The Upside of Turbulence by Donald Sull seeks to shake up manager and the way they are thinking about leading in turbulent times. It achieves this goal and gives managers new ideas and tools to jolt them out of micromanaging the bottom line. Some of the ideas in the book are not new, however Sull’s treatment of them and the supporting tools provided in this book give it 4 stars and make it a recommended read in my opinion.
Perhaps the most profound statement in the book concerns the commonly held idea that companies have a lifecycle where they are born, grow rapidly, mature, stabilize and decline. Sull debunks this idea with the following logic.
• Companies do not have a lifecycle.
• Opportunities have a lifecycle.
• A company takes on a lifecycle when they tie their future to a single set of opportunities.
• A company avoids the lifecycle by being willing to use their core competencies to handle multiple opportunities.
Sull’s argument is that managers need to become prepared to manage in a time of turbulence which is defined as rapid and unpredictable changes in the environment that influence a firms ability to create value. According to Sully, turbulence undermines strategic plans, management ability to see and respond to change, as well as their ability to see situations from the outside in. Sull explains these and other concepts using stories as well as providing pointed arguments that show the limitations of prior management books and thinking.
Sull’s remedy for turbulence is to manage an “agility loop” that recognizes the limitations of linear planning and moves into iterative management. The agility loop is an executive’s view of the PDCA and other similar cycles.
However, rather than just repeating these management approaches, Sull puts them into a broader executive context and pairs agility with the idea that enterprises also have the ability to absorb market turbulence- which is sometimes necessary to achieve long term plans.
The book is peppered with thought provoking observations and key points including:
• Luck and the right circumstances have a greater impact on company success than the well-laid plans of executives or their foresight. However, companies that are prepared are the ones who can take advantage of their luck.
• Companies do not go through a lifecycle – opportunities have a lifecycle, which means that your corporation is only doomed to follow a lifecycle if it sticks to the same set of opportunities without change.
• Surfacing the company’s mental map is an essential element in creating an agile organization as everyone knows their assumptions so they can be tested, debated and adjusted or simply tearing up the map.
• Organizations become rigid building a system of commitments that re-enforce each other and can inhibit agility. Here Sull offers the ideas of five forces that shape these commitments: Frames, Processes, Resources, Values and Relationships.
The best chapters in the book by far are Chapter 8 – the Agility Loop, Chapter 10 – Avoiding a Corporate Mid-life Crisis and Chapter 9 Building an Agile Organization. These chapters lay down the guts of Sull’s argument and contain the tools and tables to help executives understand and apply these principles.
Overall recommended for every executives and particularly business unit executives who can get so caught up in the day to day that they loose their perspective and agility. CIOs and IT professionals will find this book helpful in understanding a business-based view of agility that can help them position IT agility.
Strengths
• Clear line of argument and focus on the issue of managing in turbulent times and how an updated/expanded view of agility can address those issues.
• Great tables and tools that executives can apply to themselves to start the conversation, help reach conclusions and improve their management capability.
• Good use of multiple case studies and stories from Carnival Cruise Lines, Mittal Steel, Korean War Jet Combat, Zara, etc.
• The core chapters that explain Sull’s argument are clearly written and focused.
Challenges
• You have to read all the way to chapter 7 before you get the answer and the meat of the book. This is a challenge, so you may want to read chapters 1,2,7,8,9, 10,4,11,5,6,3.
• Several chapters focus on the intellectual and academic underpinnings of Sull’s argument that may cause business readers to put the book down. The third chapter is pretty much a full chapter dedicated to Karl Popper which is fine, but this chapter and the next take the long road to the conclusion.
• There is an over reliance on the Carnival Cruise Lines as an example as it only goes up to the point that Carnival sold itself to P&O so while you know what Carnival did, you do not know how they would have done in the current environment. Other cases suffer from this to a lesser degree, as there are few contemporary examples.
Overall highly recommended for business and IT executives who have to find a way to find success in the tough economic environment we find ourselves in.
Link to the review in Amazon
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