We were well into our lean journey, and I was starting to think about lean accounting. To top it off, the entire process is based on an arbitrary calendar year, which is usually completely unrelated to desired business activities which are often unrelated to creating customer value.Ī decade ago I was president of a mid-sized medical device company. Therefore it’s obviously time to start spending countless hours on variance analysis, coming up with explanations for missing budget, and presentations to executives on what will be done to fix it. Sometime around September or October the process will begin, looking backwards at financial history then imposing some arbitrary mandate like “keep spending flat while increasing sales 25%.” That preliminary budget will go up the chain, get bloodied up to further veer from any potential reality, and after lots of anguish and gnawing of teeth, will be set in stone retroactively around February or March.Īt which time it’s already outdated and the underlying assumptions, if there were any meaningful ones to begin with, have probably diverged from current business reality.
This book slides right into that, and I immediately thought of several relevant parallels.Ĭonsider the craziness of budgeting that most organizations unfortunately endure. Now the reason I will sometimes venture into individual psychology is because there’s often an analogue to organizational psychology or even basic organizational leadership. It doesn’t veer off the deep end too often, and simply tries to help you reframe your perspective to focus on a future driven by goals that then guide current day decisions. The entire book is a Socratic dialogue between a student and a philosopher, which helps make it an enjoyable read for the non-psychologist. The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga is sort of like Adler meets Stoicism.
Not usually my genre, but I came across a fascinating book with a unique presentation style, and spent a few days knocking it out.
Like every varietal of both legitimate and fad psychological theory, this spawned some self-help books. Adler was an Austrian psychotherapist in the early 1900s who, although a good friend of Sigmund Freud, developed a theory of individual psychology nearly the opposite of Freud’s.Īdler’s perspective can most simply be described as “look forward, not backward.” Whereas Freud focused on how the past affects current decisions (etiological), Adler suggested focusing on how a current decision will affect the future (teleological). I’m not really sure how it started, but one day a couple months ago I found myself diving down an internet rabbit hole in search of more information on a guy named Alfred Adler. Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.
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