The Book Club Notes: “Organizational Physics. The Science of Growing a Business” by Lex Sisney
A book published in 2012 that surprisingly didn’t make it to the ‘Bestsellers’ lists. Interesting blend of advice on entrepreneurship, management, HR and generally mechanisms of scaling a company. A must-read for ant startup CEO.
For whom it may be interesting
Our CEO Björn suggested this book for our monthly Book Club sitting and most of us were excited to read it. But after actually starting to read it not everyone remain this excited. This book contains tons of useful information, and some really insightful and actionable advice, but if you are not managing your own company or not working on scaling it, some chapters will be not very interesting for you.
Intended readership: CEOs and management of startup companies, HR, people interested in the startup functionings and growth techniques.
Key Takeaways
- There are 4 main organisational styles (PSIU management styles):
- 👷♂️ The Producer. Has high drive to shape the environment, moves at a fast pace, takes short-term view, is results-oriented, and follows a structured approach.
- 👮♂️The Stabilizer. Has high drive to respond to the environment, moves at a slower pace, takes a short-term view, is process-oriented.
- 👨🚀The Innovator. Has high drive to shape the environment, moves at a fast pace, results-oriented, takes a long view and operates in an unstructured way.
- 👨🏫The Unifier. Has high drive to respond to the environment, moves at a measured pace, is process-oriented, takes an unstructured approach and a long view of change.
2. An organization is a complex adaptive system that must must shape and respond to its environment and can take energy from the environment.
3. The mass of an organization naturally resists change and every action performed in the business creates an equal and opposite reaction that must be managed.
4. Identify the energy drains for yourself and for your company and work to eliminate them, as they are the signs of entropy in the organization.
5. In order for an organization to accelerate momentum, there are really only two things that must occur: The organization must make good decisions and implement them quickly.
Our rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Though this business book is primarily aimed at the CEOs and people who manage companies, some parts of it were really interesting for all our team members. We were greatly inspired by the PSIU framework and even had a round of trying to identify each other’s styles.
We would also recommend Lex Sisney’s blog, where he goes into even more detail of what he outlined in the book.
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