On the cover of this book it says Named Management General Top Ten Business Book of 1999 and Louis Patler is to change what Mark McGwire is to baseball Jay Condor Levinson (author Guerrilla Marketing series of books)

Firstly, and perhaps unfairly, who is management general to make such a pronouncement and secondly, is it a compliment that Louis Patler is to change what Mark McGwire is to baseball? I mean, if I said Michael Howard is to politics what Cyril Smith is to hang gliding, many people would be in the dark as I am over Mark McGwire.

My first comment stems from the fact that on page 217 of the book, Patler provides a link and lots of kind words for Management General … so, cynically, perhaps it’s a bit of mutual back slapping?

A more telling test is this: have you heard of Thoughtware; and have you heard of !eadership? The wacky spelling, !eadership, is intentional.

You may well have heard of another book that Patler co wrote, If it ain’t broke - BREAK IT! That phrase has certainly reverberated around the world. Curiously, that book is billed as being a New York Times best seller. Do they mean that it isn’t a best seller by any other definition than theirs? Just curious!

Well, to this book: it’s really a lot like lots of other management guru, how I done good, I am filthy rich on the back of this sort of stuff, are you? A lot like Tom Peters’ slop basically: lots of quotations from books, articles and television programmes. Lots of pithy sayings from himself or people he has met; and lots of down to earth philosophy that we really should appreciate that we cannot live without.

The book is an eclectic mix, therefore, of all sort of things: huddled together under these section and chapter headings:

• attitude!
• attitude
• the future
• service
• “good lucky”!
• perspective
• ideas
• innovation
• strategy
• perspective
• !eadership
• talent
• retention
• globalism
• !eadership
• appendix A: the new tiltset
• appendix B: the new Thoughtware

The book starts with a prologue: here’s the start of it

My assistant, Ann Luckiesh, has a sharp eye for business wisdom. A few days ago she sent me an email from home with the heading: “If your horse dies, dismount!” Seems like a rather obvious and simple statement. Unfortunately, in business we have the tendency to delay, skirt or complicate matters, and employ a few too many strategies. As the rest of her email illustrates, too often when the horse dies, we:

1. buy a stronger whip
2. change riders
3. say things like, “This is the way we have always ridden a horse.”
4. appoint a committee to study the horse
5. arrange to visit other sires to see how they ride dead horses
6. …

You get the idea: this sets the tone for a lot of the rest of the book: Patler himself says that

The tone I have tried to set in the pages that follow is somewhere between that of the Harvard Business Review and an email to a good friend or mentor.

Don’t misunderstand me: in general, I do like books like Tilt!, although I find Peters as unreadable as I do Michael Porter’s work. I know, that’s my problem as they are two highly respected people in their respective fields and who am I?

The best approach to reviewing a book like Tilt! is to dip into it: at random, this is what I have found worthy of sharing:

Service: The “ABCD” awards: above and beyond the call of duty Patler recalls the day he was the facilitator at a Food service Summit Leadership Conference and the COO of McGuffey’s Restaurants told the story of how a waitress of his had won an ABCD award for solving a problem with a four year old waaaaaaa, waaaaaa boy who didn’t want anything other than a Big Mac. Awful end to the story in my opinion but definitely good service! (see pages 41 and 42!)

Innovation: the Monty Python Interview Exercise: M-PIE … whenever I have an issue or topic that puzzles me and find myself at an impasse, I find the smartest, zaniest person I know and ask them to interview and push me on the topic … in this case … I am trying to make a distinction between “creativity” and “innovation”.

Patler then relates the transcript of his interview with Rick Crandall PhD … questions only, here:

• why isn’t the average business creative?
• so what is the difference between creativity and what you mean by innovation?
• so, it’s a major change, not just a variation on a theme?
• what can the average employee to if they’re not in a creative - let aloe innovative - environment?
• tell me more about people maintaining their own enthusiasm, creativity, morale, in an organisation in which they’re underpaid, overwhelmed and under appreciated
• could an individual change the culture of an organisation by planting the first grain of sand that irritates the organisation to create a pearl?

and so on, see pages 82 - 90 for the rest of the questions and Patler’s answers.

I’m sorry Mr Patler but either Rick Crandall PhD is not in the least bit wacky or you’ve edited his wackiness right out of what he did and said!

!eadership: This CEO earns a dollar a year! Netscape Communications chief executive Jim Barksdale … said he would accept only $1 in salary one year, counting instead on the company’s stock to increase his personal fortune …In a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Netscape said that Barksdale will forgo his salary and bonus because he “believes that his compensation should be linked to the long term interests of the company’s stockholders.”

In this case, let me contrast Barksdale’s apparent altruism with something from Alfred Rappaport from an article in the Harvard Business Review (How to Link Executive Pay With Performance March-April 1999):

As the Stock Market began its ascent in the mid 1990s, executive pay always the subject of heated debate, mounted along with it. That's because among the largest US companies, stock options now account for more then half of total CEO compensation and about 30% of senior operating managers' pay. One problem became particularly clear during the bull market's astonishing run: even below average performers reap huge gains form stock options when the market is rising rapidly.

The sad and stark reality is that stock options are so popular because even a moderate set of performances can be more than amply rewarded if only because of inflation. The FTSE 100, for example, is 20 years old now and has risen from 1,000 to around 5,000 in that time … we can see what a 20 year share option would, therefore, on average do for the CEO even if s/he hadn’t really performed that well.

Moreover, Rappaport also points out that any rise in the share price says nothing of the performance of competitors … it says nothing about the CEO’s performance relative to his benchmarked peers.

As another aside and as a matter of interest, I took at look at Jim Barksdale’s page on Netscape’s site and I have to say it suffers from some astonishing lapses:

• Want to write to Barksdale? Can't, no link given
• When did Barksdale put his personal page together? No idea, undated
• How do you navigate out of that page to other pages in the site? Can't, unless you follow one or more of the hyperlinks that litter the page. Some links go to other Netscape pages but others go to external sites.
• Want to click on the buttons/links to the Annual Report or Awards? Can't because they give you an error on page message!

More than that, the page has been optimised for Netscape but in Internet Explorer it looks a real mess and is an advertisement for no one!

I don’t want to be too unkind but is there a link between such a terrible page and Netscape’s overall performance in the Browser Wars? What price stock options with this performance?

Finally, appendix A is called the new tiltset and comprises a set of to, by, for exercises. To, by, for? Yes, for example:

3 The Fishbowl

TO: to keep meetings moving, to open up new lines of discussion when there are lulls.
BY: Ask participants to write out their biggest concern the largest barrier faced and/or the toughest question/topic they want addressed. All are written on small pieces of paper and dropped in a fishbowl. At random times or as needed … someone reaches in and, bingo, a new topic emerges.
FOR: The purpose is to keep involving new and important issues, to encourage discussion and communication.

There are 11 to, by, fors in appendix A and they are probably useful for teacher and trainer alike: number 2 (paper aeroplanes) will appeal to the smart aleck in you and number 9 (backcasting) appeals to me!

So I might have given the impression that this is not a good book and that it was a mistake to publish it. Well, I bought it at a huge discount six years after it was first published. I doubt that many people will remember thoughtware and tilting either. However, there are snippets in the book, lots of them too, that rattle a few brain cells and may cause people to pause for thought from time to time. That’s not a bad thing.

What is thoughtware, though? Mindset, Skillset and Toolset … read the book to see exactly what Patler is thinking here but I imagine you can work it out from this review.

Why tilt? That’s more awkward and here’s what Patler says in the preface of the book:

… given today’s business environment. there is no such thing as “a level playing field.” … If you want to “tilt the field,” simply tilt your head.

Let me finish with a niggle: on the back cover of the book it says Capstone Publishing www.capstone.co.uk Well, take a trip to that site and you’ll find that you end up at Capstone Finance who, it seems, are ready to lend you anywhere from £30,000 to £3,000,000 …

Duncan Williamson
3 June 2005