We live in turbulent times and if we want to survive we have to make innovation a way of life. That’s the message which Gary Hamel brings us in Leading the Revolution: How to Thrive in Turbulent Times by Making Innovation a Way of Life, and it is an important message. The book is written in a brash, opinionated style which appeals to some readers but not to others. Hamel says the age of progress is over; we are now into a new age of revolution. Somewhere out there is a bullet with your company’s name on it. Every company must become an opportunity-seeking missile. Only stupid questions create new wealth.
When I read a business book, I look for principles that I can apply. This book has plenty of principles, but I am not sure how useful they are. For example, chapter 8 sets out 8 design rules for innovation: unreasonable expectations, elastic business definition, a cause not a business, new voices, a market for innovation, low-risk experimentation, cellular division, and connectivity. I think that some of these might be useful for some businesses, but I have met plenty of managers with unreasonable expectations and elastic business definitions whose businesses were not going anywhere.
I do not usually complain about a book’s typography, but whoever did the layout for this book spends too much time downloading free fonts from the Internet. Can’t decide which ugly chunky font to use to highlight random sentences? Why not use them all?
The book does contain a number of interesting stories about innovation in different companies, and it is worth reading for the inspiration. It really is important for businesses to have an innovation strategy, but I am not sure that you will find one to meet your needs in this book.
No matter what personality type you have or how easy to get along with you might be, there are likely to be some people that you can work well with, and others that you struggle with. Some partnerships work so well that the two partners working together achieve far more than the sum of what they could have achieved working apart. Other partnerships achieve less than what one of the partners could have achieved by himself or herself. Power of 2: How to Make the Most of Your Partnerships at Work and in Life, by Rodd Wagner and Gale Muller, sets out to identify the factors that make up a great partnership.
The Gallup organisation conducted research into the issue, and this resulted in a theoretical model of dyadic collaborative relationships. Rodd Wagner and Gale Muller have distilled this into eight elements of a successful partnership. In a successful partnership, the respective partners have complementary strengths, they share a common mission, they treat each other with fairness, there is a high level of trust, the partners accept each other’s idiosyncrasies, mistakes are forgiven, the partners communicate well, and they are unselfish towards each other.
The book includes a chapter on each of these elements, and concludes with some additional insights for leaders and managers. The chapters contain plenty of anecdotes illustrating the principles described, making them very interesting and engaging. This is a useful book for anyone who wants to work on improving collaborative relationships.
Malcolm Gladwell is often invited to speak at large Christian conferences because his writings demonstrate an unusually perceptive view of the human condition. His latest book, What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures, is a collection of articles which Gladwell wrote for the New Yorker between 1996 and 2008. Each article approaches its story from an interesting angle. Gladwell has an ability to find and bring to life an interesting story out of seemingly mundane circumstances.
The Pitchman tells the story of a man who makes successful infomercials. The Ketchup Connection attempts to explain why there are many varieties of mustard but only one successful variety of tomato sauce. Blowing Up describes a financial trader with a contrarian investment strategy. True Colors tells the story behind hair dye. John Rock’s Error describes some of the history of the birth control pill’s inventor. What the Dog Saw explains how a dog whisperer controls bad-tempered dogs.
Unlike Gladwell’s previous books The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, this book does not relate to a single theme. If you read it you will undoubtedly end up being better informed about a number of topics, and the book is helpful if you want to study how to tell a story in an engaging manner, but its strength lies primarily in its entertainment value rather than in the usefulness of the information it contains.
A video review of this book is now available on my new site, Businesslessons.org.
A lot of time and effort goes into designing a building for a church, but how often is comparable effort spent in designing the structure of the church itself (that is, the people, not the building)? Linda Bergquist and Allan Karr consider the church design process in their book Church Turned Inside Out: A Guide for Designers, Refiners and Re-aligners. The book draws from the fields of design, ecology, philosophy, organisational theory and many others in its discussion of church design.
Chapter 9 describes the characteristics of attractional, relational and legacy churches. It does not say that one model is right and another is wrong, although it does highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each. All sorts of churches are needed, and it is better to be deliberate about the style of church you are adopting, rather than falling into it by default. Chapter 10 discusses the organising principles, distinctives and challenges for numerous different models of church.
I found the book to be fairly heavy going, and the chapters of most interest to me were near the end. This was far from the most engaging book I have read in the past year. Nevertheless it was worth reading because it contains helpful information which is not available elsewhere. The book raises interesting questions which need to be addressed by church planters and should also be considered from time to time by leaders of established churches.
Multi-site churches are becoming the new “normal”, according to Geoff Surratt, Greg Ligon and Warren Bird in Multi-Site Church Road Trip: Exploring the New Normal, and they estimate that there are now more than 3,000 multi-site churches in the United States, whereas there were only about 300 ten years ago. To illustrate the benefits and variety of multi-site churches, the authors took a “road trip” and came up with a number of really interesting insights.
Seacoast Church has 13 different campuses, and some of these are quite big (5,000 attenders) whereas others are quite small (80 attenders). Teaching is mostly done by video. The smaller campuses get the benefits of being part of a larger church (access to high quality resources, specialist ministries, etc), while the larger campuses get the benefits of smaller churches (more opportunities for people to serve in meaningful ways, etc).
Christ the King Community Church International has 17 US and more than 100 international sites. Teaching is done in person at each site. Christ the King is a church of small groups, and it uses deliberately simple, low-tech, low-cost approaches to multiplying its ministry. Lifechurch.tv, on the other hand, is a leader in the use of technology in its 14 campuses, and it includes a fully online campus which can be attended by anyone in any country of the world.
The book includes many other examples from many other churches. Multi-site models have been used to kick-start the planting of new churches, and they have been effective in revitalising dying churches. Almost any church will find something of interest in the book; it certainly gave me a number of ideas about reaching unchurched people more rapidly and more cost-effectively. I recommend this book to all church leaders, including those who have never heard of or considered multi-site church strategies.
When Donald Miller started collaborating with some film makers to create a film about his life, he discovered that it was necessary to fictionalise some elements in order to make his life seem more interesting, and that got him thinking about how he could re-create his own real-life story. Don’s interactions with the film makers and the subsequent changes he made to his own life are described in his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.
The screenwriter Robert McKee has written a book called Story, and he gives seminars explaining the ingredients of good screenwriting. Don attended one of the seminars and discovered that the essence of a good story is “a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it”. He decided to make his own story more interesting by hiking the Inca Trail in Peru, going for a long kayak trip in British Columbia, cycling across the US, and meeting his estranged father.
Don writes in a whimsical and immensely entertaining manner. Interestingly enough, although I enjoyed reading each of the stories about things that Don had done to make his life story more interesting, I was left with the impression that the book would still have been just as entertaining without any of them. Nonetheless, it is a great book, and it has inspired me to find ways of making my own life a more interesting story.
Out of the 51 books that I reviewed in 2009, which is the best? There were many good books. The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier provides a scientific but readable treatment of the reasons why the world’s poorest countries are failing. Sticky Church by Larry Osborne demonstrates the importance of small groups as a retention strategy for churches. Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo provided a strongly-worded and controversial call to change in the way we help the poor.
It’s Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong provides a gripping account of the recent history of corruption in Kenya. The Monkey and the Fish by Dave Gibbons shows how important it is for churches to embrace third-culture attitudes. A Sense of Urgency by John Kotter provides a well-written guide for overcoming obstacles to organisational change. Africa by Richard Dowden gives extraordinary insights into many African countries.
But the winner of this year’s Choosethecross.com Book of the Year award is Servolution: Starting a Church Revolution Through Serving, by Dino Rizzo. When you start a new church, how do you get people to show up? Dino and his wife DeLynn decided to reach the poor and hurting by doing whatever they could to serve them. The book has an inspiring story line while also providing great advice which can be followed by any church.
In recent years, numerous confusing new church models have arrived. What are these new models, and are they any good? Aubrey Malphurs addresses issues like these in his book A New Kind of Church: Understanding Models of Ministry for the 21st Century. Some churches are changing for the better, but many churches in North America and other parts of the West are changing for the worse. Churches that are declining need to change, but they also need to avoid falling into error.
Malphurs encourages us to interpret the relevant Biblical passages, develop a theology of change, and develop a theology of culture. He then goes on to provide a framework within which we can evaluate the different church models through a Biblical lens, then provides a strategic approach to developing a new church model. There is no single correct church model; every church, whether traditional or contemporary, reflects a unique church model.
I found the book helpful in the way it addressed a variety of different church innovations; however I think it was addressed on the whole to readers from relatively traditional church backgrounds, and it is therefore less likely to be helpful for those who have been keeping up with the latest church trends. I recommend this book to anyone whose relatively traditional church is struggling with the need to reinvent itself.
“Management 2.0 is going to look a lot like Web 2.0,” according to Gary Hamel in his book The Future of Management. I read the book because Hamel was a highly-touted speaker at the 2009 Global Leadership Summit and, as the cover of the book says, he is “ranked #1 influential business thinker by the Wall Street Journal”.
In order to thrive into the future, Hamel says, companies need to accelerate the pace of strategic renewal, make innovation everyone’s job, and create a highly engaging work environment. He then refers to three model organisations: Whole Foods Market, where employees are organised into autonomous work groups which make the key operating decisions affecting themselves; W L Gore & Associates, where employees negotiate their job assignments with their peers; and Google, which has a highly consultative management style and gives employees “20 percent time” to experiment with new ideas.
Hamel then goes on to challenge the principles of modern management, such as standardisation, specialisation, goal alignment, hierarchy, planning and control, and extrinsic rewards. He says that experimentation beats planning, strategic efficiency requires a resource allocation process based on market principles, and democracies outperform other styles of governance.
In my opinion, Hamel correctly identifies many of the problems of poorly run organisations, but his proposed solutions are far too impractical to be useful to most organisations. He proceeds on the assumption that there have been almost no advances in management techniques over the past century. His Wall Street Journal Blog post of 21 October 2009 says that he is too busy to read business books, and this may explain his lack of awareness. Hamel’s book is worth reading to provoke your thinking, but uncritical acceptance of his solutions is likely to lead to disaster.
The book provides a detailed analysis of the sequence of events involved in a successful strategy for selling professional services. The sales process is no longer a matter of the seller just presenting its credentials; the seller must now attempt to gain strategic insights into any problem which the client may be facing, and craft a customised solution which provides a demonstrable and measurable advantage to the client.
Most professional services providers have been trained in how to provide their particular professional service; they have not been trained in how to undertake a strategic assessment of a client’s business and come up with ideas that add quantifiable value. Accordingly, selling their services is intimidating for them. This book provides a very helpful step-by-step guide to success in the professional services sales process.
We live in turbulent times and if we want to survive we have to make innovation a way of life. That’s the message which Gary Hamel brings us in Leading the Revolution: How to Thrive in Turbulent Times by Making Innovation a Way of Life, and it is an important message. The book is written in a brash, opinionated style which appeals to some readers but not to others. Hamel says the age of progress is over; we are now into a new age of revolution. Somewhere out there is a bullet with your company’s name on it. Every company must become an opportunity-seeking missile. Only stupid questions create new wealth.
“Management 2.0 is going to look a lot like Web 2.0,” according to Gary Hamel in his book 
“If there ever was a time when professional services sellers needed new strategies and tools, this is it.” So says Michael McLaughlin in his book 
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