Review by : Karen McCann Blogger and author
Towers-Clark lays out a blueprint for survival in the years ahead, when automation and artificial intelligence will dominate our businesses and our lives. He identifies antiquated attitudes that no longer serve us in the twenty-first century — and suggests a bold new business model to take their place. With so much change happening at dizzying speed, this book offers insights and ideas that may enable you to survive, even thrive, in the dazzlingly different world of the near future.
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Review by : Adrian Leu CEO Inition
Management has to change to face up to the challenges thrown at it both from human and technological perspectives. This book starts from understanding the basis for this change and how it affects the human, social and technological capitals. I really enjoyed reading it because it’s honest, it’s perceptive but most of all it’s grounded in practiced experience. Moving towards a totally transparent company where responsibility and accountability is not hierarchical anymore. There is a need for such books that dissect a taken path and honestly show what worked and what doesn’t. I hope that this will influence other companies in trying something similar. There are a lot of insights and ideas in this book especially about how employees react to change and how to make them embrace it without coercing them. And what’s important is the fact that Charles Towers-Clark realized that this experiment started with a profound personal change in his style of management and his relationship with his employees. Lots to think about and highly recommended.
Review by : Shane Barker GP
A glimpse into the future as well as a guide to managing different generations. It is clear that an open approach to communicating across organisations is going to be the way of the near term future. It is striking that special forces units have a similar approach to responding to situations: namely, recruiting the total brain power across the patrol and applying it while adapting to ongoing change.
I loved this book and wonder how I can bring it into my own sphere: I will be buying more for my partners.
Review by : Shanks Kulam CMO of xmobility
Excellent reading material to stimulate the grey matter, highlighting the reality of how the world is exponentially changing, how one can consider accommodating such changes both in your business and personal lives and making one realise what you may have thought is Futurama is indeed here already…..OMG my car really can drive itself..today!
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Review by : Phillip Pepper CEO of Pencil and Pepper
This book will question your assumptions. Charles Towers-Clark is a CEO who, after running one large company, decided to do it differently a second time around. This book tells you what happens when employees set their own pay, know what everyone else is paid (including the CEO), can see all the company’s financial data, and can choose what work to do and how to go about it. Towers-Clark is a CEO who is actively giving up control, fundamentally challenging what it means to be a boss and, as a consequence, what it is to be employed in the collective project we call work.
Towers-Clark considers the dialectic between a prevailing thesis of AI driven automation and the impact this will have on the way we work, and a radical antithesis in the form of the W.E.I.R.D approach to fostering a new kind of corporate culture. (W.E.I.R.D is an acronym for the personal qualities this approach urges us to exercise).
Of course it’s not all plain sailing. Rational employee resistance to trading orthodox security for challenging responsibility, and the author’s dilemma in bring them around to his way of thinking without resorting to managerial fiat is what makes this an engaging human story.
Read the book to find out if this bold experiment is a success, and whether you think it’s just a bonkers notion or if Towers-Clark has hit on a more rational, resourceful and creative engagement with the enterprise and organisation of work. You’ll find plenty of acute observations and stimulating ideas along the way. Highly recommended.
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Review by : Luis Rey, PhD Director, International School Sevilla - San Francisco de Paula
‘Fascinating’ is the least that can be said about this book. It fosters a deep reflection on how a company might be run in the current state of social and technological progress. Mr Towers-Clark daring approach (‘“a”, not “the” way to do it’, as he insists), is so consistent with nature’s laws that it reminds me of Alexander Pope’s words about Newton: …‘and all was light’. Admittedly, this or that idea in the book may sound odd or even need discussion and tweaking (after all Einstein did it with Newton). Still, the value is beyond any doubt. And it is so because its a fundamentally different way to conceive management – it is of value for anyone interested in human advancement. Grandiloquent as this may sound, it is nonetheless true: humans, like other animals, have an innate feeling of what is fair; and every human is unique. This book is precisely about the unique contribution that each of us can make and how to relate to each other in a fair, transparent way. On top of it all, it improves company efficiency and personal wellbeing. Could one ask for more…?
