Small Giants is a great expose on a variety of companies, spanning several industries that represent a larger set of companies out there that, if they so desired, could grow quite large and focus on profitability as a big driver of that growth. However, these companies choose to stay “small” by many standards, focusing on excellence, customer experience, and employee satisfaction as key elements of their business models. I found it inspiring and a great contrast to much of the literature in the business world today about either startups that scaled up to multi-billion dollar companies or those companies that have survived for decades. This book is choc full of interviews, examinations, and explanations of the principles and practices at the heart of these organizations. Any entrepreneur, leader, manager, or employee seeking to expand their view of alternative organizations to work for would benefit from reading this book.
Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want
This book is an essential component of a three part collection of the Startup Owners Manual and Business Model Generation. I’m reviewing this book first because it is the most widely applicable to varying roles and endeavors in the world of business and organizational development. Value Proposition Design provides a systematic and proven method to design, prototype, develop, and improve your value proposition from a product or service perspective. I’ve used this method and it’s toolkit extensively in my consultations, collaborations, as well as my pro-bono consulting work helping to improve local non-profit value propositions. This book helps you deconstruct and reconstruct your customers “Pains, Gains, and Job’s to be Done” by accompanying and addressing them with “Pain Alleviators, Gain Generators, and Products/Services”. I’ve used this method when designing new processes, services, and products in higher education, outdoor product development, business process design and improvement, and community health services organizations. I believe it helps do really get deep into the details of effectively and successfully serving your customers needs. It’s as close to an engineered approach I’ve seen but with a central component of relationship development and psychology as well. I recommend this book for change agents, continuous improvement experts, product developers, entrepreneurs, and leaders wanting to have deep insight into their customers, from the CUSTOMERS perspective (central to Lean thinking).
The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility
Stewart Brand is one of the greatest thinkers of our time. Founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and the author of a host of other design and futurist oriented books, the Clock of the Long Now is a book fit for anyone seeking to understand underlying structures in our thinking, technology, and how those play out in the evolution of our societies. This book is great to understand some of the inherent drawbacks of the way we’ve pursued technological development, potential pathways for solutions, but also for a great exploration of Strategic Thinking in general, especially as it relates to design and societal ramifications of our technology. I recommend this book for techies but also for anyone wishing to expand their strategic thinking reading into a clear, outcomes oriented thought experiments.