Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Business books seem to fall into one of three categories:

1. Memoir style – the author gives an auto-biographical re-telling of his career and what he thinks are the important lessons from it. Jack Welch’s Winning fits in this category.
2. Student/Teacher style – a protagonist hits hard times and a super-intelligent teacher patiently teaches him. This style generally has a number of back and forth conversations with the student asking simple questions and the teacher pontificating for pages at a time. Robin Sharma’s Leadership Wisdom from the Monk Who Sold His Ferrari (and Scott Adam’s God’s Debris) are both this style.
3. Fable style – very simple concept described through an occasionally entertaining story.

Patrick Lencioni’s The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive is the fable style. I didn’t find the fable very important to communicating the content, but without the fable, Lencioni would have had about 20 pages of text.

The story (good executive makes a bad hire who almost takes down the company…) was interesting for the “behind-the-scenes” look at executive politics, but unfortunately that wasn’t really the point of the book.

The four points are:

1. Build and Maintain a Cohesive Leadership Team – know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, have good open discussions, hold each other accountable, and commit to decisions once they are made.
2. Create Organizational Clarity – specifics around why your business exists, what values are important, who your competitors are, your products’ differentiation, and your execution plans and responsibilities.
3. Over-Communicate Organization Clarity – repetition, simplicity, multiple mediums, cascading messaging.
4. Reinforce Organizational Clarity through Human Systems – make sure that your value are reflected in your hiring, firing, and performance management (including rewards and recognition)

None of this is really rocket science, though I’ve found it’s much harder said then done. The interesting thing I found was consequences of not doing this stuff.

Corporate politics are a reality and basically impossible to eliminate; the strategy should be to minimize politics as much as possible. Having clear organizational goals and areas of ownership will help a lot. In a company where multiple teams are working on the same project, there will be ridiculous amounts of politics as the teams fight for turf and resources.

Or consider a company where the “worker-bees” are rated against a value-system that management is clearly not following or even being evaluated against. Morale will obviously be a problem in that company.

I wish that Lencioni would have included some hard data supporting his premise or at least describing real companies that do this well. Without this, I feel that the book is not complete. The book is a very quick read (under an hour), so in that sense it’s probably worth reading. If you take a few notes as you read, there’s no need to re-read it.