Book Description Review “Formula X reads like an exciting adventure, full of insights for organizations that want to be in the market faster and act more decisively. The key message is that self-managing, multidisciplinary teams, focusing on clear goals and on continuous innovation and value creation, will become winners for the customer. Leaders can take-away a law of nature by understanding how weight and inertia will slow you down, and that diversity, rhythm, and rituals help to make teams stronger and perform better. A good formula for learning organizations in dynamic markets!” ― Jeroen Tas – Chief Innovation & Strategy Officer, Philips“Faced with the need for acceleration in organizations, this book is very accessible for everyone and contains useful and smart tools. Let’s get started!” ― Wilma van Dijk – Director Safety, Security & Environment, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol“A faster organization is a struggle for many companies. An amazing book, that makes clear that you learn easiest from companies outside of your market, instead of your competitors. The way this book explains how to increase the speed and ultimately the success of an organization is unique and stimulating for anyone who wants to lead a faster team or organization.” ― Harry Brouwer – CEO, Unilever Food Solutions“There is a strong relationship between the challenges faced in this story and what I encounter in my own job. Drawing patterns in problems allows me to abstract the issue and apply logic to necessary changes. The underlying model was the highlight of the book for me. Professionals need to understand and master this theory.” ― Jeff Willard, Director Global Network Services, Nike“This book describes in a playful way how organizations can become agile and effective by distributing decision-making and building on trust and real (multidisciplinary) cooperation in a safe environment. This fits in with the way we want to work at bol.com and it takes us further.” ― Huub Vermeulen – CEO, bol.com, the largest bookseller in Netherlands Read more About the Author Jurriaan Kamer is a speaker, organization designer, and transformation coach at The Ready. He specializes in making organizations more human, more adaptive, and faster. He is a big fan of Formula 1 racing and everything related to the future of work. Jurriaan lives in Utrecht, NetherlandsRini van Solingen is a tenured professor at the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands and CTO of Prowareness We-On. He is also the author of The Power of Scrum, Scrum for Managers, and How to lead self-managing teams. Rini lives in Delft, Netherlands Read more Customers Review: I read the book in 4-5 hours. It was both inspiring and gave practical things I could try to improve my organization.
There are few business fables I hold in high regard. Most have a weak story and/or insufficient substance. Exceptions include the works of Eliyahu Goldratt, Patrick Lencioni, and Mark Miller. I also like Stephen Denning’s Squirrel Inc. but other bestsellers such as Who Moved My Cheese? and The One-Minute Manager, not so much.Jurriaan Kamer and Rini van Solingen have written a book in which they use the business fable format to explain “how to reach extreme acceleration” in almost any organization, whatever its size and nature may be. I realize that in Formula 1 racing, extreme acceleration is essential to winning a race. So is down-shifting. However, I was curious to see how Kamer and van Solingen illustrate its relevance to a business world that is more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous now than at any prior time I can recall.The details of the story — KitchenQuick’s background, setting, key players, current crisis, plot developments, climax/resolution — are best revealed within the narrative, in context. My own opinion is that the story doesn’t work [begin italics] as a story [end italics] but serves as a somewhat wobbly framework to support the information, insights, and counsel that Kamer and van Solingen share.There really are some valuable lessons to be learned from F1 racing and don’t forget that it is a relatively small but very expensive business, with competing teams costing as much as $18-20 million a year and individual cars costing $2-3 million. Here’s an acronym for the ingredients of the “secret sauce” of success:Focus and clarity: A compelling vision that drives those who share itAccelerate decisions: Distributed authority that can make reversible decisionsSimplify (Einstein: “Make everything as simple as possible but no simpler.”Team management: Saint Paul: “Many parts, one body.”Elementary physics: Speed, acceleration, deceleration, and agilityRhythmic learning: Create revelations with “a cadence of recurring interaction moments”The recommendations in this book are provided for thoughtful consideration. Presumably Jurriaan Kamer and Rini van Solingen agree with me, however, that it would be a fool’s errand for a reader to adopt and then attempt to apply all of them. Invoking automotive nomenclature, I am again reminded that all organizations have an engine as well as a multi-gear transmission, an accelerator pedal, and a brake.F1 team members and especially their drivers know WHAT to do and not do, WHEN, and HOW. The same is true of business teams that consistently achieve peak performance.
Formula X does a great job of translating org change principles in a fun and easy way. Mainly, through a compelling story that feels super relatable. The main character, Ronald, is a well meaning general manager of a kitchen installation company that is trying to accelerate the pace only to find he cant squeeze more out of an already maxed out time. After trying the traditional consultant route- spoiler it doesnt work- he learns how to let go and engage his team bottom up. While many of the ideas in this book are not new, the relatable narrative and compelling storying telling make it a great way to get up to speed on progressive organizational design and leadership principles.
This book does a great job bringing some important organizational concepts to life. You don’t need to know anything about how kitchens are remodeled or how Formula One teams are run (but if you don’t know anything about either one you’ll definitely learn some stuff along the way!). It’s impossible to read this book and not come away with a bunch of things to start trying in your own organization right away.
Stories are the best way to inspire. And Formula X is one of the few books on self-management tells a good story. Fun, insightful, and applicable—you won’t be able to put this down when you pick it up.
It is an easy-to-read book.Through a fictional story, which is 80% of the book, it shows how we can give up command-and-control and plan-and-predict to allow organizations to move forward and be agile, looking for alternatives such as sense-and-respond, experiment-and-adapt, and engage-and-align.Right after the first chapters, I got involved with the context and characters. The course of the story and the added elements, borrowed from many theories, models and frameworks, are inspiring and can make you want to experiment and make changes in your organization.The story was pleasant and reflected many current issues within organizations.In the other 20% of the book, the authors talk explicitly about the FASTER model (Focus and clarity, Accelerate decisions, Simplify, Team engagement, Elementary physics, Rhythmic learning), a model in which the fictional story ended up playing throughout the book. |
6 reviews