Recently, I’ve been finishing off the book “Chasing the Rabbit” by Steven J. Spear.
The book has a passage that provided a much clearer description of something I’ve tried to explain to various people at various times over the past 11 years.
It’s a quotation from a person relating their experience in a personal performance review:
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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).
Maybe because I could not recall the previous review, this book was not what I expected….
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The Book |
What we thought |
 “What got you here won’t get you there - how successful people become even more successful”by Marshall Goldsmith |
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… but I found it excellent! |
| Full Disclosure – yes, that’s a tracked link to Amazon shown above. We buy quite a large number of books on a wide range of topics, all relevant to our business in some way. If you did happen to purchase the book from Amazon, they’d throw a few shekels our way, which would help us to buy (and hence publish reviews of) even more books. Hence, Karma would return the benefits to you… |
No, we’re not dead. We’re doing decidedly better (even) than an “ex-parrot” nailed to the perch.
In fact, just last week the guys in the office put together a document listing a large number of things we have going for us, or are doing right. Here’s my short summary of what they said:
(A) Business Vision
There was universal agreement that the underlying vision for the business was sound (after all, most employees, and even a few ex-employees, have invested in the company in Round 3 or Round 2).
It was also reiterated that our chosen business model was also one of our advantages.
We are also not afraid to pause for introspection, such as discussed here.
This week we launch NEM-Watch 8.2, an upgrade to our much loved market watching software. This upgrade was started in early 2008 while I was living in the UK and needed some extra cash to fund my global exploits. Armed with a laptop and VB6, I began NEM-Watch’s transformation from ugly duckling to swan. The 15 months that followed would be a roller-coaster ride providing some valuable life lessons and highlighting many of the do’s and don’ts of software development. It’s hard to make duck-lovers take to a swan. read more »