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Showing posts from December, 2017

Blitzkrieg business

Like many people I found myself in a buying panic on Black Friday. I havered over some wireless headphones, or a VR headset for the PS4 I don't have time to play, or an Amazon Echo but somehow couldn't bring myself to make a decision. In the end my Amazon basket contained only one item: Heinz Guderian's Panzer Leader. So I bought that and was left with faintly unsatisfied with my Black Friday efforts. I shouldn't have been. Although a little dry, this is a really superb book on disruptive leadership in a time of colossal social and technological change. Although perhaps not so well known (seems that great strategists tend to be less popular than charismatic characters, see Montgomery vs Slim, Patton vs Abrams), Guderian was a revolutionary. He invented Blitzkrieg, amongst other things. A couple of ideas have particularly caught my attention in the early chapters, which I thought worth sharing. 1. Organising disruptive capabilities One of Guderian's key realiza