★★★☆☆ It's in English

Competing for the Future

Gary Hamel, C.K. Prahalad

In 2000 I had been a professor of Molecular Biology for ten years. Although things were going well, I felt that I had fallen into an intellectual rut. So I decided to enter an "Executive MBA Program". "Executive" in this context just means that the students in the program are full-time employed managers and remain that while in the program. I argued that as a professor running a lab I was effectively in middle management, and they bought it!

It was one of the best things I ever did. I thought that there I would meet people who I would never meet as a prof, and I was right. Furthermore, many of them were very smart and capable people. My fellow students were without question the best part of the experience.

Aware of my ignorance of business, I essentially put on my reading list every book any professor mentioned. And thus I came to read Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad's Competing for the Future. Most of these business books were dreadful -- Competing for the Future distinguished itself by not being awful. It is not *good*. But it is not awful. For one thing, it is written in English. Most of these business fad books are written in impenetrable jargon. And with even the least critical thinking skills you quickly discern that the jargon is not there to express difficult technical concepts, but just to hide the truth that the authors don't really have any clear ideas.

Competing for the Future is not like that. It is written in language that an intelligent native English speaker can make sense of. Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad have ideas, and if you read their book you will understand those ideas. I don't say that the ideas are particularly good or original, but just by making sense they stand head and shoulders above most business books.

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