Mavericks at Work Book Review free essay sample

In the past 10-20 years, the environment changed vigorously due to globalization and rapid development of internet. If organizations just follow the old success formula, probably it will go out of business. In the book â€Å"Mavericks at Work†, William C. Taylor Polly Labarre mentioned how â€Å"Mavericks† leaded their company to success in this fast changing environment. According to Oxford Dictionary, Mavericks means â€Å"an unorthodox or independent-minded person†. This book showed how Mavericks’ unorthodox thinking leaded companies to success. 4 mains areas were focused in this book, â€Å"Rethinking Competition†, â€Å"Reinventing Innovation†, â€Å"Reconnecting with Customer† and â€Å"Redesigning Work†. These 4 topics can be seen as innovative way of planning, leading, controlling and organizing functions of management. Part One: Rethinking Competition In the 21st Century, competition is much more vigorous than before. Many companies put too much focus on how to compete with its competitors. Their competitive strategies were to provide the same product or service as their competitor does. We will write a custom essay sample on Mavericks at Work Book Review or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Quality and cost are the only difference between different competitors. It will finally lead to loss loss situation. In part one, we can see how the Mavericks perform differently in planning process. Analysis on the market and identify a competitive strategy Different from the other competitors, the Mavericks tried to find a market that is not discovered by other companies. ING was one of the successful Mavericks. In the year 2000 all banks targeted customers with large amount of money for high risk investment purpose. ING targeted the customers who only wanted to deposit a small amount in the bank for saving purpose. After ING found this new market, it used a focus differentiation strategy so that their products are uniquely designed for its targeted customers. As the products are unique in the market, the customers are loyal to the company. Setting Mission and Goals The mission set by Mavericks is unique in the market. For example mission of ING is â€Å"leading Americans back to savings† while the others are about making profit or be the top. Therefore both employees and customers can easily find the difference between the Mavericks and other company. Formulating strategy While formulating strategy, companies usually focus on short term benefit rather than long term benefit to get higher bonus and credit from shareholders. However the Mavericks focus on long term benefit instead of short term benefit. For example, ING rejected big customers because if they accepted the big customers, its targeted customers will be ignored and finally it will lose its uniqueness as well as the targeted customer. Part Two: Reinventing Innovation Usually we think that innovative ideas are coming from laboratories and scientists. Most of the companies still see them as the only source of innovative ideas. However, due to high education level and well developed internet nowadays, the Mavericks realized that there are many ideas can be created by the grassroots all over the world. Organizing the grassroots How to find and organize the grassroots became the first question faced by the Mavericks. They found a place where most grassroots can be found – the internet. However these grassroots cannot be organized and managed by normal management way because they are not employed by the company. Some mavericks like Goldcorp organize the grassroots by setting up internet competition platform. It posted all its data about mining on the web and asked the participants to submit their ideas of where should be drilled. Motivation By the views of Maslows hierarchy of needs, most companies motivated their workers by safety needs such as employment and salary. Instead, the Mavericks motivate the grassroots mainly by Esteem, i. e. roviding worldwide recognition to these grassroots which they can’t get in a traditional workplace. Communication As there are too many grassroots and they are worldwide located, the company cannot communicate with them one by one. Lower communication channel richness methods such as email / Memo were used. Therefore the Mavericks focus narrow and tightly define so that every participant could understand the requirements easi ly. An example is when Marketplace limited the competition topic to single country and single theme, better ideas were generated by grassroots. Leadership As different from internal management, an open source leader does not have any leadership position power over the grassroots. The only thing the leader can do is to be open and transparent. Part Three: Reconnecting with Customers Many companies only focus on their products, their controlling process is mainly focus on the cost and quality of their product. They seldom connect with the customers and even set tricks in hotline to stop their customers reaching them. However, the Mavericks performed the controlling process mainly based on customers’ experience and they even make use of the customers in controlling process. Controlling Culture Even a company has good mission and competitive strategy, the employees may not follow and the customers will not be convinced. An example in the book is Commerce Bank, aiming at â€Å"Greating memorable experience† of the customers. In order to have good control in the organization to achieve its mission, the Mavericks built up company culture so that the employees themselves are internally aligned with the company. It created loose, fun, unapologetically cheery culture which made the employees feeling fun when they are working. It also had a volunteering â€Å"Wow Patrol Team† to organize elebrations, ran contests and otherwise contributed to Commerce’s culture. Everyone in the company was happy and their customers can feel it, which finally created unique experience and brand image to the customers. Controlling message received from customers Many companies see their customers as the one who only pay for their goods. Some better companies may use customer feedback to control the organization. The Mavericks further involve the customers themselves in the controlling process. An example in the book is Netflix which is a DVD rental store. It created a society where the customers can rate the movies, so others customers would follow and rented the highly rated movie. Netflix was benefited as the customers themselves forecasted the customer needs and therefore the store would not buy too much bad movies or too few good movies. Part Four: Redesigning Work People is the most important part of the company because company itself does not generate ideas but the employees do. Talents are even more important in Mavericks companies. This part mentioned how the Mavericks work in recruitment and designing structure in organizing process. Recruitment Companies usually post ads and waiting for talents to apply. The Mavericks never wait for the talents because they believe that talents almost always have a good job so they won’t find job by themselves. Instead, they find talents actively such as internal referral used by Starbuck or setting recruitment ads as search result by Google. Normally academic result or experience are the important requirement used to select talent, but the Mavericks select suitable talents by attitude and aptitude. They believe knowledge can be trained but attitude is in born and difficult to change. Many companies may just try to improve the compensation package to attract talents. However the Mavericks understand that attractiveness of job content is the major factor that affects the choice of the talents. For example IBM offering challenging projects, high quality team member and dynamic work place to the candidates. They also see hiring great talent as attractive point to other talents because all talents like working with great talents and learning from them. Designing structure Unlike formal structure, some mavericks such as SEI designed â€Å"Achocracy† structure with very high mobility. There is no formal structure in SEI. When there is a new project, the employees form a temporary team themselves and work on the project. The team will be dismissed after the project is completed. Conclusion In conclusion, the mavericks’ way of management is to make the company unique in market. Industries of banking, product industry, information technology etc were very success after applied the Mavericks way of management. According to contingency theory, there is no best theory and it depends on different situation. From my point of view, the Mavericks way of management is more suitable for the companies which are ambitious, product can be differentiated, customers can be segmented and competition exists. An counter example is government because she has too much limitation such as they cannot target narrow customers to maintain fairness nor sharing information to customers because most information is confidential. The government’s decision cannot too depends on her customers because it may harm the long term development like Greece. In 2006 when the book was published, the unorthodox way of management mentioned in the book is very innovative. However in 2011, many companies tried to copy the Mavericks way of management. If every company used the same way of management, the Mavericks companies will face head to head competition. Instead of the Mavericks way of management, the most important point I learnt from this book is the Mavericks thinking, i. e. being innovative to design my own Mavericks management way, rethink and rethink about management so that my management way can always be unique even in the fast changing environment.