Kevin Duncan - Business Greatest Hits: A Masterclass in Modern Business Ideas

BUSINESS
GREATEST HITS

Also by Kevin Duncan

Marketing Greatest Hits
Run Your Own Business
Small Business Survival
So What?
Start
Tick Achieve

BUSINESS
GREATEST HITS

A MASTERCLASS IN MODERN
BUSINESS IDEAS

KEVIN DUNCAN

A & C Black London

First published in Great Britain 2010
This electronic edition published 2010 by A & C Black Publishers Ltd

A & C Black Publishers Ltd, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY
www.acblack.com

Copyright Kevin Duncan 2010

The right of Kevin Duncan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cartoons by Gray Jolliffe

All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organisation acting or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by A & C Black Publishers Ltd or the author.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Print ISBN: 9-781-4081-2463-1
Electronic ISBN: 9-781-4081-3437-5

Visit www.acblack.com to find out more about our authors and their books. You will find extracts, authors interviews, author events and you can sign up for newsletters to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers.

As always, my writing is dedicated to my girls:
Sarah, Rosanna and Shaunagh

Acknowledgements

My heartfelt thanks to Gordon Wise for the introduction,
and to Lisa Carden for helping it all along.

Cartoons by Gray Jolliffe.

For regular free updates and new material visit
kevinduncan.typepad.com/greatest_hits or contact the
author at:

kevinduncan@expertadvice.co.uk
expertadviceonline.com

To purchase the Apps of this book, or its sister title
Marketing Greatest Hits, visit:

www.businessgreatesthits.com
www.marketinggreatesthits.com

CONTENTS

Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell
Freakonomics, Levitt & Dubner

Nudge, Thaler & Sunstein
Sway, Brafman & Brafman

The World is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman

Wikinomics, Tapscott & Williams

Sun Tzu: The Art of War for Executives, Donald Krause

The Ultimate Question, Fred Reichheld

Free, Chris Anderson

Six Thinking Hats, Edward de Bono
Six Frames, Edward de Bono

Liars Paradise, Graham Edmonds
The Tiger That Isnt, Blastland & Dilnot

The Logic of Life, Tim Harford

Why Should Anyone Be Led By You? Goffee & Jones

Smart Leadership, Yudelowitz, Koch & Field

How to Lead, Jo Owen
Leadership for Dummies, Loeb & Kindel

The Seven-Day Weekend, Ricardo Semler

Screw it, Lets Do it, Richard Branson

In Search of Excellence, Peters & Waterman

Built to Last, Collins & Porras
Good to Great, Jim Collins

The Halo Effect, Phil Rosenzweig

Making it Happen, John Harvey-Jones

The Age of Unreason, Charles Handy

A Whole New Mind, Daniel H. Pink

See Feel Think Do, Milligan & Smith

Purple Cow, Seth Godin
Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite, Paul Arden

Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky

Hello Laziness, Corinne Maier
How to be Idle, Tom Hodgkinson

Execution, Bossidy & Charan

Why Entrepreneurs Should Eat Bananas, Simon Tupman

How to Get More Done, Fergus OConnell
Getting Things Done, David Allen

S.U.M.O., Paul McGee

This book attempts to summarise the top 40 best pieces of business thinking in recent times to give you a breadth of knowledge at your fingertips. It is designed to be the definitive compendium of everything you need to know from the best minds in modern business abridged, condensed, and ready for immediate action.

Modern business is a blur of jargon with thousands of books all purporting to hold the key to relentless success. The working reality is often very different. I have distilled all the books into one-minute summaries and interlinked them with six short, explanatory chapters so that you can become an authority and decide for yourself.

As well as saving hundreds of hours of reading time, the reader should be able to grasp ideas with pithy accuracy, explain them authoritatively to colleagues and, crucially, avoid being hoodwinked by those who claim to understand a concept when in fact they have got the wrong end of the stick.

You need no longer be afraid to get to the point quickly. You can draw together the most important ideas using some basic unifying principles such as:

Big theories are not necessarily complicated this book makes sense of them for you.

Simple ideas always work you can apply them immediately to your business.

Broad and often misused concepts can be clarified and demystified.

What is business strategy? There is no mystery and plain language reveals all.

Treat case histories with extreme caution. If they were that easy, everyone would be doing it.

Make sense of all the jargon and buzzwords.

How is it organised?

I have corralled 40 of the most interesting books into six sections covering the big themes, business strategy, leadership, business classics, creativity, and organisation. If you want to get to grips with one of these areas in particular, then head straight to that section. If you prefer a more sequential approach, then work your way through from the beginning. Although business is never chronological, you will at least be able to absorb the most popular current concepts, take a view on the issues, examine the vexed area of creativity, and then decide how to get sufficiently organised to enact some of it.

The six sections

Theres no such thing as right and wrong in business. Its all a matter of opinion. As a result, there are potentially only two ways to determine what the right business strategy is:

the most senior person in the room says so;

the person writing the case history retrospectively decrees that it was, when in fact it was probably luck.

In the spirit of the second point, I have used a healthy dose of my own opinion to decide which books make the cut to appear within these pages. I have chosen them either because they are widely acknowledged to be seminal works, or because they represent a particular stance or counterpoint to the prevailing view. As such, they may not all be the most famous, but they will offer contrasting views so that you can be aware of all the angles in a particular debate. I will be delighted if you disagree with my selections because this will mean that you are already reading widely and forming your own opinions.