Leadership Knowledge

I did not like this book. And since I actually bought it (paid money for it) I’m going to say I hate it. Thus the 1-star rating. I picked this book up at Borders and skimmed through it and thought it would be an interesting read. Unfortunately my skim job was a bit too cursory and when I later sat down at home to read it I was terribly disappointed. The book is a theoretical fluff piece with no practical application that I am aware of.

It doesn’t take a rocket-scientist to know that the world over the next ten years is going to be faced with huge problems. A ticking time bomb is getting ready to explode as to the following:

1. Environmental Problems

2. Business & Economic Problems

3. Political & Governmental Problems

4. Social & People Problems, including education, healthcare, and social security

This book does not scratch the surface of the vast majority of these 4 pillars of problems we are going to face. What this book talks about is how change exists in the business and home lives of most people, and they (we) have to do some “scenario planning” in order to anticipate surprises in an Age of Uncertainty & Risk. Some scenarios are touched upon. But touching on the ones included in this book wasn’t helpful to me. And most of them were common sense, too.

I will rank this book with another book I recently read and reviewed – “Leaders Make the Future” (ISBN: 9781605090023). I gave it a 3-star rating since I did not pay for it. But if I had bought it, then I would have given it a 1-star, too. These books that try to cover the future typically just don’t come across well. They don’t cover enough bases or make meaningful helpful points that the reader can use in moving forward in their lives.

I “listen” to the future. Sure I do. I hear that government is getting out of control and seems to be quite corrupt. I see that the United States seems to be turning into a socialist society. I see that the masses are not getting good educations. And education is way too expensive. And people are pretty much only fit to look for jobs rather than make their own. I see a country that has laws about immigration, but ignores those laws when it comes time to enforce them. Worse yet, the US doesn’t even try to enforce them unless an illegality stares them in the face. But were these problems discussed in this book? No. Were these problems relevant to the subject matter of this book? Yes. Bottom line is that if the author cannot do the subject matter of his book justice, then he should not have written the book (or gotten it published). 1 star!

PS. I encourage you to take a look at the Search Inside feature offered by Amazon. There you can examine the Table of Contents for this book. Read the chapter titles and you will see how fluffy and flaky this book really is. I will say this: If businesses are going to be more and more dynamic in the future, then they are going to have to shrink in size considerably. And the world is in trouble because employees of a small company have to be more competent than a mere cog in the wheel of a big company. We don’t have a trained work force to handle this new development. Unfortunately this book doesn’t get into all this.
Rating: 1 / 5

Two quotes immediately flashed across my mind as I started reading Listening to the Future by Dan Rasmus, a key soothsayer at Microsoft, and Rob Salkowitz, a free ranger in the Microsoft ecosystem who occasionally wanders further afield. The first is a Kant quote: we see not what is, but who we are. The second is due to Alan Kay, a big name in the hoary past of my employer, Xerox: the easiest way to predict the future is to invent it. Looking out and ahead at the future is as much a synthetic and introspective act as it is a predictive act, even if you don’t explicitly set out to introspect or synthesize. Microsoft’s visions of the future merit some belief simply because the vast energies of that 600 lb gorilla, channeled by those visions, might be sufficient to bring them about. Goliaths win more often than we suspect, because Goliath beating David doesn’t make the news. For you and me, this book is vastly more interesting for what it reveals about the strategic culture at Microsoft than for what it reveals about the future (which is interesting enough in its own right though).

The governing paradigm of the book might be called Scenario Planning 2.0. If strategic cultures were cars, this would be a PT Cruiser. Scenario planning is an approach to imagining the future that relies on specific background narratives; grand What-Ifs against which your foreground ideas can be war-gamed. To get at their big what-ifs, Rasmus and Salkowitz looked at the bewildering variety of variables that people think (or panic or daydream) about — aging Baby Boomers, green issues, terrorism, peak oil — and pick out two: globalization and workforce democratization, to serve as the key ones. Each of these two variables is used to create a dichotomy axis that separates out mutually-exclusive futures. The result is the 4 quadrant picture of mutually exclusive types of futures pictured above. Here are these four scenarios:

* Proud Tower: Globalization succeeds, the workforce organizes itself into hierarchical, vertically-integrated global mega-organizations, created by increasingly integrative M&A activities, and populated by Organization Man 2.0.

* Continental Drift: Globalization fails, the workforce organizes itself in large, intra-national corporations whose agendas are subservient to national agendas

* Frontier Friction: Globalization fails, the workforce organizes itself into anarchic, non-hierarchical and fluid forms

* Freelance Planet: This assumes more and more people will become wholly or partially free agents and organize themselves outside of corporations.

Rasmus’ research group evaluates technology and business ideas against these futures, for relevance and business value, and most importantly, robustness. The premise is that if an idea seems to hold up against the hypothetical forces these four scenarios might unleash, then it is probably worth investing in. The authors explain this approach with the colorful metaphor of wind-tunnel testing: good ideas will survive these 4 wind tunnels. The sorts of ideas they are interested in are mostly obvious: contextual collaboration, the evolution of devices, interfaces and user experiences, machine learning and so forth. But most of the book is not actually devoted to how Microsoft uses the models, but how others might apply it. After the model is introduced in Chapter 1, the remaining 8 chapters, with titles like “managing a dynamic business” and “prospering in a blended world” apply the framework to a variety of questions, some at the C-suite strategy level, and some at the level of middle-management operational issues.

You should certainly read the book to learn about Microsoft. But should you adopt these Microsoft methods yourself?

My answer: depends on who you are. If your company has an essentially pragmatic DNA, this is a great model to follow. If, on the other hand, you have an essentially religious DNA, this type of thinking could slow you down and drain your emotional energy. You might be better off taking the bigger risks of planning around single futures you plan to create and not listening to the futures others might cause. (This is an extract from my full review at http://enterprise2blog.com/2009/01/the-future-according-to-microsoft/)
Rating: 4 / 5