Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Toolkit for Managers (Columbia Business School Publishing) Review

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Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Toolkit for Managers (Columbia Business School Publishing) ReviewThere has been a veritable onslaught of strategy and business 'design' literature published in the past few years. Most of it is interesting but falls into one of two traps: either it's too theoretical to put into action, or it's directed to a choir of the design-familiar and leaves everyone else behind. Liedtka and Ogilvie break the mold with their new book, providing a framework and a tool kit to help almost anyone with interest and motivation explore the power of design thinking.
It starts with a relatively simple point. Most of the time, most of the world sees the design process as messy and unpredictable and nonlinear and twisted and terribly inefficient. In many organizations, that's why design is often considered a black box so impenetrable that it's outsourced to marketers, product developers, and, well, designers. Liedtka and Ogilvie take the mess and unbundle it all into a four-phase, 10-step framework that starts to look more like a process that individuals and organizations can learn and replicate.
While the steps are somewhat familiar, the recommended approaches in each phase sound reasonable but are more challenging for most people to put into practice. (Try explaining to a typical business planner that you're going to generate new business offerings based on research you conduct with a dozen or so customers, and you'll see what I mean.) Lucky for all of us, Designing for Growth provides concrete tools and step-by-step instructions and plenty of real-life examples for each step of the journey so that there's sufficient structure to help the reader navigate the discomfort of trying something new.
I've been fortunate enough to collaborate with Liedtka and she's fond of saying that she's not a designer, and that if she and her faculty colleagues can make good use of the Designing for Growth tools then anyone can. Having watched her in action, I'd say she's more of a designer than she'd like to admit, though perhaps not in a traditional sense. Because for me -- and as illustrated throughout Designing for Growth -- being a designer isn't about being artistic or clever or even all that creative. Being a designer is about approaching a complex problem with curiosity and empathy and patience and then having the discipline to explore many possible answers before selecting a path forward. This book helps bring out that design thinker in each of us.Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Toolkit for Managers (Columbia Business School Publishing) Overview

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How Companies Win: Profiting from Demand-Driven Business Models No Matter What Business You're In Review

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How Companies Win: Profiting from Demand-Driven Business Models No Matter What Business You're In ReviewHow Companies Win by Rick Kash and David Calhoun is recommended reading for executives facing the need to grow revenues in a sluggish economy. Kash and Calhoun provide a comprehensive discussion of what is going on -- namely the shift from a world driven by your supply chain to one driven by a new demand chain. The demand driven world described by Kash and Calhoun explains why and how companies need to change their approach to win in the future.
Just about every company's strategy is based on the idea that demand is greater than supply and all that they have to do is be better than the competition and the money will flow. Kash and Calhoun make a strong argument that the economy has shifted with more supply than demand. This simple shift changes the whole basis for enterprise strategy, marketing strategies, products and services. The impact of this change and how leaders are using this reality to their benefit is the subject of the book.
While the book is targeted primarily at Marketing Professionals, I recommend this book for executives looking to understand how to move forward and capture the markets that matter. Line executives will gain an understanding of the importance of addressing different market segments. Technology professionals will appreciate the role that information plays in defining the demand driven enterprise. Others will find the author's arguments providing an interesting view on what is going on in a world where traditional notions of strategy and competitive advantage are under threat.Strengths
The book is clear and comprehensive. The authors describe the process for creating a demand driven strategy and plans work. The results they achieve and sample deliverables. This discussion provides a clear view on the concepts they present and how they might apply to your company.
The book contains detailed discussions and case studies of leading companies like Best Buy, Hershey's, P&G and others. The cases cover both the decisions facing executives as well as the results they achieved. While case studies are common in business books the time, detailed and coverage are a strength of the book.
The book tackles complex issues that other actors assume away. I have read very few books that talk about issues like pricing, operational precision, etc. These discussions are helpful in taking a broader look at issues related to creating and demand driven organization.
The book considers the entire enterprise and its response to a demand driven world. The need to create a demand chain, new forms of marketing, the need for precision and operational excellence are all great points that make this a book that goes well beyond describing new ways of marketing.
The book is focused on providing a business based explanation of the challenge facing companies and its impact on top and bottom line revenue. While the book does advocate a set of techniques for becoming a demand driven organization, it never loses sight of the need to drive business results.
Challenges
The authors come from a Marketing background and the techniques in the book are marketing centric. However, the issues raised living in a demand driven world go beyond revising your marketing strategy. The authors know this and look to address the points in latter chapters, but there is room for additional material and insight into the operational, execution and other issues involved in becoming a demand driven organization.
The authors are consultants who have applied their tools with leading companies across multiple industries. At times, the book drifts into branding which detracts from the message. It does not happen often, but when it does its noticeable.
The consumer products and food industry are among the first to experience the reality of excess supply and therefore they represent many of the case examples. While the authors acknowledge business to business commerce, it is not the focus of the book. that does not mean that the concepts do not apply in business to business. It just means that the reader will have to work a little bit to apply these concepts to this situation.
Overall, this book uses a different view of the relationship between demand and supply to create new forms of strategy, new ways of looking at customers and markets, and new ways to execute in a tough business environment.
In a world that has changed we all need new ideas and new tools. Kash and Calhoun provide executives with the ideas they need to answer the question, where we go from hereHow Companies Win: Profiting from Demand-Driven Business Models No Matter What Business You're In Overview

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Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs Review

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Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs ReviewRawn Shah's book, Social Networks for Business, is a top down technical view on implementing social media. He provides a view of social networking that will appeal to IT professionals as it is based on a premise that social networking is a technology that should be structured and controlled at the center like other technologies. While this is possible, the advice Shah offers is based on the fundamentals that if you build it right, manage it right, then they will come.
That logic is simple but it assumes that business professionals are users of the technology rather than creators of the solutions that operate on a social network. That last piece is important as those following the advice in this book bear a high probability of simply recreating existing low value low activity intranet portals and knowledge bases in new social networking clothing.
A warning that this is a rather lengthy review in order to explain why I see the book as technically correct but not enough to address the issues fully. Shah is not wrong, its rather he is narrow in the ability to his advice to work beyond his experience and he is looking at the issue with an established techno-management lens that does not capture the potential of these new technologies. Perhaps no book can capture it all, in which case this becomes part of a social media library and body of study.
That has been my observation at more than two dozen companies I have met all of whom have the same question "We, meaning IT, have built a social network with all the bells and whistles but no one wants to use it." The reason behind the low use is in the question itself. Social networks are not built and provided by one party for others to use. Social networks are not software in the traditional sense, but generative technologies that require engaging the business in their creation of the applications that matter.
My intent in this review is not to degrade Shah's work. The book is first rate, complete, well written and very thoughtful. Its just that Shah's application of traditional heavy weight IT management principles do not consider the idea that the business, not IT builds the solutions. This is understandable as the author comes from IBM and the advice he provides reflects their unique sales/engineering culture that looks for structure and unfortunately is unique to Big Blue. There is nothing wrong with IBM, the same way that there is nothing wrong with the advice in this book.
Readers need to be aware that this book treats social networking as a management and technical issue. A view that I have observed is incomplete at best and detrimental to the enterprise efforts to gain the collaboration, knowledge sharing and flexibility needed to compete in this environment.
Shah recognizes this issue, devoting five of the ten chapters to issues related to the social system. Unfortunately here he takes a technical management view defining the roles, governance and structures required to set up a central management of the network. The work is good and complete down to salary ranges for community managers and their assigned work tasks. I can see this working in a highly structured culture where people look for the right way to contribute before making a contribution. The issue with gaining value from social networking is not that they do not have enough management; it is more like they do not have enough emphasis on the social systems. In this regard I like Seth Godin's notion of mavens as a lightweight structure to make the social systems work.
Strengths:
*Comprehensive in addressing the management and technical issues involved in implementing social networks in a modern top down corporation
*Strong focus on defining terms and laying out the taxonomy of social networking
*Chapter 10 the last chapter's first few pages summarizes a strong definition of social media and networking. It should have appeared in the first chapter as it sets a good context for the book
*Proves technical and operational management best practices for those technologies
*Clearly written and focused as it delivers a significant amount of information in 162 pages.
Challenges
*The absence of examples is regrettable, as we need to see how these practices work in reality rather than being described in the abstract. Changing social relationships is always contextually heavy and some examples would have gone a long way to addressing the points mentioned earlier.
*The book does not address business issues that can be addressed by social networking. The focus of the social networking solutions implied by the book is in terms of people using wiki's, blogs and the like rather tan what the business uses the tools to accomplish.
*The view of social networking as fundamentally a technical and central management issue. This is despite the fact that Shah offers models that are not based on central control like the starfish model. Unfortunately as he goes to illustrate potential applications the management structure turns out to be centralized more often than not (Chapter 5).
*The book outlines solutions that are dependent on the authors experience within IBM and that colors the recommendations and views. IBM is mentioned sporadically throughout the book and while they have accomplished a lot using social networking, the book is a little too IBM centric to be viewed as an entirely independent analysis of what works in the market place. This does not make what Shah writes wrong - it just makes it narrow in is potential application.
*Social behavior is assumed to come from management structures rather than the motivation and interest of people. This gives the reader the feeling that a top down approach, driven by sponsors can tacitly coerce collaboration out of a corporation.
Shah's book brings a technical set of practices that compliment McAfee's business-social definitions in his book Enterprise 2.0. This is a good thing and readers will find value. However they must recognize the limitations and implied mental models found in the book.
I need structure for social networking and this book does a good job of describing structure. However, you need the right social systems first as no amount of structure will overcome weak social dynamics and create value.Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs Overview

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