The ONE THING
I love to read and love to learn, so it is no suprise that one of my favorite pastimes is to wander through bookstores. I love perusing the titles, skimming a few pages of those that interest me and maybe marking a few to add to my reading list. It's a habit I developed probably thirty years ago.
One of the subject areas I generally skim is the business management section. Learning about management styles and techniques is interesting and informative. Last fall, however, as I was skimming titles, I had an epihany. As I skimmed the titles I became aware of just how many titles purported to embue the reader with "the one thing" that they could do to be the best leader, the best manager, to build the most successful company, and ... well, you get the idea. As I looked further, I found books of similar types in other subject areas. It seems that everyone one is looking for the ONE THING that gives them an advantage. The problem was that in skimming the books it quickly became apparent that the "one thing" differed from book to book.
How Could That Be?
As I pondered this situation, a couple of explanations came to mind.
The first explanation is that there are many road to the same outcome. That is, despite the author's assertion that his or her approach was the "one best way", perhaps there were other, equally effective ways of acheiving first-rate outcomes. The author simply chose a title that he or she hoped would sell more books.
The second explanation is that maybe the "one best way" worked for this manager, in this organization. Whether or not it would work for a different manager, with a different management style, in a different organizational environment is questionable.
A third explanation (yes, I know that "a couple" means two), and the one that I most agree with, is that all those books are just a bunch of hooey. There is no one best way that applies to everyone. The titles, and, indeed the premise on which they are based, are aimed at selling books and nothing more.
This last gains some support from psychologist Daniel Kahneman who notes that humans love stories and abhor the unexplained. So we look for stories to explain why a particular business appears to be successful while another fails. We look for stories to explain why one person is hugely successful while another, even with similar talents and abilities, fails miserably. And, it seems, that's what most (if not all) of these books are: stories to explain success or failure.
They're Just Stories
There are three problems with these stories. First, the stories are always rendered in hindsight. It is much easier to explain success or failure after the fact. Whether or not the success or failure was predicted (or could have been) beforehand is a different story. this suggests that "the one thing" is not so much a truism as it is an interpretation designed to explain the outcome.
Second, the stories almost invariably omit the factors that don't fit the narrative. That is, a story that explains why TheCompany was so successful omits the myriad blunders and failed attempts that occurred along the way. Or, if the story is about a person, the story may omit the obvious strokes of luck that occurred as part of that success story. If Bill Gates was 10 years older, or 10 years younger than he is, no one would have heard of him. His luck was in being at the right place at the right time with the right skillset.
The third problem is that rarely is an event the result of some single factor. There is no ONE THING. We humans are a lazy bunch. We want things presented to us in simple, easily digested bites. We don't want to hear that the success of one company was based on the interaction of dozens of factors while that of another was based on the interactions of dozens of other factors. The two companies might share some of those factors, but not all of them, yet they were both successful. And we certainly don't want to hear that changes to any one of those factors might well have doomed the company rather than ensuring its success. That's way too complicated and we don't like complicated.
So, What's My Point?
Well, I have two points to make, really. The first is that the world is a complicated place that cannot be easily boiled down to simple rules. That means that success can come from many factors, or the interaction of many factors, but rarely can be attributed to a single all-encompassing idea.
The second point is that reading these books is interesting, thought-provoking, and even inspirational. But they don't explain anything. They are simply interesting stories that reflect one person's interpretation of the facts, after the fact, that they invented to explain success or failure.
Read them with a large dose of salt.