Practically Radical: Not-So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Challenge Yourself [Hardcover]

William C. Taylor (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 4, 2011

“The most powerful and instructive change manual you’ll ever read. It will persuade and inspire you to change your business, your work, and maybe your life.”
—Daniel H. Pink, bestselling author of A Whole New Mind

In Practically Radical, William C. Taylor, the New York Times bestselling co-author of Mavericks at Work offers a refreshing, rigorous new look at pragmatic ways to shake things up and make positive change in difficult times. Anything but your typical business book, Practically Radical is a must-own for small business owners and CEOs, for managers at all levels, and innovators and entrepreneurs of every stripe.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As the business world becomes increasingly competitive, global, and adoptive of new technologies, companies worldwide are constantly searching for answers about how to best evolve to meet their customers™ needs and to stay abreast of their competitors. Taylor (Mavericks at Work) asserts that change is the name of the game; he takes us on an inside look at 25 companies that have grown ever more adaptive to not merely survive but thrive in today™s challenging environment. Taylor™s book is intended to guide leaders in launching fresh initiatives and rethinking œthe logic of leadership itself as they work to rally their colleagues around an agenda for renewal. The work achieves its promise with actionable prescriptions and meaningful examples, such as how organizations like the Girl Scouts have redefined their brand and revitalized their mission, how Zappos has reimagined retail and service, and why, like IBM, leaders must constantly challenge the status quo by examining the self-reflection and commitment to innovation. An engaging and briskly written read, this will captivate and benefit business people interested in change and innovation. (Feb.)
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From Booklist

In the depths of the Great Depression, economist John Maynard Keynes wrote that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations, evoking a basic animal instinct within us to do something productive and procreative, even in the face of hard times. Taylor, a former Harvard Business Review editor and cofounder of Fast Company, a full-color business magazine, begins this discussion on creative solutions for tough economic times by reviewing the pioneering companies that got their start during recessionary environments: Federal Express, Microsoft, and Texas Instruments, among others. The radical solutions he proposes may be as simple as bucking the trend. Case in point, online shoe and apparel retailer Zappos.com, which has developed an almost cultlike customer loyalty by encouraging buyers to call in to their 24/7 phone line and offering a full one-year return policy. Taylor profiles 25 companies and organizations from the Providence, Rhode Island, police to the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra to illustrate how radical thinking can transform companies and excite management and staff to tap into their group genius. --David Siegfried

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow (January 4, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061734616
• ISBN-13: 978-0061734618
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #557,441 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bill Taylor is a cofounder of Fast Company and coauthor of Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win (with Polly LaBarre). He has published numerous essays and CEO interviews in the Harvard Business Review, and hosts a blog on being "Practically Radical" on HarvardBusiness Online. He's written columns for the Sunday Business section of the New York Times and for The Guardian ( London). A graduate of Princeton University and the MIT Sloan School of Management, he lives in Wellesley, MA, with his wife and two daughters.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars New Ideas about Strategy, Leadership, Innovation and Success January 4, 2011

By Andrea Meyer

Format:Hardcover

With this book, Bill Taylor, cofounder of Fast Company, continues in his passion to help leaders create change and fix what's wrong with their organizations. His books inspire and provide real-life stories, fueled by Taylor's own experiences and personal interviews with people who make things happen.

My favorite section of the book is Part III, "Challenge Yourself." (The other two are "Transforming Your Company" and "Shaking up Your Industry.) The lessons here are palpable, and for me the most valuable was in Chapter 8 and Taylor's interview with Boston Scientific cofounder John Abele. Taylor focused on a more personal story rather than the more well-known aspects of Boston Scientific. I won't spoil the story, but the insights from it helped me understand the delicate balance of collaborative leadership. It's not simply collective intelligence that solves a problem, but "collective capability." That is, leaders create the conditions in which diverse people work together to solve a tough challenge. The crux, as Abele says, is that "leaders can't be so self-effacing that they become invisible. They have to create a reason to collaborate and a platform to make it possible."

Taylor's book creates these conditions as well, conditions in which "diverse and dispersed groups of people can rally around a cause, sort through a problem, and make tangible progress on difficult-to-achieve goals." I hope that Taylor continues this with a companion website to this book to let leaders share their ideas, issues and stories.

The book ends with a Practically Radical Primer: 10 Questions Every Game Changer Must Answer. This is a quick-hit section that offers a lot of insights and challenge-yourself questions to help you create the changes you want to see happen.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars How and why to transform your company, shake up your industry, and challenge yourself January 12, 2011

By Robert Morris HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Dan Pink has characterized this book as being "the most powerful and instructive change manual you'll ever read" and I certainly share his high regard for William Taylor's book. Most change initiatives fail and reasons vary from one situation to the next. However, as Taylor explains in this book, organizations cannot be transformed unless and until those who lead them first transform themselves and thereby serve as exemplars to others. He also points out that organizational transformation requires having effective change agents at all levels and in all areas, not only in the C-suite, what Cynthia Barton Rabe characterizes as "zero-gravity thinkers" - innovators "who are not weighed down by the expertise of a team, its politics, or `the way things have always been done.'"

Taylor agrees with Rabe that zero-gravity thinkers have "psychological distance" from the setting in which they work, "renaissance tendencies" that draw on a range of interests and influences, and "related expertise" that allows them to find the points where blue-sky ideas intersect with real-world opportunities. They are visionary pragmatists: they see possibilities and realize how difficult it will be to make them realities.

For example, Taylor cites what he calls "Five Truths of Corporate Transformation" (Pages 83-93):

1. Most organizations in most fields suffer a kind if tunnel vision, which makes it hard to envision a more positive future.

2. Most leaders see things the same way everyone else sees them because they look for ideas in the same places everyone looks for them.

3. In troubled organizations rich with tradition and success, history can be a curse - and a blessing. The challenge is to break from the past without disavowing it.

4. The job of the change agent is not just to surface high-minded ideas. It is to summon a sense of urgency inside and outside of the organization, and to turn that urgency to action.

5. In a business environment that never stops changing, change agents can never stop learning."

Later in his lively and eloquent narrative, Taylor cited and discusses "Five New Rules for Starting Something New" (Pages 172-182) and then "Five Habits of Highly Humbitious Leaders (Pages 245-254). As Taylor explains, he first encountered the term "humbitious" when a 30-year veteran of IBM, Jane Harper, used it to describe herself, together with the term "possibilitarian." She claims the term "humbitious," a blend of humility and ambition that drives the most successful business people, was coined by researchers at Bell Labs. Of course, more than two centuries earlier when Socrates was described as the world's wisest man, he replied that if that were true, it was because all he knew was that he knew nothing. Of course, effective change agents know a great deal but correctly realize what aspiring leaders at IBM were told, that "by far the lion's share of world-changing luminaries are humble people. They focus on the work, not themselves. They seek - they are ambitious - but they are humbled when it arrives. They know that much of the success was luck, timing, and a thousand factors out of their control." That is essentially how Jim Collins describes the mindset of Lever 5 leaders in his book, Good to Great.

Taylor achieves brilliantly his stated objective to do more than share with his reader what he has learned about "the hard work of deep-seated change"; he also provides a wealth of information about the behind-the-scenes efforts of change agents in a real-world circumstances who helped to transform their organizations and, more often than not, the industries in which their organizations compete. The major themes and core messages he gained from his association with these visionary pragmatists is distilled in the "Practically Radical Primer," a set of ten questions that can serve as a self-audit for aspiring change agents.

In this book, Taylor has identified and defined the challenges of change; he has also made every effort to prepare his reader to confront them in "not-so-crazy" but nonetheless radical ways. First, however, those who read this book must overcome what James O'Toole so aptly characterizes in his book, Leading Change, as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom."

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A true manual for change January 12, 2011

By Jeff Lavoie

Format:Hardcover

I have heard much about Mr. Taylor and his innovative ideas. After reading Practically Radical I now see what the buzz is all about. It is refreshing to hear new ideas and actual examples of those ideas being used around the world, especially during these tough economic times. I have already started to use some of his phrases with my staff (Humbition,Vuja de). I have even put the phrase on page #199 on the bottom of my inter-office e-mails "The most effective leaders no longer want the job of solving the organization's biggest problems or identifying its best opportunities. Instead, they recognize that the most powerful ideas can come from the most unexpected places: the quiet genius buried deep inside the organization." I would highly recommend this book.