I have been a fan of Harlan Coben’s since I read Tell No One. It’s a great thriller that kept me guessing until the last page. Then as I sought out more of Coben’s books, I discovered his series detective Myron Bolitar and I found another reason to like him.
The Myron Bolitar books were Coben’s earlier works, then he took a break from Myron to write his stand-alone thrillers. He came back to Myron with the 2006 novel Promise Me and now once again with Long Lost.
I still enjoy reading about Myron and Win but it’s just not the same as the earlier books were. Something’s missing and I’m not sure what it is. Maybe it’s because Myron himself talks about how he’s getting older.
Long Lost also takes Myron out of New Jersey where all the other books have been centered. Much of Long Lost takes place in France. Myron goes there to help his former lover find out what happened to her ex-husband who disappeared mysteriously. Myron soon finds himself taking on international terrorists. Win soon joins him in his pursuit, only to find that they may be facing a situation too big for them.
As with all of Coben’s books, Long Lost is fast paced and exciting. I liked it better than Promise Me, but it still isn’t up to the standard of the early Myron Bolitar books. However, if you read it, you’ll find yourself hooked on Coben’s stories just as I was.
When I mention podcasts to people, they often look at me with a blank stare. I’ve yet to talk to someone I know who actually listens to them. I really don’t know why. There is some great information available for free on podcasts, as well as some good laughs. I suspect people just don’t understand what a podcast is or how to find one. For the ones listed below, all you have to do is go to the itunes store and type the title in the search box. Podcasts are free and can be viewed or listened to on your computer or on an MP3 player. So here goes! BrainStuff (Short podcasts about how any number of things work, what things are, etc.) Dancing With Elephants (A fun, cute and educational podcast featuring a mother, father and their young sons discussing their family experiences, current events, reviews and other news.) Just One More Book (A couple reviewing their favorite children’s books in a local coffee shop. Very helpful reviews, many featuring books that you don’t hear about all the time. Of those we’ve checked out of the library, most were wonderful. Very few of the books they’ve reviewed were not to our tastes.) Scrap Time (A video podcast reviewing scrapbooking materials of all kinds and demonstrating the use of various scrapbooking items.) The Sesame Street Podcast (Short episodes of Sesame Street featuring clips revolving around a word of the day. WONDERFUL for preschoolers to watch on a video ipod during long road trips or when stuck waiting somewhere for a much longer time than expected.)
There are many more, but those are a small sampling to get you started!
I’m always excited to pull the monthly package from Crossway from the mailbox and see what I’ll be reading next. But I must say, when I opened What He Must Be, I couldn’t help but feel a just a little disconcerted—this was for parents, right? Or at least for the guys trying to figure out “what they must be.”
The book, written by popular teacher and speaker Voddie Baucham Jr., is a basic run-down on the Biblical qualities fathers should look for in potential suitors for their daughters. But it’s more than that—because it’s not only the fathers who need to know. It’s for the daughters as they seek to become young women of God; for the young men who face the challenge of overcoming our culture’s expectations; for the parents who raise their children to fill the necessary roles.
What He Must Be isn’t anything life-shattering—but it’s a solid, Biblical approach to something that has been severely undervalued and trampled upon in today’s world. Mr. Baucham calls upon Christian families to return to the principles that some might call “old-fashioned,” but that are in fact the cornerstone of a healthy, functional family.
I don’t have any complaints about this book, except for a minor error in which the author mistakenly cites a scene in a certain movie (no, it wasn’t Lucy who was involved in the ill-fated Caspian romance). But regardless of his Chronicles of Narnia knowledge, Voddie Baucham Jr. has done a commendable job laying out the basics of What He Must Be.
Profiting from Evidence-based Management by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton
This book is a timely reminder that management should be based on sound scientific principles yet in the real world it is anything but. Evidence Based Management (the authors’ rebranding of ‘scientific management’) is a loud wake-up call to senior executives and their consultants to apply scientific thinking whenever they launch a new business initiative.
The authors, both professors at Stanford, present an interesting yet remarkably chaotic collection of evidence, case studies and advice about the crazy things that managers (and their consultants) believe and implement, often in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Here is an attempt to untangle the advice given in this book and provide some examples of the many excellent ‘dangerous half-truths’ it explores:
How to Apply Evidence Based Management (EBM)
Managers and their consultants often implement initiatives that destroy value big time for two main reasons:
They believe in false management practices
They poorly apply good practice that has worked elsewhere
In both cases they are not using their critical thinking skills properly. Here is a useful checklist of questions to ask before tackling any major initiative:
Is the practice better than what you are doing right now?
Are you already doing it under another banner?
How often does it succeed elsewhere?
Can you test it in your organization first?
Is the change really worth the time, disruption and money?
Are your timescales and budget realistic?
Do the promoters have incentives to underestimate the costs?
Is it best to make only symbolic changes rather than core changes?
Will this change actually hurt the organization’s performance?
Are powerful stakeholders clamouring for this change?
Is doing the change good for you but bad for the organization?
Will doing it increase your fame, prestige or pay?
Will doing it mean that someone powerful owes you a favour?
Will it make your job easier and everyone else’s harder?
Do you have enough power to make the change happen?
Internal support and resources?
Are your allies powerful enough?
Do you have a strategy to strengthen supporters and weaken opponents?
Are people already overwhelmed by too many changes?
Do people believe that this change will stick or is it just a flavour of the month?
Are people still digesting the last change initiative?
Will people be able to learn and update as the change unfolds?
Will you be able to pull the plug?
How will you know it is failing?
How will you know when it is time to quit?
Who will judge it a failure and pull the plug?
Other advice from the authors’ on how to apply EMB includes:
Identify and gather relevant evidence and options (‘show me the evidence’)
Ask the following questions before implementation:
What assumptions does the idea make about people and organizations? What would have to be true about people and organizations for the idea to work?
Which of these assumptions seem reasonable and correct to you and your colleagues? Which seem wrong or suspect?
Could this idea still succeed if the assumptions turned out to be wrong?
How might you and your colleagues quickly and inexpensively gather some data to test the underlying assumptions?
What other ideas or management practices can you think of that would address the same issue and be more consistent with what you believe is true about people and organizations?
Practice ‘wise management’:
Act with knowledge / evidence (while doubting what you know)
Understand the limits of your knowledge / evidence
Have humility about your knowledge / evidence
Ask for and accept help from others
Give help to others
Be curious – ask questions, listen, constantly strive to learn new things from the events, information and people around you
Avoid succumbing to a management belief or ideology by asking:
Is my preference for a particular management practice solely or mostly because it fits with my intuitions about people and organizations?
Am I requiring the same level of proof and the same amount of data regardless of whether or not the issue is one I believe in?
Are my colleagues and I allowing our beliefs to cloud our willingness to gather and consider data that may be pertinent to our choices?
As you can see, the above is hardly earth shattering and I do think it needs further refinement. I can’t make up my mind whether the authors ploy to scatter it randomly throughout the book was intentional (i.e. “this is pretty weak so let’s try and hide it”) or chaotic (i.e. “wouldn’t it be cool to stick this particular nugget in here”. This is a poor way to make a series of useful points about management.
However don’t let these remarks put you off. The rest of the book is a terrific romp through the bone-headed behaviour of some the highest paid executives on the planet.
Acquisitions Create Shareholder Value
One of the most spectacular ways to destroy shareholder value is through misguided acquisitions. RBS/ABN Amro, Lloyds TSB/HBOS, Daimler/Crysler, AOL/Time Warner, HP/Compaq and hundreds of others litter the economic landscape. Yet power-bent CEOs and their advisers continue to cheerfully leap into this particular ‘valley of death’.
Skilful acquisitions can add a great deal of value yet few organizations have perfected how to do them. Based on a careful study of their own skills, the characteristics of their target companies and the historical carnage, Cisco has made dozens of successful acquisitions. This book does not spell Cisco’s recipe for success in full but provides a useful indication of the different ways synergy can be realised:
There must be multiple real synergies
The target company must be significantly smaller than Cisco
The target company is geographically proximate making integration and collaboration much easier
Compatible organizational culture
Use a structured merger integration process to ensure key staff stay
Continues to strengthen its acquisition process
The authors conclude that Cisco is using EBM and profiting from it.
Casual Benchmarking
Benchmarking can add a great deal of value yet it is often poorly done and destroys shareholder value. The book gives the example of how United Airlines unsuccessfully aped Southwest Airlines in the mid 1990s. It also describes how the US automakers copied Toyota and failed. Both of these failed because they failed to adopt the culture which underpinned both approaches.
As one executive put it “Instead of copying what others do, we ought to also copy how they think.” Before you benchmark you need to ask:
Is the benchmarking target’s success because of the practice you seek to emulate? e.g. Herb Kelleher CEO of Southwest Airlines drinks a lot of Wild Turkey bourbon. Should your CEO do the same?
Why does a particular practice improve performance? If you can’t evidence this you are engaging in superstitious learning and may be copying something that is damaging.
What are the risks / disadvantages of implementing the management practice? Are there ways of mitigating these that we are missing?
Doing What Seemed to Work in the Past
Al Dunlap (aka ‘Chainsaw Al’) was notorious for attempting to ‘turnaround’ companies via massive layoffs. This one-size-fits-all approach did not work in many cases (along with the accounting fraud that allegedly accompanied it). Before implementing a management practice the following questions should be asked:
Is the practice you are about to implement closely linked to past success? Don’t confuse success that has happened in spite of an action with success that has occurred because of that action
Is the new situation so similar to past situations that what worked in the past will work in the new setting?
Why do you think the past practice worked? If you cannot analyse the logic it is unlikely you will be able to determine whether or not it will work this time.
Implementing New Enterprise Software
This is normally far more expensive and time consuming than expected. Botched implementattions are linked to serious setbacks and failed organizations. A survey of 232 IT exectutives found that 51% viewed their ERP implementations as unsuccessful. A survey of 365 IT executives showed that a typical major software project took twice as long and cost about twice as much as originally planned and over 30% were cancelled before completion.
Switching to Better HR Practices
Changing to the ‘best’ HR practices may be so disruptive that it isn’t worth it. A study of 181 Silicon Valley start-ups between 1995 and 2001 found that changing people management systems after the firm had been founded was linked to increaseed staff turnover, reduced performance and double the failure rate.
Quality Improvement Efforts
Six Sigma and TQM efforts can increase quality and incremental innovation. But focusing on tiny improvements in old systems can detract from the big picture. Also many qualify initiatives are all talk and no action. Harvard studies of the paint and photography industries show that a focus on morcess improvement is linked to less radical innovation. Studies of TQM implementations show that companies talk about it but often actually do very little.
Business Process Re-engineering (BPR)
In 1994 CSC Index “State of Re-engineering Report” of 99 completed re-engineering initiatives found that 67% were seen as producing mediocre, marginal or failed results. Michael Hammer the main promotor of BPR now admits that only about 30% of BPR projects achieve their goals.
Layoffs
Layoffs alone can’t help companies improve profits or long-term performance. They have hidden costs like lawsuits and lost skills, damage surviving employees’ morale, commitment and health. A University of Colorado of S&P 500 firms between 1982 and 2000 showed no link between downsizing and subsequent return on assets. Other studies suggest that layoffs are focused on workers rather than managers – a process called featherbedding – so the relative cost of administration goes up.
Launching a New Product
Less than 1% of chemical compounds developed by pharma firms are ever sold and only 30% of those tested on people are ever marketed. A study of 151 companies showed that the new product failure rate was 40% in food processing and 30% in medical instrument firms. A study of 700 firms found that nearly all the money invested in R&D was devoted to failed products.
Starting a New Organization
The death rates of new and young organizations are substantially higher than for established organizations. Dun & Bradstreet say that only 1/3 of retail and service businesses live longer than 5 years.
Other Dangerous Half-Truths:
These beliefs are often rooted in ideology or in cultural values and are quite ‘sticky’, i.e. difficult to recognise:
Share options motivate employees. This can work in smaller companies but tends to act as a perverse incentive and time waster in larger companies.
First mover advantage is crucial to success. Note how Microsoft and Apple are usually not the first movers into new markets.
Paying teachers bonuses based on child performance works. Research shows that it normally does not. Teachers are not in it for the money. Better to harness parental influence.
Work should be separated from the rest of life – leave your personal life at home. This is very interesting and gets an entire chapter on its own. The upshot is that there are potentially big gains if personal life can be skilfully woven into business activities. Too long to do justice here. However, Southwest Airlines skilfully integrates work and private lives (i.e. friends & family become fare paying passengers, people’s ‘genuine’ behaviour attracts customers, etc.)
The best organizations have the best people – you need to have an aggressive ‘talent management system’. Again too long to give it justice here. The upshot of this is that a large organization with great systems and effective teamworking will often outperform the one that ruthless hires the best and prunes the rest.
Do financial incentives drive company performance? The principle points in this chapter are how ‘Perverse Incentives’ potentially attract the wrong kind of employee, get them motivated to do the wrong thing and create a divisive environment which ultimately saps performance. The recent collapse of the banking system is strong evidence for this.
Strategy is destiny? i.e. does the traditional ‘business school’ approach to strategy work? The answer (and we run a 3 day course on this) is that it helps understand the competitive environment but that it can be highly limiting and damage agility. This is a highly complex issue and is highly context specific. One size does not fit all.
Change or Die? The book lists a range of dangerous organizational changes, identifies the main risks and provides evidence supporting this position. It also asks what to ask before launching a major organizational change initiative.
Are great leaders in control of their companies? This is complex but the short answer is that leadership is more about projecting a positive future and achieving through others than control freakery.
Conclusion
A leading medical statistician recently told me that less than 20% of medicine was evidence based. I shudder to think what the equivalent percentage is for management. I think the following quote from the book deftly sums it up:
“If doctors practiced medicine the way many companies practice management, there would be far more sick and dead patients, and many more doctors would be in jail.”
I started this book on Friday evening and finished it between 6 and 7 am Saturday morning. Obviously that is why I’m so tired today but I really thought I’d be able to sleep all day to make up for staying up all night. I mean really, what am I doing tonight but staying up all night?
But I didn’t get to sleep so I’m very tired. Hmmm…I seem to remember having said this earlier so I’ll skip all that stuff this time.
Lisey’s Story is by Stephen King for those of you who don’t know that. My sister was telling me it was a scary book – I thought I had read it before but once I got into it I realized I was thinking of Gerald’s Game also by King.
The story is about a woman whose husband dies. They were madly in love and had been married for over 20 years. He was a famous writer & several people want access to his unpublished manuscripts. When she won’t grant their wishes, one of them encourages a madman to persuade her. She starts delving not only into her husband’s past but also into memories she has worked so hard to put behind the purple curtain of her mind.
It is a good story – she has several sisters who also have small roles but reminded me of my own sisters. The madman was truly mad and her husband’s past was exceptionally strange.
I was a little disappointed in the theme of a “alternate reality” place but I realized that this book was written back when several authors were playing with that subject matter, including Koontz. I got rather tired of it back then and had hoped this one was not about that. However, I also remembered how, back when it was prevalent through literature, I could kind of understand it because we all have places we go to in our mind when life is threatening to drown us.
The book talks about both a physical trip to this alternate reality but also just the mental trip. An example is the husband could disappear all together whereas one of her sisters could only go there in her mind, her body was still in the present.
I won’t say it is one of King’s best – I have a few others I liked way more – but it was good and kept me interested. I’m thinking the next book of his that I will probably check out from the library and read will be “The Stand” which was always intimidating because it is so darn thick.
I should probably start by admitting that I have a certain weakness when it comes to authors Michael Grant and Katherine Applegate. Their Animorphs series basically ruled my life as a young teen, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t maintain a certain level of obsession even today. So my opinions of their other books may not be wholly without bias. However, I will do my best.
Hunger is the second book in Grant’s Gone series, the first of which came out last summer. It’s been three months since everyone over the age of 14 disappeared, and more kids are developing mutations – superhuman abilities. The food is running out and tensions are rising, particularly between the kids with abilities and those without. Sam is having trouble solving everyone’s problems and keeping everything running and the stress is wearing on him. On top of everything, The Darkness – the mysterious force living in the old mines – is working on plan to escape and take over the FAYZ. If it succeeds, no one is safe and no one will have the power to stop it.
I had been anxiously anticipating this book since I finished reading the last one and it did not disapoint. It was exhilerating, action-filled and highly satisfying, while still ending with the vague threat of future danger for the next book. There are so many different aspects of the book to think about and pay attention to – the over-arching threat of the Darkness, the rivalry between Sam and Caine over control of Perdido Beach and the food supply, the friendships and romantic tensions between certain characters, the tension between mutants and “normals,” and the social and political concepts as the kids try to work out a functional system for living together in Perdido Beach. I wasn’t sure at first about the concept of the Darkness – it seemed a little much – but my concerns were quickly forgotten and almost from beginning to finish, I had trouble putting the book down. I’m completely hooked now – on the plot, the characters, everything. I’ll be eagerly awaiting volume three next summer. It’s a long wait, but I’m certain it will be well worth it.
