Who moved my Blackberry – Lucy Kellaway

Who moved my blackberry is an Epistolary novel (written as a series of letters, diary entries, etc – Arvind Adiga’s The White Tiger is one and uses letters). The book has been written by Lucy Kellaway, but the protagonist Martin Lukes is credited as the Author and Lucy’s name appears as co author.
Before this book, Lucy introduced Martin Lukes thru her columns in the Financial Times that and continued for many years (sample: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6ca3db5e-989e-11dc-8ca7-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1) . Lucy’s name is never mentioned in the column to maintain authenticity!

Martin Lukes is the Marketing Director of a-b global’s UK Operations (a-b Global is a fortune 100, US company). The story revolves around his struggle to move up the corporate ladder. He manages to climb with very little ability, but a lot of management jargon, super ego, kissing-up to the CEO and finally with some help from a personal life coach. He manages to get to the position of Special Projects Director (heading special projects, is the management’s way of saying that the exit door is nearby).

The book is a wonderful satire of the corporate world and all its Bull (a bit to the extreme at times). It has everything that is wrong it today’s corp world, right from life coach (the jargons used by the life coach (named Pandora Barry) are the best – “strive to thrive, better than your best, etc”), massive egos that are so self obsessed that make people oblivious of the situations they are in, usage of blackberry (or any other e-tool), rebranding, off shoring, downsizing, reorganizing, affairs, you name it. And it all culminates in a scandal (Insider trading).

A great moment in the book is the coining of the word "creovation" by Martin; this is the half creation and half innovation. These two words are the current buzz words in any self-respecting organization. And, Lucy has a good amount of fun by poking around this concept. The second best is the 'Phenomenal Performance - Permanently' by the CEO himself

This books explains how so many people with limited talent/intelligence are way up there – and what hits the nail is that we all know someone who closely resembles Martin Lukes –sometimes, it is a mirror that Lucy Kellaway is holding! And what you see there is frightening!

This is a well written book, considering the constraints of constructing the entire book with a series of blackberry messages. Some of the emails are laugh-out-loud types and many will bring a smile for sure. This is not a serious book, but a wonderful deviation if you are into serious stuff. An enjoyable parody into the world of corporate and its wretched culture. Does it carry a message? Probably.

Personality by Daniel Nettle

Alert: this will probably be a bit dry, but this is a facinating topic for me, hence pls. tolerate and travel with me!

Book Reference: Personality by Daniel Nettle

Each one of us is very different in our own way…is this true? Why are we different? We react to same situations/stimulations differently, why is it?
What drives these differences in our individual personality.

According to Gordon Allport, Personality is, “The dynamic organization within the individual of those psychological systems that determine his unique adjustments to his environment”. Yes, it is complex; but quite simply put- it is the way we react and interact with the environment around us in a consistent manner.

The various dimensions of this personality is known as the traits. Traits is the pattern in our behavior- it is the way we are wired! Although there are many (some count to 80) identified traits the five major traits that are used popularly to measure personality are:

1. Openness (to experiment new things, curious, imaginative)
2. Conscientiousness (being dutiful, dependable, etc)
3. Extraversion (highly social, etc)
4. Agreeableness (good natured, trusting, etc)
5. Neuroticism (nerves, emotional stability)
Collectively these traits are known as the The Big 5.

According to WIKI; The first public mention of the model was in 1933, by L. L. Thurstone in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association. Eversince there has been a large body of research on this framework and we will be focuing on these traits.

How The Mighty Fall - Jim Collins

In this book, Jim Collins tries to answer the question, why some companies that are doing exceedingly well turn around and fail (and also on why some continue to do well - but the focus is on the failing companies). Jim Collins comes out with the following framework of five stages of failure and discusses the stages with well-researched case studies of 11 organizations that have gone thru them.

Stage 1: Hubris born of success –Assuming that Success is a given no matter what we do.

Stage 2: Undisciplined pursuit of more – Going after quick gains and abandoning the core strengths/values (flywheels) for something new and radically different and deep into stage 1.

Stage 3: Denial of risk and peril – blinded hubris, refusing to see the risk vs. reward symmetry of venturing into a new strategy and abandoning old core strengths.

Stage 4: Grasping for salvation – Looking for a silver bullet (getting a new hotshot CEO, going after (with millions) an all-out drug that is still not proven) that will salvage the organization. Losing out on the culture of the organization.

Stage 5: Capitulation to irrelevance or death - the final stage, where everyone just gives in after the financial power gets eroded by the many false starts. And the organization just melts away.

The organizations that he discusses range from HP (HP took down two of my favorite companies – Digital and Compaq), Bank of America, Ames Dept Stores, Circuit City, Merck, etc. Jim Collins argues that the fall is mostly self-inflicted and not driven by the environment (environment does play a role).

It is really surprising and staggering to read about some of the decisions some leaders take even as they stare at the downfall of their company, it is as if they are blinded by the ego and confidence. It is also amazing to know that many companies that fall are at the peak of their innovation cycle, for example, Motorola and Merck had the highest IP filings during the respective slides. We always think that companies that innovate survive, Jim proves it as otherwise, the message, is probably, innovate at the right time.

Another interesting point is that many companies that are on the downward slope do a lot of restructuring (Scott Papers restructured some 3 times in 4 years during their fall). I can relate to some of the findings to what is going on in my organization (esp. the restructuring), I hope we get it right and prove Jim wrong. The way the book is written is very interesting to read, he has contrasted the company that failed, with a company (in the same market and competitive environment) that has succeeded.

This book is only 123 pages and well structured with chapter-end summaries. The book is easy to read and understand for a layman like me. It is also quite updated (published May 2009) with references to the recent meltdown, but I guess the draft was ready a couple (or at least a year ago), hence not too focused on the recent happenings.

On the downside: like any other solutions book, the conclusions seem to be quite simple and the research findings looks to be twisted to suit the writer’s framework.

Jim Collins is the celebrated author of Good to Great and Built to Last (Trivia: Steve Ballmer considers Built to Last as his single favorite Business Book!). Built to Last, is on the Business Week best-seller list for more than six years, and has been translated into 25 languages. According to Wiki, this book (How The Mighty Fall) has sold more than 2.5 million copies and has been translated into 35 languages.

Outliers - 2

Successful men are shaped by a.) The Eco system that supports them and b.) the individuals, good old, hard work. These two things make them what they are (successful). There is no such thing as a genius making it on his own with limited efforts (probably the only exception is the case of one Swiss patents office clerk named Albert Einstein).

Accumulated Advantage - Gladwell, in the opening chapter talks about the Canadian (ice) hockey team and how most of the players in the national team were born in the first quarter of the year (Jan-Mar). This is because the cutoff date for joining the junior’s team is Jan 1. Boys who turn 10 by Jan 1 are in the same team as boys who turn 10 in the later part of the year; and hence have a greater physical advantage and outplay others. Obviously these guys are then groomed to be national players with superior coaching and opportunities and they just get better and better. I got intrigued by this theory and wanted to check on the current Indian Cricket player’s data, I was surprised to find that 62% of them are born in the last part of the year (Sep-Dec). Some cutoff theory working here too, I guess. The point is, if we recognize this bias, we can groom many top class players (from across the year). Gladwell calls this Bias as “the accumulated advantage”; you have the advantage of being born at the start of the year (or at the end of the year if you are in the Indian cricket team) and because of that get all the other advantages of good coaching and preference. It is not pure meritocracy.

The 10000 hour rule – This which pretty much says that if you want to excel in anything you need to put in at least 10000 hours of hard work on the stuff and hence fine tune your talent. He quotes Beatles and Bill Gates as examples. Beatles put in at least 10000 hrs of music (esp. between 1960 and 1964) and Gates had unlimited access to computers at School (it also helps if your family is already rich and funded many of those computer equipments). In all, it comes to at least 20 hrs of work in a week for 10 years and you will be a master in the chosen area.

Genius – Gladwell profiles Christopher Langan who has a super IQ of 195 (90-109 is normal and anything above 140 is considered to be Genius), but works as a bouncer (security guard at bars) and later settles in as a farmhand to take care of horses. Gladwell goes on to write what went wrong along the way and why Langan could not realize the full potential of his intellect, in spite of being the most intelligent man of America (world). The bottom-line is that the Eco system was not there to support him (he had a poor and difficult childhood) and also could not sustain the university system that is ill equipped to manage someone as exceptionally gifted as Langan.
This story of Langan is contrasted with that of Robert Oppenheimer; Oppenheimer being equally brilliant and equally emotionally unstable (he tries to poison his tutor at Cambridge). The difference is; Oppenheimer gets to be successful (Oppenheimer is known as the father of atom bomb and was heading the Manhattan project to develop an atom bomb during WWII (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project)) and this is not just because he is brilliant, but also has the right upbringing, his parents are wealthier, well connected and also let him grow intellectually by providing a nurturing environment.

The subsequent stories about early Jew immigrants in New York having a difficult life as tailors toiling many hours to make a living, but ensuring that their next generation move ahead and become successful lawyers, again focuses on the hard work and related reward, the culture and the unfolding of events (the boom in filing litigations and hostile takeovers).
Interesting chapter is “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes”; in which Gladwell talks about the connection of culture to the number of plane crashes in a country. It goes like this: in a country which has a culture of respecting and not questioning authority – the number of crashes are high compared to a country that has little or no respect to hierarchy or question authority if required. What is happening in the cockpit is that the co-pilots fail to question or correct the captain’s critical decisions even if he feels that it is incorrect and this leads to crashes. An airline that encourages the culture of questioning authority, encourages a co-pilot to question a captain’s decision and this can avert a disaster. There is a great body of work done by Geert Hofstede

Outliers - 1

In statistics, an outlier is an observation that is numerically distant from the rest of the data. (Wikipedia)

When you get a set of data; there is a possibility that some part of it will have a large deviation from the mean (average), these observations or data is known as Outliers. Like a couple of IIM’s grads getting multi crore offers from Investment Bankers (not anymore, most IIM grads will now apply to SBI and Bank of Baroda, I guess) while the average salary of a fresh IIM grad is around 15 lakhs per annum. I am sure you get the picture now and will be able to identify the outlier in the graph on the left.

Outliers are usually ignored in a stats analysis as it is generally considered to be an error in observation or the knowledge that the mean can get much skewed because of these outliers (sometimes it is preferred; as in the IIM case, the media hypes the mean salary so much, just by including these couple of outliers). Even if it gets ignored for various reasons, an outlier nevertheless gets utmost attention (like the lone spot in the graph grabs our eyeball) and investigation.

Outliers is also the title of new book (Nov 2008) by Malcolm Gladwell, Gladwell has written 2 blockbusters before – the tipping point (2000) and the blink (2005), both the books sold over 2 million copies (compare that to Tamil writers who sell about 5000, i guess and mostly to libraries, thankfully the trend is getting better). Gladwell also commands more than 40000USD for any appearance (according to The New York Times). Outliers debuted as the number 1 seller on New York Times and has remained there for 18 weeks (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/books/bestseller/besthardnonfiction.html). That is big. Gladwell is the current blue-eyed boy of many corporates and he gives speeches at all the top corporations (like Google, Microsoft, etc). You can catch a sample of Gladwell’s skills at Ted.com - BTW, if you have not added Ted.com to your favorites than you are missing out on something and should add immediately. (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html)

“Outliers” has a simple (intuitive for most of us) message; that success is not an individual’s show and there is no short cut to success (writing a book like this is an exception!).

... To Be Continued