800-CEO-READ Blog

Today's Quote

Don't make excuses---make good.
There is no failure except in no longer trying.

Elbert Hubbard

Today's Quote

A quiet conscience makes one so serene.

Lord Byron

What are you reading?

Since Kate, Todd and Jack are out of the office today, I am going to be sneaky and ask a non-business-book related question.

What are you reading this summer?

And what would you say when recommending it?

It can be a business book, of course, or it can be a good thriller or trashy romance.

I just finished reading a historical novel that's coming out in August. It's called Loving Frank, and it's based on the actual events surrounding Frank Lloyd Wright's relationship with the wife of one of his clients, Mamah Cheney, who was an early activist for women's rights. The book centers heavily on Mamah and her experience of knowing Frank Lloyd Wright, but it also enlightens some of the famous architect's eccentricities and artistic vision.

You can take the gal out of the bookshop, but you can't take the bookshop out of the gal.

Your turn!

New excerpt up

There's a new excerpt up on the Excerpts blog. It is taken from Chapter 4 of The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies by Chet Holmes.

"As we've already established, it's harder than ever to get in front of a potential buyer, so when you finally get your company in front of that buyer, you need to maximize what you can accomplish in that moment. You need to think and plan strategically. This chapter also shows you how being a strategist will make it easier to get to that customer in the first place."

Check out the rest of the excerpt over at the Excerpts blog: http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/

Today's Quote

It's a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead--and find no one there.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

links for 2007-06-28

• New Ideas from Dead CEOs>>The Wall Street Journal | Their View From the Top
  The remarkable lives in "New Ideas From Dead CEOs" are more than enough to carry a reader along.
  (tags: businessbooks biography)

Implications of the Blogosphere

Dov Seidman, who we mentioned earlier in the week, was the focus of Thomas Friedman's New York Times column today.

You need to subscribe to the New York Times online to view the article (a trial version is available), so those who have a subscription or want to get one can access the column here:

The Whole World is Watching

Here's a brief excerpt:

When everyone has a blog, a MySpace page or Facebook entry, everyone is a publisher. When everyone has a cellphone with a camera in it, everyone is a paparazzo. When everyone can upload video on YouTube, everyone is filmmaker. When everyone is a publisher, paparazzo or filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. We're all public figures now. The blogosphere has made the global discussion so much richer -- and each of us so much more transparent.

The implications of all this are the subject of a new book by Dov Seidman, founder and C.E.O. of LRN, a business ethics company. His book is simply called "How." Because Seidman's simple thesis is that in this transparent world "how" you live your life and "how" you conduct your business matters more than ever, because so many people can now see into what you do and tell so many other people about it on their own without any editor. To win now, he argues, you have to turn these new conditions to your advantage.

And here's a link to the book: http://800ceoread.com/products/?ISBN=9780471751229

Today's Quote

The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance

Percy Bysshe Shelley

links for 2007-06-27

• BusinessWeek | "The Twisted Economics Of Harry Potter"
  "For booksellers, the source of the pain is mammoth retailers like Amazon.com (AMZN ), Wal-Mart (WMT ), and Britain's ASDA chain, which have slashed prices by 50% to woo fans."
  (tags: businessbooks economics retail business)

Inevitable change.

What provokes change? Back in the mid-1400s, Gutenberg changed communication (as did his lesser known predecessor). Communication was again changed with the Internet. And, of course, no one can deny that one invention substantially changed our lives and cliches. Then, the music industry was changed by Apple. I know you can think of more.

Every time change occurs, the world adapts and evolves. Eventually we stop noticing the difference and go on with our everyday. Even so, the idea of change is seen as a threat. A threat to the current way of life. A threat to what we know and are comfortable with.

Change is inevitable. Take mobile phones, wi-fi will change their industry. [Login required.] Or Detroit's major industry, will gasoline prices force them to switch strategies? [Login required.] In our industry of books and ideas, new technologies are unveiled and the fine lines of copyrights threaten tradition.

In the end, we can fight against the inevitable. Or embrace it as an opportunity to be better.

Today's Quote

To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn falsehoods

Robert Heinlein

links for 2007-06-26

• Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines | Slashdot >> The Mechanized Future
  "In our increasingly mechanized world, we repeatedly hear promises that every new digital product, computerized service, or other form of technology, will make our lives easier — bestowing greater leisure, health, and happiness. Yet are any of those pro
  (tags: businessbooks bigidea)

The Right Use of Books

"The Right Use of Books"
from The Art of Living, circa 55 CE, by Epictetus.

Don't just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.

Meet the author (online)

Most authors have a web site and/or blog where they discuss their experiences writing and publishing the book, touring the country with it, and upcoming events. The author of How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything in Business (and in Life), Dov Seidman, invites you to visit his web site here:

http://www.howsmatter.com/

Interesting economics

If all economics classes had a professor like Robert Frank, economics might be a bit more hip. Professor Frank commences his classes by asking students to apply economics to real-world issues.

These questions and their answers now make up his recently published book, The Economic Naturalist. Over at another famous economics site you'll find a few excerpts including this one:

Why do fast food places promise a free meal if you aren't given a receipt at the time of purchase?

To deter theft, owners of restaurants and other retail establishments require cashiers to reconcile the total amount of cash collected during their shift with the total volume of sales rung up at their register...One way cashiers can circumvent this control is by neglecting to ring up a proportion of their transactions...Thus if a cashier failed to ring up a customer's $20 meal, he or she could pocket the $20 without creating an accounting discrepancy...By offering a complimentary meal to anyone who fails to receive a receipt, owners provide an economic incentive for customers to monitor cashiers for free.

Today's Quote

Seeing much, suffering much and studying much, are the three pillars of learning

Benjamin Disraeli

Today's Quote

In a great business there is nothing so fatal as cunning management

Junius

Today's Quote

Where there is unity there is always victory

Publilius Syrus

links for 2007-06-23

• The Sushi Economy >> Fast Company | A Fishy Expedition
  [A] fascinating account of the transformation of raw fish and vinegared rice from a Japanese street snack to an economic indicator of an emerging Western-style business culture [book link].
  (tags: businessbooks global industry)

Booklines

Nina created The Sorted Book Project. We decided to take a stab at it with business book titles. Read from top to bottom.

Okay, so maybe it's a bit harder with business titles. I thought about trying it with ChangeThis titles but didn't get that far. Maybe it's With Books Falling from the Sky, What Must Starbucks Do? Pushing Past the Dip. That's a start.

An essay from Adrian Slywotzky

What Your Boss Means By "Risk" Is Changing:
Opportunities Created by the New Risk Management

By Adrian J. Slywotzky
With Karl Weber
Authors of The Upside

We have some good news and some better news for corporate risk managers. The good news is that risk--once a mere afterthought in the world of corporate management--is moving toward center stage. More and more business leaders are coming to understand the vital role that risk management plays in shaping the future of their companies...which means that the opportunities for risk managers to influence thinking at the C-suite and boardroom level are greater than ever before.

The better news? What board members, CEOs, CFOs, directors of operations, and other top-level executives mean by "risk" goes beyond the traditional definition. Today's "risk" is a bigger topic than in the past, carrying with it bigger challenges, new sets of skills, and a new way of thinking that you can master to elevate and expand the conversation.

If you're a traditional risk manager, you're expert at coping with the three familiar categories of business risk: hazard risks (fire, flood, earthquake), financial risks (bad loans, currency and interest rate swings), and operating risks (the computer system goes down, the supply chain gets interrupted, an employee steals). You've probably been working with insurance companies, finance and security experts, and other specialists to reduce the levels of risk your business faces in each of these areas and to develop hedging strategies to minimize potential losses.

These traditional kinds of risks remain extremely important. But today, more and more company leaders are beginning to focus on a different set of risks that can be even more dangerous. These are the strategic risks your business faces.

Strategic risks target one or more of the crucial elements in the design of your company's business model. In some cases, they shatter the bond between you and your customers. In other cases, they undermine the unique value proposition that is the basis of your revenue stream. In still other cases, they siphon away the profits you depend on. And sometimes, they destroy the strategic control that helps your company fend off competition. In the worst case, a major strategic risk can threaten all these pillars of your business.

Not all businesses face every form of strategic risk (technology risk, competitor risk, customer risk, brand erosion, industry risk, project failure, etc.). But every business faces some. In fact, strategic risk comprises most of the total risk most companies face.

Here are a few examples of the kinds of strategic risks that most companies today are grappling with:

Project risk. Think back to the last major project your company initiated (R&D project, new product launch, market expansion, acquisition, IT project). What were the odds of success at the outset? What is the true success rate of all your company's projects in the past five to ten years?

If you assess them honestly, the true odds of success at the outset of most major projects are less than 20%--which means the risk of failure is greater than 80%. The new risk management asks: Can those odds be changed? How? What specific moves have other companies made to radically alter the odds in their favor? Which of these moves can you use to dramatically change the odds on your next project, or even on your entire portfolio of projects?

Customer risk. Has your business ever been surprised by its customers--by sudden, unforeseen shifts in their preferences, priorities, and tastes? When this happens, the revenue base on which your company is built can erode very quickly. But there are companies that have found specific ways to beat customer risk. How have they learned to get inside the minds of their customers, anticipating surprises before they happen? What growth breakthroughs did they create? Can you adopt their methods successfully? The new risk management is focusing on answering questions like these.

Transition risk. When technology or business design shifts transform an industry, as many as 80% of incumbent firms fail to survive the transition. But a handful of companies have not only beaten transition risk, but also turned it into an enormous growth opportunity--and a few have done it successfully more than once. What lessons do these survivors have to teach the rest of us? Here is another area where the new risk management is deeply involved.

These three examples just skim the surface of the kinds of challenges posed by strategic risk. (Our new book, The Upside, delves into the seven chief forms of strategic risk in significant detail.) But they'll suffice to illustrate the range of new problems risk managers can learn to think about in order to help their companies better navigate the new age of volatility that all of us are living through.

Of course, strategic risk has always existed. But it has not always been high on the list of leadership challenges. In more stable periods, everyone knew there were dangers that could threaten the viability of their companies' business model, somewhere out in the indefinite future. But they usually weren't considered big enough or likely enough to worry much about.

Today risk has moved to the top of the agenda. As everyone intuitively senses, our world is becoming a riskier place, featuring greater risks, more frequent risks, and more kinds of risks.

The explosion of risk is particularly obvious in certain fields, such as geopolitics, weather systems, and financial markets (although shrewd analysts like mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot have argued that the risk in markets has always been greater than generally recognized). It is becoming especially obvious in business. Companies that once owned seemingly invulnerable strategic niches have been reeling under assaults from quarters no one predicted. As a result, one great name after another appears in scare heads on the business pages. General Motors and Ford are working hard to reestablish their market positions; once-powerful brands from Sony, Levi's, and Reader's Digest to Polaroid, are eroding or disappearing before the onslaught of new competitors; U.S. manufacturers are losing tens of thousands of jobs to overseas competitors; airlines are facing challenges in the wake of deregulation and geopolitical developments; and the PC, TV, and stereo businesses are becoming no-profit zones as once-exclusive technologies become commodities.

No wonder business leaders from the boardroom to the executive suite are becoming increasingly nervous about the risks their companies face. All they need to do is switch on the TV news or open their newspapers to get an inkling of the looming threats.

The evidence that risk is increasing isn't just anecdotal. It's quantitative as well.

As an example, let's look at the stock performance of electrical utility companies. (Yes, we know you probably don't work at or even invest in a utility, but bear with us--it's an unusually clear example of a trend with broad implications.) The utility business was historically regarded as an industry with an extraordinarily low risk profile--the classic "widows and orphans" stock holding.

But in the 1990s, something happened. For a host of economic and political reasons, the electric energy industry was rapidly deregulated. As a result, the volatility of earnings (EBITDA) for the average electrical utility roughly doubled during the nineties. And volatility means large, unpredictable changes--in revenues, earnings growth, dividends, stock prices. In other words, risk. And stock market analysts have found that the same is true in other industries.

Why is risk so much more threatening in today's business world than ever before? There are many reasons, but several stand out:

• In today's wired world, customers have instant access to more information about products and services than ever before--and can switch brands at the click of a button.
  
• The multiplication of sales channels (from direct mail to QVC to big-box discounters to the Internet) is opening up more avenues for competition and transforming once-unique product offerings into commodities.
  
• Deregulation is forcing businesses that once enjoyed the security of near-monopoly markets and guaranteed profits to struggle for survival.
  
• Globalization has opened every market to competitors from around the world, exerting powerful downward pressures on prices and further damaging brand loyalty.
  
• Worldwide capital in search of investment opportunities is driving an ever-accelerating pace of technological change, creating upheavals in more and more industries, including ones not normally thought of as technology-driven.
  

Thanks to trends like these, business strategies that seemed to guarantee success just a decade ago are now being battered by unpredictable, often-destructive forces of change. No wonder, during the last twelve years, fully 170 of the Fortune 500 lost 50 percent or more of their value over a twelve-month period--the kind of precipitous collapse that was once rare but now is becoming commonplace.

The fact is that many of those 170 value collapses suffered by the Fortune 500--as well as similar calamities that have befallen small- and mid-sized companies in every industry--could have been foreseen, prevented, and transformed into opportunities for growth.

What's required to make this happen? Two things:

(1) A large dose of new thinking, beginning with an expansion of the definition of "risk management" to include not just insurable risks, but "uninsurable risks" as well, including the increasingly dangerous strategic risks that can threaten a company's success, or survival; and

(2) Adoption of an array of new tools for measuring, responding to, and transforming risk--tools that many of today's smartest companies are already developing and deploying, and which other businesses in virtually every arena can learn from, imitate, and improve upon.

We wrote The Upside to serve as a resource in both of these areas.

Experts in the arena of traditional risk management can play a crucial role in expanding and elevating the conversation about risk in their organization they can bring to bear both the new thinking and the new tools that can help their companies reduce controllable volatility (there will always be plenty of the other kind). And the sooner they begin the process, the sooner they can mitigate those risks, and in most cases transform those risks into upside opportunities, and sources of significant competitive advantage.

About the authors

Adrian J. Slywotzky -- cited by Industry Week as promising "to be what Peter Drucker was to much of the 20th century, the management guru against whom all others are measured"--is a director of Oliver Wyman. He is the author of the bestselling The Profit Zone (selected by BusinessWeek as one of the ten best books of 1998), Value Migration, and How to Grow When Markets Don't. He has also been published in the Harvard Business Review and the Wall Street Journal and has been a featured speaker at the Davos World Economic Forum, the Microsoft CEO Summit, the Forbes CEO Forum, and the Fortune CEO Conference.

Karl Weber is a freelance writer and editor who has collaborated with Adrian Slywotzky on several books and worked with such authors as former president Jimmy Carter, Loews Hotels CEO Jonathan Tisch, UN ambassador Richard Butler, and representative Richard Gephardt.

See www.crownbusiness.com or www.mercermc.com for more info.

To a billion dollar business

David's Blueprint to a Billion is still getting quite a bit of coverage after being out for over a year.

Here are a few links you may have missed:

1. An interview on ABC News (link on the right side of the page).
Billion dollar companies have exponential financial growth (example: Google that went from 15 million to one billion in a mere four years) and follow seven unique managerial practices.
2. An article published on the Street where he introduces the seven unique practices. David explains that "[w]hile Blueprint Companies represent 5% of the American companies that went public since 1980, the big surprise is their disproportionate impact: They account for 56% of employment in 2005 and 64% of market value created."
3. And an article over at Investors.com.

Today's Quote

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work

Peter Drucker

Where I Wish I Could Be

Today's Quote

Take my assets--but leave me my organization and in five years I'll have it all back

Alfred M. Sloan

links for 2007-06-21

• Bit Literacy >> As reviewed by 37signals | Achieveing Emptiness with Bit Literacy
  "The message of Mark Hurst’s new book, Bit Literacy: In an age of infinite bits, time and attention are the scarce resources. The solution is to constantly manage your bits with the goal of reaching an “empty” state."
  (tags: technology productivity businessbooks)

Holy Shit.

I am listening to the keynotes at Tools of Change.

Manolis Kelaidis is talking about his bluebook project. He has prototyped a book that will interact with other devices.

He used his finger, pressed on a song title in his book, and his computer started playing the song.

Applause followed.

[I will post video as soon as I can.]

Tags: toc2007

Changing the world by learning to sell green products.

MarketingProfs applies Levitt's marketing myopia to "green" businesses. When creating environmentally friendly products, businesses can easily fall into the marketing myopia trap; that of, focusing too much on the green benefits.

It seems the majority of consumers won't go out of their way to buy a product simply because it's green. Take Philips' fluorescent lightbulbs named EarthLight pitched in 1994 with a price tag of $15. Sure, it was good for the environment (though didn't fit most lamps) but sales never took off. When the bulbs were repackaged and promoted money savings in 2000, sales took off. [Now, green bulbs are becoming an industry standard.]

The problem: consumers didn't understand what was in it for them.

Which makes me wonder how many people bring their grocery bags back for 5 cents savings or their Starbucks' mug in for 10 cents off. How much value do consumers need to see to convince them go green?

Today's Quote

The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators

Edward Gibbon

Posted by jack at 8:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

links for 2007-06-20

• BusinessWeek | "Paperbacks For Balmy Days"
  "From 'weird ideas' to Iacocca, here's what to put in your beach bag"
  (tags: businessbooks summerreading)

TOC - Business Models that Guarantee Profitability in Publishing

Bob Pritchett, CEO of Logos Bible Software, is talking about their direct to customer business model. They have 500,000 users and about 20% of those are returning customers. Their business involves developing electronic versions of religious texts from both acquiring rights for existing publishers and developing original content.

They have a five part process for launching one of their electronic products:

1. Launch Products
2. Take Orders
3. Cover Costs
4. Start Production
5. Ship and Charge

They put all of their products up on their website and gauge interest before they put them into production. And interest is a customer giving Logos a credit card number. Using this system, they don't put a title into production until they have guaranteed to cover their production costs. Customers who enter early is the process get a good discount (30%) and the discount drops as more people commit to the project. Each project is a guaranteed success and any additional sale is hugely profitable.

They have also tried "community pricing" as well. Their customers are allowed to bid on potential projects. Their bid represents how much they would be willing to pay for the proposed project. Each project has again has a project breakeven and once the "auction" shows the project can be done, users are offered the lowest price which allows the project to make money and the product is priced at the highest revenue generating point based on the data. I think it is very clever and there is much better information at their site.

Tags: toc2007

These are a few of our favorite things

I thought it would be fun to take a cue from Ben and Jackie and ask the 800-CEO-READ crew to compile a list of our favorite things about Milwaukee. Wow, a very passionate discussion ensued -- don't worry about Milwaukeeans failing to supply an opinion. All in all, we came up with a great list. We had to group a few things to include everyone's favorites, but that just serves to paint a more complete picture of our city.

In no particular order, here are our Ten Favorite Things about Milwaukee:

• The Lakefront and Lake Michigan
  
• Theaters: Pabst Theatre, Theater X, Oriental Theatre
  
• Festivals and Concerts: Summer Fest, Irish Fest, Bastille Days, Festa Italiana, Pride Fest...you name it, we've got a festival for it.
  
• The Milwaukee Public Market (Third Ward) and neighborhood Farmers' Markets
  
• Independents: Alterra Coffee, Schwartz Bookshops, Anondyne Coffee, Bulls Eye Records
  
• Milwaukee Parks
  
• Restaurants and Bars: Palm Tavern, Riviera Maya, Crawdaddy's Cajun Restaurant, Pizza Man, Paddy's
  
• Neighborhoods (and affordable living): East Side, Bay View, Riverwest, Downtown, Third Ward, Brewer's Hill
  
• Miller Park Stadium and baseball and beer
  
• Milwaukee Art Museum
  

Winter sunset on Milwaukee's East Side

Print on Demand Workshop from Day One

There was a great session on Print on Demand yesterday. Here are some quick notes:

Ingram's POD service, Lighting Source, shared these stats from their service:

500,000+ titles available
14,000,000 printed thus far
1.3 million printed each month
average print run - 1.8 copies

Coming from a manufacturing background, I tend to take some things for granted and Phil Zuckerman from Applewood Books made a great point:

Price and content are important, but what really matters to resellers is availability.

The constraints of large press runs in offset publishing play havoc with decision-making. Traditional printing still makes sense in many instances, but the folks who are combining it with POD are finding a whole new set of possibilities around how to manage inventory.

Cambridge University Press has brought back to life thousands of titles and have doubled the revenues from their backlist over the last ten years.

Knowing when and where that will come from is hard to say, but again that is the beauty of POD. At Cambridge, they had a little over 1400 titles that did not sell in 2005 that went on to sell $1.5 million in 2006. These were all incremental sales not possible in the past.

There is also an angle that allows for quick updating of books.

Today's Quote

The chief executive who knows his strengths and weaknesses as a leader is likely to be far more effective than the one who remains blind to them. He also is on the road to humility--that priceless attitude of openness to life that can help a manager absorb mistakes, failures or personal shortcomings.

John Adair

Take 'em to the beach.

If you're looking for a paperback to peruse on the beach, BusinessWeek suggests:

• The Poker Face of Wall Street by Aaron Brown (due out late July) -- how gambling fits in with finance.
• The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences by Louis Uchitelle -- the ugly side of layoffs.
• Mr. Gladwell's Blink
• Spoiling For A Fight: The Rise of Eliot Spitzer by Brooke A. Masters -- learn about the roots of the NY governor.
• Piano: The Making of a Steinway Concert Grand by New York Times reporter James Barron -- "Follow a single piano, No. K0862, on its yearlong journey through Steinway & Sons' New York City factory and on to the company's storied concert division, where instruments are earmarked for loans to artists and institutions."
• Toxic Emotions at Work and What You Can Do About Them by Peter E. Frost
• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann -- an insight into what Native American life was like before Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.
• Iacocca: An Autobiography -- No need to find the paperback from 1984; Lee's autobiography was recently re-published.
• Weird Ideas That Work: How to Build a Creative Company by Bob Sutton -- Here's what Jack had to say about Weird Ideas. You may also know Bob from his recent book The No Asshole Rule.
• Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky -- on life in France during WWII. The author died in Auschwitz before finishing the book.

This came from this BusinessWeek article.

links for 2007-06-19

• The Wall Street Journal | Reading Recommendations for Non-Profits
  (tags: businessbooks nonprofit)

Flickr fun

I finally got around to posting some pictures from our May event with Nikos Mourkogiannis, author of Purpose. You'll also find a few new pictures from around the office and from our trip to New York City for BEA.

Here's a link to our Flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/800ceoread/

Reporting Live from O'Reilly Tools of Change Conference

I got on a plane early this morning to head for California. I am attending O'Reilly Tools of Change Conference in San Jose. A bunch of folks are here to talk about the future of publishing.

The actual conference starts tomorrow with today being a set of tutorials on a variety of topics. I caught the tail end of the RSS talk (widgets were the main buzz) and I am attending the Print On Demand session later today. If there are interesting points, I will pass them along. Otherwise, expect more tomorrow.

Tags: toc2007

Building a virtual team

The WSJ published their Journal Report this weekend. The topic: Business Insights. Inside are book recommendations and articles on outsourcing, change, growth, strategic execution officers (SEOs), and something we're currently working on -- virtual teams -- 10 rules for making them work. The first rule being:

Rule #1: Invest in an online resource where members can learn quickly about one another.

Lynda Gratton profiled David Oglivy's investment in Truffles (not the edible type); it's an internal place where employees can exchange project information and collaborate. The name shows an appreciation for fine ideas (what the Oglivy represents); it comes from Oglivy's belief:

...that people should search for knowledge with as much energy and enthusiasm as a pig searches for truffles in the oak forests of France.

The tools we use are about conversation. They're from the folks over at 37signals. There's basecamp: a storage and exchange area; campfire: our daily chatting place, sadly no s'mores yet; highrise: a CRM database; and backpack: everything that'd be stored in a backpack, calendars, notes, to-dos, etc.

I'm curious. What are you using for your virtual teams?

On glossy paper, no less!

Jack and Todd were recently interviewed for an article in the Summer 2007 edition of Executive Living, a special publication of Milwaukee's Business Journal. The story is about current reading trends in corporate book clubs.

What you can't see is the rest of us making faces at them behind the photographer.

Today's Quote

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him

Niccolo Machiavelli

Jack Covert Selects - The Sushi Economy

The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy by Sasha Issenberg, Gotham Books, 352 pages $26.00 Hardcover, May 2007, ISBN 9781592402946

I admit that I'm not the most adventurous foodie, but I realized that I would have to try sushi a try for the first time when my 9-year-old granddaughter began eating sushi for lunch at school. I still haven't taken that first nibble of a spicy tuna roll, so you may wonder why I decided to take a bite out of Sasha Issenberg's The Sushi Economy. Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell and books like The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, books that look solely at one industry or one thought from many different angles have become quite popular. These books read like biographies, and that makes for some very enjoyable and informative reading. It is a challenge, however, for these narrow-focused books to work because the writer must be able to tell a good story. Fortunately, Issenberg is a fine storyteller, consistently peppering the book with fun and insightful commentary about an interesting subject: sushi's rise from a pesky problem for fishermen to a luxury commodity in the global marketplace.

The northern blue fin tuna is a key ingredient of quality sushi, and, in 1991, the price for the fish approached $36 per pound. In order to reduce the price, groups in Canada and Japan brokered a deal. Sound like strange bedfellows? Well, at that time, fishermen in Canada considered the fish a menace to other species because they competed for food with the herring and mackerel. At the same time, Japan Airlines wanted more freight for their planes returning to Japan. Solution granted. But it wasn't easy, and Issenberg tells us of the different methods of preserving fish for the long trip and how the fish mongers in Tokyo received the fish from Canada. He also explains how the Tsuliji fish market in Tokyo works and the amazing amount of fish that are processed there daily. How the fish that are "farmed" are treated differently than those caught in the wild, and how the vendors bid and then resell the product.

The book isn't just about the fish; it is also about how sushi has grown in popularity. Focusing on Los Angeles as the place where sushi got its toehold in the U.S., Issenberg goes into the nuts and bolts of the food distribution system. He follows a small slab of tuna that, by the time it hits a small sushi bar in L.A., has changed hands--hopefully, clean hands--nine times in three days. The book also features some of the great chefs, focusing on Nobu Matsuhisa, who is known for his fusion cooking and incorporating Japanese and South American ingredients.

The world is now an international marketplace, and we can partake in foods from any place imaginable, often found just around the corner. But it is also essential that we understand where our food comes from and the effect its commercial popularity has on its country of origin. Issenberg's book will take you on a trip around the world and is a perfect summer read in lieu of a trip to the fish markets of Japan.

Today's Required Reading

InBubbleGuy tackles the definition of sport (and yes, there is a business tie-in).

Today's Quote

The races of mankind would perish did they cease to aid each other. From the time that the mother binds the child's head till the moment that some kind assistant wipes the brow of the dying, we cannot exist without mutual help.

Sir Walter Scott

Jack Covert Selects - Weird Ideas That Work

Weird Ideas That Work: How To Build a Creative Company by Robert I. Sutton, Free Press, 240 pages, $14.00 Paperback, May 2007, ISBN 9780743227889.

You won't see many re-runs of Jack Covert Selects, but we feel Robert Sutton's paperback release of Weird Ideas that Work deserves a fresh mention. Here's the original review from 2001, revised slightly after reading the paperback edition:

I am not an instant fan of books with clever titles because many times the title is the high point of the book. Not true here. Sutton writes with a real flare for his subject, and shows a real investment in creativity. He fills the book with stories of great feats of innovation. Some of these stories we've heard before, but many we haven't, involving companies we all know. The first chapter, "Why These Ideas Work, but Seem Weird," examines the way ideas are generated in organizations and how we can change our approach to creativity. Then the second chapter, "What is Creativity, Anyway?," proves that "weird" ideas do in fact work. You'll likely read Chapter 2 many times because Sutton uses effective examples of innovative successes. Let me start with my favorite:

Sutton tells about Marks and Spencer's, a leading food store in England, whose problem was buttering bread (really!). They were expanding so rapidly and their prepared sandwiches were selling so well that a huge amount of employee time was taken up buttering the bread. What to do? One of the executives was visiting a bed sheet supplier and observed the silk-screening process used to apply the designs on the sheets. He discovered that same technology would be applicable to his bread buttering problem. All of Mark and Spencer's sandwiches are now buttered by silk-screen. Thinking out of the box: that is Sutton's message. Another good one? Back in the early nineties, many companies were developing super mini-computers for business folks. These inventions generally failed until Palm Computing's Jeff Hawkins realized that his "competition was paper, not computers." Rather than trying to imitate the personal computer, they discarded previous assumptions and began developing Palm Pilot, a widely successful product.

The following 12 chapters are on the author’s own 11 weird ideas. As you would expect, these are provocative practices, such as: "Encourage People to Ignore and Defy Superiors and Peers (Weird Idea #4)" and "Reward Success and Failure, Punish Inaction (Weird Idea #6)." These ideas were drawn from Sutton's research in behavioral psychology to explain how innovation can be fostered. He shows how the best teams and companies use these behaviors and other counter-intuitive approaches to crank out new ideas, and he demonstrates that every company can reap sales and profits from this creativity. Then, as I often admire about the most successful books, he includes a chapter about how to implement these ideas in your organization.

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