Updates

  1. Person pages list letters, writing, profiles and links as sortable tables with filters, and show each person's companies as links; Fund letters show each letter's description in its own column.
  2. Experts show a checked job title and a short description of each person; 30 more people have photographs.
  3. Every company, fund, university and publication the experts work for has a page listing the people there.
  4. Fund letters show each letter's thesis and filter by it; 225 person pages list the essays, columns and newsletter issues the person wrote.
  5. Person pages list every essay and newsletter issue a person wrote, and their own books as a table in List view.
  6. Recommends shows the five largest kinds of book and the rest under More; browse pictures load sooner.
  7. Podcasts and talks link the original episode, filter by Audio and video or Press, and list each publisher once.
  8. Pages are wider, Recommends has List and Grid, and a filter clicked again turns off.
  9. Book cards sit in a ruled grid with Open Library and Goodreads links and each book's one-line note.
  10. Funds is now Investors; each investor's styles are buttons that filter the table.
  11. Podcasts and talks on a person's page filter by year and publisher and show as a list or a grid of pictures.
  12. Quotes show only people's own words: 472 summaries written by list sites are gone.
  13. Country pages open from Browse again, and every link on the shelf lands on a page.
  14. Subject and person pages show their sections as tabs, and each book appears once on a person's page.
  15. Book cards show the quote, who said it and the source; grids show five cards to a row.
  16. On a phone, a menu holds the sections, search, Updates, Feedback and dark mode.
  17. Feedback takes a screenshot of the page with no browser prompt, opens a screenshot full size when you click it, and clears itself once sent.
  18. Book cards are centred, search names the topic each book sits in, and any text cut short shows whole on hover.
  19. Search groups its results by kind: people, companies, geographies, subjects, topics, books, funds, fund letters and papers.
  20. The Books table lists who recommended each book by name, and the browser tab names the section you are in.
  21. Feedback can take a screenshot of the page, or one you paste or choose, and opens in the corner beside Updates.
  22. Each rail button reopens its section where you left it, and Browse, Table and People show on every book and subject page.
  23. Filters grey out choices that hold nothing instead of hiding them, and Books › People filters by authors or recommenders.
  24. Feedback takes a subject line and up to three screenshots.
  25. Biographies are grouped by the person they are about: 41 new pages, from Abraham Lincoln to Lee Kuan Yew.
  26. Sport splits into 23 sports, and Religion into one topic per faith.
  27. Book lists show as cards: the cover, one recommendation quote and every recommender by name.
  28. Seventeen subjects that had two or three pages under different names now have one page each.
  29. Every page lists its Experts as authors and recommenders, with a link to them on the Experts tab.
  30. Economics, Financial history, Financial panics and Accounting are subjects of their own, with one page per financial crisis.
  31. Book, person and subject pages open inside the app, so the tabs stay in view.
  32. 996 more book covers, and photographs or logos for 227 more people and companies.
  33. Books › Browse shows every subject as cards, and the rail holds Fund letters, Papers, Experts, Books and Funds.
  34. Every topic over 150 books splits into narrower topics, each with a page of its own.

Send feedback

What is it?
Screenshots, up to 3 (optional)
or paste one with Ctrl+V

We use your email only to reply to you.
The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Exec

The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive

Patrick Lencioni
2000
T2 208 pages · about 3h 28m to read Open Librarygoodreads

Summary

Lencioni presents his argument as a business fable following two chief executives running competing consulting firms, one focused on organisational health and one on strategy and market position, followed by a short section stating the model. His central claim is that organisational health is a greater competitive advantage than strategy, technology or finance, because it is harder to copy and because it determines whether any strategy can be executed. He defines health as minimal politics, minimal confusion, high morale, high productivity and low turnover.

The four disciplines are: build and maintain a cohesive leadership team, which requires that the team trust each other, engage in unfiltered conflict, commit to decisions and hold each other accountable; create organisational clarity, which requires the leadership team to agree on the answers to six specific questions covering why the organisation exists, what its values are, what its business is, what defines success, what the priorities are and who is responsible for what; overcommunicate that clarity, which he argues requires repetition to a degree that leaders find excessive and embarrassing; and reinforce the clarity through human systems including hiring, performance management, compensation and firing.

His specific argument about communication is that leaders stop repeating a message at the point when they are bored with it, which is roughly the point at which the organisation begins to hear it.

The fable is thin and the model is stated in the last thirty pages. There is no research base beyond consulting practice. The six questions for organisational clarity are the most immediately usable element, since they can be answered in a single leadership session and the disagreements they reveal are the point.

Key takeaways 8

  1. Organisational health is a greater competitive advantage than strategy or technology because it cannot be copied and determines whether any strategy can be executed.
  2. A cohesive leadership team requires trust, unfiltered conflict, genuine commitment and mutual accountability in that order.
  3. Six specific questions covering purpose, values, business, success, priorities and responsibilities must be answered identically by every member of the leadership team.
  4. The disagreements revealed when leaders answer these questions separately are the substance of the exercise rather than an obstacle to it.
  5. Leaders stop repeating a message when they become bored with it, which is approximately when the organisation begins to hear it.
  6. Clarity must be reinforced through hiring, performance management, compensation and firing, or it decays into a statement nobody acts on.
  7. Human systems that contradict the stated priorities teach the organisation what actually matters.
  8. There is no research base beyond consulting practice, and the model is asserted rather than tested.

Who should read it

Leadership teams that agree in the room and diverge afterwards, wanting six questions that expose the disagreement quickly.

About Patrick Lencioni

American management consultant and founder of The Table Group; writes business fables about executive teams and organisational health.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team names a sequence - absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, inattention to results - and gives managers a diagnostic order for working through them. The Advantage sets out organisational health as a measurable executive discipline covering clarity, meeting design and internal communication.

The Table Group

Patrick Lencioni’s page →The Table Group →

Who recommended it 3 · 1 direct

Mohnish PabraidirectSource
Ali Abdaalreported
Brian Armstrongreported

Similar books 6

Chosen by shared topics, the entries that hold them, and the people who recommended both.

The AdvantageThe Advantage
T2 The Advantage
Patrick Lencioni · 2012
Open LibraryGoodreads

Organisational health, clarity and cohesion, matters more than strategy or smarts.

Recommended by: Changpeng Zhao, David Cancel

The Five Dysfunctions of a TeamThe Five Dysfunctions of a Team
T2 The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Patrick Lencioni · 2002
Open LibraryGoodreads

A fable of a failing executive team and a five-level model of what goes wrong.

Recommended by: Alfred Lin, Chris Powers, Sarah Pritula and 1 other

1001 Ways to Energize Employees1001 Ways to Energize Employees
T4 1001 Ways to Energize Employees
Bob Nelson · 1997
Open LibraryGoodreads

Recommended by: Mohnish Pabrai

1001 Ways to Reward Employees1001 Ways to Reward Employees
T4 1001 Ways to Reward Employees
Bob Nelson · 1994
Open LibraryGoodreads

Recommended by: Mohnish Pabrai

Corporate Culture and PerformanceCorporate Culture and Performance
T4 Corporate Culture and Performance
John P. Kotter, James L. Heskett · 1992
Open LibraryGoodreads

Recommended by: Mohnish Pabrai

FishFish
T4 Fish
Stephen C. Lundin et al. · 2011
Open LibraryGoodreads

Recommended by: Mohnish Pabrai, Simon Sinek, Tony Hsieh

Where it sits in the reference 3

Patrick Lencioni
Strategists
Management and Organisational Design
Business themes
Culture, teams and people
Business themes

Topics

LeadershipBusiness and Management