The Milkshake Moment - Book review

Finished reading "The Milkshake Moment" by Steven S. Little. The book is about Overcoming Stupid Systems, Pointless Policies and Muddled Management to Realize Real Growth. Stupid systems and Pointless policies is my favorite topic. Steven does a good job of presenting the problems created by organization 's systems & policies and how they hinder it's growth. Its surprising as to how a company which wants to give the best experience to its customer, ends up doing exactly opposite and becoming its own enemy.

On the flip side, I feel the book lacks the depth in demonstrating stupid policies and systems. It focuses only on those policies/systems which have a direct impact on customers and sidelines the one's which may not be associated with customers but have significant impact on the way employees work. Also the book doesn't really offer much on how to overcome stupid system/policies. Instead it gives case studies where he was happy with some incident or customer service and speculates as to how the leader demonstrated some quality or lack of it. On the contrary, when I think about it, I feel the book "Simplicity" by Edward de Bono, offers more solutions to overcome complex systems in organizations. He makes a very important point that, most systems are not built by keeping the right users/beneficiary in mind. If we do that, the process/policies/systems will be more simple and meaningful.

On an all, its a good book to read. It at least makes us realize how an organization's own systems and policies can drive away customers.

Switch

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, is a book written by Heath brothers and claims to help bringing change in people. By now, I have read quite a few books written by psychologists/psychiatrists. They all have a typical pattern - first a framework is proposed or certain claims are made and then case studies are presented, analyzed to justify the claim or the framework. Switch is no exception.

The common belief about bringing change is that its people problem, that they are lazy and resist change. The book first denounces these myths associated with change and presents us with a different perspective as indicated by three simple rules given below:
1. What looks like people problem is often situation problem.
2. What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.
3. What looks like resistance is often lack of clarity.

The above three rules and the subsequent road map for change is built on "the Elephant and the Rider" metaphor introduced by Jonathan Haidt. The road map or the framework as Heath brothers calls it, is a collection of methods to address each of the above three items. Each method is backed by case studies to demonstrate their effectiveness and help us understand them better. Its all about simple ideas or inspiration which can bring powerful change. And change, not just in an individual but in an organizations and even a whole country.

What I learned from this book is that to bring a change in others, there has to be a change in me. A change in my perception about where to begin and how to bring the change. It fits perfectly with what I learned 7-8 months back: "The real problem is not the problem itself, its our inability to think beyond our perception".
And I believe the methods proposed in the book, will help me see beyond my perception.

Switch: A must read if you are struggling to bring a change at home or at workplace.

8 books that I read in the last 2 months

Its more than 2 months and yet there is hardly any work. To make the most of this available time, I have been reading and reading a lot. Thanks to Wipro library for a wonderful collection. Here is a list of books I have read so far and their ratings, reviews.


Title: Necessary But Not Sufficient

Author: Eliyahu Goldratt

About: Application of TOC to ERP

Rating: 4.5/5

Review: Excellent book and I believe every person associated with ERP/CRM/HRM implementation should read it.

Take away: Software/tools/technologies are necessary, but not sufficient for effective operation of organization. Accurate data, well defined process and continues process improvement is critical for success of Enterprise software projects.

Title: Critical Chain

Author: Eliyahu Goldratt

About: Principles of TOC applied to project management

Rating: 4/5

Review: If you work on projects (any project from construction to software development) and wonder why they never complete on time, then do read this book.

Take away: Critical chain is principles of TOC applied to the traditional critical path (PERT) method of planning for projects.

Title: 2 States

Author: Chetan Bhagat

About: The story of his marriage

Rating: 2/5

Review: Typical bollywood story, narrated like a hindi essay.

Title: Entrepreneur’s Toolkit

Author: Harvard Business Essentials series

About: Guide to doing business effectively for people interested in entrepreneurship.

Rating: 4/5

Review: Covers various aspects of business that an entrepreneur should be aware of before starting his/her company. A must read for anyone thinking to or recently started a new venture.

Title: Changing Minds

Author: Howard Gardner

About: The Art and science of changing our own and other's minds

Rating: 2.5/5

Review: It takes patience to read this book. Howard starts by defining a framework by which he proposed to evaluate how and why mind changes. He then uses it to explain the change of mind of some famous people (e.g.:  Bill Clinton, Bush, Gandhi, etc.) The book fails to keep the excitement as it becomes more of analysis based on assumptions of the author. It only covers why mind changes happened in those famous people and does not talk anything about how to change people's mind as proclaimed.

Title: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA): A Planning and Implementation Guide for Business and Technology

Authors: Eric A. Marks, Michael Bell

About: SOA planning guide

Rating: 2.5/5

Review: Explains the SOA principles very well. But I could not read it beyond 4 chapters. The book isn’t structured well. The topics, paragraphs do not build on the concepts. Instead they are random piece of often repeated sentences. Maybe I am not at the level to grasp it all.

Take Away: SOA is all about flexibility, scalability and re-usability. This cannot be just achieved at the software/IT level. It builds on top of the organization’s business processes. The returns of SOA depends a lot on how well are the business processes defined and how much are they flexible, scalable and re-usable.

Based on what I understood from this book, I believe that companies should not directly use Lean/SixSigma for IT/software. Instead they should use lean/sixsigma to refine their business processes and then use the flexibility in IT to adopt them.

Title: 8 things we hate about IT

Author: Susan Cramm

About: How the business and IT should coordinate for better results.

Rating:

Review: This book is addressed to CXOs/leaders on why there is always friction between IT and business leaders and how to avoid them. I did not give this book any rating as I think I am not in a position to truly understand the value of this book. She also has a blog and is a good place to know more on IT leadership.

Title: Cloud Computing: Principles and Paradigms

Authors: Rajkumar Buyya, James Broberg, Andrzej Goscinski

About: Cloud computing and Parallel & Distributed computing

Rating: 3.5/5

Review: This book is intended for people who already have knowledge of Cloud computing and/or have worked on it. This book is more of a catalogue of various whitepapers and research work published by various authors. The best thing about the book is it explains some products available in the market, to address current Cloud scenarios. The references of each chapter are a great source of information about Cloud computing, HPC, Grid and all kinds of Parallel and Distributed computing. Most of the chapters end with current and future research work on the respective topic.

Tortoise and Hare - Whats your take?

We have all read/heard the story of tortoise and the hare (For those who haven't click here). Tortoise wins the race defeating the hare and moral of the story is - Slow and steady wins the race.

It might make sense, but I do not agree with it. Let me put some questions here, Will you say the tortoise won? and more importantly did he win because of slow and steady speed? Would the tortoise have won, if the hare did not underestimated him? Would the tortoise have won, if the hare did not slept? The answer to all these questions is NO (or MAYBE, but definitely not yes).

The way I see it, tortoise never won the race, it was the hare who lost it. Had he not underestimated the tortoise and not slept before completing the race, who knows what the outcome would have been. But he was complacent and underestimated tortoise. He slept before completing the race assuming tortoise will never make it.

So what is the point of this argument? If you look at it from the hare's perspective and try to analyze the result or cause of it, your moral/conclusion will change. The hare lost because he was complacent, underestimated the potential of tortoise and slept before completing the race. So the moral of the story (according to me) is - Don't be complacent and underestimate your competitor and Don't loose the focus until you have achieved your goal.

Slow and steady will surely win, if and only if your competitor is sleeping. Which is highly unlikely, at least in the world where I live ;)