Review: The Vice Chairman’s Doctrine by Ian Domowitz

A denizen of both the academic and the corporate worlds, author Ian Domowitz offers a look at the inner workings of industry from the perspective of those tasked with leadership while being denied any specific guidance and any real authority in The Vice Chairman’s Doctrine: A Guide to Rocking the Top in Industry Version 4.0.

Receiving the role of “vice chairman” was Domowitz’s entry into the behind-the-scenes realm of corporate oversight. He soon noted that job descriptions for this title indicate that it “typically goes to a top executive who has been shafted.” Reorganization and other factors can result in someone being designated as vice chairman, a possible demotion, but also a potentially rewarding job for someone who grasps its true inner function.

The secret essence of vice chairmanship is to see one’s product as the company itself, and so the vice chairman will seek to sustain and build on the company’s current credibility and success. S/he will engage in design reasoning, leading to an acute understanding of the customer, likening this process to training a dog, whose EQ, or emotional intelligence, opens the way to communication and bonding. Customers will similarly fixate on a brand that has been designed with their response in mind. One way to develop that response is through storytelling – factual or mythological, our cultures are based on the stories we choose to believe.

As one might discern, Domowitz’s book is not a typical leadership or business manual, as some of his concepts are abstract, but with surprisingly real-world applications. Moving from these concepts to a broader picture, Domowitz employs such familiar terms as innovation, culture, and branding, grounding readers in common concepts while going further afield with tenets like “intrapreneurship” and “disruptive innovation.” The extension of all of these concepts, the vice chairman, is a form of broad-scale product management in which adaptation and awareness are as crucial as decision-making.

Domowitz is not one to mince words and is in fact an articulate wordsmith who enjoys constructing a good, intellectually sound joke at his, or his industry’s, expense, for an entertaining read throughout. The quotations cited range from Einstein and Mark Twain to film analogies like “Blazing Saddles” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still” which keep things lively and relatable, for what could be a very dry subject. He’s able to weave these different elements together, forming a comprehensive guidebook that is both immensely readable and informative.

Humorous though much of the content undoubtedly is, it also carries the weight of provable fact, just as does the “socks experiment” in which people asked to choose their preferred pair of socks almost always selected the items on the right side. These are the kinds of intuitive, EI responses that a vice chairman needs to take to heart in shaping customer loyalty to his/her industry, and Domowitz makes a persuasive argument with his array of examples.

Most vitally, Domowitz possesses a charming gift for allegory, irony, and even, at times, outright satire that enhances his subject matter, making The Vice Chairman’s Doctrine an entertaining and illuminating read for readers from any professional discipline.