Greatest Hits Blog

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• Modern business is obsessed with leaders, but although everyone talks about leadership, its real meaning is becoming more and more obscure.
• Today we define leaders more by how they seem, rather than the quality of their judgement or what they are able to do.
• The net result has been a failure of leadership precisely when we need all the good leaders we can find – in business and life generally.
• We urgently need to rethink the role of leadership to rebuild trust and confidence. That means redefining the talent and revaluing the experience and remuneration associated with the roles.
• The L’Oreal generation are obsessed with rewarding themselves ‘because they’re worth it’, and that includes leaders who feel they are owed a significant living and the lifestyle to go with it.
• The modern leader is egoistic, blind to their own faults, surrounded by people created in their own image, and committed to actions that enhance their self-image.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• The leadership advice industry is worth over $10bn in the USA alone.
• Leadership and management are not the same thing, but they are usually confused – most of what’s involved in managing companies is nothing to do with leadership.
• There is a damning list of what leaders do wrong: abuse of power, inflicting damage on others, over-exercise of control to satisfy personal needs, rule breaking, and more. Types of failure include:
• Leaders (values do not correspond to organisation)
• Companies changing (the challenge is too big)
• Companies failing entirely (accepted norms of behaviour undermine the creation of value)
• Moral authority comes from being authentic, demonstrating integrity, having self-belief, showing self-awareness, and demonstrating deep understanding of the business.
• The author believes we need to reassess the concept of talent to make it inclusive; change executive remuneration and performance management; and redefine what it means to be an effective leader to make it more collaborative.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• The proposed changes would require changes to the law and the majority of ambitious leaders to stop being greedy. Is this ever possible?

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• Some companies thrive despite uncertainty, chaos and luck. This nine-year study from the Good To Great man explains how.
• 10Xers (pronounced Ten Exers) are companies that have beaten their industry by a minimum of ten times over 15 years. Their fortunes are compared with paired companies in the same sector who failed.
• The best leaders were not more risk taking, more visionary, nor more creative – they were actually more disciplined, more empirical and more paranoid.
• The great companies changed less than you would think in reaction to a changing world – in fact fast decisions often lead to poor outcomes. The best question is: “How much time before the risk profile changes?”
• Being more innovative doesn’t always help – 1 successful idea is more productive than 99 unfertile ones.
• 10X companies did not necessarily have better luck. The critical question is what you do with the luck you get, whether good or bad.
• Choosing to be great involves:
• These three characteristics form the 10X triad.

1. Fanatic discipline – considered decisions with clear constraints
2. Empirical creativity – as opposed to uncalibrated cannonballs
3. Productive paranoia – this is not the same as being paranoid (see next)

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• The 20 Mile March is a good concept. Amundsen beat Scott to the pole by consistently marching 20 miles a day. In bad weather he did it anyway, and in good he stopped at 20 to save energy for the next day. Scott either stayed in his tent or overshot and wore himself out. Companies should go for similar consistency (fanatic discipline).
• Fire bullets, then cannonballs is good too. Instead of blowing all your resources on one initiative, try a small (low cost, low risk, low distraction) bullet shot at something first, make adjustments from learning, and save ammunition for a better-informed attack (empirical creativity).
• Leading above the death line. This involves building cash reserves (oxygen canisters) and remaining hypervigilant by constantly zooming in and out (detail v. big picture). This level of attention reduces surprises and the impact of unhelpful developments (productive paranoia).

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• The book is only half as long as it looks. This is good because you can grasp it fast, but a swizz if you expected 300 pages of content for your £25.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• This is the first book for a non-specialist audience from the Nobel prize-winning psychologist – effectively the father of Behavioural Economics.
• He divides the mind into two systems:

System 1: makes fast, intuitive decisions based on associative memory, vivid images and emotional reactions.

System 2: slower, conscious, hard thought – more rational but frequently overridden.

• Collected here are hundreds of examples of how we make a lot of surprising mistakes in thinking – conscious and unconscious.
• In the Halo Effect, we assume that if a person is good at one thing, they are good at another.
• Loss aversion makes us dislike losses much more than gains of an equivalent size.
• WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is) involves jumping to conclusions based on limited evidence and is crucial to System 1 thinking.
• The affect heuristic involves people making judgements based on their emotions: (How do I feel about?) becomes a surrogate for a much harder question (What do I think about it?).

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• The idea that rationality is a restrictive idea is interesting: so-called Econs would operate without emotion and purely based on win/lose criteria, whereas Humans are susceptible to priming, framing, loss aversion, WYSIATI and much more.
• The mental shotgun means that we often compute more than we need – not something that we can do much about.
• The anchoring index can be applied to any situation in which a fact is offered in advance of a question – responses are almost always framed in that context.
• An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events based on emotion (rather than fact) that can become policy – one isolated event becomes a national phenomenon.
• The premortem is a good concept. Just before committing to something important, imagine you are a year later and that it has been a disaster – write a short history of what happened.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• This could be the most intelligent and complicated book you will ever read – at over 400 pages it is not for the faint-hearted. On the other hand, it probably covers almost every decision-making circumstance you are ever likely to face.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• This is another in a long line of books about leadership, which looks at why some people lead, why others follow, and why it matters.
• It takes a new slant by exploring how leadership has evolved over tens of thousands of years. We operate at home and work as if we are still on the savannah, leading to a ‘mismatch hypothesis’, in which there is a crucial difference between modern ideas of leadership and the kind our Stone Age brains are wired for.
• There are many different theories about why people become good leaders. They include:
• Great Man theory – true leaders are born, not made
• Trait theory – analysis of common traits in leaders reveals the formula
• Psychoanalytic – the boss takes the role of a father figure to a ‘primitive clan’
• Situational – leaders emerge in specific circumstances that make them shine
• Distributed – leadership works best when it is spread around
• Leaders often possess the Dark Triad of personality attributes: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy – they tend to be selfish and economical with the truth. It’s a strategy that works because they get the money and the women.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• It is more interesting than most leadership books, because of its historical and anthropological take, along with a reasonably light writing style
• It looks in detail at followership, and suggests that this can be a great survival strategy. Backing the right person to follow has reaped great benefits over the millennia. Kellerman’s taxonomy of followership shows 5 types:
• Where leaders become too powerful, or even corrupt, followers develop strategies to overcome them (gossip, public discussions, satire, disobedience).
• It’s amusing to think that we still vote for tall politicians, and bosses who look athletically stronger than others, but it appears to be true.

1. Isolates – they are apathetic, but can be dangerous to the leader if ignored
2. Bystanders – little or no commitment to anyone
3. Middling – reasonably satisfied participants
4. Activists – highly engaged and consistently work hard
5. Diehards – they’ll do anything for the boss

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• There are ten recommendations which pretty much amount to common sense – no bad thing, but not that new either.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• This is an extremely clever book about mapping social behaviour, co-authored by Mark Earls of Herd fame, and two anthropologists.
• It argues that humans are first and foremost social creatures who deploy (often unwittingly) a range of copying strategies to get on in life.
• We are certainly not blindly driven by hard-wired instincts – we know perfectly well how to use the brains of others as storage space for knowledge.
• Cascade models help to explain many decisions, and can be likened to rivers (tributaries), trees (branches), and forest fires (ignition and spread).
• Our social brain thinking can be tree-like, as in recursive language, which allows us to embed seemingly endless sub-bits into the main thought.
• There are many parallels with Darwinian evolution: variation, transmission and selection apply to the spread of ideas as well as genes.
• There are three categories for the evolution of cooperation: group mentality (kin and groups mutually benefit), reciprocity (“I’ll do it if you will”), and reputation (status gain).
• Copying strategies really work, and include: copy the majority, successful individuals, good social learners, kin, friends, and older individuals, and ‘copy if better’.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• Successful elements of social learning can be classified. It works best if people’s direct experience is changed by interaction; if many sparks are lit in the hope of lighting a fire; if the community is small and cohesive; the behaviour has a rationale; and the results are permanently visible and sustainable.
• Their collective behaviour map is really useful:

1. Few people + few similar options = rational choice

2. Few people + many similar options = random guess

3. Many people + few similar options = directed copying (copy if better)

4. Many people + many similar options = undirected copying (what everyone lese is doing)

• It is notoriously difficult to change behaviour, but anyone trying to do so should read consider three approaches: 1. Identify what stands out against the background. 2. Focus on the interaction among agents in your population. 3. Learn to predict and cope with turnover.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• This is an extremely intelligent book and, although short and well expressed, you need to be on top of your game to follow it. Concentration is crucial.