800-CEO-READ Blog

links for 2007-09-29

• The Shock Doctrine >> New York Times Book Review | Bleakonomics
  " 'The Shock Doctrine' is Klein’s ambitious look at the economic history of the last 50 years and the rise of free-market fundamentalism around the world."
  (tags: economics global businessbooks)
• Supercapitalism >> Portfolio Magazine | Hellbent on Capitalism
  As Reich admits, this unfettered capitalism is very good at what it tries to do: mainly, earn profits for shareholders and offer a wide array of affordable products to consumers. It is lousy at everything else...
  (tags: businessbooks economics global)
• Age of Turbulence >> Portfolio Magazine | His Fault
  For far too long, Greenspan denied the evidence before his eyes, insisting there was neither a real estate bubble nor any sign of problems emerging in the financial sector [ link].
  (tags: businessbooks biography economics global)
• Options >> Portfolio Magazine | Fake Steve, Fake Novel
  Options is a confection—small and sweet, but not exactly nutritious.
  (tags: fiction businessbooks humor)
• More Books to Read >> Portfolio Magazine | Also Worth Read...
  Shorts on Are The Rich Necessary?, A Nation of Counterfeiters, Cool It, The Economic Naturalist, The Siege of Mecca, Evil Inc., and Flawless.
  (tags: businessbooks economics industry global history)
• The Age of Turbulence >> Fortune | Greenspan speaks
  The book's second half, which he describes as "the foundation on which to erect the conceptual framework for understanding the new economy," is as compelling as it sounds [link].
  (tags: biography businessbooks economics global)

Financial Times Asks "What Is Best Business Book of All Time?"

In conjunction with their Business Book of The Year Award, The Financial Times is asking the question: "What is the best book of all time?" They solicited suggestions from a wide variety of business executives, including GE's Jeff Immelt and Ebay's Meg Whitman. The editorial staff then created a short list using the same criterea as their yearly awards. The finalists are:

• Barbarians at the Gate, by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar (1990)
• The Effective Executive, by Peter Drucker (1966)
• Good to Great, by Jim Collins (2001)
• The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clay Christensen (1997)
• The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith (1776)

You can cast your vote and leave comments if you think they missed the mark with their selections.

Jack Covert Selects - Better

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande, Metropolitan Books, 288p, $24.00, Hardcover, April 2007, ISBN 9780805082111

Innovation research shows that almost every major innovation has an origin outside the industry it impacts. Amazon.com did not originate from a savvy retailer, just as the iPod was not developed by the consumer electronics industry. Looking for inspiration outside your normal avenues can be helpful and, in this recommendation, we take you outside the realm of business books.

Atul Gawande is a staff writer for The New Yorker and his first book, Complications, was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award. He writes about the difficulties facing medicine, and he has a great vantage point as a general surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. His new book, Better, is about the quest to improve the status quo, and in medicine, this translates directly into saved lives. Gawande suggests there are three aspects to the struggle to improve: diligence, doing it right and ingenuity.

His survey starts with one of the biggest killers in hospitals: bacterial infection. Over two million people every year acquire infections while in the care of a hospital, and 90,000 die as a result. The single best way to reduce the spread of infection is medical professionals washing their hands. With nurses seeing 20 patients an hour, it is nearly impractical to stop for a 60 second scrubbing before each patient. Gawande's hospital was able to improve compliance from 40% to 70% with the introduction of an alcohol-based gel. But here's the kicker: there was no change in the infection rates. A hospital in Pittsburgh struggling with the same problem created an initiative modeled after a Vietnamese anti-starvation program that used positive deviance: get the successful minority to tell the majority how to change. With the implementation of this approach, the hospital eliminated--completely--wound infections, and the program is now being tried in other hospitals.

While the backdrop from Better is the field of medicine, the continuous improvement message fits whether you are building pick-up trucks or servicing computer networks. Business people can learn from this book about health care, just as the Pittsburgh hospital learned from the Vietnamese village, and be reminded that getting better is a universal quest.

Jack Covert Selects - Fired Up or Burned Out

Fired Up or Burned Out: How to Reignite Your Team's Passion, Creativity, and Productivity
By: Michael Lee Stallard, with Carolyn Dewing-Hommes and Jason Pankau, Thomas Nelson, 230 pages, $22.99 Hardcover, July 2007. ISBN 9780785223580

Great leadership is something we think is easy to recognize, but it can be a hard thing to define. In Fired Up or Burned Out, Michael Lee Stallard does just that by explaining the type of culture great leaders create, and also the traits leaders use to create it. As Stallard himself states, we only remain motivated and engaged at work for so long using traditional motivational speeches and incentives. He suggests altering the workplace itself, creating an organization connecting employees with each other and the mission, values, and outlook of the organization. Given a goal and a vision, the workforce of such an organization will organically inspire and engage itself. We like to think that we have created this kind of company in a third floor office in Milwaukee's Historic Third Ward, and that this has had everything to do with our success.

Explaining early on why it's so important to create a workplace culture that engages workers (and where they engage each other), he states:

The Gallup Organization conservatively estimates the annual economic cost to the American economy from the approximately 22 million American workers who are extremely negative or "actively disengaged" to be between $250 and $300 billion. This figure doesn't include the cost for employees who are disengaged but have not spiraled down to the level of active disengagement.

Beyond that sobering fact, government and private research organizations are expecting a shortage of between 10 to 35 million workers in the American market lasting through the first half of the century. Stallard's 230 pages pack plenty of inspiration to lead the kind of organization that can attract and retain workers in this difficult environment, and he discusses the practical skills necessary to do it. The book is broken up into four parts. In the first three sections, Stallard discusses how to engage workers in the workplace, how to create a great overall work culture, and the traits that make a great leader. In the fourth part, "Learn from Twenty Great Leaders Over Twenty Days," he shares twenty stories of great leadership, along with quick applications of each one. His stories aren't confined to this part of the book, though. He illustrates his ideas throughout the book using a wealth of historical examples and with stories from sports and the business world. If you feel like you or your organization is burned out and needs to be reignited, pick up this title.

Microfinance Update

I wrote last Friday about microcredit and a book entitled A Billion Bootstraps. When I got home that night a funny thing happened. I turned on the television, flipped it to channel 10, and there was microcredit pioneer and Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus on NOW's "Enterprising Ideas" series. I didn't know of the controversy in the microfinance community over what some would call "predatory microlenders", but it's there. The focus of the controversy is on Compartamos, a lender in Mexico. Started as a non-profit, it turned to investors to help it grow and became a commercial bank. They now have a larger reach into poor communities, but have been drawing criticism from Yunus and others for setting interest rates as high as 100% on small loans. There is a big disagreement here. From the transcript:

[Carlos] DANEL: If we think that capital markets are the devil, we're never going to solve poverty

[Maria] HINOJOSA: The entrepreneurs behind Compartamos will tell you that it's the lure of profits that will motivate people to lend to the poor.

DANEL: We have to stop looking at this as a zero-sum game and look at how we can bridge business and social objectives together in a successful way.

HINOJOSA: Simply put, the business objective is to make money. But how much profit is too much? That's the question being asked by the company's high profile critics, including Muhammed Yunus, the Nobel Prize-winner who pioneered the idea of modern microcredit thirty years ago.

YUNUS: When you are maximizing your profit-you are not looking at whether the poor people are getting out of poverty. You are always looking at your bottom line, how much money we are making out of this business with the poor people

It seems to me that the big difference is in who owns the bank. Maria Hinojosa sums it up.

Muhammad Yunus' Grameen bank is also a for-profit business. But there's a big difference. Any profits there go directly back to the borrowers, who are also owners of the company. Not so at Compartamos. [...] Recently, microlending as an investment idea has gained a lot of momentum. A small but growing number of international banks and investment firms are realizing that microcredit can also be good business. Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, TIAA-CREF all have backed multi-million dollar microcredit deals...

If done right, these banks could positively affect millions of lives. If you're interested in this topic, you can learn more about it, or watch Friday's program online, here. Other resources would be Yunus' own book, and for an economist's view on ending poverty, take a look at Jeffrey Sachs' aptly named and extremely popular book from 2005, The End of Poverty . Sachs also has another title being published by Penguin early next year called Common Wealth that looks like it should be fascinating.

Greenspan Starts Strong

Publisher's Lunch reports today that Alan Greenspan's The Age of Turbulence had sales of 128,000 copies in its opening week, according to Neilsen's Bookscan.

That is a great start for the book, but people will be watching closely to see if the book can keeping that momentum into the next three or four weeks.

Not related to business books...

[If you're in the Milwaukee area, keep reading.]

If you've been with us for awhile, you may know we're based in Milwaukee. And, our sister company is the independent Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops.

The folks at Schwartz are always bringing in provocative authors for speeches and book signings. This October 12-14 is their annual Readers' Retreat. It's a relaxing weekend spent on Lake Geneva meeting other readers, discovering new books and hearing from a number of authors including:

• Kim Edwards, author of the bestselling novel, The Memory Keeper's Daughter
• Kathleen Flinn, author of The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry, the true story of her pursuit of a life-long dream: to earn a diploma from the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris
• Meg Mullins, author of the novel The Rug Merchant, a story of finding love in New York told through the eyes of an Iranian exile
• Wisconsin author Mary Relindes Ellis whose novel The Turtle Warrior centers on a Wisconsin family caught in battlefields both physical and emotional
• Ron McLarty, author of Traveler.

You can find out more here. And while you're there, check out their other events. They're bringing in Alan Alda, Lake Wobegon's creator, Garrison Keillor, singer Amy Grant, Nick Hornby and more. There's a great line-up and we'd love to see you there.

links for 2007-09-26

• The Billionaire Who Wasn't>>The Wall Street Journal | Business Success Is Not Duty Free
  Chuck Feeney is a hard man to categorize. He made billions as a co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers, the world-wide retail chain familiar to almost anyone who has passed through an international airport, yet when he is traveling, he flies economy class. He i
  (tags: businessbooks biography)

Financial Times and Goldman Sachs announce shortlist for Business Book of the Year Award

This morning Financial Times and Goldman Sachs revealed the semifinalist titles in the running of being named their Business Book of the Year. Judges will determine the final winner on October 25.

The list is as follows:

• Zoom
by Iain Carson and Vijay V Vaitheeswaran
• The Last Tycoons
by William D Cohan
• The Age of Turbulence
by Alan Greenspan
• Immigrants
by Philippe Legrain
• The Black Swan
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Wikinomics
by Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams

Good luck!

Do It Wrong Quickly - Marketing in the Age of the Web

A little background...Pearson, a major international publisher of educational and resource materials, puts out some of the best books on Internet marketing, technology support, and learning HTML and multimedia software. (And they're not paying me to say so.) You've probably seen Pearson's many imprints on your resource books -- IBM Press, Financial Times, Prentice Hall, Peachpit Press, Longman, and Wharton, among many others. Peachpit's Quickstart guides, for example, give non-technicians the basic tools to make heads or tails of programs once mastered exclusively by programmers and graphic designers. As much of our creative work becomes do-it-yourself or stays in-house, it's almost necessary to start a reference library. Over the next few months I'd like to recommend a few titles to get you started.

As we're thinking about ways to expand our online presence, Todd and I have been talking a lot about the best ways to approach new projects. It used to be that we decided to do something--print a new brochure, redesign a web site, incorporate a new technology--and then presented a plan to a designer. There might be some initial back-and-forth about needs and goals, but what the designer came back with in the end was essentially a finished product. We had to be sure we knew exactly what we wanted before we asked (and paid) for it. Today, though, there's a lot of wiggle room. Especially online, we can try and fail at something new without taking a significant hit (or any at all, sometimes).

A few weeks ago Todd wrote about a book called Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres:

http://800ceoread.com/blog/archives/007328.html.

It was also featured in Jack Covert Selects in August:

http://800ceoread.com/blog/archives/007292.html.

One point Ayres makes in Super Crunchers is that by applying randomization, we can learn a lot about our customers/users' needs and preferences--a lot more than we could know by traditional trial and error.

This week I opened up Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules (IBM Press). The subtitle might make you think "Um, where have you been?" but the author, Mike Moran, actually gets at something close to what Ayres talks about in Super Crunchers. Using a bow-and-arrow analogy, Moran suggests that the archer with three arrows has a higher chance of success than the archer with one. In other words, it's great if your shot in the dark hits the bull's eye, but chances are it won't every time. On the other hand, if you take three shots at the same time, you might not hit the bull's eye, but you'll score more points--and learn more along the way.

I'm probably not doing justice to the author's message, here, but I think that the important thing to take away is that it no longer makes sense to expect that even a carefully thought-through, well-executed marketing campaign will hit the target in today's world. In fact, Moran believes that the new marketing means getting away from the plan-then-execute approach, and starting to try lots of approaches at the same time. In addition to systematic ways of assessing your online marketing (conversions, metrics), you have to listen better to your customers. He talks about the social media phenomenon, incorporating multi-media approaches in your message, and creating deeper relationships with your customers by engaging them in a conversation.

As Moran puts it, "whether change gets your blood pumping or leaves you in a pool of sweat, marketing is undergoing a revolution more profound than any of us are likely to see the rest of our lives." Do It Wrong Quickly is a friendly invitation to that revolution.

Ask 8cr! - Happiness

Welcome to "Ask 8cr!" - a new section of our blog where we've created a forum to find out what kinds of issues and challenges people are having in the workplace. We then take these issues and apply a business book we feel offers a viable solution. Others then chime in via the comments section. The person with the selected challenge gets a free copy of the book, but everyone who reads these posts, wins. Do you have a challenge at work? Send it to me at jon(a)800ceoread(dot)com.

Today's challenge deals with identifying what career path will truly make you happy. Here's a note from one of our readers:

"Currently, I'm a free agent or on sabattical or unemployed ... depends on how one looks at the situation. Have been since early April. Since I've never really known what trips my trigger regarding a job, it's been very difficult to lock into one or two specific areas that I might like. In fact, I know the kinds of jobs I DON'T want to perform. I have an M.A., have worked in theatre management, fund raising, and been an investment advisor. Am ready for something new, but don't know what." - Lynn

Maybe you're like Lynn, looking for work, but sort of dreading all of it in general. Or, maybe you have a job, but it's lost its luster to the point of making you wonder why you even wanted it in the first place. Or, maybe you're completely happy with your position, but have the nagging feeling that the company you're with stinks. Whatever the case, you're looking for happiness - not a job, not a career, not a company. So, how do we predict such things? How can we know what we should really be looking for?

Daniel Gilbert has written an incredible book called Stumbling on Happiness. Using scientific research (he's a Harvard psychologist), humor, and a writing style all of us lay-folk can understand, Gilbert details how the human mind gets used (and not used) that can help us all realize why we've made the decisions we have, and how to set ourselves back on our own paths toward happiness.

Interestingly, Gilbert discusses how people have the strange compulsion to want to "live in the moment," as if doing so will give us a heightened sense of enjoyment. Rather, "living in the moment" is just what inhibits us from fulfilling what our brains are really driving us toward - our interests, and thus, our happiness. Our brains, he says, are built to think about the future. Telling your brain not to think about the future is like telling your heart not to beat so much. From this principle, the book progresses through a series of other examples of how the brain works, and how, in its intricacy, we have the ability to manipulate it to our advantage and disadvantage. Understanding this stuff is huge, as it makes you think much more about how you think. Sounds confusing, but it's something we should do a bit more often to help break out of the patterns that keep us following a path out-of-sync with our true happiness.

Stop stumbling and pick this book up. It's an enjoyable and helpful read for all. And if my opinion isn't good enough, read what Jack Covert had to say about it here.

Social Contract Networking

I believe very strongly in personal responsibility and hard work, but have never really understood it when people say that someone else should "pull themselves up by their own bootstraps". I mean really, if someone were to accomplish that feat literally, they'd pull their own feet out from under themselves and fall right on their backside, so even as a metaphor it seems absurd. I know it's just a figure of speech, but its very utterance seems to deny any existence of a social contract. Even if one does deny the inherent existence of such a contract in society, and there are plenty who do, is it not incumbent upon a democratic government to provide some material support to its most disadvantaged citizens when the private sector fails to do so? Does it not help move the business of the country forward, or at least keep it stable, when it does so? FDR thought so, and though he was considered by many at the time as a "traitor to his class", his New Deal policies are seen by many others as the savior of American capitalism and society, tempering the sometimes harsh realities of the market with social safety nets.

The Indian government set up its own kind of new deal for their most disadvantaged citizens when they wrote their constitution back in 1950. The Dalit community, often referred to as the "untouchables", make up 16% of the Indian population, and after centuries of living at the bottom of a rigid caste system, the 1950 constitution offered many of them the prospect of a better life. As reported in Wednesday's WSJ, there is some controversy surrounding these policies today. Yaroslav Trofimov writes:

Under India's constitution, Dalits are entitled to [certain] benefits, including 15% of all federal government jobs and admissions in government-funded universities. This provides the country's most downtrodden with a way to escape their traditional occupations such as emptying village latrines, burying cow carcasses, and tanning animal hides.
But there is a catch: Any Dalit abandoning Hinduism for Christianity or Islam loses these privileges, and can be fired from jobs gained under the quota. The rules are enforced by vigilant local officials who keep a close eye on villager's comings and goings.

[...]

Such thorough enforcement means that secret lives have to be lived throughout India's society. "If they ever find out I'm a Christian, I will lose my position, no question about it" says a Dalit school teacher who behaves as a Hindu when he teaches in a state school near Medipally but decorates his Hyberabad apartment with pictures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

Now what to do? The private sector isn't yet meeting all the needs of the disadvantaged in this situation, and the government has put restrictions on their programs to do so. This is when charities often enter the picture, but as Phil Smith and Eric Thurman note in A Billion Bootstraps, even "experienced philanthropists from Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates have complained that giving money away is often more difficult than making it in the first place." The authors call the U.S. non-profit sector a "$900 billion black hole" because there are few reliable statistics about it and it can be very difficult to know exactly what is being done with the money you contribute. This is not to suggest we shouldn't donate to charity, but Smith and Thurman's book offers both a humanitarian and entrepreneurial alternative by documenting the world of microfinance. Muhammad Yunus, who wrote the forward for this book and has written his own book on the topic, won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his pioneering work in the field of microcredit. Realizing that the largest contributor to poverty is not lack of skill or ambition, but access to capital, those in the vanguard of this "barefoot banking" movement began making small loans to individuals mired in poverty with no access to traditional loans. One such example from the book:

In Tamil Nadu, the southern-most state in India, Shanti, a 28-year-old mother of two young sons, weaves delicate silk saris to sell in the neighborhood. Born into the extreme poverty rampant in this region, Shanti's weaving skills were hard won, and she has worked diligently since childhood just to survive. Though renowned for the quality of her saris, Shanti was earning only $2.60 per day, barely enough to allow her to care for her children. Desperate for the capital required to expand her business, she became indebted to a local loan shark who charged outrageous interest rates. Later, she learned about microcredit and took a loan for $60 that she invested in her business. Her income has since increased to more than $6 a day, and she is now free from crippling debt. Today, Shanti is able to focus on growing her business and creating a better life for her family.

This is globalization on a human scale. If we can foster friendship and goodwill through this kind of entrepreneurship and cooperation, I think we may start to gain back some of the admiration and standing we've lost in the world over the last few years. And though I'm still not sure about the bootstraps analogy, A Billion Bootstraps has given me an even greater appreciation for what hard work and perseverance can accomplish with just a little support.

The Little Prince Debate

Tom Peters refueled a little inner office discussion between the sales staff here at 8CR with a blog post over at TomPeters!, when mentioning The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. It wasn't until recent discussions, and Mr Peters' blog post that I looked past the personal value of the book, and thought of The Little Prince as a very valuable business tool. People look to a variety of business books for the answers of becoming better in their field, yet forget some of the basic principles that help in accomplishing these tasks. Revisiting this classic fable made me look into similar books that address a bit more of the human dilemma. Here are a few books worth flipping through (None of these books are really classified as business books, but contain invaluable insights that could improve the way we do business, and how people can progress in their chosen professions):

If you get a chance, go back and revisit Jack's posts on Chasing Daylight.

If anyone is a big fan of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, I'm Proud of You: Life Lessons from my friend Fred Rogers by Tim Madigan has just been released in paperback.

A good friend, who coincidentally gave me my first copy of The Little Prince, handed me a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh's book Peace is Every Step about ten years ago. She said that if it didn't lower my blood pressure I should seek professional help. I was very excited to see his latest book The Art of Power sitting on top of a pile of books in the office. Here is a little blurb from the back cover:

"Our society is founded on a very limited definition of power, namely wealth, professional success, fame, physical strength, military might, and political control. My friends, I suggest there is another kind of power, a greater power: the power to be happy right in the present moment......."

Wouldn't the environments we spend time in be more enjoyable with a stronger presence of the human value in them? I would like to think so.

More NYC food

We have eaten at some incredible restaurants on this trip. Yesterday was Balthazar for breakfast and Bouley for dinner.

I had to take a break from all that fine dining and eat lunch today at the Shake Shack. This is another establishment run by Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality. The burger joint is located in Madison Square Park and was quite popular today with the sunny, 80 degree day we are having in New York City today. I waited in line for 30 minutes to place my order and waited another 15 minutes to get my Shack Burger, Fries, Coke, and Strawberry Custard Shake. It was really good.

P.S. It was awesome to see Milwaukee-based Usinger's bratwursts (aka Wisconsin Bratwurst) on the menu.

Local Friend Recommends

Our friends at OnMilwaukee.com recommend a great business title in their most recent "OMC Recommends: Cool stuff we like right now" column. Jeff Sherman says this about Randy Komisar's The Monk and The Riddle:

It's a bit outdated, but Randy Komisar's novel is a great read. Not only does it help solidify the impact that passion and purpose (two of reasons, if you were wondering, why OMC has become the amazing company it is today) have on our lives, but it's a decent outline for both new and time-tested entrepreneurs.

More on the digital vs. paper debate...

We often get into philosophical debates here on everything from what constitutes a sport to the evolution of the book industry. Many times, these conversations are conducted through a string of emails. Rebecca introduced you to one debate. I thought you might like to see it unfold.

Here's a piece of the digital vs. paper debate -- featuring Jon, Rebecca, Todd and Dylan. It's lengthy and poses interesting questions and points about business books and reading in general. I did edit bits and pieces to trim it a bit for your -- the reader's -- sake. And so it begins:

Todd opens:

I saw this on the Apple Keynote:

32% of the music released in 2006 was digital-only (no CD was released)

Think about a similar phenomenon in publishing and what that would mean...

We all think. Jon responds first:

I still don't know if there's that strong of a connection between these types of publishing. Downloading a song and carrying it around makes sense. Downloading a 300 pg novel doesn't. How will this change?

Maybe language will change based on technology. Maybe people will start using less words, more images/sounds/etc. Then a 300 pg novel could be reduced to a much shorter presentation with generally the same message.

Sort of like Kanji, but much further.

This leads to much bigger questions - Is this beneficial? Is this progress? Will it lead to an even greater sense of illiteracy?

Thanks for the happy morning thoughts, Todd!

Keep reading...

Dylan brings it back around:

As it pertains to business books, I think it would mean one of a few things.
That someone had invented a good digital interface to read long format (book length) content on.

That someone had invented a print-on-demand process to bind books in peoples homes and businesses. I say this because I don't think people want to print off a 200 page book on individual sheets of paper. I think they want it nicely bound...

Now, as it pertains to business thought, I think 32% of it may already be digital. It's on blogs and in online magazines. I think our one big strength now is that businesses want speakers in person, they want to hand out that speaker's nicely bound, hardcover book to the attendees so they take a piece of that experience home with them, and they will therefore need the book in bulk.

And, Jon pulls in the Huffington:

Also, try interpreting this article as "The Velocity of Books."

Rebecca responds:

I'm not sure if Todd views it as a good or bad thing. He poses a good question: What could it mean? I think Jon hit the nail on the head with his questions:

This leads to much bigger questions - Is this beneficial? Is this progress? Will it lead to an even greater sense of illiteracy?

Consider the article that came out a few weeks ago. 1 in 4 people did not read a book last year. That doesn't mean they read a digital book instead of a paper one. It means that fewer and fewer people are reading. I'd venture a guess and say that more and more people are listening to music.

Now I'm getting a little philosophical, but I feel that while pictures and sound can get messages across, exposure to the written word triggers processes in the brain that can't be replicated by any type of technology.

I also wonder about the socio-economic impact that more digital technology is going to have. iPods and computers are expensive. Sure, poorer people still buy them, but if more and more moves to digital, how will some groups of people be able to afford maintaining complex devices?

And even if I'm wrong about this, and books really are going to go away, I have the same question as Jon--is this progress?

Dylan returns with:

If Todd was implying that bulk book sales will disappear, at least as far as business books are concerned, I think I would disagree.

I think what Jon suggests will, and definitely is happening, and I agree that we need to find our place in that new paradigm. But I think there is something else happening as well. More business books are being published now than ever, and a new kind of one as well. I think that as organizations speed up communication and start moving in new directions, it will be even more important to gather everyone in one place once or twice a year and focus on big new concepts and ideas to move forward with. I think this is especially true as the younger generation enters the workforce, people start working more often from home, etc. This is where the business book fits in, and where our more traditional bulk business is, and will be for some time. Keep in mind I'm thinking of this only as it pertains to our business, and not society as a whole. I think we must prepare ourselves for the eventuality of a decline in bulk book sales, but the trends seem to be in the other direction at the moment.

On a larger cultural and societal scale, I definitely agree with Rebecca's comments and Jon's question. I'm almost positive that fiction, history, and business or "perspective" books will continue to be published on paper. I do wonder who will be reading them. Will only professionals in these fields read them? How will people buy them? Is there still a place for independent bookstores selling recently released works?

An album is much different than a book though. The recent developments in music have made it more portable. The problem of the portability of ideas was solved by Gutenberg in the 1400's. I think they are moving in opposite directions, or that music is finally finding what books already provide for ideas and literature. If a really good ebook reader comes out, with the interface, portability, and feel comparable to a book, that may spoil my argument. People have said that will happen for over a decade, but people have also said we'll have flying cars soon since the 50's.

I also don't find the fact that one in four people didn't read a single book last year all that surprising. I think that that MSNBC poll, done 50 years ago, would have shown many more non-readers than today. I will have to look that up.

Dylan researches:

Here's what I found. I only spent about an hour on this, and only referenced the internet and one DVD, so this is obviously not conclusive.

Statistics from the National Endowment of the Arts

Percentage of adults that read a single book.

1992: 60.9%
2002: 56.6%

I couldn't find any definitive statistics older than that online. The AP poll from the MSNBC story reported that 73% of adults read a book last year. ... I don't know if this question is the most important one to ask though. I think we should be looking at active readership. Is reading 1 book a year all that different from reading none, or one every other year? Is it "active readership"? More importantly for our purposes, how much would it support the publishing industry if they had read a single book?

You could argue, I suppose, that reading breeds more reading, so if we could get everyone to read one book it could help. Moving on though...

In David Schwartz's [editor's side note: David Schwartz was the son of the founder of our sister company and local independent Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops chain] interview with I Remember Milwaukee in 1995, he cited statistics that said around 15% of the population actively read and bought books at that time. According to David, that was up from around 3% when he started working with his father at the bookshops in the early 50's. He didn't mention where he got those statistics, but I would never doubt David's knowledge of the publishing industry or people's reading habits. Considering that there are simply more people today, that should mean significantly more readers that could potentially buy books. (I should note that I didn't remember David's actual statistics. I just remembered him referencing them, so I watched my copy of the show tonight to get those numbers.)

According to that same NEA study from 2002 I referenced above, however, literary reading had dropped a larger percentage when the study was done.

1992: 54.%
2002: 46.7%

...Another good development is the consistent drop in adult illiteracy. Unfortunately, I could only find statistics up to 1979.

From the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States

Year ----- Total
1870 ----- 20.0
1880 ----- 17.0
1890 ----- 13.3
1900 ----- 10.7
1910 ----- 7.7
1920 ----- 6.0
1930 ----- 4.3
1940 ----- 2.9
1947 ----- 2.7
1950 ----- 3.2
1952 ----- 2.5
1959 ----- 2.2
1969 ----- 1.0
1979 ----- 0.6

That's where it ended. What do you think?

800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards 2007

800-CEO-READ is excited to announce our first annual Business Book Awards. With thousands of business books published each year, there can seem like an overwhelming pool of options to choose from when trying to find the best of what you're looking for. That's where we come in. We are encouraging authors to submit their books published in 2007 for us to review and recognize as the top business titles of the year.

Books will be judged in the following categories:

1. Sales
2. Leadership
3. Human Resources/Organizational Development
4. Entrepreneurship/Small Business
5. Finance/Economics
6. Advertising/Marketing
7. Globalization
8. Fables
9. Biographies/Memoirs
10. Personal Development
11. Innovation/Creativity
12. Industry Books
13. New Perspectives

Along with winners for each category, there will be three overall awards including:

Best Business Book 2007

One title will be selected as the overall best business book of the year based on exceptional presentation of ideas and content.

Author's Choice

Any author with a book published in 2007 is eligable to vote on their favorite book of the year.

Reader's Choice

Readers will also have the chance to participate by voting for their choice via an online poll starting November 10, 2007.

Important deadlines to know for the 2007 Awards are as follows:

All entries must be postmarked by October 30, 2007.
Semifinalists will be announced December 17, 2007.
Final winners will be announced January 15, 2008.

For information on how to enter a book and to learn more about the awards, please visit www.800ceoread.com/bookawards.

For any other questions, please e-mail Katie Schutrop at kschutrop[at]800ceoread.com.

A big push for digital books? Not quite yet...

There was an article in last week's issue of BusinessWeek called "Amazon Does Downloads, Sort of: Why its push into digital delivery of books, movies, and music seems halfhearted."

Here at 800-CEO-READ, there is an ongoing discussion about, you guessed it, whether digital will eventually take over the book industry and books as we know them will go away. We all agree that the physical book will never go away - it's too bound up in our culture, and it's still the most portable way of carrying ideas around with us, not to mention the fact that experts overwhelmingly agree that reading printed matter is easier on the eye than reading a screen. But we are seeing more and more cool technology when it comes to books. Todd and Dylan got to see a prototype of an electronic book at the Tools of Change Conference, in June.

The author of the article, Scott Kirsner, looks into the e-commerce side of the digital debate. Despite the fact that Amazon has acquired Mobipocket (an online, digital- book-seller), and even though it is expected to open a downloadable music service, sell an e-book device called the Kindle, and offer NBC TV shows through Unbox, a movie-download service, Amazon has been awfully timid in venturing too far out into the possibilities of selling digital content.

"Amazon's toe-in-the-water approach may seem odd, considering how it helped pioneer online shopping in the mid-1990s. You might think that fulfilling orders for digital media would be more efficient than pulling CDs off shelves, boxing them, and handing them over to UPS for delivery. But as long as digital music and e-books come with heavy restrictions on how and where consumers can use them, the market will be limited and rights holders will have the power to shake down sellers. That's O.K. if you're Apple Inc. and see music as a "door opener" for iPod and iPhone sales. But for Amazon, there's still much more money to be made shipping real stuff."

Yes, heavy restrictions will continue to make downloadable content more difficult to acquire--and whether it should be is another conversation--but the last two words of that passage stuck out to me. "Real stuff." Not only do many industries still depend on real stuff--for manufacturing, packaging, shipping, stocking, and so on--but buyers have shown that they still want tangible, material objects for their money.

I suspect, however, that Amazon's plunge into selling digital content isn't too far off. And it's more likely to be a swan dive than a belly flop.

Greenspan In Today's Papers

Testing and Tasting The Theory

Jack and I are in NYC this week on our annual fall trip. We dined at Union Square Cafe this evening. Owner Danny Meyer wrote Setting The Table last year and the two of us decided we need to check if the theory was put into practice.

The experience was amazing. Our waiter Cyrus connected with us immediately and correctly recommended the Saison Du Pont. Jack had the cod and I enjoyed the lobster "Shepard's Pie" (layered from the bottom with spinach, mushroom, lobster meat, and mashed potatoes).

It is tough to get a reservation. Your best bet (the method we used as recommended in the WSJ) is using Open Table and reserving a table 28 days before your date.

Ask 8cr!: Juggling Elephants

Welcome to "Ask 8cr!" - a new section of our blog where we've created a forum to find out what kinds of issues and challenges people are having in the workplace. We then take these issues and apply a business book we feel offers a viable solution. Others then chime in via the comments section. The selected challenge gets a free copy of the book, but everyone who reads, wins. Do you have a challenge at work? Send it to me at jon(a)800ceoread(dot)com.

Today's challenge deals with prioritizing and organization:

My biggest challenge is focus. It's kind of a subset of time management, I guess, but I am constantly torn between dozens of good opportunities. The result is that I spread myself too thin and quality suffers, but I can't figure out how to stick with just one or two main things. When I see a new opportunity, that's where my enthusiasm goes, and I have a very difficult time drumming up any interest in working on my existing projects.

I get the impression that many entrepreneurs deal with this struggle, and hope that there's a good way to use this tendency to somehow strengthen my business(es!), but right now, I just feel overwhelmed with the things I've started. - Sarah

It sounds like Sarah's juggling elephants, and I'm sure many of us can relate; every project at work seems more exciting than the last, and it's easy to start saying "yes" to everything. Then, as Sarah states, quality suffers and we burn ourselves out. Add home and personal life to this, and it's a total meltdown.

Jones Loflin and Todd Musig clear the air with their book, Juggling Elephants: An Easier Way to Get Your Most Important Things Done - Right! Using the analogy of a circus, they identify the "three rings" of our lives, and how each must balance each other. After all, as the author's state "every act must serve a purpose." If there's not something going on in one ring, it's being prepared behind the scenes, and it better be good once it starts happening, for your sake, for your "performer's" sake, and for your "audience's" sake.

The question posed in the book that hit home for me was, "Does this act belong in my circus?" After reading the book, and seeing challenges like Sarah's, I realized that I, too, have quite a circus on my own hands. Over the last couple years, I've taken advantage of more and more opportunities (I kept saying, "yes") and I often find my trapeze artists barely catching the next swing. In other words, I realize that there are acts that just don't belong, and that it's ok for me to retire them and focus on the acts that are really important. But they're all important, right? Isn't that why we said "yes" to them? It's a tough dilemma. Fortunately, the book provides ways to identify these "main acts" and explains how we can go about exercising them to their full potential, while ceasing to spend time on less-important acts. Think about it - this can have a huge effect on our lives.

The book is a quick read, but really sticks with you. Since it takes your mind through your professional and personal life, you easily place yourself in the shoes of the main character of the book, and see that juggling elephants is tough, but manageable, when applying the ideas that Loflin and Musig discuss. It's a personal book, but could also be applied to a management team, to identify what projects they should focus on, which products to push, and how any group of people can work together better and more efficiently to get the most important things done right.

Greenspan on Today Show

Greenspan got the plum spot in the 7:15 spot on the Today Show. There was a pre-recorded piece done with Maria Bartiromo and Matt Lauer did the live interview. The Q&A was awkward, but Greenspan mostly clarifying positions he took in the book ranging from the Iraq War being about oil (he says we needed to deal with Saddam or face $130/barrel) and his lack of opposition to Bush tax-cuts (he says he supported the action, but continually asked how it would be funded).

CNBC will present an hour-long program on Greenspan tonight at 9PM Eastern.

Greenspan's inspiration

Greenspan was a big fan of Atlas Shrugged -- a book some consider to be one of the most influential business books ever written.

Many have criticized the book for encouraging selfishness. Yet, Greenspan refuted it in a letter to the NYTimes in 1957:

'Atlas Shrugged' is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.

You'll find he's not the only famous businessman who learned from and enjoyed Ayn Rand's novel.

p.s. If you haven't heard, Greenspan's memoir The Age of Turbulence is due out today.

Greenspan: The Blogger

Alan Greenspan is blogging at Amazon, but there is only one post in two weeks.

Everyone Talking About Greenspan Book

The media doesn't know what an embargo is anymore. I can tell you that publishers are driven nuts when reporters start talking about a book before it comes out. With the book slated to come out Monday, Alan Greenspan's book The Age of Turbulence is the latest to fall victim to impatience.

It started with Portfolio Magazine article by John Cassidy which will appear in the October issue but showed up online earlier this week. There are vague references to the material in the book and is more of a critic of Greenspan's tenure as Federal Reserve Chairman.

The Wall Street was skipped the indirect route and featured the an extensive article on the front page of their Saturday edition. The lead is:

In a withering critique of his fellow Republicans, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says in his memoir that the party to which he has belonged all his life deserved to lose power last year for forsaking its small-government principles.

In "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World," published by Penguin Press, Mr. Greenspan criticizes both congressional Republicans and President George W. Bush for abandoning fiscal discipline.

and later in the article is the stuff people are going to be interested in:

In coming years, as the globalization process winds down, he predicts inflation will become harder to contain. Recent increases in the price of imports from China and a rise in long-term interest rates suggest "the turn may be upon us sooner rather than later."

Left alone, he said, the Fed's policy-making body, the Federal Open Market Committee, can keep inflation between 1% and 2%, but that could require forcing interest rates to double-digits, a level "not seen since the days of Paul Volcker," his predecessor as Fed chairman. "I fear that my successors on the FOMC, as they strive to maintain price stability in the coming quarter century, will run into populist resistance from Congress, if not from the White House," he writes.

If the Fed succumbs to that pressure, inflation could rise from a little over 2% at present to an average of 4% to 5% by the year 2030, he writes. Ten-year Treasury yields, now below 5%, will rise to "at least 8%" with the potential to go "significantly higher for brief periods." This, he says, will lead to stagnant returns on stocks and bonds and much smaller gains in housing prices.

You are going to be seeing alot of Alan in the next couple of weeks. Here is a head start:

• Videos from 60 Minutes
• Interesting Excerpts on Leading Blog
• AP's Story on the Book

SuperCrunchers: The Good and The Bad

Good News: Today Ian Ayres' SuperCunchers debuted on the Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller List at #13.

Bad News: The book is also reviewed in this week's New York Times Book Review and reviewer David Leonhardt comes up just short of accusing Ayres of plagiarism (and by short, I mean, the only thing he doesn't do is use the word 'plagiarism'). Leonhardt claims Ayres uses his own words as well as those of Fast Company's Charles Fishman without attribution.

My opinion: the book is still a great survey of using analytics in decision making. We recommended Super Crunchers in an August Jack Covert Selects and I interviewed Ian for our podcast series.

Bzzz...

Last night Jon and I listened to a speech from Malcolm Faulds of BzzAgent -- the company founded by Dave Balter, author of Grapevine. I'm still fascinated by what BzzAgent is doing.

Dave created BzzAgent to harness the power of word-of-mouth. Both the agents and the marketers benefit from it. The marketers have The agents get to try the latest and greatest products and tell their friends about them.

The company assumes that, on average, every agent will tell 12 people about the product/service; those 12 people then turn around and tell four other folks. Back in 2005 there were 75,000 BzzAgents. Malcolm said they're up to 310,000 now. The price varies by project. An estimate for a 10-week project with 1,000 agents that includes shipping is $70,000.

I wish I was a better BzzAgent. Then, perhaps, I would have had a shot at trying out a new car:

When the new VW Passats were unveiled, BzzAgent worked with VW dealers to arrange a 48-hour test drive for a handful of agents. Of the original 6302 agents invited to participate, 1167 scheduled test drives and 1071 completed a test drive. In the end, 375 Passats were sold/leased.

What I always find interesting is how other ideas (often found in books) are implemented in strategies. For example, BzzAgent uses Reichheld's NPS. And for phone polling they work with Jonathan and Edward's company.

Oh, and if you're looking for WOM books, see BzzAgent's Resources.

Business Books About The NFL

I am a sucker for NFL books. I love the sport (yes, my fantasy team posted their first win this week) and I am even more fascinated by the business of the NFL. Last year I interviewed Mark Yost about his book Tailgating, Sacks, and Salary Caps which deal with the business of the NFL.

This fall, there are two more books that caught my attention:

Hiring Secrets of the NFL: How Your Company Can Select Talent Like a Champion by Isaac Cheifetz uses the NFL as a metaphor for bringing the best people into the organization. Did you know second round picks more often become Pro-Bowl players than first round? Yet look where all the emphasis is placed by teams and in the media. At 120 pages, it is quick and punchy.

The second book is called Brand NFL By Michael Oriard. This one might be hard to place at the local bookstore having been published by University of North Carolina Press. I'll let you read the Washington Post review for more on the title, but let me quote one paragraph from the piece constrasting Oriard's book with two others:

Oriard traces this evolution in convincing detail. He is scarcely the first former player to write about the game -- Jerry Kramer's Instant Replay (1968), published while its author was still a member of the Green Bay Packers, remains to this day the best book about football qua football -- but the combination of his playing experience and his deep knowledge of the league's inner business workings makes for a unique and useful point of view. Much of the material in the first two-thirds of the book will be familiar to readers of Michael MacCambridge's America's Game (2004), the best history of pro football to date, but his discussion of what can fairly be called the game's larger meaning is especially interesting and insightful.

(I had to get a Packers reference into this post :)

links for 2007-09-12

• Blue Blood and Mutiny>>The Wall Street Journal | The Making of a Palace Coup
  In "Blue Blood and Mutiny: The Fight for the Soul of Morgan Stanley," Patricia Beard presents an engaging narrative of a by now well-known tale: how eight former Morgan Stanley executives rose up to oust Mr. Purcell, the interloper who had commandeered th
  (tags: businessbooks history finance)

Business Books on Monday Night Football

[ESPN Monday Night Football
Baltimore Ravens vs. Cincinnati Bengals
Transcript starting at 9:10 Central Time]

Mike Tirico: Here's Michelle Tafoya.

Michelle Tafoya: Well, let's talk about captains for a minute.

During the offseason, Caron Palmer's dad gave him a copy of this book. It's called It's Your Ship and it's by a naval captain who turned a mediocre ship into one of the best crews and best ships in the Navy. Now Carson read it cover to cover and he told me he took away two lessons from this.

Number One: If the people around you believe you care about them, they will follow you into battle.

and

Number Two: The leader must be above the group but of the group.

And his teammates must believe in him. They voted him offensive team captain for the season, Mike. He said that was the single greatest honor of his career.

Mike Tirico: More important than the Heisman Trophy, he said. Kind of surprised us all when he said it.

You've seen that all kick-off weekend, those Captain C's, permanent captains, season-long captains by Roger Godell [NFL Commissioner], as part of the edict to increase the leadership and leadership awareness within each locker room. And the teams have voted for two captains. And we have seen alot of the familiar, big name players wearing those this week.

Tony Kornheiser: That was an Isman Brothers' song- It's Your Ship, Do What You Wanna Do.

[laughing]

Ron Jaworski: Where is your mind sometimes?

Kornheiser: Stuck in the 60's, pal; stuck in the 60's

A few comments:

• Congrats to Michael. He is a friend of 800-CEO-READ and it is great to see him get some love on Monday Night Football
• This PR hit follows a Peter King/Sports Illustrated piece that highlights the book as well, but only referred to it as "The Best Damn Ship in the Navy". Seems like SI could invest in a little more fact checking to get the title right.
• Kornhesier's comic relief should have reference the Isley Brothers instead of the Isman Brothers.

No Asshole Rule Wins Quills Awards (Business Category)

The Quill Awards, which they self-describe as "first literary prizes to reflect the tastes of all the groups that matter most in publishing--- readers, booksellers and librarians", were announced this morning.

Bob Sutton's No Asshole Rule won the business category from the finalists of Small Is the New Big by Seth Godin, Women & Money by Suze Orman, Send by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, and Chocolates on the Pillow Aren't Enough Jonathan M. Tisch with Karl Weber.

The awards ceremony takes place October 22nd.

Ask 8cr! - Secrets of Closing the Sale

Welcome to our first posting of "Ask 8cr!" - a new section of our blog where we've created a forum to find out what kinds of issues and challenges people are having in the workplace. We'll then take these issues and apply a business book we feel offers a viable solution.

We sent a note out to a wide variety of people and the response has been great. The first challenge we'll address is sales related. Here's the note we received:

"My biggest challenge is getting my sales staff to be more effective -- some need better time management skills, some need to dig into the information more thoroughly to understand our competition in each deal so we know where we stand and what we need to do to earn the business, all need better closing skills." - Deanna

A thorough but common scenario - how can one close the sale after they've worked so hard to get it? Time management, competition analysis, and customer understanding and relationship skills all play a part. It's not an easy answer, and instead of looking for a quick fix, let's look to a classic: Zig Ziglar's Secrets of Closing the Sale.

This 400+ page book covers everything, from psychology, attitude, technique, listening, overcoming objections, and using technology in the process. Through these points he identifies methods that every sales person can apply to close the sale, from being alert/observant, loving your job, getting the customer involved, breaking the cost down to what he refers to as "reduction to the ridiculous," and giving the customer a reason to buy. He states, "Any time you can give a prospect an excuse and a reason for buying, and make it easy for him or her to buy, the odds are great the sale is yours for the asking." Throughout the book, Ziglar offers many examples of how to create these "reasons" for the prospect. These are important - no one wants to feel like a sucker in hindsight. By giving customers good reasons to buy, they'll always feel good about what they purchased and why they did. Absorbing these stories is insightful, and easy to start practicing on your own.

As with many Ziglar books, he addresses the issue, but in a way that goes deeper than simply telling you how to get someone to buy something. Ziglar knows that there's got to be something in it beyond this for the sales person. Otherwise, the work will get old quick. As a salesperson, how can you internally work through fear, how can you realize what's in it for you (beyond money), and how can you push forward even when things are going well (instead of sitting back and relaxing)? Part business professional, part guru, Ziglar nails it with statements like "You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want."

Anyone in sales has dealt with the issue of how to close more, and all sales managers have wondered how to help their sales people close more (maybe that's a polite way of putting it!). Zig Ziglar offers some great insight into the task at hand and beyond; a broad understanding to bring fulfillment to the sales rep, their manager, and importantly, the customer.

What's your challenge at work? Send it to me at jon (a) 800ceoread (dot) com and we'll address it in a future posting here.