I am reading The Game Changer by the totally bonkers Ram Charan and AG Lafley, the (former?) CEO of P&G. (Once I finish, I’ll be done with my to-be-read pile, hooray.) So far it’s been totally uninspiring – they seem to have taken a bunch of different products and processes developed by different companies including P&G, Honeywell and LEGO and used these as examples for an innovation framework which Ram Charan must have come up with. To me, it just seems that they’ve taken random examples of innovation and force fitted them to a nice sounding framework.
Gaurav is doing a business PhD and will point out that actually the thinking behind those examples and the framework could be pretty rigorous and analytical, but there’s no evidence of that in the book itself. It just states that these particular things are examples of the framework, and doesn’t bother to explain why this is so. Now of course putting that kind of rigour into a popular business book will make it difficult to read and unpopular, so it makes no sense. But if you don’t have that rigour, the book is practically useless as a manual. This makes the popular business book the most futile form of writing ever.
Of course, that assumes that the point of the book is to be a manual. What if it’s advertising? Anybody who reads the book realises that there’s more to it and calls in Ram Charan for a full consultancy. But… Ram Charan bills 20,000 dollars an hour. There’s no way every chhappar who buys The Game Changer at an airport bookshop can afford his services.
So the only thing that makes sense is that the book is still an advertisement, but it’s not an advertisement targeted to its readers. Instead, the fact that it has so many readers is the advertisement, which is then targeted to Fortune 500 CEOs – the pitch is that Ram Charan is a consultant whose book on strategy was a worldwide bestseller.
how did you figure out his charge out rate?
It’s there in the linked article.