Are you a fan of reading articles from business schools and big management consulting firms? Then this book might just be right up your street. The back cover gives a good hint of what you might expect:
“Business is working in tunnel vision… organisations are now fully prepared for the past... A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. Management needs to be deprogrammed.”
To understand the link between how big management consultants, business schools and CEOs are creating what he calls “colossal groupthink”, then you need to read this book.
Through 200 ‘vignettes’ (think of a comment the size of a tweet, 280 characters), Herrero aims to help us look at things from the other side. He wants us to think more critically so we can flip our thinking and stop relying on management practices that were created many years ago.
Now, I’m a big fan of Herrero, especially his book, ‘Viral Change’ as he applies very different approaches to thinking in and about organisations. I’m particularly fond of his honest views and statements that can make you laugh out loud, they’re so spot on.
To give you a flavour, here’s just a couple of his vignettes.
“The 9 to 5 management language should match the after 5 language with kids and wives and husbands. That rules out ‘strategic imperatives’, ‘leverage’, net-net’, ‘bottom lines’ and ‘alignment’. Unless you married a CFO.”
“Leadership is not a permanent Q&A session. Systems that reinforce that (‘ask the CEO’, ‘do you have questions for the leadership team?’) perpetuate the parent-child relationship.”
For me, this is a crucial book, that encourages us to think about things differently. It’s easy when we’re busy to fall back on ‘best practice’ or doing things the way we’ve always done them. But, allowing space to challenge our thinking could lead to some really interesting results.
You might not agree with everything in here, but it’s a great start to stimulate thinking and stop us thinking the same way all the time and perpetuate that groupthink.
I’d love to hear your thoughts.