June 2024

Know What Matters tells the story of Panera Bread through the eyes of founder Ron Shaich. Along the way he shares the many lessons learned. He boils down the essence of his and the company’s success to: tell the truth, know what matters, and get the job done. Know What Matters is a fun story to read that happens to teach important lessons for business leaders. It deals with issues from all phases of business life: startup, rapid growth, reigniting growth, and sale/exit.

While Know What Matters is full of business lessons, it is more reflective and philosophical than most. The first chapter begins with the sentence “I learned the most important lesson of my life as my father’s life came to its end.” That lesson, learned from both his parents, is “Take the time now, while you still have a runway into the future, to determine whether you are living a life you will respect. Don’t wait until the end.”

The author is an entrepreneur, and as most entrepreneurs can relate, “living a life you will respect” translates into building a business that makes a difference in the lives of those you serve. Through that process, your business comes to reflect your values and your passions, and your identity and your life are intimately tied up in your business. That’s what makes walking away so hard. As I work with business owners, it is hard, but necessary to prepare the business to survive without them, and for them to build a life beyond the business. Sure, we work to make the business worth as much as possible (probably not the $7.5 billion Panera was acquired for in 2017), but the more important work is helping the business operate well with or without the owner/founder and vice versa.

In between the personal notes in the first and last chapters, the author introduces the philosophy that shaped the many decisions he describes throughout the book. In the preface, he identifies three things as the “secret of [his] success”: 1. Tell the truth. 2. Know what matters. 3. Get the job done. I think of these as acting with integrity, managing strategically, and operating excellently. In the first chapter, the author introduces a theme that he returns to frequently throughout the book which he calls managing future-back, defined as “discover today what will matter tomorrow, and then bring what matters to life.” This approach, strategically managing with the end in mind, served the author and his company well throughout his time at the company that became Panera Bread.

Know What Matters is made up of 31 chapters, a Preface, and an Epilogue over 237 pages. Each chapter is a story and the length of the chapter varies, depending on how long it takes to tell the story. The author breaks these stories into three parts reflecting different phases in the company’s journey: Living the Entrepreneurial Life, Leading a Large Enterprise, and Driving Large-Scale Transformations. The title of the closing chapter in each part reflects the author’s personal/philosophical approach to telling the Panera story: “Business (and Life) Requires Hard Choices”, “Business is Personal”, and “Know When to Sell”.

Know What Matters tells the author’s personal story from his first entrepreneurial venture through completing the largest sale of a restaurant business in history. Along the way, he shares the challenges he faced, the lessons he learned, and the keys to his success. He does so with humility, transparency, and candor. The book is well written, engaging, and helpful. Entrepreneurs and business owners will especially resonate with, and likely learn from the journey. I highly recommend Know What Matters to anyone leading (or wanting to lead) a large business.

Read my full review here.

The AI-Savvy Leader by David De Cremer applies timeless leadership wisdom to the very timely topic of artificial intelligence. Writing about rapidly emerging technologies can be challenging. The author has wisely focused his attention on skills that will continue to be valuable no matter what direction(s) AI takes. Even so, the book provides a timely critique of the mindset dominating many current corporate AI initiatives and explains how companies can avoid the same mistakes in the future.

I could summarize De Cremer’s main critique of business AI initiatives is that they are too focused on efficiency gains, undervaluing the contributions of humans and overemphasizing technology. Too often business (people) leaders are deferring to technology leaders, hurting their people and reducing the potential for the technology to truly help the business. De Cremer explains that instead of focusing on replacing people with AI, companies should focus on helping people do more/better with the help of technology.

To help leaders accomplish this, he proposes nine “leadership actions” they should embrace. He acknowledges that these are not new concepts, unique to the Connected Intelligence era, but rather core leadership activities that they already practice. The AI-Savvy Leader explains how to apply those practices in the context of AI’s introduction to the workforce.

The book is organized around these nine leadership actions. Each gets its own chapter. Each chapter starts by explaining how companies are falling short in applying that chapter’s leadership discipline as they deploy AI and the impact of those failures. The author then explains specifically how leaders need to change their thinking and acting. Most chapters contain at least one section made up of specific ways in which leaders can put the chapter’s concept into practice. 

The book is easy to read. It doesn’t try to make bold controversial statements, but rather engages important topics with rational explanations, even as it often challenges conventional wisdom. It’s relatively short at less than 200 pages, but full of useful wisdom and helpful guidance. I strongly recommend The AI-Savvy Leader for anyone choosing, leading, or merely trying to survive AI initiatives in their business.

Read my full review here.

Welcome to AI by David Shrier provides a past, present, and future perspective on artificial intelligence: the good, the bad, and the scary.

Everyone is talking about AI. For decades I’ve paid attention to how artificial intelligence could impact my work, first as a software engineer and then as a business strategist. And yet, AI is changing so rapidly that even I at times struggle to get my arms around what it is and how it will change our work and our lives. Welcome to AI seeks to step into this gap.

The book is divided into three parts, roughly chronological with the first part more backwards looking, the second focused on decisions we can make today, and the third part focused on different potential futures. Not surprisingly, given the challenges of predicting the future in a rapidly changing discipline, the first part is the strongest and most helpful.

Overall the book is very readable. And yet at times it was very hard to read. The odd combination of the author’s hard criticisms of institutions he doesn’t like, over-confidence in institutions he does, alarmist warnings of coming doom, and rose-colored confidence in humanity and technology to perfectly do what is right challenges his credibility, at least in this reviewer’s eyes. There were several times I just wanted to put the book down without finishing it.

Despite those challenges, the book still has its merits. For those with limited understanding of the technology, Welcome to AI, provides a decent introduction. Perhaps more importantly, the strong positions that the author takes on important topics force readers to think about what each of us believe on those topics. The more the book rests on the author’s shaky future predictions (the AI future at this point in time is just too unpredictable), the harder it is to trust the author’s conclusions, but even his flawed perspectives help us realize how important it is to have a perspective.

If you are worried that your lack of informed perspective on artificial intelligence has kept you on the periphery of important discussions and decisions, Welcome to AI may be a great place to start to change that.

Read my full review here.

I’ve recently finished reading two books on artificial intelligence, Welcome to AI and The AI-Savvy Leader, both from Harvard Business Review Press (reviews forthcoming). Although artificial intelligence is something I’ve followed since the late 1980s, first as a software engineer and then as a business strategist, these books helped me realize that my long relationship with the concept has caused me to miss a subtle, but important shift in how society is starting to view AI.

To me, artificial intelligence is a technology. It is a tool (or class of tools) that we can use to do our work — perhaps similar to a personal computer or a spreadsheet or a smartphone or a programming language or the Internet.

The books I’ve just read don’t deny the technology that makes up AI, but they speak of AIs as individuals. In a business context, they describe an AI as a worker, not as a tool. There’s a sense of independence and equality and dignity similar to what we would ascribe to our human co-workers.

In the article linked below, I argue that we are making AI in our own image, but that image is only a weak surfacy reflection, most importantly lacking “heart”.

Read the full article here.