Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

Not sure where I first heard about this book, but it has been one of a number that have sat in our bookshelf for a while (we run a quasi-LIFO reading line).

Something prompted me to pick it up, and I am grateful I did.

1)  Binary Review

The Book	What we thought
“Simply a Great Manager” by Michael Hoyle & Peter Newman	. A useful slant on uncommon “common sense”

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Dear valued clients (that means all of you),

This week we have had new business cards printed and I have personally changed my email signature. My new job title is “Magician, Miracle Worker and Mind Reader”, which is so much more fun and interesting than my old title “Product Manager”.

Of course I am not actually a magician, do not read minds or work miracles. I do, however, seek to understand your needs better so that I can better serve you and grow myself as an individual.

When I say I seek to be a mind reader, what I mean is that I wish to understand and learn about your needs. When I say I seek to be a magician, I mean that I desire to be able to conjure the best solution to your problems. When I say I seek to work miracles, I mean that I wish to provide you with service so exceptional it will appear miraculous.

Obviously I have a long way to go and learning how to do these things is a large part of my professional growth. I would be particularly interested in any comments or suggestions that you have in how I can better accomplish my goal of being the best product manager around. Please let me know what you think, I’d love to hear from you.

Sincerely,

Stephen Hurn
Magician, Miracle Worker and Mind Reader

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Having completed our business autopsy back in July and implemented a number of changes resulting from this, we have not left it at that. Rather, in a similar way to our philosophy of lifetime learning, we also support a principle of lifetime improvement (from a combination of numerous small increments, or larger step-changes).

Hence, we met with Ross Jolly of Sound Reasoning recently (following on from Evan Fortune’s presentation at an IIB event), and he mentioned this book.

This had been read and reviewed many months ago by someone else, but I did not recall the details**.

** This is one reason why we have instituted the process of having book reviews posted on the blog, for future reference as memory joggers (basically, to ensure we actually gain better value from what we read).

1)  Binary Review

Maybe because I could not recall the previous review, this book was not what I expected….

The Book	What we thought
“What got you here won’t get you there - how successful people become even more successful”by Marshall Goldsmith	. … but I found it excellent!

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Having read, and enjoyed, “The Discipline of Market Leaders” by Treacy and Wiersema many years ago, I was anticipating some more useful insights in his latest book.

1)  Binary Review

However, I would have to admit to being underwhelmed with this one.

The Book	What we thought
“The New Market Leaders”by Fred Wiersema	. Underwhelming (especially considering the previous book)!

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That’s not to say that the book was a total waste of time – just that, the time spent reading this book could be much more productively spent reading a number of other books written in the same manner – particularly “Good to Great” and “Built to Last”, and (as noted above) the author’s earlier work.

In the interests of providing you some value in this post, here’s a couple of observations I made from the book .

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In recent times we have been looking to the future, trying to be more thoughtful about how we structure the many things we need to get through each day in order that we can achieve our growth targets.

Hence, I pulled out an old copy of the article “Job Sculpting – the art of retaining your best people” (by Timothy Butler and James Waldroop) which I had been given a number of years ago.

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This week I was interested to read an article in the AFR titled “Picking leaders the brainy way”.  For internal staff, the PDFed article is in eLibrary.

This was of particular interest to me, as I know that this is a challenge that we have struggled with over the past 10 years.   Hence, we’re keen to improve at it, as much as we can (and, by extension, if you can help us do so, we’d like to hear from you).

Note that this is not to say that we have a bad bunch of employees currently – just that we’ve had to do a bit of “getting the right people on the bus” in the past, and probably will have to do more in future.

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Following my previous post (book review of “Tale of Two Systems” – but really a consideration of Agile & Lean Software Development) I have continued to read, and think (yeah, dangerous, I know).

The following two posts will be of interest:

1)  This post from the HBR Editor’s Blog titled “How do innovators think?” provides many good points (and some of the added comments at the bottom are great as well) but I want to cut to the chase and highlight the “5 Discovery Skills” included in the article:

Skill 1 = Associating – a cognitive skill that “allows creative people to make connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas”.  Like being able to find your way without needing a map.

Skill 2 = Questioning – like asking the “5 why’s”

Skill 3 = Observation, and (particularly) doing it really well – well enough to pick up nuances in behaviour, etc….

Skill 4 = Experimentation – try a lot of things and keep what works, as noted by Collins and Porras.

Skill 5 = Networking – the post notes that the key is that the networking is done with smart people who have little in common with them, but from whom they can learn.

2)  I read in the comments that someone has already made the link with Agile Software Development.  Here’s commentary by Bob MacNeal on his blog.

In particular with respect to Bob’s post, he has omitted the 3rd skill. I am not sure why he has done this, or if it is deliberate.

However one of the comments underneath sums it up when they note “To write great software you need to observe the detail that’s not included in the written version of the requirements.”  (my emphasis added, as I totally agree)

Given the challenges, opportunities and uncertainties our business faces, we need all 5 in spades!