800-CEO-READ Blog

Business Book Authors on BookTV

Yes, I watch BookTV. Most of the time, you will get authors who have written books on politics or history. Over the past month, I have run across two segments on business book authors and they were both good.

The first segment was Richard Florida. He wrote the very popular Rise of the Creative Class and the follow-up Flight of the Creative Class. He talked about both of the books and his most recent research with the Gallup Organization. Two tidbits:

• In his first book, it talked about the sorts of things that a city needed to support a creative class. The most important is the attitude of openness in the community itself. In his polling research, he has found the largest prejudice to be against age. People often don't want young people in their community. This ranked ahead of race, religion, political view, and sexual orientation.
• Right before Katrina hit, Florida was doing spot polling around the country to find out how happy they are with their lives. He believes location is central to happiness. New Orleans ranked the highest out of the 22 cities polled. The two most important stated reasons were strong religious ties and nightlife.

The second segment was one with Yossi Sheffi, author of The Resilient Enterprise. He wrote most of the book while he was on sabbatical form MIT. He was doing some research for the UK government. Their concern was that the next terrorist attack isn't going to be against Big Ben or the London Bridge, but against Tesco and disrupt the food supply in to the general public. The book is about the operations side of business and how plan for vulnerabilities in the lean supply chains of today.

I only caught the first 15 minutes of this one, but I found it interesting that the CDC and NY Department of Health track OTC drug sales in the city. They believe that people will first look for something at drugstore to fix what ails them before going to the doctor. If they see a spike in Benadryl sales, they know the next place to look is admissions for something potential more serious.