800-CEO-READ Blog

New Release, New Excerpt - Mind Capture

We've posted a new excerpt, this one from Tony Rubleski's second "Mind Capture" book. The book has received praise and endorsements from a long list of authors and marketing professionals, and sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer thought highly enough of it that he provided the introduction in the book. He writes:

Everyone is seeking to get their message read--and everyone is wrong. Getting your message read without anyone taking action is an empty process, and an expensive proposition. The key to attraction and capture is not just reading, it's reading, remembering, impacting, and being compelled to take action. That's what this book is about, and that's what Tony Rubleski is about.

If you'd like to learn more about the book, who's talking about it, and the numerous bonus and giveaways Tony's offering, visit the book website.

If you'd like to read the excerpt, here is the direct link:
http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/008337.html?blog_id=2

5 ways to deal with negativity and foster positivity at work

Thanks to Jon Gordon, author of The No Complaining Rule and The Energy Bus, for contributing this article on positivity.

Positive Ways to Deal with Negativity

With the mortgage meltdown, floods in the Midwest, $4 a gallon for gas, food prices, the economy, famine, war in Iraq, etc., many would agree that there is a lot of negativity in the world and certainly a lot to complain about. And yet, while traveling the country this past month, ironically for the No Complaining Rule Tour, I met a number of people who inspired me with the positive ways they were dealing with the negativity in their life. In spite of their circumstances they chose to view their situation with a positive perspective... which so often makes all the difference. Since we all could benefit from their example, here are 5 positive ways to deal with negativity.

1. Find the Gift - Richard Bach said every problem has a gift for you in its hands. One woman came up to me and said that because of the cost of gas her family is driving less and as a result they are spending more time at home and having dinner together more often. She said this "negative" situation has been very "positive" for her family. Another person said he is taking the bus to work instead of driving and as a result he has met a lot of interesting people.
2. Look at the Bright Side - One gentlemen joked that because of the cost of gas he now has a great excuse to not drive and see his negative relatives.
3. Zoom Focus - It doesn't matter what the pundits say on television. It doesn't matter what Joe and Sally in your office are doing. It doesn't matter who is playing office politics. All that matters is what you do every day to grow yourself and your business. Focus on being positive and taking positive action every day. Be like the real estate agent who told me that he doesn't focus on what the news and newspapers say. He focuses on what he can do every day to be successful. He focuses on marketing his business, taking care of his clients, and building loyal relationships. What things do you need to Zoom Focus on?
4. Focus on the Opportunity Not the Challenge - Behind every innovation and solution is a story about someone who said there has to be a better way. I bet Henry Ford was walking behind a horse when he had the idea for his automobile. History shows us that a lot of people and a lot of companies make a lot of money during recessions. The key is to find the opportunity. Where is the market heading? What do people want and need? What will they want in the future? Now is a great time to build a positive team with great talent. Now is the time to gain market share while so many give up. Now is a great time to determine who is on your bus and who is off your bus. Now is the time to be indispensable to your company and demonstrate how valuable you are.
5. Be a Positive Influence on Others - I received an email from Ruthanne in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She wrote:

   "As you are probably aware, we were recently hit with a 500 year flood. My neighborhood was impacted the worst and most of our homes, mine included, are a total loss. People tell me I have been the most positive person they know who was directly impacted by the flood. I don't have a lot of time today (first day back at work in 2 wks) to tell you all the positive things that have been going on in our city and in my life, but I will be writing an article when this is all over with. I did want to say though that I have not complained throughout all the devastating catastrophe because of the knowledge I learned both from your seminar, books and newsletters."

   Ruthanne could have chosen to wallow in self pity and negativity but instead she chose to deal with her negative situation by being a positive influence on others. Think about how many people she is positively impacting in her community. Now think about the positive influence you can have on people at work, in your community and at home.

Every day simply ask yourself "How can I be a positive influence where I am, right now?"

Stay Positive!

-Jon

Author Bio
Jon Gordon is a speaker, consultant, and author of the international bestseller The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Lift, Work, and Team with Positive Energy, which has inspired readers the world over. He and his books have been featured on CNN and on NBC's Today show, and in Forbes, Fast Company, O: The Oprah Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. Clients such as the Jacksonville Jaguars. the PGA Tour, Northwestern Mutual, JPMorgan Chase, and Publix Supermarkets also call all Jon to get their team "on the bus" and moving in the right direction. Jon also impacts thousands of teachers and students each year through his work with schools, universities, and nonprofit organizations. He is a graduate of Cornell University and holds a master's degree in teaching from Emory University. He lives in northeast Florida with his wife and two high-energy children.

For more information about Jon, please visit www.JonGordon.com or www.NoComplainingRule.com.

Freakonomics' Levitt Questioning Good To Great

Steven Levitt on his Freakonomics blog takes a shot at Good To Great and the recent performance of GTG standouts Fannie Mae, Circuit City, and Wells Fargo. A purchase of either Fannie Mae or Circuit City at the time of the book's publication would have netted you an 80% loss in your investment today. Not so good.

This bring ups the whole question of the author Jim Collins' suggested methodology and whether it's one business leaders should be following. There are plenty of great comments on Levitt's post to go read on this. The same criticisms are leveled against Collins' prior book Built To Last and the classic In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled By Randomness and Phil Rosenwig's The Halo Effect are both cited for their critical views of predictable methodologies.

This has always been my belief: all of these books are directional correct. The principles they describe for success are all worth pursuing. We get a little stuck on the empirical side of the debate. It is true that these authors hang their hats on the research to give their findings legitimacy, but we can't completely dismiss everything they have to say every time a highlighted firm falters.

Books and bikes - one bookstore makes a difference

To go along with Kate's post on biking to work, check out what one book store is doing to reduce its ecological footprint: From Shelf Awareness, the book world's daily e-newsletter:

Cool Idea of the Day: The Bicycle as Bookstore Sideline
Monkey See, Monkey Read, Northfield, Minn., which opened two years ago (Shelf Awareness, February 22, 2007), is now selling the Kona Africabike 2.0 in the store and online. In his blog, owner Jerry Bilek explains why he's stocking the $299 bike that he calls a "utilitarian riding machine. . . Single speed, coaster brake, chain guard, fenders, basket on the front, rack on the back, thornproof tubes, rear wheel lock."

He wrote: "I know, why would a bookstore sell bikes? It goes like this. Books and bikes are two things I enjoy the most. Okay, add beer to the list, but I don't have a liquor license. And ice cream, but no freezer. So I settled on bikes. Not just any bikes, one bike. The Kona Africabike."

Bilek added that a T-shirt phrase he summed up his views on the matter. It read: "Gas sucks ride a bike."

For every two bikes that Monkey See, Monkey Read sells, manufacturer Kona will donate one to a home health worker in Africa as part of the BikeTown Africa program.

How to Wow - A Free Teleseminar and an Excerpt

We've posted a new excerpt from How to Wow: Proven Strategies for Presenting Your ideas, Persuading Your Audience, and Perfecting Your Image by Frances Cole Jones. If you like what you see, you can join her for a free one-hour teleseminar tomorrow at 4pm EST/1pm PST. The seminar will touch on:

Maximizing the Verbal
*Incorporating the 12 most influential words in the English language
*Avoiding the useless modifier/The importance of living language
*Proven phrasing for increasing listener buy-in

Maximizing the Vocal
*Understanding/optimizing your tonal quality
*Conveying authority: the power of the pause
*Making numbers accessible

Maximizing the Physical
*Introducing yourself to maximize authority
*Sitting to maximize others' trust
*Playing to your team: optimizing the impression you leave behind

Meeting Preparation/Presentation
*Decoding unspoken agendas
*Ally or observer? Quarterback or Closer? The importance of defining the team's roles
*Preparing the answers to the worst 3 questions you'll be asked

Questions and Answer Techniques
*Rephrasing a question to maximize your advantage
*Managing the unstated ?--listening for intent as well as content
*Handling overtly hostile questions

Making PowerPoint Powerful
*Setting up the physical space to support your message
*Incorporating the 10/20/30 Rule to structure your presentation
*The power of the "Rule of 3" for information retention

If you're interested in the seminar, download the flyer for the event here. It will give you all the information you need to join in.

Here is a direct link to the excerpt from the book: http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/008335.html

Article from Joseph A. Michelli, author of The New Gold Standard

Thanks to Joseph A. Michelli for providing this article for our blog.

Shrink Not - Adjust the sail and seek The New Gold Standard of Leadership

By Joseph A. Michelli, author of The New Gold Standard: 5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company

Soaring gas prices and the US credit crunch have many business owners scurrying to reduce costs and "do more with less." But this natural and reflexive approach to economic uncertainty is often the worst path a business leader can take. In fact, while researching my recently released book The New Gold Standard: 5 Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, Ed Staros, a founder of the modern-day Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company noted that during difficult economic times in the 1980s many hotel chains were cutting back on flower arrangements in the lobby and not placing mouthwash in guest rooms. Ed shared. "We always believed that economic challenges didn't mean that people didn't need or want mouthwash. It meant we had to raise the standard in a quality efficient way." So, how do business leaders decide when to pull-back products or service versus expanding them, particularly when business begins to slow? For example, many marketers suggest that the best time to advertise is in a tight market, namely because fewer people are doing so (allowing you to position your product with less clutter) and because it is the time when customers need most to be reminded that you are still there.

While cost cutting may be inevitable in tighter economic cycles, I gained key insights during my conversations with the leadership at The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company about how to avoid a scarcity mentality in challenging times:

1. When consumers face economic challenges they often place a greater emphasis on value. While many customers will "pinch pennies" and "clip coupons" to address financial hardships, they will still look for opportunities to "treat" themselves. When consumers do spend money freely they will want to experience true quality and not a watered-down or corporately scaled-back version of quality.
2. Focused excellence prevails. If cutbacks are necessary, companies can and should reallocate resources toward their core areas of excellence. To be "excellent" means resisting the urge to overreach into areas where your products or service will be mediocre. Doing a few things expertly beats doing many things adequately.
3. Inspire staff to focus on purpose and outcomes, not fulfillment and procedures. I have long believed that all business is personal. This is particularly clear in the world of luxury hotels and resorts. While most hotel companies that compete for this market segment have exquisitely clean and well-appointed facilities, the primary driver for guest loyalty emerges from the personal attention and caring of staff. From the onset of their employee selection process, leadership at Ritz-Carlton looks for underlying talent in service characteristics. They then train and certify the skills necessary for the new hires to do their jobs while constantly linking job function to the overarching purpose of the business - namely to provide for "the genuine care and comfort" of their guest.
4. Empowering the front-line saves money. While many business leaders talk about their empowered workforce, few put money behind the hype. At Ritz-Carlton, staff members (referred to as the Ladies and Gentlemen of The Ritz-Carlton) are given the authority to spend up to $2,000 per day per guest, without seeking the approval of their supervisors. This authority allows front-line workers to immediately resolve service breakdowns for guests or simply engage guests by doing something unexpected that will make the hotel stay memorable. The cost-saving nature of this seemingly risky level of financial empowerment is derived from the morale and loyalty of employees, the clear cost savings of resolving problems immediately, and the impact that this type of empowered workforce has on customers. Essentially, empowered employees consistently transform otherwise satisfied customers into fully-engaged brand loyalists that spend more and refer family and friends to the business.

In my book The New Gold Standard, I identify 5 key business principles that have allowed The Ritz-Carlton to continue to be a recognized leader in product quality and service excellence (two time winner of the Malcolm Baldridge award for service excellence). Rather than contracting or adopting a defensive posture during economic uncertainty, The Ritz-Carlton leadership stays the course with these five principles:

Define and Refine

Empower through Trust

It's Not About You

Deliver Wow!

Leave a Lasting Footprint

While concepts like empower through trust have been alluded to earlier, concepts such as "define and refine" and "it's not about you" warrant further exploration. By clearly "defining" the core components of the company's values, quality standards, and service tradition, Ritz-Carlton constantly communicates the path by which a guest's experience can be elevated, how the staff member can purposefully add value and the means by which the company will thrive. By having every staff member take time every day at every hotel worldwide to participate in a process called line-up, Ritz-Carlton leadership re-engages staff in a discussion of the overarching mission they all share. Further, by being attentive to the need to "refine" the brand so that it remains relevant in changing economic times, for evolving customer segments and in diverse international markets, leadership builds on their well-defined culture.

The "It's not about you" principle reflects the disciplined practice of listening to staff, customers, vendors and all stakeholders to constantly assure that business does not principally serve the needs and preferences of leadership. By adopting a penchant for listening to stated and unstated needs while maintaining a passion for service, great leaders produce businesses that endure. From the customer's perspective, these businesses are extensions of themselves and not commodities.

While none of us can control the winds of economic change, taking a few lessons from The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company can help us adjust our sails to arrive at our desired destination. I welcome your thoughts about the journey...

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joseph A. Michelli, Ph.D., is an internationally sought-after speaker and business consultant whose clients include Bridgestone Firestone, Nokia, The Hartford Insurance Group, UCLA Health System, and USMC. Michelli has vast media experience, including television programs such as "The Glenn Beck Show" and CNBC's "On the Money," and has conducted hundreds of radio and print interviews.

From David Whyte's "Crossing the Unknown Sea"

We've been gearing up for this year's author pow-wow. For me, that means going through all of my old notes. In doing that, I ran across this piece from last year. Each year the pow-wow-ees submit a piece of their favorite writing -- whether blog post, poem, eBay ad, magazine article, whatever. Last year one author submitted this piece from David Whyte's Crossing The Unknown Sea. For the record, Tom Peters declared this book as one of his top picks for 2005. I have yet to read the full book but this particular piece struck a chord. Thought I'd share it with you.

From David Whyte:

We have the strange idea, unsupported by any evidence, that we are loved and admired only for our superb strength, our far-reaching powers, and our all-knowing competency. Yet in the real world, no matter how many relationships may have been initiated by strength and power, no marriage or friendship has ever been deepened by those qualities. After a short, erotic honeymoon, power and omnipotence expose their shadow underbellies and threaten real intimacy, which is based on mutual vulnerability. After the bows have been made to the brass god of power, we find in the privacy of relationship that same god suddenly immobile and inimicable to conversation. As brass gods ourselves, we wonder why we are no longer loved in the same way we were at our first appearance. Our partners have begun to find our infallibility boring and, after long months or years, to find us false, frightening, and imprisoning.

We have the same strange idea in work as we do in love: that we will engender love, loyalty, and admiration of others by exhibiting a great sense of power and competency. We are surprised to find that we garner fear and respect but forgo the other, more intimate magic. Real, undying loyalty in work can never be legislated or coerced; it is based on a courageous vulnerability that invites others by our example to a frontier conversation whose outcome is yet in doubt.

We have an even stranger idea: that we will finally fall in love with ourselves only when we have become the totally efficient organizational organism we have always wanted to be and left all of our bumbling ineptness behind. Yet in exactly the way we come to find love and intimacy in others through vulnerability, we come to those same qualities in ourselves through living out the awkwardness of not knowing, of not being in charge.

We try to construct a life in which we will be perfect, in which we will eliminate awkwardness, pass by vulnerability, ignore ineptness, only to pass through the gate of our lives and find, strangely, that the gateway is vulnerability itself. The very place we are open to the world whether we like it or not.

Book Review Roundup

It's been almost a month since we last looked at what books the major business magazines are reviewing, so it's about time for another look.

First up, we have The Economist. The July 19th issue has a great review of A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein. This is a book that I've wanted to read since its release in April, and this review has only heightened my interest. I always love books that step back, that give us historical perspective and make us realize that, as unique an era as we live in, global trade and the debate it spawns are not unique to our times. The following paragraph compelled me to pull the book off of one of our many shelves and throw it in my bag for reading this weekend:

With an ability to switch gracefully from the macro to the micro, Mr Bernstein whisks his reader on a tumultuous journey. Along the way, it takes in the Pax Islamica established in the Mediterranean by the heirs of the Prophet Muhammad (a trader by profession himself); the rise and decline of Venice and Genoa; the devastation caused by the Black Death; the Portuguese-led age of discovery; the establishment of the great Dutch and British East India trading companies; the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade; the campaign (that led, among other things, to the founding of this newspaper) to abolish the Corn Laws; the golden period of the late 19th century in which trade flourished under the benign wing of the British empire; and the 20th century's descent into beggar-my-neighbour protectionism.

Rebecca linked to a BusinessWeek review of this book in June, and you can find that post here.

The July 12th-18th issue of The Economist reviews three books looking at the mortgage crisis and credit crunch that resulted: The Gods That Failed: How Blind Faith in Market Has Cost Us Our Future by Larry Elliot and Dan Atkinson, The Credit Crunch: Housing Bubbles, Globalisation and the Worldwide Economic Crisis by Graham Turner, and The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crunch of 2008 and What It Means by George Soros. The article begins:

Almost a year has passed since the credit crunch burst into the public consciousness. As the publishing industry finally lumbers into action, authors are attempting, like real-life Hercule Poirots, to assemble the suspects in the library and identify the guilty party.

As you may be able to tell from the tone above, The Economist doesn't come off as a big believer in these books, and the article itself eventually dismisses the remedies they contain, stating: "All three books expect more regulation of the financial system, which will inevitably have perverse consequences." Unfortunately, there is not a very convincing argument following up that assertion.

It's an assertion Roger Lowenstein would disagree with. In his review of Charles Morris's The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Money, High Rollers and the Great Credit Crash in the August issue of Conde Nast Portfolio, he writes:

...Morris says loan originators should be made to share in any eventual losses suffered by retail lenders and others down the line. After a quarter-century of deregulation, he sensibly concludes, "it's time for the pendulum to swing in the other direction."

Though he writes that Morris's "book does not have the finished quality of his previous The Cost of Good Intentions, he does believe that it "is a good first take on the mortgage debacle, and it sets forth some astute policy prescriptions."

Lowenstein reviews another book in this article, Greenspan's Bubble's: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve by William A. Fleckenstein. It seems he's not as big a fan of this title.

Fleckenstein's thesis--that Greenspan "wasn't the only reason there was a bubble, but without his sponsorship it could never have grown anywhere near as large or as dangerous as it did"--is fair. Otherwise, his book is almost a smear.

In the July 28 Issue of BusinessWeek, Steve Hamm champions Richard J Elkus Jr.'s Winner Take All: How Competitiveness Shapes the Fate of Nations. The most entertaining snippet from that review:

The book is certainly timely. Wall Street's latest "innovations" are crumbling, and America's immense appetite for overconsumption seems finally to be slaked. So, with what raw material will we build the economy of the future? Probably not social-networking Web sites.

BusinessWeek's Hardy Green has a plethora of book recommendations in the issue of July 14 & 21, many that we'd agree with. In fact, Robert H Frank's The Economic Naturalist was a runner up in the Finance & Economics category of our first annual 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards, and The Last Tycoons (William D. Cohan) and In Spite of the Gods (Edward Luce) won their categories--Industry and New Perspectives respectively. Other suggestions are In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century by Geert Mak, How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman, Discover Your Inner Economist by Tyler Cowen, Christopher Buckley's Boomsday and Julia Flynn Siler's The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty.

And, if you're interested in wine or the wine business, Fortune looks at the industry by looking at three other books on the topic: The Battle for Wine and Love by Alice Feiring, Grape vs. Grain by Charles Bamforth and The Billionaire's Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace.

Unfortunatley, I can't find that Fortune review online, but hey, it's the weekend... you should be drinking wine, not reading about it.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Books Available in Spanish

Here are some titles available now in Spanish. If ordering these books, or any titles in another language, take care to note that availability of these books can change without notice due to publishing need, copyrights, popularity, etc.

Menos es Mas: It's All Too Much by Peter Walsh - Veteran "organizational consultant" TV show host and author Walsh (How to Organize 'Just About' Everything) has more ideas in his latest book on clutter management then the spare closet has junk, and, even better, it's organized, in depth and entirely user-friendly!

Senales: The Three Signs of a Miserable Job by Patrick Lencioni - A consultant, speaker and best selling author (Five Dysfunctions of a Team) pinpoints the reasons behind and way around what many consider a constant of the human condition: job dissatisfaction.

No Es Por el Care: It's Not About the Coffee by Howard Behar - During his many years as a senior executive at Starbucks, Behar heled establish the Starbucks culture, which stresses the importance of people over profits.

El Secreto de Vender: The Art of Selling by Gerardo Mendoza - We live in a world where demand exceeds supply, markets are competitive and money dilutes in a growing number of goods and services. The goal is already know to everybody: SELL!

Books for Baby Boomer Business Owners

The Small Business Boomers blog is running a contest, and all you have to do to enter is leave a comment. Here's the deal. If you leave a comment recommending a business book you think would be valuable to baby boomers starting a business, you will automatically be entered to win two books: The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber and The Warren Buffett Way by Robert G. Hagstrom.

The deadline is August 7th, and you can leave as many comments as you'd like to increase your chances of winning, so recommend early, recommend often, and do it here.

Pockets of Knowledge

On Tuesday, I had the opportunity to interview Jeff Howe on his book Crowdsourcing. We talked about what crowdsourcing is. Essentially, it means harnessing the power of an undefined crowd to do work.

One of the pieces that stuck out in Jeff's book is a quote from economist F.A. Hayek, from his 1945 piece, The Use of Knowledge in Society:

Each member of society can have only a small fraction of the knowledge possessed by all, and each is therefore ignorant of most of the facts on which the working of society rests...civilization rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess. And one of the ways in which civilization helps us to overcome that limitation on the extent of individual knowledge is by conquering ignorance, not by the acquisition of more knowledge, but by the utilization of knowledge which is and which remains widely dispersed among individuals.

Crowdsourcing brings together the scattered pockets of knowledge and everyone who is involved benefits. On the same day I interviewed Jeff, the NYTimes (perhaps they're psychic) posted an article about a company called InnoCentive, which also makes a regular appearance in Jeff's book.

InnoCentive is the embodiment of the civilization that Hayek talks about. It matches organizations together with innovators. The innovators are possible problem solvers for organizations like P&G and Eli Lilly (where the organization started). They come from around the world with diverse backgrounds and are rewarded if they find a solution. Amazing results when people come together.

Jeff posted more on the article over here. I'll post our podcast a bit closer to the book launch in late August.

The World Is Flat... Now It's Free

Beginning tomorrow and running through August 4th, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Macmillan Audio will be offering the audio edition of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat for free. Listeners will receive the audiobook in three easy-to-download sections, and soon after that, as an added bonus, will also receive an exclusive prepublication audio excerpt of Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America. The book itself will be released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on September 8th.

Jeff Seroy, Senior Vice President of marketing and publicity at FSG, said the purpose of this audio giveaway is to "celebrate Friedman's enormous influence on our lives and times. And in preparation for the release of his new book, a green manifesto and a continuation in many ways of his thinking in The World Is Flat, we want to enable anyone who hasn't already read The World Is Flat to catch up with Friedman's argument and vision for the future."

If you'd like to receive these free audio downloads, sign up at the following address: http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/giveaway

Worth a Second (or Third Look)

Sometimes, we forget what books have been featured or talked about in the past few months. I came across some books that are worth a second look! One has been recommended by our Change This editor as a must read (Zenobia), another has been a Jack Covert Selects (Myself and Other More Important Matters), while the others I just felt the need to bring them back into the light and recognize them as invaluable resources for today's business environment.

So, for your consideration - - - take time to look at the titles again (maybe for some of you - this will be the first time):

The Nonverbal Advantage Carol Kinsey Goman	Celebrity Experience Donna Cutting
Zenobia Beth Kephart et al	Myself and Other More Important Matters Charles Handy

** Also new out this summer: The paperback edition of The Ultimate Sales Machine by Michael Gerber, Jay Conrad Levinson and Chet Holmes **

Rajesh Setty Interviews Mike Kanazawa

Beyond the Code author Rajesh Setty has posted an interview with Mike Kanazawa, author of Big Ideas to Big Results. The two met at our 2007 Author Pow-wow, and are both ChangeThis authors as well.

Here is an excerpt of that interview:

Rajesh Setty: I've heard you talk about doing "more on less." Can you explain more about that and how it relates to driving change and success?

Mike Kanazawa: In many organizations there is little time for strategic thinking, prioritization of work or thinking through effective resource allocation. Every group is running fast against their own goals and often out of alignment with other divisions. Organizations end up in tactical overload. As resources get spread thin or cost cutting is done, leaders fall back on the old rallying cry, "we just need to do more with less!" In the end, these organizations get stuck in gridlock and progress comes to a grinding halt.

One of the big impediments to change is that people are so overloaded with firefighting on a daily basis that they can't get out in front of things to do fire prevention work or to create strategic change. Shifting your mindset to doing "more on less" can help you and your team to get your work under control and deliver results more quickly on the few initiatives with the greatest business impact.

Here is a direct link to the entire interview: http://blog.lifebeyondcode.com/2008/07/22/big-ideas-to-big-results-interview-with-mike-kanazawa/

For even more, you can find Mike's ChangeThis manifesto here. Rajesh has written two manifestos, which you can find here and here.

More From The Penguin Blog--The Hornby Edition--and Other Stuff I've Been Missing

I love Nick Hornby. His column, "Stuff I've Been Reading," is (or, sadly, was) the first thing I turn to every month when The Believer arrives in the mail. They're consistently the most unpretentious, enjoyable and downright funny reviews out there. If you're interested, McSweeney's has released two collections of those reviews--The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt. Joe Posnanski, author of a wonderful book himself, has called Hornby's Fever Pitch "one of the five best sports books ever written." Hornby is also author of High Fidelity and About a Boy--both made into terrific movies--and Fever Pitch was also made into, well, let's say a Jimmy Fallon movie. He has authored many, many, many other books as well.

But, none of that is why I'm writing of him today. I mention him today because he has his own blog, a fact I've somehow overlooked until I came across his post about eBooks, a hot topic here at 800-CEO-READ. The Penguin Blog picked up the post, which is where I found it. (And, what's the first thing I read on Nick Hornby's blog? That he's giving up his "Stuff I've Been Reading" column. Drats!)

Anyway... onto that ebook post. Hornby begins:

In branches of Borders, they are trying to flog us their e-book reader, the 'iLiad', for £399. Meanwhile in the London Evening Standard, David Sexton seems quite taken with Amazon's version, the Kindle. In my branch of Borders on Monday, the iLiad was piled high on the left, just as you walk in; on the right is their wall of bestselling paperbacks, many of which are being sold at half price. It was a quiet Monday morning, and there didn't seem to be too much interest in the four hundred quid e-book reader; what was striking, though, was that there didn't seem to be too much interest in the four quid books, either. Attempting to sell people something for four hundred pounds that merely enables them to read something that they won't buy at one hundredth of the price seems to me a thankless task. (A member of staff at Borders told me that he attempted to persuade a young and famous comedian to buy an iLiad last week. He seemed interested, until he was told the price, at which point he swore loudly and walked away. So at the moment, they are priced too high for millionaire showbusiness entertainers.)

If you're interested in the eBook debate, be sure to check out the discussion that followed its posting over at The Penguin Blog.

Paper Cuts has an interesting look at how the internet commerce has actually increased the price of certain books by discovering "a previously non-existent market for what you might call 'rare but not collectible' books."

And, finally, The Guardian has been having authors submit their top ten lists of books in their genre. Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist and The Logic of Life, chose the top 10 book undercover economics books in February. His choices were:

1. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
2. Micromotives and Macrobehavior by Thomas Schelling
3. The Poetry of Robert Frost, Complete and Unabridged by Robert Frost
4. Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton
5. The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod
6. The Winner's Curse by Richard Thaler
7. The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith
8. The Hare and the Tortoise by John Kay
9. How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff
10. Why Buildings Fall Down by Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori

For Harford's explanations of these picks, go here.

For other author picks, go here. If you love independent bookstores as much as we do, start with Jeremy Mercer's top 10 bookshops of the world, and allow us to nominate here our beloved sister company, Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops.

Feel free to submit your Crowdsourcing questions

This afternoon I'm interviewing Jeff Howe, author of Crowdsourcing.* Back in 2006, Jeff coined the phrase of crowdsourcing in his article for Wired magazine. Crowdsourcing, a play on outsourcing, is the idea of using crowds to solve problems, invent and generally, get work done. Think, Wikipedia, Threadless, and iStockPhoto. The crowds are changing business as we know it.

And since I'm interviewing Jeff today, I thought it only right to ask you (the crowd) to submit questions you might have about Crowdsourcing.

If you have any questions, submit your questions by 1:30pm CST and I'll make a point to ask Jeff.

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* On bookshelves everywhere on in late August.

Plato and the Question of Beauty

I was browsing new book titles today and one just popped to my attention right away! It's called Plato and the Question of Beauty by Drew A. Hyland. The reason why I feel compelled to talk about this book goes back to my college days and my freshman year, second semester. I don't know if anyone has taken a right class at the wrong time like I did....the course was Communication in Civilization and I found out 3 weeks into it that even though it was a freshman course (# 171), juniors and seniors usually take it. (It was used, I like to think, to weed out those not ready for college). Most students had notes and past tests from alumni and I found out too late in the class to drop it. So, I muddled through.

Boy, was I glad I did! In the communication field, even though it can get a bit liberal as to what is taught, can feature very valuable information. The class I took brought Plato to my impressionable, freshman mind and I will never forget what I read. We only touched on the Symposium, the Republic and Pheadrus, and his lessons about life and skills in rhetoric are useful to us in 2008 just as they were to Plato those many years ago.

Hyland's book talks about those works as well as Plato's Hippias Major and is definitely right in step for today's business environment where people and companies move too fast, communicate too fast and tend to ignore details and the beauty around them. I'm not saying everyone that reads Plato will have this epiphany, but it may open minds to thinking of things in a different way. Plato may even help you when dealing in communication between co-workers, colleagues, etc.

If you do pick up a copy, enjoy it - and let me know what you think!

The Behavioral Economics of Penguin Classics and A Long Tail Discussion

The Penguin Blog has an excellent post on behavioral economics and why people buy more Penguin Classics than other publishers. Sales Managaer Fiona Buckland has obviously been following business literature, as she references not only the classic Why We Buy, but also recenty released Predictable Irrational and Nudge--the latter of which they've recently acquired the paperback rights to and will be releasing in January. (In her post, Buckland also links to a great review of Predictably Irrational from The Guardian)

Seth Godin had a very interesting post on the profitability of The Long Tail on Friday. Here's how he illustrated it :

To simplify his post, he describes the three "profit points" this way:

It's tempting to go for the bestseller list, to create a mass market hit. This is the box labeled 1 on the tail above. Everyone wants to be here. It's where ego meets profit. A home run. Pixar lives in box 1.

Incidentally, it turns out the odds of making the bestseller list (at least The New York Times') aren't so good.

The second pocket is labeled, conveniently, #2 (not because it's second best, merely because it's the second one I'm mentioning). This is the profitable, successful niche product. Roger Corman's horror movies, say, or Vandersteen's $3,000 stereo speakers. Not a product for everyone, certainly, but among those that care and are choosing to pay attention, a fantastic choice.

The third pocket is to own the long tail, to make a small royalty on a huge range of products. That's CDbaby and iTunes and the Garrett Wade tool catalog.

If you're interested in the issue, I'd suggest you read the entire post, as it's much more nuanced and discusses The Dip of The Long Tail.

Kevin Kelly wrote an insightful follow up post on the issue, in which he writes:

There's a blatant switcheroo that Seth (and almost everyone else) makes when explaining the Long Tail. In pocket #1 [and # 2]of the curve, Seth talks in terms of a creator of a work. But then when he gets to the long tail, he switches away from a creator, to talk in terms of an aggregator of other creators' work. Why is that? What happens to the creator? The creator is dropped when we get to the long tail "pocket of profit" because the long tail is not profitable for the creator. It's profitable only for the audience and aggregators.

[...]

... As one crosses the sections -- going from the short head to the long tail -- one should be consistent and view it from the aggregator's point of view or the creator's point of view. I think it is a mistake to conflate the two view points.

That is a very good distinction to make, and if you're an author (or creator of any other material) it's important to make it. But, to be fair, Seth's focus is not on that distinction, and although it's from a slightly different perspective, I think he ends up making essentially the same argument that Kelly makes. Seth writes that:

The most common misconception about Long Tail thinking is that if you don't succeed at pocket 1, don't worry, because the tail will take care of your product and you'll just end up in #2. That's not true. #2 isn't a consolation prize for mass market losers. Mass market losers are still losers.

If you're looking for the creator's view, Kevin Kelly is definitely right when he states that "The longer the tail, the worse for sales." And, Seth is right when looking at it from a company perspective, stressing the need to be the best at what you do in your category or market (Pixar, Vandersteen's and iTunes), whether what you distribute is your creation or not.

Looking at it from the publishing industry perspective, you obviously want those big hits on the bestseller lists, but you also want to have imprints in niche areas with a die-hard fan base that buys plenty of books, but probably not enough to make even a dent on the lists. And, it probably doesn't hurt to have those long tail distributors there to help sell titles here and there that, for whatever reason, fail to gain traction with a wider audience.

Joe Nocera's Best Business Books Ever

Joe Nocera is a columnist for The New York Times who writes about big business, and yesterday my inbox was filled with notes pointing me to his blog. His latest post recommends what he believes are the best business books ever. Here is Nocera's list with his commentary:

• "Liar's Poker," by Michael Lewis (even though I've since become convinced that the anecdote that gives the book its title never happened).
• "The Devil's Candy," by Julie Salamon. (Greatest dissection of the movie business ever written.)
• "The Box,", by Marc Levinson. (Hard to believe you can write a great book about the rise and importance of the shipping container, but he pulled it off.)
• "Indecent Exposure," by David McClintick. (Published in 1982, it single-handedly created the business narrative genre).
• "The Go-Go Years," by John Brooks. (The best book by the most elegant writer to ever make business his subject.)
• "The Kingdom and the Power," by Gay Talese. (Yes, the subject is The New York Times, but how can you leave it off any list of great business books?)
• "Titan," by Ron Chernow. (Chernow's magisterial biography of John D. Rockefeller.)
• "Do You Sincerely Want To Be Rich," by Godfrey Hodgson, Bruce Page and Charles Raw. (Hard to believe that this committee of authors could write a sensational narrative about the rise and fall of Bernard Cornfeld, but that they did.)
• "Disney Wars," by James Stewart. ("Best corporate psychoanalysis I've ever read," says John Huey.)
• "The Informant," by Kurt Eichenwald (Forget his Enron book, "Conspiracy of Fools." This book, about the strange saga of Mark Whitacre and Archer Daniels Midland, is his masterpiece.)
• "Father, Son and Co.: My Life at IBM and Beyond", by Thomas J. Watson and Peter Petre (The only great ghost-written C.E.O. autobiography ever written. No one else --not even Lee Iacocca or Jack Welch -- even comes close.)
• "When Genius Failed," by Roger Lowenstein. (Another one of those "how-did-he-do-it?" books: this account of the fall of Long Term Capital Management, which by all rights should be a tough slog, is crackling good read.)
• "Greed and Glory on Wall Street," by Ken Auletta. (This book, about the crack up of Lehman Brothers, has a great cast of characters, starting with Steve Schwartzman.) - [Out of Print]
• "The Smartest Guys in the Room," by Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean. (O.K., O.K., they are former colleagues of mine, and I was deeply involved in editing this book -- but I have to say, I think it turned out pretty well!)

Now as we have mentioned before, Jack and I will have a lot to say about The 100 Best Business Books of All-Time in February, but for now we'll say this. Nocera favored the story and tale over the tactics and theory. We think you need to read a wide range of books to get the mental nutrition you need for a well-balanced business diet. You'll be seeing some of these titles again.

PS Nocera has a new book out from Portfolio called Good Guys and Bad Guys: Behind the Scenes with the Saints and Scoundrels of American Business. This is compliation of profiles the writer has penned over the last several years.

Jack Covert Selects - Management Lessons From Mayo Clinic

Management Lessons From Mayo Clinic: Inside One of the World's Most Admired Service Organizations by Leonard L Berry and Kent D. Seltman, McGraw-Hill, 276 pages, $27.95, Hardcover, June 2008, ISBN 9780071590730

Over a century ago, a family of doctors in a small Minnesotan town formed an organization that has gone on to touch countless lives. These days, over 42,000 employees, students and volunteers go to work every day at Mayo Clinic's three U.S. campuses--one each in Minnesota, Florida and Arizona. But, talking to the clinic's patients, you'd never think the care they received came from such a large entity. Mayo Clinic has grown exponentially over the years, but has retained its human touch throughout. How has Mayo Clinic done it? Leonard Berry and Kent Seltman answer that question with this book.

In profiling this one very special organization, Berry and Seltman touch on almost every aspect of business--from the loftier issues of Vision, Values, and Purpose, to the everyday issues of customer service, management structure, hiring and branding. The authors tackle each issue methodically and know exactly when to step back and let those within the Clinic and their patients tell their own stories, keeping the book fresh and inspiring.

One such story is from Dr. Breanndan Moore. He was called in to work on a kidney transplant in the middle of the night, and noticed a technologist still in the lab. Being her supervisor and fearing the worst, he called her into his office the next day, asking why she had been in the lab at 2 a.m. It turned out that earlier that day she accidentally used the wrong solution on an antibody test and couldn't read it. She had come back just to do the test again. That was commendable, but Moore wondered why she didn't wait and redo the test the next day. She replied "Dr. Moore, I can't have the patients at Mayo Clinic waiting an extra day in the hospital just because I fouled up a lab test."

That technologist was behind the scenes, unknown to patients, and she wasn't expecting to be rewarded for her extra work--she didn't even expect anyone to know about it. It is employees like her that make Mayo Clinic what it is, and it is Mayo Clinic's culture that creates employees like her. Not every business has the high calling that Mayo Clinic has. Not every employee goes to work everyday clearly knowing that the work they do will benefit a life other than their own. But, the lessons and methods provided in this book can help any management team instill a culture and purpose to effectively manage an organization around.

The Mayo brothers established and built "one of the world's most admired service organizations" with solid values and a practicality in operations that is truly clinical. What else would you expect from a Midwestern family? The Mayo Clinic continues that work today, and you can expect those same qualities in this book.

The Bicycle Gang

I'm sure somewhere, there's a theory that, those who ride together, work well together. Or so holds true here.

We 8cr-ers have a bicycle gang. It's a group of us that rides together to and from company gatherings and homes and apartments. Dylan, Todd (our shipper) and I often traverse the Milwaukee streets in our pack of three on our ride home.

There's a list of reasons supporting why bicycling to work, well, works -- nice to the environment, heart-friendly, and easy on the budget. It's the beginning of taking up bicycling to work that can be a bit daunting. For various reasons.

If you're looking for advice on how to start, try Rory McMullan's Biking to Work guide. It's an 85-page introduction to the type of bicycle to choose, helpful accessories, and talking points for getting a bike rack at your office.

Good luck!

Edgelings and The Longer Tail

Silicon Valley's native son Mike Malone has been covering the tech industry better and for longer than anyone. We voted his latest book, Bill & Dave, the best of the year in the biography and memoir category in our first annual 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards. He has now teamed up with Robert Grove and Tom Hayes to create Edgelings.com, a technology news website, of which he is Editor-in-Chief. The press release states:

Edgelings.com is designed to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of high tech industry coverage in daily newspapers and mainstream magazine, and by the retreat of trade magazines from general readers to ever-more narrow niche audiences. In the process, Edgelings is also pioneering a new relationship with journalists that will give them a financial stake in the success of their stories measured by readership and traffic impact.

[...]

"Ultimately, we intend to be the home of the most original technology and business writers in the world," says Mike Malone, Edgelings editor-in-chief. "We believe it is possible to have great reporting and great writing; and knowledgeable coverage of tech that is readable by the non-tech audience.

"To get that kind of quality, we intend to enter into partnership with the best writers and bloggers in tech, and enable them have a financial stake in Edgelings¡¦ success. That means helping drive traffic to their sites, rewarding them for readership, and paying them commensurate with the traffic they generate."

The site is partnering with Pajamas Media, so it should develop an audience quickly.

In book news, Chris Anderson's The Long Tail has been released in paperback and contains a new chapter on marketing and an epilogue on the reaction to the book. You can read his post on the paperback edition here.

Jack Covert Selects - Good Is Not Enough

Good Is Not Enough: And Other Unwritten Rules for Minority Professionals by Keith R. Wyche with Sonia Alleyne, Portfolio, 242 pages, $24.95, Hardcover, July 2008, ISBN 9781591842101

It's no secret that the leaders of America's largest corporations do not reflect the makeup of our country's population. Looking at the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, there are: four African Americans, four Latinos, five Asians and 13 women.

Why is this still true in corporate America and how can we change it? This is what Keith Wyche tries to resolve in Good Is Not Enough, written with Sonia Alleyne. First, he suggests that not only is there a managerial issue to be dealt with on the corporate level, but that employees themselves must do things differently to make it in today's business world.

If a company's culture is counterproductive, it can be hard regardless of what you do to stay, get promoted and bring about change. So, get out. Find some place better. Once finding a new organization, the authors discuss how to "fit in" and make the corporate culture work for you, explaining that this can be accomplished by changing perception (how one is seen), visibility (making oneself accessible), and knowing when to move over/get out, find a mentor, and be more prepared. Each focal point has its own chapter and contains several examples and explanations.

Chapter 6, in particular, deals with the skills that one must have to excel in the corporate world, and applies to everyone making their way up in business. If you cannot communicate, don't have some leadership skills, and can't be a team player, you won't get far in any organization. Wyche counsels employees not to look for Gold Stars at work. In the workforce, just doing great things isn’t enough. You often won't get noticed by just doing outstanding work. You need to meet with your superiors, show others what you've done and let them know that you're there if they need you.

Good Is Not Enough demonstrates how minorities in the workplace can, and have, overcome obstacles to thrive in previously uncharted territories of corporate America. But the lessons laid out here are useful to anyone in the workforce who is underappreciated or thinks they may not be reaching their full potential within their company. With any job, some aspects are easy to change: how you approach a job or present yourself. Others are impossible. This book is a guide to the pieces that one can change to help overcome the challenges that one can't change.

Jack Covert Selects - Predictably Irrational

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely, Harper, 280 pages, $25.95, Hardcover, February 2008, ISBN 9780061353239

We've all been there--the skin-to-strip adhesive is beginning to give, and it's clearly time to give the Band-Aid the ol' yank. That truism from mom--"fast and easy"--rings true, but does it really? According to Dan Ariely, maybe not...

As amusing as such human trivialities prove to be for light lunchtime reading, the increasingly grave results stemming from our seemingly simple everyday decisions (hybrid vs. hydrogen, fluorescent vs. incandescent, Starbucks vs. Dunkin' Donuts) beg a closer examination of Ariely's theory that we're not only all irrational, but Predictably Irrational. Pointing out inherent human foibles is no gesture of contrariness or devil's advocacy on the part of the author. Rather, as Ariely states, "these irrational behaviors of ours are neither random nor senseless. They are systematic, and since we repeat them again and again, predictable. So wouldn't it make sense to modify standard economics, to move it away from naive psychology?"

Hoping to expound on the growing field of behavioral economics, Ariely guides the reader through the backwaters of our own minds. Chapters chart the dangers of making decisions based on comparison (citing Crocodile Dundee nonetheless), the fallacy of supply and demand (Starbucks tricked us!), and the ridiculously high price of ownership (would you pay $2400 for a basketball ticket?). All the while Ariely keeps his tongue planted firmly in cheek. And, as for the Band Aide, it turns out that mom may have just been protecting herself from discomfort when she offered the quick-rip solution: Patients actually feel less pain if treatments are carried out with lower intensity and longer duration.

Ariely is currently the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT, holding a joint appointment between the school's Media Laboratory and the Sloan School of Management. What does such a lofty title mean, you might ask. Basically, that he understands human behavior as well as anyone on the planet, including the cognitive workings behind every one of our weird inclinations at work, in the store, in restaurants, and even at the bar. But throughout this book, the Professor's Friday afternoon tone never wavers--he's conversational, informal, and increasingly engaging despite the usually tedious nature of such a barrage of examples. Rarely is a book of empirical evidence at once so eye opening and fun.

New Excerpt - The Gridlock Economy

We've posted a new excerpt over on the blog that we post excerpts on--the excerpts blog. It is taken from Chapter 3 of The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Cost Lives by Michael A. Heller. In it, you'll read how current patent laws may actually be stifling innovation in drug development and holding up potentially life saving medicines. As Heller himself puts it:

This chapter brings you up to speed on drug patent gridlock. A decade ago Rebecca Eisenberg and I helped launch today's debate when we cautioned in Science that "privatization of biomedical research must be more carefully deployed to sustain both upstream research and downstream product development." Otherwise, we wrote, "more intellectual property rights may lead paradoxically to fewer lifesaving drugs."

Here is the direct link to the entire excerpt: http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/008311.html