800-CEO-READ Blog

links for 2007-03-30

• LibraryThing | Catalog your books online
  Share and connect via book recommendations.
  (tags: books library catalog)
• Let My People Go Surfing >> Fortune | Patagonia: Blueprint for green business
  The story of how Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard [author of Let My People Go Surfing] took his passion for the outdoors and turned it into an amazing business.
  (tags: business greenbusiness businessbooks leadership)

You're Already a Citizen Marketer

The second event in our LeaveSmarter Series took place last Thursday afternoon. We're crazy busy around here (just ask inBubbleGuy) so we haven't had a chance to blog about it, but we'd be remiss not to mention how enjoyable Ben McConnell's presentation was. He even took a few technical glitches in stride, showing off his shiny red sneakers to keep the momentum going.

One of the strongest messages I took away from the event is just how powerful social media are. Ben showed us some pretty cool (and, in a few instances, kind of scary) examples of the videos, blogs, and other online content that citizen marketers are creating. I particularly liked the fan version of Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie" music video.

Using our nametags as a talking point, we shared with each other the products and services we're citizen marketers for. For instance, I wrote down Sala da Pranzo, a great little Italian restaurant on Milwaukee's East Side. inBubbleGuy promoted the bacon-wrapped water chestnuts we provided --one of the driving attractions to the series. Todd talked about More Space.

The name tag idea was Ben and Jackie's, and I highly recommend it as a way to get people mingling at your next event. Speaking of the next event, we would love to see you at our final LeaveSmarter event on May 16. Nikos has a powerful message that we're sure will bring this season to an inspiring end.

We'll have some photos from the event up on our Flickr site very soon.

links for 2007-03-29

• Go Put Your Strengths To Work >>WSJ.com | Doing More of What You're Good at Doing
  The strength of Mr. Buckingham's book is its philosophical base in the late Peter Drucker's classic admonition: "The effective executive makes strength productive. He knows that one cannot build on weakness."
  (tags: businessbooks management)

Shout out from Seth

ChangeThis got a nice mention on Seth Godin's blog today. He has a really great entry up about how you can benefit from publishing an e-book. Here's a direct link to the post:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/03/you_should_writ.html

I feel compelled to boast a little bit about ChangeThis (since I've only been here for a few months and it still fascinates me). Seth Godin conceived of the project in 2003. In the summer of 2005, 800-CEO-READ took over managing the site. We have a great editor, and we're seeing record downloads. It seems like the ChangeThis reader community is growing each month. If you've never been over to the site and are wondering what it is, here's a blurb from the FAQs:

ChangeThis is a new kind of media. It's calm and thoughtful and direct and transparent. And unlike almost every other form of media, it reaches people through community. If an idea is a good one, it'll spread, because people like you will send it to their friends. Unlike a broadcaster, we're not using FCC frequencies to send our ideas to people who don't want to hear them.

Unlike a book or a newspaper, it's free. And there are no ads.

I really like this explanation of why we're doing this:

Because we're tired of the yelling, tired of the irrational posturing, and tired of the lies. We decided to do something about all three. Our bet is that smart people will embrace being talked to with respect and will spread the word.

We have no secret plan. No ulterior motive. We wanted to see if it would work. The fact that you're reading this sort of implies it did, at least a little.

Check it out. And thanks, Seth, for the shout out.

Hot Spots spark innovation

A few days ago we posted an excerpt from the book Ignited. Here's an excerpt from a February Financial Times article that reviewed Lynda Gratton's new book, Hot Spots: Why Some Teams, Workplaces, And Organizations Buzz With Energy - And Others Don't, another "hot" title this spring:

But, if you are lucky, you may also spot the occasional flash of orange or red. These are "hot spots" - "a moment when people are working together in exceptionally creative and collaborative ways . . . Hot spots occur when the energy within and between people flares - when mundane everyday activities are set aside for engaged work that is exciting and challenging. It is at times like these that ideas become contagious and new possibilities appear."

Gratton has not branched out from her distinguished career studying management to dabble in meteorology. The "hot spots" are an extended metaphor, but one that is soundly based on a body of academic research into networks, teams,culture, collaboration and creativity.

The author brings up examples like the communities that build Linux, Nokia, and Goldman Sachs to illustrate the fact that even groups with far-flung members can feed on one another's energy to spark innovation.

Gratton has written a succinct and utterly compelling book. She is really a kind of one-woman hot spot in herself.

Check out the article: "Creative sparks warm up a business ice age" by Stefan Stern.
www.ft.com, February 28 2007.

links for 2007-03-28

• Payback >> Financial Times | Make the most of your innovations
  "The majority of products in most companies are cash traps – they will absorb more forever than they will generate," declare James Andrew and Harold Sirkin, senior innovation and operations experts at the Boston Consulting Group and the authors of Payba
  (tags: innovation businessbooks)

2006 Bestsellers (a little late)

Some folks started asking us for the 2006 bestsellers. Some how we forgot to do this right after the New Year, and I know many of you are dying to hear the results.

One note on methodology: We award points to a book's position on our monthly list, as well as the number of months it appears on our lists.

Without further ado...

800-CEO-READ's 2006 Best-Selling Books

1. It's Your Ship by Michael Abrashoff (Warner Business)
2. The Ultimate Question by Fred Reichheld (Harvard Business School Press)
3. Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne (Harvard Business School Press)
4. Dealing With Darwin by Geoffrey Moore (Portfolio)
5. The Ice Cream Maker by Subir Chowdhury (Currency)
6. Blueprint To A Billion by David Thomson (Wiley)
7. I've Seen A Lot Of Famous People Naked, And They've Got Nothing On You! by Jake Steinfeld (AMACOM)
8. If Harry Potter Ran General Electric by Tom Morris (Currency)
9. One Billion Customers by James MacGregor (Free Press)
10. Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble (Harvard Business School Press)
11. Satisfaction by Chris Denove and James D. Power IV (Portfolio)
12. Treasure Hunt by Michael Silverstein and John Butman (Portfolio)
13. Redefining Healthcare by Michael Porter and Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg (Harvard Business School Press)
14. The Power to Predict by Vivek Ranadive (McGraw-Hill)
15. The Millionaire Real Estate Mindset by Russ Whitney (Currency)
16. More Than 85 Broads by Janet Hanson (McGraw-Hill)
17. Don't Retire, Rewire by Jeri Sedlar and Rick Miners (Alpha Books)
18. Make Money, Not Excuses by Jeam Chatzky (Crown)
19. Inside Every Woman by Vickie Milazzo (Wiley)
20. The Cycle of Leadership by Noel Tichy with Nancy Cardwell (Collins)
21. The Big Moo by The Group of 33, edited by Seth Godin (Portfolio)
22. Small Is The New Big by Seth Godin (Portfolio)
23. The Long Tail by Chris Anderson (Hyperion)
24. Breaking The Bamboo Ceiling by Jane Hyun (Collins)
25. Seven Secrets of Great Entrepreneurial Masters by Allen Fishman (McGraw-Hill)

New Excerpt on Excerpts Blog!

We have a new excerpt up on the ol' excerpts blog. It's Chapter 9 from Ignited by Vince Thompson.

There comes a point when it's time for those in leadership to light a fire under every uninspired and discouraged group. Ignited is for middle managers who need an outline of clear, realistic steps to promote change within an organization.

In Chapter 9, Thompson talks about the common tendency to become inward-focused. He suggests that one step toward reshaping an organization is scouting The Landscape--the external influences on our world, customers, and competition.

Here's a direct link to the excerpt:

http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/006854.html

links for 2007-03-26

• The European Economy Since 1945 >> New York Times | Boom and Bust
  ...presents not only a comprehensive account of Europe’s postwar economic experience but also an important analysis of capitalist development more generally.
  (tags: businessbooks economics history)

Everyone wants to be a bestseller.

What does it mean to be a best-selling author? Like everything else, there are various definitions. This particular WSJ article is speaking of the online bestseller lists like those of Amazon and Barnes and Noble. To get on the top of these lists, you can buy placement (for around $10 - 15 grand) in an email called the "Best-seller Blast" that is sent out by big-time authors.

What's interesting is the fluctation of these lists.

Outside the top 1% or so of books, few sell multiple copies a day, so little separates books with rankings tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, apart. Morris Rosenthal, an author and publisher based in Springfield, Mass., who has studied the Amazon charts, says a day without a sale can send a book ranked 10,000 to as low as 50,000.

Fittingly, the WSJ's question of the day is, What influences your book choices? I'd follow up with the question: if it's a bestseller list, what makes for a good list?

If You Can't Be Here...

We are on our way over to the Citizen Marketers LeaveSmarter event. Since most of you aren't in Milwaukee today, I have posted a podcast I did with Jackie Huba.

If you want to really pretend you were here, you can cue that up around 12PM Central. That's when things will be starting up here.

Leading For Growth: A Review, Part II

I'm going to build off Todd's review of Leading for Growth. I heard about it months ago from its publisher and started reading it on my train ride down to Chicago the other day. Co-author Ray Davis has helped take Umpqua Bank (based in Oregon) into the limelight; I'm sure you've heard of the bank from a number of Fast Company mentions. It's a model for customer service and building a great experience. Imagine a bank where:

...branches [in Umpqua's world branches are stores] keep dog bowls full of water just outside the door for clients with pets...employees open up the lobby for community events. Recent programs include yoga lessons, movie nights, and a "stitch and bitch" knitting club that meets once a month...Davis encourages spontaneous demonstrations of outstanding customer service by giving each branch a special fund expressly for that purpose. Every associate also spends a day training with the Ritz-Carlton.

It shouldn't be hard to believe but it is. A bank with employees trained by the Ritz-Carlton?

In the book, Ray shares a conversation he had with a Ritz bellman. Ray was inquiring as to how the hotel fared in the Ritz's quality program. The bellman explained that they had failed because housekeeping overlooked the TV Guides.

Now, get this: housekeeping had forgotten to move the bookmarks every day! And that is the type of attention to details Ray encourages.

links for 2007-03-22

• Chocolates on the Pillow are not Enough >> Wall Street Journal | The Customers Want More Than Coddling
  The secret to running a good hotel is making guests feel welcome, providing a memorable experience, and ensuring both physical and psychological security, 24/7.
  (tags: biography industry businessbooks)

Leading For Growth: A Review

Authors Ray Davis and Alan Shrader did all the right things to pull me into Leading For Growth. Now, let's talk a bit about the book itself.

Davis came to Umpqua Bank from a consulting practice where he saw nothing but the same in the banking industry. The five-branch bank he took over looked like any other community bank. He decided the only way to survive what to be different. The rest of his book is his stories and beliefs.

You get the normal explicit lessons in this book. He has chapters on empowering your employees and clearing obstacles out of their way. Davis also emphasizes sweating the small stuff and protecting the brand.

It is the messages "between the lines" that are more interesting. A number of anecdotes from the book sum up his leadership style as a form of tough love. Take his reaction to plants being added to the bank's first concept store:

So, I called this VP and asked why he had put plants in the store. He said he just thought he'd warm it up a bit.

So I said, "Here's what I want done. Please call The Plant Lady and tell them to get the plants out of there."

"But Ray, we have a three-month contract on these plants."

"I don't care what we've got," I replied. "I want all those plants out of the bank by noon today."

"Well, that's pretty short notice. They probably can't get over here until later in the afternoon."

I said, "That's not a problem. Tell them the plants will all be in the parking lot." Needless to say, the company got there before noon and took the plants away. You can't protect your brand by being sloppy about details.

It sounds here like he is just being a jerk, but I think Davis is illustrating the importance of leaders protecting important aspects of company's brand and culture. Leaders often need to make big statements to show far they will go, so the stories get created and told.

Can You Hear What David Allen Is Saying?

LifeClever has a list of 17 different interviews with Getting Things Done guru David Allen. You'll find 247 minutes of audio and over 21,000 words of text in the links provided—useful for novice and expert alike.

Disease: A Good Thing?

In the Big Think genre, I am recommending people pick up Survival of The Sickest by Sharon Moalem and Jonathan Prince. Moalem is a evolutionary biologist and he has some interesting things to say about diseases. He says many of the things that afflict us now are the same things that protected us in the past.

My family has a history of diabetes that runs through it. My father always thought it was from his mother's side of the family. Moalem makes a strong case for it coming from the paternal side. He believes that higher sugar levels are the body's way of producing antifreeze. This phenomenon can be seen in wood frogs that boost their glucose levels to 100 times normal before "freezing" for the winter. Grapes vines do the same thing before a frost to protect their fruit.

Having this mechanism, might have been helpful in northern climate or say during an Ice Age. Turns out that Finland has the highest rate of Type 1 diabetes, followed by Sweden, Norway and the United Kingdom. As it relates to me, my grandfather was an Ellis Island immigrant who came from Sweden.

I am going to let you read the book to get the rest of this story and answers to other questions like:

• Why can sunglasses cause sunburn?
• Can the tanning salon lower cholestrol?
• Can a person rust to death?

The book has a medical Freakonomics feel to it (and they both share William Morrow as their publisher). Check it out.

John C. Bogle is the Man

While this blog rarely covers personal finance books, I think that any time Jack Bogle puts pen to paper folks should take notice. His new book, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing, is another dose of refreshing common sense from the guy who created index funds as we know them today. Not to spoil anything, but there’s simply no great secrets revealed in this book. For years Bogle has been preaching a very simple and very powerful point. In today’s market the individual investor faces insurmountable odds over the long haul, after you factor in the transaction costs and the powerful incentives driving fund managers. Therefore buy low-cost index funds. End of story.

The charm of the book rests in Bogle’s sharp wit and spicy writing. Here’s a passage I particularly enjoyed:

As investors, all of us as a group earn the stock market’s return. As a group—I hope you’re sitting down for this astonishing revelation—we are average. Each extra return that one of us earns means that another of our fellow investors suffers a return shortfall of precisely the same dimension. Before the deduction of the costs of investing, beating the stock market is a zero-sum game.

But the costs of playing the investment game both reduce the gains of the winners and increases the losses of the losers. So who wins? You know who wins. The man in the middle (actually, the men and women in the middle, the brokers, the investment bankers, the money managers, the marketers, the lawyers, the accountants, the operations departments of our financial system) is the only sure winner in the game of investing. Our financial croupiers always win. In the casino, the house always wins. In horse racing, the track always wins. Investing is no different. After the deduction of the costs of investing, beating the stock market is a loser’s game.

Jonathan Clements, a Wall Street Journal personal finance writer with tremendous common sense, just touted Bogle’s new book in a piece, saying, "It's an easy read that will, I suspect, quickly join Burton Malkiel's 'A Random Walk Down Wall Street' and Charles Ellis's 'Winning the Loser's Game' as one of the indexing crowd's favorite books."

links for 2007-03-20

• Wired 15.03: Interview with the author of I Am a Strange Loop
  "The work was the inimitable Gödel, Escher, Bach, and its creator, Douglas Hofstadter, stunned the world with his zany, in-depth, and utterly brilliant investigation of self-reference in art and mathematics. ...to make his point perfectly clear, he has e
  (tags: businessbooks)
• Tobacco | An evil weed | Economist.com
  "Allan Brandt, a Harvard professor, has written a history of the cigarette in America. It runs from the automatic rolling machine, patented by James Bonsack in 1881, to last year's retreat by the Bush administration in a case that was intended to make the
  (tags: businessbooks industry)

What Are You Reading?

We are well into the Winter Season, so we figured it was time to ask:

What Are You Reading?

You Have 10 Pages To Convince Me

We tell authors and publishers all the time about the importance of the first 10 pages of a book. For Jack and I, the author has about three pages to catch our attention. If not, we are on to the next book. Leading for Growth is a great example for delivering in those first opening pages.

How often do you read the Table of Contents and see "Chapter 1: Introduction, Chapter 2: How We Started..." Ray Bard made a great point at our author workshop—"The Table of Contents should be written like it was marketing copy." I rarely see this. Here is a sample of what authors Ray Davis and Alan Shrader did in this book:

1. What Business Are You Really In?
   Umpqua started to take off when we decided we were really in the retail business, not just the banking business, and started learning from successful retailers like Nordstrom. This chapter offers advice to help you discover what business you are really in.


2. Never-Ending Discipline
   Leaders need to realize that growth is not a project, not a quick fix. You must have the discipline to realize you never have made it.


3. Have Position Passion
   Be relentless about your vision. Know what you stand for. We call ourselves The World's Greatest Bank. It helps us stand out with our customers, but more than that, it creates positive passion within the company.
   

You can't underestimate the importance of the introduction either. This is where people are going to find out what the book is about. Someone told me the other day they always skip the introduction. I told them that it was a big mistake, because a reader always knows from the introduction whether the book is going to be good and more importantly whether it is going to work for them. Davis starts the introduction with this:

The simple fact is, you get better or you get worse. You cannot stay the same. There is no Door Number Three.

From this, you know it is about growth and my case I firmly believe what he is says. The great Table of Contents and what Tom Ehrenfeld calls "a great promise" pulled me through the whole book. More tomorrow on the book itself.

Five Best from Ken Roman, Former Advertising Executive

Saturday's Wall Street Journal had a list of the five blue-chip business management books. The list was compiled by Ken Roman, a former advertising executive. I think it is one of the best lists I have seen.

1> The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
2> Management and Machiavelli (out of print) by Antony Jay
3> What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School By Mark McCormick
4> Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy
5> Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? by Lou Gerstner

A brilliant list.

links for 2007-03-17

• Fast Company | Branding with online dating services by Dan and Chip Heath
  "Is it fair to say that finding a soul mate is pretty important? If so, online dating sites should be full of sparkling bon mots, as people try to woo prospects. As a dater on Match.com (NASDAQ:IACI), you have two key ways to communicate something quickly
  (tags: businessbooks communication humor)

links for 2007-03-16

• AdAge >> Overthink This: Your World Just Came Out in Hardcover
  "The book I've been recommending to everyone lately is a brilliant first novel titled "Then We Came to the End" by a young New York writer named Joshua Ferris. It's an often hilarious, vivid, oddly touching story about office culture -- anybody who's ever
  (tags: humor businessbooks business)

Jack Covert Selects: Flower Confidential

Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers by Amy Stewart, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 280 Pages, $23.95 Hardcover, February 2007, 9781565124387

I have always liked flowers. I spend a lot of time in my gardens on my infrequent days off and my parents ran a small-town greenhouse/florist operation for a short time. Though this book doesn’t qualify as a business book in the classic sense, it qualifies as a book about an industry, an industry that is changing rapidly, an industry that is quite unique.

As the author says:
“Flowers are like nothing else that we buy. They don’t play by the same rules. For one thing, they are basically free. You can pick a flower by the side of the road. You can grow one in your garden for next to nothing. A flower is perishable as a piece of fruit, but less practical—you can’t eat it, after all. Put a rose in a vase and it’ll be dead within a week. That’s all you get for your money. In spite of this, the cut flower market is a forty-billion dollar business worldwide.�

When this book first crossed my desk, I was concerned that the book would be an “expose� of the evils of the international flower trade. Instead, this is a straight-forward account of a very large business, and yet she tells the story with a wide-eyed innocence and humor that is fun to read.

“It might be that it’s unromantic to call a flower a commodity or a manufactured product, but flowers are all those things at once. They are ephemeral, emotional, and impractical, but we Americans buy about four billion of them. We buy more flowers than we do Big Macs. Flowers are big business. It just happens to be a gorgeous, bewitching, bewildering business.�

Like the industry itself, this book is fresh, different, and while it may be a little self-indulgent to include it in a set of business book reviews, I truly believe that you will enjoy this book. And if that doesn’t sell you on the book, the author also includes an appendix where she lists the best way to care for cut flowers. Here is just a tidbit of what you can learn:

“Commercial flower food really will extend the vase life of flowers. You can buy it at craft stores, nurseries, and flower shops, but if you don’t have any use a pinch of sugar and a drop of bleach. (If you have it, you can also use a pinch of ground up Viagra, and expensive but effective treatment that prolongs vase life by helping to open vessels that conduct water up the stem to the flowers in much the same way that—well, never mind.�

links for 2007-03-15

• The Cubicle Survival Guide >> The Wall Street Journal | The Best Way to Labor Away in Our Little Boxes
  The latest entry in the growing corpus of workplace-whacking is "The Cubicle Survival Guide: Keeping Your Cool in the Least Hospitable Environment on Earth," by first-time author and Web-site production coordinator James F. Thompson.
  (tags: businessbooks humor general_business)
• Ignorance, Confidence, and Filthy Rich Friends >> The Wall Street Journal | Twain's Roughing It
  His slim volume is less a biography than a sketch of the writer's entrepreneurial and investing life.
  (tags: businessbooks finance biography economics)
• Private Label Strategy >> Financial Times | Quality becomes commodity in brand battle
  Private labels can no longer be dismissed as a cheap and nasty alternative to the real thing.
  (tags: businessbooks retail)

New Feature: Book Reviews on Del.icio.us

We pay attention to what many people are writing about business books. Sometimes those articles and blog posts become the basis for a blog post here. Often, those reviews pass into the night—a missed opportunity to inform you of what we are seeing.

We are going to fix that. We have cleaned up the 800ceoread del.icio.us account and have started actively bookmarking reviews from major media outlets. Starting tomorrow, we will be also posting those reviews here.

Let us know what you think.

Last year's tallies brought to you by Feltron

Have you heard of Nicholas Feltron?

He lives in NYC.
He's 29 years old.
Has a cat named King.
Runs the company Megafone.
And when the weather calls for it, wears a sweater.

He's a graphic designer who records each detail of his life down to the number of book pages read by book (noted below each book title), magazines read, text messages sent and received, animals eaten, cities visited, and on and on. This is his third annual report. Check out the design. It's a great depiction of numbers and data.

Inside he notes that he read 3761 book pages in 2006. On his list of books were:

1. The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
   233 pages


2. See No Evil by Robert Baer
   279 pages


3. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon *Best fiction
   221 pages


4. The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
   304 pages


5. Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
   207 pages


6. JPod by Douglas Copeland
   448 pages


7. It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be by Paul Arden
   127 pages


8. The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan *Best Non-Fiction
   411 pages


9. A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman
   160 of 209 pages


10. Exquisite Pain by Sophie Calle
    112 of 281 pages


11. The Works by Kate Ascher
    215 pages


12. Heat by Bill Buford
    315 pages


13. The Disappointment Artist by Jonathan Lethem
    149 pages


14. The Looming Tower by Lawerence Wright
    144 of 373 pages


15. Universal Principles of Design by Lidwell, Holden and Butler
    63 of 211 pages

Find out more here.

Excerpt from Flower Confidential

There's a new entry up on our Excerpts blog. It's a chapter taken from Flower Confidential: The Good, The Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers by Amy Stewart.

Flower Confidential takes us inside the flower trade and reveals what has been gained (and lost) by the new varieties and unusual breeds created in labs, and, of course, the worldwide market for flowers.

Here's a direct link to the entry: http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/006799.html#more

Jack Covert Selects: Firms of Endearment

Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose by Raj Sisodia, Jag Sheth, and David B. Wolfe, Wharton School Publishing, 272 pages, $27.95, Hardcover, January 2007, ISBN 0131873725 (ISBN 13: 9780131873728)

I’m not one to jump on the latest fad (though it is true that I did like Hootie and the Blowfish in their heyday—they are actually good!), but I have a feeling this whole “Green� thing isn’t going away. And it shouldn’t. More and more companies are realizing that they will attract more employees, please more customers, and build stronger businesses if they adopt socially responsible principles. Firms of Endearment profiles some of the biggest companies doing making this: Whole Foods, Harley-Davidson, Trader Joe’s, Southwest Airlines, IKEA, and New Balance, to name a few.

So what is a Firm of Endearment, or FoE, as the authors call it? Conveniently, the authors answer that question for you in the first chapter.

"Quite simply, a FoE is a company that endears itself to shareholders by bringing the interests of all shareholders groups into strategic alignment. No stakeholder group benefits at the expense of any other stakeholder group, and each prospers as the others do. These companies meet the tangible and intangible needs of their stakeholders in ways that delight them and engender affection and loyalty to the company. [Firms of Endearment] connect with their stakeholders at a deeply emotional level."

So how can you identify a Firm of Endearment? Besides aligning themselves with stakeholders’ interests, these companies tend to have more modest executive salaries, open-door policies, better employee benefits, better training, and a strong focus on the customer experience. They also claim environmentally friendly practices and social consciousness as corporate values.

This book is both a profile of several Firms of Endearment and also a recipe for becoming a FoE. I was happy to see that our little company fit the profile in many ways.

Other Strengths Books From Gallup

I talked last week about Strengths Finder 2.0. I posted a short podcast I did with Tom Rath. The book also made the the WSJ bestseller list on Friday, debuting at #3.

What you might not know is there are a whole series of products built around the Gallup Strengths Finder assessment. Here is a list of the books based on their Strengths Practice:

• Strengths Finder 2.0 for everyone
• Now, Discover Your Strengths for Managers
• Teach With Your Strengths for Teachers
• Living Your Strengths for faith-based communities
• Discover Your Sales Strengths for Salespeople
• Animals Inc. for those who need the business fable version

In addition to those books, there are two programs for the pre-workforce world.

Strengths Explorer is an online tool for children from 10 to 14 years of age. It is meant to give an early pick into what kids are leaning toward.

Strengths Quest is meant for college age adults. Over 100 universities use the tool in the during freshman orientation and 250,000 students have taken the Strengths Quest assessment.

Go forth and find your strengths!

Jack Covert Selects: True North

True North: Discover your Authentic Leadership by Bill George with Peter Sims, Jossey Bass Publisher, 240 Pages, $27.95 Hardcover, March 2007, ISBN 0787987514

Bill George is one of the people I would love to sit down with and drink a beer. His previous book, Authentic Leadership, was a strong seller and a strong book on the whole. He was the CEO for Medtronics and grew it like crazy and is now a professor at Harvard Business School. The title for this book comes from the idea that we all have a ‘True North’ within us and we need to follow that direction. The authors describe it as such: “True North is the internal compass that guides you successfully through life. It represents who you are as a human being at your deepest level. It is your orienting point—your fixed point in a spinning world—that helps you stay on track as a leader.�

The authors interviewed 125 leaders in business ranging from George Schultz, former secretary of state, to Howard Schultz of Starbucks. The book is rich with personal stories and anecdotes that support the need to be true to your True North. For example, the story about the Starbucks’ Schultz is a story about his father, how that relationship shaped who Howard Schultz became and, in turn, why Starbucks offers health benefits for part-time employees.

It is inspiring to hear the voices of successful leaders communicating their vision of what motivates them. A quote like this one from Young & Rubican CEO, Ann Fudge, helps set this book apart. “All of us have the spark of leadership in us, whether it is in business, in government, or as a nonprofit volunteer. The challenge is to understand ourselves well enough to discover where we can use our leadership gifts to serve others. We’re here for something. Life is about giving and living fully.�

And these “been-there� words from Amgen Chairman and CEO Kevin Sharer, who gained priceless experience working as Jack Welch’s assistant in the 1980s and saw the downside of GE’s cult of personality in those days. “Everyone wanted to be like Jack,� he explained. “Leadership has many voices. You need to be who you are, not try to emulate somebody else.�

This book is a perfect book for the person that needs support and direction to find their ‘True North’.

Jack Covert Selects: Growing Great Employees

Growing Great Employees: Turning Ordinary People into Extraordinary Performers by Erika Andersen, Portfolio, 288 Pages, $24.95 Hardcover, December 2006, ISBN 9781591841517

Management is a well-traveled path on the road of business books. Good to Great and Now, Discover Your Strengths have captured the attention of executives for the last five years (and two permanent positions on last year's Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller List). I think these books best address management at an organizational level, but this month, I want to point you to something a little more tactical.

Growing Great Employees is a how-to manual for managers, written by executive coach Erika Andersen. The book is written for managers who want to get better at what they do. As you page through the book, you'll see that the content and layout reinforce that goal. You'll find short sections with lists that offer instantly applicable advice. There is a workbook aspect with numerous "Try It Out" sections, and each chapter ends with a "Big Ideas" summary which you can use to review (or preview) the material.

The breadth of subjects Andersen covers in the book indicates just how wide-ranging the skills are that good managers need. She starts with the importance of listening, writing good job descriptions and hiring the right people. From there she moves onto managing as a coach, using the "Social Styles" model to understand reports and giving timely and effective feedback. The book closes with chapters on coaching others to be good coaches, delegating tasks properly and treating management as a skill to be mastered.

Growing Great Employees uses a gardening metaphor from start to finish illustrating what managers/gardeners should be doing for optimal growth. The metaphor worked really well for me given my shared joy of gardening, but the book offers more than just an effective metaphor. Management really is a process of planting, tending to, and watching employees grow, and Growing Great Employees is "miracle grow" for your business.

Cabin Fever

Here at 800-CEO-READ, we see things a little differently...

A Quick Weekend To Do List from Seth Godin

Here is Seth's list

What would you add?

I would add, clean your clothes dryer vent. There was a fire around here caused by the lint igniting in a clogged dryer vent and I was surprised at the number of house fires each year caused by clogged dryer vents.

ChangeThis : The New and The Popular

ChangeThis has a new set of manifestos for your consumption. Bob Sutton gives the alternate argument to his best-selling book with a piece titled The Upside of Assholes. Consultant Mark Graban says the things Toyota does to make great cars can help healthcare. Elizabeth Haas Edersheim takes a theme from her book on Drucker and writes about how all Peter's advice still applies. Lonely Planet is Elizabeth Johnson's take on how technology is not really making the quality of our relationships any better. 100 Ways to Kill A Concept (the cover art is worth the look) and Frontline Leadership round out the six manifesto set.

We also wanted to give you a list of what people were reading in February:

1. How To Be Creative
2. Talking Strategy: Three Straightforward Ways to Make Your Strategy Stick
3. Purposive Drift: Making It Up As We Go Along
4. Reclaim Your Life: A Two-Week To Help You Regain Time
5. The Bootstrapper's Bible
6. 25 Ways to Distinguish Yourself
7. Keep It Real
8. The Art of the Start
9. Not a Dirty Word: Seven Steps to Creating an Accountability-Based Organization
10. You are Being Lied To and Other Truths

Promote Different.

There is a big article in the Wall Street Journal today about Apple's iTunes and how they wield their power to promote. The classic promotion model in media is to offer co-operative advertising to retail outlets in exchange for favorable placement in store displays or through featuring product in advertising the retailer is doing. Examples of this range from the placement of a book in the front of a Barnes & Noble to a image from Lords of The Rings on all the televisions in the Best Buy Sunday ad to books featured on inBubbleWrap.

iTunes does it differently. They will not accept any money for promotional placement on their front page. A legion of editors act as the first filter about what should be promoted. They have asked labels to lower album prices in exchange for their premium space. Rhino did this on a set of Prince albums to coincide with the artist's Super Bowl appearance. iTunes has also asks for exclusive content from artists. If you spend any time on the site, you see featuring iTunes only content all the time. In all these cases, no money is exchanging hands.

Excerpt from The Mormon Way of Doing Business

A new excerpt is up on our Excerpts Blog. It's a chapter from The Mormon Way of Doing Business: Leadership and Success Through Faith and Family by Jeff Benedict.

Before being named CEO of Dell, Kevin Rollins developed a reputation within the company for being a logistics and operational genius. Those abilities have a lot to do with why Michael Dell initially hired Rollins. Since moving into the CEO spot, Rollins has instilled his penchant for discipline throughout the company through his management style. Many of his personal habits that impact the way he approaches management were refined while serving a mission for the Mormon Church.

The Mormon Way of Doing Business profiles several top business executives (including the CEOs of JetBlue, Delitte & Touche, Dell Computer, Harvard Business School, and more), and explores how their Mormon beliefs have influenced their incredible success.

Here's a direct link to the excerpt: http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/006797.html#more

Building On Your Strengths

I did a interview with Tom Rath of Gallup on Monday. We will be posting that in a couple of weeks, but I wanted to share something that he said during the interview.

A little background first...if you are familiar with with Now, Discover Your Strengths then you are familiar with Gallup's Strengths Finder survey. Playing to your strengths is a philosophy that Gallup has been advocating for over 40 years and is a key consulting practice for them. NDYS came out in 2001 and web based survey was an immediate hit. You answered a series of questions and they delivered back to you your five strengths. The book as well as the online commentary help you get your bearings. Now, Discover Strengths was really designed for managers and there were many suggestions on how to manage employees with these wide variety of strengths. The book has sold more each year than the prior and last year, it spent 50 weeks on the Wall Street Journal Bestsellers List.

Here was the amazing stat for me: 2.5 million people have taken their Strengths Finder survey [mouth dropped open]. Given the number of books they have sold, they have determined that somewhere between 80% and 90% of those who buy the book go on to take the assessment. How is that for response rate?

Add this one to it: With 34 possible strengths and each user's five strengths displayed in the order of importance, there are 16.4 million possible combinations. Tom said that chances are when you take StrengthFinder that you will get a result that has not been shown before.

The book featured on the podcast is Strengths Finder 2.0. This is the new book from Gallup and is meant for frontline employees. They have updated the assessment with better accuracy from their questions and more personalized insights on the results (i.e. even if two people both display the same strengths, they could get different suggestions for improvement based on how they answered the questions).

Ben & Jackie

Get ready for the second installment of the LeaveSmarter event series. In just two weeks, on Thursday, March 22, Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba will be in Milwaukee to talk about Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message.

Ben and Jackie are writers and consultants based in Chicago. They operate a heavily trafficked blog, Church of the Customer, and popularized the term "customer evangelism" with their previous book, "Creating Customer Evangelists." In The Big Moo, Seth Godin featured Ben and Jackie among the world's 33 smartest business thinkers.

Here's a bit about the book:

Word-of-mouth marketing experts Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba show how industrious everyday people (they call them “citizen marketers�) are spending their free time promoting the companies and brands they love—or knocking the ones they don’t. While some companies have caught on and engage these unofficial promoters, McConnell and Huba offer advice for the majority of businesses which have not: Get on board before it’s too late.

Featuring original data on citizen marketer behavior and interviews with some of the most popular online personalities, Citizen Marketers examines the emerging world of social media and puts it into a business and cultural context by explaining how do-it-yourself weblogs, online videos on YouTube, and social networking on MySpace are becoming the new centers of influence. With just one nod of appreciation, McConnell and Huba write, a corporation could ensure that an enthusiastic fan stays that way, growing their web presence, influencing others and sometimes creating word of mouth communities.

Join us at The Eisner - American Museum of Advertising and Design in Milwaukee’s Historic Third Ward. You get lunch and a copy of Citizen Marketers.

Make your reservation at 800ceoread.com/events. Bring a guest and save $10/person. Bring a group and save $20/per person. However you want to swing it, we hope to see you there!

Good to Great: Fabulous or Fabulistic?

In The Halo Effect, author Phil Rosenzweig challenges the neat conclusions and timeless principles that business experts create to explain high performance. And he focuses his sharpest critique on Jim Collins, who is arguably the most influential management thinker today (gee—not so dumb a target to pick if he wants exposure….) In particular, Rosenzweig de-constructs Collins’ methodology, arguing that by selecting “great� companies from a vast database of research on past performance, Collins has essentially fallen into a self-fulfilling intellectual exercise tainted by the halo effect.

As a result, says Rosenzweig, Collins ends up creating a managerial parable with little empirical basis. Instead, he has deftly packaged, in a catchy set of metaphors and slogans, a few timeless ideals about what great managers should do. Rosenzweig charges Collins with carefully creating a safe, appealing promise that holds profound allure to any manager who considers themselves above average, and who, with just the right amount of gumption and stick-to-it-ness, could truly shine.

Here’s the money passage:

Yet no one seemed to look closely at these [methodological] shortcomings, because Good to Great had such an encouraging message: You, too, can transform your good company into a great one. Collins was explicit on this point. He wrote: “Greatness is not a matter of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice.� It’s a compelling story. People want to believe their good efforts will be rewarded, that good things come to those who wait, and that’s exactly what Collins was saying: With vision and humility, by caring about people, through persistence and focus, you can become Great. As a tale of inspiration, there’s hardly a better one than Good to Great.

Indeed, Rosenzweig goes on to posit that Good to Great is at its very essence a fable, “rooted in a classic narrative structure� of rags to riches, an archetypal tale whereby persistence and humility eventually lead to triumph.

Now personally, I’ve always believed that one of the reasons that Collins’ book went into the stratosphere was its ability to marry the Millionaire Next Door promise of greatness to those who considered themselves ordinary folks who, by dint of daily discipline, could elevate themselves. And, I’ve always admired Collins’ brilliant ability to make his ideas sticky by applying smart, evocative labels that communicate the key ideas.

I believe that the real value of the book is how well it helps executives (i.e. the people whose decisions have a material impact on the company) make better decisions by broadening the frame through which they weigh their choices. And in this regard, ultimately, I am far less persnickety than Rosenzweig when it comes down to methodology. Call it lazy thinking, maybe. But I guess the point is that ultimately the proof of what works is…what works. And just as Rosenzweig goes to great lengths to prove how difficult (nay, how impossible) it is to trace the true causes of business success, one must apply this same thinking conversely. Which is to say that by his own argument, it is almost impossible to prove that the reasons attributed to success are wrong.

It’s important to note that Rosenzweig takes no pot shots or Collins nor does he actually dis the entirety of his work. (Remember this is a man who cares about fine distinctions—he states that his book is meant to shift inquiry away from explaining why companies succeed into an exploration of why it is so hard to understand the root cause of enduring success.) After making a case that Collins is essentially a story-teller seen as sage, Rosenzweig goes on to concede the potential value of Collin’s tale, or that of any other business writer who helps managers frame their actions in a new light. “The test of a good story is not whether it is entirely, fully scientifically accurate—by definition it won’t be. Rather, the test of a good story is whether it leads us toward valuable insights, if it inspires us toward helpful action, at least most of the time.� And in that regard, I fully agree with him.

How about it readers? Where do you come down on this debate?

More on The Halo Effect

I’m delighted to see Phil Rosenzweig’s The Halo Effect getting the attention it deserves. His core argument merits attention on this site, where we take the power of business ideas very seriously. “The central idea of this book is that our thinking about business is shaped by a number of delusions,� he says at the outset of his book. This ex-manager turned business prof then shares a smart and pointed deconstruction of the ways that he says pundits and gurus produce the principles that inspire managers. Above all, Rosenzweig hammers away at business thinkers who extract timeless lessons by conducting research on companies that have performed at high-level for a sustained period. He argues that journalists and business thinkers fall under the spell of numerous delusions that lead them to interpret their data so that it confirms their existing biases. Under the “halo effect,� people find or invent reasons to explain why certain success stories are successful.

Rosenzweig’s argument is thoughtful, and I highly recommend that anyone who believes in the power of business ideas read his book. To get started you can read a great deal of his work on his website, which contains study guides to The Halo Effect, excerpts, a feisty blog, and a trove of original articles. Moreover, he goes into detail about the business boo