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Over the Easter weekend and the previous week, I got around to some reading. In between reading Bad Blood (which dives into the story of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes) and yet another good fable by Patrick Lencioni on Silos, Politics and Turf Wars I also read “A Radical Enterprise” by Matt K. Parker. This is yet another really good publication from IT Revolution. I’m fairly fond of IT Revolution and read most of the books published by them.

“A Radical Enterprise” explores high-performing organizations that have left the path of traditional enterprises and gone the path of alternate approaches to how organizations work. With his book, Matt takes the reader on a tour through four imperatives:

• Team Autonomy
• Managerial Devolution
• Deficiency Gratification
• Candid Vulnerability

From the beginning to the end, concise real-world examples from enterprises and organizations are given and their journeys to becoming radically collaborative are related to. If one thinks that these must be startups or at least entities that have been founded in the past twenty years: think again. Among the referenced organizations are Haier, Matt Black Systems, Morning Star and W.L. Gore. Part of the book outlines how enterprises have been transformed - to outline that being radically collaborative is not something that has to be established in the founding phase.

For parts, it reminded me of ‘Part 4’ in the book “The Connected Company” where Dave Gray elaborates on leading the connected company and refers to loosely coupled, semi-autonomous units.

I recommend reading Matt’s book - it does serve as a very nice introduction to the topic and domain of rethinking organizations. For me, this is a five out of five rating on Goodreads.