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Blog
Helen Giles, 03 Jan 2012
One thing I love about the New Year is when magazines publish lists of the best books of the previous year.
I wonder what HR magazine readers’ best leadership and management books of the year would be? For me it would have to be Scott Keller and Colin Price’s Beyond Performance.
The authors have carried out an extensive empirical research project over the space of a decade with hundreds of companies. Their evidence shows that only a third of organisations that achieve excellence are able to maintain it over decades and that the successful companies are those that focus not solely on performance, but on organisational health.
They identified 37 practices against nine dimensions that separate organisations that both achieve and sustain excellence and those that don’t. And guess what? Around two thirds of those practices relate directly or indirectly to the way people are managed. Canny HR practitioners can extrapolate the grid as a template for a persuasive approach to organisational development within their companies.
Do other HR readers have Top 20 truly useful HR Books of the Year nominations?
2 comments on this article |
Michael Moran 06 Jan 2012
Bounce: The myth of talent and the power of practice by Matthew Syed Book review in full: This is book every talent manager should read. It is written by The Times's sport journalist Matthew Syed, who in a previous life was an elite sportsman being an international table tennis champion. Interestingly he builds on the work of Malcolm Gladwell's premise that to be extraordinary in sport, music and business you to spend 10,000 hours of practice. Syed's contention is that it takes 10 years of practice to reach elite performance. There is no such thing as a child prodigy, it's just a case that they got their practice in early. Using his own experience in the world of table tennis, he also highlights the importance of environment. Parental support, in his case his parents bought him a full sized table tennis table which fitted in their garage, (He claims that the parents of the Williams's sisters had moved to Florida with a view of creating tennis champions prior to they birth!). Access to the best coaches, it happens he went to school that had a UK table tennis coach ( slightly spookily is his analysis of how many of our best table tennis players came from the street in which he lived). Practice is important, but it is also about the nature of that practice. Having an elder brother who stretched him was significant. He also highlights the importance of the right type of feedback, having a growth mindset. The importance of praising effort not intelligence. He acknowledges all too often the fact that all these conditions come together by luck, to produce elite performance. However it is readily apparent that an organisation, sports team or parents if you know what produces excellence, you can replicate it. He quotes the example of Laszlo Polgar who "manufactured" his 3 daughters to be chess grand masters. Pulling recent psychological research he covers a wide range of subjects including why sportsman and women choke on the big stage, why blacks are superior runners ( they are not, it's about the environment in which they develop), the use of placebos in sport and what caused the air crash of Eastern Airlines Flight No 401. I can commend this book without hesitation.
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