What Works: Success in Stressful Times

This is a book about success. It is about success in good times and bad. Its twenty examples come from every corner of the planet. It encompasses organizations and communities as diverse as the world’s best university and the world’s best slum. Of course, none of these stories is a tale of perfection and each example has flaws. But they are examples of collective human endeavour that I have found both humbling and inspiring and which I believe have powerful common messages for all of us. By understanding what works, we can make other things work better-the aspects of our daily life that we can improve. By any rational calculation the world is better placed now to make good choices about the future of our species and our planet. We are better educated than ever before; have better health and better information; technology continues to leap forward; and, of course, we are-notwithstanding the odd bump-richer than ever before. But if we are to face the many challenges we have to try to learn from each other. We all have to do it. It is the millions of acts by ordinary people that will eventually make a difference. In a modest way, it is to help us make a difference that I have tried to tell the stories in this book.

What Works has been more than a decade in gestation. In 1994–5 I published a book on the future of the global economy, The World in 2020. I then spent a huge amount of time travelling the world, talking about the future I had sketched with companies, academic institutions, management schools, professional bodies-and writing columns for The Independent newspaper in London all the while. The more I travelled, the more I began to marvel at the range of things I came across in every part of the globe that worked really well-success stories that deserved a wider audience.

So this book started as a desire to report, to share stories. But, of course, there have been many studies of success, particularly business books promoting apparently successful forms of organization, usually with an ideology attached. This study differs from those in that it does not aim to sell a theory-the notion that if companies or governments adopt this or that form of management theory or organization then they, too, will succeed. Actually they seldom do. You cannot, for example, transport the American corporate model to, say, India and expect every firm there to prosper. Besides, the shelf life of apparently great ideas is short indeed. Companies universally admired by one generation as models of managerial excellence are reviled by the next as failures. Government initiatives launched by one generation of ambitious politicians are quietly abandoned by the next. And economic principles embraced by one generation of academics are disputed by the next. After all, if financial markets were really as efficient as economic theory suggests, they would not have created two classic bubbles in the past decade: the internet craze and the dot-com crash; and the sub-prime boom and bust.

THE LESSONS