Saturday, November 28, 2015

Tempo! is available at Bokus, Bokon, and Adlibris

Bokomslag Tempo! : Praktisk strategi, organisation och ledarskap i en kaotisk tid (häftad)
Click the picture to buy Tempo! from Bokus.


Tempo! has finally got distribution in Sweden! The printed version of the book is now available on Bokus, and Adlibris.

In addition, companies hiring me for consulting work, can buy Tempo! from a special web shop, at a considerably reduced price.

When I wrote Tempo! my intent was to write a practically useful business strategy book in Swedish. I did not want to tell other people what to do with their businesses, that is for them to decide, but I wanted to help out with how to do whatever it is they want to achieve.

I had seen too many companies where good, smart people just ran into a brick wall when they tried to make things better, not just for themselves, but for everyone in the organization, and for their customers.

Tempo! is illustrated with more than 100 diagrams and photos
Originally, I wanted to write a book about a practical method for developing strategy. I felt there was a lot of need, because I have seen many companies where strategy and tactics are confused, and where the relationship between strategy, tactics, and organization are ignored.

This can lead to a world of hurt when the organization tries to do things it is not designed to do, or when it tries to do two or more contradictory things simultaneously.

Another thing I wanted to provide was a means of clear, unambigious communication. Far to often I have heard people say "We want to work towards the company goals, but we don't know what the heck they are!"

So, what do you get with Tempo!? Basically three things:

  • The basics that every manager, and preferably everyone, in your company needs to know about how people work, how processes work, and how your organization works. Expect some surprises here.
  • A strategic framework, Strategic Navigation, that is basically a civilian adaptation of John Boyd's military Maneuver Conflict framework.
  • All the methods and tools you need to make it work. 
    • Crawford Slip lets you gather and organize information from large groups of people very quickly
    • TLTP, The Logical Thinking Process, lets you find root causes of problems, find solutions, and then build the project plans you need to fix them.
    • Process Behavior Charts, a tool that helps you make sense of otherwise very difficult to interpret data in reports.

The material has been thoroughly researched, used in practice, and proofread by some of the best management experts around, including Bill Dettmer, Chet Richards, Don Reinertsen, and many, many others.

Now, with a much better distribution network than before, I do hope more people will find Tempo! useful.

If you read the book, feel free to drop me a note, and tell me what you think of it, if you found it useful, and if you have any suggestions for improvements.


Saturday, November 21, 2015

Less! available on Dito, Bokus, bokon, and Adlibris

The ebook version of LESS! is now available on DitoBokus, Bokon and Adlibris. LESS! is of course also available via Amazon.

I am very proud of LESS!. I am particularly proud of the fact that I did not write most of it. LESS! is a collaborative work, and working with the other authors has been a privilege I cannot adequately describe. One of my best adventures ever.

LESS! is about building better places to work:

Have you ever had a great idea crushed by the words, "we can't do that, because it's not in the budget"? Then you really need to read up on Beyond Budgeting. Bjarte Bogsnes, VP of Performance Management at Statoil and Dr. Peter Bunce, Director of the Beyond Budgeting Round Table, have written two chapters helping you free yourself from the chains of budgeting.

If you look around you at work, and see people with great potential, but somehow things never get together like they should. The sum of the work is always less than the sum of what the individuals can do. Then Making the Entire Organization Agile, the chapter by Steve Denning is for you. Steve is a former director of the World Bank. He is a deep thinker with unsurpassed practical experience. In November 2000 he was selected as one of the world's ten Most Admired Knowledge Leaders (Teleos).

If you want to do Lean or Agile, what is you and your organization's position on Theory X and Theory Y? Why do you need to know about them? Because Agile and Lean are Theory Y based, and your organization is most likely Theory X based. X and Y ideas don't mix well. Not understanding the difference is a major cause of failure when implementing Lean or Agile. Dan Bergh Johnson's chapter Agile and Lean do not fit into Taylor's Glove will get you up to speed on the all important fundamentals.

And that is just for starters. There is lots more, by authors like James Sutton, Karl Scotland, Håkan Forss, Ola Ellnestam, Brian Hawkes, Maarit Laanti, Ari-Pekka Skarp, and me. And you might want to check out the Foreword by John Hagel III. John is a great author in his own right, Director at Deloitte LLP, and co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge.

Finally: LESS! hits Swedish book stores!

Recently, I wrote an article for a Swedish website about applying queueing theory to writing and publishing books. Having done that, I decided to follow my own advice from the article, and see what I could do to increase my own productivity.

The first thing to do, is to figure out whether I can do more with what I have already got. I can, and quite easily too.

If I build better distribution and marketing networks, I will sell more, it's that simple. I won't go into details right now. I have work I need to get on with, but distributing via Publit gets me access to half a dozen new sales channels in Sweden. I am also adding a couple of marketing channels I haven't used before.

The result, if I do it right, will be more book sales.

As you can see from the Publit webstore embedded in this post, the mix of books is quite eclectic: Management & Leadership, Photograhy, even a comic book.

Eventually, I will compartmentalize a bit, but for now, I want the word to spread any way I can: Some managers are also hobby photographers, and vice versa. Some comic book readers also lead business organizations.

Expect more books to hit the online, and physical, book stores, real soon.