129. Is ”Thing Explainer” the Best Management Book?

09/29/22 • 1 min

I think the lessons in Randall Munroe's "Thing Explainer" are more important to effective management than any other book I've read.

SCRIPT

To be honest, I *much* prefer reading fiction to reading management or leadership books. I’m leaning even further in that direction the more I disagree with my past self. Like, I have written – or caused other people to write – so much stuff about corporate governance over the years that I now believe completely misses the point. I sometimes wonder how authors who contribute to the archives of management literature feel when they look back at their publications even like 2 years later. Do they disagree with themselves as much as I do? Anyway, I’m here to make a book recommendation – one I can’t believe I haven’t made yet on OMG. Please have a look at Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe. He’s got a few other books since then including a brand new one that I’m sure he’d much rather a plug for, but I stand by my position. Each page of Thing Explainer has a detailed illustration kinda like a blueprint or patent drawing of some super complex or interesting thing like a nuclear reactor or a submarine and explanations of how every part of that thing works using only the 1000 most common words in the English language. And in a couple of minutes, you’ve learned how some crazy complicated thing works without learning any new language, and while having lots of fun. It’s probably already obvious why I think Thing Explainer is an amazing management book, but just in case: presenting complex ideas in simple words, while also having some fun, is both possible and a better way to communicate than most managers do. Think of this book as an illustration of what managers COULD be doing.

I think the lessons in Randall Munroe's "Thing Explainer" are more important to effective management than any other book I've read.

SCRIPT

Previous Episode

128. Corporate Governance is Broken (but it’s not that bad...)

I really *do* think that corporate governance is fundamentally broken. But I'm not too worried about it. All we need to do is shift our focus a bit.

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When I launched Ground-Up Governance a couple of weeks back, I wrote an intro piece that began by stating, “Corporate governance is broken.” And I sincerely meant it – and still do! Funny thing is that despite being a dramatic thing to say, I don’t think it's a huge deal... because, honestly, it's not that hard to fix! I’ve really learned a lot in the process of writing this season of OMG in terms of refining what I really think corporate governance is, and what GOOD governance is, and what they’re not. So, the part that’s broken, in my opinion, is that a huge amount of what corporate leaders – executives and boards – actually DO has very little to do with corporate governance, but they don’t seem to be aware of it. Every minute spent on compliance, oversight, presentations, crafting and consuming pre-reads, and so on, only matters to the extent that it is in service of making effective decisions. In other words, unless we DELIBERATELY do compliance, oversight, presentations, and crafting and consuming pre-reads in a way that enhances our decision conditions, we’re basically not doing good governance at all. That’s what’s broken: we spend an unimaginable amount of time on stuff that barely matters to good governance. And very little time on the stuff that does matter. It’s not because we’re ineffective, or because we’re negligent, but because every resource, course, regulation, and recommendation seems to be pushing us AWAY from good governance. My single most important piece of governance advice? Consume all the traditional governance resources you want, understand them, take the salient bits, and then tune the rest of it out!

Next Episode

130. You can’t understand corporate governance without understanding power and authority

People need power to get things done, but even having a LOT of authority doesn't mean you'll have any power. This is a critical thing to understand if we want to understand corporate governance.

SCRIPT

A few episodes ago I cross-posted the first episode of the Sound-Up Governance podcast featuring Professor Tiziana Casciaro from the Rotman School of Management, where I worked for 20ish years. It was no accident that Tiziana was the first guest – she’s an expert on what power is, how people get it, how people lose it. Even more interestingly, she’s got really cool insights into why people with lots of authority – maybe CEOs or corporate directors, for example – sometimes don’t really have much power, meaning they can’t really get anyone to do the things they want. Tiziana describes power as controlling access to something that other people want. That something could be really tangible, like money or a promotion. It can also be more abstract, like comfort or happiness or just feeling cool. I’m sure you can already see where I’m going. What could possibly be more critical to corporate governance than power? Sure, every board technically has a huge amount of authority in their organization. In a way, they have *all* the authority in their organization. Any authority others have has been delegated to them – on purpose or by accident – by the board. And the board is ultimately accountable for what those others do with their authority. But who cares about authority without power? What difference does it make for corporate governance to happen, for decisions to be made, if nobody actually y’know does anything in response to those decisions? It raises a cool question: “what resources does a board control access to, and why would anyone in an organization care?”