Book Reviews: Patrick Lencioni's Business Fables

I read the following books from: Patrick Lencioni

In general, I hate business or philosophy books that are structured as fables. The following books just made me cringe:
Who Moved My Cheese?

Our Iceberg is Melting

Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Books But Patrick's way of storytelling is a bit different and less cringe inducing when the book is well written. However, when he uses the same style for all of his books, soon they get old and as annoying as other fables. Having said that, his concepts are very good and very usable. If you want to cut to the chase and save yourselves from those fables, you can read the methods from his website.

Here are my reviews:

Three Signs Of a Miserable Job

This book talks about how the root of misery in workplace is rooted to 3 things: Immeasurement (lack of measuring one's progress in the job),
Anonymity (when people are not known, recognized and appreciated for what they are and what they bring to the job)
Irrelevance (People need to know how their works matters to someone or a group of people).
I liked the fable part which was actually instrumental in illustrating the above 3 concepts. The fable was about an old executive trying to revive a clunky pizza place using the above 3 concepts.

The Five dysfunctions of a Team
More than the concepts, you need to read the fable which illustrates how an executive revived a team and helped them function well. The five concepts are too many to remember crisply, however, here is how it stuck in my mind.

When you have a team of people, they need to function in such a way that they are accountable to each other. They should expect open criticism from their team and should not feel vulnerable because they could be criticized. So you could have conflicts and you should not be afraid of facing such conficts. Conflicts need to be played out and resolved instead of trying to achieve artificial harmony which does not resolve the underlying conflicts. After having such conflicts and the decisions are made, everyone needs to stick to their commitments and be accountable for those commitments. And the team must pay attention to the results of the team. So individual goals should give way to the goals of the team.


Death By Meeting
This book is when the fable structure stopped working for me. Essentially this book talks about how the meetings must be like performances. They should have drama and conflict and they have to be played out and resolved. Just like the different forms of performances (ex: sitcom, serial drama, movie, etc.) you should have different types of meetings: daily checkins, weekly meetings, monthly strategic and quarterly offsite reviews.


Three Big Questions For A Frantic Family
This fable was the most boring. But the concept was interesting. It asked families to make a value statement for themselves embodying what made their family unique. Then it asked families to identify their most urgent rallying cry (like: buying a new home, getting the child into college, etc.) for things they should do in the next 2 to 6 months. Then it asks to identify defining objectives, the way they will achieve the rallying cry. Then it asks to outline the standard objectives, i.e. standing responsibilities. This is a good framework for families.

I liked all these books but the above order indicates my ranking for this series.