The art of action
Perhaps the best business book I've ever read: analyzes leadership into its components and failures to adapt -- and how to avoid them. von Clausewitz's On War reformulated in practical terms for business. Highly recommended.
Stats for nerds
6recommend
6mentions
6people
2019–2026years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I recommend reading The Art of Action by Stephen Bungay on this particular topic.
A line in this presentation about loosely coupled, highly aligned teams is a major idea straight out of this book.
I saw some questions in threads here about how to achieve this: unfortunately, I have no bulletproof answers on this front, because what I've seen in practice is that large teams really like to talk about ideas/read books/get training on all these great ideas, then pantomime some of the behaviors from source material, then give up shortly thereafter without actually achieving results and only adding to the chaos and dysfunction.
In my experience, it takes hard organizational resets to achieve new results, with either major leadership shakeups or senior leadership truly, completely, deeply buying into a new way of doing things and seeing it through; such successful transformations have been a very rare occurrence across my career.
- There is a good book on that subject by Stephen Bungay called "The Art of Action". He explains the concept of Auftragstaktik. Great book, although a bit hard to read.
- I‘ve done a book summary on The Art of Action by Stephen Bungay where he applies military principles to civilian life and it‘s one of the best ones in this field I‘ve read: https://www.lostbookofsales.com/notes/book-summary-art-of-ac...
- "The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results"
- Indeed. The OODA loop model describes how you can win a competition by responding to a changing situation on the battlefield faster than your opponent. The Lean Startup describes basically the same thing but for civilian companies, and where the opponent is "the market" rather than a more well defined enemy.
"The Art of Action" by Stephen Bungay is also a very good book on this subject.
- I really like "The Art of Action" by Stephen Bungay, who's a military historian/management consultant.
It's interesting to compare the Taylor vs. Drucker view on management against the Bülow vs. Clausewitz view on war.
