Creativity cannot be reserved for the R&D team or the marketing department. Every enterprise needs to be creative at all times, in all areas, and in all activities. This is what Jeff Mauzy and Richard Harriman call "systematic creativity". Their call for universal and constant creativity might be a slight stretch but it stretches in the right direction. The universal nature of their opening message does not carry over into some unique formula for fostering systemic creativity. Instead of one "right" way, they draw on four decades of research in the field of creativity to set out basic principles and practical techniques that have endured.

The emphasis on tested principles and practices in place of a fixed recipe is the first of six underlying central assumptions for the book. The second assumption is that creativity and innovation are two distinct concepts. The authors follow clear practice in distinguishing creativity - "the generation of novel and appropriate ideas" - from innovation - which "implements those ideas". A third central assumption is that creativity occurs in three areas: individuals, coalitions and teams, and organizations.
The remaining pillars that hold up the perspective of Creativity, Inc.: Underlying creativity are four interconnected dynamics that form the "heartbeat" of systemic creativity: motivation, curiosity and fear, the breaking and making of connections, and evaluation; Creativity depends on climate; Systematic creativity asks everyone to be a leader.

This stimulating, informative, and cleanly written book is organized in three parts. Part I, Creative Thinking, Part II, Climate, and Part III, Action. The first two parts examine a range of aspects involved in building individual and organizational creative capability, while the final part shows how to connect creativity to purposeful work. Happily, the authors understand that organizations find it easier to boost creativity temporarily; making it stick as an integral part of the organization is much tougher. They devote the final chapter to "Sustaining the Change".

If you're the kind of reader who likes to go beyond the main text and dig into the authors' sources and references, you'll be delighted to find that the compact (185 pages) of the main text is followed by copious chapter notes and references. Creativity, Inc. provides a rich set of principles and tools for steeping every aspect of your organization in creativity. Mauzy and Harriman's book on systemic creativity complements work on systematic innovation processes. Businesses that manage to get the twin engines of creativity and innovation running at full power will have the only enduring competitive advantage left.

What do you do if your company has been a high performer but then hits the wall? The economy may have slowed down, your product innovation has dropped off, growth has been too fast, or execution has been ineffective. According to Amir Hartman, what your company needs is ruthless execution (a term Hartman coined with John Sifonis while working with Hewlett-Packard). This consists of the method and strategies that Hartman's research suggests business leaders have employed to break through performance walls.

Ruthless execution consists of strategies organized into three categories: leadership, governance, and critical capabilities, each of which contains several practices. Hartman does not guarantee success in breaking through the wall if you use any of these strategies. But these approaches are common to those who have succeeded in the past and were used in the order presented in the book.

When troubled or uncertain times arrive, leaders typically but fruitlessly adopt either the "Run-and-Gun strategy" or the "Slash-and-Burn" strategy. According to Hartman, a third approach of ruthless execution works far better for most business leaders. In this book, he has no interest in identifying the major causes of companies hitting the wall. No matter what the cause it is an inability to focus and execute that is at the core of the problem.

By studying a diverse set of industries and companies of all sizes, using surveys, company documents, research reports, publicly available financial data (10-Ks), and interviews with key business leaders, Hartman believes he has discovered the practices used by those companies who succeeded in breaking through the wall. Much of the book consists of overviews of these efforts, many of them familiar to business readers, including Jack Welch's time at GE, Louis Gerstner's turnaround of IBM, Larry Bossidy's famous execution at Honeywell, along with Baxter, Novartis, and Cisco.

Ruthless execution proceeds through the stages of leadership, governance, and critical capabilities. The first part of the leadership aspect is strategic recalibration: the act of validating the direction and focus a company is going to take. This involves rearranging the portfolio of business initiatives (Hartman offers four rules for portfolio management), assessing how resources are allocated to initiatives, and setting a course while finding a healthy balance between performance and growth efforts.

After strategic recalibration, the second leadership practice is devising a business philosophy. Hartman prefers "business philosophy" to "organizational culture" because a culture may endure over generations but he is referring to the view that comes from the top and typically is identified with the CEO. He holds up Jack Welch as exemplifying the creation and promulgation of a business philosophy.

The second part of ruthless execution is governance. This consists of: Accountability - using a set of "alignment" strategies; Performance management system - using a small number of critical financial, strategic, and operating metrics (10 principles are offered); Discipline - communicating messages that are consistent, straightforward, and easily comprehended.

The final part of ruthless execution is critical capabilities: These are the specific actions that executives drive to break through the wall. They are the three critical skills and delivery capabilities with which business leaders need to be equipped: Productivity management - cost and working capital management, productivity management inc. technology-driven productivity improvement (which is aimed at optimizing, reconstructing, inventing and for which Hartman outlines six principles); Talent management - hiring the best talent and getting rid of underperformers; Focused corporate transactions - mergers and acquisitions, and divestitures.

The final chapter introduces a Ruthless Execution Index intended to help executives who want to understand where to improve their ruthless execution. While some executives will find much of the material familiar, the book gathers and organizes many aspects of the execution so vital to continuing and recapturing success.

At some point in a great battle between good and evil, at least as portrayed in pop culture, we can expect the villain to gloatingly assert: "It is your very goodness that will make you weak and fail." Professor Donald Sull is no super-villain but makes a similar, though rather more developed, claim about the best businesses. Rather than blaming the failure of a previously excellent company on incompetence, corruption, laziness, or lack of imagination, Sull locates the problem of stumbling giants in active inertia: the tendency of management to respond to disruptive changes by accelerating activities that succeeded in the past. In Revival of the Fittest, Sull analyzes this barrier and helps managers tackle the demanding task of overcoming it.

To overcome active inertia, Sull recommends neither evolutionary nor revolutionary change typically prescribed for faltering champions. Instead he explains the power of transforming commitments. Commitments matters, he explains, in that they both enable effective management and can disable it when they no longer fit what is needed. Managers select, make, honor, and less often remake commitments or binding actions by investing capital, making personnel decisions, exiting a business, making public promises, making public promises, forging relationships with resource providers, writing contracts, or by manipulating information. Commitments are a powerful tool for creating the desired future but they also become cognitive, cultural, and structural shackles that prevent a company from changing - even when the need to change is clear to all.

Companies take shape at the beginning of the "life cycle of commitments" through defining commitments consisting of strategic frames, resources, processes, relationships, and values. The character of the organization hardens over time as managers make reinforcing commitments large and small. The best companies develop a "success formula" that becomes the envy of competitors and the source of best practices for writers and consultants. This story takes a tragic turn when, eventually and inevitably, a gap opens and widens between the nature of the company and the business environment. The only way out - if one exists at all - is through transforming commitments that require boldness, prudence, and tenacity.

Sull uses pairs of companies to show how some have spiraled down while others successfully made and kept their transforming commitments. IBM's justly famous transformation under Gerstner exemplifies the latter, though this is only one of a wide range of illuminating examples in the book. Sull casts light on the active inertia trap which can arise from the basis of any of the original defining commitments. He follows this with eight risk factors to check for and some diagnostic tests to administer. If transforming commitments fit your situation, you must then choose the right anchor. This may be a new strategic frame but may also be new resources, processes, relationships, or values. The right anchor needs to be worked on by the right person who gives the transforming commitments traction by making commitments credible, clear, and courageous.

Since commitments are powerful tools, Sull's cautious advice includes an unflinching look at seven common mistakes that can lead transformation efforts off-track. Neither does Sull allow managers to anticipate the benefits without also appreciating the personal costs. The book does not try to delve deeply into every relevant aspect of each stage, allow the book to convey vital points while remaining slim enough for busy executives to actually read.

Consultant Cathleen Benko and business professor McFarlan come into alignment in this tremendously practical book. Today's companies need to bring their misaligned, overlapping, and inconsistent projects into alignment through "frontier living". This means delivering results in the present while adapting for the future's business context by using four "traits" to configure your project portfolio for confusing, volatile, and unpredictable conditions.

The title of the book refers to the need to "connect the dots" between an organization's objectives and its project investments to create and balance present and future value. The book's plethora of tools combined with the easygoing writing style makes it engaging and painless to absorb. Benko and McFarlan can be forgiven for overstating the role of project alignment - that is, after all, the standard book author's tendency. It is true, however, that companies project initiatives total up into the trillions of dollars and it requires no stretch to accept the claim that those initiatives have grown faster than companies' ability to manage them. Benko and McFarlan focus on the project portfolio as the most promising key to unlocking value, arguing that the portfolio is a company's future currency. We find their underlying principle that "companies are better served by adapting themselves for the future rather than by trying to predict its destination" to be a sound one.

Alignment, in this book, specifically means aligning three drivers of business performance: a company's project portfolio with its objectives; the projects in the portfolio to each other; and the portfolio and company's objectives with the ever-changing realities of the business context. To prosper on the "information frontier", certain shifts in mind-set - "traits" - are needed. Along with operational short-term and strategic long-term objectives, these constitute the organization's *intentions*. Four traits are used throughout the book as each of the various tools are explained and applied: Eco-Driven (effective collaborations), Outside-In (looking at yourself the way others look at you), Fighting Trim (agility, coordination, and options orientation to deal with uncertainty and respond to change), and House in Order (provisioning the other traits to enable cross-enterprise collaboration).

The seven alignment tools in this book fall three groups. The Trait Meter assesses, plans, and measures trait development according to the four traits. Once this first step is completed (which includes creating an Intentions Framework), the second group of diagnostic tools comes into play: The Intentions, Sides, and Right Brain tools. These measure the nature and size of the alignment opportunity, identify organizational bias and sort projects into business activities, and identify change capacity issues. The third group of tools - Common Threads, Project Chunking, and What-If Planning - focus on building flexibility into the portfolio.

Working through the book for real will, of course, be far more challenging than merely reading it. But the authors have done a good job of clarifying important issues of alignment and have provided a workable and appealing framework and toolset for tackling those issues.
(3 stars from me is good. 4-star ratings are given too easily.)

The way to succeed is to double your failure rate. That comment by Thomas Watson, Sr. is not among the innovators' words of wisdom in Stefan Thomke's densely informative exploration of technologies and processes of experimentation but it perfectly fits the message. Central to Thomke's message in this book is the idea that iterated experimentation through the use of models, prototypes, and computer simulations is the key to learning and innovation. Getting the key to fit in the lock of increased organizational innovation capability, however, takes some jiggling and struggling. Experimentation Matters details the technologies that can transform innovation but place just as much emphasis on the changes that must be made to business processes, organization, culture, incentives, and management. Thomke provides plenty of detailed illustrations of companies wrestling with these issues, and offers six principles revolving to help companies experiment early and often and to organize for rapid iteration.

The first part of the book explains in depth the reasons why experimentation matters for learning and innovation, and how new technologies are affecting the development of both products and services. Thomke shows how the rate of learning is influenced by several factors that affect the process and how it is managed: fidelity, cost, iteration time, capacity, sequential and parallel strategies, signal-to-noise ratio, and type of experiment. Beneath the bewildering diversity of approaches to innovation in different industries, Thomke uncovers six principles that can improve how experimentation occurs: Anticipate and exploit early information through front-loaded innovation processes; Experiment frequently but do not overload your organization; Integrate new and traditional technologies to unlock performance; Organize for rapid experimentation; Fail early and often but avoid "mistakes"; and Manage projects as experiments.

In the final chapter, Thomke looks at how some companies are "shifting the locus of experimentation" to customers as a way to create new value. This approach, sometimes referred to as "co-creation", not only raises productivity but helps fundamentally change the sorts of products and services that can be created. Innovation toolkits given to customers need to enable them to iterate through the steps of experimentation, be user-friendly, contain libraries of useful, pretested and debugged components and modules, and they must contain information abut the capabilities and limitations of the production process. In addition to the development of a customer toolkit, Thomke adds four other steps for shifting experimentation and innovation to customers and, very importantly, notes how the creation and capture of value also shifts.

One great strength of Thomke's book is the attention given to the managerial and organizational challenges of implementing new technologies such as computer modeling and simulation and combinatorial and high-throughput testing. As other writers have repeatedly emphasized - but many managers have not yet understood - new technologies *must* be introduced only in concert with revised business processes, structures, and management approaches. Iterated experimentation helps learning by increasing the number of failures. But if incentives continue to punish failures, the new technologies will be underused or misused. Financial incentives, organizational culture, and management communications will have to change if experimenters are to feel free to fail at the most productive rate.

Thomke illustrates and details the crucial role of organization, process, and management in realizing the potential of experimentation technologies with a range of illuminating cases. He devotes a chapter to these effects in the integrated circuit industry, examines the challenges faced by Bank of America in its bold service experimentation efforts, and shows how managers at Eli Lilly struggled with non-technological aspects of high-powered experimentation in the drug discovery process. A study of experimentation in the auto industry, particularly at BMW, suggests several lessons regarding the reality of technology introduction: Technologies are limited by the processes and people that use them; organizational interfaces can get in the way of experimentation; and technologies change faster than behavior. Thomke also shows how managers can look at projects as experiments, reiterating, refining, and learning from them as they proceed through the stages of design, build, run, and analyze.

Do you work naked? If you're one of the millions of people who work away from the corporate office much of the time you might. Or you might follow a strict routine of showering and dressing first thing. As Cynthia Froggatt argues in detail, non-traditional working practices vary tremendously - but eight principles can help employees and managers alike shape those practices for improved satisfaction *and* effectiveness. Making the change from traditional, regimented working practices to "virtual workplace" practices can be difficult but the rewards can be great. Froggatt's principles cover the issues thoroughly.

To ensure that working away from the office (whether at home, a coffee shop or library, a client's office, or elsewhere) increases productivity without causing anxiety on either side, this book recommends these guidelines:
Initiative: Overcoming the fear of change and becoming change agents - Froggatt provides a checklist for uncovering obstacles to peak performance in the virtual workplace.
Trust: Achieving confidence in the management-employee relationship - this requires doing away with the layers of outdated performance measures. A real concern is the "input bias" according to which managers evaluate workers more highly based on what they see rather than on what is actually produced.
Joy: Creating a work environment that is enjoyable in atmosphere and attitude. Even if your company is not considering allowing or encouraging virtual work, the points discussed under this principle could help improve your workforce's motivation and commitment.
Individuality - Creating a culture of autonomy creativity versus conformity. Froggatt outlines three types of solo workstyle, effectively demolishing the idea that virtual work equals working in a home office.
Equality - Flattening the hierarchy so cooperation and teamwork can flourish. Perhaps the principle least specifically tied to virtual work, this one promotes the removal of all forms of hierarchy which, ironically, may be less influential for those who aren't often in the office to experience them.
Dialogue - Providing an honest communication forum to inspire and inform. Even more than for regular workplaces, virtual work relies on open, honest communication.
Connectivity - Optimize technological advantages, including employee locale. This principle is all about equipping your virtual workforce to enable people to take full, productive advantage of increased flexibility.

Workplace Options - Provide comfort /creative setting for all work locations. Here, Froggatt goes some way to redressing the emphasis on virtual work by stating that both the physical infrastructure of workplaces and the technological infrastructure of online work are crucial to the emerging environment of virtual work. Workplaces of the future are being shaped by six trends, argues Froggatt: Access will become more important than ownership; People will commute less but travel more; Individual choice takes precedence over management control; No more captive audience at "the office"; More attention to workplaces in the home; Blurring of leisure and work.

Drawing on companies such as Cisco Systems, Autodesk, Verifone, The Promar Group, and SAS Institute, Froggatt paints a diverse picture of the ways that companies can help balance work and personal life while enabling knowledge workers with differing work styles to become more productive. The illustrations of each principle help to make clear how you might go about implementing the abstractions. The downside - for some readers - is an absence of real theoretical underpinnings and little attention to the validity of studies cited to support the author's contentions.

For example, on p.40, a Nortel employee survey is used to show higher employee satisfaction of teleworkers as compared to the overall Nortel population. We are given no reason to believe that this is a fair or useful comparison. Perhaps the types of workers made virtual were more satisfied to begin with - a before and after survey would be more revealing. Readers may also find that in the author's eagerness to establish the viability and attractiveness of virtual work, the real challenges of virtual work may sometimes have been assumed away too quickly. On the whole, however, Work Naked provides plenty of ideas for those interested in exploring new working styles for 21st century knowledge workers.

In Frederick Reichheld's 1996 book, The Loyalty Effect, he argued that a 5 percent increase in customer and employee retention can increase profits between 25 percent and 100 percent. Taking that as the foundation for his new book, Reichheld reinforces and updates his message that loyalty in the form of mutually beneficial relationships between customers, employees, suppliers, and investors (the first two being primary) is the key to sustained success. He finds that most companies fail the "acid test" of loyalty, with less than half of today's employees believing that their company deserves their loyalty. His current book draws extensively on examples to show how executives can put the loyalty effect to work.

You will find some of the usual suspects throughout the book: Harley-Davidson, Southwest Airlines, Dell Computer, Cisco Systems, Intuit, but also some examples probably less familiar: The Vanguard Group, Northwestern Mutual, MBNA, The New York Times Company, and the U.S. Marine Corps. All the cases make for vivid reading, though abstraction-centric readers can greatly reduce their reading time by going straight the end-of-chapter summaries and application tips. However, the case studies and stories show that the loyalty effect can be put into practice in diverse ways and Reichheld keeps his book below 200 pages.

Underlying the diverse aspects and implementations of loyalty, Reichheld has identified six principles: Play to win/win: profiting at the expense of partners is a short cut to a dead end; Be picky: membership is a privilege; Keep it simple: complexity is the enemy of speed and flexibility; Reward the right results: worthy partners deserve worthy goals; Listen hard and talk straight: long-term relationships require honest, two-way communication and learning; and Preach what you practice.

Stated in summary form, these will probably seem obvious. The detailed vision that the author presents of the principles, however, is not always obvious and certainly is rarely observed with any thoroughness. He analyzes each principle into component ideas. For example, "play to win/win involves "high road strategies" which themselves are further analyzed, along with more thoughts about strategic focus, partnerships, and growing from the core. You should find some rewarding insights with little effort in this book.

If you've heard a little about nanotechnology and wonder about possible impacts on your business or your life, this is the book to read. Those who have already read widely on the subject will find little additional value in the book, other than its function as a comprehensive compendium of current development efforts and potential business impacts. The writing doesn't shine and sometimes has a oddly 1950s feel to it - see the chart on p.24 and the old-fashioned language on p.33 for examples. Despite this, the book performs well if you approach it as a current reference guide to the potentially enormously disruptive group of molecular-scale technologies called "nanotechnology".

Authors Uldrich and Newberry devote an unnecessary amount of text to convince the reader than nanotechnology is not science fiction. Those who think it is won't be reading the book, and those who do read it won't need convincing. The upside of this strenuous defensiveness is a wealth of facts and figures for the reader to assess each area of emerging and potential nano-business. The authors draw a sharp line between the more common microtechnologies of today (such as the MEMS sensors that deploy your airbag) and nanoscale technologies that operate at the level of one billionth of a meter. Some approaches to nanotechnology, such as Drexler's vision of self-assembling and replicating nano devices fit this characterization better than many of Uldrich and Newberry's examples yet, oddly, Drexler's name appears nowhere in the book.

Ever since IBM scientists woke up the mainstream to the potential of nanotechnology by writing their company's name with 35 xenon atoms (a minute size that would allow "IBM" to be written 350 million times in the space of a single printed period), developments have come ever faster. This book does a good job of showing both how broad and disruptive are the potential applications, and in outlining the probable sequence of developments. They divide the nano realm into nanomeasurement and nanomanipulation, and the latter into nanofabrication (or nanoscale engineering) and self-assembly then explain why the scale of the technology can affect potentially just about every product and industry including health care, materials, energy, inventory management, computers, agriculture, sensors - anything whose products and processes will be changed by the ability to made precise atomic manipulations that affect physical properties of strength, conductivity, and optical, magnetic, and thermal properties.

At the end of each chapter you will find a summary of the "nanopoints", including general but helpful prompts to get you thinking proactively about this technology. Toward the end of the book, the authors speculate about nanotechnology's affects on the world past the year 2013. For the long-range perspective they recommend tracking NASA, since its needs for stronger and lighter materials, self-repairing systems or materials, low-power equipment, and so on, would all be met by nano advances. For the next decade, however, I would instead recommend keeping an idea on DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). DARPA's model of innovation and its current areas of interest seem far more promising than that of the embattled and backward space agency.

In today's unstable global environment we appreciate more than ever the virtue of resilience in both individuals and organizations. This collection promises to provide you with the ability to solve problems without the usual or obvious tools and prepares them to improvise rapid responses to crisis. You *will* find enough solid contributions here to justify the purchase, unless you already have the original HBR articles. The pieces range from Robert Galford and Anne Siebold Drapeau's February 2003 "The Enemies of Trust" back to William Patagonis's "Leadership in a Combat Zone" from late 1992.

These two pieces also hint at the diversity of the collection hidden under the title. Patagonis writes about how he directed the logistics of the 1991 Gulf War. He explains that leading successfully requires a person to demonstrate expertise and empathy - which can be systematically learned and true leaders create organizations that support the cultivation of leadership. Galford and Drapeau analyze the role of trust, finding a disparity between managers beliefs about their own and their colleague's trustworthiness and their lack of confidence in their ability to build trust within the organization. In explaining the disparity, the authors distinguish three kids of trust: Strategic trust, personal trust, and organizational trust.

Two of the strongest pieces are Diane Coutu's "How Resilience Works" and "A Survival Guide for Leaders" by Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky. Coutu explains resilience at its toughest as consisting of a staunch acceptance of reality, a deep belief, often bolstered by strongly held values, that life is meaningful, and a well-developed ability to improvise. One weakness of this piece is that the reader is left to figure out how to go about the development process if no crisis forces the issue. Heifetz and Linsky draw on their book Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading to explain risk management for leaders in two parts: An externally-focused part offers tactical advice about relating to your organization and the people who comprise it. The internally-focused part focuses on your human needs and vulnerabilities to help you from defeating yourself.

The other pieces included are: "Leading in Times of Trauma" by Jane E. Dutton, Peter J. Frost, Monica C. Worline, Jacoba M. Lilius, and Jason M. Kanov; "Crucibles of Leadership" by Warren G. Bennis and Robert J. Thomas; "The Toxic Handler: Organizational Hero - and Casualty" by Peter J. Frost and Sandra Robinson; and "September 11, 2001: A CEO's Story" by Jeffrey W. Greenburg.

Since the future isn't what it used to be and only seems to get stranger by the day, Peter Schwartz's latest book should be a welcome guide to the "inevitable surprises" ahead. Schwartz isn't just any futurist; he's a kingpin at the Global Business Network and frequently consults to governments and large corporations. Schwartz argues that many of the big surprises ahead can be foreseen if we use scenario thinking to closely examining existing signs. With this point as well as in some details - such as the impact of shrinking populations - Schwartz is in accord with Peter Drucker. This book lays out the dramatic transformation and volatility we face over the next quarter century. The book's scope is wide enough that everyone is likely to find themselves startled and stimulated.

In case you read Schwartz's previous work and wonder whether he still believes in "The Long Boom", the answer is an undeniable and unashamed *yes!* Productivity and accelerating technological advances will return the economy to a long-term path of strong growth. This doesn't mean that Schwartz paints a pastel portrait of the future. We can expect a cleaner environment and opportunities in abundance, but must also anticipate massive migrations of people, declining populations in large parts of the Western world, a confusing and unruly international situation, global climate crises, plagues, and possibly an asteroid strike. Study this book, challenge Schwartz's thinking, and prepare yourself and your business for a wild ride ahead.

Schwartz believes that his forecasts and scenarios will stand up to the test of future history better than those of most prognosticators. The reason is that, in the grand tradition of "predetermined elements" in scenario planning, he is drawing out the implications of events that have already happened. Many of the big surprises are, in fact, inevitable. So why are we continually caught off guard? Schwartz pins the blame on our tendency as decision makers to react to the drivers of change either with denial or defensiveness. Neither kind of response is effective and both are "fundamentally irresponsible" as Schwartz puts it. In this book, he aims to help us understand the kinds of inevitable surprises lying ahead, and to suggest steps that organizations can take to thrive.

In the author's view, humanity faces greater challenges now than ever before. At the same time we have greater capabilities than ever before. Our greatest challenge is "to master our own accelerating power, without being swept away by it." Along with a few other well-grounded futurists, Schwartz has laid down a challenge along with weapons for tackling the future. Inevitably, most readers will read this book and find it both informative and engaging but few will incorporate the resulting ideas for action into their plans. When it comes to these large-scale shifts, *doing* has always been disadvantaged compared to *denial* and *defensiveness*. Being proven wrong about this would be a surprise but, alas, not an inevitable surprise.