Book review: The Advantage

Every business searches for a sustainable competitive advantage. It looks for it finance, marketing strategy, yet as Patrick Lencioni argues, any advantages gained are "incremental and fleeting". He writes: "In this world of ubiquitous information and nanosecond technology exchange, it’s harder than it has ever been in history to maintain a competitive advantage based on intelligence or knowledge. Information just changes hands too rapidly today." If that's true, then where is the sustainable competitive advantage to be found? The answer is organisational health, by which he means when it has integrity, with its "...management, operations, strategy, and culture fitting together and making sense." As Lencioni is the first to admit, there's nothing revolutionary about believing that a happy and motivated workforce can make a huge difference, but today's business leaders either regard it as too obvious to be a serious focus, or are too short-term to build the type of long-term culture necessary. In addition, they think it is too simple, or beneath them. Lencioni identifies three biases that need to be overcome – sophistication (too simply), adrenaline (leaders like the daily rush of activity and are less good at slowing down and dealing with issues that are critical but don't seem urgent) and quantification (it can be difficult to measure). Having made his case, Lencioni then introduces his "four disciplines model", which make up the core of the book — and the main central four chapters. These are:

1. Build a cohesive leadership team
2. Create clarity
3. Over communicate clearly
4. Reinforce clarity.

It's a testament to the way the book is written, and how refreshingly free of jargon it is, that even though all of this seems obvious, the chapters contain a lot of tips, tricks and methods that the moment you read them you wish your own company would adopt (or, if management, consider adopting yourself). There are anecdotes illustrating the pitfalls teams can fall into. One involves the leadership team of an international pharmaceutical company seeing sales decline, and then deciding to cut costs by declaring a moratorium on all first and business class travel. There is no debate around this decision, with the assembled executives in the leadership team merely nodding their heads in agreement. Half the executives then go to their teams and give them the unpopular order to change the way they travel. The other half tell their teams to ignore the decree. When people in the organisation begin to notice the discrepancy in behaviour between the departments, anger and frustration breaks out. Lencioni sees this as an example of not achieving real commitment (i.e. not having a cohesive leadership team). He views it as a result of the leadership team not engaging in healthy conflict, and the cost is not only the financial cost of people continuing to fly business class, it is also the loss of credibility that executives encountered afterwards and the internal politics they created by failing to achieve active commitment around the decision. Lencioni's solution to this is that leadership teams should instead argue decisions such as this through to achieve what microchip manufacturer Intel used to call "disagree and commit". If you thought there was only one type of a meeting — a boring one — then the penultimate chapter The Centrality of Great Meetings is for you. Not only does it list the four basic types of meetings (administrative, tactical, strategic and developmental), it also details lists how often they should happen; where they should happen, whether in the office or off-site; and how long they should be, from five to ten minutes to one to two days. You don't have to agree with any of this, of course, but disagreeing with it forces you to come up with alternatives, and I'm sure Lencioni would see that as a giant step forward. This is a really good book, and it focuses on an area that many leaders would rather ignore, or assume that someone else is dealing with. Let's hope it leads to a renewed focus on workplace health. Wiley, £18.99 Tom Otley For more business books, try GetAbstract – BT Plus Members get one month's membership free.