🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
🎨 Impressions
How I Discovered It
Who Should Read It?
☘️ How the Book Changed Me
Why haven’t I thought about it myself, when I used to work in management myself? That commander such as Suvorov was not only a warrior but also a manager, who managed the army in the same manner as most CEO are managing companies nowadays. Intrigued to learn something new.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
If you don’t have a simple solution, then you don’t have a solution. — V. Letunovsky
📒 Ideas
What is it about?
- The author hopes that info in the book will help leaders to master:
- Principles of script planning.
- Elevate the skills of effective management feedback (whatever it is)
- I suggest remembering Навык обратной связи 4A
- Learn how to motivate and encourage staff to do hard things.
- Build a successful corporate culture rooted in national traditions.
- Bring up in employees the victory spirit of Suvorov.
- And the most important, strengthen the belief in oneself and his men.
Be as samurai, ready to die in any moment
- Business leaders are often afraid of losing.
- Profits and success, the only motive that drives in corporate world.
- But what if there is another way.
- A way to look at your ambition differently.
- The most prominent trait of Suvorov was fearlessness.
- Because of clear conscious.
- He lived righteously and wasn’t afraid of dying.
- This brought with itself an ability to evaluate situation adequately, in the most critical moments of battle.
- It helped him to be himself anywhere he went.
- The same was true for samurais, they were ready to die at any moment.
- Immaculate attire, weapon in the best possible shape.
- Modern business do not worry about posterity, only about momentarily gains.
- How do we think in the most crucial moments? What thoughts do we have when we talk about work we do? And what would we do if not this?
Be water, my friend
- The intensity of the flow of the battle only increases.
- After each stage, the flow doesn’t ebb away, instead it takes an even faster pace, literally washing away everything in its course.
- Like tsunami, a force of nature that couldn’t be opposed.
- In modern business, leaders too often fret and stay too long in indecisiveness.
- Decisions are wasted, time is consumed by inessentials and trivialities.
- The flow of the company is decreased by it, and in the end we have instead of a roaring river, a quiet stream, that dries on our eyes.
Cut weight, stay lean, no fat
- By fat I mean all those moochers of the back office who does not generate income and inhabit only loss part of the balance sheet.
- How this could be changed. Eventually, we face a dilemma, either to hire more back office personal or field officers.
- What are the proportion between back office and front office, what function they must be able to perform.
- How to make them interchangeable?
- The example with Gemba is good but insufficient, this event doesn’t provide real connection between departments.
- And what is the function of a leader in this setup.
- What kind of thinking he uses to build such integration.
- Architect?
Total unity of forces and understanding of goals
- How much stays hidden from regular employees, how much they don’t know?
- Complete tranquility is not a fresh idea. It has been introduced in Netfilx as candor. Прямолинейность
- The only question stays, how it could be implemented in current professional landscape.
- To what limit information must be shared? What penalties for betraying trust should be put on an employee? Where is a red line?
- Actually, Suvorov also had a delegating style of management.
- He outlined the main plan, delivered orders to the executives with a side note, that in case when they think that orders do not answer to the best interest of operation, they must adapt, take responsibility, and do what’s best under certain conditions.
- Choose the best option, act with common sense.
Corporate team building is a win-win event
- Maneuvers should be performed in such a away, where both sides win.
- How?
- ^532241
Decisions must be made promptly
- No need to waste time.
- Rely solely on common sense, timing and current situation.
- There is no need to wait for approval from higher ranks.
- The only thing is, how to reach timely decision.
- Beware of substituting probabilistic decision with personal.
- Postponing of a decision only means you don’t know what to do.
- Little trick, you have to blur your vision, if you want to see a right path.
- Imagine that you are concentrating on only one aspect of the situation, missing out the bigger picture.
- But the problem is this, how to blur a vision is a way that leaves in control and changes situation?
Constraints of the system
- What are your constraints?
- Things that are preventing to go the way where we wish to go, realize planned or reach previously agreed goals.
- In Suvorov’s universe, there are several of them.
- Staff.
- Organizational.
- Marketing.
- Define and resolve right away.
Initiative on a battlefield equals initiative in the business
- Foresight and anticipation
- of the precisely measured situation.
- Exact pinpointing of key links in sequence of action that lead to the future victory.
- Small recourses applied in the crucial places can work magic, wherever misapplied big resources lead to dire consequences.
Anticipate and execute
- The main principle of business. No need to wait something.
- These two main principles demand lots of energy and discipline to follow.
- Дисциплина это свобода
- And maybe I have another ideas from Mindful Self-Discipline Living with Purpose and Achieving Your Goals in a World of Distractions, but I am not sure yet how or what to connect.
- The last thought on this topic, be an architect in one mindset and an executive in another.
Start with why
- Aim at why not at what
- Unite goals and correlation they have.
- What is the reason in doing one thing? This is the curse of the modern age.
- Do all employees understand the why, or they only know the what?
- Suvorov’s soldiers knew not only the value of every maneuver, but also the reason. It was called goals unity.
Script planning and the third alternative
- We saw how Suvorov planned his offensive.
- Vividly imagining every possible outcome, though he knew exactly how everything will unfold.
- When to stop looking for solutions, when they will be good enough?
- Do better look for third alternative
- Considering key players of the market, or in the case above the main constraint, the subjective analysis is appropriate.
- There are three acts: Exposition and a line-up of a story.
- We have to understand in the end, place, time frame, main character, antagonist, a backstory. Here the main conflict of constraint is set.
- Thereafter, we move to the second part, the section of a script planning. Here we elaborate on obstacles, that arise on the way of the hero of the story and how he overcomes them.
- The last part is resolution. Hero fulfills his purpose. The protagonist faces the antagonist and the grand finale unfolds.
- Can we script plan the fight with aforementioned random problem? The insane thing that I come up with later in this writing. @You can’t prepare enough.
- There are three acts: Exposition and a line-up of a story.
Infer from the goal, deductive thinking
- Don’t go from small to big, instead go backwards.
- Win, was the only goal he had in mind, every decision that has taken place after the goal set, comply to the goal.
- Reasoning also follow into this basket, the only goal is to win.
- What is my goal? What is my why? What lines do I follow in my aspirations?
- In short, what are the pillars of work?
- Pillars of a life
- Around what all activities are built?
- Suvorov used subjective analyses to understand what his goals really are, and more importantly, what goals and pains his subordinates have.
- He put himself into the shoes of a person he analyzes, or even the whole department.
- It is crucial to live the role of the person whose work you want to improve, his aim you wish to correct.
- Experience the condition in full.
- Doesn’t matter if it is a person, department, or even country.
- This what well known SWOT-analysis lacks.
- Imagine for a moment a situation in which you need to explain a certain event to yourself, or even better, to plan accordingly to current needs.
- Suvorov, first, accepted the situation how it is.
- True, False or Uncertain.
- It doesn’t matter that after detailed scrutinization, true might turn false, and false could turn out true.
- Accept first, and imagine the best and the worst outcomes. Describe in every detail, and then all the steps that brought you there.
- Препарирование живого проекта negative experiment
You can’t prepare enough
- Ari de Guise from Shell, speculates that there is no such thing as balanced indicators.
- No amount of rebalancing KPI, or even introducing a new one, can save from a disaster.
- Then what can? As in Netflix, culture of absolute candor and meritocracy?
- Calibration of internal systems, can mitigate the randomness of outer environment, but to what degree?
- KPIs do not demonstrate the complexity we are working in. How can we change that?
- If not KPI then what?
- ^07e40b
- Maybe we can plan accordingly if we consider that nothing is cast in iron?
- Randomness governs our life and decisions.
- Choice is absolutely random, and to think differently is a straight path to a disaster?
- ^b5d025
- How can we benefit from randomness in business? What attitude we must demonstrate to benefit at maximum?
- Separate two teams and listen to what random event the have prepared, as soon as they stop talking throw at the absolutely insane incident.
- What insane things I can come up with?
Goal setting from Suvorov
- Detail a dynamic plan of future activities.
- Work with perspective in mind.
- Show precision and visibility.
- Describe with tiny details victory plan.
- Involve as many as you can, they will help in goal setting.
- Show consistency and determination.
- Make every step understandable and achieve correct perception.
- We need to cut 20% of staff, how would you do it? Let’s plan for the process.
Think act by Shedrovitsy was invented by Sorovov
- In Оргуправленческое мышление man is shown as a species of action.
- He doesn’t accept thinking without action and action without thinking.
- Both Suvorov and Shedrovitsjy were men of action-based activity.
- You can’t manage technology, especially if there is none. Like offensive or tactics of battle.
- The only point of appliance are men. The only thing we can manage and change is their attitude.
- We can set a goal from perspective of attitude and action.
- By doing it, we can also improve any system.
- Suvorov hadn’t taught useless maneuvers, every action had a goal in mind. ^532241
- One is to train specific patterns and mindset in the heads of combatants.
- All marches ended in battle or training if there wasn’t anyone to fight.
- What has it trained in his army? What quality could be taught and by which activity after workday in our staff.
- Let’s think a little, what attitude we want to make as our basic and how it could be achieved?
- What improvement our system needs?
No place for randomness. Really?
- Here, our perception of reality changes. ^8ecb39
- Suvorov was a believer that there is no place for randomness on a battlefield.
- I think that he wasn’t telling the whole truth. Battlefield is a place of storm and randomness. You can’t plan long enough and thoroughly enough to be ready for every unaccounted event.
- To be honest, most people, even Suvorov, don’t understand personal limits.
- What we know, how we know and where from this knowledge comes from.
- Thus, statements that everything and every are accounted for – lie.
- But there is a grain of common sense. We should plan to some extent, but where the lies the limit of detalization?
- In stick to simplicity as close as you can. At war as in business, simple solutions are the best one.
- However, we have to remember that our solution must be win-win.
The simpler the better
- Modern management schools don’t teach any useful skills.
- They are so far from the ground that don’t perceive the needs in education at the bottom.
- Though, education is the most important aspect in any line of work.
- Take me for a moment. I thought that I could teach, but as soon as I began realizing my aspiration, I’ve found that teaching is not a simple book and homework approach.
- Homework is even counterproductive in a sense.
- So, what have I done? Went to the University to get a degree.
- And even there I haven’t been told the most essential features of teaching. I had to dig for them myself through practice.
- What are the most critical parts in teaching?
- Emotion.
- Interest of student in teacher and vice versa.
- Context you present material (it must touch interests of the students).
- If we draw analogies, this could be taught, we don’t know yet how.
- And in business the same.
- What skills I needed the most when working in GPN?
- Communication, no, I don’t think so.
- What skills could be counted in your line of work. In a field and in an office?
- What are the basic principles in your work? What accounts for the biggest part of work?
Self-education is the only education
- Suvorov, correctly predicted that instead of giving fish better to provide a fishing rod.
- And he did that by giving the source of the most influential written works in war literature.
- We can start by making a list of works that you think could benefit you and improve the quality of your work
- Then we switch to a person you admire the most. A role-model you can look at and mentally consult in an hour of need.
- What would he do, if …?
- Inspiration begins aspiration.
Transclude of Mindful-Self-Discipline-Living-with-Purpose-and-Achieving-Your-Goals-in-a-World-of-Distractions#c522a1
- We can even create our model, traits are more that enough and a bit of self-talk.
- Space for self education is important.
- Culture of book clubs in the companies is underdeveloped. I can go as far as make proclamation that it non-existent.
- There is no place where managers can gather and talk about the topic of a book. Companies want to do it, but they usually stop at buying corporate access to the library, such as ASPINA or MIF, I, personally, had one in GPN.
- How far did it get me? Nowhere, to be honest.
- Environment and community are even more essential than means.
- So, what that I have anything I want? I don’t have the most important thing: time, energy, company, etc.
- DoDo successfully has created and are creating still their book club. And they began not with buying books, but from reading and discussing.
- Can you state three lessons that you’ve drawn from our meetings, club wise?
- Valery speculated that the only thing we should self-educate is self-esteem.
- But not the esteem that locks a person inside his egocentric views.
- Through service to others and submitting oneself to higher ideals, we open ourselves to true self-realization.
- Again Ambitions
- Since only in under these circumstances, people feel themselves happy for real and can conjure miracles.
Liberalism is a form of traitorism
- For a long time I couldn’t understand my nonacceptance of liberal values. Though they are sound and human centered, I don’t like them.
- I feel myself as a boy from hell from Strugatsky’s story.
- Humanitarian values, imposed by the collective West, bring with themselves consumerists paradigm.
- Where a person comes first.
- It poisons our officer’s honesty, simple honor such love for motherland, family, friends, and community.
- Instead of that it puts in the front row, self-love, selfishness, vanity.
- Reason of this simple, this type of people are easy to manipulate.
- All their wishes revolve around consuming, they have egoistic I, where selfless we is needed.1
Everyone requires a mascot
- It’s strange how little time we spend on thinking about symbols.
- Mascots have been invented not for the sake of it.
- It holds a certain meaning, that features values, norms of behavior, and defines actions.
- What could be considered mascot in your organization?
- I, for one, recognized for the three-piece suit I wear, Steve Jobs for a turtleneck and jeans, and the Mercedes he parked on a place for the disabled.
Further reading, about Genghis Khan How he and Petr the first surrounded themselves with people smarter then they themselves.