Author:Doug Stephens

Author:Joel Mitch

Publisher: Business Plus

Comments: According to Mitch Joel, a number of elements have converged to change business forever. It is time to Ctrl Alt Delete your business, reboot and start again. The author of Six Pixels of Separation claims we are in "business purgatory". However, there are a number of things we can do and this applies to people also who risk finding themselves unemployable. None of the points he makes are truly original but they are phrased interestingly and brought together to form a powerful message of change.

Authors: Robert Scoble, Shel Israel

Author: Jonah Berger

Author: Nick Waplington (photographer)

Author:Jeff Fromm and Christie Garton

Author:Sheryl Sandberg

Author: Brad Stone

Author:Michael Lisicky

Author: Natasha Frazer-Cavassoni and Mark Shaw (photographer)

Author:Philippe Verheyde

Author: Doc Searls

Author: Monica Burckhart

Author:Jan Whitaker

Author: Didier Grumbach

Author:Leonard Koren

Author: Geoffrey A. Moore

Publisher: Portfolio

Comments:A real classic on innovation in companies, Dealing with Darwin is one of the few books which really try to classify types of innovation and therefore get away from the common trend of calling every innovation “disruptive”. Geoffrey Moore divides types of innovation into three zones: a) product leadership zone; b) customer intimacy zone and c) operational excellence zone. Each of the three includes four types of innovation. The first one, for example, includes “platform” innovation as demonstrated by Microsoft. The second, experiential innovation such as that found at Starbucks. And the third, process innovation as exemplified by Dell. This is a rich and methodical discussion which, like some others, recognises the need to run a business simultaneously with chasing and developing innovative practices and ideas.

watch him

See also The Day After Tomorrow: how to survive in times of radical innovation by Peter Hinssen

and The Three Box Solution: a strategy for leading innovation by Vijay Govindarajan

Author:John Londei

Author: John Maeda

Publisher: The MIT Press

Comments: In this short book, John Maeda from MIT’s Media Lab offers ten laws for balancing simplicity and complexity in business, technology and design. In Maeda’s world, improvement is not synonymous with more. The clean look of the iPod has made simplicity fashionable. Yet, the paradox is that we want something that is simple and easy to use at the same time as we want something that can do everything we want it to do.

Maeda's first law of simplicity is "Reduce." It's not necessarily beneficial to add technology features just because we can. And the features that we do have must be organized (Law 2) in a sensible hierarchy so users aren't distracted by features and functions they don't need. But simplicity is not less just for the sake of less. Skip ahead to Law 9: "Failure: Accept the fact that some things can never be made simple." Maeda's concise guide to simplicity in the digital age shows us how this idea can be a cornerstone of organisations and their products, how it can drive both business and technology. We can learn to simplify without sacrificing comfort and meaning, and we can achieve the balance described in Law 10. This law, which Maeda calls "The One," tells us: "Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful."

Author: Arie de Geus

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press

What: A somewhat idealistic vision of corporate organisations but with interesting elements for department stores

Why it is important: Many of the characteristics of Living Companies can be found within department store companies, especially within IADS members. In these times of reinvention, reading with a fresh eye this theory (which did not get old) can be helpful for strategists and HR.

Aries de Geus worked for 38 years at Royal Dutch/Shell, where he developed the concept of “learning organisation”. His book “The living company” is the result of his career-long reflection on the reasons why only a handful of companies managed to exist more than the average Fortune top 50 companies’ lifespan of 50 – 60 years, and the lessons that can be learnt.

What are “living” companies?

De Geus, a second-generation executive at Shell (founded in the 1890s) realized that he and his colleagues took for granted that their firm would never die, an idea that was contradicted by statistics. Only a handful of companies in history, such as Stora (Sweden, 700 years old) or Sumimoto Group (Japan, founded in 1590) managed to survive more than a century.

The theory supporting his book is the belief that managers focus too much on producing goods & services and by doing so forget about their company’s organisation itself, as a social body. He identified 4 common traits to all these long-lasting companies:

• They are sensitive to their environment (learn, react and adapt to the context),
• They are cohesive and promote a sense of identity,
• They are decentralised,
• Financing new projects are carefully assessed and evaluated (conservative financing).

Such companies are adapting to any new context without compromising their core identity because they focus on maintaining and growing their organisation to its full potential, instead of simply maximising their revenue.

To be able to do so, these firms developed the capability to interpret any kind of information, in order to make the best-informed decisions (de Geus argues that historically, wealth started by being generated by land, then by capital, and finally by knowledge. As of today, there is no example of companies that failed due to a lack of natural resources: they failed because they could not interpret changes and adapt to a new context).

Implementing the scenario-planning capability at Royal Dutch / Shell

The goal was not to predict the future, nor to make plans that invariably ended up becoming constraints and commitments. For de Geus, the objective was to work on various real-time scenarios, acting as an eyes opener for decision-makers without being fairy tales. This approach helped to assess decisions without taking too many risks (which is still often the case today: directors and managers make decisions and experiment directly with reality, instead of making simulations).

The author describes in the central part of the book his approach and implementation of the scenario capabilities within Royal Dutch / Shell, and how he addressed resistance from the various teams involved.

Going further: not having a strategy, “doing” the strategy

For German researcher William Stern, each living being has an undifferentiated wholeness, with its own character, the persona. The persona is characterised by:

• A goal: it wants to live as long as possible to realize its potential,
• A self-consciousness,
• The ability to understand the outside world and interact with it,
• The knowledge that its lifespan is finite.

De Geus uses this theory for companies and explains that the concept of persona applies to firms, allowing all its members (teams) to share the notion of membership to such an organisation, the choice to share a common fate. He also explains that there are 2 types of companies:

• “Economic” companies, which maximise profits and minimise resources used to do so. People are considered as assets in such organisations, and the membership level is very low (translated by low levels of loyalty and commitment),
• “River” companies, which primarily share a purpose to a community. Profit is seen as a mean and not an end. Companies such as Mitsui, or Deutsche Bank, which were both virtually destroyed after WWII but survived and thrived in the post-war period thanks to the support of their communities, are examples or river companies.

“River” companies are able to progress because not only they understand and interpret their environment, but because they process the information in a valuable way for their survival, thanks to 3 mechanisms:

• Innovation is favoured at all levels (individual or collective),
• Information is flowing freely between teams
• Interaction and mobility are encouraged.

This helps such companies to learn on a constant basis, instead of steering. In other words, “do” their strategy rather than “have” a strategy. In de Geus’ vision, money for such firms is not an end, but a tool: profit is part of the equation to survive, along with other elements, such as people, mission, and place in the society as a whole.

Buy it on Amazon here: The Living Company Amazon

Author: Frederick F. Reichheld