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Book review: Rethink
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Rethink: A Business Manifesto for Cutting Costs and Boosting Innovation
Ric Merrifield
Financial Times Press/The Pearson Group (2009)
In this volume, Merrifield offers what he characterizes as a "revolutionary new operations design technique" that consists of five sequential steps:
1. Identify the "whats" that are truly valuable and determine the contribution(s) each makes to your company's progress. "The Greatest value often comes from an unexpected quarter."
2. Know what you are (and are not) good at. How well do the previously identified "whats" perform? In Chapter 4, Merrifield offers some useful and easily applied approaches to measure performance.
3. Make (and break) connections. Pause and determine how the "whats" relate to each other. "Otherwise, you might jettison a nonperformer only to set off a destructive chain reaction among its high-performing but dependent neighbors."
4. Understand what can (and cannot) be predicted. That is, "you need to figure out how your company and its customers, suppliers, and partners are likely to react to the plug-and-play changes you have in mind."
5. Unravel (and follow) the rules. In Chapter 7, "you learn how to align your key 'whats' with the complex maze of federal, state, and even foreign regulations."
Of special value to me are the sets of questions that Merrifield poses. Indeed, one of the great values of this book is the quality of the questions asked rather than of the answers provided. The "rethinking journey" is one of consistently and rigorously challenging any and all assumptions, premises, and so-called "conventional wisdom" about how to reduce costs while increasing innovation, about how to get more done in less time with fewer resources, and meanwhile, in process, about how to establish and then sustain a culture of creative and productive confrontation in which dissent, candor, and intellectual integrity are not only encouraged and rewarded but, indeed, required.
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