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Book Review: Simple Sabotage Field Manual (Declassified) by the Office of Strategic Services

April 22, 2023 //
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Why on earth am I reviewing a field manual on sabotage by the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA) from World War two?

Well, there are a couple of reasons other than the most obvious one that someone suggested it.

This very short reprinting, which would usually only be of interest to historians or those with underground bunkers and very full larders, is glimpse into the mind of a someone who wants to disrupt or destroy an organization both physically and psychologically.

There is not much that the average person could not have thought of themselves when it comes to physical sabotage, but it is interesting to note how just not doing simple things in the workplace can create serious problems and should therefore be taken seriously by managers. Most disgruntled employees are not quite so literal in showing their displeasure, but one does become aware, through the numerous examples, of just how vulnerable most workplaces and organizations are.

 There is an illuminating passage early in the book.

“It should be pointed out to the saboteur where the circumstances are suitable, that he is acting in self-defense against the enemy, or retaliating against the enemy for acts of destruction.”

I, and most modern managers, do not think of employees, even problem employees, as the enemy. However, it is not a far stretch to think that there have been times when an individual employee on a disciplinary path may feel that they are in a battle of wills. This might not lead to outright sabotage, one hopes, but “quiet quitting”? Quiet quitting is the phenomenon of an employee doing just enough not to get fired – but no more. As the book says a couple of sentences on…

“The saboteur may have to reverse his thinking… Where he formerly though of keeping his tools sharp, he should now let them grow dull…”

Where the book really becomes of interest for managers, however, is in the final seven pages where it discusses what steps managers and supervisors can take to disrupt an organization’s psychology. If you recognize your organization within these pages – it is time for change. It is also a great reminder of seemingly well-intentioned actions by leadership teams. Insisting on perfect work where it does not matter, for example. Or “see that three people have to approve everything when one will do.”

There is even guidance for meetings and committees to be found in this later section. Warnings to try and increase the size of meetings or committees to the point where they become unwieldy is reminiscent of the often-told Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, anecdote that he will not attend meetings that cannot be fed by a single pizza.

A thoughtful reading of this short book by managers should act as a warning and a reminder both to themselves and about others.  I think is also a good training tool for new managers to show what not to do and to be aware of the traps of self-sabotage that managers can often fall into. It is also a good reminder of where the line exists between performance problems and being a disruptive influence in the workplace.

Eighty years old it may be, but this short book still has some things to teach us.

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Categories Books, Business, Leadership, Management, personal development

Book and TV Review: Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

October 24, 2022 //
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After I reviewed both the TV show and book, Five Days at Memorial, I swore I was not going to make a habit of this.

And yet here we are.

Super Pumped, the book, is an in depth look at the rise and fall of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Impeccably researched, and detailed, it goes into the twists and turns of the Uber story. A story of hubris, a complete lack of ethics, a toxic working environment, and a deep dive into the cult of personality that often surrounds tech founders and CEOs. The book also has a few gonzo moments as the author finds themselves part of the story they are covering for both for good and bad.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, the TV Show, is the first season in an ongoing anthology series. The second series will be based on a forthcoming book, also by Mike Isaac, on Facebook. The TV show does an excellent job of capturing all the major beats and intrigues of the book, while also adding a distinctly more human face to its subjects. Kalanick is much more fleshed out in his relationships with girlfriends and family. There is also much more focus on how much the key figures start out liking each other rather than just being marriages of convenience. However, how much of this is “added drama” is unclear. But given the attention to detail of most of the rest of the story, I am inclined to believe the implication if not the actual events themselves.

Where the TV show really shines is in its portrayal of the side characters and their experiences with Kalanick and his “Bro” culture. Episode five is an extraordinary study in sexual harassment and a dysfunctional Human Resources department as experienced by regular employees. Another scene that stands out is when (spoiler) Kalanick’s girlfriend is breaking up with him, an event that clearly affects him, but yet he stops the argument so that he can answer an email on his phone. The book certainly focuses on the sexual harassment aspects of Uber’s culture, however, the visceral nature of the TV dramatization makes for uncomfortable viewing without straying into exploitative / voyeuristic territory. A thoughtful selection of scenes from this episode would make an excellent starting ground for understanding sexist work cultures and how to avoid them and the sexual harassment that ultimately results for managers – both new and old.

The story of Uber and Travis Kalanick is an extraordinary one and is worth your time as a cautionary tale and as a reflection on our cultural blind spot when it comes to convenience. What kind of world do we live in where convenience trumps ethics and the celebration of behavior this is, not to put too fine a point on it, despicable? Does success excuse bad behavior or does success breed a lack of respect for the rules? Does startup culture, which embraces out of the box solutions, also include the idea that as long as you are successful all will be forgiven?

While Travis Kalanick is undoubtedly an extraordinary individual, the TV show rarely makes the viewer feel anything other than deep unease if not downright dislike. The book, while less personal and emotional, is able to illicit sympathy for Kalanick during a meeting with the author and, when out of spite, one of the Uber board members leaks details of Kalanick’s departure from Uber – humiliating him, when the agreement was for a face-saving departure.

By the nature of a TV show, even a series, it can’t go into the detail that a book can. It is interesting that Super Pumped the TV Show starts when Uber is already a reality and uses conversations between protagonists to comment on its past founding and early days. Whereas the book starts from Kalanick’s previous start up and Uber’s humble beginnings as an idea of Garrett Camp when he could not get a cab. Likewise, the TV show ends with Kalanick’s ouster as CEO whereas the book continues into the intrigues of finding a successor and the settling of various lawsuits.

While Super Pumped the book is very much worth your time; Super Pumped: The Battle of Uber, the TV show, is the more extraordinary piece of media. Incredibly watchable, and a useful tool for managers when it comes to toxic internal cultures, the TV show is worth staying up till 2:00AM, as I did, to watch the entire thing in one hit.

Both will also make you download the Lyft app.

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Categories Books, Business, Leadership, Management, Movies, Staff Meeting Resources

Book Review: Humble Pi by Matt Parker

November 20, 2021 //
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There are few people who would argue with the statement that math is at the heart for most of our modern world. What is less well understood is what happens when that math goes wrong. And it does. All the time!

Mr. Parker’s highly amusing and thought-provoking book is about math and computers, but what becomes clearer as the book goes on is that this is also a book about systems and how and why systems can fail. There are lots of examples of people adding up numbers incorrectly or trying to take shortcuts to make the math simpler, which in turn leads to devastating and sometimes lethal consequences. However, it the subtler applications of mathematics where “Humble Pi” really scores.

For example, looking at 30- or 40-year-old kitchen appliance, still in use, is often accompanied by a phrase such as “they don’t make things today like they used to.” While this might seem obvious at first glance given that we are talking about an appliance working well beyond its expected lifespan, this is actually an example of “Survivor Bias.” If we looked at how many of the appliances had been manufactured, and then looked at how many were still in daily use, the chances are that we would recognize that this surviving appliance is an outlier and that the vast majority of the appliances have actually long been replaced or broken down. It is only the existence of this surviving outlier that prompts the idea even though we would likely not comment on its existence were more of the appliances in existence. The appliance’s rarity generates a false narrative that can only be understood by understanding the underlying math of the number of appliances produced.

For managers there is much to take away from Humble Pi. Mr. Parker encourages us to look at systems like layers of sliced Swiss cheese. All systems should be made of multiple layers – the checks and balances of any good system. But it is important to understand that there are possibilities for mistakes in every layer of a system – the holes in the cheese. The challenge as designers of systems is to ensure that the holes in each layer do not align. The author uses the example of two different nurses in a hospital performing a complicated drug calculation the same way and both making the same math mistake leading to a medical error.

Related to this idea of errors being a natural part of a system is the impact of a lack of tolerance for errors on new employee training. If managers terminate employees for making mistakes, the people who are left to train new employees are those who are must less likely to make mistakes. These are probably the worst people to train new employees who are obviously more prone to making mistakes. If instead, we teach employees to work a system that can detect mistakes and provide feedback, a system where the holes do not line up, then we will overall have far less mistakes – even when people are new. As the books says, humans can be very resourceful in finding ways to make mistakes.

This is not just a book about rounding errors, and why you should turn your computer off regularly. It is a book about what it means to be human in a world that relies and is built on mathematics, which humans are inherently not very good at. It is a fun and interesting read that will stay with you long after you put it down.

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Categories Books, Business, disaster preparedness, Management

Book Review: The Personality Brokers by Merve Emre

February 22, 2019 //
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The Personality Brokers Cover

I’ve never been a particular fan of Myers-Briggs personality testing, and their ilk, that still permeate business and management culture to this day.

And if a takedown of Myers-Briggs by exposing the complete lack of any scientific basis for personality testing in general is what you are looking for there are perhaps better books. Although, it has to be said, the author does a pretty good job of debunking Myer-Briggs while telling its history anyway.

The Personality Brokers is an examination of how Myers-Briggs became the cultural phenomena that it is today. Its highly humble origins in child rearing of highly dubious quality and obsession with Carl Jung – both his work and the man himself. Through what should have been its repudiation; training spies in World War II and personality typing Nazis – badly. All the way to it being a possible solution searching for a problem and the attempt to automate the hiring process.

The Personality Brokers is a cautionary tale of how wanting something to be true because it would be so useful if it was, does not excuse ignoring the evidence. The fact the it is still a tool used by both business and government today is astounding given the history of the Myers-Briggs and, when pointed out, the obvious reasons why it cannot work as a tool in the workplace.

That it is tool that has cost people their jobs, and possibly their lives, over decades should be a scandal of the highest order. Myer-Briggs offers organizations a way of sorting the workforce without the sticky and inconvenient truth that people defy categorization. What Ms. Emre does in this illuminating volume is show that Myer-Briggs personality testing has always been a dangerous myth that people wanted to believe and therefore overlooked its flaws. That it is something that Jung would have found abhorrent, and perversion of his work.

One cannot help asking “why?” all the way through this book. Why did this idea go so far? Why has not been stopped? And why are business people so gullible when offered a solution that really is too good to be true. While there have undoubtedly been people who have found Myers-Briggs useful, both as managers and professionals, it holds little value over traditional goal setting or positive thinking.

This is a great book for arguing with your boss about.

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Categories Books, Business, Career Advice, Leadership, Management, personal development, reviews

The Cost of Servant Leadership (Animated)

December 6, 2017 //
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One of my most popular blog posts is “The Cost of Servant Leadership” which I published in 2012. Due to some renewed interested, I thought it would make a nice first choice as the core content for my first experiment into animation. I hope you enjoy!

If you would like to read the original post, The Cost of Servant Leadership, you can find it here.

 

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Categories Animation, Business, Leadership, Management, Veterinary

The Self-Reviewing Manager

April 1, 2017 //
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As a manager, you are never going to please everyone.

Some might even argue that if you do, you are not doing your job correctly. You will be called upon to discipline and even terminate employees, some of whom you might consider friends if you no longer had to manage them, and who may already consider you a friend. That is until you fire them – no friendship survives that.  Moreover, a portion of your job is to stick your head above the parapet wall and take the pot shots that people send your way: customers and employees alike. You may well take the wrap for decisions that other stakeholders, and even the courts, have made and the people you work with will almost certainly never know about the arguments that you have won to protect their interests.

If you are someone who values internal culture, like I am, then you have the added concern of trying to make any piece of feedback positive. Gone are the days, for the most part, of managers losing their tempers and yelling at the people the work with. I won’t say that I have never lost my temper at a member of staff but I have made sure to apologize afterwards and I have always felt that loosing one’s temper is counterproductive: If it actually hurts what I’ve trying to achieve then what is the point? Management is hard, we are all over worked, underappreciated, our hands are often tied, and the goal posts are always shifting. However, the rewards make it worth it: financial, recognition of your peers, and the sense of achievement when you see both people and businesses grow.

And then there are things like this:

“I loved the actual job here. Worked here for almost a year. If you could rise above petty back-stabbing and the fact people would be super nice to your face, and cut you down in a heartbeat behind your back, then it was a great job. Hospital chief administrator suffered from Little Big Man syndrome and needed to be avoided at all costs – unless you wanted your day ruined, as he was always incapable of saying anything nice, and preferred to berate – even if praise was his intention! Some of the doctors were difficult, but most were really great to work with. Overall, if you have thick skin, this was a good place to work – but no benefits other than an employee discount for vet services.”

Ouch.

Other than the obvious of “what else would you expect a terminated employee to say?” What else can be learned from this from a management perspective? What can I learn from this since I feature so prominently?

Well yes, I am short – well spotted. Not much I can do about that. I guess you could argue that as someone of limited stature I have to be additionally careful to not appear angry so as to not play into the stereotype. As noted above, this is actually in my own interests anyway but a helpful reminder that I need to live up to my own standards.

If I am to be avoided, then that is actually pretty difficult. I try very hard to check in with every employee on both shifts every day and I am obviously sorry they felt this way. I think the comment of being “incapable of saying anything nice, and preferred to berate” is a little harsh. We, as an employer and I personally, have put a number of programs in place to improve and celebrate employee recognition. However, I will admit, that I do need to praise more in person than I currently do. Most managers do suffer from this and it is probably one of the more difficult aspects of the job. It is particularly hard when you have an employee who is not doing anything particularly wrong, but also not doing anything particularly exceptional. Since the above quote is from an anonymous post it is difficult to know for sure anything about this former employee, but as a general takeaway I think this rings true.

A “reading between the lines” insight, and backed up by some feedback from former employees who are now friends (see I’m not all bad) is that there is perhaps a lack of trust at times. A feeling that I did not have the employee’s “back.” This is probably a feature of trying to make customer service central to what we do. If a customer complains about an employee or the service they delivered, unless the claim is outrageous, I will probably try to make to client happy. This can certainly be interpreted as taking the side of the customer instead of the employee. It shouldn’t – I’m trying to protect the business and therefore indirectly the employee. If I feel there is an issue to be addressed with the employee, I will address it separately; however, it is easy to see how this issue arises and perhaps I need to do a better job of dealing with this unintended tension.    

As a final note, it is interesting that this former employee felt that discounted vet services was all the benefits that were on offer. I would take away from this that I needed to do a better job of explaining the other things that formed our benefits package.   

I don’t want a lot of reviews like this – nobody does. But the same rules apply to bad reviews about yourself as to bad reviews about your business. They are an opportunity to get feedback that you would not otherwise be able to receive. And while anonymous former employee reviews are even more unfair than anonymous customer reviews, due to the legal issues involved, a little self-examination is not a bad thing. If nothing else, it hopefully made for an interesting blog post.

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Categories Business, Career Advice, Leadership, Management

Hiring Unicorns

February 3, 2017 //
2

Is is just me, or is hiring getting more difficult due the bad behavior of the un (or under) employed?

I mean I get it, and employers are partly to blame, looking for a job can really suck. Employers rarely respond to applications (guilty), some employers insist on their own applications rather an accepting a resume, interviews are time consuming, and wages in some fields are stagnant.

However, none of the above explains some horrendous behaviors I have seen – in particular in the last year or so.
“Obviously you did not read the resume – good luck to you.” A message from an applicant after receiving a rejection email because they were totally unsuitable for position.

“Hi I’m very interested in the position, although I do not have any experience, could you call me back with more information?” A phone message from candidate replying to ad that clearly stated “NO PHONE CALLS.” I have 100 applications on my desk, if everyone does this I’ll do nothing else for days.

Harassing an employer with voicemails telling them that you are obviously the best person for the job and how dare they not hire you because you probably know more than they do. – Yes, this actually happened to me.

Replies to ads that directly contradict what is being asked for. – I don’t think I need to explain this.

Companies, or consultants, replying to ads for full time employees. – Please don’t assume I don’t know what I’m doing. If my ad explicitly states that telecommuting is not an option, an outside contractor is even less likely.

LinkedIn invites after an interview for an entry level position.- This is not going to get you the job and just makes things weird.

Not showing up – really! You accept an invite for an interview and then do not have the courtesy to call and cancel?

Photos on your resume. – We get it, you think you’re hot, but it really just makes most managers uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable.

Resumes in weird formats. – When did a PDF become so hard to create? Those of us who get a lot of email everyday are very wary of opening attachments from people we don’t know, but PDFs are a necessary evil for the most part. Word files are annoying but I guess I’ll live with it. Wps files? Google doc files? Jpegs? Screen shots from your phone? I get it you don’t have a computer, and are using your phone, but there are better ways. Just looks lazy.

Bringing a coffee or energy drink into the interview with you. – I’m sorry to get in the way of your morning routine, but I may be your future employer. Or not.

Dressing inappropriately. – It is an interview, not a nightclub, or a trip to the store on a Sunday morning, or a day at the beach.

Now a lot of managers blame the Millennial phenomenon for the above behaviors ; however, I’m not so sure. For one I’m not a big believer in the Millennials being that different from everyone else. They just happen to be young people who are not shy about saying what they want. And a lot of the above behaviors have come from people who do not fit into the generally agreed upon Millennial age bracket. I do think there are cultural things afoot, however, that transcend age. A lowering of the value of work, and generally a misunderstanding of a value of first impressions for starters.

As Tyler Durden from Fight Club might say: “you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.”

If you want to impress an employer, try professionalism. There are so few practicing it that it will make you easily stand out

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Categories Business, Career Advice, Management, Uncategorized

Movie Review: Burnt

September 9, 2016 //
0

I have been reviewing books for a number of years now; however, movies have always been my passion and on occasion I have used movies in staff meetings for the accessibility of the message. I decided that it was time to share some of these.

(Clicking on the image above will take you to Amazon where a tiny percentage goes to help my movie and book buying habit.

 

Burnt is a great movie. Staring Bradley Cooper, it’s the story of a chef seeking redemption by opening a new restaurant in London and winning a 3rd Michelin star after imploding and ruining his mentor’s restaurant in Paris.

It’s use as a management tool comes from the relationships of running a team and of how not to treat employees. It does contain swearing, so if that is incompatible with your company culture this movie is not for you.

I feel there two ways to use this particular movie. In whole; individually, to help illuminate how abusive management is contagious and ultimately counterproductive and in a general staff meeting. As a tool in a meeting I found the best way was to isolate certain scenes.

Chapter 5: @ 26:30 through to Chapter 6: @ 36:20 – The preparation for the opening of the restaurant. The attention to detail. Staff working at the top of their game, working as a team, and watching that disintegrate due the the behavior of one employee and then the abuse that is untenable.

Chapter 7: @ 40:44 through Chapter 7: @ 43:45 – Again, the preparation and attention to detail and that things have recovered after the events of Chapter 5 and 6. Does this mean the behavior that was seen in chapter 5 and 6 was ok and worked?

Chapter 9: @ 50:58 through Chapter 9: @ 52:23 – Contagion. Demonstrated behavior turns into learned behavior.

Chapter 10 through Chapter 10: @ 56:03 – More contagion, and now it is difficult to control.

Chapter 12: @ 1:11:52 through Chapter 12: @ 1:16:00 – Appalling behavior has a price to pay – even years afterwards.

Chapter 15: working as a team, and working together, is more important than anything else.

It is unusual to see actual work environments, even though this is quite a dysfunctional one, with the real kind of relationships that employees have between each other in a mainstream movie. A thoughtful viewing of “Burnt” should give any leader pause for thought or something to aspire to. And even with taking scenes in isolation it should allow staff to see how bad behavior from anyone can spread and create a workplace where no one wants to work. It is also nice to see a movie where unacceptable behavior is shown for what it is: unacceptable, rather than celebrated.

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Categories Business, Customer Service, Leadership, Management, Movies, Staff Meeting Resources, Uncategorized

Learning to Live with Yelp

September 3, 2016 //
2

By Mike Falconer

The most popular post to date on my site is: “Why I hate Yelp (and you should too!).”

I still do by the way; and everything is that post still stands today three years later; however, I have grown to accept it as part of the daily life of being in business and feel that, a few road bumps aside, I’ve made my peace with online reviews and even with Yelp.

That mighty sound a little contradictory, but the bottom line is that reviews are here to stay so we all have to deal with it.

“Scott, we have a Yelp problem. We keep getting these horrible reviews what can we do about it?”

” – Build a better product.”

Scott Stratten @unmarketing

There is no strategy or tip that I, or anyone else, can give you that will fix your business and your online reviews overnight (those that promise to do so are scamming you). If you are a horrible business the chances are you will have horrible reviews online.

Now you can write your own reviews, and risk the wrath of companies like Yelp or Google which are filled with people smarter than you or I (sorry it’s true) who spend a lot of time and energy trying to foil the attempts of those gaming their systems. If you are really unlucky you could also find yourself the subject of a FTC investigation and slapped with a serious fine. It has happened a few times already to those trying to buy or reward those for reviews (many thanks to he great Mike Blumenthal @mblumenthal for this awesome nugget of info and indeed for solidifying my thoughts on Yelp, and online reviews, in general) and expect it to happen a lot more when the government figures out how prevalent it is and how much money can be made. But why bother? It is simpler, easier, and better for your business to just fix the problems in the first place.

Think Yelp or Google (or whatever review site you feel tortures you on a regular basis) does not accurately reflect what your clients think of your business? Prove it! Survey your clients. Make it easy for them to complain and give you feedback. Have a policy to deal with complaints. And, of course, read, learn, and above all, reply to your reviews. If your survey results really are different from what you are seeing from the review sites then publish the data and be honest about what people were complaining about and what you are doing to fix it.

When I started reviewing my business’s clients what I found from the was that they wanted to respond. The feedback I got was overwhelmingly positive, and it allowed me to fix issues, even minor ones, quickly before they blew up online. It also provided real data about what problems we did have and where we were excelling.

A splash page with links to review sites helped make it easy for those who already reviewing us privately to review us in public. As a rule I and not a big fan of asking for reviews – particularly when companies just try to flood one channel. (400 reviews on Google and 10 on Yelp just makes you look shady.) However, a simple splash page with three or four links is tasteful and is the least spam-like way I have found and does not seem to offend anyone.

Unhappy clients will, of course, still happen. How you respond to them is all important, not just for the client, but your future clients who will read your response and see how you deal with complaints.

Apologize – it costs you nothing.

Try to resolve the issue – D’uh!

If you can’t resolve the issue – apologize again!

Do not get into a protracted fight online – would you rather be right or have an unhappy client, a bad review, and maybe worse? Genuinely apologize and try to make things right.

And never, never ever, send, say, or do anything that that you are not completely happy with being splashed all over the Internet. “If you take your review down we will give you your money back” means you care more about the bad review than the unhappy client. If the client deserves their money back – give them their money back!

I am a big fan of responding to even positive reviews – a simple thank you goes a long way. The interesting thing about responding to every review and trying to keep clients happy is that it is not just new clients that notice. Potential new employees use the tools available to them when researching their potential new employer. Those tools are Yelp and Google.

While I still hate Yelp – it really is a flawed product. It exists because customers used to basically be powerless. The balance may have shifted but I know at my business we try to solve issues, I know that we sometimes succeed and sometimes we fail. We are not perfect, but we have not stopped trying and I think even those that view us on Yelp can see it.

And I can live with that.

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Categories Business, Customer Service, Management, Marketing, Search, Uncategorized

Book Review: Holacracy, The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World, by Brian J. Robertson.

June 7, 2015 //
3

(Clicking on the image above will take you to Amazon where a tiny percentage goes to help fund my book buying habit.)

 

If you live in Las Vegas…Check!

Have an interest in management and business issues… Check!

And know a number of people in the Downtown / Zappos / entrepreneur community… Check!

Then you can’t help but have heard of Holacracy.

Normally the tones of conversations about Holacracy, and in particular of Zappos’s ’embrace it or leave’ offer to their staff, mix wonder and an unbelieving shake of the head normally reserved for parents of teenagers. This new book by Brian J. Robertson aims to change all that.

The funny thing is that it actually does a pretty good job.

The first real hint that there is more here than just a new business book, is in that the author has been involved in Lean software development and it is almost a throwaway comment- which is unfortunate. Lean is becoming a highly respected way of changing how companies work (please see my review of Lean Hospitals for a better explanation) and there are some interesting commonalities that someone, better versed in both than myself, needs to explore.

At its core, Holacracy is the deconstruction of work into roles, accountabilities, domains, and polices and giving employees the freedom, and the structure, to make modifications when “tensions” arise without the formal structure of supervisors and management. Interestingly, a lot of the housekeeping of Holacracy is in preserving the integrity of the process rather than the comfort of the employees. “It is difficult to hide from empowerment when the organizational process around you continually shines a light on your hiding place.”

Of course, if you are looking for things to turn you off such as parody worthy jargon; “In Tactical Meetings circle members use a fast-paced forum to deal with their ongoing operations, synchronize team members, and triage any difficulties that are preventing progress.” then you will find it. However, it is worth embracing one of the key conceits of the author when describing the adoption or even understanding of a system such as Holacracy: The rules of any game fade into the background when everyone knows what they are doing and how they should do it. It is only when someone breaks the rules, or does not know them well enough, that the rules come into sharp relief.

For those of us who are constantly looking to upgrade our management tool box, there is a lot you will recognize from other areas and other ideas what are worth re-purposing if a complete adoption of Holacracy is never even on your mind. The structured checkins at the beginning of meetings, for example, I am already planning on adopting along with the book’s strategy definition.

Of course, a book of this length (it is a short 200 pages that I read in a morning) can be nothing more than a appetizer or introduction to the world of Holacracy. I would have liked to have seen a few more diagrams and a decent FAQ section: The idea that the CEO of a company unadopt Holacracy at any time but is not above the rules is great to know; but would have been nicer to hear on page 10 rather than page 152!

My main criticism of the book, however, is in the field of Human Resources. What does the disciplinary process look like in a Holacracy? What does termination look like? How does that jive with legal and privacy issues? There is mention of compensation models, but these are brief and experimental at best.

There is something really interesting going on here with Holacracy and it deserves a more positive press that it currently seems to be receiving; hopefully this book will help change that.

But it is not a panacea – at least not yet.

But is is worth your time to find out why!

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Categories Books, Business, Management
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