Nine Lies is a research backed dive into a range of received business knowledge that is less true than it appears on first hearing.
It looks at a range of reasonable sounding statements about organisations and leadership, and strips them back to some real meaning.
The truth is that people find meaning in work through the teams that they work with, more-so than the entire organisation. They understand their own strengths, and are most inspiring when they make use of their strongest ones.
The best companies recognise this. They cascade meaning to the people in their teams rather than enforce obedience. They plan, but only really to gather intelligence about the world. When the world moves on, they throw the plan away, but know where they are going.
The best, most engaged teams are those that trust their leaders, trust each other and know they can do good work every day by bringing their strengths to bear. There’s no simple model, no one-size fits all and no quick measure of what’s good.
Super frustrating for anyone who wants to rely on numbers, models and check-box assessments.
Instead, you need to understand the problem, the context and the people. We all know that you can’t reduce people to numbers, and that some leaders will suit some teams more than others, but in a big org it’s tempting to fall back on the comfort of a spreadsheet or a two-by-two grid.
If you want to build a powerful and engaged org, then the ideas in this book are a great starting point. They’ll guide you on how to understand where you are today, to find the best teams and support them to be even better and to transform every team into one that’s a high performer.
This one’s certainly worth a space on the bookshelf!
James Osborn 