Management Intelligence is a newsletter produced by Edward de Bono and Robert Heller. I am an unreconstructed de Bono fan, and in the latest issue, he writes about the need to constantly challenge complacency. Thinking about alternative approaches may actually confirm that the current approach is the best one. Concepts, factors and values that arise in the course of thinking about alternatives can be useful in future thinking about the matter. To think you know in advance that there cannot be a better way is just an extension of complacency. To try to find a better way and fail to find one emphasises the value of the current idea - until another attempt is made later. We need to challenge complacency because failure to find a better idea reinforces our belief in the current system. Complacency is only justified when we have made an effort to challenge it and have failed.

in 1960, a Brooklyn-based bakery famous for its rye bread, Henry S. Levy and Sons, popularly known as Levy's, commissioned ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach to create an ad campaign. Legendary copywriter Bill Bernbach came up with the immortal line: “You don’t need to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish rye.” The campaign featured ethnic (and palpably non-Jewish) individuals eating or preparing sandwiches with Levy’s rye bread. This campaign is included in the Top 100 Ad Campaigns of the 20th Century.
The reason I thought of Levy’s is that I have just read Veronica Canning’s Shoeisms: Working Woman’s guide to take control and be the sassy, successful woman you know you can be. The book is obviously aimed at women, but I kept thinking: “You don’t need to be a woman to benefit from Veronica’s pearls of wisdom.” The book provides a host of hard-nosed tips for taking control of your professional life. Veronica looks fear squarely in the face and shows how to do it anyway. She suggests that we become aware of our anger triggers, that we learn to fall forward, and that we emulate tortoises rather than hares.

“Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match,” is the title of one of the hit songs from Fiddler on the Roof, the long-running musical based on Tevye the Milkman and other tales by Sholem Aleichem. This story of Jews in constant danger of attack from their Russian neighbours has resonated strongly with people from many other cultures. (In Japan, audiences were quoted as saying: “I enjoyed that, but how will anyone outside Japan understand it!”) The original Broadway production opened in 1964, and for almost 10 years the show held the record for the longest-running Broadway musical. The highly acclaimed production was extraordinarily profitable. I have a friend from New York whose father was approached to invest in a new Broadway musical. When he heard that the themes included persecution, pogroms and anti-Semitism, he laughed and refused. “No one in their right mind would ever pay to go and see such a show,” he said. “It’s a guaranteed loss-maker.” The $10,000 that he was being asked to invest would have netted him millions!

Feargal Byrne’s LOST JOB START BUSINESS website www.lostjobstartbusiness.com recently posted this warm endorsement of Yanky’s Fire in the Belly:
Becoming an entrepreneur is a difficult and in many cases turbulent event in a person’s life. It’s a like a child getting his/her first set of teeth. It can be quite painful at the start, but once the teeth emerge past the gum line the sweets and chocolates that can now be eaten more than make up for the teething pains. There is no doubt about it, entrepreneurship holds many great rewards. But diving straight into the entrepreneurial deep end, when you have come straight out of employment can be daunting at first. Thankfully, Fire in the Belly provides excellent insight combined with an enlightening big picture view of what it means to be an entrepreneur.

In Fierce Leadership: A bold alternative to the worst best practices of business today, Susan Scott systematically demolishes some commonly-held management best practices. One of them is best practice #5: From customer centricity to customer connectivity. There is a great example of this in egonomics: what makes ego our greatest asset (or most expensive liability). Co-author Steve Smith tells of the day his air conditioner broke down. A repairman spent 30 minutes routinely checking all 20 best practice diagnostic items on his clip-board, and then added more Freon to the system, even though the air conditioner was not low on Freon. He explained his actions thus: “I couldn’t find any other problems, so I figured that was probably it. If this doesn’t work you’ll probably need a new air conditioner.” The next day, the air conditioner was still not working, so Smith called the repair company again, this time insisting – against the better judgment of the company - on a different repairman.