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Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Clever, by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones
How to deal with clever clogs, plus Eureka moments, perfect coaches and brilliant ideas
Clever, by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones
The world is not a simple place. We cannot divide ourselves into two camps — the entrepreneurial do-ers (free agents who cannot be employed by others and follow their own path) and the employees (who sit at their desks and do what they are told). There are also the ‘clevers’. They are creative, talented, and extraordinary thinkers. They can be difficult to manage, anti-authority, questioning of the status quo and dangerous. But, unlike the entrepreneur, they need a system and its resources in which to flourish. This book, by Goffee and Jones, past winners of the McKinsey award for the best article in the Harvard Business Review, is a guide to managers who want to harness the potential of their cleverest people.
Using extensive research and interviews with senior management at companies like Electronic Arts, LVMH, Google, McLaren and Cisco, the authors sensibly use real life case studies rather than abstract theory to illustrate their points. The book is broken into three parts — dealing with the clever individual, creating and running clever teams and finally how to create a clever organisation. Along the way the insights from professionals are both valuable and revealing. The publicity for the book tries to tie it into the global economic crisis, asking whether a failure to manage clever people was at its heart. In reality, this is a slightly unnecessary angle for a book that is strong on positives and fascinating analysis. Very clever, in fact. 8/10
£19.99 Harvard Business Press
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Borrowing Brilliance, by David Kord Murray
£12.99 MARSHALL CAVENDISH
Lively historical anecdotes make this an eminently readable tour of the creative process. The basic idea is that, rather than a form of plagiarism, ‘borrowing’ other people’s ideas helps us to contruct new ones. Kord Murray provides a six-step process for creating solutions to business problems, citing everyone from Charles Darwin to Walt Disney to Steve Jobs. It seems a pity that the designer of this rather good book’s gloomy dust jacket didn’t borrow a little brilliance of his own. 8/10
Coaching and Mentoring, by Jane Renton
£12.99 ECONOMIST BOOKS
It is estimated that around 100,000 British executives are currently undergoing some sort of coaching — you may well be one of them. It’s become a huge business over the last decade and there are all sorts of coaches and mentors out there. So before you splash a lot of cash on one, make sure you know what you’re doing. This book, aimed mainly at HR directors, takes you through the history of coaching, the types available and plenty of solid case studies to learn from. 7/10
The Eureka! Enigma, by Ron G Holland
£12.99 MORGAN JAMES
The third in Holland’s self-help trilogy describes itself as the “the definitive manual for your neck-top computer” and proposes a step-by-step logical approach to achieving a personal goal (that “Eureka! moment”). The basic premise is that we should treat the brain like a biocomputer that we can programme by adding ‘software’ in the form of new skills, apititudes, experiences and values, and filter out irrelevant hardware (ie negative thoughts). In short, stop whinging and start taking action. 7/10
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