FT business books: what to read this month

‘Beyond Disruption: Innovate and Achieve Growth without Displacing Industries, Companies, or Jobs’, by W Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne

In their new book, the authors of bestseller Blue Ocean Strategy link two management obsessions: the “fourth industrial revolution” and stakeholder capitalism.

As well as creative destruction and the use of their own theory, which urged businesses to redefine an industry problem and cross industry boundaries to solve it, there is a third option: “nondisruptive creation” of new markets outside the boundaries of existing industries. Historic examples include sanitary towels or microfinance. These were innovations where “social good and economic good went hand in hand” without upsetting established industries.

Pursued at scale, their ideas could help entrepreneurs and governments by “creating new jobs with little displacement of existing ones”, even as automation advances, they maintain. It is an enticing vision, which could in theory minimise the backlash that disruptive innovations have triggered throughout history. In practice, some of the methods they propose for achieving such breakthroughs are less novel. “Enablers” for nondisruptive growth include old favourites such as resourcefulness and a “‘could’ not ‘should’” mindset. The idea of non-destructive creation has also been around for a while.

Disruptive innovation is so embedded that it is hard to see why an ambitious entrepreneur with a brilliant idea would step away from a golden long-term opportunity just because it might have a short-term impact on incumbent industries. Still, Beyond Disruption is a high-profile contribution to the running debate about how to shift such thinking.

‘Walk Away to Win: A Playbook to Combat Workplace Bullying’, by Megan Carle

Air, the recently released feature film about how Nike revolutionised the basketball market with the Air Jordan shoe, is a paean to the company and its (male) managers. Walk Away to Win reads like the antidote.

Megan Carle (first name pronounced “Mee-gun” — as she points out, repeated mispronunciation is a microaggression sometimes used by bullies) quit the basketball division at Nike in 2016, having suffered workplace bullying in the final stretch of her long career. Nike, which says it has a zero-tolerance approach to discrimination, is fighting a lawsuit following other women’s complaints of sexual harassment and discrimination, triggered, Carle says, by her low-key departure.

Carle has translated her sense of betrayal after years in her dream job into this “playbook”. “Think of this book as the what, the why, the where, the when, and the how of workplace bullying, so it doesn’t ruin you, a colleague, a comrade, or a company,” she writes.

It amounts to a bracing coaching session based on anonymised case studies (including Carle’s own), robust advice and a heavy dose of basketball jargon. The suggested “drills” at the end of each chapter work well even for non-fans; injunctions to “box out, bang the boards, throw some elbows” or to avoid “spraying the infield”, less so. Even so, with bullying repeatedly in the news, this is a well-timed pep-talk.

‘Spark: 24 Concepts to Ignite, Unstick or Supercharge Your Work Life’, by Chris Mettler and Jon Yarian

Think about a book where chapters are like songs on a playlist: organised in a way that readers can rearrange them, mark their favourites or recommend to others in whatever order they prefer.

“Don’t think of it as a book,” say authors Chris Mettler and Jon Yarian “Think of it as a conversation.”

Although the concepts covered in Spark relate to and depend on each other, the usual linear narrative is not important in this unconventional manual — you go through them in almost any order, letting the ideas bounce around.

The aim is to spark people into action and productivity, not to dictate rules or presume that others would share the authors’ perspective on what should or should not be done. It is a guide to inspire and to provoke achievement and innovation at your own pace.

The 24 topics approached are organised in three main sections. Section one includes concepts you can work on without other people, such as integrity. The second is focused on partnerships and ideas you can work on with someone else. The third is dedicated to concepts shared across entire organisations, for example, agile operations.

The final part of the book presents combinations and sequences for the terms examined and how they lend themselves to each other. Curiosity, for example, is the necessary precondition for creativity. It is possible to produce action without curiosity, but it is difficult to be creative without the desire for something truly new.

While Spark is far from a step-by-step handbook, it is written in everyday language, offers examples that people can relate to and clearly identifies important concepts that drive success across individuals, teams and whole organisations.

‘Building Moonshots: 50+ Ways To Turn Radical Ideas Into Reality’, by Tamara Carleton and William Cockayne

Creating a successful business is often a numbers game, whether that be calculating profit and loss, the amount of funding necessary or the size of the potential market. When it comes to giving advice, around the 50 mark seems an acceptable number — just ask Paul Simon about the thorny subject of leaving your lover.

So it is with the authors of Building Moonshots, who offer practical insights into extraordinary entrepreneurship. Tamara Carleton and William Cockayne employ the fruits of years teaching at business schools about innovation and start-ups to offer just over 50 tips to building a high-growth start-up.

Their wisdom comes from decades spent around the Silicon Valley cluster at Stanford University and researching the behaviour of major corporations in their jobs as lecturers on leadership. This book focuses on the “moonshots”, defined by the authors as those companies that “drive humanity forward”. They are the businesses whose ambitions are almost impossible and then deliver world changing innovation. The authors’ advice is based on having had “a front seat” into the ways such companies have achieved these goals.

It is an easily digestible book, but is not designed to be read cover to cover in one sitting. Its 352 pages are broken down into 54 pithy chapters, each outlining a way that moonshots succeed, peppered with MBA-style case studies to explain how real companies do this. 

Presumably 54 is not an exhaustive list. But a 55th might be that reading books like this is, of course, not enough. While it offers plenty of insight into the most successful, long lasting businesses, these organisations are built on hours of hard work and sheer perseverance.