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Mint
15-05-2025
- Business
- Mint
Business bestsellers survive but where did management gurus go?
Once upon a time, a best-selling book would grant its author guru status. Having your name embossed on the hardback cover was an unofficial badge of expertise, whether you were an aspiring management thinker, a boardroom sage or a speaker-circuit regular. Unlike keynote invitations, books delivered credibility and had intellectual cachet. Not anymore. In an era where everyone seems to have published something, has the gold standard of thought leadership lost its lustre? To understand how this happened, flashback to 1982, when In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman hit retail shelves with evangelical zeal. American businesses, battered by stagflation, oil crises and the rise of Japan Inc, were in search of reassurance. The book offered exactly that: proof that US companies could still thrive, and more importantly, a codified playbook for success: eight easy-to-recall traits, apparently data-driven and actionable enough for managers to feel empowered. Also Read: When will business books focus more on corporate failures than successes? Critics later pounced on its methodological flaws and Peters allegedly even confessed to having 'faked the data" in retrospect. But the damage was done. A new genre was born: the business bestseller. And with it, a new mantle: of the business thought leader. From that point on, books were no longer just idea containers. They became platforms for corporate wisdom. Successful authors got lucrative speaking engagements, management consultancy gigs, corporate board seats and media publicity. Business books became business. High stakes meant new tactics. Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema, authors of The Discipline of Market Leaders, reportedly spent over $250,000 buying their own books across the US to get into the New York Times bestseller list. It could let them hike their speaking fees and get bigger consultancy and book deals. In India, many business authors, especially those who were already well known for their professional success, have become public figures. Gurcharan Das's India Unbound transformed him from a former CEO into a public intellectual. Nandan Nilekani's Imagining India served not just as commentary, but as a policy guide. Raghuram Rajan's Fault Lines earned him stardom beyond the field of economics. Also Read: The best business books tend to be about music and sports Today, the business book has become something of a glorified business card. Many are padded essays stretched to 200 pages, bloated with anecdotes, loaded with buzzwords and dressed in covers screaming for attention. With an estimated 12,000 business books published every year, the genre is suffering a global glut. Few books offer a breakthrough idea. Many are simply checklists. And in a world of digital content overload, thought leadership is shifting to more dynamic platforms. Podcasts, newsletters, X threads, LinkedIn posts and short videos are shaping professional discourse faster than traditional publishing cycles can churn out books. A book can take two years to write and publish. A podcast can go live right away and viral soon after. Publishers are adapting: Simon & Schuster recently announced it will reduce reliance on expert reviews on back covers. This isn't merely administrative; it's an acknowledgment that curated praise doesn't drive sales. Another brutal reality for authors is that a book that takes four years to write can vanish in four months, even before it gets a chance to appear in a cheaper paperback edition. This doesn't mean books are obsolete. They allow for depth, with slowly built and layered arguments. Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation, which explores the profound impact of digital life on young people, is a case in point. The book format allowed him to explore a cultural phenomenon in a way no blog post or tweetstorm ever could. Books are also timeless. They endure in libraries, sit on shelves and signal intellectual gravitas. But their monopoly over idea dissemination is over. Today, thought leadership is an ecosystem. Books are part of it, but so are newsletters with subscriptions, viral LinkedIn posts, Substack essays, X threads and, yes, 30-second videos on Instagram or YouTube Shorts. Political influence has gone the same way. Also Read: From stock market advice to the Medimix story, business books to add to your TBR So, what should a would-be thought leader do? Write that book with a big idea, yes. But don't stop there. Treat it as one gear in a larger machine. Build an audience through diverse platforms that use voice, video and short-form text. Share ideas in real-time. Experiment. Engage. Books are for depth. Podcasts are for reach. Newsletters are for loyalty. Tweets are for traction. Master the digital mix. Books will still matter especially in policy, academia and legacy media, but they no longer offer an automatic key to the kingdom of influence. In a world oversaturated with information, clarity is currency, velocity is value and reach is power. So, have we reached 'peak book' point à la 'peak oil'? Quite possibly. The hardcover may no longer be the sovereign badge of authority it once was. But in the age of agile content and restless attention, thought leadership is no longer about a singular polished manuscript. It's about being present, persistent and plural. Anyone who writes a book now to get an important idea across must also embrace digital channels. Because in the new world of ideas, it's not just about being read. It's about being ubiquitous—heard, shared, seen and of course remembered. The authors are, respectively, professor at Columbia Business School and founder of Valize; and Fortune-500 advisor, startup investor and co-founder of the non-profit Medici Institute for Innovation. X: @MuneerMuh
Mint
25-04-2025
- Business
- Mint
Leaving the seat of power
The arc of management bends towards sitting on your arse. You may intend to get away from your desk, but it holds you there nonetheless. There are always more emails to clear; there is always more work to get done. When you do leave your desk you are probably off to sit down somewhere else, in a meeting room. And you will probably share that room with your closest colleagues, people who sit behind desks that are located extremely near to yours. Domestic cats have larger territories than some bosses. Worse, the chair's magnetic pull is getting stronger. The pandemic normalised video calls with people in different locations: managers can see employees around the world without leaving their perch. Quantification is another excuse to remain sedentary. Dashboards and data can keep bosses informed about the state of the business in real time without ever having to stand up. The antidote to this problem is obvious but sufficiently uncommon that it has a name: management by wandering—or walking—around (MBWA). Tom Peters, a management guru, popularised the idea in the 1980s in 'In Search of Excellence", a book he co-wrote with Robert Waterman. He had first come across the term at Hewlett-Packard: bosses there had a habit of dropping by employees' workstations to have informal conversations about what they were up to. Mr Peters adopted it, arguing that managers should go to see the places and people where the real work gets done. That case still holds, although the benefits are not guaranteed. One reason to leave the seat of power is motivational: most employees like attention. A study published last year by Pablo Casas-Arce of Arizona State University and his co-authors looked at the impact of short, morale-boosting visits by the new divisional manager of a Latin American bank to the 79 branches under his control. The researchers found that the visits were associated with a boost to sales productivity that started to show up prior to the day itself, and that were biggest in higher-performing branches. These improvements in branch performance were transitory, however, persisting for at least a few weeks before starting to fade. And the motivational effect in this case is doubtless explained, at least in part, by the fact that the divisional manager in the study was new; big cheeses can come to seem a lot less inspirational if you see them all the time. The more substantial benefits of MBWA come not from managers descending like minor royals, but from regular visits to the front line to identify and solve problems. Toyota is well-known for its precept of genchi genbutsu (go and see for yourself), which encourages managers to investigate manufacturing problems in person. Toyota bigwigs routinely undertake gemba (the real place) walks to see assembly lines for themselves and to drive home the firm's philosophy of kaizen (continuous improvement). This way of thinking can lead to some eye-catchingly analogue practices. At a Toyota car plant near Derby, in Britain, lots of information is still communicated on paper; autonomous robots bearing windscreens trundle past display boards plastered with posters. Managers there talk arrestingly about having to earn 'the right to digitise": things that can be consumed on a screen might end up being an excuse for bosses to stay away from the factory floor. Perambulating bosses do not always lead to good outcomes. A paper published in 2013 by Anita Tucker of Boston University and Sara Singer of Stanford University examined the implementation of an MBWA programme at 19 American hospitals. They found that in hospitals where senior managers toured the front lines and solicited ideas for improvement, nurses on average felt that performance had actually deteriorated. The authors hypothesise that the problems came from raised expectations: bosses asked people to identify problems and then did not do enough to actually alleviate them. Where perceptions of performance did improve, it was because hospitals concentrated on easier-to-solve problems and because managers there took responsibility for making sure that issues were dealt with. Wandering around, in other words, demands discipline. Bosses are busy: doing MBWA well requires managers to make a conscious effort to leave the office and to invest time solving the problems that they see. But in an era of Zoom calls and data analytics, there is still no substitute for shoe leather. © 2025, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. The original content can be found on
Forbes
06-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Mediocrity Is The Enemy: How Successful Companies Reclaim Their Competitive Edge
Business break free from mediocrity. In 1983, I read In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman. This iconic business book featured case studies of successful companies. Forty years later, many of these companies are no longer considered 'excellent.' Some are no longer in business. Many organizations that once stood as industry leaders started operating on autopilot, allowing standards to slip, not paying attention to the competition and not keeping up with their customers' expectations. I recently interviewed John Rossman, a former Amazon executive, on Amazing Business Radio. We discussed the business challenge of sinking into mediocrity that he writes about in his new book, which he refers to as a manifesto, The Pig, the Lipstick and the Playbook of Champions. One of the intriguing sections in his manifesto is titled The Tragic Tale of Competitive Advantage, where he refers to Kodak, Blockbuster and Xerox as 'examples of once category-defining companies that could not move beyond the success that made them disrupters.' These are the types of brands whose leaders could have benefited from reading this short but powerful work. Below are several key takeaways from our interview. These are leadership principles that can help us avoid mediocrity—or worse, failure—and improve our chances for success. Rossman explains that the 'pig' in the title of his leadership manifesto refers to a successful business. The 'lipstick' represents the lies we tell ourselves. For example, leaders say, 'Next year, we'll grow more.' 'Next year, we won't disappoint customers.' 'Next year we'll innovate.' These lies create two challenges that businesses face today: To break free from mediocrity, Rossman emphasizes that change must begin with humility. Companies must be willing to admit their shortcomings, whether they've disappointed customers or employees or failed their own ambitions. He recommends instituting a formal Voice of the Customer program and paying close attention to disappointed customers. Rossman says, 'I truly believe in humility as a starting point for change. Recognizing where we fall short with customers is crucial to being able to innovate and thrive.' Rossman talked about 'gold standard' companies that slipped from playing at the top of their game, including Boeing, Intel, Nike and Starbucks. Rossman referenced an interview with Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, who summed up what happened as the company started changing its model. Schultz said, 'The worst thing that a company can do, like a sports team, is start playing defense because you're afraid to fail. That's a disease.' Rossman's response to companies in that situation came from his Amazon days, when he learned about the concept of Big Bets. The concept of Big Bets is about ambition. Rossman explains, 'The concept of big bets at Amazon is that the 'big' is the ambition, not the size of the bet. Everything is an experiment with the intention of winning, realizing that many won't. Understanding that failure comes with the game of innovation is a critical mindset.' In other words, an innovation mindset comes from running many small experiments with big intentions, knowing full well that many will fail, but also knowing that the ones that succeed will keep you competitive and can potentially transform the business. You must constantly place these bets, or your successes may eventually fall to the level of mediocrity as competition catches up and potentially passes you up. Toward the end of the manifesto, Rossman shares a Michelangelo quote that sums up his way of thinking and is a perfect way to end this article: 'The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low and achieving the mark.'
