This Luminaries episode delves into the consulting paradigms that shaped Generation X, particularly through the lens of seminal texts such as "In Search of Excellence" and "Built to Last." We explore the fundamental frameworks posited by authors Peters and Waterman, juxtaposing them with the more nuanced insights of Collins and Porras, who sought to understand the enduring qualities of successful companies. A key focus lies on the evolution of thought within the consulting profession, as we reflect on the lessons imparted by these influential works and their relevance to contemporary practice. Furthermore, we consider Peter Senge's "The Fifth Discipline," which introduces the concept of the learning organization and its implications for fostering long-term success in business. Through this discussion, we aim to illuminate the complexities and legacies of consulting wisdom from the past, offering insights that resonate with the challenges of today’s corporate landscape.

Foreign.

Welcome back, Luminaries.

As always, you have chosen wisely.

We're so glad you're with us now.

In our main episode, you heard Mike and me talking about the way that consulting careers looked for people of my generation, of Generation X.

I was the in house laboratory animal.

And what can you learn about your Gen X colleagues and their quirks by exploring these ideas?

That's our plan anyway.

What do you think, Mike?

Yeah, absolutely.

Maybe that'll mean you'll add a couple of things to your reading pile, or maybe that'll mean you'll remember how your own thinking and reading got you to where you are today.

And later, we're also going to discuss the fifth discipline and built to last text that many Gen X consultants have had on their bookshelves or in their big heavy briefcases.

Don't I remember carrying all this stuff on and somebody saying, oh my God, what do you have in your luggage?

I go, it's my library to be.

Read, so those to come later.

First, though, we've got unfinished business from our Boomer episode.

Mike, we're looking to you, we're counting on you to tell us what we need to know about this book and which famous consulting firm are we going to find lurking behind the title?

This is great because, boy, this does bring back the memories pretty strongly.

Let me say that for me, of course, the famous consulting firm is always McKinsey.

And we're really going back, I think, to McKinsey 7S model.

Now, anybody who is a boomer consultant, if you don't know McKinsey's 7S model variants of it, because I think this was the mother of so many things.

For those of you who don't recall, seven S's were structure, strategy, systems, style of management skills, which was the S word that actually stood for corporate strengths, staff, meaning people and shared values.

And this star, like Constellation, explained all things about making a great firm and making a firm great.

Well, interestingly, we don't know this because we don't present this at the front of In Search of Excellence.

What we get from In Search of Excellence is saying we've examined 43 of Fortune 500's top performing companies.

Actually these were 62 are the best performing McKinsey companies because we've got data on them and we're going to weed them out.

Some of them we think are a little bit weaker even though they've got some good results, like General Electric failed to make the list.

Ah, here we see a little bit of a transition.

And Peters when interviewed said one of his kind of drivers personally for carrying this out was to prove that certain established methods, particularly some of the philosophies and practice like those used by Xerox and advocated by Peter Drucker and Robert McNamara.

Okay, now boomers, I know Drucker and boy, everybody from my generation knows McNamara.

This is Google him.

Yeah, exactly.

And some of these quotes, the knowns and the unknown knowns and the this comes later, McNamara.

There were no unknown unknowns.

This was all the whiz kids of Kennedy's cabinet back in the day.

And let me tell you that that didn't just end in the 70s.

I remember coming to IBM's turnaround going, wow, finance, this is it.

This is the shadow, this is the one ring to rule them all.

So do you think Peters and Waterman were about to tell us there's a whole new different set of beans that we should count or were they trying to change our view of the world completely?

I think they were, yet I think they were.

And I think they were trying to take this 7S model essentially and say we're going to prove that's where it is.

It's not in counting the beans, it's in paying attention to this.

So they put this, their methodology together and they looked over, they even said in the book structure, strategy, people, management style, systems, procedures, guiding concepts, shared values, corporate strength and skills along with financial performance to select excellent companies.

So it's not just financial performance we have to get behind these.

They took these 43 companies that make the cut and they said what are the things that they had in common?

And I suspect they weren't using factor analysis to get to the answer.

Yeah, I think they were just pulling these factors out of whatever warm and special place they keep their factors in Right.

We might have referred to it in an earlier episode in a cut from a great consulting show here.

Marty.

Marty, we're thinking about you, babe.

So here are the eight things.

So we have this setup for a very rigorous empirical theory based study.

And what we come out with is these eight things.

One, a bias for action rather than overanalyzing situations.

Two, a customer first focus in all decisions.

Okay, this is great management wisdom we've seen in so many places of business.

The customer is always right.

Rule number one.

Rule number two, if in doubt, read rule number one.

Okay, maybe this started here.

Maybe we knew this before this ongoing innovation with new products, services and processes through autonomy and entrepreneurship.

Now that's a little interesting compared to some of that Drucker and some of that productivity through well trained, rewarded and empowered frontline employees.

Okay, hands on value driven leadership.

Ah, okay, I'm starting to twitch a little bit here.

Would anybody ever argue for leadership that was not hands on and was not value driven?

Never mind, I'll shut up.

Talk about controversial things that people might take issue with.

Number six, sticking to the knitting and avoiding distractions from the key business.

Seven, avoiding top heavy executive ranks and organizational bureaucracy.

Okay, and then eight.

And now I'm going to have a hard time lampooning this a little bit because it sounds like the first three episodes of our podcast.

Simultaneous loose, tight properties in which firm targets are set, but individual discretion is allowed to attain them.

Well, there you go.

Oh, spoiler.

I don't know where we're going to get to in our evaluation in a minute, but for exactly that reason, Mike, I think that's actually my favorite one because it's like a dichotomy.

Like, it's not obvious how, but it does sound quite insightful.

If you're a little loose, but also carefully a little tight, that seems to be an attribute.

Nobody says that getting to the top tier of the top dozen of the McKinsey clients of the world has to be easy.

It has to have a paradox.

And I think it's fine.

I quite like that better.

Better than sticking to the knitting, which just sounds.

Sounds like apple pie actually is what it's.

It's apple pie.

And it also says, hey, we got one thing that this firm does and never distract from it.

We're going to continue to make the best buggies that anybody can hook their horse to.

Oh, wait, maybe that wasn't.

But I think you're absolutely right, Ian.

And this was, I think eight.

One that was starting to get to something that was good.

Ah.

And it was a brand new invention, was it?

Or was it Stephen Covey coming back to clean and green.

Now, my son, you figure out how to weed the garden.

Clean and green.

That's what you're going for.

Oh, okay.

So, Mike, what were you thinking and feeling when you got back into this?

You know, I've talked about this book many times.

You read it more than once, I'm sure.

It's funny, Ian.

I call to mind how many times did I stand in front of a client and discuss ready, fire, aim.

That we're not going to overanalyze.

We're going to go out there and try things and customer first.

Absolutely.

There were some firms that had gotten pretty walled off from customers, yet there were things that resonated.

And at the same time, I had a little bit of that feeling going back through it, going, this sounds great, but there's so much storytelling.

We said one minute, manager.

Great, because it's a fable.

Yeah, this was a fable, or fable, like Tortoise and Hare kind of things, but told as if it was truth down from the mountain, because these excellent companies do it.

And that's the proof.

The proof of the pudding wasn't in the eating.

The proof of the pudding was they ate that pudding.

And look at that.

Sounds like great pudding.

Yeah, exactly.

It must be great pudding.

It is great pudding.

Period.

End of paragraph.

I don't think that's the last time in this episode, Mike.

We're going to discover in one of our favorite books here some.

Some unproven pudding.

But let's.

Let's pause for a second.

So we had the McKinsey 7S framework.

We had the eight values or attributes of these excellent companies.

It was certainly a big deal.

Everybody got super excited about this.

Yes, you can see that there are some how tos that are raised by questions like innovation.

How do we do that?

And the answer was the 90s and the noughties spawned a literature of how to do innovation.

We did all kind of love, though, a good framework back in those days.

It seemed like we really depended on it.

And I don't think we've weaned ourselves off the idea of frameworks, have we really?

And maybe we'll talk a little bit more about that.

Why frameworks are really helpful, why maps are really helpful, even if the map is not the territory.

Mike, that was a great summary of Peterson Waterman in Search of Excellence.

Let's make the jump in related territory, but forward in time from the boomer generation to Generation X and we get another piece of work about studying visionary companies that had been prosperous and trying to discern why.

Which one are we talking about here?

This is great because this is built to last.

1994.

Now we're up to Jim Collins, Jerry Porras.

And now we have what's almost to your point again, a direct response to In Search of Excellence.

To say, here's real excellence today, given all the things that we've learned and that we can.

We can click forward here because we're better consultants, we're better researchers, we can give you better, more grounded advice that is really much more empirical, if you will, based on a different methodology here.

And that sounds really good here.

I'm thinking, I like that.

I like that idea.

So let's find out.

When you do it better and you do it differently, what does the output sound like?

And I'm ready.

I'm ready for that.

Here's what we get.

One, we take it from eight to four, which is easier.

That's it.

Because the truth is never eight things.

It's actually three things.

No more than seven things, but.

So eight we knew was a problem to begin with first, ah, about a core ideology.

And not just having a core ideology.

But it's not just stick to your knitting.

It's maintaining unchanging core values and purpose.

For example, they talked about Hewlett Packard's commitment to technical contribution while constantly pushing for change and improvement in everything else.

And you mentioned on number eight, in Search of Excellence again, they even stopped to point out this is the genius of the end, A N D in capital letters, to be both idealistic and pragmatic.

And actually, I think that probably, if not all great wisdom, because I've got to be a little thing much of great wisdom, perhaps most of great wisdom, is a little bit of a paradox.

So here is a little bit of this thing, like we said in our first episodes on Great Consultants here.

So it wasn't just that they were clearing the decks and being even more manly about getting empirical data.

They were trying to examine some of the nuance of what it was like to be successful.

They are credit for that.

Yeah, they are, they are.

And we'll come to their methodology in a minute.

Because I was torn a little bit in a rereading about the promise of the methodology and the results, because what I expected to see was a little bit, just perhaps a little bit more, but it's way up High.

So what we get, number two, is focus on being clock builders and not time tellers.

So I'm thinking, what equation does that come out of?

But it's an interesting point, the point they're making here.

And I guess part of this was marketing and selling.

And for consultants, we couldn't just say just the facts, ma'am, but it was this idea that says rather than succeeding through one great idea or charismatic leader or the two that were joined together, that these companies built organizational capabilities that transcended any individual.

So the difference between somebody who could tell them the time at the moment or sell them back the time at the moment versus teaching them to build a clock or creating long lasting capability.

This sounds like the old joke, give someone a fish, they'll eat for a day.

Teach someone how to fish and they'll eat for a month.

Show them how to use the Internet and they won't bother you for years.

Oh, I thought you were going to go back to the consultants who give a man a fish and boom, you get a good job.

Teach that client how to fish and she'll never hire you again.

Right.

All your bookings for next quarter are out the window, but I like that even better.

The Internet and the Internet and Never Bother your Again Maybe fits well as an intro to their third point.

What's that then?

What else have we got to learn from Built to Last here?

After all that methodological rigor, One of the keys of these firms that survived over decades, not just now, is they all have big, hairy, audacious goals.

So some of you from this generation might remember Bhagsar.

Right?

Clear, compelling goals that unite and stimulate organizations.

Not just strategic objectives, but bold missions that capture people's imagination and energy.

That sounds great.

I'd like some of that.

Yeah, I'd like some of that.

And then again, I worry sometimes because I remember some clients that said, oh, we just need a moonshot, we gotta come up with a moonshot that will solve all our problems, then the buses will run on time.

Maybe not.

So big, hairy, audacious goals.

And then there must be a fourth.

You said there was a list of four here.

There was, yeah.

The fourth one is to create a culture, a corporate culture through careful selection.

So indoctrination, almost a cult like devotion to the company's ideology, but doing it in a way that allows for significant individual autonomy in how people express and pursue that ideology.

So they've done a nice job.

I've got to say, I.

I can get behind more of those four than I can get behind many of the eight of Peters and Watermen.

With the perspective that I have today.

You can certainly see though, how in Gen Xers and Boomers were loyalists to ideas and to institutions, much more than our successor generations were.

So you can see that the idea of establishing a cult is pretty close to what some of us were trying to aim for.

Talk us through the comparison though, Mike.

How was Built to Last different relative to its precursor, In Search of Excellence?

Collins and Porters went to great lengths to point this out.

They said, look, we have a very different time horizon.

We're looking at companies that were excellent, not at the moment like they did In Search of Excellence, but that had prospered over many decades, some for nearly a century.

So they said, ah, that flash in the pan that we had with In Search of Excellence.

Think Atari, think Wang.

Yeah.

Whoa.

Excellent companies.

I don't know.

Didn't stay long enough to find out.

They used a fascinating comparison methodology.

So instead of just saying, okay, here are the companies that are, if you will, right sample justified these excellent ones here, they took each company that they were looking at, this visionary company, in their words, and paired it with a comparison company founded in the same era, in the same industry, with very similar early products and markets.

So trying to do a pairwise comparison to make sure that we're not saying, oh, gosh, actually, both of these companies had big, hairy, audacious goals, but one failed and one succeeded.

All right, I'll take that.

And they said that they really wanted to, in the research focus, look at fundamental characteristics that allow these companies to remain great over long periods, through multiple generations, through changes in leadership, through changing market conditions.

So saying, let me make sure that we've really put them through the test of varying variables that would knock somebody off the excellent shelf.

And that in fact had knocked a number of companies off the excellent shelf of Peters and Waterman.

Now they say that's really what made their insights much more robust, in that your client firms, if you were consultant back then, you could take these to the bank for long term success.

So they've tried to be more robust.

We joked to ourselves a couple of times in this conversation about how management scientists have tried to look for rigour, methodological rigor, and it certainly seems like we have the early signs of it here with Built to Last.

Built to Last seems to have been a response, partly a methodological response to In Search of Excellence.

What blowback, if any, came from Peters and Waterman to defend or augment the work that they'd done?

He said that we did highlight some wrong companies, that we think all of our principles applied, but we didn't do that.

And maybe our central flaw was suggesting that these same eight points would apply forever as opposed to.

They were an answer for these companies at this point in time.

However, he said, I think we made a major contribution.

We took some of the soft factors and turn them into hard factors at a time when the only other, the only hard factors to be considered were numbers.

And Collins and Porus, I think, also did some of that as well.

Nice.

So they've tried quite hard then to retrospectively pull the ideas together.

Do you think they would regard themselves as colleagues or rivals, these two pairs of authors?

It's funny, if you go back to their heritage, it's like you talking about the Gen X consultants, knowing you were competing against very similar individuals and worrying that maybe somebody was staying up later and working harder.

I think they would have seen themselves very much as, hey, it's a big ocean out there, there's room for us both.

They were probably both colleagues and rivals a little bit.

They all of them stayed on the lecture circuit and the speaking circuit for quite a while afterwards.

So good luck to them.

Absolutely, Ian.

While all these great thinkers, if you will, were trying to find the Platonic ideal for an excellent company, there was an engineer up at mit.

So different.

This isn't Harvard, this isn't Stanford, who was trying to think even bigger.

Can you tell us a little bit about that influence for Gen X?

With pleasure.

Not terribly far away, just a little bit up the river at MIT was an engineer, an aerospace engineer by training called Peter Sange or Sanji.

I've heard it pronounced both ways.

He was a lecturer at MIT who was focused on group problem solving.

He was a big advocate of a discipline that he called systems thinking.

And he wanted to apply this method to try to convert companies from being merely ones that tried to continually optimize themselves into ones that had a higher level purpose of learning.

He was an advocate of the idea of an organization being a learning organization, trying to create results that matter.

So his book was called the Fifth Discipline, the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.

And before we even get into it, we should acknowledge this was one of the biggies.

High praise for Senger and the fifth discipline.

And I can't quite remember the first time I turned the pages, but this was one on everybody's lips as we tried to justify our own thinking in front of the clients and CEOs.

What were the five disciplines?

It's interesting that he refers to the fifth one.

It presumes that there are at least four sort of subsidiary ones that go before it.

And that's exactly the idea.

The fundamental premise is that the fifth discipline, this idea of systems thinking, is the one that rules them all, is the one that integrates four other core disciplines.

And we'll talk through what they are in a second.

Systems thinking in Sange's world helps us to see how different parts of an organization interact.

If this all has the sound of the kind of language that you get in a martial arts movie or in studying Eastern philosophy, I don't think that's completely an accident.

There's a little bit something Zen about Senger and the fifth discipline.

It's not a habit, it's not a tool, it's not a roadmap.

A discipline is something that you commit yourself to work out for your whole life.

It's your craft, and you're forever improving on it.

It's not a single thing.

It's more of mindset.

And I think this slightly mystical tone is what Peter Senge was going for here.

Now let me talk you through the five disciplines just very quickly.

You can find all of these online and dig into it in more detail if you're interested.

The first discipline is systems thinking, to integrate all of the other disciplines together.

His big insight, or his big point to the world was that when you make a change in one place, you will be surprised how that has ripples of change and consequences in other parts of the organization.

And he was an advocate of the idea that you could possibly model this and you could certainly think about it and try and understand it.

Next we have the discipline of personal mastery.

And this, I think, really focuses on individual growth and learning.

A little bit like Stephen Covey, he's encouraging people to think about this at an individual level.

The discipline of personal mastery means that we study and try to get better at the things that matter most to us.

This also creates tension.

Our ultimate goal of mastery shows us how far we are behind that level of mastery.

And the tension between where you'd like to get to and where you are now is motivating.

And he has this metaphor of a rubber band stretched between your goal and where you are now.

It's quite an astute statement about motivation and vision, especially of a certain kind of personality.

So that was personal mastery.

We have mental models Senge is telling us that we have these deeply ingrained assumptions and generalizations, what you might call received wisdom, things that everybody knows to be true or believes to be true.

Employees are all basically lazy, or people naturally want to learn and contribute meaningfully to their work.

These are two rather opposite statements.

And if we can try and reject the old flawed one and embrace a new one by embracing a new mental model, says Sange, then we can cultivate the.

The remaining disciplines.

Two more to go here, Mike.

We've got shared vision.

And by the way, I'm not sure, but I guess this is one of the very early times in business literature that somebody said it was important to have a vision.

And there's lots of mockery and cliches and roasting out there about the difference between visions and missions and values and beliefs that corporations like to write in big letters at the top of their website or in the entrance hallway to their big headquarters.

But Sange said that there was something specific in mind.

When you talk about shared vision, a picture of the future that people truly want to create together, it has the feature of being compelling.

That is to say, it's motivating people to act.

And it embraces the idea that people will learn and excel because they want to, not because they're told to.

And this shared vision, when it compels everybody, pulls the whole organization forward.

So we had systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision.

Time for discipline.

Number five, team learning.

He says that there is a discipline of learning together as a team, that we need to suspend assumptions and listen and engage with each other to create genuinely new thinking.

And there's a connection between this idea and the work of a jazz ensemble, where musicians are listening to each other and reacting and creating something greater than any one voice could create.

So, Mike, I think the big strength of this is the power and the depth of some of the thinking.

I think there's lots that's quite new here.

There are one or two things that are rehashes of old ideas.

There's some really interesting new insights.

And I can get on board a little bit with Peter Sanke because he's an engineer and he was trying hard to think.

The downside for me is that some of this comes across as a little bit pompous, comes across as a little bit overblown, partly because it gets very woo about the ideas, and that's partly, I think, because he's trying to make a statement that is eternally true.

He's trying to elevate this all to the level of something that has the power of a law of nature.

And I'm not sure that it stacks up at that.

I don't think it's got enough strength to bear its own weight.

So I'm a little bit conflicted as I look back at this book here.

I really like the ideas.

I'm not sure about how some of them are presented.

Yeah, Ian, I had a very similar feeling in looking back on some of these books.

And I have to remember coming back to the fifth discipline a little bit later, not now, but as a reference for some work I was doing in a consulting project and having a little of those feelings there was on the one hand something that says this was to me personally very compelling and interesting.

And two, a little bit like some of this, a little too woo woo for my client.

Although just thinking about the disciplines themselves as you just expressed them there, I'm being pulled back the other way a little bit for a minute here going, God, this is really important stuff.

And it's so true.

The unintended consequences of some of what we do.

I later got into scenario planning and lots of scenario planning engagements, these ramifications and the way things had feedback loops and all of that.

It was different.

We haven't even talked about re engineering the Corporation Hammers and Champion.

Oh my gosh, I can't imagine how many bonuses were built on that book and all the engagements that drove.

But back then I was also thinking, these are all gurus and they're gurus with kind of a solution.

And they were meant to be almost one size fits all for all firms.

So we're going back again a long way back.

Michael Porter's Competitive Strategy.

And all of a sudden some of the strategy thoughts that were both a combination of more rigorous economic analysis and a little bit of not just necessarily one size fits all, but again, it's another set of silver bullets as we were trying to figure out precursors to the Internet, then the eventual Internet, and then how businesses could themselves be completely transformed by what was going on.

Here I was at IBM, consulting at Watson Labs.

I'm walking down the halls past Nobel Prize winners and people who are pretty much on track to be Nobel Prize winners and trying to solve business issues and thinking that's science, this is business.

But paradigms are important and rigor is important and how do we bring these things together?

It was a place that had offices but had whiteboards, that had people together, that was open 247 and served coffee 24 7.

And these interactions of ideas and these little conversations, what also is proven through rigor and that also speaks to contingencies.

And then I guess the last thought, Ian, is one that you and I were talking about earlier and that's that.

And I alluded to a little bit earlier, the map.

You were.

You want to talk about just for a minute, the map and how these were maybe maps for all of us?

Yeah.

There's an old joke, isn't there?

That was it.

Party of soldiers or explorers or something stumbling across the mountaintops in a storm and they twists and turns and they're almost ruined and then they're almost saved and then they're just about doomed again.

And then finally they make it back and they go, thank heavens we were saved because we had a map.

And then whoever has been supervising the expedition turns over the map and says, you've got the map to the wrong part of the.

Part of the terrain there.

So the value of having a piece of paper in front of us gives us sort of confidence far in advance of the actual value of what's written on the piece of paper.

And I think that's a very good precis of the mindset of Gen X consultants and business people.

We really wanted to believe that the map was going to help us because there was all this turmoil and change going around as businesses became technology based.

I think also it appealed to the ego of consultants wanting to be the one holding your own piece of the map, wanting to be your own guru.

I think lots of us thought that it was our job to try and somehow be mini gurus of our own.

Like, ah, that's Frieda or Frederick.

He or she is the.

The telecoms and media supply chain integration strategy guru for our firm.

And everybody wanted to be a guru or saw that as their destiny in life.

It's motivating enough to have kept quite a few careers going.

You look back at it now, though, Mike, with a little bit of detachment, and you think the individual ideas are great.

And I think that's my take on Peter Senge.

I think the individual ideas are great, really powerful ideas that drive solutions to some really big problems that organizations still have.

The way that we knit the whole thing together, though, I think doesn't quite stand up.

But I do love the idea of the power of learning married with the power of context.

And why consulting firms and consultants can be so incredibly powerful and helpful.

I look forward as we go on to next week, to say how do we click forward into our next generation?

Yeah, it's a good question.

And there's a fascinating connection to later generations.

Before we move off.

Peter Sanjay in the Fifth Discipline, his later career, he took this idea of the interconnectedness of things and the interconnectedness of the world and human humanity and became a big writer about and a big advocate for sustainability.

So if you're sitting here as a millennial or a Gen Z thinking this is Gen X stuff, this doesn't bother me.

Take a look at where the idea later got to with this thinking.

It took us to a real view of the connectedness of all of the changes in the world and the way human beings interact with what's happening around us.

So he gets great points, I think, for having been farsighted on that this particular book formulated and encapsulated in this particular way.

I think now is a little of its time.

Mike of these three that we've talked about at some length now, and it has been fun.

Of these three, which would you like to recommend to someone who wants to get their minds around Generation X thinking or to just help them along as thoughtful consultants?

It's interesting.

We go back and forth.

I think I'm going to come back to Fifth Discipline that on the one hand, maybe we do it in a more generationally appropriate way.

Maybe we do it through some podcasts that are looking back, not just ours, but some others.

Maybe we do it through some TED Talks, maybe we do it through some videos.

Then we find out ways to say, wait a minute, can we cut through some of this and say, is there some really good stuff going on here?

I certainly have learned.

So if we go back to when we were talking about the secrets of consulting and Jerry Weinberg remembering that he was quoting Virginia Satir.

Oh yeah, who was the person who was behind family systems, who applied systems thinking to families and did great breakthroughs in working with them.

Jerry was applying the same thing to consulting on a much more practical level.

So while I might say that maybe fifth Discipline, not the all singing, all dancing thing that it was, but some reminders about some of those disciplines and the power that they still hold for us now.

I remember one example too that he used.

You and I are both at P31 now.

We do a lot of trading for consultants, for people inside of firm surgeon consulting.

And I remember one of Sega's original examples was how talking about how small changes can lead to unexpected problems and follow on consequences.

And an example was that a quick fix to something like budget control, like cutting training programs, might temporarily reduce costs but could lead to decreased capability, lower morale and eventually higher turnover, creating a reinforcing cycle of problems.

And I thought, you know what, Peter, you've expressed that really well.

I almost want to put that on the P31 website.

But so from a selfish and from somebody who is now trying to work to think about craft and discipline over time.

Personally, I think there was a good bit of what Sange was talking about that if we pull it out of the timed context that he was in, could be perhaps even more helpful than big audacious Harry goals.

I don't know.

I think so.

I think these books were striving to and partly were at the high water mark of big integrative, thoughtful ideas about whole corporations.

And I think that what's happened in the decades since then is that we've sub specialized and the picture's fragmented in a way that's actually useful.

We've stopped trying to make it all into one big integrative picture.

Not completely, but mainly on the one hand, we are really lucky as business people and consultants that we've got all this literature to choose from.

Whatever kind of inspiration and insight and analysis you'd like, there's some of it out there written by some really smart people who are also, by the way, very good at selling books.

Right?

So that's our good fortune.

On the other hand, we can be distracted by these many volumes of work.

Think about it this way, Mike.

No one has ever tried to write the one big, integrated, fundamental, universal perspective on the art of plumbing like that.

Career does not need a whole literature to framework itself and break itself down and measure it and insightfulize it.

People just go out and learn how to plumb and they get on and they make the water come out the taps.

So maybe sometimes we need to get over ourselves a bit.

Nice, nice.

Ian, let me throw the same question back to you.

Which of these would you recommend to someone who again either wants to get their minds around Gen X thinking or just help them as a consultant?

I think I'm going to go for fifth discipline again.

But I'm going to say skim it, pick and choose the chapters and then, especially if you're the generation younger, go and check out some of Senge's work on sustainability because you can see a connection here and you can appreciate the value of where his thoughts are coming from.

The only other thing I want to say about the fifth discipline is that I hope it appeals to our surrogate listener, Bruce.

Hello, Bruce.

This is all for you, my friend.

I think this might be right.

All in your wheelhouse.

Hope you're enjoying the show, Bruce.

We're glad to have you listening.

Thanks so much.

All right, Ian.

Next week, even more as we move on to the next generation on the Consulting for Humans podcast.

Millennials.

We're coming for you.

Look forward to talking with you next week.

Sa.