Execution
Explains how to make the leap from the vision of a good idea to delivering results and demonstrates how to handle sudden changes in the business environment by making crucial connections among people, strategy, and the operating plan.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
9mentions
5people
2009–2022years
78% recommend22% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- So far my favorite books of 2022 are:
Political
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Why We're Polarized
Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America
I liked these two books together because they are two sides to the same coin and offers something I feel a lot of political books don't, a hope for a better America. Both books offer perspectives on this history of the political parties and how we have gotten to this point.
World
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How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future
Vaclav Smil is an amazing author, his latest book really covers a range of topics from energy to food and how solving these problems are not as simple as people think. If you like these types of books, his other book (more dense) Energy and Civilization: A History is something I would highly recommend.
Leadership
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To Risk It All: Nine Conflicts and the Crucible of Decision
Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
Leadership has been a big topic for me recently to explore and out of the books I have read these three have opened my mind. I was in the Navy for severals years and so To Risk It All and Extreme Ownership really resonated with me. Execution is a great book as well and the three of them really cover the core of leadership, making hard choices, ownership, and execution based in reality.
Some of these books are new and a few of them are older, but these and several others are books I have read this year and have found them very enjoyable. I will also put out there if you like business an honorable mention of "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't" which also was a pretty good read about how some businesses have done well and beaten the market while other industry giants have not.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52098718-why-we-re-polar...
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44244963-breaking-the...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56587388-how-the-world-r...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31850765-energy-and-civi...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58885774-to-risk-it-all
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23848190-extreme-ownersh...
- I liked Bossidy's "Execution" and "Facing Reality", like all such books they wander a bit but they have some good insights. "Managing Humans" was okay but I guess I may have come to it a bit later in my managing experience so it seemed pretty obvious. "The 5 dysfunctions of the team" is useful for understanding how to look at root causes of teams that become dysfunctional, can be depressing when you recognize your own team in its pages :-). And not a management book per se but "The Sociopath Next Door" was a useful read because it better helped me understand and identify people who were very different than I am in terms of their emotional investment in things.
- If it helps, I feel that way about the Opera.
Over the years I've had both experiences where I've asked for someones recommendation and found it amazingly accurate, and found what was recommended ordinary or uninspiring. My take on it is that the way people absorb information is unique to the individual and some presentations get through that filter and some don't.
The other important thing I learned was that the filter changes, as you become more educated in a subject, you can pick up more with less if the author assumes you already know the basics. When writing for publication I sometimes felt I was explaining too much but my editor would dial that in for me, when I described to little she would gently prod me back to reality with "How the hell is someone reading this supposed to know what that means?" :-) When I went to far she would chastise me with "Everyone already knows that."
I've read Brooks, and in my opinion he writes for people who are already in the role of business leader and are trying to advance by not making the mistakes others have made. But is it brilliant? I don't know. Can it be brilliant for Bill and Warren and not for anyone else? Probably. I found it useful but not as useful as Larry Bossidy's "Execution: the discipline of getting things done" [1] which really helped me understand what "progress" was when you were a manager versus when you were an engineer and progress was "obvious" in the sense that the project got completed. But I can't say that Execution is more brilliant than Business Stories, they are just different and one was better for me.
Bottom line don't sweat it if you don't see the brilliance, note it and move on. Later if you find you can recall what you read differently, based on your experience, consider going back and re-reading it. See if it has become more, or less, brilliant given your additional understanding.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Execution-Discipline-Getting-Things-Do...
- 1. Choose Yourself! by James Altucher 2. CRUSH IT! by Gary Vaynerchuk 3. Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan 4. Let Go by Pat Flynn
- Getting a mentor will help, usually someone outside the company that you trust enough to question them honestly (too many people try to get mentored by people they think of as infallible and then fail to ask questions when their understanding is incomplete).
If you are looking for reading material, consider putting the books "Execution" and "Facing Reality" (by Larry Bossidy with Ram Charan) on your list. I found these to be a good concise description of some of the more 'meta' aspects of senior leadership.
- TL;DR version: Steve Ballmer should leave, its all his fault, waaaaaaaaaaaaaah.
Ok, so that may be a bit harsh but that is the gist of it. I would prefer it if the author said why he cared. By that statement I mean Microsoft mail fail, they may not. Steve may leave, he may not. Technology will change. But unless you're long on Microsoft in the market I'm not sure why you would invest so much time disparaging Ballmer.
Microsoft is a big place, it may land in the toilet it may not. I watched Sun fall from being the #1 server company in the world to an acquistion for a software product. Does it matter that they didn't make the right moves once the server market shifted? Wasn't it even possible?
"Confronting Reality" [1] is a good, although somewhat depressing, book about how organizations resist seeing things they don't want to see. As a companion to "Execution" (also by Bossidy) I think folks who want to manage companies should read both.
The key point in Confronting Reality is that even when "you" see things clearly, you are but one pixel of an image sensor of potentially damaged pixels. As a leader you have to understand how people become afraid of seeing an unpleasant reality and then just simply do not see it, like your eye doesn't see the big opaque circle in the middle of your vision.
Microsoft's world changed, the successful people got promoted but the stuff they were successful at became irrelevant. If they started again on their same project from the same place they would not be successful now. But that doesn't change the fact that they were successful and now they are calling the shots at some elevated place in the organization. There are so many things that shape an organization, some can be changed, some cannot.
I don't know if Microsoft will survive. I know they are not having the impact in the market they would like, but I'm not sure they know what market they are in. They need a mission, which is something Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple have but Microsoft does not. At least not obviously. No mission, no market, no way to measure your effectiveness. That is a sad place to be.
[1] www.amazon.com/Confronting-Reality-Doing-Matters-Things/dp/B001T0I7KA/
