800-CEO-READ Blog

Guy Kawasaki's Art of the Start Pitch Kit

We think this is pretty exciting.

For the launch of his new book, Guy Kawasaki has put together a great deal. Called the Art of the Start Pitch Kit, you a copy of Guy's new book Art of the Start and a SanDisk Cruzer 128MB USB Flash Drive. What we like is that it is only available from 800-CEO-READ.

The book gives you the knowledge and inspiration. The Flash Drive give you a place to store it.

The kit costs $34.95 (you do the math, it is a great deal) and we have a limited number available. We are taking pre-orders now and will start shipping Sept. 9th. Get 'em while you can!

Attn: Project Managers

I have two books in my hand that are written for project managers. And since we are all projects managers (ask Tom Peters), these are books that apply to all of us.

The first book is The Definitive Guide to Project Management. The subtitle is "the fast-track to getting the job done on time and on budget". This is a soup to nuts book on the art (because I think it is an art) of managing a project. Here are the chapter headings from the book:

1. Introduction
2. Basic Principles
3. Project organization and team
4. Everyday basics and adminstration
5. Planning
6. Monitoring and control
7. Scope management and risk management
8. Define
9. Design
10. Build and test
11. Implement and Review

The second book is called The Project Management Advisor: 18 Major Project Screw-ups and How To Cut Them Off At the Pass by Lonnie Pacelli. I think this is for folks who have a project or two under their belt. Some of his key causes of project derailment include teams that don't gel, trying to do too much, and not doing enough training. The book has a companion website where you can get more info.

Good Luck

Good Luck was written in eight hours, straight through.

However, it took us over three years to create it.

Some people will only remember the eight hours.

Others will only remember the three years.

The first ones will believe we were just lucky.

The others will believe that we created the conditions for Good Luck.

But don't listed to us, listen to the words of George Bernard Shaw:

"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them." -- George Bernard Shaw

Enjoy and let us know how you like it.

We will be posting a selection from Good Luck on the Excerpt Blog this week

This week's books

I have been getting a lot of books lately. It is a sign that we are heading into the fall season. This is a prime time for the publishing industry with lots of new releases. To give you a sampling, I thought I would just give you a list of the books I received in the mail this week.

• Mastering Foreign Exchange & Currency Options by Francesca Taylor (FT Prentice Hall, June 2004)
• J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century by David Cassidy (Pi Press, August 2004)
• The Essential CIO: Leadership Strategies for Personal and Professional Success, edited by Richard Pastore and Edward Prewitt (CXO Media, 2004)
• Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne (HBS Press, Feb. 2005)
• Semper Fi: Business Leadership the Marine Corps Way by Dan Carrison & Rod Walsh (Amacom, August 2004)
• The Secrets of Great Sales Management by Robert Simpkins (Amacom, July 2004)
• Extending the Supply Chain: How Cutting-Edge Companies Bridge the Critical Last Mile into Customers' Homes by Kenneth Boyer, Markham Frohlich, and G. Tomas Hult (Amacom, October 2004)
• The Wisdom of Alexander the Great by Lance Kurke (Amacom, August 2004)
• Dickless Marketing: Smart Marketing to Women Online by Yvonne DiVita (1st Books, January 2004)
• The (Mis)Behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward by Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard Hudson (Basic Books, August 2004)
• HRD in the Age of Globalization: A Practical Guide to Workplace Learning in the Third Millenium by Michael Marquardt, Nancy Berger, and Peter Loan (Basic Books, August 2004)
• The Mystery of Capital: Why Capital Triumphs in the West and Fails in Everywhere Else by Hernando De Soto (Basic Books, June 2003)

Next Week's Good Luck Charm

We are pretty high on Good Luck by By Alex Rovira and Fernandos Trias de Bes. Jack wrote a Jack Coverts Selects on the book. Starting Monday, we are going to run an excerpt from the book over on the Excerpt blog. If you want a small headstart, Rovira and Trias de Bas recently wrote a piece for the BusinessWeek Online.

Amazon Removes Review

J.D. Lasica wrote a review of Dan Gillmor's We the Media for Mindjack. He then uploaded the same review to Amazon and found it was immediately taken down. Amazon's email response was:

Your review of "We the Media" was removed because your comments in large part focused on your personal opinions of the subject matter, rather than reviewing the title itself.

While we appreciate your opinions on the subject, the intent of customer reviews is to assist our customers in making an informed purchase decision. We provide our customer reviews section for you to comment on the merits of the book and the author's writing style. We ask that you not use it as a place for discourse on the subject matter.

You can read J.D.'s response here.

If there is anyone else who has read We the Media and would like to write a review, feel free to send it to me (todd at 800ceoread dot com) and we'll post it here. We are all about discussing interesting ideas.

A Book Called Beyond Bullets

Cliff Atkinson of Beyond Bullets announced Tuesday there will be a book published under the same name. It is be released by Microsoft Press and will ship February 2005.

If you haven't been to Cliff's blog, you should go check it out. He talks about how to make Powerpoint presentations more effective. Beyond the software, he really talks about how to better communicate thoughts and ideas to your audience.

David Allen on Unstuck

David Allen of Getting Things Done fame gives his friend Keith Yamashita a plug on his blog. We've talked about Yamashita's new book Unstuck a number of times here on this blog.

FusionBranding: Comprehensive View of Customer Economy

Seth Godin recently said good business books fall into two categories: how-to's and inspirational (via Thinking by Peter Davidson). I tend to do much of my business reading in a third category: "pushing the edges." And any book that takes on an established marketing 'bible' is definitely pushing the edges.

When June Cleaver wore pearls while serving dinner to Beaver and the family, "positioning" could work. Consumers had limited access to information and companies could generally control how offerings were portrayed within limited media..."Positioning" ignores a basic principle of communications theory. Communication does not occur just because the speaker (or company) speaks. It occurs only when the message is heard, and ideally, accepted....["P]ositioning is out of step with the requirements of the customer and demand economies. The interlinked imperatives of these eras are relationships, execution and the ability to do business on customer terms. It definitely is not, in Ries and Trout's words, "what you do to the mind of the prospect." A more powerful perspective is to enable prospects - and customers - to shape your thinking. The problems with "positioning" does not mean that offerings should not be differentiated. Differentiation means creating or adding values that meet the specialized requirements of target markets. - FusionBranding: How to Forge Your Brand For the Future by Nick Wreden

FusionBranding: How to Forge Your Brand by Nick Wreden is a tough book to classify. At first glance, it appears to look like one of those 'written by committee' consulting firm exercises. It's not. It's a comprehensive book clearly written by one author that attempts to look at branding and marketing from a holistic organizational point of view. Most marketing books are focused on one specific aspect and rarely encompass the breadth of operations, technology, partners/channels and measurement and accountablity systems that are crucial to successful marketing efforts.

The more I read FusionBranding the more I felt that it really should be the textbook that college students read today (and maybe get that mass market unilateral message thinking out of their head). In fact, this would be the perfect book to hand an intern, a new college hire, or an engineer transitioning to the marketing department in order to give them a full perspective on all the touchpoints of marketing within a B2C or B2B mid- to larger-sized company.

[T]he environment that facilitated past branding successes is dead. Unfortunately, old habits die hard. Companies are still attempting to brand with past strategies, even though the world where those strategies worked no longer exists...."Positioning" and the "4 Ps" got imprinted on the genes of an entire generation of marketers, but it's time to bury the concept and come to terms with the reality of a new branding era.

And it's not just new marketers that could do with a conversational-marketing, systems-based, results-oriented approach to marketing.

Most readers here are well aware that the world has shifted from a mass market towards a customer-centric economy. In 'pushing the edges' style author Wreden boldly predicts that in the future we'll move further into a demand economy where pricing is fluid (think eBay) and offerings are entirely personalized and customized. While I'm not so sure of his future prediction, he is right on target with marketing today.

What does branding on customer terms mean? Companies no longer sell. Customers buy. It's a critical distinction....The loss of power and control in the buyer-seller relationship is difficult for some companies to accept...Habits formed by years of sending unidirectional, one-size-fits-all messages to faceless, powerless customers must end. Ultimately, customer economy branding is all about viewing consumers as candidates for relationships, not markets for products.

Wrenden also quotes ex-IBM CEO Louis Gerstner on the IBM turnaround: "We're going to build this company from the customer back, not from the company out." And that right there sums up the entire philosophy that drives this book. Even the chapter on advertising is titled: Marketing in an Opt-In World.

Although released in 2002, the book still feels freshly appropriate for today as Wrenden wrote it with the Internet firmly in mind. Albeit a small mention, that it mentions blogs at all is a testament to its forward-thinking author.

Just the chapter on PR alone justified my time investment - it crisply describes what I do but have struggled to explain to clients. Now with Wrenden's book I know that it's called "constituency management" and it naturally includes a market and competitive intelligence component.

Impatient marketers (I sighed when I realized that the book was nearly twice my 200-page limit) may use the book more like a reference after you've read the first few overview chapters.

I tend to be attracted to a quite different sort of business book (i.e. Re-Imagine is more my style) but FusionBranding has a definite place in the marketers' arsenal.

With a Little Bit of Luck

TRAIT TWO: Make Small Talk

As I travel across the country giving presentations, I have learned that many people hold small talk in low regard. In my research for What Do I Say Next? I discovered that the only people who put down small talk, are the ones who are bad at it. The ConverSENsations® saw small talk as a way to get to know people and never denigrated it.

The You Never Know It Alls didn’t wait for the great opening line. Nor did they first speak BIG talk, about famine, quantum theories of physics or economics of incarcerating first time offenders. Although these are great BIG Talk Topics, the people who attracted coincidental opportunities talked about little things: weather, traffic, movies, etc. They start with, “Hello, how are you?” And then they listen to the answer.

***

Bill was standing in line at a Lake Tahoe grocery store when the woman in back of him asked him if he was there to ski. "I noticed that she was older, dressed conservatively and warmly...it was cold there during the season. I was in a hurry and not much in a mood for small talk as the family was hungry and I was getting the dinner fixings. But I responsed that we didn't mind the cold because it meant the snow didn't melt and we could ski.

She asked if we ever visited during the summer and the family had been talking about that exact thing not an hour before. One thing lead to another and she offered to rent her Tahoe condo for 'next to nothing' that summer. My wife was very impressed with the condo coup. This had little to do with my negotiating skills...it was just my good fortune resulting from my being open and making small talk with a very nice person."

BOOK REVIEW: Simply Better

I just got done reading Simply Better: Winning and Keeping Customers by Delivering What Matters Most by Patrick Barwise and Sean Meehan (Harvard Business School Press, August 2004). The first plus for me is that the authors are European (Barwise teaches at London Business School and Meehan at IMD in Switzerland). I always like the fresh set of anecdotes and perspectives you get from authors on another continent (see Funky Business, Corporate Religion).

The premise of the book is that companies should focus on customers and want is it that they really want:

We believe your first priority should be to improve the performance of the things managers often dismiss as being mere "table stakes," "hygiene factors," or "order qualifiers" ( as opposed to order winners) and that we will refer to as the "basics". Most customers, irrespective of how you may have organized them into segments with slightly different needs, expect the basics. Alas, it seems they are disappointed remarkably often. The rewards that would arise from businesses simply meeting and exceeding straightforward, reasonable expectations are substantial.

They point to a number of companies ( Orange, Alliance & Leicester, Tesco) who served the very basic needs of the customer better and have grown and/or own their markets.

I like the back to basics message. Some will find it is written for the Global 500 set, but there are lessons to be learned for everyone.

Tom's 60 TIBs

Among the new batch of manifestos at Change This, Tom Peters authors one called This I Believe! - Tom's 60 TIBs.

If you like Tom, you will love this.

That sucks

Brad Feld has a post on his recent read of Your Marketing Sucks by Mark Stevens. Brad tell a great story that goes with the book.

Extreme Makeover: Company Edition

Business 2.0 reviews Sergio Zyman's new book Renovate Before You Innovate.

Or Why So Many Business Books Are Awful

Kevin Dugan from Strategic Public Relations sent me a link to The Economist's article "How 51 Gorillas Can Make You Seriously Rich (or Or Why So Many Business Books Are Awful)".

The article takes on just about everyone in biz book publishing. The jabs range from "Many [books] appear to be little more than expanded PowerPoint presentations..." to "put an animal in the title—gorillas, fish and purple cows are in vogue this year". Like all forms of media, there is good and bad content. Business books aren't any different.

The last paragraph start with, "It is hard to believe that many managers run their businesses differently as a result of their reading." I think if people pick-up and read a business book they are looking for an answer. Readers have some question in their head. Many times the question is, "Am I doing the right things?" They are looking for confirmation of their beliefs. Others read with the question, "Is there anything new I should know?" This is a more powerful question that recognizes the need for the updating of one's beliefs. The minority are reading business books because they feel they need to change something.

I think The Economist is right in saying that most managers don't change how they run their companies as the result of reading a book. I don't think that is the purpose for reading business books.

Technology Trends

Also in Friday's WSJ was an extensive review of technology titles. In his review "Join the Revolution" [sub. needed], reviewer L. Gordon Crovitz says:

More than one author of late -- perhaps sensing a need -- has pondered how to tame technology, how to profit from it or, if coping becomes too much, how to escape it altogether.

These are not simple matters. We live in the early days of an Information Revolution that will change our lives just as the Industrial Revolution changed our forefathers'. The innovations of that earlier era -- clocks, contracts and capitalism -- have their modern equivalents in nonstop information feeds, networked communities and global markets. And yet it is all rather hard to gauge at this point. How, in the end, will modern technology change us? And how do we know that technological progress is human progress?

Crovitz reviews:

• Human-Built World: How to Think About Technology and Culture by Thomas Hughes (University of Chicago Press, May 2004)
• The Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way People Live With Technology by Kim Vicente (Routledge, March 2004)
• Technology Paradise Lost: Why Companies Will Spend Less to Get More from Information Technology by Erik Keller (Manning Publications, April 2004)
• Caught in The Current: Searching for Simplicity in the Technological Age by Jay Bookman (St. Martins Press, June 2004)
• Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology by Eric Bende (Harpercollins, August 2004)

Why Not?

On Friday, Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff, authors of Why Not?: How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small, had an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. Their essay was called "Going, Going, Google" and they discuss some things Google did right and some things they could have done better in their IPO auction [sub. needed].

Happy Monday.

It is a little cloudy and gloomy here in Milwaukee this morning. They are calling for some amount of rain all week. :(

It will be a full week here on the blog. I just wanted to let you know they we have been moving everything to a new server and as you all know, that can cause some problems. If you see any problems, drop me a line (todd at 800ceoread dot com) and we'll take a look.

We are going to get back to posting Tom Peters' essay on strategy. I have a number of books I want to tell you about. I want to talk about the visit with Harvard Business School Press.

So, lots to talk about.

Daily dose of Yo! (#4 & #5)

A few last excerpts from the Book of Yo!

"Remember your brain is an extremely sophisticated machine for making up terrors that aren't going to happen to you."

Simon Woodroffe, pg 7

And now for my longest excerpt.

"I went to visit a food supplier recently, and upon arriving I found a solid looking sign in the prime parking space "Reserved for Simon Woodroffe" it said."

"... I commended the factory manager on the welcome and he told me that soon after the receptionist that had been responsible for my welcome had stared there, she approached him and asked for a change in job title... "What sort?" the manager asked..."A First Impressions Technologist" she told him. That's what I call a revolutionary."

Simon Woodroffe, pg 26

I'm really not doing the book justice with these random snippets though, you just need to take my word for it and get yourself a copy...!

Change This!

I hope you have heard about Seth Godin's new project by now.

It is called Change This. Read about their mission. And then read some of the manifestos.

For biz book readers, you will find manifestos from Guy Kawasaki and the team of Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba.

Thank You! Thank You!

Thank you everyone for this opportunity to share my weirdness with you, and I hope by now that you realize that we all have an incredible opportunity in front of us to recognize the value of the individual and our own natural weirdness in the Age of the Individual.

Weirdos in the Workplace! The New Normal…Thriving in the Age of the Individual (Prentice Hall) is available right here at 800-CEO-READ.

May the weirdness be with you all!

The More Weirdos There Are, The Fewer There Are

In the Age of the Organization Man (50’s-60’s), the organization took primary responsibility for workers’ futures. They were highly paternalistic cultures. Keep your nose clean, and we’ll take care of you. In the Age of Diversity (70’s-80’s) organizations were forced to open their doors to “protected classes,” but did not assimilate them into the culture. In the Age of the New Economy (90’s), workers gained a new control of their own destinies because of the supply/demand for talent.

For the organization AND the individual to capitalize on the Age of the Individual (today and tomorrow) it is incumbent upon both the organization and the individual to take responsibility for tapping their natural weirdness. A high-performing weirdo of worth has found the unique intersection of his/her interests (that which s/he loves), his/her abilities (that which s/he does better than most) and the market (that for which there is a demand) or his/her AIM.
And when that happens, the organization owes it to such rare breeds to accommodate and to celebrate them. And anything the organization can do to facilitate that discovery is a win-win until we have attained Principle #4:

THE MORE WEIRDOS THERE ARE, THE FEWER THERE ARE

Ultimately in the Age of the Individual, and in a high-performing meritocracy, the concept of weirdos in the workplace becomes relative. In other words, when weirdness becomes the norm, it is no longer perceived as weird. So, the more weirdos you hire, the fewer you have. It may sound rather utopian, but it is the right direction in which to AIM if you and your organization wish to thrive in The Age of the Individual. Now go Get Weird!

Discrimination is Good, It Is Right, and It Is Necessary

If we are to transcend (philosophically) the traditional definition of diversity, we must also re-visit the much-aligned concept of discrimination. The word discrimination got a bad rap during the Age of Diversity, but it cannot be an automatic conclusion that discrimination is always malicious or even wrong. As a manager, if you never discriminate, you are not a manager.

The key, however, is to discriminate based upon relative value and performance. That kind of discrimination is not only good, it is right, and it is necessary in the Age of the Individual, and in a meritocracy. It’s not an option. Workers cannot have it both ways. If you want a culture that celebrates their individuality, you must also assume the responsibility of making a valuable individual contribution.

Critical to making a successful transition to a meritocracy is education. Educate your workers as to the performance criteria by which survival and success are measured, and that if individuality is to be a celebrated core value of your organization, then the individual must also be responsible for earning the right to be treated as an individual, to be a weirdo of worth!

All Workers Are Not Created Equal

The key to success in the Age of the Individual requires understanding that not all “individuality” is valuable. Weirdness rooted in genius is different than weirdness that is purely for the sake of individual expression or rebellion. There is a difference between the eccentricities of an Einstein and the employee whose lack of personal hygiene knocks you over.

For organizations to thrive in The Age of the Individual, they must become meritocracies, i.e., where one’s success is rooted in his/her value and contribution. There are three categories of weirdos in the workplace. Those who should be accommodated and even celebrated (geniuses and high-performers), those who can be tolerated (decent hard working people who are just annoying, but cause no harm), and those who must be terminated (i.e., whose outlandish behavior overshadows their value to the organization), and they are all defined by a cost-benefit premise I call the Weird:Worth ratio.

The more you are worth, the more you can be weird, which leads to the 3rd new rule for a new age…

Everything You Need to Know About “Strategy”: A Baker’s Dozen Eternal Verities

“Strategy” is essentially about “knowin’ where you’re goin’.” Not, mostly, a bad idea; though with today’s market gyrations—and market gyration velocity—that’s increasingly difficult to do, a chimera, a distraction even. For me, “knowin’ who you’re goin’ with” tops the list of imperatives in a world of white water, and knowin’ that those you’re goin’ with share your passion and determination—and the flexibility of mind to adjust and adjust and adjust on a dime. All of which is to say I’m not, and never have been, a champion of the management school of thought that says, or implies, “Get the strategy right [big word, “right”!] and the rest, as in all good things, will more or less automatically follow.” In fact I think such a view—admittedly not as prevalent today as it used to be, in the wake of everything from huge bankruptcies to 9-11—is total crap.

So what do you need to know about “strategy”? That was the question I was asked recently by a rather contentious, die-hard academic strategy buff. (These ideas tend to die hardest in academic settings—where the stakes are so low.) My answer, in brief, follows:

You can find the rest of Tom Peters' paper posted over the next several days on the Excerpts Blog.

My name is John, and I’m a weirdo!

Hello!

My name is John, and I’m a weirdo!

[Hello, John!]

That is the first and last step in my recovery program. You’ll figure that out later!

OK, now the serious stuff. First, I want to thank Jack and Todd for having the mental fortitude to invite me to clog the blog. Second, I want you to know that my messages are dead serious. I just wrap them in irreverence, pragmatism and directness so more people will read them and remember them.

My first book, Get Weird! 101 Innovative Ways to Make Your Company a Great Place to Work (AMACOM, New York, 2001) was a best-seller, and my newest book (I mean really new ~ just hit the shelves August 14), Weirdos in the Workplace. The New Normal…Thriving in the Age of the Individual (Prentice Hall) will be the subject of our upcoming discussion.

If you want a preview, go to www.weirdosintheworkplace.com

Good Morning

Lots of cool stuff happening today.

First, we have author John Putzier guest hosting today. He'll be by in a few minutes.

Second, we are going to posting some new material from Tom Peters. He has just put out a new paper called Everything You Need to Know About "Strategy": A Baker's Dozen Eternal Verities. We want to thank for allowing us to publish the material here. I am going to post the first segment here and send everyone over to the excerpt blog for the remainder.

Lastly, we want to welcome the folks from Harvard Business School Press. They are visting with us today. I hope to have some interesting stories to share.

Daily dose of Yo! #3

"If I'm in conflict and it's 90 per cent your fault and just 10 per cent mine, I know I cant change what you do, but I can create a 10 per cent shift in the situation by changing my part. This often works wonders"

Simon Woodroffe, Pg19

Creating Your Own Luck

The name I affectionately gave those who seize serendipity and capture coincidence is You Never Know It Alls. Having heard the phrase 'you never know' all of my life and having said it more ofter than I can remember, it continues to have impact on creating luck. You Never Know It Alls don’t conform to the “Keep it to yourself, play your cards close to your chest” school. They are people who are open and that openness is the lynchpin of their so-called luck.

First and foremost, the people featured in How To Create Your Own Luck talk to people they don’t know.

TRAIT ONE: Talk to strangers.

First revealed in How To Work A Room, as an antidote to the warning – “Don’t talk to strangers”, this counterintuitive trait opened up a world of possibilities for most of the people in this book. If you take a moment to think about it, you have had experiences that started with talking to someone you didn’t know. Sometimes that incidental, serendipitous conversation scores a huge success and impacts the bottom line.

Joy Fera lives in the Vancouver, BC area and was a rowing Olympian in the 1976 games. As you can imagine, having the 1988 Winter Olympics in a neighboring province, was very exciting for her.

"I remember the day Calgary was awarded the 1988 Games. My sister and I said to each other, "We will be there. The next six years will go fast." I just felt I HAD to be in Calgary.

So I flew there to meet my sister as she was now on staff at Nakiska, where the alpine ski events took place. We met on the morning of the Opening Ceremonies. We had no tickets. We decided we would take our chances and go to the Olympic stadium just to see if anyone was selling a ticket for the Opening Ceremonies.

"I probably had not more than $100 in my pocket which, even in those days, would not have bought very much. For most people it takes courage to just go up and talk to a stranger. It's normally something I just don't do… much less ask someone for an extra ticket to buy. But my other thought was that I came all the way from B.C. hoping I could buy a ticket outside the stadium. If I didn't ask, I had a lot to lose.

Although it was very uncomfortable, I went up to a woman who liked nice and sheepishly asked, "You wouldn't happen to have any tickets would you?" And to my surprise, she said, "Sure, HAVE these. And she just handed me a pair of tickets. I looked skyward to thank G-d, knowing that only He could have performed this miracle. Then this very nice woman said that NBC had given her some extras so they were free! You can imagine my joy, even delirium. Not only was I going to the Opening Ceremonies, but I was going to sit in NBC seats."

Talk about You Never Know who you'll run into.... that nice lady whom Joy Fera met was Mrs. Southern, of Spruce Meadows Race Track in Calgary, which is why she had NBC Tickets.

OF course Joy wrote the Southerns a thank you note and is forever
grateful to them.

"By the time we sat down, the Ceremonies had already started and we were seated in row 9!!! I learned a valuable lesson: Be brave, follow your heart and speak to strangers! You just never know!"

"It will be so exciting when Vancouver hosts the Olympic Winter Games in 2010. It was even exciting to be in GM Place, Vancouver when the announcement was made. With any luck,I’ll be there!”

I am sure that Joy will. After all, she by talking to a stranger, she knows she created her good fortune and great seats for the Olympics.

My Job

There are many joys in my job. One of the real treats is meeting the authors and publishers. This week I got to be involved in two interviews—that will shortly be posted on this blog—with two guys that I have respected for quite awhile. Ram Charan and Larry Bossidy are fascinating guys. Just wait until you read what they have to say about their forthcoming book Confronting Reality. I think it is going to be as big at Execution. Trust me, these guys have a lot of very interesting stuff to say. I also want to thank Tom Ehrenfeld for all of his help with the interviews.

Next week I will be going to meet publishers, agents and PR people in NYC. I love the city, especially when somebody else is paying, but historically I always seem to try to cram to much into the time I have. As I gracefully age, I am learning and I am going to take it easy this trip. It is also getting easier to do just that as publishers continue to consolidate and the cream continues to rise to the top. I can skip certain publishers and concentrate only on the best.

The reason I go is to try and get a feel for what books are really resonating in the marketplace this Fall. Often times a book that a publisher gave a two page catalog listing—which means high hopes—doesn’t sell well to the book buyers and a title that only got a half page really sold well. That is information that I like to have and compare to my thoughts on the books. I also get to sit in on some acquisition meetings where editors decide what book proposals they will acquire for the Fall of 05.

Five Fabulous Books

Yvonne at Lip-Sticking has a post called 5 Fabulous Books Jane Encourages You to Read.

Her list includes:

• Ten Things I Learned:The Inspiring True Story of the Door-To-Door Salesman Who Changed Lives by Shelly Brady
• Lapsing into a Comma: A Curmudgeon's Guide to the Many Things That Can Go Wrong in Print - And How to Avoid Them by Bill Walsh
• Powertools for Women in Business by Aliza Sherman
• New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World by Kevin Kelly
• Dickless Marketing: Smart Marketing to Women Online by Yvonne Divita

Daily dose of Yo! (#2)

"I never set out to build a brand, and have my suspicions of any advertising agency or designer who does. What a brand should do is reflect the true spirit of the group of people it represents and communicate that spirit truthfully to the world. Without truth and substance beneath, brand can only be gloss and will not survive."

Simon Woodroffe, pg 48

THE EIGHT TRAITS of People Who Turn Random Chance into Runaway Success

What is it about some people that make them successful? Are they born under a lucky star? Do they get all the breaks? NO! To a one, they are people who see the opportunity, perceive a possibility and parlay it into something positive, which has a measure of success. They don’t just see opportunity, they seize it. They are observers who pay attention: to issues, problems, perplexing situations, and to people. Whether their moment of serendipity turned into a job or business, or two tickets to the Olympics or even the opera, they are OPEN! Because of that, they create their own luck.

In studying their stories, they reveal that they have two types of traits.

The Usual Suspects

When studying the stories that changed careers, jobs or businesses, there is a track of traits I call the USUAL SUSPECTS, which are discussed in most business books. These are the qualities and characteristics generally ascribed to those who are successful. They’re what you’d expect the “given” traits to be. When it came to business and careers, the You Never Know It Alls don’t just work smart, they work hard instead of hardly work! They have good attitudes. Some days it’s one that’s realistic, other days, it’s simply positive, but whichever it is, their attitude is a good, healthy one that embraces possibility. In addition, they have a vision that is bolstered by great follow-through.

The UNusual Suspects:

What most business books and courses don’t identify are the unique traits exhibited by people who have seized the serendipity, co-opted the coincidence, and captured the karma. They are the Unusual Suspects of traits that set them apart from the crowd. They are counterintuitive behaviors, actions and attitudes that go against the prescribed norm. Interesting enough, these traits are also the outgrowth of solid, savvy networking skills.

The people who had the ‘You Never Know!’ experience exhibited different combinations of these Eight Traits.

• Trait One: They talk to strangers.
• Trait Two: They make small talk.
• Trait Three: They “drop” names.
• Trait Four: They eavesdrop and listen.
• Trait Five: They ask for/offer help.
• Trait Six: They stray from their chosen paths.
• Trait Seven: They exit graciously without burning bridges
• Trait Eight: They say YES when they want to say NO.

The You Never Know It Alls don’t conform to the “Keep it to yourself, play your cards close to your chest” school. They are people who are open and that openness is the lynchpin of their so-called luck.

First and foremost, the people featured in this book talk to people they don’t know.

Daily dose of Yo! (#1)

"Tell people about your ideas, especially those that might get stolen. It'll scare them off, and scare you into getting them done"

- Simon Woodroffe, pg7

More Yo!

johnmoore suggested that I share some of the wisdom from The Book of Yo! - Todd agreed. So, for the next five or so days, I'm going to feed you a daily dose.

Enjoy...!

Speaking of Johnnie Moore

He continues to produce posts in his Beyond Lovemarks series.

• Beyond Lovemarks: Spontaneity
• Beyond Lovemarks: Things/Ideas or People/Relationships?
• Beyond Lovemarks: Restoring the power of language
• Beyond Lovemarks: Fouroboros engages

More Wisdom

Dave Pollard at How to Save the World writes an extensive review of James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds.

[via johnnie moore]

Lots of Luck

There are three books coming out in the next few months that deal with the topic of luck.

The first is Good Luck: Create the Conditions for Success in Life and Business by Alex Rovira and Fernando Trias de Bas. Jack wrote a review and posted already this month. We like it here at 800-CEO-READ. We are going to be running an excerpt from it starting two weeks from today over on the Excerpts Blog.

The second book is from contributor Susan RoAne. Her book is called How to Create Your Own Luck: The "You Never Know" Approach to Networking, Taking Chances, and Opening Yourself To Opportunity. Her book is chock full of stories that illustrate eight traits of "luckiness". Starting this week, Susan is going to post a weekly entry on each of the traits she talks about in the book.

The last book isn't directly about luck, but I think there is a strong connection to the idea. Rosabeth Moss Kanter has a new book coming out called Confidence: How Winning Streaks & Losing Streaks Begin and End. She spends the first half of the book talking about the cyclical nature of winning and losing. In the second half of the book, she about what needs to be done to turnaround the downward spirals.

After all of this, "Are you feelin' lucky?"

Spooky Action

Mike DeWitt at Spooky Action is a pretty big fan of Jay Abraham's book Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got.

Dilbert Meets The Dalai Lama

Tom Ehrenfeld has a fun piece on his site "that imagines what the journal of the Dalai Lama would be like if he actually had an office job."

BOOK REVIEW: The Book of Yo!

Title: The Book of Yo!
Author: Simon Woodroffe
Pages: 60
Published: October 2000
Dog-ear score: 36.6%
Reviewer: Rich...!

I must start this review by saying that bar none, this is simply the best business book I have ever read.

How the author managed to get so many gems into 60-pages is beyond me. If you want a summary of Purple Cow, Re-imagine!, and many others, this is the book for you.

The book highlights the experiences of Yo! Sushi founder, Simon Woodroffe. It is part autobiography, part marketing guide, and part self-help book, and man, it blends the three extremely well, leaving you wanting more.

The first time I read the book I made the mistake of reading it in a sitting, the next time, I read just a page a day, scribbling notes and marking pages like a man possesed. I'm now on my third reading, and I'm still geting more out of it. This is the book Tom Peters set out to write when he started Re-imagine! (and I enjoyed that book too.)

This is truly an undiscovered classic. The one book I'd read if I could read only one.

Last word: Brilliant...!

Marketing Books to Make You Smarter

David Wolfe wrote an outstanding series of posts last week.

He started with his post Why Marketing Underperforms and says:

Marketers don’t have a common foundation...Without a common foundation everyone set his own rules, so opinion often outweighs fact. Engineering is about facts. It’s easier to defend facts than opinions. What you experienced last week was marketers getting upset when their opinions were challenged by your engineer’s left brain logic.

He followed that with How to Fix Marketing and ended that post with:

Marketers are hired under the assumption that they have enough working knowledge of human behavior to be effective in what they do. Why else would you hire someone to help you market a product? Sorry, experience is not a substitute for dedicated scholarship and consumer surveys, interviews and focus groups cannot tell you what you should know about consumers.

His next post was Traditional Consumer Research Can't Do the Job and he talked about all of the research that is done and how it only vaguely describes consumers motivations.

What caught our attention at 800-CEO-READ was A Readling List of books in behavorial science:

• Stories We Live By by Dan McAdams
• Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goldman
• Descrates' Error by Antonio Damasio
• What Jung Really Said by E.A. Bennett
• Toward a Psychology of Being and The Farthest Reaches of Human Nature by Abraham Maslow
• The Right Mind by Robert Ornstein
• Media Equation by Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass
• The Secret Life of the Brain by Richard Restak
• How Customers Think by Jerry Zaltman
• Ageless Marketing by David Wolfe

I have only read one of these books (How Customers Think). I have some catching up to do.

Thanks!

Hi all!

Thanks for logging on to the 800CEOREAD weblog and checking out my new book, Who Are "They" Anyway? Hope you enjoyed following the story over on the excerpt blog.

It's a message of freedom and empowerment. Once we get it that there IS no "they," then we see that if there is going to be any positive change in our jobs and in our lives, it is up to US to make those changes. It's not a message that everyone wants to hear -- so good for you for embracing it! New possibilities open up for us when we accept the fact that no one is coming to save us -- we must create our OWN future! Success is not something that happens by accident, by the luck of the draw -- success is a choice, a choice that is available to each and every one of us, in every moment of every day.

I'll leave you with a question to ponder for yourself: What would you do if you had no fear?

I'd love to hear from you if you have comments, reactions to the story, ideas, or feedback of any kind. You can comment here or your can reach me at my new web site www.whoaretheyanyway.com.

Enjoy these last weeks of summer!

Best always, BJ

The Rat Test

This interactive test goes along with my Way of The Rat entry from Tuesday.

Cvber Gremlins

Sadly, 800CEOREAD's entire e-commerce system went down around 4AM yesterday and didn't come back until last night. I am more than sorry and our propeller heads have assured me that redundancy will be the word of the day going forward. We are back!!!