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‘Collective Intelligence: How to Build a Business that’s Smarter than You’, by Jennifer Sundberg and Pippa Begg
Jennifer Sundberg & Pippa Begg have spent a lot of time thinking about how boardrooms can function better. But as co-CEOs of Board Intelligence — an online portal where company directors can view, comment, and collaborate on important documents — they have realised that the decisions made at the top of a company are the minority of all of those taken in a typical workplace.
As they say in their new book Collective Intelligence: “To be successful, businesses need to think well and act fast at every level. To move quickly, to leapfrog the competition, you need your whole organisation to have better conversations about the things that matter, not just the board.” The goal, they say, is “building a collective intelligence that is greater than the sum of its intellectual parts”.
In their quick read, Sundberg and Begg use examples from corporate life — from Microsoft and Nokia to Gatorade and easyJet — to help businesspeople think better in pursuit of a company’s shared purpose and mission. Asking the right questions, communicating well, building new habits, conducting more effective meetings and focusing collectively on the objectives at hand all lead to better performance. But companies also need to know when to pivot.
The most successful CEOs don’t “hoard” power but rather help others to better think through problems so they can “delegate decision-making with confidence”. While readers looking for more prescriptive guidance on how to move forward may be left feeling unsatisfied, it is a whistle-stop tour through processes that lead to clear thinking and conducting business better.
‘The Geek Way’, by Andrew McAfee
For Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, geeks are people who get obsessed with a problem and are willing to embrace unconventional solutions to solve it. These are individuals who are “not concerned about going with the flow” but instead follow “wherever their inquiries take them”.
The author says leaders of organisations should think more like geeks: focusing on finding unusual fixes to their business’ challenges. In an age of fast technological change, and uncertainty about the future of the workplace, this could help them land on better ways to run a company.
The book introduces ideas for thriving in a fast-moving world, combining management theory, competitive strategy, the science of evolution, psychology, military history and cultural anthropology. They are more cultural solutions than technological ones, resulting in a single, unified theory: “the geek way”.
The framework can apply to many circumstances: in industries as diverse as space exploration, cloud computing and advertising, and in departments ranging from research and development, to human resources, to design.
It is also not just practised by computer scientists and those working in technology, but permeates companies and extends from founder CEOs to managers to individual contributors.
A good read for leaders wondering how to build a twenty-first-century organisation, The Geek Way encourages readers to rethink their notions of what is possible, and to reorient their thinking about what a company can — and should — be.
‘Raising the Nation: How to Build a Better Future for Our Children and Everyone Else’, by Paul Lindley
Paul Lindley likes to think big. The entrepreneur behind the organic baby and toddler food brand Ella’s Kitchen — and now the University of Reading chancellor and a children’s welfare campaigner to boot — wants to create nothing less than a National Health Service for young people’s wellbeing.
This 330-page book is part manifesto and part collection of essays from academics, charity bosses, politicians and parents whom Lindley has met over the years. Each makes up a separate strand in Lindley’s web of ideas, culminating in a final chapter that models how legislation, the built environment and public services can be constructed with children in mind.
Statistics are a key weapon in Linley’s rhetorical arsenal. One astounding figure he pulls out early on in the book is that half of all people who have ever lived have died before their 16th birthday. The democratic deficit, given that none of these people will have been able to vote, is laid bare.
Being a start-up guy, Linley clearly likes ideas to fix specific problems. Sometimes this is good: fellow entrepreneurs Oli Barrett and Harry Warren push their idea of always turning on subtitles in younger children’s programming to nurture reading skills. But sometimes this attention on micro-challenges jars.
After a particularly harrowing first-hand account from a young woman caught in the care system, where social workers would not even offer her a hug, Linley suggests “a good place to start” to find answers: management changes that airlines introduced to reduce accidents on flights. Given the enormity of the problem, this well-intentioned suggestion comes across as a bit flippant.
The size of the task Linley has set himself is immense, and he has the humility, at least, to admit this. While he tries to knit the various strands of the chapters into a final model for a society where children’s wellbeing is the basis of policy decisions, he ends up writing that this book is more of a first draft of a manifesto for change, designed to stimulate further debate.
‘Warriors, Rebels and Saints: The Art of Leadership from Machiavelli to Malcolm X’, by Moshik Temkin
This book is that rare thing among ‘leadership’ titles: a truly original concept. It’s original for the reader, that is. Moshik Temkin, a visiting professor of leadership at several institutions including Harvard, has essentially taken his well-established course on the art of leadership through historical examples — and transferred it into a book.
That’s not a criticism: its pedigree makes for an incredibly well-researched and lively read. The starting point here is “to teach about leadership in the past, and to reflect on leadership in our own day, by capturing the same energy, emotion and spirit of enquiry that have animated discussions in my classroom”. It certainly succeeds in that aim.
A chapter on “what leaders do we look for in a crisis?” focuses on the failed leadership of Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression and teaches us that Hoover should have done better, given the apparently smart political skills he had previously displayed. It turned out that they just didn’t work in a crisis. Temkin has a pithy turn of phrase: “He didn’t just have a tin ear; it was rusty from lack of use.” Also not great: Hoover was “thoroughly inflexible”.
Enter the “presumed lightweight”, rich underachiever Franklin D Roosevelt, whose upbringing, we learn, included a mother who endlessly told him how special he was. It was Roosevelt who managed to turn things around — and remain popular with the electorate — by being more direct. Perhaps there are some parenting lessons here, too.
Temkin’s chapters, including “leading when you have little power” and “how to lead under tyranny”, take us from Machiavelli to Martin Luther King. We are also introduced to leaders who should be better known. These include senators Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, the only two lawmakers in either the House of Representatives or Senate to vote against an escalation of the Vietnam conflict in 1964.
Both “understood the significance of what they were being asked to vote on, and faced derision for going against the flow”. They should, Temkin suggests, “be household names”. Sadly, as we learn throughout Temkin’s book, fortune too often favours the vain, the petty and the downright violent.
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