Insights on the Future of Business
Joel Kurtzman, editor
A Strategy & Business Book
San Francisco, Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1998
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How do thought followers - like me - tango with thought leaders like each of the 12 people in Joel Kurtzman's book?
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First, you link the name of each of the 12 to the interview before it got put into a book. So, if you are reading this review, you don't have to buy the book.
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Then, you let each of the thought leaders lead. In this case, by quoting the words from each of the 12 that the editor put in an idiot's box. This way you can decide which of the 12 interviews you want to read.
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Then, you let each of the thought leaders lead. In this case, by quoting the words from each of the 12 that the editor put in an idiot's box. This way you can decide which of the 12 interviews you want to read.
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- Charles Handy, a professor at the London Business School: Suddenly, growth for its own sake sounded like a very funny concept. In order to hold people inside the corporation, we can't really talk about them as employees anymore. Boots, the big British drug and chemical company, built a corporate headquarters that can't hold more than a hundred people.
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- Minoru Makihara, President of the Mitsubishi Corporation: Where there are changes, there are always opportunities. Eventually, I believe we will have to fix Return on Equity at a certain rate. That will create greater incentives. We feel that you can't penalize someone for having been assigned to work in a declining area.
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- Keshub Mahindra, Chairman of Mahindra & Mahindra: Within a certain span of time, our products must become globally competitive. These rules were made in the foolish belief that the only people who had enough wisdom in this country were the people in the government. India's literacy rate is only about 50 percent. As a result, people find it very difficult to relate to the "new technologies".
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- Minoru Makihara, President of the Mitsubishi Corporation: Where there are changes, there are always opportunities. Eventually, I believe we will have to fix Return on Equity at a certain rate. That will create greater incentives. We feel that you can't penalize someone for having been assigned to work in a declining area.
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- Keshub Mahindra, Chairman of Mahindra & Mahindra: Within a certain span of time, our products must become globally competitive. These rules were made in the foolish belief that the only people who had enough wisdom in this country were the people in the government. India's literacy rate is only about 50 percent. As a result, people find it very difficult to relate to the "new technologies".
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- CK Prahalad, a professor at the University of Michigan: No monarchy has ever fomented its own revolution. We don't want people who are satisfied with how things are. We want people who are curious, impatient, trying to buck the received wisdom. People at lower levels have less of a problem accepting their new strategic roles. The more difficult transition is for senior managers.
- CK Prahalad, a professor at the University of Michigan: No monarchy has ever fomented its own revolution. We don't want people who are satisfied with how things are. We want people who are curious, impatient, trying to buck the received wisdom. People at lower levels have less of a problem accepting their new strategic roles. The more difficult transition is for senior managers.
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- John Kao, a professor at Harvard Business School: Jamming is when you improvise and adapt to conditions. Jamming follows rules, not individual notes. The management of creativity is intimate. It deals with an individual's personal, psychological landscape. The traditional managerial mind-set is analytical. In a creativity-driven environment, a traditional managerial mind-set could do damage. The challenge is not to let people do whatever they want. The challenge is to create accountability in a nonmechanistic way.
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- Paul M. Romer, a professor at Stanford Business School: The first thing that you lose in the knowledge economy is the classical notion of the right price. The law of conservation of matter and energy states that we have the same quantity of physical stuff we have always had. The physical world is characterised by diminishing returns. The realm of ideas does not suffer from diminishing returns. When firms face increasing costs and diminishing returns, no single firm can supply the whole market. We're going to start to find much richer institutional arrangements to control the flow of information.
- Paul M. Romer, a professor at Stanford Business School: The first thing that you lose in the knowledge economy is the classical notion of the right price. The law of conservation of matter and energy states that we have the same quantity of physical stuff we have always had. The physical world is characterised by diminishing returns. The realm of ideas does not suffer from diminishing returns. When firms face increasing costs and diminishing returns, no single firm can supply the whole market. We're going to start to find much richer institutional arrangements to control the flow of information.
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- Stan Shih, founder, chairman and CEO of Acer Group: We are really something of a virtual corporation. We call it the Dragon Dream. The dragon is the Chinese people, and we Chinese want to contribute in a big way to a global society. The customer is Number 1. The employee is Number 2. The shareholder is Number 3. I keep this message consistent with all my colleagues.
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- Norbert Walter, Chief Economist, Deutsche Bank: There is the notion that if you failed once, you are basically dead. As a society, we are very risk averse. The government demands fire doors that could probably withstand a nuclear blast. It is what I call "unnecessary quality". When I was young, an entrepreneur was considered crazy. You are not considered an outlaw anymore if you start your own business.
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- John T. Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems: We now have a chance to acquire everybody. In our industry, you are acquiring people. And if you don't keep those people, you have made a terrible, terrible investment. You try to blend cultures. But you've got to have one culture that really survives, and there has got to be a clear leader. You have to tell the employees up front what you are going to do so you don't betray their trust later.
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- Warren Bennis, a professor at Marshall School of Business: Great Groups are a snapshot of the way organizations out to look - a graphic illustration of what's possible.The leader is rarely the brightest person in the group. Rather, they have extraordinary taste, which makes them more curators than creators. People in organizations may have vision, but there's zero meaning to what they're doing. They've actually forgotten why they are there. You should reveal as much as possible but without scaring people. You don't want to share things that will diminish enthusiasm.
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- Gary Hamel, visiting professor at London Business School: Challenging the status quo has to be the starting point for anything that goes under the label of strategy. A revolutionary challenges the prejudices and dogmas of the incumbent. The future is more often created by heretics than by prophets. Look at the assumptions people have made about who is and who isn't the customer. Is there another way to slice the pie? How do I know the difference between what is universal and what is American if my cultural understanding stops at the Atlantic?
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- Jean-Rene Fourtou, Chairman and CEO of Rhone-Poulenc: If you meet too often, you take away people's power. You do their work for them. You make their decisions for them. Problems started in companies when the workers and the CEOs stopped sitting together, stopped eating together, stopped sharing. If all you have are procedures and computer systems, you kill the organization and you kill the spirit of the people who work there.
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There it is. A 12 item buffet brain food meal. I hope you'll enjoy at least one of the things on the table.
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Is there bad news about this book?
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Yes. It's a set of thoughts from a set of 1996 and 1997 interviews.
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What was the world like in 1997? How old were you 13 years ago? I was a sexy 60 rather than a senile 73!
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This means the book points to a very basic question. How does one keep up to date? How does one keep in touch with the 2010 thought leaders about business?
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Here are five suggestions. They are based on what I do.
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One
Decide what interests you. What it is you want to keep up to date on? Perhaps it's your career field - like advertising. Perhaps it's a particular industry - like finance and banking. Perhaps it's a particular issue - like leadership or strategic thinking. In my case, there are two things about business that I try to keep up to date on. Two things that interest me.
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One is how to turn a failing or failed organization around. The other is to understand why academics and managers believe that most people who go to work want to get to the top rather than to keep out of trouble and earn enough money to spend on things that turn them on. Things like their family or a hobby or going on holiday.
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The first interest means I like to read as much as I can on great turnarounds. Like Lou Gerstner turning IBM around. Like Steve Jobs turning Apple around. My second interest is rooted in attitudes to work that I see around me.
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Two - about 90 minutes a month
Create or join an interest group that meets about once a month. The one I belong to meets on the first Tuesday of every month. For 90 minutes. From 5:00 to 6:30 pm. There are about eight of us. We take turns at introducing a topic for discussion. It's usually based on a short article from a popular business magazine, like Fortune or BOSS. Recently, we've talked about whether the ability to trust people is a necessary but insufficient condition for being an effective team leader. About how one can manage one's own and one's team's imagination? About taking Zen to work. About half the group are former students of mine. Everyone is moving upwards, either in banking or in consulting. Very good for keeping a brain as old as mine more up to date than it would otherwise be.
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Three - about 30 minutes of reading a week
Subscribe to a good business journal. I keep up to date on the first one, reading anything I want to read in the Monash University Library. The other two are also good. Mostly, I read only the table of contents and sometimes - like three times a year - I read something that interests me.
- Strategy and Business - I get the monthly update about what’s new. Each issue briefly describes articles by Booz & Company thought leaders or experts from the business world, selected for their management insight. Click here to register for the free e-mail update.
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Four = about 15 minutes of reading a week
Take a free subscription to a weekly update from a reliable source. I take the first. The other two are just as good.
- Harvard Business School Working Knowledge - I seldom read more than the abstracts. About 30 minutes of reading a week.
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Five = about 15 minutes of reading a day - about 8 hours of reading a month
Read at least one newspaper every day and subscribe to a monthly or quarterly general report on new books.
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Every day, I read Nine O'Clock and The Age. More precisely, I begin with the sections on sport where I read a fair bit of the stuff that's reported. For the rest, mainly I read only the national and international news headlines, as well as only the headlines in the business sections. This seldom takes more than 15 minutes of my day.
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I take the free subscription to Readings Monthly, most of which is also on-line. It carries short reviews of what's new in books and music and DVDs. Again, mostly I read only the titles of the books. The exceptions are books on sport, war and poetry. This takes about 30 minutes a month.
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Every day, I read Nine O'Clock and The Age. More precisely, I begin with the sections on sport where I read a fair bit of the stuff that's reported. For the rest, mainly I read only the national and international news headlines, as well as only the headlines in the business sections. This seldom takes more than 15 minutes of my day.
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I take the free subscription to Readings Monthly, most of which is also on-line. It carries short reviews of what's new in books and music and DVDs. Again, mostly I read only the titles of the books. The exceptions are books on sport, war and poetry. This takes about 30 minutes a month.
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Why the estimated times?
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To make a point.
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In a 30 day month, most of us are awake - in some sense of that fuzzy word! - for about 480 hours. My keeping up to date program takes about 12 hours of reading and discussion a month. That's only 2.5 percent of the time I'm awake during a month. This is why I never say anything when people tell me that it takes too much time to do what I do!
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For what it's worth, this is how I try to keep up with thought leaders in fields that interest me. I hope you find a way that works for you.
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James Moulder (plato@sims.com.au) is a retired business school academic who lives in Melbourne, Australia. His hobbies are theology and poetry.
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James Moulder (plato@sims.com.au) is a retired business school academic who lives in Melbourne, Australia. His hobbies are theology and poetry.
