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Bookshelf Some of the potential perils of the future can be summed up with the ominous acronym VUCA, which stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambi- guity. In this anxious environment, writes Bob Johansen in Lead- ers Make the Future, top executives will have to develop ten new skills. These include the maker instinct, which capitalizes on the human desire to create; dilemma flipping, which turns an insoluble problem into a new opportunity; and bio-empathy, which considers business choices through the lens of the natural world. Even more inter- esting, Johansen examines all these skills through a set of drivers that will shape the future, such as the diaspo- ras created by climate change, and the complex collaborations that will occur among governments, markets, and people. Johansen, a fellow at the Institute for the Future, writes, "The most important value of forecasting is to help people learn to lead aggres- sively even if they feel uneasy. Dis- comfort will come with the territory for the next ten years—and probably far beyond." (Berrett-Koehler Pub- lishers, $26.95) Top executives at Xerox spend a day a month serving as "Customer Officer of the Day," taking responsibility for resolving customer complaints—and hearing directly from the source what kinds of problems custom- ers have with Xerox equipment. "Listening with your own ears" is one way Michael A. Roberto advises lead- ers to root out trouble in their organizations before small problems become catastrophes. In Know What You Don't Know, the Bryant University professor argues that "leaders need to become hunters who venture out in search of the problems that might lead to disaster for their firms. They cannot wait for When CEOs want to improve efficiency, they often look at how their businesses operate and try to fix their processes. Instead, they should be looking at what they're try- ing to achieve—and making sure those "whats" are done right. That means, says Ric Merrifield in Rethink, they need to answer essential questions: "How important is a particular activity to the company's goals? How well is it performing in that context? Should it be given greater attention and resources? Should it be automated? Outsourced? Or completely eliminated?" He argues that treating a "what" like a "how" can have disas- trous consequences, as Home Depot proved when its attempt to make its staff more efficient cost the company its greatest advantage: knowledgeable employees whom customers trusted. Merrifield is a fan of Internet technologies that allow compa- nies to share information among employees and partners. But even adopting new technology doesn't make it easy to stream- line, he admits. "You still have to make tough decisions about where to put your resources." (FT Press, $24.99) 64 BizEd JULY/AUGUST 2009 the problems to come to them." He suggests seven strategies for doing so. These include circumventing the gatekeepers—for instance, by "listen- ing with your own ears" instead of hearing packaged reports; becoming "ethnographers" who study employ- ees and customers in their natural hab- itats; hunting for patterns throughout the organization; and encouraging useful failures that lead to learning. Like Toyota's Ken Watanabe, Roberto believes that "problems are not the enemy; hidden problems are." He shows how to yank those problems into the light. (Wharton School Publishing, $27.99) "Bad collaboration is worse than no col- laboration." That bald statement is the opening line of Collaboration by Morten T. Hansen, a professor at UC Berkeley and INSEAD. In the book, he takes a thorough look at that most unwieldy but poten- tially profitable form of teamwork: companywide collaboration. He's clear-eyed and blunt about his topic, advocating that leaders assess whether or not collaboration will produce a better product or a higher return before they encourage it. He provides intriguing insights into companies where at certain junctures collabora- tion attempts failed miserably, such as Hewlett Packard and Sony, and companies where collaboration has yielded astonishing successes, such as Apple and Procter & Gamble. Best of all, he provides plenty of specific formulas to help leaders determine where they might find synergies within their companies and how they can estimate their likely return on equity. It's a how-to book