Serendipity and Learning

The book is a story about Ford. And how Alan rescued Ford from the doldrums. What I liked about the book is the level of detail - not just in the story of Ford, but also in the details of the execution - as to how it happened. At one point, Alan notes - compelling vision and ruthless execution - and simple as that might seem, it is difficult in small firms, so imagine doing that in a gigantic firm. One of the remarkable features for me was the fact that in turning around Boeing in the post 9/11 scenario and in turning around Ford - Mullallys toolkits were the same. He continued to hone and use his core strength, he was technically sound, an engineer and took that level of interest and it paid. At each level - from appointing the right person to giving them the autonomy - measuring - building transparency - this is a story over a few years of both the vision and the execution and both of these would come under question. The second remarkable feature is the time he took to start m...

While I am an avid reader of business-books, I had never heard of this book and it was quite by chance that I even picked it up. And am glad I did.  Driving Honda by Jeffrey Rothfeder is a fabulous read. It starts off from the founder Soichiro Honda and his passion for everything mechanical and how he got Honda to where it is through all the ups and downs. From there it looks at the culture, the kind of people they employ, what is their approach to various aspects and beautiful nuggets of Honda that I had no idea about. The story of how the founder found an able partner to work with was inspirational as well. The concept of waigaya - deserves an explanation by itself - is about how Honda is so much of a bottom up organization - this was one great piece which I loved. (more about this in a later post - as this is one of the things which has come up in many of the recent works which I have handled). The process ensures a lot of disagreement, debate and resolution and they have ...

At a recent training, someone spoke about the Mintzberg triangle. I located it here . Image from that page reproduced here. The page linked above has a better explanation of diagram above, but what intrigued me was that the triangle exists for practically anything. The facilitator referred to this in the context of facilitation. Of how facilitation has science, craft and art to it. That is so true,  I thought. Worth a thought! Need to read of Mintzberg though...

I recently had the privilege of reading Business Sutra. The book is a thought provoking read to say the least. As any creative mind would say, in order for the mind to be creative, it is important for the mind to open, expand, gather in a greater range - this book does that by using Indic (mostly Hindu, but smattering of Jain and Buddhist) line of thought to explain some of the 'sutras' of business and management. It comes across a little different - because mostly we would not have encountered anything along these lines of thought.  Throughout business school, business is from seen from a mostly western perspectives (and the only Indian companies that we referred to are used to mostly as Lalaji businesses - with barely any good thing heard about them except perhaps the 'parta' system of accounting). Through many pages as I read it, I realize that Human Resources in India has much to harness from Indian Itihasa and Purana which it has not – with the r...