Are You Reading Critically?

People in my seminars and workshops often ask me “what business books do you read?  I answer, “I don’t read business books. The group is usually stunned.  What I found through the years is that  many business books don’t really offer any new ideas and often lead readers to the conclusion that there are simple answers to complex problems. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate my point.

Patrick Lencioni is a writer and consultant that a number of people admire.  His books often have a number in the title: The Five Temptations of a CEO; The Five Dysfunctions of a Team; The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive; and The Three Signs of a Miserable Job. Let me be clear that Patrick Lencioni and I probably have a great deal of common ground in our shared passion for making workplaces better.  His books are very accessible and seem to have struck a chord because his book sales are off the charts.  And I do not disagree with the major themes in the books above.  What is a problem for me is how the work gets applied.  Most people in organizations who cite his works tend to have read them non-critically and believe that, “if we can only overcome these five dysfunctions we will be a better team.  What is missing is the question, “might there be a sixth or seventh dysfunction or temptation that is really tripping us up?  Patrick Lencioni provides an example of what philosophers refer to as reductionist thinking – the tendency to reduce problems and solutions to the simplest set of principles.  Another example would be Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  The finite number of principles that reductionist thinking yields are not necessary bad or incorrect principles.  I have worked with teams that, in fact, exhibit all five dysfunctions about which Lencioni writes – as well as others!.  However, reductionist thinking has a way of making people lazy.  Instead of asking “are these really the three, four, or five things in play or better yet, might there be other principles that would apply, there is a tendency to accept as true the results of this reductionist thinking.

Another book that I have seen get mis-used is Jim Collins’ Good to Great.  Collins talks about great organizations making sure that they have “the right people on the bus.  I have talked with a number of executive who extol the virtues of this book and especially cite the part about getting the right people on the bus.  The way this passage gets interpreted is to hire (that is get people on the bus) who look like, think like, and act like the people doing the hiring.  So without real diversity do we really have businesses that can be as great as they could be?
So what do I read?  I read biography, history, and poetry.  I am currently reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals.  This is the story of how Abraham Lincoln selected for his cabinet four of his rivals for the Presidential nomination in 1860 and forge them and others into a team that lead the United States through the Civil War. If you really want to learn about getting the right people on the bus and building an effective team read this book. But read it with a critical eye, ask questions, then decide how you want to move forward.