A New Way to Think: Your Guide to Superior Management EffectivenessMore recently, Marshall Goldsmith asserted that “what got you here won’t get you there.” My own opinion is that what got you here won’t even allow you to remain here, much less get to there, however “here” and “there” are defined. Warren Buffett once suggested that bad habits are too light to notice until they are too heavy to break. Business models consist of a cluster of individual and organizational habits. Over time, people become hostage to what James O’Toole so aptly characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom.”
Roger Martin wrote this book to help those who read it to think differently about the essentials of management: context (competition, stakeholders, and customers), making choices (strategy and data), structuring work (culture, knowledge work, and corporate functions), and key activities (planning, execution, talent, innovation, capital investment, and M&A).
Martin acknowledges that all of the now dominant models make sense and therefore need to be re-evaluated from time to time. He focuses on fourteen of what he characterizes as “new or different models” that can provide any organization “a better likelihood” of achieving better results “than the model it replaces. And I would welcome the next thinker who will improve on each of my models.”
Each is based on a core principle:
1. Competition happens at the front line where there is interaction with customers, not at the head office.
2. To actually create shareholder value, put customers before shareholders. That leads to organizational success…and enrichment of shareholders.
3. Unconscious habit is a much more powerful driver of customer behavior than is conscious loyalty.
4. In strategy, what counts is what would have to be true — not what is true.
5. Creating great choices requires imagination more than data.
6. You can only change culture by altering how individuals work with one another.
7. You must organize knowledge work and workers around time-bound projects, not jobs.
8. Corporate functions need strategies to be effective to the same extent that operating businesses do.
9. Recognize that an effective strategy selects goals and risks rather than try to control them on an uncertain path.
10. Accept that “execution” is essentially the same as “strategy.”
11. Treat each talented employee as an individual with unique needs and desires as the key to attraction and retention.
12. The design process for approving and launching an innovation is as important as the innovation itself.
13. Treat an asset as what it is worth immediately after conversion from unfettered to embedded capital…and calculate its ROI based on that embedded value.
14. A key goal in any acquisition should be to provide more value to the acquired entity than the corporation receives from the entity.
He thoroughly explains each in a separate chapter, anchoring them in real-world situations with which most readers can readily identify.
Obviously, no brief commentary such as mine can do full justice to the material that Roger Martin provides in this brilliant book but I hope I have at least indicated why I think so highly of him and of his work. No one has a better understanding of the WHAT and WHY of effective management. One man’s opinion, the greatest value of his countless books and articles as well as decades of classroom teaching is primarily found in his explanations of HOW.
His achievements in knowledge leadership are unsurpassed. I again offer a heartfelt “Bravo!” for this one.