Eighty-one-year-old former managing director of Credit Suisse HOLT and founder of Callard Madden & Associates, Bartley J. Madden follows previous business books (including Value Creation Principles and Value Creation Thinking) with this earnest treatise on the importance of fomenting a spirit of knowledge acquisition and innovation within firms.
The author’s goal is to help readers create “a knowledge-building culture,” which, he posits, is the key ingredient of long-term performance. To this end, he offers the “Knowledge-Building Loop,” a mental model for the process of gaining new knowledge and encouraging creativity in problem solving. The Loop involves six steps, among them: maintaining “constructive skepticism about what you think you know” and cultivating a mindset in which “unintended consequences spark inquiry so that future actions produce desired results.” To illustrate, Madden offers the edifying example of the Wright Brothers’ construction of the Wright Flyer, which evolved from their engagement with all steps of the Knowledge-Building Loop.
Madden also explores, among numerous other topics, imagination, lean thinking, strategies for value creation, iterative improvement, models of organizational structures, and competition—many complemented by illustrative case studies.
The author identifies his audience as everyone from “managers, boards of directors, investors” to “in general, anyone who is intellectually curious about how firms outperform and underperform in creating long- term value.” Unfortunately, it’s hard to imagine anyone without an MBA navigating his often-dense, academic prose (as in: “Systems thinking provides actionable insights by clarifying a system’s goal, the interrelationships among the system’s parts, and the critical constraints impeding the achievement of the system goal”). Happily, the case studies are written in more accessible prose, but the denser passages will present obstacles to many.
Those undeterred by academic language will find some interesting ideas here, but others will want to seek a more accessible offering.