Business books of 2019
Of the roughly ten thousand business books published during the year, I have only come across a tiny proportion. The books chosen here are those that I think are well-written and that say something new, important, insightful and intriguing—books that open the mind. (Several of them were published before 2019.)
1. Managing Agile At Scale
Many large organizations have spent decades unsuccessfully battling bureaucracy. Even firms that have well developed Agile implementations in software development often fall victim to bureaucracy when they attempt to expand it beyond software. For most senior managers, it’s an unsolved puzzle.
We can learn from one organization that has had significant success in implementing both operational and strategic agility at massive scale: Amazon. In Think Like Amazon: 50 1/2 Ideas to Become a Digital Leader (McGrawHill Education, 2019), John Rossman gives the clearest account of how Amazon has tamed bureaucracy and has become, in the process, one of the largest and most agile firms on the planet, as well as one of the most valuable. Rossman’s book offers a clear and succinct account of the Amazon mindset and offers “50 ½ ideas” to enable others to learn how to think—and act—like Amazon.
Think Like Amazon shows how Amazon created an environment with very different values and behaviors from a bureaucracy. At Amazon, it is “Always Day One.” Rossman speaks from experience. He worked at Amazon for about four years and ran two of their businesses.
Two caveats. First, the book is written to help a manager learn from Amazon’s mindset and playbook to challenge and improve the speed and effectiveness of a business. Rossman’s book focuses on those parts of Amazon that build capabilities, which Rossman estimates to be around 70.000 to 90,000 employees out of the total of some 650,000 employees. Rossman’s book is not intended to be a complete narrative about how the whole of Amazon operates. For example, it does not discuss parts of Amazon that are not Agile, such as the fulfillment centers and the customer service centers and the challenges Amazon faces there,
Second, Rossman’s book does not deal with the possibility that Amazon may have become too agile: it may be using its market position to undermine partners and competitors in ways that may raise anti-trust issues. This applies both to AWS software services and Amazon marketplace, in both U.S. and Europe.
Another book on Amazon that is worth a look is The Amazon Management System: The Ultimate Digital Business Engine That Creates Extraordinary Value for Both Customers and Shareholders (Ideapress Publishing, 2019) by Ram Charan and Julia Yang.
2. Managing Leadership
Globally, some $50 billion is being spent annually on leadership education, training, and development. In Professionalizing Leadership (Oxford University Press, 2018) Professor Barbara Kellerman argues that this investment has had very little return. The leadership industry, she says, has not only failed. It not only doesn’t much good, it does actual harm. Kellerman explains why and what should be done about it.
She notes the proliferating definitions of leadership, such as: (1) leadership is purposive behavior; (2) leadership is persuasive behavior; (3) leadership is the exercise of power; (4) leadership is the exercise of authority; (5) leadership is the exercise of influence; (6) leadership is the art of inducing compliance; (7) leadership is a process; (8) leadership is a relationship; (9) leadership is an activity; (10) leadership is an attribution,
She notes the unsettled question of the differences between a leader and a manager, Historically the words were interchangeable. But, “more recently, the leader’s tasks tend to be regarded as quite different from the manager’s, the former more formidable, the latter more pedestrian. The manager administers, while the leader innovates. The manager is a copy, while the leader is an original. The manager relies on control, while the leader inspires trust. …Traditional managers are incompetent at best, and venal and untrustworthy at worst.” And so on. Being a leader is seen as a more demanding or higher calling than being a mere manager. In the event, neither management nor leadership is being approached in a professional manner (with the possible exception of the military). Much so-called leadership training is management training with a fancier label.
Kellerman argues that that leadership teaching that purports to be serious cannot be confined to a brief time or confined to narrow corporate purposes, Professionalizing leadership must involve education, training and development over a number of years. She conceives of leadership as a system with three interacting and complex parts: leaders, followers, and contexts.
Real leadership, Kellerman says, entails “leadership for the public good”. Corporate “leadership programs” that are intended to develop leaders merely in the commercial interests of that particular corporation, not the public good, should really be called “Manager Development Programs” or “Manager Training Programs.”
3. Managing Strategy
Disruption, which happens gradually then suddenly, is both a risk and an opportunity. In her important new book about strategic agility, Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019)), Professor Rita McGrath shows us how firms must not only see around corners. Even more important, they must take action.
No stranger to Agile, McGrath was promoting Agile management even before Agile was invented, in her path-breaking 1995 article in Harvard Business Review, “Discovery-Driven Planning,” Now in her latest book, McGrath fleshes out more of the detail and rich experience of what’s involved achieving strategic agility.
One of the striking points made in Seeing Around Corners is how slowly big disruptions take to happen. Corporations like Kodak and Blockbuster, full of very smart well-educated people, watched as the forces of disruption gathered until it was finally too late to do anything to avert disaster. In the case of Kodak, it was Kodak itself that invented the digital technology that would eventually upend its own core photography business.
Professor McGrath has an array of steps that firms can take to spot coming inflection points. They include opening themselves to “critical communication with people who may disagree or who may have different vantage points,” and “get out of the building,” not closeting themselves with like-minded people
The key, McGrath argues, is to focus on what customers are doing and what they need, and to take an expansive view of the “arenas” they create, rather than the markets or sectors that currently serve them. The arenas, following the work of Clayton Christensen, are defined by the jobs that need to get done by customers.
Central to the strategy McGrath advocates is to create options for the future without taking big, risky bets. An option buys you the right, not the obligation, to make a choice in the future.
4. Managing the Economy
We live in an age of competing economic narratives. In Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events (Princeton University Press, October 2019), Nobel-Prize-winning economist, Robert Shiller shows how stories drive our decisions about how and where to invest, how much to spend and save, and help propel major economic events and policies. Economists have systematically neglected the role of narrative. Now Robert Shiller’s new book aims to change that.
As a macro-economist, Shiller is particularly concerned with the phenomenon of contagious narratives which can drive big economic events. The book is a magisterial account of more than a century of history of ten pairs of “perennial economic narratives,” in which one narrative emerges, only to be replaced by its counter-narrative, which in turn is replaced by the original narrative in a new form, and so on.
Micro-economics is also under siege. In Willful: How We Choose What We Do (Yale University Press, 2019) Richard Robb challenges the classical view of economics as to why do we do the things we do. The classical view is that we are rational individuals, making decisions with the intention of maximizing our preferences. Behaviorists see us as relying on mental shortcuts and conforming to preexisting biases. Robb shows convincingly that there is yet another category of actions that we do for their own sake.
5. Managing Higher Education
As the world undergoes a Fourth Industrial Revolution that is “fundamentally altering the way the way we live, work, and relate to one another—in its scale, scope, and complexity, a transformation … unlike anything humankind has experienced before”—one might imagine that business schools would be hotbeds of innovation and rethinking, with every professor keen to help understand and master this emerging new world. Paradoxically, it’s the opposite. For the most part, today’s business schools are busy teaching and researching 20th century management principles and, in effect, leading the parade towards yesterday.
Now help is at hand with Building the Intentional University: Minerva and the Future of Higher Education (The MIT Press, 2017) Stephen M. Kosslyn et al. The authors show how to reinvent higher education for the 21st century by building it from the ground up. Minerva has actually created a new kind of university program. Its founders raised the funding, assembled the team, devised the curriculum and pedagogy, recruited the students, hired the faculty, and implemented a bold vision of a new and improved higher education. This book explains that vision and how it is being realized.
The Minerva curriculum focuses on “practical knowledge” (knowledge students can use to adapt to a changing world); its pedagogy is based on scientific research on learning; it uses a novel technology platform to deliver small seminars in real time; and it offers a hybrid residential model where students live together, rotating through seven cities around the world. Minerva equips students with the cognitive tools they need to succeed in the world after graduation, building the core competencies of critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communication, and effective interaction.
The book offers readers both the story of this sweeping idea and a blueprint for transforming higher education. Still in its infancy, Minerva offers transformational change in education and skills development.
6. Managing Politics
Just this last week, we learnt from Roger Cohen in the New York Times that “Boris Johnson could mislead the queen. He could break his promise to get Britain out of Europe by Oct. 31. He could lie about Turks invading Britain and the cost of European Union membership. He could make up stories about building 40 new hospitals. He could double down on the phantom $460 million a week that Brexit would deliver to the National Health Service — and still win a landslide Tory electoral victory not seen since Margaret Thatcher’s triumph in 1987. The British, or at least the English, did not care. Truth is so 20th century.”
To those of us who find these events puzzling, Roger Eatwell provides a guide in National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy (Pelican Books, 2018). He explains that many of the sweeping assumptions made about leaders like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump and the people who vote for them are mistaken. We have failed to scrutinize the large body of evidence that has been built up in the social sciences over the past forty years that explains what’s really going on. Worth a look if you’re interested in 2020.
7. Managing The Planet
In Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (Henry Holt, 2019) Bill McKibben looks at what we’ve done to the planet and what we can do about it now. It assembles the most vivid statistics, distills history and makes the case even more forcefully that our very existence is in peril.
8. Managing Language
For better or worse, often worse, leaders and managers create the text of modern life. Often, they don’t say what they mean or mean what their words say. Every leader and manager can benefit from learning to write clearer and livelier prose. In First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life (2019) Joe Moran offers a witty and humane primer on how to do just that. In sentences that practice what Moran preaches, he gives us an affable guide to better writing and to life. As an ambassador for humanity, Moran is blithe and convincing. A lot of fun, as well as useful.
“Making a sentence sing is a way of making others more likely to listen and ourselves more likely to be understood. A good sentence gives order to our thoughts and takes us out of our solitudes. It is a cure, however fleeting, for human loneliness and for the chronic gulf of incomprehension that divides writer and reader.”
