From an article in Backbone, a tech mag produced by Toronto’s Globe & Mail. 

Loren Hicks, a Toronto-based independent management consultant, says that the fact that Microsoft’s browser updates will now come faster to market still doesn’t compete with a community-based product like Firefox.

“The key constraint on software development is not money, but brainpower. No matter how well funded, a command-and-control organization will never be able to compete on product quality against a widely dispersed open community. You can’t buy innovation or unbiased peer-review.”

The Sun Tzu principle of shih, which provides the backbone of our book, The Rules of Victory, depicts the world more like a game of Go—complex, multi-dimensional, ever-shifting, and interdependent—than a game of checkers, which is more of a straight-out slugging match. As such, it lends itself much more readily to working “widely dispersed open communities” rather than command-and-control situations.

James Gimian & Barry Boyce  

In the June 18, 2008, Toronto Globe and Mail, business book reviewer Harvey Schachter reviewed Stall Points by Matthew Olson and Derek Van Bever, Yale University Press. The book talks about how successful companies hit a takeoff point, and soar. But eventually, most meet a stall point, where suddenly everything seems to fall apart. The review mentions that the authors make the point that “it is the assumptions that you believe the most deeply or that you have held true for the longest time that are likely to prove your undoing.” Here’s what I wrote to Harvey about that:

I am continually shocked in my consulting work with how blind even the most successful and effective leaders are to the limitations of their own views. Jerome Groopman talks about it in How Doctors Think. The neuroscientists talk about it in discussing the problems with cognitive bias.

In Rules of Victory we talk about it in terms of View, and how that leads (or doesn’t) to synchronized and effective Practices and Actions.

One of my favorite images in talking about this is the experience of using a flashlight on a dark night: It simultaneously sharpens perception at the focus but renders the periphery more opaque. Since so many answers lie somewhere in the periphery, our ability to see and understand what’s lies out there needs to be expanded. This is akin to what Olson and Bever present in seeing the limitations of the assumptions underlying one’s strategy.

James Gimian