Business – The Innovator’s Dilemma
Clayton M. Christensen · FrancoAngeli When companies fail, it is rarely because they stopped listening to and following the market. Far more often, in fact, it is the opposite. They keep serving their best customers, invest in the most profitable products and allocate resources to the opportunities backed by data. Clayton Christensen starts from this paradox. The very practices that built a company’s success can become the reason that same company recognises change too late. Disruptive innovations first appear as lower-performing alternatives aimed at small, unprofitable markets. To an established organisation they look like negligible investments. Over time, however, they improve, win new customers and redefine the market. By the time they are big enough to deserve leaders’ attention, the room to react has already narrowed. Through the analysis of different companies and industries, Christensen shows how hard it is to invest in something the present still advises against. The new Italian edition, published by FrancoAngeli, also includes a foreword by Marc Benioff, CEO and co-founder of Salesforce.Why we recommend it: it explains how a company can make one correct decision after another and still arrive at the wrong choice. For anyone leading a business, it is one of the most important paradoxes to understand. An absolute must-have this September.
Psychology – Noise
Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein · UTET Two professionals receive the same information and reach different conclusions. The same person, asked to assess the same case at two different moments, may change their judgement even though the facts have not changed. For Kahneman, Sibony and Sustein, this variability is called noise. In this book, the three researchers examine the phenomenon in medical diagnoses, court rulings, recruitment, forecasts and business decisions. Noise runs through every context in which someone has to form a judgement, even when experience and expertise ought to guarantee consistency. For a board, all of this is central. Facts, in themselves, do not exist. An important decision can depend on the order in which information is presented, the perceived authority of whoever speaks first or the moment at which the discussion takes place. Experience helps, and at the same time it can make it harder to notice one’s own inconsistency. The book proposes a discipline of judgement built on criteria defined in advance, independent assessments and processes that stop the first opinion voiced from steering all the others. It is the same principle that makes Executive Advisory valuable: bringing an independent perspective to the table before consensus renders the alternatives invisible.We recommend it because: a decision can be reasonable and still produce different results each time it is entrusted to different people. Noise shows how much this variability costs and how to begin reducing it. Within ourselves as much as in our relationships with others.
Fiction – Traps
Friedrich Dürrenmatt · Adelphi Alfredo Traps is a travelling salesman. When his car breaks down, he is put up at the villa of an elderly retired judge. The evening seems to promise a good dinner, fine wines and a few hours of conversation. The host and his friends, however, have an unusual pastime. They re-enact famous trials, taking turns as judge, prosecutor, defence lawyer and executioner. All they lack is a defendant. Traps agrees to take part. After all, he is convinced his conscience is clear. As dinner goes on, the game begins to change shape. Episodes from his career are reconstructed, connected and interpreted. Promotions, ambitions and coincidences gradually form an accusation that Traps had always avoided levelling against himself. In just 87 pages, Dürrenmatt turns a car breakdown into a trial of individual responsibility. The most unsettling point of the story concerns the gap between what is permitted and what we are responsible for. Traps has always judged his own conduct by the rules of the world he lives in. That dinner imposes a different criterion on him: to look at what his choices have produced, yes, but in others.Why we recommend it: those in positions of responsibility are judged also for the consequences they chose to ignore. Dürrenmatt tells this in fewer than a hundred pages: ideal for a quick but intense read.
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