Predictive Leadership by Kirk Dando – Anticipating Problems Instead of Solving Disasters:
A Review and Recommendation by Carol Kallendorf, Ph.D.
Founder, Delta Associates, Inc.
I may be like you in that I’m way past recommending business books. My experience over a lifetime is that being disappointed by books on organization and management is a national/international pastime.
That’s why I have so surprised myself by recommending Kirk Dando’s book, Predictive Leadership to our clients, colleagues and friends. Rarely will you hear me say, “You just gotta read this book.” Not since Frank Lencioni’s book, the Five Dysfunctions of Teams, have I read a book that truly captures the dynamics of an organization with its pitfalls and opportunities.
Most business books just don’t lay out in a useful way the journey up the mountain to the top.
Kirk Dando’s foundational principle in his new bestseller is that organizational management rewards those who solve the continual series of problems and crises in the course of business’s struggle to survive and succeed.
However, success in navigating the treacherous path from the base camp of the mountain to its pinnacle can only be accomplished by a leader who can predict problems before they happen, see around the twists and turns of its journey and be able to continually climb the mountain rather than time after time dig the organization out of the avalanche they’ve suddenly been buried under.
Throughout my own career in organizations I have read hundreds of books that claim to give the reader insights into how to be a part of the tiny percentage of organizations that successfully grow and scale. Kirk Dando, from early childhood and into a successful career as a C-level executive in major organizations has believed that careful observation of hundreds of organizations reveal reoccurring patterns that allow managers to clearly see what problems will emerge next, before they have occurred, and build people and processes to anticipate the problem, rather than the costly process of solving problems after they have happened.
Predicting problems is a concept we all understand. How many times have we said, “I wish I had seen that coming?!”
Yet Kirk Dando’s book is an accurate step by step map of what our organization is experiencing, what will happen to it tomorrow, and the specific things we can do in 12 clearly explained critical mistakes that organizations can’t afford make- and don’t have to.
Kirk Dando’s advice, that he has given many CEO’s over the years, names the potential failures that masquerade as success signs.
He shows when and how increased revenues and market share can be a sharp warning of dangers ahead. He follows companies who are in a massive hiring mode, and demonstrates how more people can kill agility and leave the organization lost on the mountain.
The best recommendation of Kirk Dando’s book I could give is that my eyes got big as I turned the pages and realized the importance of these principles, and that I made changes in my organization the very day I began to read Kirk Dando’s book. The book is well written in the style of a person who has been there.
It is a book that you will naturally review and keep as a punch list of the ways you’ll be successful.
