Quick and easy recipe for success aimed at time-poor managers

BOOK REVIEW:The 80 Minute MBA: Everything You'll Never Learn at Business School, By Richard Reeves and John Knell Headline, £10.99

AN ESTIMATED five books on leadership are published every day, so keeping up with the latest trends in management is an onerous task, notwithstanding the fact that the majority of these contain few genuinely new insights.

Anything that can compress the good stuff for time-poor managers is certainly worthy of attention, so Richard Reeves and John Knell have performed a useful task with The 80 Minute MBA.

The book can be read in an evening and it is a good primer, if not an MBA course in itself. It also serves as a road map of other management books, as it faithfully references its source material. The authors say they hope it will stimulate more indepth reading, and no doubt it will.

The best chapters are those on leadership. Charisma, balance and authenticity are often cited as key requirements of leaders, but this is debunked by the authors.

There is no evidence that charismatic leaders are more successful. The opposite may be true in fact. Balance is needed for organisations but not for individual leaders. Great leaders excel at certain key tasks and build great management teams to do the other stuff. Authenticity is also overrated and is confused with honesty. There are times when lying is best.

Winston Churchill’s diary in 1940, for example, makes it clear that at the time he thought the US was not going to enter the war, the Germans looked overwhelmingly strong, and Britain was almost certainly going to go down. His decision to lie about this belief and rally the nation was a key leadership moment.

Strategy is equally overrated. The dirty little secret here, according to the authors, is that it makes leaders and MBA students feel powerful in a world where they are not. Execution instead is the key. It suits business leaders to talk endlessly about disruption, revolution and game-changing new technologies that demand a new response. Yet the evidence of the past 10 years suggests the majority of companies winning on the internet use the technology to leverage and execute their existing strategies better.

Good leaders know four things: where the organisation is heading; what is going on; who they are; and how to build a strong team. In character, they are not bullying or hectoring, but they are authoritative.

One man who encapsulates these qualities for the authors is Darwin Smith. When he took over Kimberly-Clark in the early 1960s, he realised the future of the firm lay not in paper but in paper products such as tissues, nappies and paper towels, where the profit margin was better. He took a bold decision to sell the firm’s paper mill, which was not an easy call given its location: Kimberly.

Smith did not deviate from his line and Kimberly-Clark became one of the most successful companies in the world. Asked in a rare press interview to describe his management style, Smith said: “Eccentric.”

But knowing where you are going may not be as important as building a great team first. Because the future holds so much uncertainty, a team with the agility to retask, seize new opportunities and question received wisdom is more important than a single dominant vision. So the authors’ advice is: hold out to get the best people rather than filling gaps; get rid of underperformers fast; communicate and build a good team; spend time getting roles and responsibilities pinned down; and energise your people.

Good leaders also find their successors, though not always willingly. As management expert Manfred Kets de Vries is quoted saying: “I’ve often said that the major task of a chief executive is to find his most likely successor and kill the bastard.”

A recurring theme is balancing the control of organisations with providing freedom for people to grow and innovate. What makes human capital special – its humanity – also makes it harder to co-ordinate. The Holy Grail is getting people to give more of their best willingly and with passion – what the authors call the commitment dividend. Money and perks alone do not get you there; rewarding work does.

Good organisations build communities and display solidarity and true sociability. Gossiping by the water cooler should not be viewed as a semi-criminal activity. Investment should be made in physical spaces for people to interact.

If you set people free to work at their own pace with a degree of autonomy, some will abuse it, but the return you will get from others in terms of trust, motivation, engagement and productivity will more than compensate for it, the authors argue.

Customers too need to be treated with more respect. Co-creation of products and services between producers and consumers, and trends such as long-tailing, whereby the production and promotion of a large number of niche products now assumes an equal if not greater significance than “big hit” ones, are discussed. Amazon, for example, makes most of its profits selling obscure books rather than mainstream blockbusters.

To their credit, Reeves and Knell do not take themselves too seriously. In a discussion of the modern malaise of “hurry sickness”, they talk to the director of advanced technology at lift company Otis, who tells them the door-close button gets used more than any other button in elevators. The delay in elevator response is known technically as the “door dwell” and averages three seconds, apparently. Given the book’s title, the irony at least is not lost on them.

Frank Dillon is a freelance journalist