EclecticLip

For the book club, a decision was made to ease into the new year (at the time, 2011 was a then-new year) with a book on finances.  If for no other reason that a lot of people get stressed about money ’round the time Christmas bills arrive, and stressed employees aren’t productive employees.

J.D. Roth’s Your Money: the missing manual was chosen, because it seemed humbler (and correspondingly less hyperbolic) than other personal-finance books on the shelves.  One highlight of the book was the discussion about the hedonic treadmill, which explains why — unless you start off in abject poverty — more money doesn’t tend to make you happier.  It was refreshing to see this covered in a personal finance book, given that the book’s reading demographic probably consists of people who think having more money will, indeed, make them happier.    Another was the suggestion to make budgets simple enough that they can be followed — this spoke to me, as my own budgeting efforts have usually failed because they were so ambitiously detailed, they got too cumbersome to track.

As always, if you enjoyed the summary, please consider supporting the author by purchasing a copy of the book. 

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Your Money - the missing manual

The Corporate Lattice was chosen as the book club’s thirtieth book, in recognition of the fact that the “corporate ladder” is a poor metaphor for a companies of relatively stable size.  The situation is different for rapidly growing companies, who might need an ever-enlarging cadre of managers or directors to oversee burgeoning work teams. 

It was also recommended by a colleague who found the book useful on her return from maternity leave on a part-time basis.  Her limited availability meant she had to find a role which didn’t build directly on her career to that point, so the lattice metaphor may have helped in showing that a career move couldn’t just be “up” or “down” but sideways as well.

As a soon-to-be-father, it was surprising to find that the authors’ research found more men reporting work-life conflict than women — perhaps because companies have come to accomodate mothers’ scheduling needs, but have not yet come to appreciate the impacts of children on fathers’ availability.  Some of the book’s conclusions seemed to overreach as well, as captured in the “side notes” at the end of each chapter summary. 

As always, if you enjoyed the summary, please consider supporting the authors by purchasing a copy of the book. 

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The Corporate Lattice (summary)

Given the overriding importance of data presentation (read graphing skills) to the effectiveness of the modern “knowledge worker” it was decided that the book club would cover a book on that very subject.

Stephen Few’s Show Me The Numbers was chosen after a review of reviews (a meta-review?) on Amazon, which seemed to suggest that Edward Tufte (the giant of the field) might not be the best read for business-centric readers tied to Microsoft Excel.  Key points that stood out from the rest of the text included the “4 chunk rule” (describing the maximum limit of themes or aggregations of data people can process at a time) and the fact that when it comes to graphs, it’s the shape of the data that counts.  Not the particular values.  (If the values are critical… the data should be presented as a table!)

This review is the first (thus far at least) to be summarized in two files — a Word document and a PowerPoint slide deck — due to the benefit not just of explaining what the text was saying, but showing it visually as well.

As always, if you find the review to be useful, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 

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Show Me The Numbers (summary)

Show Me The Numbers (PPT)

A long-time proponent of the “A3″ reporting format (which aims to summarize a problem and its solution in a roughly 11″ x17″ sheet of paper) it was a delight to cover Understanding A3 Thinking in the book club. 

Having authored some epic reports and PowerPoint slide decks in my time, the prospect of condensing findings into a single – albeit large – sheet of paper, immediately piqued my interest.  It also brought to mind the quotation by Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is noting more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.
 

Consider that it’s standard form to report out insights in essay format, with complete sentences; this is as inefficient as incandescent lighting.  In Edison’s invention, only a few percent of the energy output is light (the rest is waste heat).  In a technical report I’d be surprised if more than 20% of the words relate to the discoveries; I’d bet most of the words are “filler” required to make the communication of information, conform to grammatical rules. 

While Understanding A3 Thinking did cover the guidelines Toyota uses for A3 reports (e.g. emphasizing visual methods, instead of verbal methods, for explanation) it suggested the overarching value was to ingrain rigorous problem-solving discipline in the employees.  Over the course of the problem-solving, engineers submit A3’s to their supervisors and other senior staff, who provide guidance and suggestions, both on problem-solving approach and data presentation. 

As such, by the time an A3 report is finished, it will have gone through extensive “peer review” (or “superiors’ review”) which helps improve the quality of the findings, the presentation, and the problem-solving skills of the author — who may in turn pass these best practises to future junior employees.
As always, if you enjoy the book summary, please consider supporting the authors by purchasing a copy. 

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Understanding A3 Thinking - summary

Hmm… life’s busy-ness sure didn’t return to normal, there…

Anyways, here’s the 27th book we covered in the work business book club: Financial Intelligence.  It was chosen because of the feeling that a little financial literacy could probably go a long way for engineers and other technical types.  The fact that the question “what’s EBITDA?” recurs in all of our business-update meetings also played a role. 

One of the books requiring a longer summary (which clocks in at 12 pages!) the biggest takeaway for the reviewer was that accounting is an exact science… based on rough assumptions.  I didn’t appreciate the challenges involved in trying to represent a company’s financial situation, when any number of line items may need:

• to be amortized / depreciated (e.g. capital costs for equipment, where you might need to estimate how long equipment will last before obsolescence)
• to be matched with corresponding revenues or expenses  (e.g. travelling and other costs for salespeople should be reported only when a sale is actually made, or the customer definitely spurns you)

As always, if you find the summary useful, please consider supporting the authors by purchasing the book. 

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Financial Intelligence - summary

Hmm… missed out a few weeks there.  Life’s busy-ness has only now returned to normalcy. 

Getting to Yes was chosen as the book club’s 26th volume because it deals with negotiations, which, like it or not, play a pivotal role in business.  It was expected that book club members’ careers would benefit from knowing a bit about negotiating, whether they were arranging supplier pricing, defining multi-firm partnerships, or in particular, agitating for higher pay & benefits. 

The book’s emphatic message that negotiators should focus on interests instead of positions, was probably the main takeaway — the one-sentence summary.  One book club member did offer that the BATNA concept was most pivotal in their own supplier dealings.  In short, he found it difficult working with suppliers who had a strong BATNA (Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement)… because the status quo worked well enough for them; they had no driving incentive to negotiate a new arrangement.

As always, if you enjoy the book summary, please consider supporting the authors by purchasing a copy of the book. 

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Getting to Yes (summary)

For the book club’s “silver anniversary” selection, it returned to the theme of human behaviour examined previously in Gut Feelings (#13) and to a lesser extent in The Tipping Point (#4) and First, Break All The Rules (#12).  As complexity theory has gained prominence over the past year, research for a book on that topic was made, with the club eventually deciding on The Perfect Swarm.

The volume’s treatment of group intelligence and the problems associated with consensus decision-making, are highly-relevant to business decisions – and R&D in particular.  When research teams push new boundaries, they tend to defer to the most-expert member when it comes to drawing conclusions or deciding on a path-forward; but the book cites work suggesting that diversity of opinion is key for selection the best options.

As always, if you enjoy the book summary, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 

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The Perfect Swarm (summary)

Steven Sharp’s book The High Velocity Edge (previously titled Chasing The Rabbit) was chosen as the book club’s 24th book, on the recommendation of a university professor.  In some ways a complementary volume to The Toyota Way, the book proved an extraordinarily valuable read.  And happily, while the book is somewhat Toyota-centric, other successful organizations also received chapters of their own.

The author is a multiple Shingo Prize winner, and its premise is that success at Toyota and similar “high velocity” organizations comes not from the tools deployed at the firms… but rather, by the culture that invents those tools.  More bluntly, the use of “lean manufacturing” tools (5S, value stream mapping and so forth) does not correlate with corporate success.  The creation of a corporate culture with the discipline to remain dissatisifed with the status quo, is far more important.

As always, if you enjoy the book summary, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 

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The High Velocity Edge (summary)

Joseph Heath’s economics primer Filthy Lucre was chosen as the club’s 23rd book summary.  This choice was spurred by the seemingly-unprecedented furore about the implementation of the HST in British Columbia.  In light of this, it was felt appropriate to do a book on economics; and this tome, which critiques fallacious right-wing and left-wing ideas, seemed a good, neutral choice.

The HST — which harmonized provincial and federal taxes (hence its initials, which stand for Harmonized Sales Tax) — seems to be sensible policy, from my reading; Canada’s most populous province, Ontario, implemented one at the same time without nearly as much rancour.  I imagine the backlash in BC stems from the governing Liberal Party (by Canadian standards a far-right-wing party, despite its name) committing during the recent election campaign that it wouldn’t implement an HST — then reversing its position several weeks after the election.

As always, if you enjoyed the book summary, please consider supporting the author by purchasing a copy of the book. 

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Filthy Lucre - summary 

Douglas McGregor’s monumental volume, The Human Side of Enterprise, was the book club’s 22nd selection.  Penetratively insightful even for today’s readers (who have the added benefit of the recent “empowerment” fad) it must’ve been an astonishing read to his contemporaries.  One of them — W.L. Gore — famously ingrained this thinking into his company’s culture.  Even the name W.L. Gore & Associates (the firm’s employees all have the nominal title “Associate”) reflects McGregor’s advice to eschew titles.

Striking in McGregor’s tome is its implied criticism of Taylorism (or at least its excesses) — which tended to separate a workforce into “brains” (management) and “brawn” (labour).  While Taylor’s (followers’) dualism would have made Descartes proud, it prevented most of the workforce from reaching its potential.  Besides, power corrupts, and the concentration of power in management probably didn’t do the company much good.

The Starfish And The Spider (book 9) is a particularly complementary book club selection.

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The Human Side of Enterprise - summary