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.

A video review is available on my new site, BusinessLessons.org.

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.

A video review is available on my new site, BusinessLessons.org.