AT LAST... A GOOD READ

Since Lockdown One I’ve been struggling to read properly.  

Properly  meaning reading a book from beginning to end. I’ve flipped through magazines and papers, I’ve dipped into books usually stopping out of frustration. Nothing seemed to grip me or suspend my thinking about the mechanics of reading. I was like the child in the car asking “are we nearly there yet?” 

A very clever and good friend confessed to suffering from the same affliction saying he read a book at the same pace now as he used to read Latin prose (mind you he got the top classics scholarship to the top college in Oxford over  half a century ago so he probably read Latin quite fast.) Now he flipped through the first few pages of a book and said he knew pretty well what the author was going to say and he couldn’t be bothered with fiction.

I got paranoid and went to the optician for a test expecting to be told I was going blind. Instead he prescribed reading glasses. I’ve taken a while to get used to them as when I have them on I can see the printed page clearly but the rest of the room is a blur and a glass of wine even before I’ve started drinking it seems out of focus. 

Harper Lee cured me when I read what she’d said:

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”

The clincher was to realise three books by three of my favourite writers were out at the beginning of May. Robert Harris, Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis. 

I’ve finished two in three days and the third will be read and done with by tomorrow.

I can read. I can read again.

“The Bomber Mafia” by Malcolm Gladwell is a study of the psychology of war. When in the late 1930’s a Dutchman invented the bomb-aimer so sophisticated it could (theoretically) enable you to drop a bomb from six miles up into a barrel of pickles, a group of young men, self-styled the Bomber Mafia, realise this could mean being able to end war which involved large armies killing each other and focusing instead on taking out key factories. The story (a true one of course) is the debate between this vision led by an intellectual  young General Hayward Haskell and the more pragmatic ‘obliterate-them’ view of an even younger get-it-done General Curtis LeMay.

In the event Haskell gets fired in the war against the Japanese and is replaced by the dour LeMay who leads napalm raids on 67 Japanese cities. The war was over before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Millions had been burnt to death before that final hammer blow.

Unbelievably May gets a medal from the Japanese for helping stop the war quickly and letting the US in rather than a prolonged break-up of Japan by the Soviets and Chinese.

Gladwell says:

“Curtis won the battle. But Haskell won the war.”

It’s a great story but I’m not sure I agree with that after recent events in Syria.

“V2” is by Robert Harris. They’re both war books. Obviously I feel aggressive. The book describes the story of Werner Von Braun’s V2 rockets and the attempt of the British to anticipate through trigonometry how to take out their launch sites.

It’s near the end of the war, Hitler’s last gamble. And as it ends with both sides thinking they’d inflicted vast damage on the other but ends with the line “we were both misled”.

Gripping, informative, readable and …. read.

And yet to come…

LET YOURSELF GO. THINK.

I hate what the MBA culture has done to Daniel Kahneman’s calls System One, which others call the right brain and normal people call instinct and impulse. I hate business plans which, for the most part are bigger works of fiction than Harry Potter. I hate the endless piles of paper, spreadsheets, analyses and self-serving reports. A friend said “paper plans or paper planes” - right on.

In his brilliant book “Blink” Malcolm Gladwell describes the magnificently effective tool a well-trained gut is. The expert on art who can intuitively smell a fake because “something feels wrong”; the professional card player whose playing behaviour changes before his rational brain notices his impulse to have done so sensing that the cards are stacked; our first impressions which are sometimes but seldom wrong.

All this suggests our desire to balance rationality and intuition, which is (if you think about it) perfectly rational, is entirely wrong. It belongs to the same school of thought that suggests you must dumb down the brilliant to accommodate the mediocre.

Intuition allowed free rein may lead us somewhat astray sometimes and can earn us the reputation of shooting from the hip but our gut feel and our ability to hone it and develop it is our magic bonus.
Where human ingenuity comes in lies  in our ability to think hard about whether the instinct that is so strong can make sense and isn’t simply a prejudice or a prejudgement based on previously good experiences. In a word we have great instincts but we are also smart. And we are smart enough to listen and learn. Our skill in learning up to the moment of death is impressively distinctive.

But when they insist you read all that data because therein lies the answer,  first of all ask them what they really think about the problem.

How to solve problems and make brilliant decisions. (Business Thinking Skills that really work) published by Pearson is coming out on November 7th 2014

BE NIMBLE, IMPROVISE AND WIN

We can all make the mistake of getting stuck in the same old groove. But business can’t be treated like Su Doku, a game with straightforward rules.  Yet words best designed to make anyone scream like corporate template and company strategy (usually because there isn’t one) are same old groove words for most people.

If we are going to make well informed, even inspired decisions we have to get outside the groove and consider our situation from a different perspective - what Professor John Kay of the LSE calls “obliquity”. He says obliquity (pursuing our goals indirectly) is necessary because living in a world of uncertainty means the problems we encounter aren’t always clear and we often can’t pinpoint what our real goals are. Things change and people (the behaviour of whom is often hard to predict) change too. Direct approaches are often unimaginative whilst ‘muddling through’ for a bit can sometimes be a much more productive answer.

Stories of improvisation beating the corporate plan abound but I enjoy one Malcolm Gladwell tells. Big corporate Goliath being outwitted and outgunned by the guerrilla tactics of David armed with the 1000BC equivalent of Remington XP-100 (rated the most accurate hand gun in the world). David knew he’d win so long as he improvised out of the reach of lumbering Goliath’s but what’s baffling is that Saul and the other spectators  only foresaw this as a toe to toe duel because that’s how you did things in those days in Israel. They were thinking in “like-we’ve-always-done-it” terms rather than let’s improvise and win terms.

In business, stories of small, loose thinking winners include Nike winning as a Vietcong style upstart founded in 1964 against Adidas founded 1948 – Nike is now twice the size of Adidas, Facebook against My Space (in June 2006 My Space captured 80% of social networking traffic (up from 76% in April). Facebook was second with 7.6%. The ball has been dropped in most markets we are looking at and no one really knows where it is. Better to improvise rather than pretend the ball’s still in sight.

We all tend to overestimate power whether it’s physical like Goliath’s or exploited by people who feel they’re expected to flaunt it. That’s a high risk strategy on their part but some seem to think it worth taking. Chuck Prince ex CEO and Chairman of Citigroup certainly seemed to think so as he made the defining quote of the 2008 crash on the very eve of the credit crunch:-

“When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.”

 You make decisions that solve problems by taking each on its merits and not being hamstrung by a rigid plan. Strategic plans can make one option blind. Remember Mike Tyson:

“Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth”

WHY UNDERDOGS START AS FAVOURITES

In the middle of the punishingly deep pile of books I got for Christmas is Malcolm Gladwell’s latest offering “David and Goliath – underdogs, misfits and the art of battling giants”. Ever since his first book “Tipping Point” I’ve enjoyed his ironic, inquisitive style and his ability to spot the counter-intuitive. His best insight to date was of the company which spent more time and money than anyone else recruiting the best talent from the MBAs in the USA.

That company (outright victor in the war for talent) was Enron.

This book first of all describes why David, armed with the pre BCE equivalent of a .44 Magnum (his lethal sling) was the guy to bet on when faced by an overweight clown armed with sword and spear. (Even I would take on Mike Tyson if I had a gun and he didn’t.) His point is that size is not everything.  Yet all the accepted wisdom is power comes from scale. Not if you’re Indiana Jones of course…

Ask little Aldi –grocer of the year for the second year running with sales up 31.5% year on year with car parks resembling that of a posh funeral, as they themselves ironically observe, as they count the tills being filled by their middle class conquests. They and Waitrose are close contenders for the best outfit.  Their trick? Price… yes but quality too. They keep on outscoring the others for taste and quality – sixteen gold medals from the Grocer Magazine - but they’re not so good on what David Cameron, allegedly, called “green crap.” They are on the verge of doing a David on the Goliaths –Tesco/Aldi. They also have the best advertising – check it out.

It must be hateful to fight the Vietnamese and Taleban when all you have are costly tanks and stuff with your soldiers away from home when your opponents have improvised explosive devices and motor bikes so they can get home for tea.  The key words are improvisation and home.

One of his other points is the law of diminishing returns. He cites alcohol. Most doctors will tell you a glass or two of claret a day is good for you. Friends of mine have taken this advice to heart and, just to be on the safe side, have doubled the dose - to nil beneficial effect.  But carry on to a bottle or so a day and the effects are detrimental. More of the same is not a recipe for success. Balance is the key.

Back to scale.  The thought that bigger organisations are ipso facto better is what’s troubled me for ages. Our inbuilt instinct for M&As and “buy-and-build” are plain daft as anyone sitting on an ailing out of town superstore will admit. This inbuilt instinct allied to the desire consultants have to apply old business models to new situations. (Well it worked for RBS ….QED.)

That’s something fast-on-his-feet David didn’t do.