Category: Book Review

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Book Review Coaching Leadership

The Goal

The Goal - Front Cover of the book

There’s loads of value in going back and revisiting the classics, not just to remind ourselves why they are a classic, but also to see which of those lessons we are missing out on and could be making more use of in our day-to-day lives.

The Goal is one of those classics that anyone in a large organisation should take the time to read. It’s a story based around a struggling factory, a company under stress and a leader who can’t find the way forwards. It’s also a lot more than that. It’s a primer in system thinking, the theory of constraints and some of the basics of queuing theory.

Before you go too far, it is also worth highlighting that it’s a bit of a product of its time, some of the scenario is very “mid century American corporate”, whilst the trappings may feel dated, the core principles are solid.

It strips everything back to the core question. What is the end goal of a company? To make money by providing maximum value. What other measures matter? None.

You go through a journey of learning, identifying where the bottlenecks are, removing them in turn and finding more capacity than you ever thought you had, with no fresh investment.

Forcing things through, chasing with “urgency” might just fight your immediate fire, but it won’t transform your delivery, or get you out of a hole. Only taking the time to step back, to look at everything going on, find the thing that is constrained and fixing it. Only having that discipline will make a difference.

We learn that making assumptions is misleading. We need to get out on the shop floor to really see what’s going on. We all learn that small fluctuations lead to large delays in the end, especially as the number of steps increases.

Wherever you can remove a dependency, you speed everything up. Each time you remove wasted effort from your bottleneck, you speed everything up. Where you find a way to put more resources to serve your constraint, you speed everything up.

When you look at the system overall, you see the cost/benefit equation differently. The costs of an hour in the bottleneck is a cost of an hour of overall production.

Improving things that aren’t the bottleneck is just waste. Piling up more half finished things in a queue for a constrained machine is a cost, not creating more value.

Improving the bottleneck is worth doing even inefficiently. You don’t consider the cost of the step, you must measure against the cost of value forgone overall.

This way of thinking isn’t easy to come by, it’s a lot easier to manage a dependency, to optimise on the micro and to celebrate getting your bit done. Switching to this model of systems thinking requires discipline, and it requires lots of belief. These findings are counter-intuitive, and contrary to the easy answer or standard thinking.

You need to convert the production line concepts to your own context, which you can do in any creative endeavour.

Give people this book, get them to read it and then you can start your experiments in optimising the system and delivering the most possible value!

Categories
Book Review Coaching Harvard Business Review Leadership

Power to the Middle

Book cover image of "Power to the Middle"

Power to the Middle is a McKinsey book that tries to “bust the stereotypes of the middle manager”. It’s a fair departure from some of the familiar consultancy cost cutting practices, and a lot closer to the ideas presented in Slack, around building resilient organisations in the ever faster changing world of work.

It’s research backed, with a wide range of stories around the central message. Middle Managers really are the glue in your organisation. They are the ones that connect up the people on the ground with the Executive direction, and the ones that bring strategy to life.

Each chapter of the book addresses a specific topic, and leaves you with 2-3 key points to help make sure that you are making best use of the vital Middle Manager role. From moving them into the coaching and development role they need to occupy, to crafting the role as an attractive destination, to allowing Middle Managers to take on strategy and craft it to fit their own specific needs and circumstances.

Command and control approaches through brittle structures are not going to give you the flexibility and innovation needed to survive in the modern world, and unlocking the power of these connectors is key to a successful future.

The key takeaways ensure that you are able to give some actions to your managers, while also making sure you are taking the right actions to support them, it’s a nice balance to show that everyone has to put the effort in to realise the value.

It’s overall an easy read, well broken down into contained chapters with those key messages to enable you to summarise quickly. It’s also great to see this kind of thinking coming from a major consultancy, transforming the manager role and unlocking all the potential held within it is much more refreshing than seeing it as waste that can be cut.

As the world changes ever faster, we must be effective, and recognise that that costs more than a perfectly efficient machine created for an unchanging purpose. We can’t optimise for now, we have to optimise for the change we know is coming, and we’ll do that with flexible, empower managers able to shape their teams to deliver on the overall strategy of the organisation.

Categories
Book Review Coaching Leadership

Surrounded By Idiots

Front cover of Surrounded By Idiots

There are fools everywhere, and sometimes you can feel like they are just there, getting in your way, not understanding you, and frankly being dense just for the sake of it.

Surrounded By Idiots is an immensely readable book that takes this opening premise, and gives you the “four colours” of people to help you understand they aren’t idiots, they are just different.

As with any profiling tool, you need to take what you find to be valuable from the book. Don’t just box yourself into one of the colours and use that as a new crutch to justify why things don’t go well for you!

The book has loads of examples to help you understand the Red, Yellow, Green and Blue profiles. From the dominant, pushy Now now now types familiar to every Sales org, to the precise and methodical Blues of your data analytics department, Thomas Erikson guides you through an explanation of the profiles, how they work and what matters to them.

He helps you understand how to connect better across the divide. How do you appeal to someone who shows mostly Green characteristics? How do you meet in the middle, or at least somewhere away from your centre?

He works through the hard stuff, giving feedback, feeling angry and what saps our energy. Knowing all this helps you pull a disparate group together, leaning on strengths and rounding out weaknesses.

The key takeaway is that we are not all the same, and so to get on we have to work together to build our community. By putting in the effort to understand people we can build better and stronger relationships, and have a more fulfilling life with less stress.

A very noble goal, and again, a very engagingly written book. I’m sure you will enjoy it, and you’ll definitely learn something from it!

Categories
Book Review Coaching Leadership

Team Topologies

Front cover of the Team Topologies book

Team Topologies is a great book by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. It gives you methods to organise your technology teams for fast flow, and a simple way to categorise those teams.

It’s a short and punchy book broken into three key sections. We start with Org Charts, Conway’s Law and teams as the unit of development. The second section takes you into the meat of the book, covering team anti-patterns, the four fundamental topologies and how you might choose sensible boundaries. The last section is focused on interactions between the teams, and methods of iterating towards the structure.

The big ideas are really around long lived teams as the unit of software delivery, that there are only really a few types of team, and that we can choose to target high flow and iterate towards it over time.

Flow doesn’t mean efficiency, so a lot of the identified anti-patterns are where an organisation has attempted to be efficient (handing over work, creating queues and specialist groups), targeting least overall effort, rather than soonest delivery of value.

The book highlights a number of times that you must have good engineering practices as a pre-requisite. If you are not able to release software easily and with confidence, or to do so in an automated manner, then you will need to fix that before gaining value from this structure.

It’s also clear through the book that attempting to suddenly move all teams into the model on day 1 is unlikely to work, that iterative and adaptive approach is most likely to be successful, especially via the analysis of cognitive load on teams, and splitting responsibilities where they are overloaded.

I think it’s easy to get excited by the simplicity provided in the book, with four team types and three interaction modes, there’s a lovely easy classification system, and engineers love to put things into buckets or give them a label.

In a mature existing org it’s unlikely that you’ll get a perfect one to one mapping ever, but the taxonomy does give you a chance to start using the same language when describing teams, and an ideal to aim towards.

The case studies and tips scattered through the book bring this to life. Iterations on orgs take years not days, as they need to bed in and become part of the culture. The first thing you try is going to be wrong, so the examples where people have iterated over time are particularly enlightening.

I think that a lot of the core ideas will be familiar to org minded thinkers, but they are pulled together in a compelling way. There’s a lot of value in the approaches outlined, but they require discipline to understand fully, to recognise the foundations that must be in place to be successful and the willingness to iterate as the org continually moves forwards.

Simplicity is hard, don’t fall into the trap of thinking it’ll all be easy once your leadership team has read the book and you’ve rebadged all your teams in team topologies terms.

Be willing to put in the work, and you’ll be rewarded with a shared set of terminology, and a repeatable process for building out teams that deliver the maximum possible value in the shortest time.

Categories
Book Review Coaching Leadership

2023 – Top 5

Winner Every Time text on top of teddy bears
Photo by Robert Linder on Unsplash

It’s time for the annual top 5, and it’s tools and books taking top spot once again:

  1. Radical Candor
  2. Coaching Spectrum
  3. Coaching Tools – Scaling
  4. Tech Debt
  5. All Good

Two new entries from this year’s posts, all about Tech Debt (and good news for followers of this story, I’ve got my new windows coming in the Spring), and All Good, how only positive feedback can be limiting!

A big positive is the continued overall growth of the site, doubling the number of visitors since last year. I’m super happy that people are finding value in this content, and that they keep coming back for more.

Here’s the top 3 from my LinkedIn Wednesday Coaching series:

  1. Is average good enough?
  2. What’s your default style?
  3. What’s another way to look at it?

If these resonate with you, then why not have a go at answering them for yourself? And if you’d like to see more, then join me over there and get involved.

I’ll be sharing some more book reviews in the New Year, and if there’s anything specific you’d like me to cover, just drop me a line at james@jamesosborn.co.uk or connect on LinkedIn, I’d love to hear from you.

Categories
Book Review Coaching Leadership

Slack

Slack Front Cover

Tom de Marco’s Slack is a great example of why we should go back to the classics, rather than chase the hotness of the thousand new business books released every month.

It’s short and powerful, and hits you with the core message early and often. Efficient organisations are brittle. They cannot react to changing conditions, and things often take longer to achieve end-to-end.

Instead, we should strive to be effective by ensuring there is Slack in the system.

We recognise that people are not fungible units of resource. It takes time to change contexts, to build expertise and to get good at a job. Splitting someone’s focus to two tasks comes with an effectiveness cost. Splitting them to several means they may as well not be there. The orchestration costs more than the benefit they bring.

Sometime you need people to not be 100% busy, so they can do the important thing when it turns up. The value is in being able to absorb the change, and to be effective you need to accept the ‘cost’ of them not ‘producing’ all the time.

More pressure slows people down, knowledge work requires space to think, experiment and think again. You don’t get better long term outcomes by forcing more onto people, you get better outcomes by them having space to breathe.

Tom takes us through thoughts on how to scale this thinking to the organisation, on the right time to drive change (before things go bad), and why the connecting layer of leadership is key to giving you this successful org.

Watch out for the push to efficiency if you want to be effective!

Categories
Book Review Coaching Harvard Business Review Leadership

Nine Lies About Work

Front cover of Nine Lies About Work

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!

Categories
Book Review Coaching Leadership

Range

David Epstein’s Range argues that in the modern world it’s generalists who will succeed over specialists in a wide variety of situations.

There are a few narrow fields where early specialism may triumph. Easy learning environments where you get quick feedback on what went right or wrong. Things that have repeatable elements that you can reliably master. Chess, golf and playing certain instruments can all match these criteria, and we can all think of examples of people who specialised early and went on to be masters in the field.

However, wicked problems are not so tractable to the early specialisation. Things that take longer to see success or failure. Areas where novel thinking is required, or connecting multiple dots from different disciplines leads to success. In these areas, early specialisation can be harmful, the focus on mastery of a narrow area leads to solution blindness. Every problem is solved with a hammer, no matter if it’s a nail or not.

The book argues for early sampling before applying focus to attempt to achieve mastery. Most of the most successful people at even the repeatable problems try out a range of things before settling on the one that they connect most with, and that sampling time gives them confidence that they connect well with what they’ve settled on, and the grit to succeed.

It’s not the case that we don’t need specialists, they move forwards the state of the art, they go deep into problems and create something new. Generalists can span across these deep solutions, connect them in novel ways and bring to bear existing solutions from one domain, to solve a problem in a way a specialist would never be aware of.

Epstein also gives practical advice to make use of these generalist successes. Take the time to sample in an area. Support children who are doing so and don’t worry if they ‘fall behind’ early on, once they find fit they’ll accelerate ahead of the early strivers. Don’t get held up on grit to be successful, you need to want to be there before getting gritty matters.

Make use of existing tools. Learn from specialists and take the best of what they know to solve problems in your areas.

Create diverse groups to solve problems more effectively!

Range is a great book to look at what learning techniques and approaches work well in the wicked modern world, how we’ve fallen for some bad assumptions on specialisation and how we can balance the two to be more than the sum of our parts.

Categories
Book Review Coaching Leadership

Managing Humans

This is Michael Lopp’s first book, now on its fourth edition. It’s sixty chapters, short pieces of advice, anecdotes and stories.

If you are familiar with the blog, then it’s very much like revisiting some old friends, but polished up and putting their best foot forwards.

It covers every core leadership topic, from how to hold a 1-2-1 to how to manage the rumour mill, and on to navigating reorgs and the politics that go with them.

I read through the fourth edition in couple of sittings, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of “just one more” as each chapter really is only a few pages long. However, I’d say the real value lies in dipping into a particular chapter that’s related to current concerns, absorbing the lessons and putting them to use in your context.

Not everything will be valid for you. If you are in a high growth tech start-up then a lot of it will be, in other organisations you might be able to take less overall. Lessons on individual leadership, meeting culture and the needs of people will be universal.

I found that the thread running though the book was less well formed than in The Art of Leadership, which Rands recognises as having the fuller arc.

As a leader, especially in a tech org, if you were only going to read one, I’d point you to Art of Leadership, but I really think you’d benefit from both!

Categories
Book Review Coaching Leadership

The Scout Mindset

Julia Galef gives us “The Scout Mindset“, a book about developing your skills in seeing things how they are, rather than how you hope they might be.

We start off by looking at two types of thinking, the Soldier and the Scout. Soldier thinking is both defensive and aggressive. There’s a truth, I know it already and I need to protect it against the assaults of others. Scout thinking is focused around discovering the truth that we don’t yet know. It’s about exploring, improving the map and throwing the old map away when we learn more.

The Soldier approach has value in some situations, and is usually our default way of approaching problems. The Scout mindset is less common, unfamiliar, but likely to be better for the complexities of modern life. So how do we move from one model to the other?

Julia gives four key stages to moving towards the Scout mindset:

  1. Develop Self Awareness – Understand when you are thinking like a Scout or a Soldier
  2. Thrive Without Illusions – Get comfortable living with how things are
  3. Learn to Change Your Mind – Be comfortable being wrong, and celebrate steps towards the truth
  4. Rethink Your Identity – Don’t let beliefs define who you are, as it makes it harder to accept change

Through these stages, there’s some great deep dives on some surprising topics, ranging from how boundlessly positive thinking can be harmful, to how you might have to do things that aren’t obvious to have the biggest impact.

It’s well written, and the book doesn’t endlessly labour similar points or loop over and over on the key message. There’s lots of practical advice, and a great collection of references and further reading to pick-up on.

Any leader working in complex spaces would benefit from reading this book, and trying to think more like a Scout.