‘The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation’ by Ron Adner

These days, it is enough to read the introduction and then quickly scan the rest of the content to absorb the essence of most management books. The Wide Lens is one book I have read cover to cover, and now am in my second round!

In today’s interdependent world, no matter your situation, your success depends not just on your own innovation and execution excellence, but also on the ability and willingness of the visible as well as invisible partners that make up your ecosystem. This is often a blind spot for many.

Using great examples from tyres to telecom – both successes and failures – Ron Adner introduces a new set of tools and frameworks that will uncover a company’s hidden sources of dependence in taking an innovation to market.

Here is a sneak peek into the Wide-Lens Tool-Box:

• Begin by gaining a clear view of your Value Blueprint. It will reveal hidden Co-innovation and Adoption Chain Risks. Drawing a clear blueprint will encourage you and your team to formulate a plan for dealing with problematic elements proactively, at the start of your journey. It will help you avoid the familiar improvisation of tactical adjustments that is the hallmark of incomplete strategy.

• Using the Leadership Prism to assess the distribution of expected surplus will help you identify who the natural ecosystem leadership candidates are, and whether you are among them. Using the First Mover Matrix will help you determine your ideal timing, letting you see whether the structure of interdependence is likely to reward early movers or hold them at the starting line waiting for the race to start.

• Exploring alternative blueprints using the Five Levers of Ecosystem Reconfiguration will help you arrive at a plan that can accept the constraints of your ecosystem and still deliver a complete value proposition. And coupling this exercise with the principles of the Minimum Viable Footprint, Staged Expansion, and Ecosystem Carryover, will help you identify the best sequence to follow in building toward your value proposition, and then leverage this achievement to extend your advantage to additional opportunities.

Bottom Line: Eliminate avoidable failure; strategise more robust success!

Aren’t the phrases Value Blueprint, Leadership Prism, Minimum Viable Footprint teasing you enough to grab the book at first opportunity?

The Little Blue Reasoning Book: 50 Powerful Principles for Clear and Effective Thinking

'The Little Blue Reasoning Book: 50 Powerful Principles for Clear and Effective Thinking' is written by Brandon Royal

Some 2,500 years ago, Socrates gave birth to the art and science of what we now call critical reasoning; also referred to as critical thinking, it may be defined broadly as “the process by which we evaluate information.” Notwithstanding our ability to read, no other single skill is more important than our ability to reason.

This book provides a distillation of the most useful reasoning concepts, presented as fifty tips interspersed through five chapters.

Chapter 1 on 'Perception & Mindset' provides an initial framework for reasoning.

Chapter 2 on 'Creative Thinking' introduces non-traditional thinking methods.

Chapter 3 on 'Decision Making' focuses on applied reasoning and introduces various tools, the major benefit of which is to structure or quantify the decision-making process.

Chapter 4 on 'Analyzing Arguments' shows us how to break arguments down according to classic argument structure: conclusion, evidence, and assumption.

Chapter 5 on 'Mastering Logic' provides the foundation for understanding some of the most relevant examples of reasoning flaws found in everyday conversation and speech.

Here is a glimpse of some of those Tips:

Tip #2: Think of mindsets as divided into four basic types: Analysts, Idealists, Realists, and Synthesists.

Tip #4: Convergent thinking focuses the mind; divergent thinking opens the mind.

Tip #6: Not challenging the obvious, evaluating ideas too quickly, and fear of looking the fool — these are the three greatest creativity inhibitors.

Tip #8: Brainstorming has rules: quantity of ideas is preferred, wacky ideas are welcome, delayed evaluation is mandatory, and “hitchhiking” is encouraged.

Tip #11: In selling creative ideas, most people are moved more by the depth of a person’s conviction and commitment than they are by the details of a logical presentation.

Tip #19: Evidence + Assumption = Conclusion. The assumption is the glue that holds the evidence to the conclusion.

Tip #21: The five most common critical reasoning errors people make include: comparing “apples with oranges,” over-generalizing on the basis of small samples, ignoring relevant evidence, confusing cause and effect, and failing to anticipate bottlenecks when plans are put into action.

Tip #34: Test the opposite scenario — if you hear that a full moon causes the crime rate to rise, always ask what the crime rate is like when the moon is not full.

Tip #40: Always look for potentially vague terms in an argument and ask for or seek clarification.

Tip #45: Necessary conditions are not the same as sufficient conditions. The statement “A person needs water to remain healthy” does not mean that water alone is enough to keep a person healthy. Water is a necessary but not sufficient condition for someone to remain healthy.

The book also presents 10 classic trade-offs:

1. Breadth vs. Depth
2. Control vs. Chance
3. Individual vs. Collective
4. Means vs. Ends
5. Quantity vs. Quality
6. Short-term vs. Long-term
7. Specific vs. General
8. Subjective vs. Objective
9. Theory vs. Practice
10. Tradition vs. Change

Seven Transformations of Leadership

‘Seven Transformations of Leadership’ is a 2005 HBR article by David Rooke & William Torbert.

The authors argue that great leaders are differentiated not by their personality or philosophy, but by their internal action logic! Action logic is how the leaders interpret their own and others’ behaviours, and how they maintain power or protect from threats.

Based on their research, the authors categorise action logics into seven distinct types. These action logics function as a leader’s dominant way of thinking. Here’s the list starting with the least productive (and least complex):

• Opportunist: Wins any way possible. Self-oriented. Manipulative. ‘Might makes right’ approach. Opportunists are good in emergencies and in pursuing sales, but few people want to follow them for the long term.

• Diplomat: Avoids conflict. Wants to belong. Obeys group norms; doesn’t rock the boat. Diplomat is a supportive glue in teams, but can’t provide painful feedback or make the hard decisions needed to improve performance.

• Expert: Rules by logic and expertise. Uses hard data to gain consensus and buy-in. Expert is a good individual contributor, but lacks emotional intelligence. Also lacks respect for those with less expertise.

• Achiever: Meets strategic goals. Promotes teamwork; juggles managerial duties and responds to market demands to achieve goals. Achiever is well suited for managerial work, but inhibits thinking outside the box.

• Individualist: Operates in unconventional ways. Ignores rules s/he regards as irrelevant. Individualist is effective in venture & consulting roles. But, irritates colleagues & bosses by ignoring key organizational processes & people.

• Strategist: Generates organizational and personal change. Highly collaborative; weaves visions with pragmatic, timely initiatives. Strategist challenges existing assumptions. Generates transformations over the short and long term.

• Alchemist: Generates social transformations. Reinvents organizations in historically significant ways. Alchemist leads society-wide change.

Interestingly, the same seven action logics can be used to describe teams and organisations as well.

In the sample set researched by the authors, there were 5% Opportunists, 12% Diplomats, 38% Experts, 30% Achievers, 10% Individualists, 4% Strategists and 1% Alchemists!

The most remarkable finding of the authors’ research is that leaders can transform from one action logic to another. Few may become alchemists, but many have the desire and potential to become Individualists and Strategists.

The article suggests ways in which leaders can transform from one action logic to another. Read it here, if you are interested.

Infinite Vision: The Story of Aravind Eye Care

"Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the World's Greatest Business Case for Compassion" by Pavithra Mehta & Suchitra Shenoy

The mechanics of how Aravind works, are well documented by several business case studies, but they fall short on some fundamental questions like what created, and what continues to animate, the model. This is the crucial gap this book fills in.

The authors of the Aravind book start with an interesting inquiry: If Aravind is the extra-ordinary answer, what were Dr V's Questions? Discover they did, and how! The Indian Express columnist, Amulya Gopala Krishnan says, "A story about an organisational marvel, this book is somehow internally illuminated. It has a plot, poetry, and emotion - things you don't expect from a business title".

"To give sight for all" was Aravind's founder Dr V's vision! That's not a small goal even for world's governments, and Dr V was a retired person with no money, business plan, or safety net! According to the World Health Organisation's estimates, 39 million people in the world are blind, 80% of them needlessly so! But, when intuitive goodness is pitted against unthinkable odds, it stirs the imagination and awakens possibility. Spirituality was where Dr V found many answers! Through a continued process of aspiration, rejection, and surrender, Dr V was able to tap into an intelligence that went beyond the thinking mind. Aravind Eye Care System is actually named after Dr V's spiritual guru, the freedom-fighter-turned-mystic Sri Aurobindo.

It's not just this "spirit", but superb execution capabilities that made Aravind. That Aravind's assembly line systems and skill-based task delineation, ala McDonald's, maximise the Surgeon's productivity and deliver high quality service at low cost is probably well known, but how many know that it is the institutionalised quest for constant refinement that has perfected the model?

Sample this for an outcome of such perfection: UK National Health Service does 500,000 eye surgeries annually; Aravind alone does 300,000! That's not all... Aravind does it at less than 1% of Britain's costs! Because, Aravind model arose from a potent question "How much can we give for what we get?" vs. the more typical "How much can we get for what we give?" That question gave rise to a model defining insight, that there is a synergy between quality, cost, and the demand for services...

Combined with the non-negotiable service principle that there would be no difference in clinical outcomes between paid and free patients, and another insight, that the market price is set based on an average provider's cost and throughput, gave the strategic objective of phenomenal productivity, to give Aravind a decided edge in the marketplace.

Nurses are at the core of such productivity. They hand instruments to Surgeon in such a choreographed sequence, that the Surgeon's eyes don't even lift from the microscope! There is far more to the role of nurses than mere assembly-line efficiency; they are the scaffolding that holds the Aravind model in place and the most pervasive conveyors of its culture. The nurse recruitment process and the training system, described in the book, are pearls of wisdom in Human Resource Management.

Once the strategy is tested for its workability, the next step for any enterprise is scaling. "Start with a microcosm of what you're dreaming of; seeing it in motion will give the energy you and your team need" was Aravind's approach. Such insights pop-up through the book!

Taking on a goal that far exceeds your capacity has a powerful side effect. It primes you to find allies everywhere. At Aravind, the global mission led to counter-intuitive commitment to training its competition! That raises another important question "You can package and share what you do through workshops and training programs, but how do you systemetise and givee away what you are?" Read the book to find the answer :)

High volume is key to Aravind model, but eliminating curable blindness is not just about numbers, it's about reaching people in a human way.

With such deep insights into the evolution of a noble mission, the making of a strategy, the ring side view into execution details and the unique approaches to scaling of the world's greatest business case for compassion, I have no hesitation in commending the book as the Gita for social enterprises...

“How to Study with Mind Maps: The Concise Learning Method” by Toni Krasnic

Learning is a central human activity and has important implications for school, career, and life. It is the foundation for success in and enjoyment of life. But, in all of your years of attending school, did anyone ever teach you how to learn? Probably not. This book will teach you how!

Concise Learning is about turning studying into learning and about turning information into knowledge. This book will teach you how to make this significant transformation in your studies through a learning method that involves visual mapping, critical thinking, and problem solving. Don’t fret; this isn’t a book on learning theory. Rather, this book will provide you with a simple and intuitive, yet proven and powerful, method for learning and managing multiple sources of information. In other words, this book will serve you as a learning blueprint that you can apply immediately.

With so much to learn, you simply can’t absorb everything. Some information will be lost. What’s really important is that you have control over what information gets lost and what gets retained. Struggling students get bogged down in unfocused and unproductive reading, copying, and repetition, instead of focusing on key concepts and the pursuit of a complete picture, which really drives successful learning. Successful students apply an information filter early in the learning process because they know they can’t possibly absorb all of the information presented, nor do they have to. They select what is important to learn. They make a conscious decision to absorb only the key concepts, which in turn enables them to learn the course material better and faster and to be able to apply it to other areas of learning as well.

With Concise Learning Method (CLM), learning is achieved via a five-phase process (looking for puzzle pieces) that involves meaningfully organizing and connecting key concepts in a visual map (putting together the puzzle pieces), critically thinking, and asking key questions.

CLM allows you to readily consolidate information from multiple sources and look at it from multiple perspectives in a highly visual, interactive format. Further, it allows you to process the information as you encounter it rather than waiting for all of the “puzzle pieces” to fall into place. This free-form learning allows the brain to merge logic and creativity to enable maximum learning.

Visual maps are so powerful and work so well because they are based on memory principles that help you learn and retain new information. They are effective because they force you to be active, focus, concentrate, and think; they contain visual cues that strengthen memory; they provide connections and structure to organize information logically and meaningfully; and they provide a way to personalize information according to your interests and what makes sense to you.

The 5Ps - the five phases of learning - and the 4 steps within each of the 5Ps guide your thought processes, as you’re learning.

The 5 phases of CLM (illustrated from the perspective of a formal student, but are relevant for anyone) are:

1. Preview (preview the lecture material): Before class starts, preview the lecture material (textbook, lecture notes, etc.) to become familiar with the lecture topic and unfamiliar terms and concepts. This phase results in a high-level visual map (outline) that serves as the initial framework to organize and connect key concepts and make them relevant to your mind. The preview phase also prepares your mind for the information to be discussed in the lecture, resulting in increased interest, participation, and comprehension during the lecture.
2. Participate (participate actively in lectures): Active engagement in the lecture results in a revised key concepts framework (visual map) and further solidifies meaningful learning.
3. Process (process all lecture-related information into your visual map): Process the information from lecture, textbook, and other resources immediately or shortly after the lecture by organizing and connecting key concepts into a further refined and more detailed visual map. In this phase, you’re essentially processing all information in a very personal way so that it is meaningful to you. This helps transfer information from short-term memory to long-term memory.
4. Practice (practice by solving new problems): Don’t simply read through practice examples where the solution has been worked out for you. Also, don’t stick with repetitive practice examples. The key here is to apply what you’ve learned to situations you haven’t encountered before. Use your existing knowledge to tackle new problems of all sorts – concrete, abstract, factual, conceptual, and procedural. Approach practicing problems as though you were taking an exam by working examples you’ve never seen before. This phase gives you “hands on” experience, helps you review, and further solidifies what you’ve learned.
5. Produce (produce results and new ideas): As you critically think about new information, questions, and problems, your fresh perspective will result in a unique product of your understanding, concepts, experiences, ideas, and reasoning. Your mind will, in effect, produce new knowledge that is already well integrated with your existing knowledge.

Within each phase, the 4 following steps encourage active interaction and dialogue between the course materials, your visual map, and your thinking.

1. Identify key concepts: You decide what’s important and what you want to learn. You are not a passive recipient of information. Rather, you are an active agent in your learning and must determine what information you want to receive in order to learn best. Key concepts could be simple facts and ideas but most commonly represent a set of facts, ideas, attributes, or characteristics.
2. Meaningfully organize and connect key concepts using a visual map: You decide how you want to learn. You are not a passive recorder of information who simply memorizes key concepts. Rather, you construct your own meaning by organizing and connecting the key concepts in a meaningful framework (visual map). The visual map you compose reveals your understanding and deepens and extends your thinking. Notice that the information has now been accurately captured, reduced to key concepts, connected to other key concepts, and meaningfully organized.
3. Think critically: By organizing and connecting key concepts, you clear your thoughts and sharpen your understanding so you can think critically about what you’re learning. Critical thinking is a cognitive process that appears in several categories of the cognitive process dimension (see section 1.4) and involves reasoning things out on the basis of evidence and valid conclusions. To think critically means you understand and reconstruct what you hear and read into your own thinking and experience. The end result is a new creation, where someone else’s thinking now exists in your mind within your own framework.
4. Ask key questions: Critical thinking, in turn, allows you to develop and ask key questions that guide and propel your inquiry and problem solving throughout the 5Ps process. Key questions are questions that investigate information and experience, probe reasons and evidence, and examine interpretations and conclusions.

You know you’re on the right path when you’re actively observing and discovering, asking and answering questions, thinking, understanding and retaining what you’re learning, applying what you’ve learned, and, most importantly, feeling engaged and interested.

Little Bets by Peter Sims

University of Chicago economist David Galenson spent years studying groundbreaking creators, delving deeply into their personal histories and work methods. He divided innovators into two basic types, and called them conceptual and experimental. Conceptual innovators, such as Mozart, tend to pursue bold new ideas and often achieve their greatest breakthroughs early in life. On the other hand, experimental innovators use iterative, trial-and-error approaches to gradually build up to breakthroughs.

In 'Little Bets', Peter Sims strongly recommends the latter as the most practical route to success...

Fundamental to the little bets approach is that we:

1. Experiment: Learn by doing. Fail quickly to learn fast. Develop experiments and prototypes to gather insights, identify problems, and build up to creative ideas, like Beethoven did in order to discover new musical styles and forms.
2. Play: A playful, improvisational, and humorous atmosphere quiets our inhibitions when ideas are incubating or newly hatched, and prevents creative ideas from being snuffed out or prematurely judged.
3. Immerse: Take time to get out into the world to gather fresh ideas and insights, in order to understand deeper human motivations and desires, and absorb how things work from the ground up.
4. Define: Use insights gathered throughout the process to define specific problems and needs before solving them, just as the Google founders did when they realized that their library search algorithm could address a much larger problem.
5. Reorient: Be flexible in pursuit of larger goals and aspirations, making good use of small wins to make necessary pivots and chart the course to completion.
6. Iterate: Repeat, refine, and test frequently armed with better insights, information, and assumptions as time goes on, as Chris Rock (American Comedian) does to perfect his act.

The little bets approach is about using negativity to positive effect. If your plans fall apart, refine them; if you don’t know where best to begin, just begin somewhere. Every decision is a risk; take a chance and see what happens. Experimental innovators must be persistent and willing to accept failure and setbacks as they work toward their goals.

We grew up on 'Think first and act later' and 'Look before you leap'. Sims argues that it can be more rational to act first and think later, more efficient to fail and find out what doesn’t work. Because, ingenious ideas almost never spring into people’s minds fully formed; they emerge through a rigorous experimental discovery process. In fact, most successful entrepreneurs don’t begin with brilliant ideas; they discover them.

The entrepreneurial way of operating was also the subject of some fascinating research by Saras Sarasvathy, a professor at the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia. In one of her studies, titled “What Makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial,” she argues that the approach enables us to focus on what we can afford to lose rather than make assumptions about how much we can expect to gain. The affordable loss principle! Successful experimental innovators tend to view failure as both inevitable and instrumental in pursuing their goals.

What stops us from being experimental? Great emphasis gets placed in our education system on teaching facts, such as historical information or scientific tables, then testing us in order to measure how much we’ve retained about that body of knowledge. Memorization and learning to follow established procedures are the key methods for success. Even when we are taught problem solving, such as solving math problems, the focus is generally either on using established methods or logical inference or deduction, both highly procedural in the way they require us to think. There is much less emphasis on developing our creative thinking abilities, our abilities to let our minds run imaginatively and to discover things on our own. We are given very little opportunity, for example, to perform our own, original experiments, and there is also little or no margin for failure or mistakes. We are graded primarily on getting answers right. In essence, we’re taught to be linear thinkers - to follow pre-established procedures and plans - in a nonlinear world. If only the world were predictable!

To be sure, experimental innovation should not entirely replace linear thinking in our regular work processes. Engaging in discovery and making little bets is a way to complement more linear, procedural thinking.

The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Unfamiliar with the Bed of Procrustes? Check out this wiki link

Aphorisms require us to change our reading habits and approach them in small doses; each one of them is a complete unit, a complete narrative dissociated from others

Here go some of those aphorisms that I liked...

1. For company, you often prefer those who find you interesting over those you find interesting
2. The best revenge on a liar is to convince him that you believe what he said
3. You remember emails you sent that were not answered better than emails that you did not answer
4. To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers
5. You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting
6. It is a good practice to always apologize, except when you have done something wrong
7. Rumors are only valuable when they are denied
8. Over the long term, you are more likely to fool yourself than others
9. There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same
10. I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity
11. If your anger decreases with time, you did injustice; if it increases, you suffered injustice
12. Economics cannot digest the idea that the collective (and the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals
13. When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure
14. Hatred is much harder to fake than love. You hear of fake love; never of fake hate
15. Wisdom in the young is as unattractive as frivolity in the elderly
16. It is a very recent disease to mistake the unobserved for the nonexistent; but some are plagued with the worse disease of mistaking the unobserved for the unobservable
17. You can replace lies with truth; but myth is only displaced with a narrative
18. Someone who says “I am busy” is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you
19. For most, success is the harmful passage from the camp of the hating to the camp of the hated
20. Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur
21. People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels—people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up
22. People usually apologize so they can do it again
23. The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary
24. Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing
25. A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation
26. It is much less dangerous to think like a man of action than to act like a man of thought
27. We unwittingly amplify commonalities with friends, dissimilarities with strangers, and contrasts with enemies
28. Corollary to Moore’s Law: every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half
29. What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried
30. The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse
31. If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry
32. If you lie to me, keep lying; don’t hurt me by suddenly telling the truth
33. You may outlive your strength, never your wisdom
34. They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)
35. A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a “solution” and creates a problem
36. You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others
37. Some reticent people use silence to conceal their intelligence; but most do so to hide the lack of it
38. When someone starts a sentence with “simply,” you should expect to hear something very complicated

Every failure of what we call “wisdom” can be reduced to a Procrustean bed situation!