9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Without business think, you're only whining., May 5, 2002
This review is from: businessThink: Rules for Getting It RightNow, and No Matter What! (Hardcover)
What a great new book. What caught my eye was how many heavy hitters (Tom Peters, Warren Bennis, and Ram Charan)recommended it. It is good.
1. Business Think emphasizes that thinking matters. We've gone way too far with the ready, fire, aim. Poorly thought out presentations, projects, meetings, reorganizations. Businesses that succeed don't get more done, they get more of the right things done.
2. Business think teaches employees how to gain political traction rather than whine. While they think they are making helpful suggestions, most employees bring complaints and gripes to their boss because they think about ways to improve their job, not the business. So when they bring suggestions that help their team but would hurt other departments or the company's bottom line,the executives don't listen. Before you can talk your bosses language, you have to think like the CEO. It's sad because most employees have good ideas but thinks no one listens.
3. Business Think shows you that you have to listen first to your boss or board or the finance department before they will listen to you. And it shows you how to do it.
The book has a Fast Company style of writing that is snappy and edgy for a while and then wears a little thin. But it keeps a serious subject from getting boring.
I'm going to buy it for my entire department. We do way too much training for managers. It's time to train the people to think like their manager.
If you ever got rated down for not thinking strategically, this book is the best I have seen for laying out how to be seen as a player.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
An overdose of self-praise, little originality or practicality, August 25, 2005
Summary:
Do not read businessThink, unless you want to learn how to write hundreds of pages of common knowledge and hype it as revolutionary thinking. The book does contain useful thoughts but they are definitely not new and are wrapped in disgusting self-propaganda for the businessThink "methodology". The authors do not demonstrate any significant knowledge of business best practices or the relevant literature, consequently the examples used to underline the points are far from enlightening.
Details:
Normally I stop reading such books before the end of the introduction, but being on holiday and the weather being rainy, I got as far as the beginning of Chapter 5. Then I decided that businessThink was not even worth the $6 bargain price I paid for it.
I do not expect every business book to contain breakthrough ideas (for instance, I enjoyed reading "Thinking Inside the Box" even if it claimed to contain only the old, commonsense rules of business). However, what Marcum and Smith did in this book; pasting together trite from business literature, calling it "revolutionary" on every second page of the book, lacing it with irrelevant or imprecise examples, and using a conceited and patronizing style in the meantime is way too much for me.
Being mostly a compilation of common business knowledge, businessThink does give you some good general advice, but much better business books exist, with more relevant and practical examples and written by more modest authors.
Let me share with you what I have read in the first four chapters and then you can decide whether you are interested in the rest. (My comments are in parentheses.)
Foreword by Stephen R. Covey: Powerful breakthroughs need a paradigm change, not just a change in attitudes. He believes that businessThink "presents a provocative, principle-centered paradigm shift for rethinking the way we do business". This book is "every person's MBA for the real world". And this goes on for 8 pages... (By the way, if I hear or read "paradigm change" or "paradigm shift" I get immediately suspicious. This is one of the favorite phrases of empty-headed corporate parrots.)
Introduction: Despite of an "innovation explosion" and a confidence among entrepreneurs, most businesses fail. This is because most businesspeople just "do" business and not think about it. (This is the first of many not-so-solid conclusions of the authors. A business can fail for many reasons, inadequate thinking being just one important aspect.)
But do not worry, all you feeble-minded, unable-to-think-coherently businesspeople around the globe, because here we are to help you out with our eight rules that "will be the seeds of a much-needed revolution in business". We offer a complete, fail-proof solution to the "dysfunction of the real business world". Live by these rules and "you will develop a business instinct or seventh sense".
If you learn how to think correctly - that is, if you adopt businessThink - then it will be better for both you and for your company. Since you may find this idea difficult to comprehend, let us elaborate the upsides of thinking versus not thinking. (And they actually list the advantages of using your brain at work! This is probably necessary because the moronic reader has not learnt businessThink yet. By the end of the book, he might be able to assemble such a list himself, but for the time being he surely needs instruction by the bright authors on this point.)
Chapter 1: Today thinking is the most important activity of businesses. But most decisions fail, while decision confidence is high. (The authors cite research results, some of them without proper reference.)
Let us see an example of a company making bad decisions - Webvan. (A verbatim quote from Fortune magazine follows, with what I believe to be a rather shallow analysis of Webvan's failure. Surfing on the Net, I found a better article on the topic in 5 minutes. If Marcum and Smith could not come up with an original example, at least they should have chosen their quote wisely.)
In today's business white-collar productivity is all-important. Thinking is everybody's job. (I believe, I've also heard this before...)
Currently in most businesses "there is no common approach or common criteria for making decisions". But here are the Eight Rules of businessThink listed and shortly explained.
Neither EQ, nor IQ is enough for proper application of businessThink, you need a fusion of the two.
Chapters 2 and 3: The first rule is "Check Your Ego at the Door". That is, listen to others, do not be overconfident, show humility etc. (Of course, this rule is only applicable in business decisions but you can forget about it when you write business books - at least that's what Marcum and Smith seem to think...)
Some of the revolutionary ideas regarding the first rule include:
- Don't think black and white, but consider other options.
- Beware the absolutes like all, never etc.
For your convenience, these rules are also demonstrated in business scenarios, comparing the "old school" thinking with businessThink.
(Many of these thoughts are meaningful. The only problem is that the "old school" does not exist. At least I have never read any business book or methodology that would recommend that on a company meeting you should say things like "The idiots. I totally agree with you..." instead of "What kind of information could we get together...?". Of course in practice you will meet stupid reactions, but this is not because of some pervasive "old school". Smart people have avoided thinking black and white for centuries, while dumb people will continue to react stupidly. So it is a ridiculous claim of the authors that businessThink provides the reader with a completely new approach.)
Chapter 4: The second rule is "Create curiosity". Ask questions, refresh your beliefs and forget about hierarchy and titles.
(This is of course not bad advice, but the examples cited range from the inaccurate - Grace Murray Hopper inventing the COBOL language - to the unproven in practice - the company IDEO reinventing the shopping cart in a TV show -, indicating a lack of serious knowledge or adequate research by Marcum and Smith on this topic. This shallowness of the authors is also evident from other parts of the book, e.g. in the beginning of Chapter 5 they cite a research result but instead of referencing the original publication they refer to another book. I would expect that if you make an experiment a starting point of a chapter in your book, you would actually read the original report in full, not just some interpretation of it.)
Enough said... If you are really in need all these ideas then I doubt that you will profit from any book, including this one. I give two stars for the glitters of humor and for the honesty of the authors' own failure stories.
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