The Best Business Books Ever: A book review by Bob Morris

The Best Business Books Ever: The Most Influential Management Books You’ll Never Have Time to Read
Basic Books (2011)

Note: This review is of a book published earlier this year. It is a sequel to one published in 2003.

What we have here is a series of brief discussions of “the most influential management books you’ll never have time to read,” a total of 130, one per author or co-authors. They were selected by persons not identified and the book was published by (appropriately) Basic Books. No doubt those who examine the list will disagree with the selections (I do and more about that later) because any such list is bound to generate controversy. Some readers will question the selection of an author’s work (e.g. preferring Jim Collins’ Good to Great to Built to Last written with Jerry Porras) and other readers will object to an author’s inclusion (e.g. Gerry McGovern, R. Meredith Belbin) and/or exclusion (e.g. Adrian Slywotsky, Jason Jennings). That said, the 130 really would provide an excellent “basic library” of resources that include non-business books such as Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, and Carl von Clauswitz’s On War that have indeed had significant impact on thinking about leadership and management.

The two-page format is eminently sensible:

WHY READ IT? A capsule introduction describing the book’s key contribution to management
GETTING STARTED: An introduction to the main themes that each author sets out to address
CONTRIBUTION: A detailed summary of the book’s most important points
CONTEXT: An overview of both the immediate reaction to the book and its long-term significance
FOR MORE INFORMATION: Essential bibliographic information on the given title

Granted, it is impossible to do full justice to any of the 130. What surprised me is how much useful material the anonymous co-authors of the digests manage to provide. Although the format is standardized, the approach to essential points varies to accommodate the unique significance of the given work. Here are two brief excerpts:

On the contribution of Igor Ansoff’s Corporate Strategy (1965): “The book presented several new theoretical concepts, such as partial ignorance, business strategy, capability and competence profiles, and synergy. One particular concept, the product-mission matrix, became very popular because it was simple and – for the first time – codified the differences between strategic expansion and diversification.”

On the contribution of Clayton M. Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma (2003): “The author cites five reasons successful companies fail to capitalize on disruptive technologies:

• Customers control the pattern of resource allocation.
• Small markets do not solve the growth needs of large companies.
• It can be difficult to identify successful applications in advance.
• Larger organizations rely on their core competencies and values.
• Technology supply may not equal demand.”

Having read most of the 130, reviewed a majority, and interviewed the authors of several, I disagree with only a few of the selections and would have replaced them with others I consider more worthy such as Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (1987), Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable (2002), Guy Kawasaki’s Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition (2008), Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1996), and the U.S. Army’s Official Army Leadership Manual: Leadership the Army Way (available to the general public in Be*Know*Do, an adaptation of the manual published in 2004).

Five of the earliest major innovations

Steven Johnson

I have just read Steven Johnson’s latest book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation published by Riverhead Books/Penguin (2010), and was delighted to read the especially informative appendix in which he provides a Chronology of Key Innovations, 1400-2000.

Here are the first five:

Double-Entry Accounting (1300-1400): First codified by the Franciscan friar and mathematician Luca Paciola in 1494, the double-entry method had been used for at least two centuries by Italian bankers and merchants. Some evidence suggests that the technique was developed by Islamic entrepreneurs who passed it on to the Italians through the trade hubs of Venice and Genoa.

Printing Press (1440): While elements of the printing press, including the concept of movable type, date back to earlier Chinese and Korean inventors, the first true printing press that combined the screw press [previously used to crush grapes] and metallic movable type was created by Johannes Gutenberg circa 1440.

Concave Lens (1451): Humans have used lenses to magnify images and to start fires for thousands of years, but the first used of the concave lens to treat myopia is attributed to the polymath German cardinal Nicholas of Cusa.

Parachute (1483): Leonardo da Vinci sketched the original design for the parachute in the margin of a notebook. The first physical test of the design occurred in 1783, when Louis- Sébastien Lenormand leapt from the Montpelier Observatory in France and, with the aid of his primitive parachute, landed without injury. In 2000, an exact replica of de Vinci’s parachute was constructed and tested, and proved to function.

Terrestrial Globe (1492): The Nuremberg-based mapmaker Martin Behaim constructed the first terrestrial globe in the early 1490s, after returning from extensive journeys in West Africa. He called it the Erdapfel, which translates to “earth apple.”

If you share my keen interest in the origins of transformational devices (be they creations or innovations), you will enjoy reading these books:

Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology
Eric Drexler

Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud
Peter Watson

Scientific American Inventions and Discoveries: All the Milestones in Ingenuity From the Discovery of Fire to the Invention of the Microwave Oven
Rodney Carlisle and Scientific American

The Fire of Invention: Civil Society and the Future of the Corporation
Michael Novak

The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created
William Bernstein

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
William Rosen

 

 

Literally, one of history’s coolest ideas

In his latest book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation published by Riverhead

Steven Johnson

Books/Penguin (2010), Steven Johnson examines the origin and development of what is quite literally one of history’s coolest ideas: the air conditioner.

Based in Brooklyn, the Sackett-Wilhelm Lithography Company housed “the first working version of a machine that would do more to transform the settlement patterns of human beings than any other twentieth-century invention, with the possible exception of the automobile.” After two summers of extreme heat, the Sackett-Wilhelm owners contacted the New York City office of the Buffalo Forge Company and inquired, if its experts could make air warmer, could they also make it cooler? One of those experts was Willis Carrier.

Here is Johnson’s account of what happened after two years of research and development under Carrier’s supervision:

“The Sackett-Wilhelm system [to control humidity] had been a success, but the steel coils were prone to rust after regular use. One night, waiting for a train in Philadelphia, watching a heavy fog roll across the platform, [Carrier] had a sudden flash of insight. His air conditioning system could be a miniature fog machine: by drawing air across a fine spray if water inside the device, he could use the water itself as a condensing surface. Thanks to those tenacious hydrogen bonds, the molecules of water vapor in the spray would pull the moisture out if the air, regulating the humidity and eliminating the rust problem.

“As Carrier put it in his autobiography, ‘Water won’t rust.’ Carrier applied for a patent for his ‘Apparatus for Treating Air’ in September of 1904. On the second of 1906, the patent was granted. Before long, Carrier and a band of entrepreneurial engineers from Buffalo Forge and formed the Carrier Engineering Corporation, exclusively devoted to the manufacture of air-conditioning systems.”

This is but one of several dozen examples that Johnson cites of breakthrough innovations. What do all share in common?

1. Collaborative efforts addressed a specific need or problem.
2. Eventual success was achieved only after a series of failures.
3. Those involved were provided with — or created — a “generative platform” (i.e. an open environment within which all kinds of values, perspectives, insights, and hunches could “collide and recombine”)

If you share my keen interest in the origins of transformational devices (be they creations or innovations), you will enjoy reading these books:

Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology
Eric Drexler

Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud
Peter Watson

Scientific American Inventions and Discoveries: All the Milestones in Ingenuity From the Discovery of Fire to the Invention of the Microwave Oven
Rodney Carlisle and Scientific American

The Fire of Invention: Civil Society and the Future of the Corporation
Michael Novak

The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created
William Bernstein

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
William Rosen

Book Review: The Great Reset

The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity
Richard Florida
Harper/Harper Collins (2010)

The First Great Reset occurred in the 1870s, the Second in the 1930s, and a Third is now developing. “The promise of the current Reset is the opportunity for a life made better not by ownership of real estate, appliances, cars, and all manner of material goods, but of greater flexibility and lower levels of debt, of more time with family and friends, greater promise of personal development, and access to more and better experiences. All organisms and all systems experience the cycles of life, death, and rebirth.”

Literally, a reset means “to set again or renew” (Webster), “to set again or differently” (Oxford English Dictionary). As Florida makes crystal clear, however, a Reset is not an invitation to reload with the same “ammunition” (i.e. values, mindset, perspectives, strategies, and tactics) because, more often than not, that “ammunition” of the status quo helps to explain the emergence of a Great Reset in response to its inadequacies and thus is among its causes. This is precisely what Florida has in mind when observing that economic systems “do not exist in the abstract; they are embedded within the geographic fabric of the society – the way land is used, the locations of homes and businesses, the infrastructure that ties people, places, and commerce together. These factors combine to shape production, consumption, and innovation, and as they change, so do the basic engines of the economy. A reconfiguration of this economic landscape is the real distinguishing characteristic of a Great Reset.”

Note: Eric Drexler has a great deal to say about these and other issues in Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (1987) as does Joel Mokyr in The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (1992) and then in The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (2004). Presumably Florida shares my high regard for these three books.

Florida provides a wealth of information and analysis of the First and Great Resets, especially in terms of their impact on the economic landscape, first in the 1870s and then in the 1930s. For example, what was then characterized as “the war of currents” (i.e. competition between Edison and Westinghouse) revealed which system (alternate or direct current) was more efficient and would benefit the public most. “In that effort we can see a crystal-clear example of innovation progressing toward infrastructure that could become the foundation of a Great Reset.” It did. Consider also led to great systems innovations in locations such as Edison’s lab in New Jersey and clusters of innovation in Pittsburgh and Cleveland. There were also major advances in transportation infrastructure. Florida also notes other large-scale systems innovation in mass public education as well as in manufacturing that could fully harness the productive power of industrial capitalism.

With regard to the Second Great Reset, its impact was wider and deeper than its predecessor. “For starters, [it] saw massive improvements in economic efficiency. Advances in machinery and the introduction of the modern assembly lines generated huge economies of scale. Power generation improved, and companies got better at capturing and using what before had been wasted energy…Research and development expanded significantly during the Second Reset. Although many see it as an easy target during budget cutbacks, spending on research and development actually doubled over the course of the 1930s…The Second Reset bought about enormous upgrading and expansion of America’s educational infrastructure. More and more Americans attended public school and more completed high school, with the percentage of high school graduates increasing from around 20 percent to more than 50 percent between 1920 and 1950.” By the time the U.S. entered World War Two, the essential components of the Second Great Reset were in place.

In my opinion, The Great Reset to be the most valuable book that Richard Florida has written…thus far.