800-CEO-READ Blog

More Reading from All Marketers Are Liars

Seth Godin ends All Marketers Are Liars with a list of other books worth reading:

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffery Moore
Positioning by Trout and Ries
In Pursuit of Wow! and The Tom Peters Seminar by Tom Peters
Blink by Malcolm Galdwell
Selling the Dream by Guy Kawasaki
The Republic of Tea by Bill Rosenzweig and Mel Ziegler (out of print)
Don't Think Of An Elephant!/How Democrats And Progressives Can Win by George Lakoff
Secrets of Closing the Sale by Zig Ziglar
Why We Buy by Paco Underhill
Creating Customer Evangelists by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba
Emotional Design by Donald Norman
The Moral Economy of the Peasant by James Scott
Creative Company: How St. Luke's Became "the Ad Agency to End All Ad Agencies" by Andy Law

This Week - 5/31/05

Happy Tuesday! For those overseas, everyone in the States had the day off yesterday for Memorial Day, where we honor our Armed Forces.

As I said last week, it is going to be a little slow here. Jack and I are traveling to New York on Thursday for the big book convention of the year. I will try to post some updates from there. If it doesn't work out, we will give you a summary next week.

I will see what I can dig up for those who are reading during this short week.

Have a great week!

Final Day of the Business Blog Book Tour

The final day of the All Marketers Are Liars Tour has us at Jennifer Rice's What's Your Brand Mantra?

She has a series of questions posted that she posed to Mr. Godin.

Jack Covert Selects--Think Big Act Small

Think Big Act Small: How America’s Best Performing Companies Keep the Start-up Spirit Alive by Jason Jennings, Portfolio, 220 Pages, $24.95 Hardcover, May 2005, ISBN 1591840767

How do we learn? When you look at books like Good to Great and It’s Not the Big that Eat the Small (Jason Jennings' first book which he co-wrote with Laurence Haughton), it is researching the heck out of “what is a long term high performer.” Then you research these companies to find out the “secret” of their success. It is especially exciting when you find companies that aren’t as big or well know as GE. What Jennings’ and his research team did was to look at 100,000 American companies and found nine companies that have increased revenue and profits by ten percent or more for ten consecutive years. The nine companies range from retailers like Petco and Cabela’s, manufactures like Medline Industries, service companies like Sonic Drive-In, private education companies like Strayer and industrial giants like Koch Industries. Rounding out the nine are SAS, the software company, O’Reilly Automotive and DOT Foods.
What do all these companies have in common? You guessed it: they all “Think big and act small.”
In the book, each chapter focuses on a company and how that company handles one of the ten “Building Blocks.” The building blocks are:
1. Down to earth
2. Keep your hands dirty
3. Make short term goals and long term horizons
4. Let go
5. Have everyone think and act like an owner
6. Invent new businesses
7. Create win-win solutions
8. Choose your competition
9. Build communities
10. Grow future leaders.

The book is loaded with insight and easily applicable ideas for anybody interested in improving themselves and their company. I especially like the conclusion:

“We live in interesting times. Complexity causes people to yearn for simple, profound ideas that can be readily related to diverse situations. People gravitate to confidence, decisiveness, and clear, powerful messages, searching for the ultimate metaphysical reference point. So we end as we begin, with this message: to guild an organization with balanced focus, camaraderie, and the ability to prosper over the long term…think big, act small.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE MONTHLY BOOK REVIEWS, PLEASE SEND AN EMAIL TO JACK AT 800-CEO-READ.COM.

800-CEO-READ and ChangeThis

We are happy to announce today 800-CEO-READ will be taking on the stewardship of ChangeThis.

ChangeThis was a project started with Seth Godin, Amit Gupta, and a team of interns last August. The goal of the project was to create a distribution hub for world changing ideas. In the last 10 months, people who have contributed to the site include Tom Peters, Guy Kawasaki, Robert Scoble, Donna Brazile, Malcolm Gladwell, George Lakoff, Mark Cuban, Jay Levinson, and Seth himself.

We feel ChangeThis is another way for 800-CEO-READ to help thought leaders find an audience for their ideas.

Our first task will be to get the slushpile filled back up. We hope you will all help with that by voting for manifestos you would like to see and proposing ones yourself

We are currently working on the next issue of Changethis which we expect will be published in the next two weeks.

Jack and I want to thank Seth for trusting us to continue ChangeThis.

We think it is going to be alot of fun.

Hear the Sermon at the Church

Seth was at The Church of the Customer yesterday. He was featured in a podcast with Jackie and Ben.

Today he will be at metacool.

This book needs more love

I have not seen many talking about Eric Von Hippel's Democratizing Innovation. For all of you who believe that citizens are rising up to take back control, you need to check this out. If you are in business, you need to understand that your customers are probably modifying your products to work better for them. They may have a couple of ideas on how you could do things better or maybe you could give them the tools to do it themselves.

Here are three great pieces from the book:

• Annual sales of lead user [citizen innovator] product ideas generated by the average lead user project at 3M were conservatively forecast by management to be more than eight times the sales forecast for new products developed in a traditional manner--$146 million versus $18 million per year.
• ...[T]o say an innovation is minor is not the same as saying it is trivial: minor innovations are cumulatively responsible for much or most technical progress. Hollander (1965) found that about 80 percent of unit cost reduction in Rayon manufacture were the cumulative result of minor technical changes. Knight (1963, VII, pp. 2-3) measured performance advances in general purpose digital computers and found, similarly, that "these advances occur as the result of the equipment designers using their knowledge of electronics technology to produce a multitude of small improvements that together produce significant performance advances."

• One major business of Nestle FoodServices is producing custom food products, such as custom Mexican sauces, for major restaurant chains. Custom foods of this type have traditionally been developed by or modified by the chains' executive chefs, using what are in effect design and production toolkits taught by culinary schools: recipe development procedures based on food ingredients available to individuals and restaurants, and processed with restaurant-style equipment. After using their traditional toolkits to develop or modify a recipe for a new menu item, executive chefs call in Nestle Foodservice or another custom food producer and ask that firm to manufacture the product they have designed--and this is where the language problem rears its head

  There is no error-free way to translate a recipe expressed in the language of a traditional restaurant-style culinary toolkit into the language required by a food-manufacturing facility...

  [Nestle created a toolkit to solve the translation problem.] Chefs interested in using the Nestle toolkit to prototype a novel Mexican sauce would receive a set of 20-30 ingredients, each in a separate plastic pouch. They would also be given instructions for the proper use of these ingredients. Toolkit users would then find that each component differs slightly from the fresh components he or she is used to. But such differences are discovered immediately through direct experience. The chef can then adjust ingredients and proportions to move to the desired final taste and texture desired. When a recipe based on toolkit components is finished, it can be immediately and precisely reproduced by Nestle factories...[R]esearchers showed that by adding the error=free translation feature to toolkit-based design by users reduced the time of custom food development from 26 weeks to 3 weeks by eliminating repeated redesign and refinement interactions between Nestle and purchasers of its custom food products.

The book has a Creative Commons license is available for download from Von Hippel's website. This should eliminate any reason not to read the book.

Other links to convince you to check out the book:

Video Lecture of Von Hippel (it is outstanding)
The Feature Interview with Von Hippel
Introduction Excerpt at Fast Company's website
Book Review from HBS Working Knowledge

Ecommerce Site Trouble

We are trying to track down some trouble we are having with the ecommerce site. I thought I was enlist some of our loyal readers

Are any of you having problems getting to the 800-CEO-READ site? We are seeing an intermittent error, but it seems once you get it, you can no longer use the ecommerce site because of the error become constant and recurring.

Leave a comment if you have had any problems.

When Good Companies Spawn Bad Books, and Vice Versa

So Bill Gates plans to author a new business book. Yawn. If it’s anything like his previous dull, sanitized effort, this book will be about as intriguing as the instruction manual to Windows. I’ve found very few books about Microsoft to have much value, which raises an interesting question. Why do some great companies spur terrible books, while other exemplary ones inspire great titles?

Consider IBM. I can’t think of a company that has produced a richer collection of business books. Jim Collins, in an excellent essay that details an epic story arc derived from three great IBM studies, finds much value in Big Blue books. Enron, on the other hand, was a spectacular failure that led to superlative books. Jack loves Kurt Eichenwald’s A Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story. I just finished The Smartest Guys in the Room, which is one of my favorite books of the past year—a thoroughly researched and beautifully written book propelled by a bemused tone of horror from two smart journalists. And the recent documentary, adapted from the book, has received glowing reviews.

And let’s not forget the good old IRS. What is it about the bureaucracy that spawns such good business books? We’ve mentioned Many Unhappy Returns ,the recent Charles Rossotti book—which is a fine memoir about trying to tackle a political organization with mere business skills. I’d add to this tout two more great reads. First off, Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man’s Tour of Duty Inside the IRS by Richard Yancey, which is an utterly delicious first-person account of twelve years inside the organization. Yancey is a writer at heart, which explains why he initially saw the gig as a day job to pay the bills while he wrote at night. But over the years he couldn’t help but internalize the code. The drama of his job distracted him from writing plays, and over time he found himself eventually seeing the world through the eyes of the IRS. His sharp-eyed story reads like a mix of Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, Mike Daisey’s Doing Time at Amazon, Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs, all mixed with a bit of Bartleby the Scrivenor.

For those of you who question the fairness of the tax system, David Cay Johnston’s Perfectly Legal will confirm your worst suspicions. This impressively researched and stridently written book exposes the glaring flaws of the federal tax code. In particular, the daunting and persistent loopholes that enable the wealthiest to skirt their fair share, and, to pass on the bill to those down the food chain—the already challenged middle class. The fact that a growing number of individuals today must pay the Alternative Minimum Tax, thereby defeating its very purpose, is but one striking finding.

At any rate, what companies would you nominate in this category? Which have led to great books, and which have inspired turkeys?

Forbes Looks At Two Leadership Books

Rich Karlgaard of Forbes writes about Winning (great tips, but didn't move him) and Wooden on Leadership (loved it).

BBBT moves on to Southern Hemisphere

Today the Seth and Business Blog Book Tour will be stopping at Hello_World.

This is home to 8cr contributor Rich!.

Things are up and running there this morning. Check it out!

Jack Welch on C-SPAN

I saw Jack Welch last night on C-SPAN. He was at Sacred Heart University talking with a audience from the business school about Winning.

One of the audience members asked him to recommend some books he had read in the last year. Jack said about the only thing he reads is "inside business stuff" like Conspiracy of Fools and DisneyWar.

The other thing he mentioned was that everyone should be reading business media. Jack said everyone should have subscriptions to Fortune, Forbes, and BusinessWeek and be reading the Wall Street Journal every day. He said you should have opinions on what is going on in the world of business and be asking yourself what you would do in the reported stories.

Review: All Marketers Are Liars

All Marketers Are Liars
Author: Seth Godin

A Review
By Wayne Hurlbert, Blog Business World

"All marketers are liars".

With that provocative title and opening salvo, well known author, marketing expert, and business blogger Seth Godin takes the reader on another landmark journey into the marketing field.

After reading All Marketers Are Liars, your approach to marketing, advertising, and your own buying habits will never be the same again.

While Seth Godin begins with the disarming premise that marketing people are liars, he softens that stance to marketers are story tellers. Good marketers are story tellers, and like all great tales, myths, and fiction, the facts are not essential. What is really important to a good story is a universal truth.

The listener hears the story, and if it rings true to the person’s perceptions, the story becomes that of the listener. The person hearing the story internalizes the subjective truth of the story, and becomes part of the story. The facts don’t really matter. The listener hearing what is believed as truth is what really counts.

With that change of gears, Seth Godin postulates that it’s then the purchaser of the product or service who becomes the liar. The marketer tells the story. The potential customer creates the lie.

When we buy or consider purchasing a product or service, we lie to ourselves. We tell our inner persona, and how we view ourselves, that the marketer’s story is true. Seth expands that concept further, and says that the marketer must devise and live the story. In effect, the story becomes the truth for that business. The story is an act of creation for the business.

It’s our job as customers to incorporate that story into our own internal belief systems. In fact, it’s more than a job. It’s our part of our need to satisfy our egos about our beliefs, ideas, and of course our purchases. In the words of Seth Godin, it’s our worldview.

A person’s worldview is the lens through which all things are seen. Whether a person considers themself to be rugged and outdoorsy, suave and sophisticated, or up to date and a trendsetter, that is how all things related to the person’s life are seen. The worldview is the story the person internalizes about themselves. To Godin, all images, stories, and messages are framed within that worldview.

To Seth Godin, a worldview is the lie the person tells about themselves and their place in society. Those self told lies are the way that all marketing messages are processed by every individual. If the story told by the business fails to agree with our internal worldview, we ignore it. If the story is not heard, and accepted as true by enough people, the marketing message and the business fails. If no one creates the internal lie, the story lacks truth.

Our internal worldview, which frames all of our perceptions of things around us, determines if a story is true from our point of view. Seth understands that one person’s worldview is not like another. In fact, the book postulates one thousand worldviews held by millions of people. Worldviews range from a very few people to many millions. A wise story teller is one who finds the tale, that is true for many diverse worldviews.

A successful marketer needs only to have the business and product story accepted as truth by a fraction of them. If enough similar and overlapping worldviews internalize the truth of the story, the business and its products and services become a success.
All Marketers Are Liars is the third in the series, of landmark books on the process and psychology of marketing, by marketing expert Seth Godin. Following up the groundbreaking theories presented in Purple Cow and Free Prize Inside, Seth expands his philosophy to include more of the purchaser’s internal thought process. The two previous books outlined the necessity of standing out from the crowd, and providing a unique experience to the customer.

All Marketers Are Liars presents the need to create and live the company and its story. The book correctly defines the need for the buyer to become part of the story as well. By combining the lessons of all three books, the marketer can successfully create a unique business, spread the business idea, and now live the story of that business. As a group, the three books outline a powerful marketing strategy that involves both the company itself and its customers.

Not ignoring his own lessons, Seth Godin has added the buzz building touch of long Pinocchio style fake noses for his readers. As a meme, the noses build a story, and spread the book’s idea. Seth has also added a blog for the book at http://www.allmarketersareliars.com/ as he follows his own advice of utilizing blogs, as a tool for spreading the word

Are all marketers truly liars, or do the business customers the ones who create the lie? Seth answers that question very well with the fake liar’s noses. The reader wearing the nose has already internalized the story. It’s no longer a lie, but a true story. The reader listening to and understanding Seth Godin’s marketing philosophy, internalizes the book’s concepts of story telling, into her own worldview. The book and its story becomes a truth for that reader.

In fact, Seth Godin lives his own story.

What could be more true than that?

This Week - 5/23/05

Merry Monday to Everyone.

Today marks the beginning of the ninth Business Blog Book Tour. The book featured on this tour will be All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin.

Things have already started up at Brand Autopsy. I will be pointing people to the stops throughout the week. You can also find the whole schedule on the BBBT site.

I made one change to this tour. You will notice that neither A Penny For... or 800-CEO-READ are on the tour. Call it evolution in the tour. We will keep organizing them, but I think it is better to have readers interacting with the authors on these tours.

In other news, we are running a excerpt from Enlightened Power over on the Excerpt Blog. The book is a series on essays on how women are transforming the concept of leadership. The essay we have chosen is by Cynthia Cunningham and Shelley Murray. It is about their job-sharing of a VP post at Fleet Boston.

I posted alot of audio last week and I will be putting up another excerpt this week. I will probably do it today to make sure it gets done.

You can expect alot of the normal stuff this week too.

Next week, Jack and I are off to Book Expo America so it might be a little light with the holiday and our traveling.

Enjoy your week!

The Currency of Bankruptcy

A number of recent hearings, articles, and other events have given new currency, so to speak, to a recently touted personal finance title, All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Plan. What’s new? The passage of the bankruptcy bill, for one, as well as the recent Senate hearing on the implications of this bill on credit card disclosure. In addition, both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have published excellent articles on the key trends concerning troubling personal finance trends, the myth of class mobility, and the explosion of personal debt in the U.S.

Consider the following quote from the May 17 Journal article. “For Americans who aren’t getting a big boost from workplace raises, easy credit offers a way to get ahead, at least for the moment. To some, the expansion of credit is a milestone of democracy, giving middle- and lower-income people financial flexibility that only the rich used to enjoy. Others see the borrowing binge as a way for average households to make up for sluggish growth in income over the past several decades. Since 1990, income for the median American household has risen only 11% after adjusting for inflation, while median household spending has jumped at 30%, according to an analysis by Economy.com. How could the typical family afford to spend so much? Median household debt outstanding has jumped by 80%.”

We recently mentioned several worthy personal finance titles. Now, given the continuing debate over the structure of personal debt and its role in the economy, it seems like a good time to check back in with co-authors Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi of All Your Worth. By the way, another excellent book on this topic is Credit Card Nation by Robert Manning, a strident and convincing effort which is backed by an excellent website.

Q) Please explain how your background in the broader financial landscape
affects your advice to individuals.

A) Elizabeth is a professor at the Harvard Law School. She’s been doing original empirical research since 1981. Amelia has an MBA from Wharton, and she is a former consultant with McKinsey and Company. Together, we embarked on innovative research into the financial state of the modern American family. What we found alarmed us. The rules of money have changed, and families—millions of ordinary, hard-working, middle-class people with good educations and decent jobs—are living on the financial edge. It became very clear that the old harangues to “use double coupons” and “just save more” aren’t cutting it. To get ahead in today’s economy, families Americans need specific tools that help them take control over all their spending –from the mortgage right down to the tube of toothpaste.

Q) How does the recent passage of the bankruptcy bill affect the advice you
give in your book?

A) It makes us want to shout the advice from the rooftops—with a bullhorn! The safety net is fraying, and that means families need to take stronger steps to protect themselves. This bill means that there is even less margin for error, and that Americans need to be savvier than ever if they are going to get ahead.

Q) Your book rebuts the received wisdom of most books about personal finance. Without naming names, what would you say are the worst sins of personal finance titles? What types of commonly touted wisdom would you caution folks to avoid above all?

A) Worst advice: Cut out the lattes, save a few pennies here and a few nickels there, and all your financial problems will magically disappear. The truth is, if you can’t afford a latte, you can’t afford your life. You are in need of a comprehensive overhaul. Not only is the “latte problem” not real (as the data prove), it is dangerous. This advice has encouraged millions of Americans to spend all their time focusing on the pennies, while ignoring their real problem – they are spending too many dollars on big-ticket items. But this advice continues to get shelled out, not because it is true, but because it is so much easier to shake a finger over too many frivolous things without giving any hard advice on how to take control over the things that really matter.

Second worst advice: Put a second mortgage on your house to pay off credit card bills. The advisers do a few quick calculations and claim you can save a few dollars on interest. They never mention that if anything goes wrong and you can’t pay all those bills, you will lose the roof over your head! Credit card companies can’t take your home, but home equity lenders sure can; that’s the only reason they give those preferred rates to begin with.

Third worst advice: To get into the stock market, you must spend zillions of hours researching stocks and bonds and hundreds of new financial gizmos (or hire someone who will spend zillions of hours on your behalf). This is absurd—and it keeps people on the sidelines when they should just jump in. A simple indexed mutual fund will do the trick for most people, and it takes only a few minutes to shop for.

Flat World Manifesto

OverMatter has pretty much posted the entire Thomas Friedman article from New York Times Magazine. For those looking for a introduction to The World Is Flat, this is a great start.

Bill Gates Writing New Book

Many of the topics that Gates is expected to cover in his book includes themes around improving the way individuals and corporations collect and manage the increasing volume of data made available through technology.

There is no date yet for publication.

[via Reuters on Yahoo! News]

Publishers Push in the Blogosphere

This article from the The Book Standard attributes bloggers and their reviews to the success of Freakonomics.

I will tell you that I track certain titles to see what people are saying and the level of conversation with Freakonomics was on par with Blink when it first came out.

If you were one who got a copy from William Morrow, leave a comment. Did you review it on your blog? Do you think it was the right book for the blogosphere? Would you accept books from other publishers?

Attn: Tom Peters Fans

Tom Peters has started a new linkblog called TP Wire Service.

I have subscribed and have been enjoying the links. It is a collection of things from all over the net that match TP's attitude and energy. Today you will find everything from the Google Factory Tour to Freeing Your Inner Think Tank.

Check it out.

Another Personal MBA List(s)

I ran across another blogger inspired by Seth's comments about being able to get a MBA by reading 30 books.

On the OverMatter list, you will find lots of Godin, Drucker, Kawasaki, and Ries/Trout. What is also cool is he has done a great job of pulling together links of others who have created personal MBA lists.

The Story of Success

When Todd and I talk with authors and publishers about what a book needs, we always say a good beginning. Nobody has the time to struggle getting “into” a book. You need to start with something compelling. Check this out from forthcoming title called The Story of Success.

“This is a book about story and the ethical role storytelling pays in our lives—particularly our lives in organizations. So let me begin with a tale from an unusual workplace. I borrow it from a participant at one of my Stories for Leaders seminars, a principal in a West Coast marketing consultancy who recalled an exchange he had with an employee of his “oldest client,” a cemetery with which he was working at the time. He reports hearing the following from a “counselor” (salesperson):

A guy call me for a pre-need arrangement. That’s what they call buying your funeral before you die. He says on the phone, “How fast can I choose a plot, buy a casket, and pay for everything?” I tell him we can do it immediately. He shows up in an hour. The guy is only 45 years old and looks reasonably healthy. I take him up the hill to our latest property. That’s what they call a gravesite. I tell him what the opening and closing costs will be. Opening and closing costs means digging the grave and then shoveling the dirt back in after the burial.

I then take him to the casket room. He chooses the most expensive casket, measuring to see how well he will fit into it. He makes all his decision. He then asks me for the paperwork. I tell him that it will take a few hours to prepare and that I will send it to him the next day. “No,” he says emphatically. “I need it now.”

I look at him: “May I ask why you are in such a rush?” “Yes, you may,” he answers. “When I am done here, I’m going home to commit suicide.” I look back at him and say, “I’m a commission salesman. The deal has to be in effect for seven days in order for me to receive my commission. I’ve spent hours with you and if you commit suicide today, I won’t get my commission.”
The guy waited because of me. I got him help. He’s still alive. And I got my commission.

Most of us have only passing interaction with cemetery counselors, and prefer it that way. We do not spontaneously locate our notions of ethical practice at the cemetery—in fact, we generally assume that we have gotten that far, it’s too late to redeem ourselves through virtuous acts. Yet cemeteries, too, need to be managed, so this grave story speaks to questions that The Story of Success raises and hopes to answer for business and management.”

Understand that I have just started the book and it isn’t due to be published until September but I really liked this beginning.

Lots to Listen To...

My blog work today mostly involved getting three posts up on the Podcasts Blog.

You will find an interview and two audiobook excerpts (here and here) are now available for download.

Enjoy!

Jack Covert Selects--The World is Flat

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century By Thomas L. Friedman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 480 Pages, $27.50 Hardcover, April 2005, ISBN 0374292884

Tom Friedman, three time Pulitzer Prize recipient, has written an impressive book on the "brief history of the Twenty-First Century." It is not only about globalization but more about how we got where we are today. This is a book that isn’t necessarily a “business book” per se, but it is a book business people truly need to read. Why? This book shows us that you can’t react to a situation until you know as much as you can about the situation. I expect that this won’t be the last word on globalization but I expect it will be the best written book on the subject. I have read all of Tom Friedman’s books and he is a great storyteller in the sense of “sitting around the campfire” storytelling. This book effectively paints a clear picture of complexities like foreign policy and economic issues. It also investigates the impact of developing countries, geopolitical issues and companies on the world we live in.

Here is an example of his take on outsourcing:

“The relatively high standard of living that she can now enjoy—enough for a small apartment and car in Bangalore—is good for America as well. When you look around 24/7’s call center, you see that all the computers are running Microsoft Windows. The chips are designed by Intel. The phones are from Lucent. The air-conditioning is by Carrier, and even the bottled water is from Coke. In addition, 90% of the shares in 24/7 are owned by U.S. investors. This explains why, although the United States has lost some customer service jobs to India in recent years, total exports from American-based companies—merchandise and services—to India have grown from $2.5 billion in 1990 to $5 billion in 2003. So even with the outsourcing of some service jobs from the United States to India, India’s growing economy is creating a demand for many more American goods and services.”
Here is a blog post about Open Source. http://www.800ceoread.com/blog/archives/001087.html

I understand that this subject is not without controversy, but if you want to read a book that is not only well written, but laid out logically, and if you are interested in changes that will affect us all, this is the book for you. It's not only informative, but demystifies many issues which will make reacting to changes in our global community easier for individuals, companies, communities and governments alike.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE MONTHLY BOOK REVIEWS, PLEASE SEND AN EMAIL TO JACK AT 800-CEO-READ.COM.

Is this good or bad?

Shawn at Everything or Nothing writes:

Todd at 800.CEO.READ sent me Make Your Own Luck as my free book for sending in a birthday greeting during their birthday celebration. But I'm begining to think I like reading what they write about business books more than I like actually reading the books sometimes.

Now, this could put us in a bit of a predicament. We keep these blogs going to keep you all updated about everything going on in business books. We also hope you'll buy one or two along the way.

I am not sure what we will do if we figure out the blogs are actually hurting sales.

:)

All Marketers Are Liars Giveaway

We have put together a little deal with Seth and his new book All Marketers Are Liars.

If you buy two or more copies of the book, you will get a free copy of Seth's new e-book KNOCK KNOCK.

KNOCK KNOCK is Seth Godin's incomplete guide to web design.

Provocative, useful and short (three key things in an ebook) Knock Knock pulls no punches as it explains exactly how you can make any website work better. Using case studies, unsupported intuition and a few vivid examples, the author explains what your technical people refuse to.

40 pages, profusely illustrated. This book is a PDF and is a sneak preview. A free version will be distributed in September.

You can also buy the ebook itself for $9 by clicking on this button:

So you can buy it direct, free with a couple of copies of AMAL or wait until September. The choice is yours.

Jack Covert Selects--By the Seat of Your Pants

By the Seat of Your Pants: The No-Nonsense Business Management Guide by Tom Gegax with Phil Bolsta, Expert Publishing, 400 Pages, $47.00 Hardcover, April 2005, ISBN 1931945160

I have worked with the author's PR people in the past so when they sent me the manuscript six months ago, I excitedly picked it up. Then I read for about an hour and put it down because there was just too much information. When they called me to ask my opinion, I told them that I thought they needed an editor because they had six books in one. They said the book was selling for $47 and they wanted the book to be looked at as a handbook. Then I went back and realized that what Gegax—I just love to say his name—had done was to put together one of the best guides to running a business. And he should know: Tom Gegax made his money with Tires Plus, which he sold in 2000 to a multinational firm after it grew to a market leader in the Midwest. The book consists of a whopping sixty plus chapters. Each chapter deals with an issue any manager will have to face during his/her career. This is one of those books I wish I had years ago when I started the odyssey I have been on the past twenty odd—very odd—years.
I am not going to list all the chapters, but rest assured that this book is very well organized which makes it a wonderful reference tool as well. Just a sample form some of the topics covered extensively and in a fresh way in the hiring section:

• Finding the best people
• Stripping the Guesswork Out of Hiring
• Squeezing Even More Secrets Out of Interviews
• Welcoming New Hires
• Pointing Underachievers Towards the Exits

At the end of each chapter are takeaways that have true lasting value. This is a book that will live on your bookshelf for a long time.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE MONTHLY BOOK REVIEWS, PLEASE SEND AN EMAIL TO JACK AT 800-CEO-READ.COM.

Thanks for the Response

We had a great response from everyone of on my request for reviewers on What Is Your Life's Work? We have more than enough people now.

I will be getting back with everyone today or tomorrow with details.

A Beautiful Book

How a book is packaged can make all the difference.

HarperBusiness has re-released the 1949 text of Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor and the book is gorgeous. I don't think the picture does it justice. They used great red cloth on the covers. There is no dust jacket. There is a simple plate on the front with the title and author and a plate on the back with a summary and author information. The pages are rough cut. I love the whole package.

I think it is a perfect gift for the investor in your life.

Daily Drucker - May 12th

The Manufacturing Paradox

How do you get far more output with far fewer workers?

The most believable forecast for 2020 suggests that manufacturing output in the developed countries will at least double, while manufacturing employment will shrink to 10 to 12 percent of the total workforce. What has changed manufacturing, and sharply pushed up productivity, are new concepts, such as "lean manufacturing." Information and automation are less important than new theories of manufacturing, which are an advance comparable to the arrival of mass production eighty years ago.

The decline in manufacturing as a creator of wealth and jobs will inevitably bring about a new protectionism, once again echoing what happened earlier in agriculture. The fewer farm votes there are, the more important the "farm vote" has become. As numbers have shrunk, farmers have become a unified special-interest group that carries disaproportionate clout in all rich countries.

ACTION POINT: Determine the rate of growth in output per person in your manufacturing or operations functions. Is your organization experiencing the manufacturing paradox? Recommend programs for retraining excess manufacturing workers.

This from The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done by Peter F. Drucker

Review: Freakonomics

This review was submitted by Dave Taylor, a prolific blogger and author, parenting advocate and fast typist. You can learn more about him at http://www.intuitive.com/.

FREAKONOMICS: A Rogue Economist Explores The Hidden Side of Everything by Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner, William Morrow, 2005

I really wanted to like this book. There's a lot about how economist Steven
Levitt thinks that I resonate with, and the free association of how seeming
unrelated things interrelate is certainly reminiscent of one of my favorite
authors, James Burke and his best-selling and immensely entertaining book
"Connections."

But I didn't like Freakonomics, for a variety of reasons, the first being
that nowhere in the writing or editorial process did anyone bother to
mention to the authors that modesty trumps egocentric writing. Between the
introduction to the book and the chapter introductions, Levitt has more ego
strokes (which is to say we're trapped having to read about him) than any
other living author I've encountered in thirty years of voracious reading.

Economists tend to be very focused on numbers. You could reasonably observe
that all economists are "quants", they quantify things, they believe facts
if the numbers support them and disbelieve theories or "qualitative"
information. Quants don't like anything that's not quantifiable. And that's
the fundamental flaw of this book: everything in life cannot, in fact, be
reduced to measurable numbers and data fed into regression algorithms.

Rather surprisingly, though Levitt and Dubner criticize others about being
unable to separate correlation and causal data, they too slip into this
basic analytic error too. For example, "it turns out that obstetricians in
areas with declining birth rates are much more likely to perform cesarean-
section deliveries than obstetricians in growing areas -- suggesting that,
when business is tough, doctors try to ring up more expensive procedures."
Catch the logic error here? There are in fact many other reasons why the
perceived risk of childbirth could increase in an area with a declining
birth rate, including and an aging of the population, a factor that can
easily increase birth risk even as the birth rate declines.

What's missing in the analyses is that there are random, chaotic, and
apparently unrelated causes for behaviors. In addition to IQ, for example,
healthy successful adults also can be measured on more qualitative scales
like the so-called "emotional intelligence quotient" of EQ.

These are the fundamental ideas embodied in this book: incentives are the
cornerstone of modern life, the conventional wisdom is often wrong, dramatic
effects often have distant, even subtle, causes, "experts" - from
criminologists to real estate agents, use their informational advantage to
serve their own agenda, and the mantra of quants, knowing what to measure
and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.

Do teachers help students cheat on tests? The answer is "no", unless the
test also affects the economic well being of the teacher (think standardized
tests and their built-in incentive systems). Then the answer becomes "yes",
as is eloquently explained in Freakonomics. But, again, too much quant trips
up the discussion, when it is confidently asserted that a dramatic one-year
spike in test scores can be attributed to a good teacher, but when there's a
dramatic fall to follow, it's probably cheating. Working with lots of
teachers myself, I disagree. I have seen time and again how an inspirational
teacher will encourage students to stretch, to get out of their comfort
zones, and attain remarkable results. Once they leave that teacher and go
back into the grist mill of modern education, their results plummet. Looked
at analytically, is the good teacher 'cheating' by inspiring their students?
Levitt seems to think so...

Freakonomics also discusses the rise in power, and later drop in power, of
the Klu Klux Klan, observing that its power was "largely derived from the
fact that it hoarded information" and that the KKK saw a precipitous drop in
membership once its secrets were aired publicly. The story is fascinating
and well-written, but the conclusion is dangerously false. Hate groups don't
gain power because of secret, hoarded information, they gain power by
reinforcing the existing hates and biases of potential members. That is,
people who were Klan members might have quit due to the troubling inability
of the leadership to keep Klan information secret, but it didn't change
whether or not any given Klan member hated certain ethnic minorities, and it
certainly didn't affect whether these people would be willing to don a robe
and try to intimidate or harass someone. It's more a loss of brand luster
than anything more significant, but that seems to pass Levitt by.

Another remarkable analytic error: the book analyzes the likelihood that
people who profile themselves for online dating sites distort the truth,
without ever acknowledging that there's no reason to believe that the
members of an online dating site are in fact representative of the
population at large. That being concluded, it isn't as damning to find from
analysis that "more than four percent of online daters claimed to earn more
than $200,000 year, whereas fewer than one percent of typical Internet users
actually earn that much."

The main reason I was asked to review Freakonomics, however, was because I'm
an outspoken advocate of attachment parenting (see my parenting blog at
http://www.Apparenting.com/ to learn my biases) and half of Freakonomics
wrestles - unsuccessfully - with the question of What Makes a Perfect
Parent?

In a classic case of using what I call "Limbaugh Logic", Levitt, a
self-avowed expert (which is reinforced time and again in this book) says
that experts "don't so much argue the various sides of an issue as plant his
flag firmly on one side." Which is, of course, exactly what Levitt does
throughout this book too, though his flag has the motto "numbers are facts"
emblazoned upon it.

To understand how Levitt approaches parenthood, imagine Mr. Spock from the
popular TV show "Star Trek" was raising a child. He'd carefully analyze all
the facts associated with a behavior, draw the conclusion most supported by
the "facts", and be baffled why others aren't following the same approach.
The discussion of the statistical facts surrounding fear of flying and the
safety of flying versus driving have just this tone, with Levitt asking
almost plaintively why people are afraid to fly when driving is,
statistically, equally dangerous.

Are airbags dangerous to small children? Levitt notes that "fewer than five
children a year have been killed by airbags since their introduction"
without ever acknowledging that *the warnings that parents keep their
children away from airbags* have a clear and significant affect on this
yardstick. The question is how many kids would be killed by airbags if there
were no warnings, but that's not examined.

There's a big flaw in the reasoning presented that becomes clear in the
parenting section too: conclusions are drawn from the analysis of data based
on various studies, but just like medical research, there's no discussion of
what criteria were used to evaluate the base research. Was that study on
children growing up to be criminals funded by a liberal think-tank or a
conservative pro-imprisonment organization? Was the data upon which so much
is based regarding the efficacy of parenting techniques based on research
funded by a group with a particular view they sought to promote? If you
don't think that this is a critical part of evaluating modern research,
you're asleep at the analytic wheel.

In the discussion of test results (which Levitt correlates to various
positive or negative parenting techniques) a startling lack is any
discussion of cultural or ethnic bias *in the test itself*. For example, one
of the factors that correlates strongly with high test scores is "The
children's parents speak English in the home". But that's only true if the
test is given in English. So concluding or even highlighting that parents
who speak English correlate strongly with children who have higher test
scores is fundamentally flawed.

Falling deep into the well of quant thinking, Levitt also draws the
correlation from the data that whether a family is intact doesn't seem to
matter (in terms of being a good parent. Remember, the question isn't "what
approach to parenting produces children who test well") and that parents
splitting up "has little impact on a child's personality" or "academic
abilities." But what of emotional intelligence? What of the *experience of
childhood*? Hard to quantify, sure, but that's exactly my point. In a world
that's purely quantitative, major measures are ignored, and Freakonomics is
a powerful example of this error.

It should be no surprise that the authors conclude that nurture is not of
much importance in parenting, and that it's nature that's more important. As
Levitt says "this is not to say that parents don't matter... [but] most of
the things that matter were decided long ago - who you are, whom you
married, what kind of life you lead." This is a dangerous line of thinking,
and the very fact that modern parents are striving to create a maximally
nurturing environment for their children is a tremendous boon for our
generation and future generations. It's easy to forget the dramatic changes
in how children are reared and limit the discussion to that which we have
data for, but self-enlightenment always brings about positive change in
society, whether we can quantify it or not.

The book ends oddly, too, by turning the analytic technique on its head for
the ability to make what is ostensibly an ironic observation about how
nurture doesn't guarantee outcome: the poor black child profiled in the book
grew up to be a Harvard economist, and the wealthy white child became the
Unibomber. But so what? It's a trivial matter to isolate a single anomolous
case from any dataset and suggest it proves a postulate. It's just very,
very weak science.

Freakonomics is a very interesting book to read. Skip the introduction and
ask someone to rip out the chapter introductions, then write across the
cover "The World Is Not Quantifiable" and you'll have a fascinating read,
without being lulled into the false confidence of the quant. Or just
highlight the sentence in the introduction where the authors explain their
ultimate bias: "Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people
like the world to work - whereas economics represents how it actually does
work."

----

Dave Taylor is a prolific blogger and author, parenting advocate and fast
typist. You can learn more about him at http://www.intuitive.com/.

Book Reviewers Needed

I am looking for some book reviewers again.

I want to run a series of reviews on What is Your Life's Work? by Bill Jensen.

"What Is Your Life's Work? captures a most extraordinary moment in each of our lives -- the time when we sit down with loved ones and attempt to answer the big question about what really matters. Bill Jensen has created a wonderfully practical space for you to explore who you are, what you stand for, what you believe in, what's risky, what's not, what's worth it, what you're struggling with, and what you've accomplished."

I have a number of copies and would post your reviews here on the 8cr blog.

If you are interested, send me a note with your address to todd at 800ceoread dot com.

Berrett-Koehler Offers Direct Public Offering

Berrett-Koehler Group is offering individuals a chance to invest in their company. Through their Direct Public Offering, parties can buy shares for $8 a piece with a minimum investment of 100 shares. The company plans to use the money to expand its offering, increase marketing efforts, and pay down debt. Their book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is doing pretty well right now and a good example of the types of books they do.

[Story from Publishers Weekly]

Business Book Smarts

“Action item.” “Impactful.” “Value add.” “Synergistic.” “Stakeholder.”

Admit it. You’ve used at least one of those business ambiguous words at work in the past week. It’s not your fault. So say the authors of WHY BUSINESS PEOPLE SPEAK LIKE IDIOTS (Free Press, 2005).

Instead, it’s the fault of today's business culture which seemingly rewards vagueness, conformity, and dullness in business communication.

As employees, we’ve lost our human voice in favor of hollow and non-committal jargon. The business culture we live in has conditioned us not to use straight-forward language for fear it will be off-putting to others or make us look less intelligent.

We use jargon as a way to say something without saying anything that will be committal and potentially polarizing. And we risk sounding less smart when using simple and real words. (How else to explain why we’d rather say “Activate pilot program” and not “Let’s get started.”)

The authors of WHY BUSINESS PEOPLE SPEAK LIKE IDIOTS give practical advice on how best to avoid the common trappings of business ambiguous words by injecting personality, humor, and clarity in one’s work life.

As a companion to the book, the authors have also created a nifty software program, Bullfighter (free download), which can sniff out and eliminate jargon in your work documents.

To help make sure your next PowerPoint presentation doesn’t fall victim to conformity and dullness, follow Cliff Atkinson’s advice in BEYOND BULLET POINTS (Microsoft Press, 2005).

Cliff advises creating presentations like film directors create movies. That is … start with a script, create frame-by-frame storyboards, and use dramatic images to connect with your audience.

Hollywood creates powerful and engaging presentations, no reason business professionals can’t do the same using PowerPoint. Yes, using PowerPoint.

For a no nonsense approach to creating effective PowerPoint presentations, read Seth Godin’s e-book REALLY BAD POWERPOINT (.pdf).

Seth is an advocate of less is more thinking when it comes to presentations. He advises creating slides which reinforces and doesn’t repeat what you say. Seth also recommends using no more than six words per slide and using powerful images to emotionally tell your story.

It’ll take you few extra minutes to ditch the jargon for real words with real meaning and to go beyond bullet points. However, the reward is huge -- you’ll be recognized as someone who connects with everybody and be viewed as a star at work.

Business Book Smarts is an intermittent series of posts designed to not only be a source for good business books, but also a resource for how to better approach work situations. The author, johnmoore, is a marketing medic with the Brand Autopsy Marketing Practice and has worked deep inside the marketing departments of Starbucks Coffee and Whole Foods Market.

Brainstorming Books from WSJ

In yesterday's Journal Report, the topic was small business. Included in the coverage was a list of books to help individuals brainstorm new business ideas.

• The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen
• The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World by Peter Schwartz
• New Business Ventures and the Entrepreneur by Howard H. Stevenson, Michael J. Roberts and Harold Irving Grousbeck
• Crossing the Chasm by Geoffery Moore
• Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure by Jerry Kaplan
• Good to Great by Jim Collins
• Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 by Annalee Saxenian

The article also gives some commentary from Jerome Engel, professor at UC-Berkley.

Books for A Penny

The Wall Street Journal has an article today about