"Practically Radical": a new book by Bill Taylor, reviewed by Saul Kaplan

Saul Kaplan has a nice review of William Taylor's new book, Practically Radical: Not-So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Challenge Yourself.

Saul describes how the book opens with a story from Saul's neighborhood in Rhode Island:

When [Police Chief Dean Esserman] was hired as the Providence Police Chief in 2003, he found a city where the crime rates were high and a police force that was troubled by corruption and distrusted by the community. People were afraid to travel downtown. What he’s done since is a great story of business model innovation, and he has delivered significant value to the citizens of Providence.

In six years, Dean transformed the Providence policing model from a centralized department where police were anonymous and came to the neighborhood after receiving a 911 call to a decentralized department with neighborhood substations and district commanders who are accountable for crime in the local community. His philosophy is that when police get out of their cars and into the life of a neighborhood they become trusted allies.

I have attended the chief’s regular Tuesday morning command meetings where a sophisticated crime tracking system displays crime statistics by district. Each commander is called upon to talk about crime activity in their district and what they are doing about it. The new business model is working, with double digit declines in the overall Providence crime rate. Who would have thought to look at a police chief as an example of innovation best practices?

Read the full review by Saul here.

Obviously, I am a real fan of doing what is practically radical, i.e. what is both radical and practical.

As Deborah Mills-Scofield suggests in her blog, the 21st Century may well turn out to be about oxymorons, i.e. doing both-and rather than the the 20th Century approach of either-or and making tradeoffs. I wrote about this in an earlier post on breaking through tradeoffs in connection with Inder Sidhu's book, Doing Both (FT Press, 2010). I

I'll write more about William Taylor's book in a subsequent post. In the meantime, you can find another take on what is practically radical in my book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century (Jossey-Bass, 2010)

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