Cut the organisational and operational dead weight to climb higher, faster

I am not much of a reader of business books but every so often I feel like I need a kick up the pants at work and I find that either I can get something out of them (very rarely) or they just frustrate me and I never bother to finish them.

Happily, The Light and Fast Organisation by Patrick Hollingworth fell into the first category.

This is a business book written by someone who loves mountains – which makes it much more interesting, and strangely also feels more relevant, than a business book written by someone who only loves business.

What I got from it, as a corporate drone looking to define my relevance in a big organisation, is that I can do things to control my relevance and to make me more certain to continue to be relevant in a changing world. There isn’t a strict prescription of what you need to be, but many more stories which use the analogy of mountain climbs to guide you into a way of thinking.

Patrick talks a lot about VUCA – Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity – which is (apparently) the latest hot business acronym. While it isn’t something I had heard of before it did immediately ring true with me.  It feels like the world, and increasingly my work world, is changing rapidly, and Patrick’s explanations of what this means and how not to counter it, but instead work with it, proved very comforting to me.

After finishing this book, and passing it on to others to read, I have increased my confidence at work and felt a renewed pep to my step, feeling stronger in the knowledge that I know how to protect my relevance and benefit from uncertainty.