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster, Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000) which, like the earlier book, discusses strategy. Since IT has to provide continuous improvement in operations, there is my tactical description of how that is done, James W. Cortada, Best Practices in Information Technology: How Corporations Get the Most Value from Exploiting Their Digital Investments(Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall PTR, 1998).
The bible on knowledge management was written by Laurence Prusak. Working Knowledge (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997) provides a clear explanation of the rationale and use of KM. For a more argumentative yet stimulating book on information technology and KM, there is Thomas H. Davenport's Information Ecology: Mastering the Information and Knowledge Environment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Davenport also worked with Prusak on Working Knowledge, and you may remember him as the author of a series of books and articles in the l990s on process management, in which he argued that processes should be made computer-friendly to optimize them, rather than the other way around (the thinking of the 1980s).
A clear understanding of contemporary economic and political events is essential. On economic realities, a good place to begin is with Richard K. Lester, The Productive Edge: How U.S. Industries Are Pointing the Way to a New Era of Economic Growth (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998). The great political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington, has argued that in the post-Cold War world, politics are aligning along cultural lines rather than between communists and the Free World, describing what this means for nations and businesses in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Since population changes are the tails wagging the dogs, there is a little book by Ester Boserup that discusses trends, Population and Technological Change: A Study of Long-Term Trends (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), but also see the more current study by W.W. Rostow, The Great Population Spike and After: Reflections on the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Either one will teach you what needs to be understood. Finally, a little book by two great historians of economics and technology is must reading, David C. Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg, Paths of Innovation: Technological Change in 20th Century America (Cambridge, Mass: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
There is an enormous amount of good business history available today. Most large corporations have been looked at by journalists and historians, and many of the key business leaders of the United States and Western Europe, particularly Americans, have been the subject of biographies. Almost every major industry has also been the subject of historical inquiry. However, if you could read only a few books to be informed on how to work well in business today, here is my list. Read David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor(New York: W.W. Norton, 1998); it may be the best history book you will have read in a long time, covering the entire sweep of human history and the effects of the environment and economy on nations. Joel Mokyr has written on how technology affected economic prosperity in The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). While a very long book, and in some parts tough reading, David Hackett Fischer's The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) is the ultimate word on historical economic waves and trends. Many of his appendices are excellent short tutorials on waves and price patterns; at a minimum you should read some of those. The classic work on the history of corporations and management remains the remarkable book by the father of business history, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977). Once you have read a book by Chandler you will want to read others by him.
Curious about the Internet or about the history of computing? The hands down best history of the Internet is by Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). You will learn that there is more to technology than technology; institutional politics and objectives are at least as important as physics and technologies in determining how telecommunications and computers evolved. A classic account of the PC is by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000, 2nd edition). For a book that combines sociology, business, and a little history about the Internet, see the very wise and readable Andrew L. Shapiro, The Control Revolution (New York: Public Affairs, 1999). Finally, for a major history of the role of information in the United States, a book designed for both the general public and those in business, and written by historians, consultants and business professors, see Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., and James W. Cortada (eds.), A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
In addition to the kinds of books listed above, another way to keep up is to subscribe to some of the many business yearbooks now being published, most of which are excellent. They typically anthologize recently published material, often also include new items, lists of journals, associations, and other sources on the Internet. They exist for quality management, purchasing, taxes, training, knowledge management, and so forth, and usually focus on functional areas of a business or on an industry. I cannot imagine not subscribing to several of these as a way of sampling new thinking, learning from specific examples, and as a way of keeping current on trends and surveys. They save you an enormous amount of time in your effort to stay current and well-rounded.