Random Thoughts from a CTO: Books

Book Review: Corporate Canaries

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 23:57:55 GMT

One of the benefits I receive as a blogger is that I am asked at times by authors or publishers if I can review a book for them. Since the books are usually around management, I love the opportunity to find and read books that I may not have seen at a bookstore or on Amazon.com.

When I first received the book Corporate Canaries by Gary Sutton, I was surprised about it's size. It's the size of a paperback, but is a hardback book. It also comes to around 150 pages with larger print than most books. So, I knew that this would be a quick read, but would it have enough substance?

I did indeed go through the book quickly, not just because of its size but the author did keep me engaged. The title of his book, and many of his references throughout the book come from the days of coal miners a century ago. In those days, coal miners brought canaries into the mines for danger warnings. At the first hint of poisonous methane gas, the little birds stopped chirping...and many miners were saved by the advanced warning. What the author tries to do in the book is to take some of the lessons learned by the miners, and corrolate them with today's corporate environment to come up with -- you guessed it, Corporate Canaries.

The idea is original, and I did really enjoy the stories around the coal miners as I felt I learned a lot about that period of time and that industry. However, I found the "canaries" or lessons learned to be somewhat straightfoward and found myself saying "duh" to many of them. But, since I am in an executive position, these lessons may be more suprising to others than myself.

The problem with the book is even though I agree and understood the problems, I found myself wanting to know more of the possible answers to these problems. This is where I felt the book was weak, the solutions were too brief, too basic and didn't have enough substance to them. They were more anecdotes than full solutions. I would have wished that the author would have put more pages in the book (as he could have afforded to without making the book too many pages) with emphasis on the solutions when those "corporate canaries" impact your organization.

Is it worth the read? If you want to get a better understanding at a high level what causes organizations to fail this may be a good read. Like I said earlier, it was also interesting to learn more about miners in the process back in a time where many things were simpler but not so much different than today's business environment. If you are looking for what to do when "a canary stops chirping", I would look for something else.

Book Review: Six Disciplines for Excellence

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 19:18:30 GMT

I first found out about this book by somebody telling me about this new blog called Be Excellent!. I was told that the author of this blog, the other "Skip" in the blogosphere (if there are more tell me!) - Skip Reardon, had some interesting things to say on his blog that I would enjoy. My initial reaction upon reviewing the site is that it felt much more of a marketing blog than the blogs that I typically read - most posts centered on the book "Six Disciplines for Excellence".   Usually those kinds of blogs turn me off quickly, but something about what Skip talked about connected with me. But, I'm a little ahead of myself...

When I moved into Executive Management about five years ago, I knew that I had a lot of things to learn. One of those areas was around strategy and long term planning.   Over the next few years, I started reading whatever books I could on the subject, some I didn't like and many that I enjoyed. However, I also found myself frustrated after reading those books. Most of them focused on theories but didn't really give you the tools, templates, processes etc that you needed to implement their theories.   Others did take you further, but it seemed that their implementation required expensive solutions with more staff than our company could take on. We are a small organization that has been around for 15+ years with a staff of just under 100 people.    We needed something that would work for our organization as we struggled with the areas of strategy and long term planning. I have also learned over the years that one size doesn't fit all and that there are no silver bullets -- so I am a little skeptical on methodologies that claim to solve all of your problems and require little work from you.

So I contacted Skip and asked him to send me a book, some for personal reasons as well as something to share with my readers through a book review.   When I received the book, I glanced over it but put it aside not sure that I wanted to read it further. Given what I had experienced before, I thought this was just somebody else's "snake oil".   Then given some struggles that I was having in my organization around strategy, I decided to start reading the book. Boy, was I in for a surprise!

First of all, the author of the book is Gary Harpst. I didn't know Gary personally but I was very familiar with his background given my IT experience. Gary used to own a company called Solomon, who provided accounting systems to small to medium size businesses. I had watched as Solomon had merged with Great Plains, then was sold to Microsoft.   I had assumed that Solomon was just another success story that had the right amount of luck and the right people.   What I didn't realize was that Solomon was a struggling small company who's future didn't look too bright. As the CEO, Gary realized that the organization needed an "Extreme Makeover" at all levels to turn things around. Thus, he planted the first seeds to this book, "Six Disciplines for Excellence".

This book is geared towards a small company who is struggling with their growth and the "startup" mentality of everybody jumping in and having more informal communication and processes with 10 or fewer people. We are talking companies that are around 10 to 100 people, who have limited resources of people and money but want to be able to plan and execute more effectively. Gary makes it a point in the book that this still requires discipline and lots of it to make things work, but if you have the right organization the things discussed in the book can work for you. There are six major steps of discipline: Decide What's Important, Set Goals That Lead, Align Systems, Work the Plan, Innovate Purposefully, and Step Back.    Many areas of management are covered including Strategic Planning, Quality Management, Integrated Learning, Business Process Automation, People Performance Management and Measure Driven Improvement.   The book also provides you the manual tools, processes, checklists etc that any "do-it-yourselfer" could take and try to implement in their business. What I found also fascinating is that the book was influenced by many people (the same people that I had read and liked the theories but didn't know how to act) including: Michael Porter (Competitive Strategy ), Stephen Covey (7 Habits of Highly Effective People), Michael Gerber (The E Myth Revisited), Robert Kaplan and David Norton (Balanced Scorecard), Peter Senge (The Fifth Discipline), and Jim Collins (Good to Great) to name a few.

But the book doesn't stop there! To really benefit and to transform a company in using the six disciplines really need more help than a "do-it-yourselfer" can accomplish. Therefore, there is also a Six Disciplines company that was established to help companies long term get established and maintain using this methodology.   If you happen to live in one of the fortunate areas where a Six Disciplines Leadership Center is located, you have access to additional training, coaches, automated tools and other resources. There are plans to have Leadership Centers throughout the country, because Gary has a passion to reach as many small organizations and help them as it helped Solomon.

Throughout the book, the Be Excellent! blog and the Six Disciplines website, you can feel the passion that comes from people like Skip and Gary. These people mean business and have a desire to truly help other companies. Their ideas are sound and proven. Their business model for Six Disciplines is fascinating. If you work especially in a small organization that is struggling with growth and lack of direction, get the book and just give it a try.   You have then taken the first step towards an answer. I believe that Gary and his company can provide the help that you need to transform your business and make it excellent!

Book Review: High Impact Middle Management

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 22:29:59 GMT

Some of you may know of Lisa Haneberg from her blog called Management Craft. If you are a regular reader of that blog, you will find that her book called High Impact Middle Management (H.I.M.M.) elaborates on many of her ideas.

She focuses her book on middle management, sort of the middle child of an organization. When it comes to books on management, they tend to focus either on the line supervisor or executive management. This is really the first book that covers all of those areas yet applies it directly to this group.

In her book, she covers strategy (H.I.M.M. Playbook), organizational improvement, bottleneck identification/resolution, performance management and coaching. Each of these areas doesn't get into absolutely everything you need to know in these areas, but is a overall good starting place to cover these topics. I found myself wanting Lisa to dive more into the details, but to do so would have made the book too large. She does a great job at the end of her book in recommending other books to gain more knowledge. Lisa ends up giving just the right amount of detail to help the middle manager, and leaves the book at a good size (240 pages in a larger print) that you can get through and digest the material quickly.

I particular enjoyed the chapter called "Mucky Muck Obstructions - Navigating the Corporate Obstacle Course". She covers such things as miscommunicating, hidden agendas, alliances, and other aspects of a dysfunctional organization and shows you how to identify and work through each of these.

I enjoyed the book so much that I have decided to use it for my managers as part of their ongoing training. I found that everything in the book is in agreement to my views on management, and it provides me a way to ensure that the other managers have a similiar foundation. Lisa's book establishes that foundation.

You can also check out more about her book at her main site, Haneberg Management. Take a look at both her book and her blog!

Book Review: It's Not What You Say...It's What You Do

Fri, 10 Jun 2005 17:39:26 GMT

If you have been over to BusinessPundit or Rob's experiment over at BusinessBlogCasting, you should already be familiar with Laurence Haughton. A few weeks back, I struck up a conversation with Laurence, and found out he recently had published a book called "It's Not What You Say...It's What You Do". If the book was at all as interesting and easy to understand as our conversations had been going, I needed to read it.

In his introduction, he sets the stage of his book by providing some research on most company's day-to-day operations. He states:

"Half of all the decisions a company makes in order to solve some problem or take advantage of some opportunities will fall through the cracks in less than two years...not because of uncontrollable factors like a recession, unexpected cost hikes or any other outside factors but simply from a lack of follow through."

He then proceeds throughout the book to talk about four primary building blocks that will help a company learn to follow through more effectively:

Having a clear direction so everyone understands where they're headed in no uncertain terms.
Matching the right people to every goal.
Getting off to a great start with plenty of buy-in.
Making sure everyone maintains their momentum by increasing individual initiative.

Using solid examples from companies that he has been talked with, Laurence has a way of cutting through the theories and getting down to some practical ideas that any company should be able to reproduce. There are other books out in the market that tackle a similar subject such as Larry Bossity's best-selling book called Execution. However, I found in reading those books that it concentrated on the issues, and only resolved them through theories and the personal efforts of management only. Laurence gets the entire organization involved, not just the upper management. He believes that it takes every level of the organization to make follow-through happen, and isn't just something that comes from the top down.

Based on my experiences, I have seen evidence that this level of collaboration (he uses a concept called HOT teams) can really work. His book also seems to agree with other books that I really like such as Good to Great; Now, Discover Your Strengths; and The Leadership Challenge. It all starts with the people, and Laurence gives you some examples and ideas to get your people engaged.

Last of all, even though many authors provide a web site or email address, most are not as approachable as Laurence has been. When he knew that I read his book, he really wanted geniune feedback from me and wanted to know how he could help in my organization. I really appreciated his openness and made me appreciate his book all that much better.

Go buy the book! I believe there is something for everyone in the book. Laurence keeps the topics simple enough that it should be adaptable to any business situation.