Summer Reading List – Part III

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTIONER

Title: MIT Sloan School of Management

Competencies: work/life balance, visionary leadership,  teamwork, teambuilding, customer service, technological leadership, entrepreneurial leadership, strategic problem solving, driving strategic direction

Who benefits: readers interested in current business literature

Consultant Usage: staying up-to-date, executive coaches making reading recommendations

What’s it about? (Due to an oversight, this entry is being published two weeks late – my bad.) Continuing to develop my summer reading list, I (virtual) travel this week to the Boston area to visit the always interesting and wide-ranging website of MIT Sloan School of Management to find out what their faculty have been writing about during the past 24 months.  I love this site.  You just never know what you will find.  Although I must admit that some of these books and working papers are in a form of English that I don’t understand – I am just not that bright!

He’s baaaack!  And this time he is going to save the world!  Peter Senge (The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization) and colleagues have a brand new book (June, 2008), The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals And Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World. “Imagine a world in which the excess energy from one business would be used to heat another. Where buildings need less and less energy around the world, and where “regenerative” commercial buildings – ones that create more energy than they use – are being designed. A world in which environmentally sound products and processes would be more cost-effective than wasteful ones. A world in which corporations such as Costco, Nike, BP, and countless others are forming partnerships with environmental and social justice organizations to ensure better stewardship of the earth and better livelihoods in the developing world. Now, stop imagining – that world is already emerging.”  Quick aside: I am putting this one on my reading list.

Another just out book is Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (2008) by Dan Ariely.   Irrational behavior is a part of human nature, but people tend to behave irrationally in a predictable fashion. “Drawing on psychology and economics, behavioral economics can show us why cautious people make poor decisions about sex when aroused, why patients get greater relief from a more expensive drug over its cheaper counterpart and why honest people may steal office supplies or communal food, but not money.”  No rational reason why, but I am putting this book on my reading list too!

This is an updated edition of an important book on work/life balance: Breaking the Mold: Redesigning Work for Productive and Satisfying Lives, Second Edition  (2006) by Lotte Bailyn.  The author argues that society’s separation of work and family is no longer a tenable model for employees or the organizations that employ them.

And being a customer service fanatic I want to make sure to sneak in The Outside-In Corporation  (2005) by Barbara Bund even though it goes back three years.  She is a Peter Drucker-type thinker, getting the title for her book from a phrase Drucker used 50 years ago: “(The Book) helps you develop “customer pictures” and, through rigorous customer analysis, create unique value propositions. (The author) outlines techniques for devising and implementing customer-based strategy, pricing, communication, and distribution initiatives that will drive success in the marketplace by building or remaking a business ‘from the outside in’.”

X-Teams: How to Build Teams that Lead, Innovate, and Succeed  (2007) by Deborah Ancona  and Henrik Bresman.  “Why do good teams fail? Very often, argue the authors, it is because they are looking inward instead of outward. They show that traditional team models are falling short, and that what’s needed–and what works–is a new brand of team that emphasizes external outreach to stakeholders, extensive ties, expandable tiers, and flexible membership.”

Here is a most impressive, innovative and creative MIT special: Catalyst Code: The Strategies Behind the World’s Most Dynamic Companies  (2007) by David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee.  The book offers executive and entrepreneurs a roadmap for how to create a successful catalyst business based on work with and analysis of the world’s most successful catalysts (think Visa, Amazon, eBay).  Catalysts are reshaping entire industries as they mobilize two or even more distinct customer groups around a common platform in order to create value and drive profits.

If you like technical reading: Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution  (2006) by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David C. Robertson.  “Does it seem you’ve formulated a rock-solid strategy, yet your firm still can’t get ahead? If so, construct a solid foundation for business execution–an IT infrastructure and digitized business processes to automate your company’s core capabilities. Their counterintuitive but vital message: When it comes to executing your strategy, your enterprise architecture may matter far more than your strategy itself.”

Happy summer reading. 

 

[[tags] work/life balance, visionary leadership, teamwork, teambuilding, customer service, technological leadership, entrepreneurial leadership, strategic problem solving, driving strategic direction, catalyst code, peter drucker, outside-in company, outside-in corporation, regenerative, sustainable world, behavioral economics, predictably irrational, bill bradley, william bradley,  bradley[/tags]

 

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.