Uncommon Sense, Common Nonsense - A review

Being a technologist, I rarely read management books. Even when I start reading a management book, I hardly complete reading it as it makes little sense to me. Recently, I came across this book “Uncommon Sense, Common Nonsense: Why Some Organisations Consistently Outperform Others” ( ISBN:9781846686009 ) and read till the end. 
 
This is a book which I could make some sense of business strategy and providing a leadership vision to an organization.
The book has four key parts dealing with:
1.        Winners and losers
2.        Strategy and tactics
3.        Organisation and management
4.        Biases and remedies
The fifth part gives Application and Examples from the author’s work.

In essence, there is a lot of “Common Nonsense” (in the form of big-data in today’s world) which is visible to us as well as the competitors (Same with “Common Sense!”).  There is an amount of “uncommon nonsense” about our own organisation known to us alone and that of the competition which is only known to them. But the key thing differentiates is the “Uncommon Sense” that makes organizations constantly outperform. The strategy is about deliberating means of constantly deriving and applying the “uncommon sense”

So, “Without changing our patterns of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems we created with our current patterns of thought.” Albert Einstein’s wisdom comes to rescue.


Overall, this is a good read for all the strategists and leaders in my honest opinion.