Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down by Vineet Nayar

A story of how a compaby albeit a high tech one, transformed itself and saved the business from a potential terminal decline.  It really should be a must-read for today's managers leading organisations where we rely on the intellectual commitment of our teams.

There are echos of the Trust Quotient book I read last year but this one is nore about applying prnciples ina concrete way to a real business.


today the asset base of an organization increasingly resides in the talent and creativity of its employees. Knowledge-based businesses, especially, depend on excited teams of individuals who are eager to take on one challenging task after another and to act as custodians of the tacit knowledge in the organization. To manage them—especially Gen Y employees, and particularly in global organizations—requires a new set of capabilities. Vineet’s story shows how a company can focus on its value creators—the frontline employees—to achieve remarkable growth and profits.Read more at location 35 •
as CEO, or as any leader or manager, you must stop thinking of yourself as the only source of change. You must avoid the urge to answer every question or provide a solution to every problem. Instead, you must start asking questions, seeing others as the source of change, and transferring ownership of the organization’s growth to the next generation of leaders who are closer to the value zone. Only in this way can you begin to create a company that is self-run and self-governed,Read more at location 189 •
Management did not say to the employees in the value zone, “What can we do to help you?” Instead, we wasted their precious time and energy by requiring them to make endless presentations to us about irrelevant things and write reports about what they had or had not done. Not only did we have to stop wasting their time, but we also had to find a way to put the value zone at the center of the organization.Read more at location 473 •
Employees first. Customers second. Management … third?Read more at location 495 •
If your organization has more than a couple of hundred people in it, most of them don’t know you. You know you are trustworthy, but they do not. I believe that your personal trust quotient is lower than you think it is—probably quite a bit lower.Read more at location 712 •
The Trusted Advisor. Maister says there are four dimensions of trust:
Credibility: Credibility comes from professional expertise. If the person possesses deep knowledge and follows good practice, you feel trust in what he or she says and does.
Reliability: Reliability is revealed through actions over time.
Intimacy: This aspect of trust is about emotions. You instinctively feel that you can or cannot discuss many kinds of issues with a certain person
Self-orientation: The self-oriented dimension is Maister’s fourth aspect of trust. This one, though, reduces the trust quotient. It is about your motives and the things you care about. Can I trust you to think beyond your own self-interest?Read more at location 743 •
Opening the Window of Information The idea was to open the window of financial information.Read more at location 836 •
Opening Up the Office of the CEO: The U&I PortalRead more at location 875 •
Catalysts are simple actions, rather than elaborate programs of organizational transformation change that plod on for years and years, and they can help transform a locked-up culture into one that is constantly changing.Read more at location 1028 •
the value zone no longer lay in the technology itself and certainly not in any particular hardware or software technology. Customers could choose among many options, all of which would likely enable them to achieve their goals if implemented well. Something had to be different, then, about the way the technologies were brought together and implemented for each customer. Something more had to be changed about how we delivered our services.Read more at location 1095 •
enabled customers to cut down the cycle times in their most critical business processes, including these: Order to cash: from the moment of accepting a customer order to the receipt of payment for delivery of the order Desire to hire: from the definition of an open job position to filling it Concept to manufacture: from new-product prototype to finished production unitRead more at location 1121 •
And so we designed a survey that asked questions like these: Does this manager help you enhance the value you are delivering to the customer? After discovering that you have a problem, does this manager help you define the problem and help you identify its solution? When you approach the manager with a problem, does he or she respond by offering solutions or resolving the issues involved? If you can’t reach the solutions on your own, does the manager enable you to reach out to other people in the organization who help you achieve the solutions?Read more at location 1422 •
We saw that the EFCS concept, when applied to a large acquisition like the AXON merger, could generate such powerful results that we completed four more successful acquisitions in that year. With each of them, we proved that when a CEO focuses less on governing and more on enabling, the executive can accomplish much that might otherwise have been too risky to undertake.Read more at location 1869 •
The speed of thought, of change, and of implementation gets suffocated by too much hierarchy, wherever it may be. The only way to remove hierarchy in the organization is to recast the role of the CEO as one who asks more questions than he or she answers. The rest of the hierarchy will soon tumble.Read more at location 1880 •

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

I was intrigued by the title and then started to get put off by the fact that the book was more of a history of technology, the technology of information.  But after sticking with it I became more and more fascinated by the strange chances of fate that occured to make the technology possible over many centuries.

Some nice references to Dawkins and Hofstader.

the liar’s paradox: This statement is false. The statement cannot be true, because then it is false. It cannot be false, because then it becomes true. It is neither true nor false, or it is both at once.Read more at location 2897 •
One reason for these misguesses was just the usual failure of imagination in the face of a radically new technology. The telegraph lay in plain view, but its lessons did not extrapolate well to this new device. The telegraph demanded literacy; the telephone embraced orality. A message sent by telegraph had first to be written, encoded, and tapped out by a trained intermediary. To employ the telephone, one just talked. A child could use it. For that very reason it seemed like a toy. In fact, it seemed like a familiar toy, made from tin cylinders and string. The telephone left no permanent record. The Telephone had no future as a newspaper name. Business people thought it unserious. Where the telegraph dealt in facts and numbers, the telephone appealed to emotions.Read more at location 3064 •
He instituted a Noah’s Ark rule, inviting two of each species so that speakers would always have someone present who could see through their jargon.Read more at location 3918 •
Some amino acids correspond to just one codon, others to two, four, or six. Particles called ribosomes ratchet along the RNA strand and translate it, three bases at a time. Some codons are redundant; some actually serve as start signals and stop signals. The redundancy serves exactly the purpose that an information theorist would expect. It provides tolerance for errors.Read more at location 4803 •
Certain proteins, capable of flipping from one relatively stable state to another, were found to act as relays, accepting ciphered commands and passing them to their neighbors—switching stations in three-dimensional communications networks.Read more at location 4835 •
The Selfish Gene—he set off decades of debate by declaring: “We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”Read more at location 4874 •
a hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.Read more at location 4890 •
The process is blind. It has no foresight, no intention, no knowledge. The genes, too, are blind: “They do not plan ahead,” says Dawkins. “Genes just are, some genes more so than others, and that is all there is to it.”Read more at location 4918 •
Such genes—these replicators, these survivors—know nothing about altruism and nothing about reading, of course. Whatever and wherever they are, their phenotypic effects matter only insofar as they help the genes propagate.Read more at location 4987 •
Whether the population of France is an even or odd number at any given instant is random, but the population of France itself is surely not random: it is a definite fact, even if not knowable.Read more at location 5278 •
Wikipedia also devotes an article to the number 9,814,072,356. It is the largest holodigital square—which is to say, the largest square number containing each decimal digit exactly once.Read more at location 5493 •
He confirmed that a great deal of computation can be done with no energy cost at all. In every case, Bennett found, heat dissipation occurs only when information is erased. Erasure is the irreversible logical operation.Read more at location 5864 •
We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.Read more at location 6161 •
No sooner has one experience begun than the thought of what else is out there intrudes.” The embarrassment of riches. Another reminder that information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom.Read more at location 6670 •