Book Reviews

Follow this Path

Author:Curt Coffman and Gabriel Gonzalez-Molina PhD

The subtitle of this book is almost a chapter in itself: how the world's greatest organisations drive growth by unleashing human potential. A powerful approach based on the Gallup Organisation's study of over 10 million customers, 3 million employees and 200,000 managers.

With such a database to go at, it's a wonder they've managed to condense everything down into just 284 pages!

You might have heard of Curt Coffman as the author of First, Break all the Rules. Coffman took the idea for that book, no doubt from Louis Patler's If it ain't broke ... BREAK IT! Unless Coffman wrote his book first, then switch that, as Willy Wonka says!

This book's foreword starts wiht a graph taken from The Economist newspaper that became the subject of a discussion I had with various colleagues from around the world. The foreword is written by James K Clifton, Chairman and CEO of The Gallup Organisation in January 2002 ... firstly, chairman AND CEO ... what ever happened to corporate governance that frowns on the combining of these two roles?

Anyway, I thought Clifton's arguments were so weak and flawed that I felt compelled to discuss them in an online discussion forum: go here to see what came out of that discussion.

The Gallup Path to which this book relates is this one:

As with the other business and management books I review, let me give you an overview of teh book by listing its contents:

• The path to take

1. Welcome to the emotional economy
2. Discover the talents of each employee
3. The route that never goes astray
4. Steering toward engagement
5. Directions fro enhancing the management employee engagement
6. Emotional economics part 1
7. The open highway
8. The four emotional states that drive customer engagement
9. Directions for enhancing and managing customer engagement
10. Ecotional economics part 2
11. Managing the emotional economy

• Epilogue: a new vision for a new century
• Appendix A: managerial talent, employee engagement and business unit performance
• Appendix B: employee engagement, satisfaction and business unit level outcomes, a meta analysis

This is an intense book in lots of ways as there is a lot to consider: not surprising given the database of people and responses that are supposed to have gone into drawing it up. It's impossible therefore to do anything other than pick out a few key ideas to whet your appetite.

Q¹² is a check list that Gallup has devised and this is at the core of this book. What is Q¹²? Appendix B is where you will find Q¹² described in detail; and they say that it's based on over 30 years if accumulated quantitative and qualitative research.

1. I know what is expected of me at work
2. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right
3. At work I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day
4. In the last seven days I have received recognition or praise for doing good work
5. My supervisor or someone at work seems to care about me as a person
6. There is someone at work who encourages my development
7. At work my opinions seem to count
8. The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important
9. My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work
10. I have a best friend at work
11. In the last six months someone at work has talked to me about my progress
12. This last year I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow

Chapter 5 spells out the Q¹² ideas in some detail too.

Engagement is a key phrases that you will find throughout this book: don't just employ someone, don't just manage someone, get them involved, get them engaged. For example, from chapter 9, page 207:

Do what great managers do, and engage your customers by:

• Identifying and using employee talent themes so that they generate emotional engagement by doing what they do best
• Initiating, sustaining or restoring their emotional states
• Intensifying emotional states by making sure that employee-customer engagement is consistent.

That should give you a few clues as to what they mean by engagement; but let's turn to chapter 6 for even more insights:

In Great Britain 17% are engaged, 63% are not engaged and 20% are actively disengaged. (page 138 and the terms engaged etc are defined on pages 129 - 135) To put some value on what this means, the equivalent figures for the USA are:

In the USA 30% are engaged, 54% are not engaged and 16% are actively disengaged ... Gallup has calculated that the cost to the US economy of actively disengaged employees is in the range of $254 to $363 billion annually. This amount is larger than the US budget for either education or national defense. See pages 137 - 138

We then learn of the benefits of using Q¹²: Here's a sample of amazing success stories:

• a major US retailer saw the proportion of its engaged employees triple in the course of five years
• a manufacturing firm notices its proportion of engaged employees rise almost twofold in one year.

See pages 140 - 141 for more.

Moreover, they report, pages 127 - 128, chapter 6: 

Business units in the top half of employee engagement ... show on average:

• 86% higher success rate on customer metrics
• 70% higher success in lowering turnover
• 70% higher success rate in productivity
• 44% higher success rate in profitability
• 78% higher success rate in safety figures

You might also have spotted that they use the word and idea of emotion quite a bit and it might come as no surprise that emotion and engagement go hand in hand. In their discussions of the emotional economy, they rarely mention the word emotion! See chapters 6, 10 and 11 for much more.

I hope I have given you something of a flavour for what is in this book. For managers it contains some really useful insights and you would need to think really carefully about moving from a situation in which there is little engagement to one where engagement is the norm: the benefits, however, could be enormous.

If you are a sceptic, read this book and think about it carefully. In the area of budgeting and budgetary control, such aspects as emotional intelligence, engagement and participation have been known and discussed for decades so this present discussion is neither new nor wrong.

If you are a teacher/student, there are many insights here to keep you busy for a long time: whatever your business related topic, this book could well be useful for you. I should say, however, that it's probably better aimed at undergraduates and professional level students rather than anyone who is still in their pre university phase although a well read and mature pre university student could benefit a great deal from this book.

A recommended text!

Reviewed by Duncan Williamson - attend Duncan's courses here

The Thinkers 50: the world's most important and influential business thinkers

Author: Ciaran Parker

From time to time I am asked to review a book by a publisher, an author or someone who is thinking about using a book for a particular purpose. The Thinkers50 is such a book. I would probably not have read and reviewed this book otherwise.

I promised I would review this book from the point of view of a Business Studies teacher and student. Following on from this, the review splits itself into two distinct sections:

In terms of content it is poor, very poor; and a lot of that content is either to be found free of charge on the book's own web site or can easily be inferred from it
In terms of the book's usefulness as a resource and as a spur to further study, it's good.

There, bets fully hedged and one very good aspect of this book, although it's bound to sound harsh however I say it, is that it contains only living thinkers. That's good news because it's high time that business studies teachers and examiners moved away from Maslow, Taylor and the rest and into the more modern world. Not that those old stagers didn't say anything valuable, they did.

Having said what I've said about the content already, I don't want to dwell on that aspect of the book: I wouldn't spend £9.99 of my money on it. I am going to set the scene a little by looking at a few aspects of the book and its construction but then will spend some time looking at just three of the thinkers to be found in the Thinkers50: 50 people is too many to review, three is enough to give you a flavour of what you might do with the book.

Before I start, let me ask you to write down who, in your opinion, is the world's most influential living management thinker: it's your opinion, include who you like, no holds barred. You can compare your choice with the 50 people on the list in this book later.

If you feel you need help in making your selection, go here and see the criteria that they used to put together The Thinkers50. Those criteria include these ideas, there are seven more criteria

1 ORIGINALITY OF IDEAS Are the ideas and examples used by the thinker original?
2 PRACTICALITY OF IDEAS Have the ideas promoted by the thinker been implemented in organizations? And, has the implementation been successful?
3 PRESENTATION STYLE How proficient is the thinker at presenting his/her ideas orally?

The Thinkers50 concept is devised by Suntop Media a training and consulting company. Its training focuses on developing writing and media skills. Its consulting focuses on enabling organisations and individuals to maximise their thought leadership. Peculiarly for a business that is trying to generate such a high profile, it's web site is dated 2005 and on one page it is still talking about doing something in 2005 as if 2005 is in the future!

Where does the list come from? Again from the Thinkers50 web site:

Over the last two years, visitors to the Thinkers 50 website (www.thinkers50.com) have been providing their answers. The Thinkers 50 team also emailed hundreds of business people, consultants, academics and MBA students throughout the world. After sifting through more than 1,200 votes a list of contenders was compiled.

The result was a short-list of 80 names. A Google search was then undertaken to establish the number of references for each of those on the list, and factored into the ranking. Finally, they were assessed against 10 criteria.

Each guru was marked against the criteria that I highlighted above.

Who, then, are these people?

Kjell NORDSTRÖM & Jonas RIDDERSTRÅLE
Chan KIM & Renée MAUBORGNE
Robert KAPLAN & David NORTON    

I have taken those peoples' names from the book and they are ranked at 9, 15 and 22 respectively.

No? Well, if you are a regular visitor to my site you might have heard about Kaplan and Norton, otherwise I think the others would be a mystery to you.

Do you consider the following people to be thinkers?

Sir Richard Branson
Steven Covey
Scott Adams

I have taken those peoples' names from the book and they are ranked at 11, 18 and 12 respectively.

OK, so you do think they are thinkers ... so define thinking then in the context of this book.

Who is at the top of the pile? Michael E Porter. I suppose that this is no surprise and it might even be the "right" answer. Who is at the bottom of the pile? Why, it's Geoffrey Moore: you know Geoff, he's that high technology marketing guru who identified the Technology Adaptation Life Cycle (TALC). Then he wrote a few books that you've probably read: Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, The Gorilla Game and Living on the Fault Line. Forgive my cynicism as Moore is probably a lot better known, richer and wiser than I am but I do wonder how he got to be in the top fifty really.

My first problem with this book, then, is the method by which the top fifty were chosen: a non random and possibly non representative sample of around 1,200 people started it off ...

In the book, every thinker is tagged with a word or phrase that is meant to summarise who they are or what they do. With slight amendments by me to some of the words they use, impudent I know, here is my tally of what these thinkers do:

Title/Job	Number of Thinkers
Educator	21
Author	4
Businessman	8
Consultant	11
Journalist	3
Psychologist	1
Economist	2

Using this book

1 All of that gives you pause for thought and as an exercise for teachers and students, especially the older and wiser of our students, you could set them the question: who is the most influential living management thinker ... to make their lives easier, you could provide them with the latest Thinkers50's list, presented in alphabetical order, to ensure that they can choose someone whom they at least have heard of.

If you are teaching or working at undergraduate and post graduate level, don't give them the list, encourage them to use their own knowledge and experience.

2 Scour the profiles of each thinker for clues relating to why the laureates have been nominated. Some will be obvious and others won't. Sir Richard Branson as a thinker? Erm, major entrepreneurial adventurer but not a thinker. Jeff Bezos a thinker? Well, he's just had the one idea that I'm aware of, setting up amazon.com and despite what it says in the book about him and amazon, he's still only surviving by the skin of his teeth.

Business and management is a fickle area of study too as Tom Peters (thinker number 4) demonstrates and as Peter Drucker has freely admitted. Peters reads the business news wires and cobbles them together in a series of threads and then says things like Wow! and Excellence! People buy his books in their droves only to find that he's just written another book. Drucker, who sadly died last November so is now permanently disqualified from the thinkers 50 bemoans the fadists: me too! Drucker was thinker number 1 in both of the first two thinkers 50 lists and I'm sure he would have headed this latest one too.

Three of the Fifty: I'm going to look at what we can learn about the top three thinkers now both by using the book and by using some of the other sources suggested by the book

Thinker 1: Michael Porter ... he's almost a living legend, has written 18 books and countless articles, consults widely with the Monitor Group, above all he is an educator.

Porter's books include Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, Competitive Advantage, The Competitive Advantage of Nations and Can Japan Compete?.

Every profile in the book contains a link to a web page so let's look at the link for Porter to see where it leads: in this case, we are led to Porter's profile on the Harvard Business School and unlike many of the links provided in this book, this one is not that illuminating. It's fine and you can use this to garner some useful information about Porter and his work.

In this case, I clicked on the link to The Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness: this is a comprehensive site and although much of the materials listed here are for sale there is still a lot that poor teachers and students can learn free of charge. Please note that some of the links are now dead so be prepared to be a little disappointed because of that: there is still a huge amount to marvel at, however. Some links take us to places where we need to register to continue: if that's a problem for you then you will be disappointed again, I wasn't as I am a registration freak as I am prepared to take a look at many things in order to sort the wheat from the chaff.

For example, I found a synopsis of an article in the Harvard Business Review that Porter wrote with two others: Seven Surprises for New CEOs (co authors are Jay W Lorsch, and Nitin Nohria and it was published in the Harvard Business Review in October 2004). The synopsis is at this page and says this:

As a newly minted CEO, you may think you finally have the power to set strategy, the authority to make things happen, and full access to the finer points of your business. But if you expect the job to be as simple as that, you're in for an awakening. Even though you bear full responsibility for your company's well-being, you are a few steps removed from many of the factors that drive results. You have more power than anybody else in the corporation, but you need to use it with extreme caution. In their workshops for new CEOs, held at Harvard Business School in Boston, the authors have discovered that nothing--not even running a large business within the company--fully prepares a person to be the chief executive.

The seven most common surprises are:

• You can't run the company.
• Giving orders is very costly.
• It is hard to know what is really going on.
• You are always sending a message.
• You are not the boss.
• Pleasing shareholders is not the goal.
• You are still only human.

a) These surprises carry some important and subtle lessons. First, you must learn to manage organizational context rather than focus on daily operations. Second, you must recognize that your position does not confer the right to lead, nor does it guarantee the loyalty of the organization. Finally, you must remember that you are subject to a host of limitations, even though others might treat you as omnipotent. How well and how quickly you understand, accept, and confront the seven surprises will have a lot to do with your success or failure as a CEO.

As a starting point of a discussion of what CEOs do, I think this is good, even though it's just a synopsis. You can extend your review of these ideas as there is a link to Jay Lorsch discussing this article here. Lorsch is asked by the interviewer to explain each of the seven surprises one by one. Well worth listening to!

c) Now do a web search for Porter and see what turns up. I took the opportunity of taking a look at Google Book Search for Michael E Porter and found 28,100 pages to look at. Is this a valuable thing to do? Yes, without doubt, although anyone hoping to put off going to the library or the bookshop is bound to be disappointed as even Google's Book Search doesn't give us access to more than just a few pages for each of the books it chooses to highlight.

I clicked on the first link to the first book in the Book Search and was presented with contents page of the book Strategy that Porter wrote along with Cynthia A Montgomery. Useful? Not really.

The second link gave me the contents page of Porter's own On Competition. Useful? Not for me.

Let's try one more link ... in this case the task falls away because Porter is so famous and so well quoted that very quickly the books we are presented with are not Porter's own. The books contain lots of references to Porter's work but not a lot by the man himself.

Sorry but I think this resource would take a lot of effort to be useful in Porter's case.

b) I don't want to steal Porter's thunder; but Jay Lorsch is a very famous person within the context of business and management in his own right ... find out what he is famous for!

Thinker 2: Bill Gates ... again, Gates as a thinker? Hmm, not for me. A bit like Branson in that he is clearly an entrepreneur of significant merit but I have yet to felt in awe of anything he has thought. It was Gates, after all, who announced that 640,000 bytes of memory would be perfectly adequate for us all ... the computer I'm using now has 1,000,000,000 bytes of memory and I could still use more! Then again, if computer developers had stuck at the DOS induced 640 Kb limit of old, they might have been much more efficient and creative in their use of our memories!

Does Gates have anything useful to say to us, though? Yes, of course. Gates has always had quite a lot to say about strategy ... he has isolated six things that a company should do to achieve success in any market. It should 1. Concentrate on a market with big potential and few competitors 2. Get in early and go in big 3. Set up a proprietary position 4. Protect that position using every method available 5. Aim for high gross margins or the highest available 6. Make customers an offer they find hard, if not impossible, to refuse
Gates: thinker number 2

If you're looking for convenient lists, why not take this one from Gates. Based on e for electronic, as in email, ecommerce, ebook, here are five ethings

Gates has always sought to inject the organisation with vital components. There are five, all of which begin with the letter ‘E’:

• Enrichment: employees are attracted by high salaries and retained through generous option schemes
• Egalitarianism
• Empowerment
• E-mail
• Emphasis on Performance: employees’ performances are assessed twice-yearly. They receive a mark on a one-to-five scale. A ‘four’ is extraordinarily good: a ‘one’ means they’re fired.

Gates: thinker number 2

Question: 1 a) do you agree that employees are attracted by high salaries and retained through generous option schemes? Find evidence both for and against that assertion.
b) do these five components comprise everything that a company should inject into itself? Think of three more components (hint: they don't have to begin with the letter 'e' but if they do that's even better; and there are no single perfect answers here).

2 The book says (page 50) that Gates is not a management guru in the sense of the others. Discuss what you think Parker means by that statement.

Now let's take a look at the web link provided on page 50 of the book.

Interested in what Gates has to say about reading? Take a look at this page: Beyond Gutenberg by Bill Gates. Reprinted from "The World in 2000," a publication of The Economist Group.

Question 3 a) what is a p-book?
Set out the development of reading technologies as Gates sees it as you attempt to follow Gates' line of reasoning. Then from a marketing point of view, attempt to assess the market for e-books, p-books and possible alternatives to the book over the coming 50 years.

Let's do something a little different now since Gates tends to talk about what he knows the best: technology. This is at least partly why he can't be considered a management guru, of course. Take a look at this page Remarks by Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation WinHEC "Advancing the Platform" Seattle, Washington May 23, 2006. Scroll down to where Gates makes his entrance and read on: it's geeky but interesting as it's relevant to forecasting, business trends, the application of technology, the development and testing of systems and so on ... all relevant to business and management.

But now, click on the Multimedia Resources links at the top of the page and take a look at how the head of the world's major technology company communicates his ideas ... yes, communication is a business and management topic too.

Question 4: Try to establish Gates' audience and assess whether his message is being appropriately delivered.

The Presentation also includes materials from another speaker, Jeff Woolsey; but you can treat it as if it's all being done by one person unless you think Woolsey's style is radically different from Gates'.

There is a section of the Bill Gates web site entitled Executive email. Let's look at that now: click here to start at the Archive. I then decided to look at an email that was prepared by someone other than Gates: click here to see what Jeff Raikes (Group Vice President of Microsoft’s Productivity and Business Services Group) has to say about productivity.

Raikes says, Our goal is ambitious – to improve personal, team and organizational productivity by addressing a broad array of business processes. We're both excited by the opportunity and pleased with the results to date.

Question 5 a) assess why Raikes concentrates on what he calls Effective Virtual Teams. What are such teams and how will they operate?
b) What is XML and why does it seem to be such a vital aspect of the productivity revolution?
c) Raikes says that, In short, the end of innovation is nowhere near. Explain what Raikes meant by that remark  

There is a great deal more that I could have used of Gates' materials but the links I have given are the starting point for you to be able to do that for yourselves: he talks a lot and he has a lot to say!

Now, hands up if you have honestly, really, genuinely heard of thinker 3: CK Prahalad. Honestly?

CK stands for Coimbatore Krishnao Prahalad and he was born in India in 1941. I have read several of Prahalad's articles but I haven't read any of his books but there is a lot on the internet about him and, of course, Thinkers50 has a link to a web site to start us off. Well, not exactly start us off as it's a very thin site indeed: just a tiny bit about CK and his associates at The Next Practice (TNP).

According to itself, TNP is a unique advisory firm. We work with clients to develop the new business models, products and partnerships that are required to secure large growth opportunities in emerging markets. Our focus is innovation in emerging markets at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’. Source.

It's the bottom of the pyramid or BOP that I'll concentrate on now: look at the Thinkers50 chapter on Prahalad and you will see that the BOP idea is central to their view of him.

Prahalad maintains a deep interest in the world’s poor. This led him to write The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (2004) ... He identified the world’s poor (the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ or BOP) as a potential untapped market for companies, worth anything up to $13 trillion a year. “The real source of market promise is not the wealthy few in the developing world, or even the emerging middle-income consumers. It is the billions of aspiring poor who are joining the market economy for the first time.” A market at the bottom of the pyramid could be co-created by multi-national and domestic industry, non-governmental organisations, and most importantly the poor themselves. They would then have choice over their lives and the products they used. He pointed to Hindustan Lever’s success in marketing soap-powder and detergents in smaller, cheaper units. Source, also to be found on page 130 of the book.

I did a search of the web for Prahalad and came across a wide variety of pages, including one from FastCompany.com. This page discusses Prahalad's setting up of a company called Praja with a colleague. Praja is Sanskrit for nobility ... erm, no, it's Sanskrit of common people according to Thinkers50. A minor issue for us. What is more worrying is the article itself: it starts out well by talking about Prahalad, his career to date, his wealth and his sacrifices but then it drifts into journalistic nonsense and I lost interest. This is a pity because Praja seems to be a lot better than that.

Go to www.praja.org where you will find a great deal of information about the organisation and the work it is carrying out at grass roots level in India. Praja has prepared a Citizen's Charter that reads as follows:

• Standards: The citizens are aware of the quality of services that can be expected of the MCGM and then take prescribed action if the services do not conform to these standards.
• Accountability: Through the Citizens' Charter a clear line of responsibility for the various services is established.
• Transparency: Information that is relevant to the people's needs is offered so as to enhance their participation in civic life.
• Feedback: The MCGM looks forward to the citizens using this document as we will then get an accurate response as to how effectively the public services met their needs.

There is a great deal of information on the citizen's charter here too. Click through some of these links, or all of them if you have the time, to see what Prahalad and Praja has started.

Question 6 a) How would you describe the nature and purpose of Praja (use any additional resources you can find as you wish). Take any example from the Citizen's Charter page, from the previous link; and summarise what Praja is doing in that area.
b) What feature unites Praja's approach to Waste Disposal, Public Health, Education and so on, as per the links on the Citizen's Charter page? Hint: scroll to the bottom of any of the pages in the list on the Charter page! How effective do you think this aspect of Praja's work is or is likely to be.
c) Prime Minister John Major generated a Citizen's Charter for the UK: assess the similarities between the two charters and discuss their relative successes and failures as far as you can.
d)Prahalad is in the same league as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet in his desire to use his fame and wealth to help to give people at the BOP. Don't you think that such gifts are really just a way of someone rich easing their own consciences?

Where does Prahalad's reputation come from? What is it that got him into the Thinkers50 list? Perhaps his record of publications in the Harvard Business Review can explain for us, there have been 11 articles under the Prahalad banner:

Strategic Intent
Gary Hamel, C.K. Prahalad
July, 2005
Most leading global companies started with ambitions that were far bigger than their resources and capabilities. But they created an obsession with winning at all levels of the organization and sustained that obsession for decades.
The End of Corporate Imperialism
C.K. Prahalad, Kenneth Lieberthal
August, 2003
As they search for growth, multinational corporations will have no choice but to compete in the big emerging markets of China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil. Although it is still common to question...
Serving the World’s Poor, Profitably
C.K. Prahalad, Allen Hammond
September, 2002
Improving the lives of the billions of people at the bottom of the economic pyramid is a noble endeavor. It can also be a lucrative one.
Co-opting Customer Competence
C.K. Prahalad, Venkatram Ramaswamy
January, 2000
In the new economy, companies must incorporate customer experience into their business models—in ways hitherto untapped. Here are the challenges in doing that.
The New Meaning of Quality in the Information Age
C.K. Prahalad, M.S. Krishnan
September, 1999
A company’s software is becoming a critical source of competitive advantage and competitive risk. Yet few managers can agree on the key variables for judging its quality. Here’s a new framework for doing just that.
Competing for the Future
Gary Hamel, C.K. Prahalad
July, 1994
What drives your company’s agenda: your competitors’ view of the future or your own?
Strategy as Stretch and Leverage
Gary Hamel, C.K. Prahalad
March, 1993
Competitiveness is born in the gap between a company’s resources and its managers’ goals.
Corporate Imagination and Expeditionary Marketing
Gary Hamel, C.K. Prahalad
July, 1991
In the 1990s, competitive success will come from building and dominating fundamentally new markets. Core competencies are one prerequisite for creating these new markets. Corporate imagination and...
Collaborate with Your Competitors - and Win
Gary Hamel, Yves L. Doz, C.K. Prahalad
January, 1989
Collaboration between competitors is in fashion. But the rise of competitive collaboration has triggered unease about its long-term effects. Companies that benefit most from competitive...
Do You Really Have a Global Strategy?
Gary Hamel, C.K. Prahalad
July, 1985
Corporate response to the threat of foreign competition is often misdirected and ill timed--in part because many executives don't fully understand what global competition is. Executives must...
How MNCs Cope with Host Government Intervention
Yves L. Doz, C.K. Prahalad
March, 1980
The efforts of host governments to maintain control over their own national economies have restricted the freedom of multinational company (MNC) managers in deploying economic resources. Regulation...

 

Sidebar: Gary Hamel and Fast Forward 400

Did you spot that Gary Hamel also featured large in the list of authors of those articles? There you are, another Thinkers50 laureate: number 14. Like Jay Lorsch, Hamel is famous and worthy in his own right but since Hamel is on the current list, let me give you his web address so that you can go and see what makes him such a valuable thinker. You may come across this, said about Hamel, Professor Gary Hamel, the world's most profound business thinker. Now, where does it say that, I wonder? Could it be on Hamel's own web site? Erm, well, yes, nothing wrong with a bit of puffery is there? Good on ya, Gazza!

Whilst looking at other ideas in this tangential discussion on Hamel, I came across the Fast Forward 400 research project that you can read about here. It's worth another tangent. Do follow some of the links to get more of an idea of what they are trying to do. I found the page on 20 times faster rather old hat and intuitive; but I might be a little unkind in saying that. Worth a look I'd say.

Back to Prahalad now, for a while.

You must visit the site with the sub title All articles related to management guru CK Prahalad.

Core competence is part of our business vocabulary; but it comes from the work of Prahalad and Hamel. There's a specific link in the menu on the left of ckprahalad.com entitle core competency ... just click it! Clicking takes you to a page with two articles on that topic:

• Inside out strategy. Explanation of Core Competence of Hamel and Prahalad.
• Business Innovation: Core Competency and Competitive

Click on (more...) to take a look at the first one, just to see what we get: a good, short, simple page on the topic that can easily be summarised by looking at its headings:

• Inside out Corporate Strategy
• Business units
• Three tests for identifying a Core Competence
• Building a Core Competence
• Core rigidities?

Not wishing to be negative at all; but let me leave that page with their warning, under the heading of core rigidities: Care must be taken not to let core competencies develop into core rigidities. A Corporate Competence is difficult to learn, but is difficult to unlearn as well. Companies that have spared no effort to achieve a competence, sometimes neglect new market circumstances or demands. They risk to be locked in by choices that were made in the past.

Click on the second of the two links to read an equally simple and reader friendly expose on core competency.

At the bottom of the home page of the ckprahalad.com site there is a list of recent articles about or by the man. That list is likely to change over time and their contents are diverse, so let me home in on the one I chose at random: How strategy guru CKP is changing the way CEOs think. It's a long article but it provides a few more insights into Prahalad's work in India as well as the impact he has had on corporate America and the rest of the world.

That's it! Rather a lengthy book review cum resource guide to a book that by itself is not worth the money but, when viewed with the eyes of a CK Prahalad, it becomes a very useful resource worth working with.

Finally, who are the other 46 thinkers, then? Here's the list from the book for 2005 and if you want to know who was in the list in 2003 and 2001, just go to the Thinkers50 web site.

The Thinkers50 List

Ranking & Name

1  Michael PORTER (2)

2  Bill GATES (20)

3  CK PRAHALAD (12)

4  Tom PETERS (3)

5  Jack WELCH (8)

6  Jim COLLINS (10)

7  Philip KOTLER (6)

8  Henry MINTZBERG (7)

9  Kjell NORDSTRÖM & Jonas RIDDERSTRÅLE (21)

10  Charles HANDY (5)

11  Richard BRANSON (34)

12  Scott ADAMS (27)

13  Thomas A. STEWART (37)

14  Gary HAMEL (4)

15  Chan KIM & Renée MAUBORGNE (31)

16  Kenichi OHMAE (19)

17  Patrick DIXON (46)

18  Stephen COVEY (16)

19  Rosabeth MOSS KANTER (9)

20  Edward DE BONO (35)

21  Clayton CHRISTENSEN (22)

22  Robert KAPLAN & David NORTON (15)

23  Peter SENGE (14)

24  Ram CHARAN (-)

25  Fons TROMPENAARS (50)

26  Russ ACKOFF (-)

27  Warren BENNIS (13)

28  Chris ARGYRIS (18)

29  Michael DELL (33)

30  Vijay GOVINDARAJAN (-)

31  Malcolm GLADWELL (-)

32  Manfred KETS DE VRIES (43)

33  Rakesh KHURANA (-)

34  Lynda GRATTON (41)

35  Alan GREENSPAN (42)

36  Edgar H SCHEIN (17)

37  Ricardo SEMLER (36)

38  DON PEPPERS (48)

39  Paul KRUGMAN (40)

40  Jeff BEZOS (39)

41  Andy GROVE (26)

42  Daniel GOLEMAN (29)

43  Leif EDVINSSON (-)

44  Jim CHAMPY (25)

45  Rob GOFFEE and Gareth JONES (-)

46  Naomi KLEIN (30)

47  Geert HOFSTEDE (47)

48  Larry BOSSIDY (-)

49  Costas MARKIDES (-)

50  Geoffrey MOORE (38)

Review: Duncan Williamson - see Duncan's courses here

The Goal

Authors: Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox

OK, so I’m 20 years late in reviewing this book but I’ve found it and read it now. No harm done, then! This book was first published in 1984 and this review relates to the third edition published in 2000

Quite simply, this is a novel and a form of text book all at the same time. The odd point is that basically it works both as a novel and as an introduction to the Theory of Constraints, Throughput, Cost Accounting, bottlenecks and a whole lot more.

If you are not familiar with this book them you might wonder how on earth a novel on the theory of constraints can be anything other than, well, let’s say, odd: so read it! Eli Goldratt is a serious academic, practitioner and author and he has put together the story of a man, Alex Rogo (how do you pronounce that surname?) with a factory to save from closure. Alex runs into an old university chum, Jonah, who possesses amazing insights into a situation he has never seen when he unloads his burden of what’s wrong with his factory.

Jonah is a physicist now and he uses the Socratic method to walk Alex and his team through their nightmares. The what? Jonah knows all the answers, honest he does, but he refuses simply to tell Alex what to do: he’s a successful consultant who does have the time for hand holding anyway. What Jonah does is to get Alex to appreciate his problems and then work his way through them until he finds the solution. Great: it works very well and Alex and his team do work their way through their problems very successfully. Actually, that’ getting a bit ahead of the game because the final fifth or sixth of the book has the characters reviewing their successes and failures and they find that they didn’t do everything as well as they might have.

I have to say that you probably do need to have a reason to learn at least something about the theory of constraints and so on to want to read this book but it has sold more than three million copies so far. What would draw the ordinary reader into this novel is the private life that Alex has then hasn’t then has again after a struggle: faint heart never won fair lady, don’t forget.

I would like to think that if I ever wrote a novel about cost accounting or the Excel Spreadsheeter, it would be as good and as meaningful as this.

How about this for an opening line, if I might be so bold as to steal it from page 307 of The Goal:

As a matter of fact, I started to have a very good guideline; if it comes from cost accounting it must be wrong.

So, Goldratt’s a successful author, consultant and anti cost accountant so he must have a fair point. Any cost accountant worth his salt knows why Goldratt would think like that and would have to hold up his hand and say, ‘It’s a fair cop, officer.’

The essence of the book, then? Well, there are two threads to it that run in parallel to each other.

Thread one is the factory and the solution to its problem. How our hero not only turns the factory's fortunes around; but those of the whole group. I liked this part as Goldratt built some good and credible characters and took away the potential for building cheesy never get it wrong types. There are some incidents where mistakes are made, there are people making inaccurate assessments and, yes, mistakes.

Thread two is Alex's home life and his wife's reaction to it. Alex is living with his family in home town ... it's not his wife's home town and since they moved there relatively recently, she hasn'tmade many friends and, to be frank, doesn't look as if she's likely to. Out of the blue for Alex, she walks away from him, leaving him with the children.

It's a difficult thing for a woman to walk away like that and I don't think a woman writer would have made Alex's wife do that: men are feral and have less of a problem ... Goldratt got that part wrong, I'd say.

Still, so as not to give anything away and drag out the review too much, there is much happiness by the end of the book.

The factory may be saved; a marriage may be saved; indeed, a company may be saved.

And all because of the theory of constraints!

As I was reading this book, I turned into a salesmen and told a number of people that they ought to buy it and I had a success rate of around 50%. No commission came my way, however! Mr Goldratt ...

If you're in business and commerce, buy this book: practitioners and students will both benefit from it.

Reviewer: Duncan Williamson - see Duncan's courses for OSL Training  here

Six Thinking Hats

Author:Edward de Bono

I read Edward de Bono's first book, Lateral Thinking, when it first came out. I chose it as my prize for something that I was awarded at my school's speech day. I can't remember what the prize was for but I remember the book!

Six thinking hats may well have a similar impression on me, although it is by no means new to me: I haven't reviewed it before, that's all. I have reread this book because I am now embarking on a project that has the six thinking hats idea at its core although it is by no means a six thinking hats book. That's not such a wacky idea as you will see when the project's finished.

de Bono has conjoured up the imagery of six different coloured hats as the back drop to the way that we should think, speak and act. The colours he has chosen are meant to help with the imagery, too. Here's the list of the six hats together with the their role and meaning

• White Hat White is neutral and objective. The white hat is concerned with objective facts and figures.
• Red Hat Red suggests anger (seeing red), rage and emotions. The red hat gives the emotional view.
• Black Hat Black is sombre and serious. The black hat is cautious and careful. It points out the weaknesses in an idea.
• Yellow Hat Yellow is sunny and positive. The yellow hat is optimistic and covers hope and positive thinking.
• Green Hat Green is grass, vegetation and abundant, fertile growth. The green hat indicates creativity and new ideas.
• Blue Hat Blue is cool, and it is also the colour of the sky, which is above everything else. The blue hat is concerned with control, the organization of the thinking process and the use of the other hats.

The book centres around the use of the six hats in the context of a series of meetings or part of a meeting. That's useful as it gives us a great deal of insight into how to conduct your self when wearing the appropriate hat.

I have to say that the idea of wearing different hats is something of a turn off for me as I first came across the idea in 1980 when an Insector came to inspect the college I was working at and he was presistently saying things like, I am now wearing my Inspector's het but if I were wearing my teacher's het ... the number of times that man changed his het beggars belief. Notice the spelling of hat, too: he said het and that jarred too!

So it took me a while to bring myself even to think about the six thinking hats: that old fashioned imagery dates the book, by the way in my opinion and that's borne out by the fact that it was first published in 1985.

That's it really: learn to focus you mind and your meetings by employing the six hats thinking methodology and you'll reap the rewards. de Bono makes these claims, however: it takes the emotion out of discussions and decisions as we are only allowed to think and talk in the six hats way. This is a relatively short book that can be read in a couple of hours or so and de Bono provides us with a lot of examples, so there is no need to go astray with it.

In the preface to the book de Bono writes:

• A major corporation (ABB) used to spend 30 days on their multinational project team discussions. Using the parallel thinking of the six has method, the discussions now take as little as two days
• Statoil in Norway had a problem with an oil rig that was costing about $100,000 a day. A certified trainer introduced the six hats method and in twleve minutes the problem was solved ...

Powerful stuff ... takes us well beyond the meetings scenarios that de Bono concentrates on in the book. So you need to make the final leaps yourself: should be well worth the effort if the two examples above are anything to go by. Of course, there could be other reasons for these successes but I'm not in a position to say so with any certainty or any foundation whatsoever!

If you are involved in meetings and decision making, buy and read this book and watch out for my reviews of de Bono's other books in this area: six values, six shoes and a few more.

Reviewer: Duncan Williamson - see all Duncan's courses here

Freakonomics

Author:Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Lubner

Freakonomics has clearly taken the academic community by storm. Are you aware that there is both a teacher and a student guide to this book? Are you aware that it has become the set text for a number of University programmes, in the USA at least? It's all true. Take a look at the authors' web site and see for yourself.

Does the book deserve such plaudits as additional guides and set text adoption? I can see why; but I wouldn't go so far as to make it a set text. Strongly advise some analysts, practitioners and accountants to read it without a doubt, however.

Freakonomics was published, in the UK anyway, in 2005 and although I bought it a while ago I have only just read it. I should advise anyone who starts in the way that I did that you are misleading yourself if you just use this as a book to dip into for the odd fact or figure.

The book is written by an academic economist and a journalist. Not that they should be scarred for life; but I believe that their backgrounds force them into the analyses they make that others wouldn't necessarily make. This is neither a bad thing nor a criticism!

What is Freakonomics, then? Freakonomics is a book for data analysts in my opinion. I say that because every chapter and section of the book begins with an hypothesis or statement or fact that is then tested with reference to one or more data sets. There are six chapters and an epilogue to contend with and the chapter titles tell you something of what you might expect. For example,

Introduction: The hidden side of everything

1. What do school teachers and Sumo wrestlers have in common?
2. How is the Ku Klux Klan live a group of real estate agents?
3. Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?
4. Where have all the criminals gone?
5. What makes a perfect parent?
6. Perfect parenting, part II, or: would a Roshana by any other name smell as sweet?

Epilogue: two paths to Harvard

Where does my data analysis comment come from? Well, many of the arguments and ideas that Levitt comes up with are supported by data or are derived from a data set. Some of the ideas that he discusses are controversial, too: the idea that the legalisation of abortions was the cause of the reduction in the crime rate in the USA 20 years or so later.

Other controversial topics include a discussion of the Ku Klux Klan, the names of African American people versus the names of Caucasian people and the implications of that. Levitt does say at various stages that some readers may be offended by the ideas and the conclusions that the discusses: so don't read what he writes.

Fair enough: no one makes us read these things and of course we don't have to agree with them. Whether the legalisation of abortion was the cause of the fall in the crime rate is, in my opinion, a matter of opinion although I do think there is some strength in the argument. We should remember that whilst talking about abortions and crime rates, Levitt also talks about regression and correlation analyses and one key aspect of such analyses is that they are suggestive and not conclusive.

What this means is that whilst Levitt has made a good argument for links between abortion and crime I don't think it's the perfect conclusion. One weakness of the book is that he doesn't provide us with his data set and having visited his web site I didn't find any data there either. However, I did look around for the data and came up with the following graph. Now I am not suggesting the Levitt is hiding anything by not providing the data; it's just that I like to play with these things!

This graph is based on data taken from this site; and the American Bureau of Justice.

Maybe you can see that the crime rate really does fall from the mid 1990s following the legalisation of abortion in the USA in the early 1970s. Convinced by that? Possibly; but isn't there something missing from the analysis? What about replicating the experiment? Isn't that one of the keys of such experimental work? In other words, is this result obtained wherever else abortion was legalised? Levitt doesn't mention this.

Levitt also pretty well dismisses the impact of increased spending on the police and on improvements in policing methodologies and so on. They must have a role to play, surely? Maybe not that dramatic but some role I think.

Please note, since I wrote this review I have come across a paper written by Levitt that does contain some of the data and so on that I was looking for. Click here to get that paper (from the Jurnal of Economic Perspectives of Winter 2004, Vol 18 No 1pp163 - 190).

If you become Levitt obsessive, you can download many of his papers from his page at the University of Chicago.

I was much more convinced by the arguments surrounding the analysis of why drug dealers still live with their mothers. That's also a perfect lesson in free market capitalism, short termism and executive pay and incentive schemes for anyone who is thinking about using this book. The student's guide provides us with a table of data emanating from this chapter and it includes data relating to total costs, fixed and variable costs, average total costs and marginal costs. Draw more graphs here, to your heart's delight! I did!

I thought that the chapter on names of different races was gratuitous and not in the least bit convincing. I think that if Levitt had asked me to review his book before publication I would have advised him to get rid of this chapter. His conclusions are interesting but just so difficult to support and so easy to ignore. At the end of it all, don't we all know that names go in and out of fashion? Aren't some people prime movers in choosing names for babies and so on? Look at our own chase to name our babies after the latest addition to the Royal Family. Sad isn't it?

Read about cheating teachers, Sumo wrestlers (I didn't know any of that and am surprised by part of it but not all) and estate agents. Some interesting data and analysis there I must say.

I thought his chapter on perfect parenting was especially weak: chapter 5. Levitt discusses the ideas surrounding what the perfect parent needs to do or to avoid in order to provide little Johnny or Jenny with the perfect start. How does he do this? He does it at least in part by discussing the impact of 16 variables on the ECLS (the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study from the US Department of Education). What this boils down to is that successful parenting is measured by the mark that a child earns at school: I'm sorry but I don't know the ECLS testing system; but it strikes me as being equivalent to saying that if your child had passed the 11 plus exam, then you can be congratulated as being a perfect parent.

Having said that, considering the 16 variables Levitt does discuss is a useful thing to do. Basing his analysis and conclusions on a data set in this is, in my opinion, extremely limiting.

There is no doubt that this is an interesting book and of course don't we all wish we'd written it or something like it? It is possible just to dip into and out of this book as I initially did; but having done that I then read it properly and realised that it is a very serious book both for economists and data analysts alike. Moreover, there is an extensive notes section at the end that is well worth reading if you are interested in using this book as more than just a good read: it's around 20 pages long.

Bear in mind that you will need to concentrate when reading this book and then bear in mind that it's entertaining and a serious data analysis book and you can enjoy it. Some of the topics are controversial however and that might cause you some concern. Finally, if you agree with everything Levitt says, then I suggest you read it again.

Reviewed by Duncan Williamson, one of our Trainers

The Undercover Economist

Author:Tim Harford

The Undercover Economist has some ringing endorsements: Steven Levitt says it is 'Required reading' (cunningly he doesn't say for whom it is required!); and David Bodanis says that 'Harford writes like a dream - and is also one of the leading economic thinkers of his generation ... reading The Undercover Economist is like spending an ordinary day wearing X-ray goggles.'

I have to say at the very outset that those two reviews have grossly oversold this book. The Undercover Economist is riddled with inconsistencies, with amateur analyses and with things that are just not true. As for Harford being a leading economic thinker, I don't think so.

I should also say that there are passages in the book that are reasonable and one or two that are good. Harford is a dreadful name dropper too: never a good sign in an author I would say.

The language in which this book was written got on my nerves and there is a section on this at the end of this review.

The basic idea behind the book is that an economist, Harford, wanders through life on our behalf looking at things from an economist's point of view. Since we mere mortals are not blessed with the insights of the economist, Harford feels that we will then bow down in awe and wonderment at what he uncovers.

Take chapter one: Who pays for your coffee? A passably interesting opening chapter; but in his haste to begin the name dropping very early on, he says this, when talking about the mark up (profit) that a coffee shop might make on a cup of coffee:

"According to economics professor Brian McManus, mark ups on coffee are around 150% ... "

Harford needed a professor of economics to do that kind of calculation? We can all do that Tim: I remember at school, the metalwork teacher giving me the self same lesson on the cost of the bag of crisps I had bought and that he was tucking into, uninvited.

To be fair, Brian McManus is listed in the notes at the end of the book: he's an assistant professor at the Olin School of Business in Washington Missouri and he has written an extensive, albeit theoretical, paper on coffee shop pricing. The url for that paper is given in those notes. Still, we could all have had a stab along the lines of my metalwork teacher!

The rest of chapter one takes us into the realms of economic rent and David Ricardo: a topic that I studied many years ago and I didn't think that Harford dealt with very convincingly.

Chapter one could have been much better with much more under cover information in it: how about the Starbucks ambiance and their penchant for providing WiFi Hotspots and how they are shuffled into the pricing/profit mix?

Chapter two: what supermarkets don't want you to know. I have to say that I found very little economics in this chapter; but there was a lot of marketing. Maybe economics has borrowed a lot of marketing jargon in the years since I last studied economics. This chapter starts with, erm, talk of coffee bars ... wasn't that in chapter one? Ah, well, yes! Then there's a lot of talk about scarcity that I found passibly useful but passingly interesting!

By the time I got to chapter five I had the distinct feeling that very little of what Hartford had done was anything other than theoretical. Much talk about statistics and economic theory but I don't think he'd get a job in many organisations as a practical economist on the strength of this. If he does, then there's hope for us all.

Chapter four: crosstown traffic has two points that caught my eye. Now I know that we can't all know everything but I would have thought that every economist would have learned that there had been a window tax in the 17th to 19th centuries here in England. I'm sure Harford has seen a building like this on his travels around England:

http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/parade/hq69/Pages/newbig.html

Why is the centre top windown of the house above not a real window? It's painted to look like a window in order to minimise the occupants' window tax levy; but to maintain the symmetry of the Georgian design.

Read the point he makes about the London congestion charge on page 98: has he reported the truth or is it the case that since the charge was introduced, the counting of vehicles has improved? Just asking.

Chapter five: the inside story, starts with a quote from one of my favourite authors, Jermoe K Jerome. That's fine! Then he says something crass about picking up a phone and buying some insurance. I think Harford would tell you that it's a joke; but I' sure some people might beleive it. Read it and see! About half way through this chapter, page 120 to be precise, Harford discusses the obtaining of a degree in philosophy and, being an economist, he makes a sweeping assumption: that in order to obtain such a degree one must be smart and diligent since such a degree is difficult to obtain. He dropped three names on the previous page, by the way: Akerlof, Spence and Stiglitz.

Harford mentions that it's not possible to insure against being sacked ... not true any more.

I will make just a couple of other points now since I think I have set the tenor of my opinion of this book: could do much better.

I thought the chapter that is largely set in Cameroon was a waste of print: Harford spent three weeks in the country and then wrote such a glib chapter that doesn't do anyone any favours. My understanding of the situation in Cameroon is limited to what Harford has written. I am still not very well informed. Let me throw in the point, though, that experts are often found wanting. I once discussed the agricultural situation in Malawi with someone from the FAO: we were both at a party in Blantyre Malawi at the time and he had jetted in from Rome for the weekend, I was living and working there. Having observed local smallholders in Malawi for a while, I suggested that they could profitably be taught how to use a plough, meaning a hand driven plough. This FAO chappie responded by talking about the problems of supplying and looking after sufficient numbers of Oxen. I didn't feel it was worth continuing the conversation with him.

I haven't followed up on this one but I did make a note to ask how Abba Lerner had "proved in 1936 that a tax on imports is exactly equivalent to a tax on exports". See page 210 where it says this.

I have to confess that although the chapter on China, chapter ten, was put together in a similar way to the one on Cameroon, I thought this one was much better. I genuinely felt better informed after this one. I also learned the word autarkic, which I hadn't come across before.

I would also like to share a similar experience to the one in chapter ten, page 253. Harford writes about an outraged letter in the Guardian Weekly newspaper following the review of Martin Wolf's book Why Globalisation Works. I took part in a discussion on an internet based discussion board populated largely by A level students and a few teachers. As part of the discussion on socialism or some such I wrote that I had met a number of people in the former Soviet Union who hankered after the Stalinist regime because at least in those times, they remembered, everyone had a job and everything worked.

You will not believe the torrent of abuse that I unwittingly unleashed. Why didn't I go back to live with the communists then? I was reviled as scum ... all I did was to report what had actually happened, that some people who lived through some or all of Stalin's period in power, told me face to face that they had enjoyed their time during it. Killing the messenger isn't in it.

That discussion became distasteful and one young gentlemen who was a first year student at Oxford University at the time wrote and told me that if ever he saw me walking around Oxford he and his friends would beat the living **** out of me. His precise words. I replied and said that as I live near Oxford and am frequently to be found walking the streets, I was genuinely now in fear of my safety and that if he didn't withdraw that threat then under common law I could pursue him though the courts for the tort of assault. I knew which College he was at so I said I might also involve his College Master as well as his parents. I told him I wanted a full, written and unconditional apology or I would follow up on my intention.

He apologised in full.

Another young man wrote to tell the discussion that he had spent the previous summer working in an office in Washington DC on foreign aid project documentation so he KNEW that I wasn't telling the truth!

These people were all at really good universities: Oxford, Durham and the LSE but their thought processes were astonishing. I found the private email address of the Durham University wallah and asked him what on earth he was objecting to and he told me that what I'd said didn't make any sense. He was reading English!

The book finishes with a section of notes if ever you felt like following up on some or al of the points that Harford has to make.

The Language of the Book

I am a member of the breed of people who finds the modern trend towards using what I call TV talk less than helpful and so now I turn to this aspect of Harford's book: his language.

I appreciate that this book has been written in a semi informal style to make it easier for the non professional economist to read. However, in the very early part of the book Harford thanks the editors of the American edition of the book: to me, this looks like the American edition.

In fact, there might be an economist sitting near you right now.
... and some of them are after the money in your pocket right now.
In the end economics is about people ... what does that mean?
Economics is all about Yang Li's choice: what a meaningless sentence.
'My God,' I said
My God,' said Fran
Estimates of the death toll from the famine range from 10 million to 60 million, roughly the entire population of England, or of California and Texas combined: what does that mean?

This book cost me £12.99 but I reckon it was around £6 too much; and you clearly need to read it with a very critical eye.

Reviewed by Duncan Williamson. See our Economic resources by registering here

       

Six Sigma for Managers

Author:Greg Brue

      

So you've heard of six sigma but you don't know what it is: here are the answers to many of the questions you might need to have answered.

So you've heard of six sigma but as far as you can see it's just a mass of statistical analysis and data: read this book and learn that it's a lot more than that.

This table is the fascination built into six sigma for me:

Probability of defects of different sigma levels
Sigma Level (Process Capability)	Defects per Million Opportunities
2	308,537
3	66,807
4	6,210
5	233
6	3.4

You do need to understand such things as standard deviations to appreciate this table (see my page on standard deviations for help!)

What that table shows you, though, is this: if you take care of quality and so on at a fairly easy, low level (just within two standard deviations) then for evey one million units or events, there is the possibility that there will be 308,537 rejects.

On the other hand, if you aim at controlling your operations at the level of six sigma, then there should be no more than 3.4 rejects per million.

That might still be an abstract idea for you so read this book and read the author's example relating to six sigma and airline baggage handling ... you'll soon see the relevance of the idea!

Black belts and Green belts: this is an idea that had me puzzling when I first started to learn about six sigma. Is six sigma based on people fling long chopping their way to quality perfection?! Not at all: six sigma embodies the fundamental improvement and development idea which is that if the person at or near the top of the organisation doesn't believe in something then that something just won't work. In my own cost systems work, I always start at CEO level and determine their commitment. If the CEO doesn't like it, no one else will.

So black and green belts are otherwise known as champions: people at or near the top of the organisation whose job it is to lead and drive the six sigma system. Not just rubber stamping; but someone whose job it really is to make it work.

The contents page of this book reads like this:

1. what is six sigma
2. why do six sigma
3. setting business metrics
4. implementing six sigma
5. roles and responsibilites
6. the core of six sigma
7. quick overview of  six sigma tools
8. selecting six sigma projects
9. how to sustain six sigma
10. six sigma proof positive

There: isn't that all you need to know? The author is keen for us to know that six sigma is more of a set of ideas and philosophies than just a set of statistical analyses: much more than total quality management too.

That's not to say that statistics and statistical analysis isn't important, it is, they are; and this book does introduce such tools (chapter 7) as

• process mapping
• XY matrix
• multivariate studies
• failure mode effect analysis

Greg Brue has written a good quality introduction to six sigma: it really is raedable and it contains a large number of tables, diagrams and real life examples that will help even the most timorous reader to get to grips with something that companies such as Motorola claim has saved them billions of dollars over a ten year period.

• at General Electric, six sigma added more that $2 billion to the bottom line in 1999 alone;
• Motorla saved more than $15 billion in the first ten years of its six sigma efforts;
• AlliedSignal reports saving $1.5 billion through six sigma.

See, it's a powerful set of ideas and unlike many management fads, along the lines of those touted by people like Tom Peters, six sigma is real, long lasting and valuable.

There you are: follow what Greg Brue has to say and it will lead you into greater things and who knows, maybe you will learn to become a statistical genius at the same time.

Reviewer: Duncan Williamson - see the courses he runs here

Tilt!: irreverent lessons for leading innovation in the new economy

Author:Louis Patler PhD

On the cover of this book it says Named Management General Top Ten Business Book of 1999 and Louis Patler is to change what Mark McGwire is to baseball Jay Condor Levinson (author Guerrilla Marketing series of books)

Firstly, and perhaps unfairly, who is management general to make such a pronouncement and secondly, is it a compliment that Louis Patler is to change what Mark McGwire is to baseball? I mean, if I said Michael Howard is to politics what Cyril Smith is to hang gliding, many people would be in the dark as I am over Mark McGwire.

My first comment stems from the fact that on page 217 of the book, Patler provides a link and lots of kind words for Management General … so, cynically, perhaps it’s a bit of mutual back slapping?

A more telling test is this: have you heard of Thoughtware; and have you heard of !eadership? The wacky spelling, !eadership, is intentional.

You may well have heard of another book that Patler co wrote, If it ain’t broke - BREAK IT! That phrase has certainly reverberated around the world. Curiously, that book is billed as being a New York Times best seller. Do they mean that it isn’t a best seller by any other definition than theirs? Just curious!

Well, to this book: it’s really a lot like lots of other management guru, how I done good, I am filthy rich on the back of this sort of stuff, are you? A lot like Tom Peters’ slop basically: lots of quotations from books, articles and television programmes. Lots of pithy sayings from himself or people he has met; and lots of down to earth philosophy that we really should appreciate that we cannot live without.

The book is an eclectic mix, therefore, of all sort of things: huddled together under these section and chapter headings:

• attitude!
• attitude
• the future
• service
• “good lucky”!
• perspective
• ideas
• innovation
• strategy
• perspective
• leadership
• talent
• retention
• globalism
• !eadership
• appendix A: the new tiltset
• appendix B: the new Thoughtware

The book starts with a prologue: here’s the start of it

My assistant, Ann Luckiesh, has a sharp eye for business wisdom. A few days ago she sent me an email from home with the heading: “If your horse dies, dismount!” Seems like a rather obvious and simple statement. Unfortunately, in business we have the tendency to delay, skirt or complicate matters, and employ a few too many strategies. As the rest of her email illustrates, too often when the horse dies, we:

1. buy a stronger whip
2. change riders
3. say things like, “This is the way we have always ridden a horse.”
4. appoint a committee to study the horse
5. arrange to visit other sires to see how they ride dead horse

You get the idea: this sets the tone for a lot of the rest of the book: Patler himself says that

The tone I have tried to set in the pages that follow is somewhere between that of the Harvard Business Review and an email to a good friend or mentor.

Don’t misunderstand me: in general, I do like books like Tilt!, although I find Peters as unreadable as I do Michael Porter’s work. I know, that’s my problem as they are two highly respected people in their respective fields and who am I?

The best approach to reviewing a book like Tilt! is to dip into it: at random, this is what I have found worthy of sharing:

Service: The “ABCD” awards: above and beyond the call of duty Patler recalls the day he was the facilitator at a Food service Summit Leadership Conference and the COO of McGuffey’s Restaurants told the story of how a waitress of his had won an ABCD award for solving a problem with a four year old waaaaaaa, waaaaaa boy who didn’t want anything other than a Big Mac. Awful end to the story in my opinion but definitely good service! (see pages 41 and 42!)

Innovation: the Monty Python Interview Exercise: M-PIE … whenever I have an issue or topic that puzzles me and find myself at an impasse, I find the smartest, zaniest person I know and ask them to interview and push me on the topic … in this case … I am trying to make a distinction between “creativity” and “innovation”.

Patler then relates the transcript of his interview with Rick Crandall PhD … questions only, here:

• why isn’t the average business creative?
• so what is the difference between creativity and what you mean by innovation?
• so, it’s a major change, not just a variation on a theme?
• what can the average employee to if they’re not in a creative -  let aloe innovative - environment?
• tell me more about people maintaining their own enthusiasm, creativity, morale, in an organisation in which they’re underpaid, overwhelmed and under appreciated
• could an individual change the culture of an organisation by planting the first grain of sand that irritates the organisation to create a pearl?

and so on, see pages 82 - 90 for the rest of the questions and Patler’s answers.

I’m sorry Mr Patler but either Rick Crandall PhD is not in the least bit wacky or you’ve edited his wackiness right out of what he did and said!

!eadership: This CEO earns a dollar a year! Netscape Communications chief executive Jim Barksdale … said he would accept only $1 in salary one year, counting instead on the company’s stock to increase his personal fortune …In a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Netscape said that Barksdale will forgo his salary and bonus because he “believes that his compensation should be linked to the long term interests of the company’s stockholders.”

In this case, let me contrast Barksdale’s apparent altruism with something from Alfred Rappaport from an article in the Harvard Business Review (How to Link Executive Pay With Performance March-April 1999):

As the Stock Market began its ascent in the mid 1990s, executive pay always the subject of heated debate, mounted along with it. That's because among the largest US companies, stock options now account for more then half of total CEO compensation and about 30% of senior operating managers' pay. One problem became particularly clear during the bull market's astonishing run: even below average performers reap huge gains form stock options when the market is rising rapidly.

The sad and stark reality is that stock options are so popular because even a moderate set of performances can be more than amply rewarded if only because of inflation. The FTSE 100, for example, is 20 years old now and has risen from 1,000 to around 5,000 in that time … we can see what a 20 year share option would, therefore, on average do for the CEO even if s/he hadn’t really performed that well.

Moreover, Rappaport also points out that any rise in the share price says nothing of the performance of competitors … it says nothing about the CEO’s performance relative to his benchmarked peers.

As another aside and as a matter of interest, I took at look at Jim Barksdale’s page on Netscape’s site and I have to say it suffers from some astonishing lapses:

• Want to write to Barksdale? Can't, no link given
• When did Barksdale put his personal page together? No idea, undated
• How do you navigate out of that page to other pages in the site? Can't, unless you follow one or more of the hyperlinks that litter the page. Some links go to other Netscape pages but others go to external sites.
• Want to click on the buttons/links to the Annual Report or Awards? Can't because they give you an error on page message!

More than that, the page has been optimised for Netscape but in Internet Explorer it looks a real mess and is an advertisement for no one!

I don’t want to be too unkind but is there a link between such a terrible page and Netscape’s overall performance in the Browser Wars? What price stock options with this performance?

Finally, appendix A is called the new tiltset and comprises a set of to, by, for exercises. To, by, for? Yes, for example:

3 The Fishbowl

TO: to keep meetings moving, to open up new lines of discussion when there are lulls.
BY: Ask participants to write out their biggest concern the largest barrier faced and/or the toughest question/topic they want addressed. All are written on small pieces of paper and dropped in a fishbowl. At random times or as needed … someone reaches in and, bingo, a new topic emerges.
FOR: The purpose is to keep involving new and important issues, to encourage discussion and communication.

There are 11 to, by, fors in appendix A and they are probably useful for teacher and trainer alike: number 2 (paper aeroplanes) will appeal to the smart aleck in you and number 9 (backcasting) appeals to me!

So I might have given the impression that this is not a good book and that it was a mistake to publish it. Well, I bought it at a huge discount six years after it was first published. I doubt that many people will remember thoughtware and tilting either. However, there are snippets in the book, lots of them too, that rattle a few brain cells and may cause people to pause for thought from time to time. That’s not a bad thing.

What is thoughtware, though? Mindset, Skillset and Toolset … read the book to see exactly what Patler is thinking here but I imagine you can work it out from this review.

Why tilt? That’s more awkward and here’s what Patler says in the preface of the book:

… given today’s business environment. there is no such thing as “a level playing field.” … If you want to “tilt the field,” simply tilt your head.

Let me finish with a niggle: on the back cover of the book it says Capstone Publishing www.capstone.co.uk Well, take a trip to that site and you’ll find that you end up at Capstone Finance who, it seems, are ready to lend you anywhere from £30,000 to £3,000,000 …

Reviewed by Duncan Williamson - see all the courses Duncan runs for OSL Training

A Bee in My Bonnet - a review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion

Have you ever turned the page of a book borrowed from the library and encountered someone else’s scribbled notes in the margin? Irritating, isn’t it? I really objected to being (sub)liminally told what to think in all those books I had to study last year. So it was a foolish choice to buy Richard Dawkins’ latest book, The God Delusion. Although its author is a Fellow at my undergraduate college who used to write quite engagingly, and it seemed to be a relief not to have to wade through acres of marginal notes to distract me, I soon realised my mistake.

The relentless tone of tub-thumping fundamentalism infesting this book really set the bee buzzing. I found myself scribbling my reactions to Dawkins in the margins! He is often wrong in his claims, but since others more qualified than I have already answered many of them,  here I will share only some of my reactions.

“Do not seek to understand in order to believe, but believe that you may understand”

Dawkins is a scientist. In Latin “scientia” means knowledge, and an honest scientist or academic researcher tries to acquire knowledge by analysing something observable, and drawing conclusions. But this is only one way to achieving knowledge, as Saint Augustine tells us above. Dawkins dismisses as irrelevant any routes to wisdom other than his own, confusing faith in a personal God with faith in the Flying Spaghetti Monster for example, because such beings cannot be observed. He arrogantly discounts miracles for the same reason:

“… miracles, by definition, violate the principles of science.”

Not by my definition! Every miracle was observed by someone. But perhaps Dawkins doesn’t consider these observers good enough scientists? Or more probably their evidence does not fit his hectoring thesis, so he conveniently ignores them and arrogantly hijacks miracles to deny faith.

Similarly he tries to deny the Gospels’ evidence:

“… the gospels are ancient fiction while the Da Vinci Code is modern fiction.”

Again, I beg to differ. Fiction consists of a plotline and characters designed to entertain the reader. The Gospels are eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ time on earth, albeit muddled in their plotlines. Clearly their muddle demonstrates that they were not written as entertainment but to reveal the word of the Creator.

The major omission Dawkins consistently makes is any reference to the divine Jesus whose actions are motivated by love for mankind. The examples of religious violence and hatred he adduces in his first chapter to belittle religion are all drawn from fundamentalist groups which do not admit of Jesus’ historical command to “Love one another”.  On the contrary, by constantly haranguing the reader to consider the vapid blandishments of atheism, Dawkins conveniently avoids mentioning all the good Jesus and his followers have done over the centuries.

But there is some light relief. Dawkins sends himself up in the shrill rhetoric with which he defines the God of the Old Testament, at the start of Chapter 2:

“In public readings of The God Delusion this is the one passage that is guaranteed to get a good-natured laugh”

I found the passage offensive actually. Dawkins is deluded to expect a good-natured reaction. This ineffective attempt at humour just isn’t funny and destroys any hope of an intellectually honest discussion.

It certainly isn’t a book I would recommend for anybody honestly curious about God, be they a trained scientist or not. One wonders, with McGrath,  whether the real reason Dawkins is so insistent on pushing atheism in this book is because atheism itself is undergoing a crisis of belief. He would be more convincing if he admitted that the only thing atheism is any good for is predicting the weather.

And now that my copy has all these irritating notes in the margins, I would rather burn it than give it away or sell it. Thank God I only wasted my money on the cheap and nasty paperback edition!