“How to Build a Stronger, More Agile Organization the Way the World's Leading Companies Do” by Dave Ulrich
Again in the category of a book about management. Easy and motivating reading – make yourself comfortable. Now we will briefly tell you about everything.
The authors of the book are experts in the field of organizational management and leadership. Both are professors. Arthur Jung taught in collaboration with the University of Michigan, INSEAD and Harvard Business School, and Dave Ulrich taught at the Ross Business School of the same Michigan institution. When writing the book, we conducted a huge amount of interviews and preliminary research on the topic, but we managed to pack it into four hundred pages. Anyone who knows the value of their time and likes to receive information on a silver platter will likely enjoy literature.
Let us immediately note that this book is about human interactions, and it begins in the best possible way. The authors immediately give an example of self-organization of vacationers on the beach – to save those drowning in a rip current: one of the strangers grabs the hands of other caring people, and, after a while, as many as eighty people form a chain three hundred feet long. Nine out of nine people are saved.
The main force here was synergy: a spontaneously organized community demonstrated the power of organization as opposed to suffocating death. Does this mean we can all do more? Perhaps everyone can answer this question for themselves. However, the authors put the allegory at the heart of the book, gradually developing the theme of the possibilities of success using the example of giant organizations. This list includes companies such as Alibaba, Amazon, Google, Huawei, as well as Supercell and Tencent. They are listed, as on the cover, in alphabetical order, so you should not try to find a chronological order in the list or any superiority of some organizations over others.
The value of the book is that Dave Ulrich and Arthur Jung claim it to be universal. It can be read by both managers and owners of their own enterprises. Advice in it can be found both for managing small and global companies. To designate organizations with future and sustainable development, the authors introduce the term “market-oriented ecosystems,” and you can even identify the organization (or the company you work for) by archetypes while reading. Jung and Ulrich divided the market into three types of such “ecosystems”:
driven by creativity,
driven by technology or product,
driven by efficiency.
In our opinion, the division is quite fair, since in business you can find many examples of both companies that take things headlong and those that come up with breakthrough innovations. There are many options for development – the stories are different. It’s great that in this book the authors managed to some extent balance the reasons for success and compare different types of market-oriented and open to change organizations with each other.
That is, they do not deny that sometimes products become extremely popular due to a creative idea (like the beloved series “Stranger Things” from Netflix, which left the Russian market), and with the help of accurate calculations and figures (here the authors refer specifically to Alibaba, or more precisely, its structure and logic of relationships between autonomous teams and enterprises). By the way, we already once recommended a book about managing creative teams specifically, so if you want to dive into more creative topics, pay attention to the work of Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace.
The title of today's book uses the words “new”, “flexible”, and on the pages the authors talk about adaptability as a quality of organizations, without which it will not be possible to achieve success in a competitive environment. Especially considering how rapidly this environment itself sometimes changes. And also, speaking about strategy, they write that leaders create this very environment: “The environment creates space. Strategy determines your choice of how to fill this space. The organization puts strategy into action. In a highly dynamic environment—which China was in the case of Alibaba—the key strategic challenge is to transform your company as quickly as possible, or as quickly as the external environment changes. We call the ability to make these necessary decisions quickly, creatively, and intelligently strategic flexibility. As they say, organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get. In a market-oriented ecosystem, strategy shapes the organization to win. Sometimes, when a strategy is as powerful as Alibaba's, it even shapes the very environment in which competition occurs. So, how about learning about leadership and strategic agility from market-oriented ecosystems?”
Whether you're faced with managing a legacy company or simply managing cells whose processes could use an upgrade, reading may provide some ideas.
The book contains diagrams and tables. Some chapters present conclusions as separate abstracts. This is convenient and may come in handy if you decide to use what is written as instructions for long-term changes and will periodically return to it. To rethink the organization, the authors provide a road map: using it, you can assess the potential of your company by consistently answering the proposed questions.
The book pays special attention to the concept of leadership. It describes well the roles that leaders of market-oriented ecosystems play: business strategist, organizational architect, culture setter, talent manager. The authors do not give advice in the spirit of “what to do to become a leader,” but write about observations that they were able to note during the course of their research. Of course, they talked about leadership styles using examples of key figures in the companies in question.
The book may be of interest to those who are concerned about attracting talent and investing in R&D. There is a lot to be learned from the experiences of the mastodons of China and Silicon Valley.
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