Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

Someone suggested I read this book a long time ago.  Apologies that I can’t remember who, or I would note your name here.

The Book	What we thought
“Chasing the Rabbit” by Steven J Spear	An detailed, challenging read, but well worthwhile

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Because of the extensive and valuable discussion provided by the author, the following teaser does not do justice to the book – you have to read it to gain a real context.

PS - I’ve been told that there’s a newer version of the book available (now titled “High Velocity Edge“) that has a new preface and epilogue to reflect on Toyota’s recent issues.

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I’ve been asked a couple of times recently.

I am keen that all of our people live a value of persistent, ongoing improvement – in order that we can ensure that we achieve our ambitious vision for the business.

I understand that each person will do this in their own style, and want to ensure we support this.

For me, I find reading and reflecting one of the ways that I can achieve this – I know that I am better than I was 11 years ago when I had a hand in starting this business, but I also know that I will need to continue improving, each step of the way in future.

Hence I try to average out at a book every week or two.

To support this we have developed a library that’s probably bigger than those that exist in an average small business – and am happy for others to add their own preferences to our Amazon shopping cart.  Reading patterns tend to follow whatever’s of most interest at the time.

Posting about the books we read is another matter, though.

We try to do this for a couple of reasons, including:

1)  We believe it helps to reinforce whatever learnings we make in reading the book in the first place.

2)  Once written, the posts serve as a ready reference for these key learnings in future (though some of these posts are made restricted, for this reason).

3)  We believe that some of our posts will be useful to readers of the blog.

Note that some of the books we read are pretty average – we only try to post about those that offer us (and hence you) something of value.

If you did happen to purchase the book from Amazon (by clicking through on one of these links), we’d earn a couple of dollars, which would help us to buy (and hence publish reviews of) even more books.

We believe you won’t mind doing us this service.

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Here’s an interesting video (runs for an hour) promoting a new book “Glimmer:  How Design Can Transform Your Life, and Maybe Even the World” by Warren Berger (and Bruce Mau).

Seems like an interesting book, so have thrown it in our shopping cart, and will review it sometime in 2010.

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Paul Klaptocz pointed me at this interesting blog post from Stephen Few entitled “Malcolm Gladwell, modern problems, and the analytics age”.

With us having read two of his books many months ago (Blink and the Tipping Point – sorry, no book reviews up yet) and having previously discussed the follow-on from his 3rd book (Outliers) in my post about the 10,000-hour rule, I was curious to read further. read more »

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Read this book back in 2007, and wish I had read it earlier – would have saved some heartache!

The post date for this article is not totally a lie – I presented this review at our first shareholders meeting (19th January 2008), which followed the renewal process we underwent in late 2007.

Binary Review

Certainly worth the read:

The Book	What we thought
“10 Rules for Strategic Innovators” by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble	Not perfect, but it’s worth a read

This book is not perfect, but was (when I read it) confirmation of some of the gut feelings I had about some of the things we had been doing wrong in our business.

The core points in the book:

The basic principles are as follows:

Principle 1)  There are two distinctly different types of company:

(a)  Company A type are established companies, where the outcomes for the next year can be thought of as “Current + X%”.  With this in mind, management can be focused in a particular way – all about efficiencies, etc…

(b)  In complete contrast, Company B type (the authors label them “Strategic Experiments”) have a very uncertain future.  Start-ups are one type, and spin-offs another.

Principle 2)  The book then delves into the world of Strategic Experiments (NewCo) launched within established businesses (CoreCo) and, after talking through a couple of case studies, concludes that NewCo must do the following three things:

(a)  Forget (e.g. find its own culture, which is best done if it is physically separate from CoreCo)

(b)  Borrow (e.g. borrow the core expertise of CoreCo, which is best done if it is close by CoreCo).

(c)  Learn quickly (by a process of stating hypothesis, testing, refining hypothesis, etc…)

Principle 3)  The book then makes a telling point – that performance appraisal in Strategic Experiments should be:

(a)  Focused on how quickly NewCo learns from the market response, then adjusts its theories in the light on new information –

(b)  Definitely NOT on how closely it meets its targets.

Having been through the process in the early years of the company of (very much so) being a “Strategic Experiment”, I would certainly have liked to have read this book beforehand – and, as a result, not been so obsessed with targets that were total guesses in any case.