For some reason my expectations were quite high when I opened this book but I have to give it three stars only.
I was slightly irritated by the author's sense of superiority and self satisfaction, but that's not really a good reason for knocking stars off. The proper reasons were these:
1) A certain lack of intellectual rigour
For example, "For organizations to survive and grow, their rate of learning has to be equal to, or greater than, the rate of change in their environment. Revan's axiom - L >= C - is an essential of organizational ecology. It is easy to state, easy to agree with,..."
But, of course, it is not easy to agree to something that is, literally, nonsense. How are these measured? How can they be compared?
This is symptomatic of the logical slips that appear often in this book, weakening the arguments.
2) Its vision of how duties are divided between the board and management
One of the fundamental ideas in the book is the 'learning board', which sounded good at first, and yet the more I read the more worried I was by the details. In this book the board's role is to set policies about what the organization is for and, broadly, how resources are deployed. It is to look outward and forward in time. Management are to be much more inwardly focused, looking at implementation, and responding to deviations from plans. They are to develop systems that are effective for customers.
Actually getting to the bottom of what the author is saying was not easy and probably there are remarks in the book that contradict the impression I got and the summary in this review. Having said that, I thought it sounded like the process remained primarily top down, despite the 'double loop' model, and that uncertainties about what strategies were feasible were underplayed and not adequately dealt with. The possibility of strategies emerging from successful experience and experiments was not given enough attention.
For some good reading on this try Ries and Trout's "Bottom Up Strategy" or the more recent "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy" by Richard Rumelt.
So, overall, a bit disappointing for a book in its 3rd edition.
