800-CEO-READ Blog

For New Hires: Sink or Swim Week 4

Welcome back to the SOS blog at 800-CEO-READ.

Here is some interesting data and disconnect:

According to National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) Employers expect their college hiring for 2005-06 to surpass that of 2004-05 by 13.8 percent. Unemployment rate at a low 4.7% in April, Signing bonuses, which waned in popularity as the economy stumbled, have returned in several industries.

Sixty-five percent of employers in 2005-06 are offering signing bonuses for technology-related positions, according to a poll by Mercer Human Resource Consulting.

Overall, there is an increase in chatter from employers that hiring is becoming more of a challenge.

But despite the heated job market, complaints from companies that they are challenged to find enough employees, Mercer Human Resource Consulting found that only 44% of employees ages 18 to 24 believe they are treated fairly on the job (compared with 64% of employees ages 45 to 55.

Why is there still such a dis-connect between employees and the company’s that need them?

Whatever You Think Review by Rob Marsh

Review of Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite
By Paul Arden, Penguin, April 2006

Paul Arden’s latest book, Whatever You Think, Think The Opposite, is the kind of book I want to like. It’s written by a former Creative Director at Saatchi & Saatchi. It features lots of pictures and short bursts of thought. It’s even got a great cover. Flipping through the pages, it looks like a lot of fun to read.

I want to like it, but I don’t. This book is lousy.

Okay, that’s pretty harsh. But stick with me. Arden’s book claims to share “no-nonsense career advice that can be applied to almost every field.� Here are a few examples of what you’ll find in the book. One spread titled, “Half Nelson Full Nelson�, features two photographs of a statue of Lord Nelson, one on a tall pedestal, the other on a much smaller pedestal. The no non-sense career advice reads: “If Nelson had been placed on a small pedestal, would he be only half the man he is today?� Another page features a prominent red arrow pointing to the bottom of the page and says, “Turn this book up side down.� Doing this makes it easier to read the caption under the arrow, “Things are looking up already.� Another page simply says, “Bread. You know it makes sandwiches.�

These are the “radical insights� of a “global business guru�?

Actually, the advice gets worse. “Don’t go to university.� And “Being bottom or near the bottom has merit.� And a contrived comparison between reckless Erica who bulldozes her way through several organizations, getting fired three times and steady Eddie who happily moves up the corporate ladder only to miss out on the final promotion that would make his career.

I get what Arden is trying to do here. He’s saying take chances. Be creative. Think differently. The problem is, he doesn’t say it very well.

Fortunately there are books that deliver on Arden’s promise, including Sally Hogshead’s Radical Careering (a well-designed, well-thought-out book of career advice) and Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie (in my opinion the best book on creativity ever written). Or if you’re looking for interesting ideas from the world of advertising, try Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy, Hey Whipple, Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan, or Creative Company by Andy Law. All good books full of interesting ideas. And unlike Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite, these books are worth the money.

One thing about Arden’s book is correct. If you’re thinking of buying it, think the opposite.

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Reviewed by Rob Marsh

Whatever You Think Review by John Brothers

Review of Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite
By Paul Arden, Penguin, April 2006

In some ways, this book is remarkably inspiring. In other ways, it is quite frustrating.

For me, the principle behind the book, which isn't really apparent from the title is: Break the "rules" and do things your way. This echoes many of the current business books - Purple Cow, for instance, which emphasizes that never taking a risk is in many ways the riskiest decision of all. In all honesty, I probably wouldn't have picked this book off of the shelf on my own. Which is a pity, because it is a wonderful blend of striking images and words that manages to deliver a lot of philosophy in a little over a hundred pages, many of which have almost no text at all.

I found this book inspirational, because it helped me feel better about some of the risky things I am doing with my life right now. For example, I'm writing a trilogy of novels in my spare time, while I work at a startup business, and run a set of blogs and a couple "microbusinesses" on the side. There are days when I have thought 'You are in way over your head'. Yesterday, for instance. But reading this book, gave me a new perspective on what I am doing, and whether it really is reckless and foolish, or just a new way to approach my business life. Also, normally I would have simply mentioned 'projects', without saying what they were, but another message from the book is to be proud of what you are doing and trying to accomplish. Already, this book is changing my life :)

I also found this book to be frustrating, primarily because the people who need to read it, who desperately need to be shaken out of their 40 year carerer-slumber will find it frightening, simplistic and lacking in relevance. Some will even say 'I believe in the premise, but how does this apply to my life?' . They have spent so long following other people's recipes that they no longer know how to write their own.

So - if you are comfortable with risk, if you are excited at the prospect of a 'leap of faith', if you refuse to live a "dignified" life, I bet you will find this book inspirational, challenging and fun, and it may just inspire you to take that next chance that you were hesitating on. But if you are looking for a book that will give you a roadmap of which risks to take, and which ones to avoid for your specific career goals, this book won't help you, and it will seem like useless fluff.

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Reviewed by John Brothers

The book reviews continue...

Several people have been reviewing various business books. Today I'll be posting two reviews on the book Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite. The reviewers, John Brothers and Rob Marsh will give you two different perspectives of the book.

Here's John's review.

Here's Rob's.

Business Book Links

Dana in Green Bay wonders why more people don't do business book clubs?

IT Conversations has talks from Peter Navarro (The Well-Timed Strategy), Jason Fried (Getting Real), and Steven Johnson (Everything Bad Is Good For You).

Future Tense at Corante has a interesting post titled A Reading List For Aspiring Knowledge Workers.

Words of Woz

To truly appreciate the screen you're currently staring at, you need to know its founder -- Steve Wozniak. One of the reasons you're able to have a computer or two in your house.

This autumn, he's publishing his memoir cleverly titled: I Woz: How I Invented the Personal Computer and Had Fun Along the Way.

Check out BusinessWeek editor Hardy Green's interview with Wozniak on the book, Woz's history and various other tidbits.

Jack at Duct Tape Marketing

Last week, John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing interviewed our own Jack Covert. The interview was posted as a podcast today. Jack talks about the origins of many things including our name and recommends books for small business folks. It is 22 minutes and will give you the essence of 800ceoread.

This Week (and Last) - 5/30/06

For those of you in the U.S. not taking the rest of Memorial Day week off, we will have some new stuff for you. I first need to catch on some things we put up at the end of last week.

There was a new issue of ChangeThis published on Thursday. I really like this issue. We have added some editorial horsepower on our end and I think you will start seeing some great stuff. I would encourage you to check out all of this month's manifestos:

• Killer Instinct by Joe Finder - Best selling thriller novelist, Joseph Finder, introduces us to a dynamic (though fictional) sales expert, Jason Steadman, to illustrate key techniques for selling with killer instinct.
• Crafter's Manifesto by Ulla-Maaria Mutanen - Ulla-Maaria Mutanen explores the increasing popularity of crafting in this celebratory call-to-arms to everyone who enjoys getting their hands dirty once in awhile.
• Management Advice: Which 90% Is Crap by Bob Sutton - The way business advice is sold today makes it difficult to cull the good from the bad. With refreshing candidness, Bob Sutton shows how to divine diamonds from dust with these guidelines.
• The Eyeball Artisian by Chris Ballard - Sports Illustrated columnist Chris Ballard offers an inspiring story of an unusual man who loves an unusual job. This excerpt from Ballard's book, The Butterfly Hunter, is certain to ignite your search to find your true calling.
• Owner's Guide to Difficulties by Peter Albert - When you feel the tension building in that space between your shoulder blades, or you lay in bed at night unable to stop that film replaying all the days stresses, use Peter Albert's techniques for handling all life's difficulties.
• The Rewritten Rules of Management by Tom Ehrenfeld - In this hard-charging manifesto, Tom Ehrenfeld directs our attention to Bill Swanson's act of plagiarism and asserts that by letting Swanson get by with a slap on the wrist is like letting the Enron folks off with a small fine and a few hours of community service.

I also quietly posted an interview with Bill Welter, author of The Prepared Mind of A Leader. This was the last piece of the Prepared Mind World Tour. It is a great summary for those who have been reading along and those who want a slice of what the book is about.

We'll have more to talk about in this short week. Stay Tuned...

Check Out My Website for Your Free "Reality Check Audit"

My goal is to make it easier for customer zealots and leaders to do this work and to advance the cause for customer experience and customer profitability. If you go to my website www.customerbliss.com, you’ll find a toolkit that outlines the key things I’ve learned this past 25 years of pushing the rock up the hill. And if you click on “Reality Check Audit�, I’ll send you a complete summary of your ‘to do’ list for driving customer focus and customer leadership. It’s an audit of the actions your company should be taking to drive the action. You can take it yourself, have your leadership take it and your company…and in doing so find out where to begin your quest, identify the potholes and get the action moving.

I wish you all the best in your quest to drive the focus on customers inside your organization. My goal is to keep providing you with support and help and in that way – have my hand in the small of your back prodding you on.

Jeanne Bliss
Customer Crusader
Redmond, Washington

To Get More Information and Help...

Please check out my book: Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action. It is packed with real-world experiences you’ll recognize and practical and realistic actions you can t ake right from the page to action.

Also take a look at Fred Reichheld’s Book - The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth. Reichheld advocates using the “Would you Recommend?� question to customers as a key indicator of driving profitability. You’ll find th at my book complements and agrees with his concept…and puts forth some concrete ideas on how to execute on the concept – in the real world of the corporate machine. For example; one thing to watch out for is to ensure that you don’t just use the referral question to get a good Net Promoter™ score. My concern is that companies are already getting precariously close to using this powerful tool to game the system and work for the score rather than where it should drive companies to improve and change. Asking the question without going back and clarifying the issues with customers on why they did or did not or would not recommend you won’t get your company to change. I’m already hearing of companies out there who are starting to prod their customers, “call us if you can’t say you’d recommend us.� It would be a shame for this to fall into another number that’s “gamed� – rather than used to get the company to drive action for customers.

My other favorite book that complements and gives meat on the bones to the concept of customer profitability is Managing Customers as Investments by Sunil Gupta and Donald R. Lehmann.

If your goal is to take action to drive your company closer to customers …these three books click-together well to give you strong concepts, real-world advice and practical application for driving customer focus yielding customer profitability for your corporate machine.

Do You Need A Chief Customer Officer?

Some CEOs are considering the creation of a C-level position to drive the action for customer experience and customer profitability. However, beyond the notion that it’s a good idea, not many know how to structure the Chief Customer Officer role and its place in the organization. Here are some thoughts to help you proceed.

Suggesting a CCO may seem frivolous to leaders who believe they already focus on customers. There’s often a proliferation of tactics and projects underway…the problem is they don’t amount to anything significant for customers. So first decide: will leaders be okay with someone (other than themselves) driving consensus on customer strategy and deliverables? You may be saying, “We have consensus now.� I’m sure that you’ve had some good meetings, but how much of it stuck? When they were over, did everyone return to their respective corners and business as usual? Getting company alignment is tricky. You may need someone full time to ensure it exists for your direc tion with customers.

What about sustaining the work? After the first and second meeting of what I call “the funky task force� on the customer work, people start to lose interest. You know these meetings. The kick-off has forty people at the table, some who clamored for an invite. One month later, six regularly show up. And the person who got the job to run the task force layered on top of his/her “regular� job? Well, they’re losing interest fast. Driving this work needs hard-wired participation. Do you have headcount and staff time commitments to drive it forward?

Now to the roadmap and action plan: let’s discuss the sticky wicket of “how� to move past the hoopla of meetings and empty commitments. Do you have a central roadmap that everyone follows on how you’ll drive the customer work and measure progress? I didn’t think so. How about consistent metrics everyone agrees to? We have metrics galore in our companies and of course the ‘customer’ is now on our scorecards. But these are typically neither clear nor connected down to the operational level. Roles and responsibilities and holding people accountable are a slippery slope in the customer work. This is about the hand-offs between the silos. Most companies need a task list that clearly states what each part of the organization will do and when to get the priorities accomplished. But most don’t have one. Do you?

Is funding customer projects like pulling teeth? This may be due to duplicate spending across the organization. Everything is pitched as an individual program from inside the silos. At planning time these investments are often vulnerable in the first round of budget cuts. Why? Because each project shows up as a one-off tactic. There’s rarely an annual plan for understanding and managing customers as a key corporate asset - determining how many were lost and why and pooling resources to keep and grow profitable customers. Why? Because it’s no one’s job to do this job.

And finally, does the hoopla have any chance of sustainability as things stand now? Are leaders committing to customers, but not changing the metrics or the motivation to realign business priorities? Is the back-up position still about counting sales but not counting customers? For what actions are the most “Atta-boys� doled out? The customer work will not emerge as a priority of the organization until people’s success and career paths are tied to their accountability for how their actions impact customers. How far along are you with this? Are you heading in the right direction?

Most leaders wouldn’t refute that any of these actions are important. They want them to happen. They’ve always wanted them. Their failure has been in assuming the company could miraculously defy the l aws of the silos to make them a reality. Separate motivation, the metrics and the mechanics have stayed firmly rooted in each silo. And they will continue to stay there until someone duct-tapes the silos together in a unified and executable customer plan. Is it time you established a Chief Customer Officer to connect your company for customers?

Guerilla Metrics

Can you hear that? It’s the shot being fired into the air by CEOs the world over saying that they want focus on the customer. CEOs now know that customer profitability is the ‘Promised Land,’ the final frontier of validation that they’re running their business well. However the quest for how to get there remains elusive. Frequently the CEO hasn’t thought through how accountability for customer experiences and customer profitability will be wired in. In the absence of clearly redefined metrics and methods for accountability, nothing changes.

See if you recognize your company in this example: A home builder declared its mantra to be “customer partnership.� Customer revenue, it was predicted, would dramatically climb as customers would come to rely on the builder for services such as move-in support, spring cleaning, fencing, security and ongoing warranty and maintenance. The revenue upside and future rates of customer profitability were calculated. Only thing was - accountability metrics didn’t change to direct focus of customers and customer partnerships. They were still home sales, quarterly sales goals on upgrades and costs of running the business. Customers were lost in the shuffle.

Besides the standard sales goals, that home builder should have also been asking for the “Guerrilla Metrics.� That’s because the “Guerrillas� give CEOs five questions for driving the business toward customer relationships and customer profitability:

1. New Customers; Volume and Value?
   Ask about the volume and value of your incoming customers as often as you ask about sales goals. You may find that you are tracking incoming customers across a multitude of company areas - with conflicting definitions of what it means to be a new customer. The wild card here is if you have achieved alignment in how customers are classified inside your system. The part that’s not likely tracked is the quality of incoming customers.
2. Lost Customers: Volume and Value and Reasons
   The volume and value of lost customers needs to be paired with the new customer information to lay out the true situation for your company. You must reconcile “Customers In� with “Customers Out� to know how well you are doing with managing customers as an asset of your company. In addition to knowing which customers left, you need to know the reasons why they don’t care to do business with you anymore so you can drive change across the business.
3. Customer Renewals with Reasons
   For this to have relevance for your company, you’ll need to define customer behaviors that constitute renew or the commitment to continue doing business with you, according to your business model. The key is to understand patterns which indicate loyalty based on continuous purchase habits. You must ask for reasons why customers are staying with you to ensure that you personally know what you are delivering to customers that they value – and to ensure that there is awareness when these reasons shift or begin to erode, and actions are taken to reverse the trend.
4. Revenue and Profitability by Customer Group
   Getting to this classification of customers is not a trivial project. You need to understand the movement of customers from one profitability group to another so you can strategically lead the customer agenda. Your goal should be driving efforts that cause your costliest customer groups to decline and those most profitable to grow. If you are not demanding that the business be tracked this way and if you do not ask for accountability around these metrics in the regular language of meetings, it won’t happen.
5. Referrals by Customer Group
   If your customers are willing to stick their necks out vouching for you, they have become your marketers. Keeping these customers, growing them and developing other customers like them are the key. If you can track the rate of referrals in general and by customer group, you’ll know the strength of your ongoing revenue stream before you even spend another dollar on marketing. Companies completely focused on customer profitability will learn how referral rates differ by customer group and reasons for not referring.

This is the elusive CEO platform that’s missing for people after the big focus on customers is announced. These questions power the customer on to the corporate agenda. What do you think of the “Guerrillas?� Let’s talk about how they might work for you.

The Power Core

For customer zealots, it’s important to know what the company power core is…And if the power core is committed to customers.

Common sense, right? Not so much. Because this is often the muck that’s stepped in as brave zealots charge ahead into the corporate fray determined to make things right for customers. I’m sure you’ll recognize this…

Every company has a power core. It is usually the strongest skill set in the company, the strongest strength of senior executives. Information Technology (IT) for example; is a central base of power in many organizations now because of the pull they have in defining the corporate agenda due to budget and how dependant the corporate machine is on what they deliver. So the way that IT prioritizes things will have an impact on where the ‘customer stuff’ falls on that list. Let’s say you have a product power core company. This is where product development is the most important – product resources and product leaders get the most play, the most glory, the most reco gnition and the most resources. Customers…well, sure they get the products. But are the products built from the customers’ point of view? Is the experience of receiving the product and the post-product experience the right one? A product power core may only be thinking of the product itself…not the customer who buys it or uses it or the field force who has to service or explain it or the operator who must field calls about it. The insular nature of the company power core often gets in the way of building an experience for customers that is meaningful.

Knowing what the company Power Core is and engaging those whose finger is on the power button is critical to driving and transforming a company to have lasting customer focus. Why? Because customer focus will mean tampering with the normal flow of priorities from the Power Core. Those leading the customer effort MUST ask the Power Core to the transformation dance. Heck, the Power Core has to take a lead in actively redefining the priorities of the corporation for the corporation.

Most people leading the customer charge don’t think this through. Often the customer effort begins when bad survey results came in, or the President decides it’s now (finally, at last, or once again) a major priority. This audible from leadership is assumed to be important enough to be the driving force to get people to line up and take action. But it’s not. Everyone will salute the flag all right. But real change won’t happen until the impact of how company priorities need to shift, how resources need to be reallocated, and how success needs to be redefined is agreed to by those in the Power Core who are currently calling the shots. And THIS is one of the maj or reasons why many, many customer efforts crash and burn. The Power Core hasn’t been asked to the dance.

In most companies the power core lies is one of these seven:

1. Product Power Core
2. IT – information technology Power Core
3. Sales Power Core
4. Marketing Power Core
5. Vertical discipline (such as doing the business of a bank, or health care, or insurance) Power Core
6. Customer Power Core

Let’s talk about your company Power Core and how it is impacting your company’s ability to focus on customers and customer profitability.

What The Book Will Do For You

My book is called Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action. Here’s the deal about this book: it’s about reality. How to get the customer thing (you know, the public proclamation to focus on customers, followed by mass confusion on what to do) done beyond the lip service, T-shirts, coffee mugs, and big kickoffs. It’s about how to push the customer rock up the hill by turning the focus on the obvious: customer experience and customer profits. It’s about how to figure out how big that hill is. And it’s about how to keep that rock from falling on your head . . . as little as possible. It’s about figuring out if you’ve got the leadership chops to take this effort on, and it’s about navigating the corporate machine to figure out how and where to best leverage this effort from.

What This Book Will Do for You…

Executives and CEOs:
Use this book as a platform to evaluate your organization and your personal role in driving the customer agenda. You may be wondering why you just can’t get traction on customer management and customer profitability even though you’ve named it as a corporate priority. Through this book’s evaluations and outline of the issues, you can understand why the impasse exists. There is information to assist you in determining if the answer is a single position or a whole host of conditions, attitudes, and actions that must change in your organization. Hiring or appointing a chief customer officer will require a personal commitment by you. This book will outline what yo u need to be ready and willing to step up to doing before you put a name on that organization chart.

To the new and existing chief of the customer effort:
This is your comprehensive handbook packed with ideas on how to get this vital work accomplished. The tools, approaches, stories, and empathy contained in it will arm you with a place to start and a methodology for how to proceed in the first month, the first year, and those that go beyond when things really start to take hold. You’ll get ideas for how to manage across the silos, where to weave in accountability, and how to engage the commitment of top leaders in the journey. Most important, it will provide ideas on how to break the work into segments so you can advance the organization down a specific path of improvement.

Senior leadership and functional leaders:
You may be trying to crack the nut on how to deliver a comprehensive customer experience. You may be at the point where it’s obvious that all of the factions you’re trying to bring together to get that project done have different agendas. Or perhaps you’re the service vice president with vast amounts of customer information that could drive the company forward, but people just aren’t lining up to participate. You may have joined forces with another functional vice president to get the company to make some tough cross-company changes required to manage customer relationships. In your passion, you may have found yourself the de facto leader for this gnarly compa nywide effort. This book takes and translates the issues you’re experiencing but may not have had time to articulate. It offers tools to move the logjams you’re experiencing and tactics for how to proceed with your particular brand of challenge.

Good Morning!

Good morning everyone. I’m Jeanne Bliss. For 25 years I arm-wrestled 5 major US corporations to get them to focus on their customers and customer profitability. Today I’m here to share and discuss the ecstasy and the agony of driving customer focus and customer profitability. My goal is to discuss what I’ve learned abou t what makes customer efforts wildly successful, and what makes them crash and burn. At the end of our conversation today, you should have some concrete ideas on what you can do to thrive, survive and drive the customer agenda ahead. Along the way, I’ll throw in a few personal tidbits about how my role of ‘chief customer zealot’ often required being as annoying as the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard – to get the attention of the ‘corporate machine’ …and often the president who hired me.

So let’s begin. What’s on your mind about how to get your president and corporation to focus on customers, customer experience and customer profitability? Hit me with your best shot…I’m ready for it! Heck, I’ve probably lived it.

Spending the Day Reading

We have Jeanne Bliss hosting the blog today. She has some great stuff to say about customers and the need for them to be at the center of everything you do.

I am going to spend the day reading. I picked up a lot of things at BEA and I have the constant backlog of books waiting for my attention.

Have a great Memorial Day Weekend!

Re-opening the books on Enron

With today’s verdict coming down, this seems a good day to remind you of two superb books on Enron. I just finished Conspiracy of Fools by Kurt Eichenwald last night, and it is a great book. Eichenwald holds together his huge amount of reporting through clear writing and an extreme focus on the key players responsible for the destruction of Enron: Jeff Skilling, Ken Lay, Andrew Fastow, and their close colleagues. He recreates many encounters between these players, and details the myriad complicated financial gimmicks the company created to make it appear profitable at a time when operations were failing to produce. While CFO Andrew Fastow emerges as the leading villain in his book, he details how the foibles of those who relied on Fastow essentially enabled him to spawn the special purpose entities that were crucial to Enron’s demise.

Of course, The Smartest Guys in the Room by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind is just as compelling. These two offer a broader perspective on the disaster, recounting more personal background on the players, providing more scenes on the Enron culture, and limning a bit more of the infallibility complex that spurred the company to make so many dreadful decisions. This book helps explain how the defense of Lay and Skilling could make an argument that the company wasn’t doing anything wrong, and merely living by the rules: it appears that Enron leaders believed that an absence of operational profits could simply be overcome by trading profits and hedging strategies.

Having read both books, I must confess a mixed feeling about today’s verdict. It strikes me that these guys were guilty of the crimes they were charged with. But on a broader level, they were also the logical extension of a bad argument. This was a company whose pure focus became one of financial engineering, most of which went to enrich a chosen few. This is a crime that many companies and executives get away with. Whlie they were charged and now convicted of crimes, I'm not sure that there are sufficient safeguards to prevent this from happening again.

There’s a third book on Enron that I haven’t had time to read, titled Pipe Dreams by Robert Bryce. In his front material of the book, Bryce shares the stock gains realized by key Enron members between 1998 and 2001, right before the company crashed. Among the startling numbers are two board members, Robert Belfer, who made $111 million from his stock in that time, and Ken Harrison, who grossed $75 million in that time. Wow.

A Home Needed for Wonderful Books

We heard a rumor at BEA that there were some Free Prize Inside cereal boxes left.

We immediately asked what we could to do to help find them a home.

We are starting with inBubbleWrap and giving away 250 copies today. This is the best chance you will probably ever get to have a bubble-clad package arrive on your doorstep. I should also mention there will be a free prize shipped with Free Prize Inside.

In addition, you can buy (or adopt) your own cereal box Free Prize Inside for $4.99. This is while supplies last. You have until June 2nd to get in on the deal.

We hate to think what might happen to these poor books.

Is there room on your bookshelf to give one of these wonderful books a home?

Operators are standing by at 800-236-7323 or you can visit our website.

BEA - Carly Fiornia

We had the opportunity to sit down with Carly Fiornia last Thursday night. Portfolio is publishing her book called Tough Choices. From the description that she and the folks from Portfolio gave, the book has aspects that are auto-biographical and also tries to conveys lessons. The books covers her entire professional life starting with her first job as a typist after she dropped out of law school.

The book is embargoed (meaning there is no pre-released books or galleys prior to the publication date) so that is going to create some interest. Carly says there are a many things that have not be written about as it relates to her time at HP. It should be interesting.

I asked her what she read and she said she was a newspaper reader, though uses email alerts for specific things. She immediately followed that with saying her favorite book of late was The Smartest Guys in The Room. She drew out the lessons in leadership (or failings) and felt is really illustrated the importance of "the tone of leadership" at a company.

We ended the evening with a great dinner with Will Weisser and Deb Lewis from Penguin. I just want to thank them for the great food and conversation.

Jack's Thoughts on the Book Expo

BEA impressions

I think this might be the 15th Book Expo America which used to be called American Booksellers Association convention. The convention switches cities each year. In my decrepitude I forget how many shows I have been to but I do know the last time I was in D.C. for a convention Tiananmen Square happened.

Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail will be big. Carly’s new book Tough Choices could be good but she is amazing—Kate, Todd and I spent some face time with her thanks to her publisher—also Bill Taylor of Fast Company fame along with Polly LaBarre have written a book we are excited about called Mavericks at Work.

Washington DC’s Metro is great. Clean, easy to navigate and the stops seem to be perfectly placed—at least for the stops we needed. No cabs for the whole convention.

Lots of celebrates—Leonard Cohen, I missed him-much to my sadness, Jim Belushi, I saw all over the convention floor. Saw Newt Gingrich, Tim Russert, Sen. Bill Frist and heard that VP Chaney showed up at a party and Rumsfeld showed up also. Some people saw Tracy Ullman.

It was a great show for the books that I LIKE to read with galleys of a new Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Nelson Demille and a collection of Dylan interviews from Rolling Stone showing up.

Next year back in the Big Apple.

Dealing With Darwin Review by Kurt B

Review of Dealing with Darwin
By Geoffrey Moore, Portfolio, December 2005

Moore continues the theme from his previous books of analyzing different stages of a company's (or product line's) life and the corresponding appropriate product development and marketing strategies. Once again he demonstrates he has given this concept more thought than most. It is probably important to point out that the subtitle "How great companies innovate . . ." uses "how" more in the sense of what path they take, rather than "how" in the sense of this is the way they make it happen. This is a book about strategy, not execution. Similarly confusing titles are the on chapters "Managing Innovation in . . ." as these chapters are much more about setting your innovation strategy than they are about the activities typically considered "managing". This was somewhat disappointing - while he goes to great lengths to convince you that you should be thinking about innovation at all stages (which obviously isn't a tough case to make), and helping you think through various ways you might innovate, he gives little attention to how you actually make it happen. Maybe that will be his next book. I also would have liked to see more regarding the economics of innovation.

Occasionally he cautions readers not to over invest in innovation, but most of the book is written as "more is better, and even more is even better", and there is very little analysis of how to determine the appropriate innovation investment level.

The book is well written and engaging - not too deep into academic theory, with some meaningful original thought and substance. Others have commented about his use of "core" and "context" to describe aspects of the value proposition, and I have to agree that the concept seems sound, but these terms are confusing (particularly context). Jump to the third part of the book early on and you will have a much better understanding of these two concepts, and you will also get to one of the most important if not most original parts of the book. This section provides great context (a la Webster, not Moore) for much of the rest of the book so I think it unfortunate that it was relegated to that outback that in most business books is just fluff and padding. I didn't find the Cisco case study to be too engaging for some reason, though it seemed like a good idea at the outset. At some points I felt he was trying to make the case fit the point, and at others I would have liked to see how several other (maybe even non-tech) companies dealt with the same issues.

His experience in a tech product environment is obvious throughout the book, though whether this is good or bad for the reader depends on whether they are in the tech products industry. If not, they will likely find clichés such as how you can't make profits with commodity products to be somewhat esoteric (Exxon booked $8.5 billion in profits in Q1 - not bad for a commodity product) Moore’s context is almost exclusively tech products. He does occasionally mention that innovation in your business processes, marketing and customer experience can be valuable - though this is mostly just in a couple of pages in the mature company section. Since his previous books focused on the earlier stages of a company's life, I was pleasantly surprised to find the mature company chapter twice as long as the growth company chapter.

If you are a senior executive or a product development person in a tech products company, you will find this book to be invaluable. The further you are from that profile, the more you will have to stretch to apply Moore's very valuable insights.

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Reviewed by Kurt B.

Book Reviews Start Today

Thanks to everyone who reviewed a book! We really appreciate it.

Throughout the next few weeks, I'm going to post the reviews of all the currently published books (there's a lot of them). They'll help give you a different perspective of some of the books we've chatted about.

Interested in reviewing a book? Just let me know. Drop me a line at Kate[at]800ceoread.com.

Trust your gut

Just a note, I posted an excerpt from Head, Heart and Guts.

Check it out. It's about the value of trusting your gut while rightly weighing important facts.

Here's the link.

Is it worth your time to write a business book?

A group of researchers from RainToday.com explored the question: Is it worth the blood, sweat and tears required to write a business book?

They found that ultimately while writing a book is a long and strenuous process, if you have something worthwhile to say, it can have a tremendous positive impact on your business across the board—especially if the marketing process is approached correctly.

The difference marketing can make is fairly significant. When authors hired a marketing/PR service, "the median number earned $55,000 in direct revenue from book sales, compared to the $25,000 earned by those who did not".

Read more stats here.

Starbooks?

What do Ray Charles, Akeelah and the Bee, espresso machines, and tall, no-whip skinny mocha lattes all have in common?

Just this: Starbucks.

"Call it the Starbuckization of society," says George Ritzer, sociology professor at the University of Maryland. "Starbucks has created the image that they're cutting edge."

The company with a stop on every street corner has a desire to mold American pop culture. Their next expansion will be into books; they're just trying to find one that fits.

It'll be interesting to see what type of books they decide to publish. The Akeelah and the Bee version of a book? Or something else?

For New Hires: Sink or Swim Week 3

Due to the overwhelming response to this blog we are going to divert from our initial path of outlining the key steps and pointers from the Sink or Swim. We wrote Sink or Swim to give every new employee a methodology to take ownership of their success. It is the most comprehensive package for new employees. If you agree or disagree please let us know.

It’s been an interesting experience putting out there a body of work that is subject to, praise, critique, and even attack. All has happened over the last few weeks. To those who have never exposed their ideas, art, or other creation to the public, you owe it to yourself to do so as it is a great learning experience.

In the meantime we are curious to throw out into the digital void some questions that we hope will stimulate thought and maybe, just maybe, a response.

Question 1: Is employee loyalty an irrelevant in today’s workplace?

Question 2: Are you aware of what you contribute to your job?

Question 3: Minus cash, what do you need to feel engaged and motivated to perform your best at work?

Thank you for your thoughts.

Best,

The Sink or Swim Crew.

For more information on the book and training programs go to: www.HitTheGroundRunning.com

BEA - Chris Anderson and The Long Tail

We are going to tell you some stories this week about the just ended Book Expo America.

We got in on Thursday and the only one presentation we had time to check out was Chris Anderson speaking on his new book, The Long Tail. The talk itself was an overview and covered the same sorts of things you have seen other places.

Because it was a book-centric audience, Anderson spent some time comparing and contrasting his writing of the book to the writing he has done on his blog. He estimates he has written over 200,000 words on his blog compared with the 70,000 words you'll find in the book. For overlap between the two, he further estimates:

• 10% of the words overlap
• 50% of the ideas overlap
• 70% of the charts overlap

I believe Anderson's blog is the best example so far of an author's blog supporting and enhancing an upcoming book. Here are the reason he said he started the blog:

1. To Own the Meme - he wanted "The Long Tail" to be associated with him
2. Feed the Meme - He believe that the blog allows the discussion to continue after the initial Wired article. He show this chart from Google Trends and how the blog's launch boosted search query. I agreed with this idea wholeheartedly, but I am not sure I buy the causation he was selling.
3. Fill The Dead Space between Article and Book - I can think of a zillion books that have started as articles and become books and this idea of keeping the idea alive and evolving is huge.
4. Tap Into Distributed Intelligence and Research - Anderson says his blog readers made the book better.
5. Beta Test/Peer Review - Anderson comes from the sciences and he says it is unheard of that you would not challenge an idea before publication. Companies don't release software with beta testing. He felt vetting ideas on the blog was important part of the process.
6. Generate Book Buzz - He knows he has a core audience and believes they will buy the book and lead others to do the same.

He ended by talking about how blogs and books are different forms and how each is better suited for certain tasks. Anderson says blogs are good for capturing ideas and having conversation. Books are betters for richly exploring ideas and lecturing.

I am again going to recommend finding this book when it comes out in July.

We have five galleys that we would like readers to review for us. Drop me a note at todd (at) 800ceoread (dot) com if you are interested.

Must-Reads Compiled

We're off to BEA (the annual book convention) bright and early tomorrow morning so you probably won't hear from us until next week.

I thought I'd leave you with a long list of our compiled Must-Reads. It's a collection of everything since the beginning of business books -- from Drucker to Pink.

You can check it out here.

Have a great weekend!

David Bach on 20/20

David Bach, the best selling author of those Automatic Millionaire books, will be on 20/20 this Friday. His last book The Automatic Millionaire Homeowner was our number one bestseller for March.

C-Level Books

I talk to lots of authors who tell me that their books are written for the chief executive officer. I often think it would would be nice if somebody took the time to talk to the others in the executive suite. Somebody must have been listening. Two new books address the evolving roles of both the Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer.

The first is Reinventing the CFO by Jeremy Hope. The author asks chief finance officers to thinking differently about their job. He says it is about more than recording transactions, managing budgets, and preparing tax returns. He lays out seven roles for the new CFO and each is explained at chapter length. The roles include Freedom Fighter, Analyst and Adviser, Architect of Adaptive Management, Warrior Against Waste, Master of Measurement, Regulator of Risk, and Champion of Change.

The second book is coming next month and is called Riding Shotgun. Authors Nate Bennett and Stephen Miles have done a ton of research into the role of Chief Operating Officer. The bottom line from their research is as they put it, "a COO is not a COO is not a COO". Companies use them differently. Sometimes they take over, sometimes they don't. The use of a COO in corporate America is dropping a bit. I find the lack of consistency really interesting. Bennett and Miles lay out the various motivations for creating a COO position, the various responsibilities a COO may have, and what you should look for during a search.

PR for 50 Cents

Call it what you will, Jay Levinson said it's "sheer genius" and I imagine that Richard Mori is probably thanking his lucky stars (or his lucky New Hampshire state highway tokens) that he got great PR.

With NH's new E-ZPass System, Mori, owner of Mori Books in NH, decided to "redeem the [now obsolete New Hampshire highway tokens] for double the face value, or 50 cents each, for up to half the cost of any purchase."

So what happened? Some great PR. Mori was in a brief column in Inc (where I heard of him), on TV, newspapers and radio stations all over NH. "By early April his store had received 2000 tokens work $1000 in store credit...The exposure has driven monthly revenue up 25%, led by sales of pricier rare books."

Perhaps Jay would say it's guerilla marketing at its best.

This Week - 5/15/06

This week is a big week for us. Book Expo America is taking place in Washington, DC. This is the annual event for booksellers where publishers woo attendees with their latest. I find it like most big conventions--fancy booths, catchy giveaways, and lots of books.

Kate, Jack, and I will all be in attendance. We plan on reporting from the convention. There are some great people speaking including Chris Anderson and Bill Taylor. We have four days of packed with meetings, so I am sure there will be something interesting to tell you all about.

We'll post a couple of things before we leave.

Have a great weekl

For New Hires: Sink or Swim Week 2

Welcome to week three of the Sink or Swim: New Job, New Boss, Twelve Weeks to Get it Right blog. This week we focus on getting clarity on how your job fits into the bigger picture of team and company objectives and look at a couple ways to work more effectively with new team mates and your new manager.

In week two you will want to focus on these areas:

• Identify / confirm your specific responsibilities: What does “procure resourcesâ€? really mean? Get very clear on exactly what is expected of you.


• Refine your routine to make the most of your time: When you know how long it takes to get from point “Aâ€? to point “Bâ€? you on your way to becoming the master of your schedule.


• Define what you know and what you need to know: The first step in making a contribution is understanding what you have to contribute. Equally important is defining what you need to learn more about.


• Identify roles and responsibilities of your team mates: Understanding their roles will provide context for your job and know who to turn to for help.


• Continue to network: Get out there make small talk and shake some hands!

The Big Picture
As part of exploring your new environment (last week) you began to identify your company’s product services, competition, and industry fundamentals. Once you have a picture of what your company does you can than begin to define how your position, objectives of your team or immediate organization are linked to these broader elements. You are part of an ecosystem and it’s important to understand how the pieces come together.

Makin’ Friends
Increasingly teams are expected to collaborate. This means that job responsibilities between you and your coworkers can quickly get fuzzy. While it is a good thing to collaborate on projects with teammates, it is also important in those projects to identify specific roles and responsibilities. If there is something of interest that your teammates are responsible for and you’d like to try it on for size in order to learn, ask them first. Also let them know why you are interested. The more information your teammates have about your interest and rationale, the more likely they will be open to have you cross the border. The key to working together is to make sure you approach your teammates from a place of curiosity as opposed to imposing (i.e., telling them how it is).

This week make sure you make contact with your manger to clarify any questions you have about your position, projects, and additional expectations. While you have got their attention, confirm their preferences for communication (how often, via what methods, and what level of detail). To ensure employment longevity you will want to identify your manager’s management style and align your actions accordingly.

What new manager / new employee faux pas have you encountered or avoided?

[Check out previous Sink or Swim blog entries here: intro; week 1]

Economics Literacy

Don Moyer of thoughtformdesign writes a piece for the last page of Harvard Business Review every month. He uses graphic design to illustrate a simple business lesson. I think it is pretty cool.

In the April issue, Moyer's article is titled "Basic Training". It is a short piece about how we as businesspeople could all you a refresher course in economics. Moyer says:

In their excellent book Common Sense Economics by James Gwartney, Richard Stroup, and Dwight Lee asserts that "a nation of economic illiterates is unlikely to remain prosperous for very long." Such books are worth reading not because they introduce new thinking, but because they reinforce the foundation on which we build our own new thinking. The label "Economics 101" is generally viewed as disparaging. But who among us wouldn't benefit from a refresher course?

I would also recommend Naked Economics and The Undercover Economist. These both use great narrative to illustrate theories of the dismal science.

Fiction and Facts about Killer Instinct

Mixing business and fiction invariably involves a trade-off. Most fables by business authors make up in insights what they lack in literary style. And most works of popular fiction sacrifice business verisimilitude for the sake of “art.� Finally, business readers, you can read popular fiction propelled by a sense of what really makes business people tick.

In his new book Killer Instinct, author Joe Finder has created a masterful parable of ambition. When protagonist Jason Steadman finds his career in sales stalled, he unwittingly enlists the help of a former Secret Forces ally to push him up the corporate ladder. Finder researches his topics extensively, which gives this page-turner real insights into the nature of ambition, the character of sales, and the lines that individuals are forced to cross.

Recently Finder replied to our questions.

In Killer Instinct, the protagonist Jason Steadman improves his sales touch by reading voraciously from a range of business books. Which ones do you enjoy and recommend? Conversely which books, or elements of this genre, do you run screaming from?

There are lots of terrific books in the business field. Just to name a few: Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, Rakesh Khurana’s Searching for a Corporate Savior, Michael E. Porter’s Competitive Strategy, not to mention a whole shelf full of books by the great Peter Drucker. But there are also books that are essentially fact-free zones of inspirational hooey. Maybe they're helpful morale builders for some readers, but they're also hard to take seriously.

The ones I run screaming from all have titles like “The Navy Seals Guide to ——-� or “The Army Way of ——� They may be interesting glimpses into military culture, but they’re never going to help you close a deal or motivate a team of people who aren’t enlisted military servicemen.

And what about the best sales books?

The really great salesmen that I interviewed all recommended the same books (or tapes, or CDs): Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People, Tom Hopkins’s How to Master the Art of Selling, Zig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale, Og Mandino’s The Greatest Salesman in the World, and Brian Tracy’s Advanced Selling Strategies. These are all worthwhile books, I found. Call me a sop, but Dale Carnegie is essential, I think. And even though in Killer Instinct I make fun of Tom Hopkins, though not by name, I think his books are brilliant in their way, and quite useful. Ziglar is a bit dated, though.

Several scenes in Killer Instinct provide vivid detail on how Steadman makes the big sales. Did you base his character on one particular person? In your research, what did you observe about the habits and character of the best sales people?

I based Jason on a composite of friends and people I met while doing the research. As the book opens, he’s too lackadaisical to make a really top salesman. He’s a little burned out, and he’s not the competitive type, so he may not be the best fit for this kind of work. I did find that a lot of salespeople tend to burn out after several years in the field — “carrying a bag,� as they sometimes put it. It’s brutally hard work, especially on one’s psyche. So they reach a point in their careers that turns out to be a fork in the road with several tines. They may choose to go into sales management, or to bail out entirely, or, worst of all, they get sidelined, accept mediocrity, and hang on to their jobs just by the grace of the kindness of their bosses.

The best salespeople, I found, have what has been called an optimistic explanatory style, as do the best athletes. That is, when they suffer a defeat, as all salespeople do (sometimes several times a day) they don’t universalize. They don’t blame themselves. Those with a pessimistic explanatory style tend to spiral into defeatism and burn out quickly.

You’ve never worked a day for a large corporation. And yet your books are built with a fine grasp of business details. Can you talk about how you have conducted research for your books?

Never having worked in a corporation turns out to be quite an advantage: I go into these places as an outsider, observing the bizarre native rituals. That means I see and hear things that everyone who lives and works in a corporation have stopped seeing and hearing. I really do immerse myself in the research, talking to everyone from the CEO on down, asking all sorts of questions — tough ones, silly ones, you name it. But I’m not confrontational. That doesn’t do me any good. I don’t go in there like Mike Wallace doing a “60 Minutes� investigation. I’m there to find out how things really work, how people really feel. I want people to open up to me, and most of the time they do. I’m constantly surprised by what I hear from people I interview — how distrustful corporate executives are of the press, how isolated top executives often feel from their employees (I mean, they’re aware of it and worried about it), and how central personal personality is to success in business. It’s not surprising to hear that people buy from people they like, but it is striking how much people listen to, and follow instructions from, people they like — far more than from people they don’t. Intimidation, I’ve found, is overrated as a management tool.

One common theme in the books has to do with how successful individuals can be when bad things happen to their adversaries. As a reader of far too many business books, my only critique of your novels is that most of the real action defies the daily challenges of getting things done. Strategy takes a back seat to sabotage. Does this reflect a cynicism on your part about what it takes to succeed in business? Should executives brush up on espionage?

Well, what’s more fun to read about — strategy or sabotage? Seriously, these are thrillers, of course, which means I turn the dial up to “11� (to quote that essential movie Spinal Tap). But having admitted that, I will say that just about everything that happens in my books could happen in a corporation. There’s also a sizeable element of wish fulfillment in all my stories. Just like in Killer Instinct: who wouldn’t want to have a Kurt working behind the scenes, getting rid of adversaries and making things happen?

So in answer to your question: no, this doesn’t reflect my cynicism about the business world. Most people aren’t Kurt — most are Jason. If there’s a moral to the story of Killer Instinct, it’s that the evil, underhanded stuff doesn’t work in the end. And that’s an optimistic message.

Killer Instinct is, however, a comment on ambition, almost a parable. It’s about the meaning of success and the varying definitions of ambition.

I don’t think an executive needs an understanding of espionage in order to execute strategy. But a good understanding of how espionage works would be useful to someone trying to understand competitive intelligence and how reliable or accurate it is. And if you’re the underhanded sort, a good knowledge of cloak-and-dagger techniques can come in handy.

In a lovely article for The New York Times Book Review, you note that popular writers of literary fiction today avoid the topic of ambition or industry. What appealed to you about business as a setting for your recent books? And what books do you consider favorites in this field?

In Paranoia, the eccentric engineer Noah Mordden was continually taunting the protagonist, Adam, with allusions to the heroes of The Red and the Black, Pere Goriot, Phineas Finn, and other icons of hazardous ambition. Adam has no idea what he's talking about, but it's a sort of motif. There are terrific novels that are at least partly set in companies (like Joseph Heller's Something Happened or Richard Powers's Gain), but surprisingly few, given how big a role the office plays in most people's lives. Dombey & Son is a great novel named after a company: but Dickens tells you almost nothing about what the company actually does, and very little of the novel is set in those offices.

Writing a novel dealing with texture of corporate life appealed to me greatly—largely because this realm was all but neglected. (The exceptions are oddly narrow: the professional lives of high finance types, trial lawyers, and doctors. But these are professionals, not managers--a different class.)

Here’s the thing: Work is central to people's lives, but you rarely find that experience rendered in fiction. It’s amazing. Stephen King, in his great book On Writing, pointed this out: “People love to read about work.� Ordinarily I’d say it’s too bad there are so few books about work out there. But it seems to be working out OK for me.

In the midst of planning an event?

A few tips for event planners. The first set comes from Jackie and Ben in the Event magazine on the art of developing evanglists from your event attendees. Here's how:

1. Ask customers to facilitate activities
   Have customers volunteer to lead sessions.
2. Provide peer-to-peer opportunities
   Encourage your attendees to meet, greet and chat with each other.
3. Be interactive
   Retention rates are higher when people use what they're learning and aren't just listening to speakers.
4. Set word-of-mouth goals
   "Create phrases you want customers to spread and design your event accordingly."
5. Be creative and surprising
   Maybe this means having a surprise speaker or event. Attendees don't need to know everything ahead of time.
6. Plan a social-media strategy
   Let people connect to each other online through blogs, wikis, and tags.
7. Make wi-fi access free
   Wi-fi will help spread your word because attendees can chat/update outsiders in real-time as to what's going on and what they're learning.
8. Webcast presentations, sessions, and keynotes
   If people can't join you at the location, let them join you online through webcasts, podcasts and other virtual medais.
9. Solicit feedback
   Feedback from attendees will make sure you're delivering the right message and they're enjoying it. So open your ears and build a platform so you can listen while the event is happening.
10. Create ownership
    One way to do this is to "invite customers to join an event council."

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Book suggestions on events from BtoB:

• Build a Better Trade Show Image
• Experiential Marketing
• Guerrilla Trade Show Selling
• Powerful Exhibit Marketing
• The Event Marketing Handbook
• Trade Show and Event Marketing

The Books of William Bernstein

In the area of personal finance, there are two types of books

1. How do I get out of debt
2. What do I do with all my extra money now that I am out of debt.

The books of William Bernstein are for those who have extra money and are trying to figure out a way of investing it for the long-term. He believe in index funds and asset-based investing as the best path to success.

[a short pause while short-seller, derivative traders, and commodity brokers file out of the room]

For all of you still reading, I throughly recommend both of his books. Bernstein recommends The Four Pillars of Investing to "the liberal arts audience" and The Intelligent Asset Allocator "for the sophisticated investor".

In the first book, Bernstein explains the Four Pillars as history, theory, psychology, and business. He takes time to explain how "The Market Is Smarter Than You", how "Your Broker Is Not Your Friend", and "Neither Is Your Mutual Fund". He ends the book explain how to create a portfolio of the right asset types to minimize risk while maximizing returns.

In The Intelligent Asset Allocator, you need to already be on the bandwagon. He spends a little time talking about historical returns and the wide variation of the last 80 years. Shortly thereafter, the reader will find themselves in the world of standard deviation, correlation, and mean-variance optimizers. This is for the investors who has already drunk the Kool-aid and now wants to mix some for themselves.