RENEWAL

Biasca offers readers “a practical approach to transforming organizations.”

In his English-language debut, the author draws on his decades of experience in executive corporate roles to lay out a three-phase blueprint for helping companies to adapt and improve. To give readers an immediate understanding of his blueprint, he presents the phases along medical lines: diagnosis, prescription, and therapy, which correspond with analysis, ideas, and action. The diagnosis of a company’s problems, Biasca writes, must be precise. If sales are decreasing, for instance, what’s the diagnosis? Tension, migraine…or cancer? “If the patient has headaches and the doctor has determined he has migraines, he cannot tell the patient to take ‘some’ painkiller,” he asserts; “the written prescription has to say: Excedrin Migraine, no more than two caplets per day.” The author writes that the “therapy” must be conducted with four elements in mind: will, skill, rigor (“the performance infrastructure of the transformation effort”), and scope. Throughout the text, Biasca touches on a remarkable variety of subjects, from AI to neuroscience to psychology, each topic discussed with many examples drawn from the business world. Southwest Airlines in the early 2000s, for instance, was struggling due to high operating costs and fierce competition. The company adopted precepts of Positive Organizational Behavior, which resulted in “a more positive work environment, which led to improved employee performance and a turnaround in the company’s results.” All of the examples are well-chosen, though their profusion hampers smooth reading, as does the author’s choice to break his narrative into myriad smaller, numbered subsections—each chapter includes a preliminary summary, dozens of bulleted and numbered points, charts, and concluding summaries. This fragmentation has the effect of slowing and fracturing the book’s flow, despite the ample practical wisdom Biasca brings to his subject. A smoother presentation in future editions would be welcome.

A comprehensive if overly-fussy medical model for remedying corporate ills.