800-CEO-READ Blog

Vince Thompson Recommends Management Books

First time author Vince Thompson last month released Ignited: Managers Light Up Your Company and Career for More Power More Purpose and More Success. This afternoon, I posted a podcast I did with Vince.

After the interview, I asked him to follow-up with list of books he would recommend to middle managers:

• Love is the Killer App – Tim Sanders
• Never Eat Alone – Keith Ferrazzi
• 7 Habits To Highly Effective People – Stephen Covey
• Less is More – Jason Jennings
• Think Big Act Small – Jason Jennings
• How to be CEO – Jeffrey Fox
• The Articulate Executive – Granville Toogood
• Networking with the Affluent – Thomas Stanley
• Leading at a Higher Level - Ken Blanchard

Start with Stories

One of the sources for our de.icio.us links is the New York Times Book Review. They have a convenient email that arrives weekly with the titles they are highlighting. NYTBR doesn't really cover business, but there will be a book from time to time.

This week what caught my attention was the advertisement from Levenger. I am a bit of a sucker for cool notebooks and the ad featured their Circa line. Clicking through, I arrived on their landing page and found Ten Faces of Innovation prominently featured with the copy, "Write a book the IDEO way, using Levenger Circa notebooks." (the notebooks are leaping into my shopping cart at this point).

The most interesting part for our readers here is Tom's story of how he writes books. He uses a method taught him from another Tom--Tom Peters:

Several years ago, my friend Tom Peters taught me how to write a book. He said, “Forget what you learned in school�— all that stuff about starting with an outline and then filling in the text. Just start with your very best stories. Capture each one as you think of it, so you dont forget. Write each one on a separate card and when you get a good solid stack of them—about as many as you can hold between your thumb and forefinger—then you’ve got the raw ingredients for what might someday be an interesting book.

So the stories come first, and the chapter outlines will emerge later, in a pattern-recognition process that involves spreading your story cards out across the entire living room floor.

I started capturing ideas on 3x5 cards, and although that method seems to work remarkably well for Tom Peters (at least seven international bestsellers so far), I personally found the size a bit small for this stage of the ideation process. I was dashing off quick notes, clipping quotes out of magazines, drawing diagrams to represent the ideas visually, and found myself eager to “color outside the lines� of the 3x5 format. I next experimented with large custom-made (and very labor-intensive) cards I cut from 8-1/2x 11 card stock, but they got unwieldy.

The rest is the story of how Circa products helped with Ten Faces.

We have been working on a project recently and found the notecard (in our case post-it notes) approach really worked. You still have to do the writing, but mobility of ideas really helped.

links for 2007-04-28

• Damage Control >> Financial Times | Crisis management for a vindictive age
  [W]hen you have done wrong, repentance is required; when you have been wronged, mount a vigorous defence. [book link]
  (tags: businessbooks public_relations)

My Review of Portfolio's Book Reviews

I think AdAge jumped the gun a bit in their accusation that Conde Nast's new business magazine, Portfolio, was going light on their book reviews.

I think their coverage is through, critical, and refreshing.

Roger Lowenstein (When Genius Failed) wrote an extensive review of Taleb's The Black Swan.

There was a shorter review of Richistan, which reviewer Andy Young ends by saying:

But this isn’t a book of profound insight. Frank hops from one person complaining about the “house manager,� as the butler is now known, to another building a garish mansion. He’s too apt to use the example of one Richistani to make a point about them all. Still, the wry writing makes it obvious that Frank had a good time on the ride.

In the Also Worth a Read Section: Grande Expectations, The Last Tycoons, Pop!, and Wall and Mean.

To further Kate's post on the praise needing generation, the magazine features three books to better understand the under-40 set:

• Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don’t Follow the News by David T.Z. Mindich
• Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever by John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade
• Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto by Chuck Klosterman.

I count nine books mentioned, not including coffee table possibilities in Aircraft: Jets As Art and Soviet Posters.

The magazine itself is a book at 328 pages.

More on my overall thoughts on the magazine next week.

links for 2007-04-27

• Stealing Your Life >> The Dangers of Identity Theft | INC. Magazine
  "Nobody knows the ins and outs of identity fraud better than Frank Abagnale [who Leonardo DiCaprio portrayed in Catch Me If You Can]...who is now turning identity theft into something of a personal matter."
  (tags: books business businessbooks information_technology)
• The Black Swan >> Portfolio | Chaos Is Underrated
  Taleb’s news is that much more of the world is random than we would have it. [book link]
  (tags: businessbooks economics bigidea)

Being a Servant

Let me begin with our office setting:
If you haven't heard about our work environment (or have yet to stop by and say hi), here's an introduction. The building we have been in for the last 10 years is an old pantyhose and make-up factory warehouse. The space is large, wide-open, and undivided by cube walls. Eight of us sit in the large warehouse space. My desk is four feet from Rebecca's desk and six feet from inBubbleGuy's desk. Jake, our shipping manager, sits back near the freight elevator and numerous pallets of books. Jack and Todd both have their own office in the back. There aren't a lot of secrets here. Everyone knows (and can hear) what everyone else is doing.

Right now, I'm half-listening to a meeting happening on the other side of the room. The folks who are responsible for manning the phones, fulfilling orders and getting them to wherever they need to be in the world are meeting. Todd's there, too.

For some reason, it reminded me of the Inc. article on servant leaders I read as I fell asleep last night.

The phrase, servant leaders sounds quite humble and, to some, may even sound weak. These are the leaders who stop looking at "employees as a means to an end; rather [look at] employees' happiness and satisfaction is the end. A former AT&T executive named Robert Greenleaf introduced the concept in 1970 (although the authors of the New Testament had laid the foundation a bit earlier)."

When starting a leadership role, many leaders feel the need to set boundaries. As Matthew Hayward explains, "'Founders in the early days [of their position] have a profound need to establish their credentials. They may look on servant leadership as something to evolve into--later.'" That ideal seems to have been ingrained in each of us. If people see a leader as tough in the beginning, they won't step on toes or take advantage of him later when he eases off.

This doesn't have to be the case. Two entrepreneurs learned and used servant leadership in growing a $30 million company. Three reasons why they are servant leaders:

1. The higher you rise, the harder you must work for others.


2. Although you hold formal authority over employees, you must treat them like customers and, when reasonable, do their bidding.


3. When your desires and the needs of your organization conflict, your desires draw the low card.

A servant leader is one who stops asking what can you do for me and asks what can I do for you? What can I do to help you do your job better?

For me what's interesting about servant leadership is it changes the conversation. No longer is the experience merely what is on the boss' agenda. Now employees are empowered to speak openly about what's going on in their world.

Servant leadership has three (at the very least) positive outcomes:

1. Provides for open communication.
2. Makes for a better boss-employee relationship.
3. Enables the leader to see trends.

Often times problems are kept between fellow employees and team members. When you bring people from a team together and start asking what's going on, you get a better feeling for the overall atmosphere. You may hear trends in what's being said. Maybe Tom, Erik and Sally are all saying their computers are running a bit slower or that customers are asking for another way to get information. What is there to lose?

As a whole, the servant leadership idea also reminded me of Erika's book. I know you've heard us talk about it. Her goal is to make every work environment a bit better by consulting on social interaction styles and the resulting relationships.

I'll stop there. In case you missed it, here's the article link again.

Also by Frank Abagnale (Catch Me If You Can)

Frank Abagnale, the legendary check forger and imposter and author of Catch Me If You Can, has another book out, Stealing Your Life: The Ultimate Identity Theft Prevention Plan. And according to Inc. Magazine, entrepreneurs are especially at risk.

This may be the answer to keeping the modern day version of Abagnale at bay.

Safe Is Not Safe (Failure - Part 4 of A Series)

I think there is a general acceptance in business today doing the same thing year after year is not going to work. If you need data to confirm it, here is results from Chris Zook's latest book Unstoppable:

[W]e found that 153 of the top 500 companies in 1994 did not even survive the following decade intact. They either ended up in bankruptcy or were acquired and integrated into a larger company. Of the 347 companies that survived and maintained independence, we judged that 130 had undergone a fundamental shift in their core business strategy and its key parameters. In other words, nearly six out of ten companies faced threats to their survival or independence, and only about half were able to meet those threats by redefining their strategies.

The rest of his book gives strategies for how to redefine the core of your business by uncovering and growing hidden assets. It comes out from Harvard Business School Press next week.

links for 2007-04-26

• Where Have All the Leaders Gone?>>The Wall Street Journal | The Retirement That Roared
  To borrow a movie phrase from the 1970s -- the anachronism seems strangely appropriate -- Lee Iacocca is mad as hell and he's not gonna take it anymore. He thinks you shouldn't, either.
  (tags: businessbooks leadership)
• The Feminine Mistake >> Fast Company | And Career Makes Three
  The book's most refreshing observation, though, may be the simplest: Engaging in meaningful work is as important to a woman as it is to a man.[book link]
  (tags: businessbooks careers personaldevelopment organizational_development)

Wii-ly Cool

In a current Business 2.0 article, "How the Wii is Creaming the Competition," John Gaudiosi discusses how Nintendo remade itself with its latest gaming system: the Wii.

If you haven't heard of it, Wii is a relatively inexpensive, motion-controlled system that blends physical activity with the video game environment.

Unlike high-end products like the Sony Playstation and Microsoft's Xbox, Wii has a basic design that allows Nintendo to make a profit from the get-go. Nintendo knew it could make an instant $50 in profit on the system (whereas Playstation and Xbox actually take a hit before they make a profit on expensive games and accessories), so they offered its "killer app," Wii Sports, for free with the purchase of console and controller.

Gaudiosi explains how, in addition to the system itself, Nintendo revolutionized its marketing approaches:

Finally it came time for Nintendo to market the Wii to the world. In addition to its standard TV campaigns targeting schoolkids, the company pumped 70 percent of its U.S. TV budget into programs aimed at 25-to 49-year-olds, says George Harrison, senior vice president for marketing at Nintendo of America.

He even put Wii ads into gray-haired publications like AARP and Reader's Digest. For Nintendo's core users, he took a novel, Web-based approach: 'To reach the under-25 audience,' he says, 'we pushed our message through online and social-networking channels' including MySpace.'

It seems the Wii serves as an excellent example of taking a popular technology and incorporating social values and marketing trends.

I had the chance to bowl with "the Wii" over the weekend with some friends. It's a pretty cool experience--and my score was surprisingly close to its real-world average. (I hoped it would be better, though.) I'm not a gamer in any way, shape, or form, but I have to say that even a short experience with the Wii was enough for me to say that it was unlike any other game I've played. And somehow, that made it even better.

You can read the article here.

links for 2007-04-25

• The Black Swan>>The Wall Street Journal | Shattering the Bell Curve
  Life isn't fair. Many of the most coveted spoils -- wealth, fame, links on the Web -- are concentrated among the few. If such a distribution doesn't sound like the familiar bell-shaped curve, you're right.
  (tags: businessbooks economics bigidea)
• Last Harvest>>The Wall Street Journal | Gentle Sort of Land Grab
  In "Last Harvest" he tells the story of New Daleville, a subdivision in rural Chester County, Pa., 30 miles west of Philadelphia. It makes for an improbably compelling narrative, from the subdivision's earliest beginnings as a twinkle in a developer's eye
  (tags: businessbooks)

A Manifesto from a Praised Young Person.

Did you see the WSJ's Weekend Journal this past Friday? Smack dab in the middle of the front floats a large-headed young employee with his nose to the sky. The article, "The Most-Praised Generation Goes to Work."

This is the generation of twentysomethings who have grown up on praise and the words "you're special." The generation where everyone became a winner on the soccer field, swim team, or drama club. Gold stars and ribbons abound their world.

I, too, am in this generation brought up on praise and warm-fuzzies (a.k.a. compliments, as one of my elementary school teachers explained). Employers are responding to our generation of praise.

They "are dishing out kudos to workers for little more than showing up. Corporations including Lands' End and Bank of America are hiring consultants to teach managers how to compliment employees using email, prize packages and public displays of appreciation. The 1,000-employee Scooter Store Inc., a power-wheelchair and scotter firm in New Braunfels, Texas, has a staff "celebrations assistant" whose job it is to throw confetti -- 25 pounds a week -- at employees. She also passes out 100 to 500 celebratory helium balloons a week."

Bob Nelson, thank you consultant and author of 1001 Ways to Reward Employees, would tell you that each generation has different praise requirements:

60+ years -- prefer public, formal awards but don't need constant praise.

Baby Boomers -- are looking for "more self-indulgent treats" such as massages and new technology.

Under 40 -- need a bit more praise and "near-constant feedback."

He goes on to explain that, "'It's not enough to give praise [to this generation] only when they're exceptional, because for years they've been getting praise just for showing up.'"

If an employer is complimenting "us" for merely showing up, of course we expect to be praised when we do something above and beyond showing up. It's Pavlov's basic rule. The expectation for praise becomes a reflex.

But what if the expectations were set higher than just showing up?

Coming from a member of the praised generation, we want to be challenged. We want to care about what we're doing and we want you to care about we're doing. My favorite bosses and coaches have always been those who make me stretch and grow; they're the ones who sit me down and explain that they have big expectations for me. I have to earn their praise. It's only when I've challenged myself and succeeded (however you define success), that I can actually accept and savor a compliment.

In the end, Bob has it right. "By encouraging and praising them [the praised generation], you'll get more out of them."

So yes, we were raised on praise. Most of us benefited with self-esteem. That self-esteem gave us a backbone. That backbone helps us stand up for our ethics (which after such scandals as Enron and Worldcom, can't be bad), question company policies and processes in a productive way, and use disappointments to better ourselves rather than take it personally.

We're not asking for kudos and presents for every small success. Challenge us and congratulate us when we go above and beyond. As a fellow member from my generation and co-worker chimed in, "Take us seriously." If we're not doing well, tell us. Don't hold us to anything less.

We're not so different from other generations.

Your Chances Are Not Good (Failure - Part 3 in a Series)

Chris Zook is the head of Bain's Strategy Practice and the author of three books on growth.

Michael Porter created the framework for how most think about strategy. Zook's work provide clues on how to improve your chance of success.

What I have always liked most about his books is his quantification of the stark reality of business. Your chance of success are not good. This from his second book Beyond The Core:

In looking at adjacency expansion moves, my research team and I combed the literature, and we conducted out own independent analysis to understand as completely as possible the odds that major growth initiatives would truly drive a new source of sustained, profitable growth. We found, in our own data as well as in the secondary data, the success to only about one in four. Just 25% of investments in growth initiatives, most of them true adjacency expansions, created value and added growth

Of 160 reports worldwide we were able to find on the topic of growth, only twenty-four contain sufficient sample size and make clear assumptions regarding the criteria for success. The average success rate for new products is about 30 percent; for start-ups, below 10 percent; for joint ventures, about 30 percent. These studies span a wide range of methods and quality of data, but all show how hard it is to find and execute on new sources of growth in a company.

Zook's books give you methods that can doubled your chance of success, but you still only end up at a 50/50 chance of something working.

Failure is a part of doing business.

links for 2007-04-24

• Send >> Wall Street Journal | To: Emailers Subject: Etiquette
  In "Send," David Shipley and Will Schwalbe offer us help in separating the useful from the impositional and in making the useful more so.
  (tags: businessbooks information_technology)

This Week: National Small Business Week

This week is National Small Business Week. We are going to highlight some books for those out there is the small business world and those who want to be.

I figured we should start with the definition of a small business. This is from the Small Business Administration website:

A Small Business is one that:

• is organized for profit;
• has a place of business in the United States;
• makes a significant contribution to the U.S. economy by paying taxes or using American products, materials or labor; and,
• does not exceed the numerical size standard for its industry.

  The business may be a sole proprietorship, partnership, corporation, or any other legal form.

  SBA has several general Size Standards. A business in one of the following industry groups is small if it is not greater than the size standard indicated.

  Industry Group	Size Standard
  Manufacturing	500 employees
  Wholesale Trade	100 employees
  Agriculture	$750,000
  Retail Trade	$6.5 million
  General & Heavy Construction (except Dredging)	$31 million
  Dredging	$18.5 million
  Special Trade Contractors	$13 million
  Travel Agencies	$3.5 million (commissions & other income)
  Business and Personal Services Except:	$6.5 million
  >Architectural, Engineering, Surveying, and Mapping Services	$4.5 million
  >Dry Cleaning and Carpet Cleaning Services	$4.5 million

Now that you know where you stand, we can move onto the books.

Read an excerpt from The New Language of Business

The new excerpt on our Excerpts blog is from Chapter 11 of The New Language of Business: SOA and Web 2.0 by Sandy Carter.

Carter shows how, by levering SOA (service-oriented architecture), Web 2.0 and other technologies, business leaders can use innovations in technology to drive process improvements and support change.

With the growing sophistication about how and where innovation occurs, companies know that business flexibility is the driver. New ideas don’t just come from inside their company, but from wikis, blogs, partners, customers, and even competitors. This world requires collaboration to solicit the ideas and flexibility to respond to those ideas. The insight is that CEOs now say that more of their ideas for innovation come from partners and clients than from their own employees.

Go directly to the excerpt to continue reading.

links for 2007-04-23

• The Black Swan >> New York Times | Possibly Maybe
  It concerns the occurrence of the improbable, the power of rare events and the author’s lament that “in spite of the empirical record we continue to project into the future as if we were good at it.�
  (tags: businessbooks bigidea)

links for 2007-04-21

• Damage Control >> Time Magazine | The Crisis Doctors
  These tough critics are the "trauma surgeons of public relations," as Dezenhall puts it--the people whom companies call in when lawsuits, recalls, boycotts, federal investigations or just plain bad luck hits.
  (tags: businessbooks public_relations)
• How To Read A Business Book by Adrian Madansky -- The University of Chicago Magazine: February 2001
  All these books assert "truths" about different aspects of business...Few of these books, though, are truly great. They often contradict one another or, worse, themselves.
  (tags: businessbooks)
• The Last Tycoons >> BusinessWeek | "Piercing The Lazard Mystique"
  The Last Tycoons does benefit from well-drawn profiles of many of Lazard's leading characters, particularly Michel David-Weill, the clever, imperious French billionaire whose family controlled the firm for four generations and who presided over it himself
  (tags: businessbooks industry history finance)

Strength(s) Training

There are three books right now on the Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller list dealing with strengths development.

Gallup hold a spot with their new StrengthsFinder 2.0. I talked about the book last month.

Former Gallup consultant Marcus Buckingham is doing well with Go Put Your Strengths To Work. He was on the Today Show this morning and you can watch the five minute segment handled by their new correspondent Tiki Barber. I haven't read Buckingham's book, but am now going to. I'll come back with something next week on it.

The interesting one is their shared title--the evergreen Now, Discover Your Strengths. Marcus' name is on the cover but Gallup is the one who holds the copyright.

There is clearly competition between these folks, and it is hard to say who will win. I feel like this is "the rising tide lifts all ships" scenario. Anyone who is doing work in the strengths psychology area is going to benefit from the growing conversation.

This should be obvious.

Yesterday the WSJ ran a snippet on an article in The MIT Sloan School of Management's business journal. The article explains that often times businesses focus on price and demographics rather than how the customer actually uses the product.

To drive their point home, they quoted Peter Drucker who once said, "the customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him."

That message is as timely today as it was 10 years ago. Many companies fall into the tunnel-vision that focuses on how to sell the product. Just ask someone on the street about their mobile phone who bought it because of that snazzy marketing appeal. Or, ask me about mine.

Boom Goes Your Business (Failure - Part 2 in a series)

Jagdish Sheth says his journey started as he tried to understand why so many companies that were highlighted in books like In Search of Excellence and Good To Great failed to have continued success. Sheth argues that companies acquire habits that lead to their fall. His latest book is called The Self-Destructive Habits of Good Companies...And How To Break Them.

Sheth says there are seven deadly sins that are destructive to corporations—Denial, Arrogance, Complacency, Competency Dependence, Competitive Myopia, Territorial Impluse, and Volume Obsession.

And if we are going to define "sins" then we need to talk about what is Sheth considers bad:

For our purposes, let's consider two aspects, or connotations, of "bad." The first is the more obvious and direct: bad means unhealthy, no good for you, contrary to your self-interest, or desctrutive. Behavior that makes your customers and suppliers resent you, that makes them seek out other business partners, seems clearly "bad" in this sense. Arrogance or abuse of stakeholders would seems to be good examples. But "bad" in the business arena can also suggest "lost opportunity." Here, perhaps complacency, or underestimation of the competition, causes you to fail to maximize your potential. Your behavior may not be "actively" bad, nor are you reviled by others in your community. But your vision has failed, and you have lost, or are about to lose, your chance.

Sheth continues by saying that all of these problems may not be caused by management, but it is their responsibility to fix them.

To give you an example of content and structure, here is the chapter summary on Competitive Myopia:

Competitive Myopia

Things that lead to competitive myopia:

• The natural evolution of the industry
• The clustering phenomenon
• When No. 1 is also the pioneer
• The opposite scenario: when No. 2 chases No. 1

The warning signs of competitive myopia:

• You allow small niche players to coexist with you: You're focused on the big guys, so you don't see the niche companies as a threat.
• Your supplier's loyalty is won by a nontraditional competitor: You fail to realize that your supplier can become your competitor.
• You underestimate new entrants, especially from emerging economies: You fail to acknowledge the threat of new entrants.
• You have become helpless against a substitute technology: The threat has always been there, but you have not reacted in time and must surrender.

How to break the competitive myopia habit:

• Redefine the competitive landscape: You need to check the entire competitive perimeter to see where you are vunerable.
• Broaden the scope of your product or market: Diversify by expanding the market for your existing products or by expanding your product lines in your existing markets.
• Consolidate to squeeze out excess capacity: Decrease buyers' bargaining power by removing excess capacity from the industry.
• Counterattack the nontraditional competitors: Return fire on a unique competitor by attacking its home turf.
• Refocus on the core business: The "entrenchment" strategy may seem counterintuitive, but it allows you to concentrate limited resources in your most successful area.

There is something attractive in Sheth's conclusions. They remind us what what we don't like in people. I think they sound familiar given his heavy reliance on press accounts of these companies (Halo Effect warning).

I like Sheth's examination of the downside of business, but I am torn as to whether I have more knowledge to avoid the problems that Sheth lays out in the book or whether these emotion laden habits are really the root cause of failure.

Bad to Worse (Failure - Part One In A Series)

There is no shortage of books written to explain the success of companies. In Search of Excellence and Good to Great are the best known for using this technique. There are not many books that do the opposite—look at why companies failed.

It is worth spending some time on the topic of failure. There are many more companies that fail than succeed. I am sure you have heard the comparison of the companies that were on the Dow Jones Industrials list in 1920 and the fact that General Electric is the only one that remains.

There is one possible constraint to think about. Phil Rosenwieg points out in The Halo Effect, it is hard to distinguish between success and what actually caused the success. There may be similar problems distinguishing failure and its causes. Let's just keep that in mind as we look at a few books that examine the difficulty of keeping businesses going.

This is going to be a series that will run over the next couple of weeks.

New Excerpt - from You, Inc.

There's a new excerpt up on the Excerpts blog. It's from Chapter 1 of You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourself by Harry Beckwith and Christine Clifford Beckwith.

The question is not, are you a salesperson? The question is, how might you become more effective? Just as important, how might you make your life richer?

As it turns out, the answer to each question answers the other.

Life is a sale. And the path to success at both living and selling is the same.

Read more from the excerpt.

Sales Tips for The Day

Wallstrip presents CRM today in a Glengarry Glen Ross package.

links for 2007-04-19

• Where Have All the Leaders Gone? >> BusinessWeek | A Blast From Iacocca
  The book often comes off as a rant by someone who remembers an America that was so much better during his salad days. Still, it does contain sound advice on the qualities of good leaders and provides real examples, past and present, of effective leadershi
  (tags: businessbooks)
• Competing On Analytics >> Wall Street Journal | The Importance of Crunching the Numbers
  You need the right data, the people to analyze it properly, a keen understanding of what you are trying to do with the findings and, not least, managers who have the guts to stick to decisions based on the results.
  (tags: businessbooks strategy)
• Competing on Analytics >> Financial Times | Are modern analytics ‘rewriting the rules of competition’?
  “We define,� they write, “an analytical competitor as an organisation that uses analytics extensively and systematically to out-think and out-execute the competition.�
  (tags: businessbooks strategy)
• Off-ramps and On-ramps >> Wall Street Journal | A Different Track
  A Q&A with author Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founder and president of the Center for Work-Life Policy
  (tags: businessbooks careers)

Orbiting the Giant Hairball in Song

I remember far too well my college classes and assignments. Some could be a bit crazy. We did one presentation in a soap opera, drama style and another through a photo montage. So I can appreciate Bob Sutton's homework assignment. He recently co-taught a Stanford class--Innovation and Implementation in Large Organizations. One of the books they read was Orbiting the Giant Hairball (love this book). The final assignment was to create a video depiction of what they learned.

From those instructions and a little help from Gordon MacKenzie, Gus--one singing sensation of a student--produced this piano piece and song. Feel free to sing along with the chorus: "my organization has turned into a hairball...I need to get back to orbit." La di da di da.

Bob: Is there a free spot in your next class?

What Is It About Business Books?

There seems to be less and less coverage of business books in the mainstream media. Major newspapers like The Boston Globe no longer run reviews. Fortune covers lifestyle books at best.

It seems if you are starting from scratch, you avoid the genre as well. After a two year wait, Portfolio, the new business magazine from Condé Nast, hit newsstands yesterday. Advertising Age got a sneak peak at the inaugural issue and said:

Book reviews skip management and leadership stuff in favor of fiction, art books, and whatever else might appeal to readers. We look forward to reading "The Kid Pays for the Picture," about Ryan Kavanaugh, the 32-year-old middleman bringing private-equity and hedge-fund money to Hollywood.

The next issue of the magazine runs in September, giving time for feedback from readers and advertisers. I am waiting for my issue in the mail, so I'll reserve judgment for another post. It sounds like I will be disappointed though.

$5 Audiobooks On iTunes

iTunes has a special going right now on 25 audiobooks for under $5. The two business titles included in the offer show up on the second page with The Warren Buffet Way and John Maxwell's 25 Ways To Win With People. Also in the bargain bin, you'll find Patrick O'Brien's The Far Side Of The World, Michael Lewis' Next, and On Bullshit.

Jack Covert Selects: StrengthsFinder 2.0

StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup's Now, Discover Your Strengths by Tom Rath, Gallup Press, 192 Pages, $19.95, Hardcover, February 2007, ISBN 9781595620156

I have been writing about the Gallup Press a lot in the last six months. I reviewed Vital Friends in August and their book 12 in December. I am back to tell you there is another outstanding book from Gallup to start looking for on bookstore shelves.

StrengthsFinder 2.0 is an expansion of the franchise started by the book Now, Discover Your Strengths. Originally published in 2001, Now, Discover Your Strengths has become a mainstay on bestseller lists, spending 50 weeks on the Wall Street Journal list in 2006. If you have not read Now, Discover Your Strengths or used the first version of their online assessment too, the premise is that most people spend their professional lives trying to improve on their weakness instead of working within their strengths. The StrengthsFinder assessment is meant to help guide you toward optimizing your talents. Gallup has written other strengths-based books for salespeople, teachers, and faith-based groups.

StrengthsFinder 2.0 is meant to be the most accessible of all the books, to be used with employees at all levels of an organization. Gallup has identified 34 strengths for individuals ranging from "Achiever" to "Woo" (Winning Others Over). Each book comes with unique code which allows the reader to take the web-based self-assessment. The results from the assessment highlight your five talents in ranked order. Each strength is accompanied by an explanation, anecdotes from others with that strength, and a to-do list with actions you can implement to help you develop your talents.

I am a big believer in putting people where they can excel. StrengthFinder 2.0 is a great way to help find the right fit for the people in your organization or for yourself.

Jack Covert Selects: Mr. China

Mr. China: A Memoir by Tim Clissold, Collins, 260 pages, $14.95 Paperback, Feb 2006, ISBN 9780060761400.

Why am I doing a Jack Covert Selects on a book that is over two years old? Lately there has been a flood of books about China. Many of them are good and some are really good, but most of them deal with 21st century China and don’t offer context for the huge changes that took place in the country over the past 30 years or so. This book, written as a narrative by a British businessman, sheds light on a singular and interesting time in the business history of China, when pioneer investors were the early bird trying to catch a very big worm. It is also an engaging narrative that might not teach you how to make a million but does present a fascinating story about China’s potential.

In the late eighties, Clissold went to school in China where he spent two years improving his language skills. His stories of life in the dorms are both scary and funny. He leaves China but returns a few years later, working with a US investment fund looking for investment opportunities. This is in the very early days of the opening of China’s opportunities, and Clissold works alongside a partner, the eternal optimist and driving force of the project, who calls China “the Vietnam War of American business.�

Clissold’s representation of doing business in China is illuminating:

From my eight years of hands-on work in China, I knew that I was dealing with a society that had no rules—or, more accurately, plenty of rules that were seldom enforced. China seemed to be run by masterful showmen: appearances-mattered more than substance, rules were there to be distorted, and success came through outfacing an opponent. The irony was that the entire nation seemed to be shadowboxing with itself. Whereas to most foreigners China seemed too centralized, with an all-controlling party brooding at the hub of a vast monolithic state, everywhere I had looked there had seemed to be a kind of institutionalized confusion.

While Clissold was in China setting joint ventures with factories, he realized that working with partners was not effective for the long-term because of the severe cultural issues. At the height of their involvement they had 25,000 employees and were losing tens of thousands of dollars per day. The stress of trying to apply Western practices onto China’s way of doing business was tremendous—in fact, the author suffered a stress-related heart attack. Clissold’s fine writing depicts the impact that the changes in China had on him and the country.

He ends the book with:

Since the Open Door policy in 1979, China has lifted two hundred and fifty million people out of absolute poverty, probably the greatest improvement in the human condition ever achieved. The country has attracted more that five hundred and fifty billion dollars of foreign direct investment, and currency reserves have risen from about thirty billion, at the time we were looking at factories out in the Third Front, to more than eight hundred billion dollars in 2004. A colossal manufacturing infrastructure has been assembled on the Yangtze Delta, which is creating the most profound challenges to businesses everywhere in the developing world. The lives of millions of ordinary Chinese have been improved beyond recognition as the effects slowly trickle down to street level. Chinese citizens now have choices that we take completely for granted but that would have been unimaginable two decades ago; choices in clothing, in housing, schooling for their kids, maybe the chance to buy a car or take a vacation abroad. So the progress is fantastic.

This is the book that needs to be read to understand how a country this size can go from The Red Guards to Yo Ming in two decades. What is an added treat is that the story is told brilliantly with a load of self-deprecating humor and insight.

links for 2007-04-16

• Hidden In Plain Sight >> Financial Times | The latest on listening to customers
  The book might well have been subtitled “innovation in the age of customer-centricity�...
  (tags: businessbooks customers innovation)
• Then We Came to the End >> Fast Company | End of Days
  A veteran of two Chicago advertising agencies, Ferris sets his novel in an unnamed Chicago shop after the dotcom crash.
  (tags: businessbooks humor)

Jack Covert Selects: Deals on the Green

Deals on the Green: Lessons on Business and Golf from America’s Top Executives by David Rynecki, Portfolio, 170 Pages, $22.95 Hardcover, April 2007, ISBN 9781591841555

Not every book that becomes a Jack Covert Selects will end up a contender for the Financial Times Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award. Nope, sometimes we all need to lighten up a little and orient toward some of our personal interests. So, confession time: I play golf—not very well, but I really like a friendly game on a nice summer day. So when this book came across my desk, I picked it up because Deals on the Green is about golf and business, two of my favorite subjects.

The cover image of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett playing golf at Augusta National—where, by the way, they are both members—made me chuckle, but it does a great job of communicating what we all know, that the golf course is where a lot of business deals are made. The author, a former senior writer with Fortune describes why the golf course is such an effective board room of sorts:

No matter how sophisticated the tools become—the e-mails and teleconferencing, the BlackBerries and PowerPoints—golf remains the true communications hub of American Business. It is the great and peaceful forum where movers and shakers can meet, up-and-comers can impress their bosses, and major players can seal monster deals. It is the place where there is no need for a personality test because golf brings out a person’s true character.

Rynecki actually played with some serious Fortune 500 types, on some serious golf courses and share with us stories about the way they play and hustle and just generally enjoy themselves. Here are his illuminating thoughts on Gates and Buffett:

The reason I think Buffett and Gates embody what is great about golf—and the reason so many people want to play with them—is that they don’t take themselves seriously when they are on the course. They’re the best in their respective professions and yet don’t try to take that to golf. They’re happy having a good time. How many playing partners have you met who aren’t that way? I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count the stories I have of Fortune 500 CEOs, iconic investment bankers, and aspiring corporate chieftains who have behaved badly. How many people have you met who demand to be treated like royalty? Pretension is a dead giveaway for insecurity, and what makes Gates and Buffett so special is that they are secure individuals. They simply don’t care if they look foolish hitting a little white ball along tightly mowed grass. That is a lesson for us all.

April is the month of the Masters and Chapter 4 will tell you how you could get to play Augusta National, one of, if not the most exclusive golf course on the planet. His tips on how to actually get to play the course are worth the price of the book squared. In the past, I have referred to books that are entertaining, fun and simple as an “airplane read� and Deals on the Green is the best airplane read I have discovered in a long time.

Happy Birthday, and You Can Quote Me

On the day of this blog’s birthday, here’s a fun post.

Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It’s quotable because it’s been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority. Quotations are prostheses. ‘As Emerson/Churchill/Donald Trump once observed’ borrows another person’s brain waves and puts them to your own use. (If you fail to credit Emerson et al., it’s called plagiarism. But isn’t plagiarism just the purest form of quotation?) Then, there is a subset of quotations that are personal. We pick them up off the public street, but we put them to private uses. We quotations like amulets. They are charms against chaos, secret mantras for dark times, strings that vibrate forever in defiance of the laws of time and space. That they may be opaque or banal to everyone else is what makes them precious: they aren’t supposed to work for everybody. They’re there to work for us.

I quote that lengthy passage from Louis Menand’s terrific New Yorker article on the essence of quotations, in which he recommends the new Yale Book of Quotations. While there are several compilations of business quotations in print, I haven’t yet found the final word in that regard yet. And so this seemed like a good excuse to share a few of my favorites, and to invite you to post the business passages that have moved you. Here’s but a handful:

“Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Neither is knowledge work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is defined by its results. And for these, the size of the group and the magnitude of the managerial job are not even symptoms.� (Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive.)

“One cannot do market research for something genuinely new. One cannot do market research for something that is not yet on the market.� (Peter Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship.)

“With any problem, I always ask why five times. This Toyota procedure is actually adapted from Toyoda Sakichi’s habit of watching. We can talk about work improvement, but unless we know production thoroughly we can accomplish nothing. Stand on the production floor all day and watch—you will eventually discover what has to be done. I cannot emphasize this too much.� (Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System.)

“An organization can execute only if the leader’s heart and soul are immersed in the company. Leading is more than thinking big, or schmoozing with investors and lawmakers, although those are part of the job. The leader has to be engaged personally and deeply in the business. Execution requires a comprehensive understanding of a business, its people, and its environment. The leader is the only person in a position to achieve that kind of understanding. And only the leader can make execution happen, through his or her deep personal involvement in the substance and even the details of execution.� (Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, Execution.)

“Branding is not complicated. A brand is nothing but an expression of the consumer’s loyalty and trust. It’s a bond, a covenant with the consumer.� (Phil Dusenberry, One Great Insight is Worth a Thousand Good Ideas nee Then We Set His Hair on Fire.)

“Vernacular life was the way of life that still exists in the villages of our dreams (and television programs and in a few preserves where indigenous cultures are maintained.) In the vernacular world, work and life and family are all intermingled in a skein of human relationship. Every exchange of goods is not just an economic transaction but an expression of the community’s spirit.� (Art Kleiner, The Age of Heretics.)

“And yet increasingly, it appeared that what I thought to be an organizational learning system was in fact an individual learning system. The more I thought about what I’d learned from following the lean track, the less I was concerned with the mechanics of kanban or leveling, but the more I was impressed with the amount of specific knowledge Amy and Phil had gained in such a short time. They’d learned to be rational, to systematically recognize problems, attack them through detailed observation, investigate options, and resolve them one after the other: precisely what I was saying we’re not supposed to be good at. At the end of the day, all they’d done was resolve one problem after the next, until the waste in the system was slowly rolled back. I’d not recognized the plant each time I returned there—but they didn’t share that experience at all. They felt nothing much was happening and it all took so long and that they met with endless resistance.

“The truth of the matter, I now believed, was that rationality did not lay in higher reasoning powers, in visionary schemes, but in the ability to narrow down problems until one reached the nitty-gritty level at which one could actually do something about them. The rest is philosophy.� (Freddy and Michael Balle, The Gold Mine.)

And finally, I cite one of the most potent pieces of business thinking I’ve ever read, the condensation of W. Edwards Deming’s 14 Points for Management from his book Out of the Crisis.

1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.
2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.
3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.
4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.
5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.
6. Institute training on the job.
7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.
8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.
9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.
11. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.
12. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective.
13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.
14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everyone’s job.

Happy Blog-day!

Three years ago today, we started this little side project called the 800-CEO-READ Blog.

We are 1960 posts old today.

There have been more than 80 people who have contributed.

This blog accounts for about half of the web traffic we get in a given month.

Thanks again for reading.

Happy Birthday Blog!

There's nothing like bad clip art to say Happy Birthday Blog!

Here's to three years of 800-CEO-READ blogging!

Every day at 8:30 a.m. sharp

Every day at 8:30 a.m. sharp, our UPSer Drew stops by, drops off packages and has a quick chat. Sometimes he'll sing along to whatever is playing on the iPod, have a quick conversation with Jack about Queen (as in the band, not England) or ask Roy (one of our 13) a question about his family. Between Drew and Dennis (our afternoon UPSer), they know a lot about us: most of our names, music choices, who delivers to us, and when we need a bit of extra time to get packages ready. They're always friendly, professional and speedy. We trust them with our livelihood (thousands of books each month).

This year marks UPS's 100th anniversary. In the last hundred years they've integrated themselves into each of our lives. Their package cars and drivers are responsible for 14.8 millions packages a day (that's 10,277 pieces delivered every minute). They employ 407,000 of our fellow Americans making them the 4th largest employer in America. Worldwide they're the 15th largest employer with 25,000 UPSers tracking and delivering your packages. UPS no longer just delivers; it now enables global commerce (Introduction to Big Brown).

One of the many ways they're commemorating their anniversary is with the new book Big Brown. It will introduce you to why it's hard to find a UPS uniform, brown is the color of choice and where UPS started. The first chapter starts with Greg's explanation of The UPS driver's mystique and leads on to what it means to be a UPSer.

I'll take this moment to wish: Happy Birthday Big Brown!

p.s. If you'd like to join in a little extra celebration, check out the UPS songs.

links for 2007-04-11

• The Little Book of Common Sense Investing>>Improving the Average of the Average Investor | The Wall Street Journal
  The surest way to gain above-average returns is through a low-cost, low-turnover index fund that simply buys and holds essentially all the stocks traded in the market. Well, let me set the Journal's readers straight. Mr. Bogle is right.
  (tags: businessbooks finance)
• Primetime Women >> PrimeTime Women | BtoB Magazine
  "Women control most of the corporate and small business spending decisions in the U.S. Women hold 50% of managerial and professional positions. Among them, women ages 50 to 70, whom I call "PrimeTime Women," are in the most senior positions with the most
  (tags: marketing business businessbooks)
• The Last Tycoons>>The Inside Story of Wall Street Wars | The Wall Street Journal
  Investment bank Lazard Ltd. today is a $5.5 billion public company with more than $1.5 billion in annual revenue. The firm consistently ranks among the top 10 mergers-and-acquisitions advisory franchises, and its asset-management business administers hold
  (tags: businessbooks biography finance history)

Books To Make Your Go Faster

ChangeThis has a number of great pieces this month. Dan Coughlin was one of the authors featured there and he has a new book called Accelerate: 20 Practical Lessons to Boost Business Momentum.

Coughlin starts his manifesto with this:

Great businesses are defined by their ability to accelerate.

My definition of “accelerate� is “to increase the rate of achieving desired outcomes in a sustainable manner.� The objective of every business should ultimately be to create a great business. This manifesto is a call to action to accelerate your business and your career.

I asked him to recommend some other books around this topic of business acceleration. The first three are listed below and the remainder can be found if you click through to the extended entry.

Da