Great Ideas

I believe the best results come from the best ideas, well executed. The focus of this website and my consulting services is to support my clients to successfully execute these great ideas in their organisations. This page however provides a list of books and on-line resources that have influenced me and that I believe represent some of the best ideas out there.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – a classic that has been a top-seller for the simple reason that it ignores trends and pop psychology for proven principles of fairness, integrity, honesty, and human dignity.

Maslow of Management – Abraham H. Maslow spent a summer sabbatical at a small technology company, observing his ideas about motivation being put to the test. While there, he wrote Maslow on Management, about “enlightened management,” describing the type of workplace that would be most conducive to the workers’ reaching a point of self-actualization (happiness). If we adhere to the concept that management is hardware and leadership is software, what he is really writing about is leadership – although he calls it management. Although the book influenced some other management theorists, such as Peter Drucker and Peter Senge, it was apparently a little too advanced for the time, and perhaps it is still so.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team – explores the fundamental causes of organizational politics and team failure. From the executive suite to the factory floor, the Dysfunctions model has become the standard for eliminating the natural human tendencies which derail teamwork and create costly, organizational politics.

Silos Politics and Turf Wars – silos, the invisible barriers that separate work teams, departments and divisions, causing people who are supposed to be on the same team to work against one another. This book provides leaders with powerful advice on how to eliminate the structural obstacles that derail organizations. Urging leaders to provide a compelling context for their employees to work together.

The Ultimate Question – offers the missing link of the metrics that hold employees accountable to generate loyal customers. Focused on using one simple question – How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague? which allows companies to track promoters and detractors, producing a clear measure of an organization’s performance through its customers’ eyes.The CIO Edge – It’s not enough to be the best technologist. Or the smartest person in the room. There’s another important ability—an apparently very potent one—that determines the success of a CIO’s initiatives, and maybe even the length of their tenure. The New CIO Leader – Every enterprise today needs a new CIO leader. This book outlines the path the CIO must take to become that leader–and to deliver on the promise of technology to yield real, measurable, and bankable results.The Fifth Discipline – This book captures Peter Senge’s vision of a learning organization as a group of people who are continually enhancing their capabilities to create what they want to create has been deeply influential. It sets out the five disciplines he sees as central to learning organizations and some issues and questions concerning the theory and practice of learning organizations.
The Innovators Dilemma – The author asks why some well-managed companies that stay on top of new technology and practice quality customer service can still falter. Christensen suggests that by placing too great an emphasis on satisfying customers’ current needs, companies fail to adapt or adopt new technology that will meet customers’ unstated or future needs, and he argues that such companies will eventually fall behind.