STRATEGY CENTRAL

I learned some time back that when Bill Taylor publishes a new book…you jump on the opportunity to pick it up and start the journey.  As the co-founder of Fast Company magazine and the co-author of Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win (with Polly LaBarre), Taylor seems to be always talking about things that cause the imagination synapses to fire.  Practically Radical is no exception.

81 pages in and I haven’t had a book this marked up, underlined, starred, and dog-eared in quite a while.  The sub-title perfectly describes what I’ve experienced in the last 48 hours.  “Not-So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Challenge Yourself.”  I have to say, much like Mavericks at Work, Practically Radical is a book with an inspiring idea on just about every page.

As the subtitle informs, Practically Radical is “built around three distinct (but related) modules: transforming your company, shaking up your industry, and challenging yourself (from the introduction).”  Further, the three sections are designed to be read in any order.  You can begin reading the section that has the most immediate appeal.

I started right from the beginning and struggled a little through the introduction.  Honestly, it was a little slow going.  But…once I turned the page and began reading chapter one, “What You See Shapes How You Change — the Virtues of Vuja De,”…oh my.  Almost immediately found myself underlining whole sections and rapidly finding very transferable concepts and ideas that will quickly get application and implementation.  Chapter two, “Where You Look Shapes What You See,” is very much the same; seriously marked up, starred and underlined.

I first picked up Mavericks at Work in the fall of 2006 when I began hearing people like Guy Kawasaki and Tom Peters talk it up.  Practically Radical is already getting the same treatment as authors like Dan Pink begin to talk about Taylor’s latest project.  If you haven’t already ordered your copy, let me help you get on the bandwagon.  In the next few months, everyone will be talking about Practically Radical.  You can order your copy right here (affiliate link).

Every organization has underlying assumptions that need to be examined.  Why?  Because unexamined assumptions are often at the root of issues that come back to haunt organizations everywhere.

If you haven’t heard this portion of Andy Stanley’s talk, “Recent Random Thoughts on Leadership,” this becomes required listening for today.  You can listen in right here.

When was the last time you examined your assumptions?  How about your organization’s assumptions?  An assumption, you remember,  is a fact or statement taken for granted.  Why do assumptions need to be examined?  Looking back at history, it’s easy to see many that turned out to be nowhere near correct.  For example, the earth is not flat and the sun doesn’t orbit the earth.  Hindsight and a more accurate understanding of science has made it easy to spot these invalid assumptions and call them for what they are: old wives’ tales.

What about assumptions that are less scientific in nature?  Say, for example, the underlying assumptions that drive the decisions in your organization?  Have you ever slowed down long enough to carefully examine them to see if they’re still true?

I’ve been reading Stall Points by Matthew S. Olson and Derek Van Bever, a study of Fortune 100-sized companies that looks for the reasons behind growth stalls.  The companies in the study had experienced prolonged healthy growth, reached a point in time, and then suddenly gone into free-fall.  Some recovered and returned to previous strength.  Many have not.  The list is long but many of the names are familiar.  Levi Strauss, Apple, IBM, 3M, Sears, Kmart, etc.

Simply put, a stall point is “a distinct downward inflection in the growth rate that, for the most part, is a one-time event with lasting consequences (p. 32).”

What led to their stall points?  In large part, unexamined assumptions that were no longer correct.  Unlike the prevailing notion that the earth was flat, the assumptions that led to the stall points in many of these organizations had been true at one time…but were no longer true.  Examples would be IBM’s 1968 assumption that personal computers would “never meet the demands of core mainframe customers” or Apple’s 1988 assumption that “higher profit margins justifies ceding market share (p. 40-41).”

So those are examples of unexamined and invalid assumptions at IBM and Apple.  Obviously, both companies have recovered.  I’ve written previously about North Point’s effort to re-examine all of its assumptions.

What might be an assumption you are making in your organization?  For more on this topic you might want to take a look at Ready To Go On An Assumption Hunt?