Book - Open-Book Experience

‘The Open-Book Experience - Lessons from over 100 companies who successfully transformed themselves’
John Case
Perseus Books; Amazon [A]

Open-Book management is a new approach to management – the term being coined by the author John Case who is an author of 4 business books including Open-Book Management: the coming business revolution. The author is executive editor at Harvard Business School Publishing where he edits the monthly newsletter Harvard Management Update.

Open book management starts with this basic assumption: A company performs best when its people see themselves as partners in the business, rather than as hired hands. And the building blocks of an open-book system are:

1. Transparent company: You have to create a transparent company.
2. A company of businesspeople: You need a system of joint-accountability – a system where everyone is responsible for his or her part in the company’s performance.
3. A stake in success: You give a stake in success as well as pay them for their time.

The book presents examples from across industries to describe what open-book management is, how it is useful for top and bottom lines and how it is implemented in both the small or big companies. An interesting read, but readers should go deep only if they are really interested in the nitty-gritty, otherwise a quick scan will be of great help.

Book - Case of the Bonsai Manager

‘The Case of the Bonsai Manager – Lessons from nature on growing’
R. Gopalakrishnan, Executive Director, Tata Sons
Penguin Books; Amazon [A], Rediff Books [R]

Recently one of our marketing professors made a very good point: that Western authors in management haven’t and can’t know the pulse of India and hence we can’t learn marketing by reading Kotlar and other Western authors alone. In the same arena, a question arises: how much valuable contribution Indian authors have made in the management writing? This book is also a part of the answer.

The author loves and watches nature and uses his experiences to pill off the intricacies of business leadership in a manner not found quite often. By giving examples of animals and creatures from snails to elephants, and then from the plant life, this book tries to reach out at the biggest problem from a different angle – what causes managers to get their growth restricted or shunted and hence they are reduced to being a Bonsai Manager….

The book has a slow pace and examples, though all Indians, are at places personal and couldn’t be seen without creating a good/bad impression about the organisations they deal with. Overall, here is a great book for managers and managers-would-be, and also is a brilliant book for nature lovers who want to see how their knowledge and experience can be converted (read marketed) into such a beautiful read.