From The Secrets of Consulting:

The Second Law of Consulting: No matter how it looks at first, it’s always a people problem.

This was a book I read a few years ago, and this quote has stuck with me as it continues to resonate. Even technology decisions are really people problems.

From McKinsey:

There’s a market for talent, and as long as you’re willing to pay what that marketplace demands, you can attract talented people. The real challenge is making profits off those talented people. That’s where the big opportunity is. The leading companies today are combining talent and technology and organizational design to generate much higher profits per employee than was possible in the past. So the trick becomes, “How do I hire talent that I can profit from?”

…

In any field of human endeavor you ultimately reach a point where you can’t solve the new problems using the old principles. I think we’ve reached that point in the evolution of management. When you go back to the principles upon which our modern companies are built—standardization, specialization, hierarchy, and so on—you realize that those are not bad principles but are inadequate for the challenges that lie ahead.

Great interview with the authors of two recent management books.

An interesting article in the NYTimes on reading habits of CEOs:

Serious leaders who are serious readers build personal libraries dedicated to how to think, not how to compete.

Perhaps that is why — more than their sex lives or bank accounts — chief executives keep their libraries private.

I’m in the midst of choosing some new bookcases. My book collection is starting to get out of hand. A good problem to have methinks.

Thanks to Brad for the link, and for a number of great book recommendations from his blog.

From The Origin of Wealth:

Markets win over command and control, not because of their efficiency at resource allocation in equilibrium, but because of their effectiveness at innovation in disequilibrium.

Evolution, genetic algorithms and complexity theory, as applied to economics: It is a search problem.

This book foretells the demise of economic theories based on equilibrium. To tell the story, a wide path is walked through the history of economics, advanced computer science, physics and some chaos theory. Very interesting reading, if you are interested in economics, or why economics works or doesn’t (quite) work.

For a review, see John Hagel’s article.

The ETL series has been consistently good, and the recent lectures have continued the tradition.

A question posed by Jackie Speier, a former senator, really got me thinking:

What would you do if you knew you could not fail?

The thing that struck me was that I have no easy answer for this question.

I don’t know.

Fortunately, it is the kind of question that if you spend time thinking of an answer, you’re getting somewhere. Even without an answer, the path towards an answer is constructive.

So, what would you do if you knew you could not fail?