Rosabeth Moss Kanter

My experience was probably tainted by my spouse’s notes jotted in the margins, which at one point brutally but accurately describes the book as Dilbert (occasionally Dilbert’s boss) writing about infrastructure. A lot of generalities mixed with a lot of facts (rail transit is important for goods!) that aren’t fit into any useful structure. Yes, we need a lot of investment in infrastructure, and yes, almost everyone will be better off in the long run, but there’s a reason that we show more nonetheless are letting the country fall apart around us. Kanter says this isn’t an ideological issue (meaning that we should all easily agree on the need to shore up bridges that are about to fall down, and get more people riding bikes), but it isn’t anything but ideological. She wants more public-private partnerships, magically taking the public orientation of government and the efficiency—stated rather than shown with evidence—of private profit-oriented firms, even as she writes about some notable privatization failures. Frustrating, though overall not as frustrating as the disinvestment it describes. show less

This was a staple 15 years ago, and did a nice job of explaining the role of the champion and change agent as a sponsor of change in large organizations when I was working on that then. But, the Harvard Business School top down and organizational theories of change and innovation are really out of date now in the age of Crowd sourcing, the Long Tail, Blink, biomimicry, systems biology, etc. So, I only have this as a book end.

Invested in this after reading an interesting puff article in "Reader's Digest" - wish I hadn't bothered! All Kanter seems capable of telling us - after lots of page-filling information about specific sports teams - is that failure has a nasty habit of begetting failure, so if we want to succeed, we'd better take care not to lose twice in a row.

If you needed to know that, you might want to read this book. Otherwise, forget it!

This book brings together all of Rosabeth Moss Kanter's "Harvard Business Review" articles and many of the editorial columns that she wrote when she was editor of "HBR". The pieces span a variety of topics: strategy, innovation, customer focus, global trends, planning for change, strategic alliances, compensation systems, and community responsibility - all brought together to enforce a single, timeless message: the importance of treating people as assets, not costs, and providing the tools show more and conditions that liberate people to use their brainpower to make a difference. It is a "Harvard Business Review" book. show less