The one-sentence summary

A handful of clever star performers create disproportionate amounts of value for organisations, but they must be managed particularly astutely.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• You need a particularly astute approach to leading smart, creative people
• Research shows that a handful of star performers create disproportionate amounts of value for their organisations. They aren’t free agents who do this on their own – they need their organisation’s commercial and financial resources to fulfil their potential.
• These invaluable individuals are called clevers – they can be brilliant, difficult and sometimes even dangerous, and success may well depend on how well they are lead, which is a nightmare in itself. Traditional leadership approaches won’t be effective. Instead, bosses need to:
  • Tell them what to do – not how to do it
  • Earn their respect with expertise – not a job title
  • Provide ‘organised space’ for their creativity
  • Sense their needs and keep them motivated
  • Shelter them from administrative and political distractions (‘organisational rain’)
  • Connect them with clever peers
  • Convince them the company can help them succeed

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• They identify value rationality – a logic of goals and ends that occur when a company has an aspirational cause. This is an interdependence of equals.
• Getting the approach right works for individuals, teams, and even whole companies – clevers attract more clevers
• Their characteristics are: their cleverness is central to their identity; their skills are not easily replicated; they know their worth; they ask difficult questions; they are organisationally savvy; they are not impressed by hierarchy; they expect instant success; they want to be connected to other clever people; they won’t thank you
• Bad characteristics are:
  • Taking pleasure in breaking the rules
  • Trivialising the importance of non-technical people
  • Being oversensitive about their projects
  • Suffering from knowledge-is-power syndrome
  • Never happy about the review process

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• Nothing. There is lots here for anyone who has to deal with creative people

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• Despite its ability to make or break a business, corporate culture remains the most underutilised resource in business.
• The notoriously amorphous concept of culture can in fact be distilled into a diagnostic test that managers can use to determine:
  • How the ways in which people relate to each other affects the company’s performance, as well as the individual’s quality of life
  • Why most organisations are characterised by several cultures at once
  • How to change an organisation from one culture to another
• Every modern business force is pushing companies towards disintegration: globalisation, IT, downsizing and delayering, and mass customisation.
• Culture is made up of common values, symbols, beliefs, and behaviour.
• The Double S cube maps solidarity against sociability to generate four types of company (it is 3D so each can be positive or negative):
  • High social, high solid = Communal
  • High social, low solid = Networked
  • Low social, high solid =Mercenary
  • Low social, low solid = Fragmented
• Companies can slide (unintentionally) into the negative form of the culture but can only climb out of it.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• There are four sets of test questions companies can enact:
  • 1. Observational Checklist (physical space, communication, time, identity)
  • 2. Corporate character questionnaire (23 of them)
  • 3. Is the culture positive or negative? (a series of cross checks)
  • 4. Critical incident analysis (a series of scenarios, and answer analysis)
• These allow you to classify your company and work out what to do.
• Each of the four company types is then analysed to explain the rules of survival in them, the message they send out, their pros and cons, how leadership works in them, and how to thrive in them.
• Change is not always a choice, and can lead to dysfunction. There are a series of symptoms to look out for and steps to rectify them
• To increase sociability: promote idea sharing, increase interaction opportunities, design conducive architecture, increase informality
• To unpick solidarity: introduce qualitative measures and break up cliques
• To determine your role, ask ethical, personal questions: what are prepared to do in the name of the organisation, how close do you want to get to people?

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• It first came out in 1998 so is a bit out of date, even in 2003 second edition.

The one-sentence summary

Companies are living entities that thrive by learning, having a strong persona, and governing their growth efficiently.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• What if we thought about a company as a living being, rather than just a series of monetary assets?
• Seeing a company as a machine implies that it is fixed, that it will eventually run down, and that its people are straightforward (human) resources.
• Living companies evolve naturally because people generate change, they regenerate naturally, and can learn as entities.
• Living companies have four components:
• Learning: sensitivity to the environment and an ability to learn and adapt
• Persona: cohesion and identity as aspects of an innate ability to build a community
• Ecology: tolerance, decentralisation, and an ability to build relationships with other entities
• Evolution: ability to govern its own growth effectively, including conservative finance
• The average company lifespan is 40 years, with humans lasting 70. They die early because the thinking and language of management are too narrowly based on economics. They forget that their organisation’s true nature is that of a community of humans.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• Possible reasons why managers fail include:
  • Managers are stupid (he does not believe this)
  • We can only see when a crisis opens our eyes
  • We can only see what we have already experienced
  • We cannot see what is emotionally difficult to see
  • We can only see what is relevant to our view of the future
• This is all based on what the Swedish neurobiologist David Ingvar calls a ‘memory of the future’, in which we have envisaged a series of scenarios. Usually 60% are positive and 40% negative, but if the balance is disturbed then incorrigible optimists or pessimists take centre stage.
• In the 1930s, the corporate world tried to address this with ‘tools for foresight’ – the dreaded strategic planning that creates the illusion of certainty where there is none.
• Most companies learn through Perceiving, Embedding, Concluding and Acting.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• The author spent his entire career at Shell so all the examples come from there.

The one-sentence summary

Every human being, no matter how diverse, complies with economic logic.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• If humans are so clever, why do we smoke and gamble, or take drugs and fall in love? Is this really rational behaviour? And how come your idiot boss is so overpaid?
• In fact, the behaviour of even the unlikeliest of individuals complies with economic logic, taking into account future costs and benefits, even we don’t quite realise it.
• Rational choice theory affects most things, and can sit happily even with the most passionate emotions.
• Most things can be explained: overpaid (apparently useless) bosses, proximity to neighbours, racism, and divorce decisions.
• Rational people respond to incentives: when it becomes more costly to do something, they will tend to do less. In weighing up their choices, they will bear in mind the constraints on them, and their total budget. And they will consider the future consequences of present choices. This applies just as much to prostitutes and criminals as it does to anyone else.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• The idea that everybody responds to incentives and consequences may have wider application than we think.
• Game theory (Von Neumann) uses rational decision making to analyse every decision in a way that should lead to calmer, more beneficial decisions, but it is hard for the layperson to implement. Most of us just follow the ‘wisdom of crowds’ principle, but don’t adjust our guesses.
• Human interactions are so shot through with ambiguity that they are better viewed as focal points (Schelling): where and when would two people who can’t talk meet each other in New York?
• Tournament theory means that workers sabotage one another to win the top job: the bigger the boss’s pay, and the less they have to do to earn it, the bigger the motivation for everyone else to aim for it.
• ‘Egonomics’ is mental civil war: should I smoke or not? All humans wrestle with such conflict.
• For every year that a woman delays having her first child, her lifetime earnings rise by 10%.
• The ‘death of distance’ doesn’t make the world flatter, it makes it spikier, with evermore activity taking place in cities – centres of innovation and idea exchange.
• The rate of technological progress is proportional to the world’s population – currently we should have a world-beating idea every two months (1 per billion people per year).

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• Nothing, but don’t expect any charts or easy sections.

The one-sentence summary

To be a good leader you have to earn respect.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• Copying how other leaders behave will not necessarily make you a good leader
• Great leaders essentially act as “authentic chameleons”, consistently displaying their true selves through different contexts that require them to play a variety of roles.
• Leadership is situational, non-hierarchical, and relational
• Leadership can come from within an organisation just as easily as the very top

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• The question in the title is the strongest point, and you should ask it of yourself if you aspire to be a leader
• This orientation adds a dose of humility to the often macho area of leadership
• It is easy enough to follow the steps they recommend (assuming you have the desire);
  • Be yourself – more – with skill
  • Know and show yourself – enough
  • Take personal risks
  • Read – and rewrite – the context
  • Remain authentic – but conform enough
  • Manage social distance (tough love, and getting close but not too close)
  • Communicate – with care
• Followers are also discussed (you can’t have leaders without them)
• Followers want authenticity, to feel significant, a sense of excitement, and to feel part of a community
• Leadership has a price as well as a prize – there are no easy answers, you can be easily undone, and when things go wrong it’s your fault – so be careful what you pursue for the sake of it

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• Not much. The book is well-written and based on 25 years of research