Remarkable Reading #25: IN TRUMP WE TRUST E Pluribus Awesome! by Ann Coulter and ACCELERATE: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World by John P.Kotter

The aim of this section Remarkable Reading is pay a tribute to the books that taught, share trends & insights into where our world in the 21st century is heading in a technology enabled world, and ask the right questions.

Bolded and italics quotes and references do not belong to myself  and belong directly to the author.  The focus is to share valuable insights and teachings from the book to win business for the authors.

Recently finished reading Ann Coulter’s IN TRUMP WE TRUST E Pluribus Awesome!, a energetic, dynamic and humorous insight into the Trump campaign, and the state of affairs in American business right now.  Coulter’s writing style is idiosyncratic and quirky, yet at the same time remaining factual and informative, though keep in mind this was written before the results of the elections had been announced.

The other remarkable book I finished with recently is John P.Kotter ACCELERATE: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World.  The book is valuable and worthy, and manages to strike a note with small medium, and large businesses alike.  Like the topic of the book, it manages to keep a turbulent and active pace, and Kotter’s experience is simply sensational and astounding. One to revisit again in five years as a point of reflection.  

The two trends I found valuable are:

1. Further trends and insights into contemporary America and the world economy (carrying on further from here, here, & here)
2. How to stay competitive for businesses in a disruptive twenty-first century

From Ann Coulter’s IN TRUMP WE TRUST E Pluribus Awesome!:

Page 2 - “Trump is the first hope Americans have had in a very long time that it may not be over yet.  Perhaps the country isn’t finished.  Maybe we could begin to reverse our losses”

Page 5 - “Although the media tried to portray Trump’s popularity as a cult of personality, ironically the one thing voters weren't wild about about was his personality.  Trump was a huge reality TV star before he announced for president.  He'd been threatening a presidential run for at least a decade.  And yet, before kicking off his campaign he was in a single digits in Iowa”

Page 8 “If Trump is elected president, he will be the richest man ever to hold that office and in modern times, the one who spent the least amount of money to get there”

Page 8 - “Other people are allowed to have a home, Americans traveling abroad are encouraged to leave as small a footprint as possible, especially where there's a so-called indigenous population.  We’re terrified of trampling on the dominant culture or being seen as Clem from Texas.  To the average liberal, “Ugly American” is redundant”

Page 19 - “It was one thing to write sensitively about America's forgotten working class, but another thing to do something about it.  The economy keeps shrinking, America produces nothing, people can’t find meaningful work, and the federal budget has doubled again this year - wow! There seems to be a kind of embezzlement or something”

Page 29 - “Politics has created a class of people who have plenty of money, leaving them lots of leisure time to focus on status.  I’ve got the money: now I need to be cool. That meets a need, but it’s not the same thing as helping the country.  It’s social climbing”

Page 56 - “Marco Rubio on what ge’d do for the economy - “This country is facing an economy that has been radically transformed.  You know, the largest retailer in the country and the world today.  Amazon, doesn’t even own a single store? And these changes have been disruptive.  They have changed people’s lives.  The jobs that once sustained our middle class, they either don't pay enough or they are gone, and we need someone that understands that as our nominee”

From John P.Kotter ACCELERATE: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World:

Preface, Vii - “Accelerate is about how to handle strategic challenges fast enough, with agility and creativity, to take advantage of windows of opportunity which open and shut more quickly today.  It shows how people in some leading innovative organizations move ahead of fierce competition, deal with unprecedented turmoil, and cope with the constant threat of technological discontinuities - all without sacrificing short-term results or wearing out their work force”

Page 5- “Over time, a successful organization evolves through a series of stages (more on that later, because it is important) into an enterprise that is structured as a hierarchy and is driven by well known managerial processes: planning, budgeting, job defining, staffing, measuring, problem solving.  With a well-structured hierarchy and with managerial processes that are driven with skill, this more mature organization can produce incredibly reliable and efficient results on a weekly, quarterly, and annual basis”

Page 7 - “Skilled leaders have always tried to improve productivity, but now they are trying to innovate more and faster.  When historical organizational culture - formed over many years or decades - have slowed action, impatient leaders are trying to change those cultures.  The goal of all this, of course is to accelerate profitable growth to keep up or get ahead of the competition”

Page 14 - “In the past decade uses of the word “innovation” have multiplied exponentially in reports and conversation.  But how many organizations do you know that have innovative finance functions, supply chains, or IT departments?”

Page 15 - “Innovation requires risks, people who are willing to think outside their boxes, perspective from multiple silos, and more.  Management-driven hierarchies are built to minimize risk and keep people in their boxes and silos.  To change this more than incrementally is to fight a losing battle”.  People have been writing for fifty years about unleashing human potential and passion, then directing the energy to solving significant business challenges.  But who, outside the world of start-up’s, have succeeded in doing this?

Page 39 - “The twenty-first century will force us all to evolve toward a fundamentally new form of organization.  The good news is that this can allow us to do much more than simply hang onto what we have achieved to the twentieth century If we successfully implement a new way of running organizations, we can take advantage of the strategic challenges in a rapidly changing world.  We can actually make better products and services, enlarge wealth, and create more and better jobs, all more quickly than we have done in the past”

Page 53 - “The number of organizations living on the equivalent of melting icebergs has never been greater.  However the upside for enterprises has also never been greater. The kind of success that Google and Facebook have achieved within  five  to ten years has never existed before.  

Page 59 - “Management as we know it today is almost entirely a later twentieth-century invention,  Although it has roots that go back centuries (as in running the Roman Empire), what we see today is a very modern phenomenon.  Management now requires a great skill.  And both what is and what it can achieve would have been difficult for even a well-educated person in the year 1900 to fully grasp”

Both books are a sure-shot in terms of adding immense value to the world economy right now.

You can purchase a copy of IN TRUMP WE TRUST E Pluribus Awesome! by Ann Coulter here, visit her active website www.anncoulter.com, and follow her on Twitter here.

You can purchase a copy of ACCELERATE: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World here, visit John P.Kotter's business website here, follow John P.Kotter on Twitter here, follow Kotter International on Twitter here.

Thank you,

Praz aka Prashant