Two books covered in this post; best is last…
Via BusinessWeek I read about a new book called Exploiting Chaos by Toronto’s Jeremy Gutsche (founder of TrendHunter and apparently an all-around busy guy). The subtitle is “150 Ways to Spark Innovation in Times of Change.” Billed as a “visually delicious business book,” it looks like a great resource to keep on-hand in case you find yourself in need of inspiration, but not much beyond that.
Looking at the promo material made me crave something with more enduring value and substance, so I browsed over to Bob Sutton’s blog — the first place I go when I want a business-related book recommendation. At the very top of the page I found this post:
Collaboration: Mort Hansen’s Masterpiece
… the best management book I’ve read on anything in a very long time
Not a lot of ambiguity there. What else?
In fact, with all due respect to Collins, I think Collaboration is better book than Good to Great — because it is based on better evidence and provides more details about what managers can actually do. I am hoping that, like Clay Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma, which languished for a year before Andy Grove discovered it and talked it up, that despite Collaboration’s modest start, the story will be the same.
Sold.
Professor Sutton has never steered me wrong so I’m looking forward to checking this out. He wrote an elegant Amazon review here, and there are more tidbits in his post — including a link to this video, and the fact that Hansen co-authored the original HBR article on “T-shaped people.”
Here’s more from Don Sull at FT.com:
Many business books fall short in the solutions they offer, veering at one extreme into a long laundry list of superficial or obvious actions or at the other into a “one size fits all” solution ill-suited to the complexity of real world organisations. Hansen strikes just the right balance. He introduces three actions, that are not obvious and eminently practical. Among his many useful suggestions, I found T-shaped management and the simple rules for nimble networks to be particularly powerful. Hansen clearly spends a great deal of time with managers in the trenches, and his deep knowledge of the real world shines through in the recommendations.
This book is “academic” in the best sense of the word…
Looks like it’ll become core curriculum here in my little corner of the web. Here’s the preview at Google Books if you’re still curious.
