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Adam Bryant is the senior editor for features at The New York Times and writes the popular "Comer Office" feature in the paper's Sunday Business section. He was the lead editor for the team that won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and is a former senior writer and business editor at näytä lisää Newsweek. He lives in Westchester County, New York. näytä vähemmän

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Philadelphia Chickens (2002) — Avustaja, eräät painokset1,042 kappaletta

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I recently saw a stack of seven books on a city manager's desk; one was a dictionary of finance terms and another was The Daily Stoic and I decided to read the other five, of which this was one. This is the fourth of those five that I've read and it definitely is the most quotable. Arranged in three parts - Succeeding, Managing, and Leadership - the author culled thoughts and advice, lessons learned, and stories from a staggering 70+ interviews, and he derviced common themes...Succeeding for eaxmple:"The qualities these executives share: Passionate curiosity. Battle-hardened confidence. Team smarts. A simple mindset. Fearlessness." Bryant curated from those interviews, because
For this book, I was interested in pursuing a different story line about CEOs—their own personal stories, free of numbers, theories, jargon, charts, and with minimal discussions of their companies or industries. I wanted to hear what they had learned from their ups and downs, their stories about how they learned to lead, the mistakes they made along the way, how they fostered supportive corporate cultures, and how they do the same things that every other manager does—interview job candidates, run meetings, promote teamwork, manage their time, and give and get feedback.
Any reader should be able to highlight a number of observations in here, whether reflections of parts of themselves, wishes for directions to take, perhaps even practices to avoid. It's a nice assembly with enough takeaways to hit somebody's sweetspot.

Selected highlights (I made a lot more notes, some good ones on interviewing, observing, more):

"You learn from everybody,” said Alan R. Mulally, the CEO of the Ford Motor Company. “I’ve always just wanted to learn everything, to understand anybody that I was around—why they thought what they did, why they did what they did, what worked for them, what didn’t work.”

Tim Brown:
“I do think that’s something we forget,” said Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, the design consulting firm. “As leaders, probably the most important role we can play is asking the right questions. But the bit we forget is that it is, in itself, a creative pro cess. Those right questions aren’t just kind of lying around on the ground to be picked up and asked. When I go back and look at the great leaders—Roosevelt, Churchill—one of the things that occur to me is they somehow had the ability to frame the question in a way that nobody else would have thought about. In design, that’s everything, right?"
I took from Brown's Change by Design, one question, well, paradigm, is to use "How Can We...?" approach, not just for design as Brown would have, but for solving problems in general.

"How do CEOs build a sense of teamwork, and not just team spirit?" This is important. Rah Rah doesn't get the job done.

Gordon Bethune said "As I went up the ladder in the Navy, I never forgot what it’s like to be down the ladder, and that being good at your job is predicated pretty much on how the people working for you feel." I preached and mentored the same thing as I went up the ladder in the Navy: never forget where you came from and do you best to avoid the approaches you didn't like happening to you.

Tachi Yamada says
Learning how to delegate, learning how to let go and still make sure that everything happened, was a very important lesson in my first role in management. And that’s where I learned a principle that I apply today—I don’t micromanage, but I have micro-interest. I do know the details. I do care about the details. I feel like I have intimate knowledge of what’s going on, but I don’t tell people what to do.
I like this. I don't micromanage, but there are definitely times when I care about the details, or have to care because of the responsibility.

Carol Bartz of Yahoo: "I wasn’t given this advice, but this is what happened in my life,” she said. “You need to build your career not as a ladder, but as a pyramid. You need to have a base of experience because it’s a much more stable structure.
Obvious, right?

Bryant observes on CEOs
As much as people can try to prepare for these jobs, they’re likely to feel blindsided. That’s a lesson many CEOs share, and their experiences are useful for managers at all levels, helping them to prepare for promotions into new roles, and to develop their sensitivity to the potential outsized impact of a small gesture or an off-hand remark. Management jobs are a very public form of on-the-job training—people have to learn how to handle the work under the bright lights of center stage as employees scrutinize every move. The sooner executives appear comfortable in the role, the quicker they will win the confidence of employees. The reality of management has a way of steamrolling the theory of management, particularly for anyone taking on such a role for the first time.
This is true at any level, not just CEO.

Anne Mulcahy, the former Xerox CEO:
Most people in my position would say that as much as we’ll whine about traveling, time on planes probably is critically important to us doing our jobs. It’s time to be reflective. It’s time to catch up. It’s time to really be thoughtful and communicate. So I get off a plane with just a ton done, and that’s really important in terms of time management.
Enforced “down” time is important. If I’m at a conference and in between seminars, or just over in the corner thinking about what’s been said, I’ll take the time to think about “the business” in ways I haven’t in a while… and come back with ideas. Annoys my staff sometimes!

Susan Docherty, a vice president at General Motors,
said she doesn’t like assigned seats in a meeting room. “I always sit in a different chair,” she said. “When I was in different roles in this company, I saw a lot of leaders sit in the same chair, think the same way and talk to the same people. And I said to myself, ‘When I become a leader, and I have a big team, I’m not going to play favorites. I want to be a dynamic leader.’ And I think being disruptive, not always being predictable, is healthy.”
I like to do this, too. I will sit in different spots to shake things up, especially seats where people have hung up their planks. And depending on the type of meeting, I'll sit in different spots to watch, and sometimes nudge, the interactions.

Robert W. Selander, the CEO of MasterCard "learned to hold back on expressing his opinion. 'As you become more senior in a company, you tend to be viewed as more authoritative when you speak and therefore you have to back off a little bit.'" Important lesson that so many never seem to learn.

Deborah Dunsire of Millennium "said that management-by-walking-around is essential—not just for getting feedback, but also for retaining talented employees." Oh yeah. 100% this.

"What’s the difference between management and leadership? Management is about results."
"Leadership is an art."
"People report to managers, but they follow leaders."

There is a lot more and other readers will obviously pull different points that resonate with them.
… (lisätietoja)
 
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Razinha | 9 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Sep 4, 2021 |
I got a copy of this book through a Goodreads giveaway in return for a honest review.

While I find that there is a lot of information regarding start-ups I found it difficult to apply to a small business. If you are looking to start a larger company and have no management classes under your belt, this book would be great.
 
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Terrell_Solano | 4 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Oct 7, 2015 |
Tämä arvostelu kirjoitettiin LibraryThingin Varhaisia arvostelijoita varten.
A note about these newly posted non-link reviews.

I suppose that one of the nice things about the LibraryThing.com “Early Reviewer” program is that it's like a grab-bag gift exchange, but instead of the shape of the item, and how it's wrapped, the way you end up guessing what you're going to like is the paragraph or so of promo copy that the publishers provide about the book. Yes, you're way ahead of the game vs. a “pig in a poke” pick-a-gift in that you sort of know what you're getting … but I'm finding that I'm only rarely reading the book I thought I was requesting. Today's title is another example of this.

Now, I guess if I had heard of the author, or of his New York Times column, or previous book, I might have had a better sense of what was coming. But when the description said that Adam Bryant had interviewed “more than two hundred” (a figure that keeps coming up, even though less than 150 seem to have actually made it into the book) CEOs for this, I figured that Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation was going to be a series of interviews (or highlights thereof) extracting from these leaders their “wisdom and guidance to move an organization faster, to be quick and nimble, and to rekindle the whatever-it-takes collective spark of a start-up, all with the goal of innovating and thriving in a relentlessly challenging global economy”. But it's not.

Frankly, what Bryant has done here is much easier to digest than what would have been the case were it to have been just interview after interview, but it took me a bit longer than half the book to come up with a model of what was going on in it. The material here is fascinating, and I was getting the feeling after each chapter that I'd just attended a really interesting seminar by top-notch experts on a particular subject … and it struck me that this book was somewhat like a series of sixteen heavily-moderated (since everything is woven through Bryant's narration) panel presentations, each with a different mix of CEOs (although a few of them keep showing up across the book), and each chapter pretty much free-standing like that.

Now, had I had that perception going in, I might have gotten more from the earlier parts, when I was still trying to “figure it out” … I kept finding myself enjoying the book when actually reading it, but having a hard time picking it up in favor of other things I was reading (although I must admit, I did finish this first of the three books I started reading in the first week of January). Given this, it might be useful to walk through Quick and Nimble's chapters (with a brief note on my take on the “theme” of each) to see what these “expert panel seminars” are discussing:
  1. Why Culture Matters (“culture eats strategy for breakfast”)

  2. A Simple Plan (mission statements, measurable goals, etc.)

  3. Rules of the Road (values that steer your company)

  4. A Little Respect (bad bosses and behaviors)

  5. It's About the Team (working together, relying on each other)

  6. Adult Conversations (“tough love” for the greater good)

  7. The Hazards of E-mail (easy to misinterpret, easy to abuse)

  8. Play It Again and Again (constantly communicating)

  9. Building Better Managers (not everybody comes equipped)

  10. Surfacing Problems (researching how things really work in-house)

  11. School Never Ends (not growing = dying)

  12. The Art of Smarter Meetings (optimizing those sometimes-necessary evils)

  13. Knocking Down Silos (how to avoid tribalism)

  14. Sparking Innovation (keeping things fresh, and hungry)

  15. Can We Have Some Fun? (some silliness solidifies solidarity)

  16. Alone at the Top (trust, urgency, and change)
Again, there are a lot of voices here, perhaps a dozen or more on some of these, so there's more of a “lively give-and-take” than a definitive statement in any … although, obviously, the author is constructing a pathway to a particular point with each. Because of this structure, I found it difficult to pinpoint specific statements to hold out as illustrative of their subjects. I did, however, end up bookmarking a couple of things that somewhat stood out to me.

One of these is sort of second-hand, coming from AOL's Steve Case, but in this quoting a fellow founder of the online service, Jim Kimsey. Case says that his view in the early part of his career was that “looking like you're working hard mattered”, but he relates Kimsey's insistence that “the art is trying to set the priorities and assemble a team so you wake up in the morning and actually have nothing to do”. He continues with:

The objective should not be looking busy, but actually creating a process that allows great things to happen in a way that you can be less involved. So it was sort of a process of letting go, which is hard for entrepreneurs. But at some point you've got to let go and you've got to step back. Ultimately that is about trusting the people you've got but also trusting yourself, that you've set the right context in terms of the vision, the priorities, the team.

I don't think anybody would be surprised that this is the opening part of the “Alone at the Top” chapter, but it's a good sampling of the sort of material that fills Quick and Nimble. Some of it runs close to “common wisdom”, what' you'd expect, but a good deal goes counter to what one would guess to work best.

One other quote that stood out here was in this category, coming from Marcus Ryu of Guidewire, from the “Play It Again and Again” chapter:

Even though we talk about how important rationality is in the company, I've come to accept that rationality plays a very limited role in persuasion, and that it's mostly about emotion. It's mostly about empathy and about authenticity and about commitment. … {S}ort of a corollary to that, is about communicating with large groups of people. I've come to realize that no matter how smart the people are that you're communicating to, the more of them there are, the dumber the collective gets. And so you could have a room full of Einsteins, but if there are two hundred or three hundred of them, then you still have to talk to them like they're just average people. As the audience gets bigger and bigger, the bullet-point list has to be shorter and shorter, and the messages have to be simpler and simpler.

Which is, I guess, a more round-about way to get to the classic “KISS” advice for Keeping It Simple.

Anyway, as noted, reading Quick and Nimble is very much like sitting through a series of top-talent panel-based seminars, with input from a remarkable selection of CEOs across a very wide assortment of industries, and I almost feel like one should get a certificate for finishing it (not that the book is a difficult read by any measure). This has been out for less than two weeks at this point, so you should be find it in the “new releases” sections of the remaining business-oriented brick-and-mortar book vendors, but the on-line behemoths are currently knocking off a quarter of the cover price on the hardback. Anybody with an interest in business, marketing, and innovation should consider picking this up … it's quite the experience!

CMP.Ly/1

A link to my "real" review:
BTRIPP's review of Adam Bryant's Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation (1227 words)
… (lisätietoja)
 
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BTRIPP | 4 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Jan 19, 2014 |
Tämä arvostelu kirjoitettiin LibraryThingin Varhaisia arvostelijoita varten.
I received an ARC through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, and quickly dove into this text. I really appreciate the topical approach, with a variety of real-world examples to illustrate the principles in play. With a variety of what amounts to miniature case studies, Bryant does an excellent job of defining the principle, discussing its implementation in existing companies, and providing suggestions for the reader to utilize it in his or her own organization. While this isn't necessarily ground-breaking, it is an effective treatment with some fresh perspective on good ideas.… (lisätietoja)
 
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sstaheli | 4 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Dec 18, 2013 |

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