How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything

By: Dov Seidman, Dov Seidman - prologue, Dov Seidman - preface

Narrated by: Scott Brick

The flood of information, unprecedented transparency, increasing interconnectedness - and our global interdependence - are dramatically reshaping today's world, the world of business, and our lives. We are in the Era of Behavior and the rules of the game have fundamentally changed. It is no longer what you do that matters most and sets you apart from others, but how you do what you do.

"Whats" are commodities, easily duplicated or reverse-engineered. Sustainable advantage and enduring success for organizations and the people who work for them now lie in the realm of "how", the new frontier of conduct.

For almost two decades, Dov Seidman's pioneering organization, LRN, has helped some of the world's most respected companies build "do it right" winning cultures and inspire principled performance throughout their organizations. Seidman's distinct vision of the world, business, and human endeavor has helped enable more than 15 million people doing business in more than 120 countries to out-behave the competition.

In HOW: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything, Dov Seidman shares his unique approach with you. Now updated and expanded, HOW includes a new foreword from President Bill Clinton and a new preface from Dov Seidman on why how we behave, lead, govern, operate, consume, engender trust in our relationships, and relate to others matters more than ever and in ways it never has before.

Through entertaining anecdotes, surprising case studies, cutting-edge research in a wide range of fields, and revealing interviews with a diverse group of leaders, business executives, experts, and everyday people on the front lines, this book explores how we think, how we behave, how we lead, and how we govern our institutions and ourselves to uncover the values-inspired "hows" of 21st-century success and significance.

Divided into four comprehensive parts, this insightful book:

• Exposes the forces and factors that have fundamentally restructured the world in which organizations operate and their people conduct themselves, placing a new focus on their hows
• Provides frameworks to help you understand those hows and implement them in powerful and productive ways
• Helps you channel your actions and decisions in order to thrive uniquely within today's new realities
• Sheds light on the systems of how - the dynamics between people that shape organizational culture - and introduces a bold new vision for leading and winning through self-governance

The qualities that many once thought of as "soft" - values, trust, and reputation - are now the hard currency of success and the ultimate drivers of efficiency, performance, innovation, and growth.

With in-depth insights and practical advice, HOW will help you bring excellence and significance to your business endeavors - and your life - and refocus your efforts in powerful new ways. If you want to stand out, to thrive in our fast changing, hyperconnected, and hypertransparent world, listen to this book and discover HOW.

Download the accompanying reference guide.©2007 Dov Seidman. All rights reserved. (P)2012 Simon & Schuster Audio

Needs Editing

While I enjoyed the core message of this book, the presentation of that message was muddy and at times rambling. The several now-dated examples (predicting the future, from ~2006) didn't help. I would love a revised or abridged version.

How Matters

It was good enough that I listened to it twice. Brings understand to why corporate America can be such a struggle. Excellent narrator!

MOST IMPORTANT BOOK I'VE READ ALL YEAR - MAYBE EVR

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

I would recommend this book to every leader. How presents the key differentiator in the emerging economy.

What was one of the most memorable moments of How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything?

One of the big take-aways for me was the ideas that societies are progression along a continuum from lawlessness - blind obedience- informed acquiescence-generative/self governance.

Which scene was your favorite?

My favorite example was that of General Electric's highest performing factory in Durham, NC.

WOW

HOW can you afford not to read this book?

How you do, what you do, for the why you do it!

For ANY human trying to understand humans

This is by far one of the most important contemporary works that deal with human relationships. Read it. Listen to it. Absorb it. And make good use of it.

Values Values Values

Great book on how we can be better business owners and people. Values aare so inportant the author goes deep and tells many stories to support his argument. I agree that we get caught up in the what and forget about the how and the power it has. Add it to your book list for creating a great organization.

Painful, Cliche

I couldn't listen to this book. I'm a voracious consumer of all things leadership, business and innovation but I found the writing dull, cliche and replete with anecdotes that were uninteresting. The general notion/premise of the book is spot on but there wasn't too much eye-opening or insightful.

Theory from someone with little practical sense

If you really like business leadership books, try Jack Welsh, Bill Gates and Lee Iacoca. At least you know they actually ran a successful organization in their life.
This author is another wannabe management "guru" with no credits to his name other then his "philosophical studies"...
They are a dime a dozen these days. I guess it is a lot easier to teach than to do...
However there are a few worthy thought throughout the book, if you can take the pointless chatter in between them, then go ahead, give it a try.

Terrible execution and stunning naïveté

I rarely write bad reviews. I can find something kind to say about most books that I read, or audiobooks that I listen to. This book is one of the rare exceptions. I am 3/4 of the way through this book as I write this, and I feel compelled to pause and share this review.

I bought this title due to its favorable mention by John Doerr in his excellent book, “Measure What Matters”. It has also been reviewed favorably by other writers I respect, such as Daniel Pink. But whatever interesting ideas it has are quickly strangled by terrible execution and stunning naïveté.

First, there is the mind-warping irony of a book about values with a preface written by Bill Clinton—a serial abuser of women and frequent guest on Jeffrey Epstein’s “Lolita Express,” disbarred for lying under oath, who built a $100 million fortune post-presidency running an influence-peddling operation thinly disguised as a charity. The publishing team effectively refuted the central premise of their own book with this single decision.

Then, the prologue. The chapters of the audiobook run less than 45 minutes each; the prologue runs an hour and a half. The author name-drops celebrities and media figures (including the since-disgraced Charlie Rose), and drones on at length about nothing much.  Where were the editors to say that this ponderous bloatware was unnecessary?  Was nobody willing to tell the author to trim it down?

Needless to say, both preface and prologue can be safely skipped.

If you have read much in general business, leadership, organizational behavior, or behavioral economics, then much of the meat of this book will be familiar, but the author does try a different approach angle.  This leads to some odd omissions. When the author describes a survey showing that people view corporations as generally dishonest, despite the fact that only a few behave badly, he inadvertently raises and leaves unexplored the issue of the irrationality of human perception, and its implications.

When he discusses the tax code as a way for government to codify society’s notions of fairness, he ignores the question of whether this is a proper function of government in the first place. He doesn’t just fail to discuss these issues in any depth; he refuses to so much as nod in their general direction—leaving me with the distinct impression that the author deliberately sidestepped real and complex issues that might complicate his promotion of his premise.

After hearing for 30 years that the 1980s was a decade of greed and self-centeredness, the author now informs me that the 1990s was a decade of greed and self-centeredness.  What is lacking is acknowledgement that every decade is a decade of greed and self-centeredness, because human nature has not changed for thousands of years. What changes are the methods and the relative pervasiveness.  His section on the possible evolutionary basis of values-based and altruistic behavior is interesting, but it lacks the context of the eternal, internal battle between the devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other.

In general, this book is far more shallow than either its title or it’s subject matter might lead you to expect.  Some of that shallowness stems from an attitude that runs right past naïveté and into blatant wishcasting.  He completely oversells the effects (particularly the benefits) of enhanced transparency.

In Chapter 7 (the section, “ICU, UC Me”) he says this:
“It is not enough to make a good tennis shoe, if  you exploit workers in Vietnam to do so.”
Really? How many slave laborers toil in shoe factories in China as you read these words? And how much business have shoe companies lost as a result?  Frankly, businesses don’t care anywhere near as much as the author would like you to think they do, and any enhanced transparency has had little or no effect on their business practices. From Nike to Coca-Cola to the NBA to Hollywood, companies that do business in China are happy to overlook slave labor, Uighur genocide, abuses in Hong Kong, organ harvesting, and other horrific actions of the Chinese Communist Party if it means access to cheap labor and 1.4 billion potential customers. Words that would be charmingly naïve coming from an idealistic high school sophomore sound ridiculous when put forth by a professional business consultant.

In Chapter 9 (the section, "Reputation in a Wired World"), the starry-eyed idealist strikes again as he speaks glowingly of the concept of a "reputation score" that would follow you around, similar to a credit score:
"[The inventors] look forward to a day, in the not-to-distant future, when wireless connectivity will allow machines and individuals to instantly share reputation scores, no different than a credit score, allowing the information... to apply to a variety of transactions. Instead of silos of reputation, with various services, companies, and individuals developing isolated reputations, [the reputation service] provides a centralized of managing and developing a single reputation."
Beyond the fact that this sounds disturbingly similar to the Social Credit Score implemented in China, he utterly ignores the reality that such a score would likely be open to dishonest and vindictive manipulation. Someone decides they dislike your political donations, or something you said on Twitter, and suddenly your reputation score goes up in flames. Again, cancel culture may not have existed when he wrote these words in 2011, but it certainly exists as I write this review in 2021, and it makes the ability to transact business privately, and even anonymously, arguably more important than it has ever been.

He then goes on to reference Cory Doctorow's novel, "Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom", where, "everything is free, based on a person's reputational score.... accrued or depleted according to a person's favorable or unfavorable actions, and serves as actual currency in a world without money." That sounds nice, until you ask, "Who decides what actions are favorable and unfavorable?" Oddly enough, it's generally the people who want reputation scores like this who also believe that they will be the ones making those decisions. Such a reputation score is a blunt object used to beat people into conformity with their own vision of the way the world should be. You want to buy food? Sorry, you didn't get your COVID vaccine, so your score has been zeroed out. No food for you. Think that can't happen? There are people advocating for just that type of policy as I type this--even without the benefit of being able to target you from afar via an app on your smartphone.

As I said, I am only 3/4 of the way through this title, and I will update this review with additional information as I complete it.

Typical corporate fad idea.

What could the authors have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

Little depth, nothing original.