800-CEO-READ Blog

How the Wise Decide: Dermot Dunphy, Part I

It's day two of Aaron and Bryn's, authors of How the Wise Decide, joining us to share the problems, lessons and solutions garnered from their interviews with 21 leaders. Today, they're talking aboutDermony Dunphy, the former CEO of Sealed Air.

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Most companies today have vision statements, idealistic slogans intended to guide their management and employees. But it is easy for vision statements to degenerate into mere words on paper, lost in the short-term fog of day-to-day business decisions. A great vision can and should be stated simply, but implementing it won't be easy. We make the case in our book, How the Wise Decide, that you have to maintain the constant discipline to let that vision guide every decision you make, even seemingly innocuous day-to-day tactical choices. The benefit of that discipline is that choices become easier. All you need do is ask if an option furthers the vision. If the answer is no, even with short-term profits at stake, it isn't really an option. Let us show you how one of our wise leaders, Dermot Dunphy, created and implemented a vision that resulted in immense value.

In 1971 Dunphy had sold his packaging company and was thinking about what to do next. Investment bank DLJ asked him to take over a small packaging company that had just lost its CEO, the result of stumbling financial performance. Understand that in 1971 the packaging industry wasn't exactly a hotbed of innovation. Cardboard boxes and wadded paper about sums it up. But the company Dunphy took over was different. Sealed Air was the brainchild of two inventors who a decade earlier had created a textured wallpaper consisting of little air bubbles trapped between layers of plastic. The wallpaper went nowhere, but Sealed Air had changed course and targeted the packaging market with a product called Bubble Wrap.

Dunphy's previous company had been a commodity business that was constantly squeezed between giant raw materials suppliers on the bottom and demanding, powerful customers on the top. Sealed Air was nothing like that. "I decided, when I found Sealed Air, that I kind of woke up in heaven and that focusing on the technological edge, combined with a marketing edge, was the way to control my destiny and control the company's destiny," he says.

Dunphy quickly formulated his vision of what Sealed Air could become: a company selling not a product, but a benefit. "The strategic vision was that we were in the business of protecting our customer's products from damage caused by shock, vibration and abrasion. And the bubble was our core business."

How the Wise Decide: Bill George, Part III

Part III of the Bill George story, brought to you by the authors of How the Wise Decide.

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Bill George calls his traumatic experience in the Lenox Hill operating room a "power-of-one" observation. That single catheter failure crystallized in a way that no report ever could the problem confronting Medtronic. But George wasn't basing his decision to overhaul the catheter business on that one experience. Instead, he was considering it in the context of everything else he knew about the business. He was able to see not only the flaws in the catheter, but also the flaws in how Medtronic handled information.

Other power-of-one observations sparked more changes at Medtronic. One day George was watching a surgeon implanting an early version of Medtronic's defibrillator, a device that restores normal rhythm to a wildly beating heart. The device was large and the electrodes were delicate. The surgeon was having difficulty fitting the defibrillator into the patient's chest cavity. Finally he pushed hard and suddenly blood was everywhere. The surgeon had perforated an artery.

"Surgeons are good at cutting, but they're strong, both in personality and in physical strength. He was trying to force the device when what was needed was the refined touch of a cardiologist," George says. The patient survived, but Medtronic's technicians began focusing on making smaller defibrillators that cardiologists could easily implant without having to do deeply invasive surgery.

Bill George knew the tremendous value that derives from making power-of-one observations. In any given year he spent an astounding two thirds of his time in the field gathering first-hand information. Not many CEOs can find a way to do that, but George set up a senior management team that took care of other matters to allow him to get out of the office. As we recount in How the Wise Decide, George had many other similar experiences during his tenure as a result of visiting doctors in their offices and surgeons in their operating rooms all over the world. His observations showed him not only how to fix faulty products, but also a faulty organization and they gave him the insights that spurred the development of new products before competitors saw the potential. He spent so much time with primary sources because he knew he didn't have enough information from other sources to make intelligent decisions.

What George and other leaders who diligently practice the principle of Going to the Source understand is that firsthand information is the best information. It is unfiltered by others, it provides subtle details and nuances that are lost in Power Point presentations and, most important of all, it shows us reality in all its messy details and emotion. Without face-to-face encounters with the people who are driving the future of your business, you will miss out on the power of emotional input.

In case you're wondering about the financial impact of George's ambitious efforts to Go To the Source, during his 12 years of leadership from 1989 to 2001 Medtronic's market capitalization soared from $1.1 billion to $60 billion. That's an average annual growth rate of 35 percent!

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Stay tuned for day two of the blog hosting by Aaron and Bryn, authors of How the Wise Decide. Tomorrow, they'll be talking about Dermot Dunphy, the former CEO of Sealed Air.

How the Wise Decide: Bill George, Part II

Part II of the Bill George story, brought to you by the authors of How the Wise Decide.

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After having a faulty Medtronic catheter thrown at him by an angry surgeon, Bill George began investigating why he hadn't known about quality problems plaguing the catheter business. What he found was a tortuous path that routed the sales reps' field reports about failing catheters through seven layers of bureaucracy before they reached the people who designed the products. When George questioned the engineers about the reports they denied any design flaws and blamed the surgeons for misusing the equipment. George quickly reached two conclusions. First, there clearly was a problem with the quality of the catheters. He had seen the problem with his own eyes, had been shocked by the incident and had even brought the ruined device back to headquarters in his baggage.

"It's an overstatement, but field reports are a dime a dozen," George told us. "There's no emotional association with them. But when you're in a medical environment like an operating room all your senses--sight, sound, smell, taste--are working. It's a totally different experience than reading a field report."

Second, and more importantly, there was something dangerously wrong with Medtronic's ability to handle critical information. "It was a systemic problem," he explains. "What was wrong was that the system wasn't getting quality information from the operating room to engineering, quality control and manufacturing, the people who could fix the problems. People don't want to pass on bad news and engineers can be in denial about a problem."

George immediately ordered up a solution. Within a few months the catheter sales force was split off from Medtronic's centralized sales operation and attached to the catheter division where sales people were in much closer contact with engineering, quality control and manufacturing. At the same time George ordered engineers to get out of their offices and spend at least one day a month in operating rooms observing how the equipment they designed was being used. A few engineers complained to him that they were too busy to waste time watching doctors. "I said 'if that's the case, you're working on the wrong things'."

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Stay tuned for today's final blog entry on Bill George.

Welcoming Aaron Sandoski and Bryn Zeckhauser: How the Wise Decide

Joining us this week on the blog are Bryn Zeckhauser and Aaron Sandoski, authors of How the Wise Decide. They conducted 21 interviews of wise business and government leaders - including, Bill George of Medtronic, Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court, Daniel Kahneman a Nobel Prize Winner in Economics, Shelly Lazarus of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide and many more. They found six decision-making principles. Over the next few days, Bryn and Aaron will share examples of problems, solutions and lessons gained.

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The success of every business and every career turns on the decisions people make. Unfortunately, most of us aren't making very good decisions. An estimated 80 percent of new products fail after launch and more than half of all mergers and acquisitions destroy more value than they create. We set out to learn how to make great decisions. Our book, How the Wise Decide, taps the thinking and experiences of 21 extraordinary leaders who consistently made great decisions. We have distilled their wisdom into six fundamental principles these leaders share and that have enabled them to create enormous value. In fact, the eight retired public company CEOs outperformed the S&P by 15 times and four of the leaders became self-made billionaires. The principles sound simple, but they're extraordinarily difficult to execute because they require rare devotion and relentless practice.

We'll show you what "easy to state, difficult to execute" means by introducing you to our first principle--Go To The Source--and one of its best practitioners, Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic, the Minneapolis medical device manufacturer.
When George arrived at Medtronic he knew that new and innovative medical instruments were the company's lifeblood and that he needed to understand how Medtronic's products were used. To develop that knowledge firsthand he devoted most of the first 90 days on the job to observing actual surgical procedures. It was in a surgical suite at New York City's massive Lenox Hill Hospital that George had a rude awakening. A cardiologist was going to use a Medtronic balloon catheter in an angioplasty to open a patient's clogged arteries. Gowned and gloved, George stood only a few feet away from the operating table as the doctor carefully inserted the catheter into the patient's femoral artery. But just minutes later the handle of the catheter fell apart! Ever so carefully, the cardiologist withdrew the catheter from the patient. Then, his face scarlet with rage, he hurled the bloody device at George, who ducked just in time to avoid being hit in the face. The operation resumed, this time with a competitor's catheter.

George had been aware that Medtronic's catheter sales weren't what they should have been. The company was losing market share and the sales force had been complaining about product quality. But the engineers had said the product was fine and getting better. Maybe the sales force was just looking for an excuse for not doing a good job, he had thought. Now, shaken by what he had just seen, George sat down with the Medtronic sales rep who had been with him in the operating room. The rep told him that the problem he had just witnessed wasn't an isolated incident. The catheters had been failing with disturbing frequency. All the sales reps knew that, he said, and they had all filed the required field reports.

If all those reports had been filed, George thought, why didn't I know about them?

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Stay tuned for Part II of the Bill George story. For more from Bryn and Aaron, check out their website.

Bunches of Business Book Recommendations

There has been quite a run in the blogosphere in the last two weeks with people recommending business books.

Josh Kauffman may have started this tidal wave with his updated 2008 version of The Personal MBA. His list is 77 books long with the mantra "skip b-school and the $100,000 loan: you can get a world-class business education simply by reading these books."

BusinessPundit followed with their 25 Best Business Books Ever post, placing Adam Smith at #25 and In Search of Excellence at the top spot.

For The Best Business Book of 2008 (so Far), Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog directs people to The Opposable Mind, Presentation Zen, Rain Making, Groundswell, Senior Leadership Teams and Brain Rules.

And then people started finding old lists to highlight. A "Business Book" hit on tweetscan directed me to a October 2007 post at Newly Corporate titled "15 Books For Rogue Professionals and How To Read Them At No Cost." Their no-cost solution is the library, and they recommend everything from Carnegie to Chris Anderson to China Inc.

This led me to another tweetscan hit where Melissa Woo, inspired by this post, spent the morning tweeting her favorites. As a fellow Milwaukeean, I thought I would list all of her favorites.

• Leadership and Self Deception by The Arbinger Institute
• First, Break All The Rules by Buckingham and Coffman
• The Thin Book of Naming Elephants by Hammond
• Getting to Yes by Fisher
• Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Lencioni
• Crucial Conversations by Patterson
• Cultivating Careers by Cynthia Golden
• We Are Smarter Than Me by Libert and Spector

The Surprise Element of Our Countdown Book Club

Last week we launched the official countdown to Jack and Todd's book, The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. We thought about hiring the New York City New Year's Ball and then decided on a book club, to help you gear up for Jack and Todd's book.

As Todd mentioned, it's a six-month book club. And since we launched it last week, a few questions have come up.

A few folks asked how the book club worked internationally. Dylan answers that here.

And a few folks have asked why we're keeping the five books a secret (the sixth book being Jack and Todd's book). For us, the element of surprise is part of the package.

I say this realizing that people are worried about, (a) receiving a book they already have; (b) receiving a book that's not applicable to theirself.

While I won't give away the book names, let me try to disperse some of that fog. First, the likelihood of someone owning these titles is quite slim. A hint, Good to Great, a great, common business title, isn't in this club. In choosing the titles, we considered the likelihood of people having had read the book, their applicability and whether they're a good read.

And second, on the question of whether the books are worth reading. Their subject lines follow that of Management, Leadership, Communication, Marketing, and Entrepreneurship. I'm sure you'll find a subject (or six) that work for you.

Hope that helps in your decision! Any other questions, shoot them my way. Happy to help. Here's the link, if you'd like to join our club.

Honest Feet and Other Non-Verbal Cues

We're always giving off nonverbal cues. From rolling our eyes, as teenagers, when our parents asked us to help with dishes. To putting our elbows on the table at dinner time. There's a message we send our beyond that of our words. And oftentimes, sent out louder than our words.

Kai Ryssdal over at Marketplace recently interviewed Carol Kinsey Goman, who wrote The Nonverbal Advantage.

One discussed position is the comfort pose of crossing our arms and legs simultaneously. Carol pointed out that, while "it sends a signal of resistance or 'I don't like what you just said.' It also, by the way, cuts your retention down to about 38 percent." And clarified that it means, "How much you're retaining of what you've heard in the meeting. So you really need to be aware that your body and mind, or brain, are not on separate planets, that what you do with your body affects your brain, but it also, right or wrong, it sends a signal to the rest of the people in your group."

And of course, there's that our feet give off the most honest cues. (Perhaps, we should direct our attention to people's feet, rather than their eyes?) Why's this true?

Goman: Because they are the least trained part of the body. So feet are probably the most honest part of the body. They will bounce when you're nervous or happy, they will cross, they will do that ankle lock and pull back when you feel not included in a conversation or a meeting, your toes will turn up if you're seated and you get great news.

If you're a podcast subscriber, you can listen here. Or you can read the full text.

BusinessWeek review of Hell's Cartel

Last week BusinessWeek reviewed Hell's Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler's War Machine by Diarmuid Jeffreys. Hell's Cartel is about IG Farben's decision to utilize death camp labor during WWII to speed up efforts to develop synthesized plastics. The German chemical group was famous for discovering ammonia and (at Bayer, a subsidiary) sulfa, the first antibiotic.

Jeffreys, author of Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug, details the journey this once highly esteemed company took once it made a deal with the devil. Part corporate biography, part history, and part moral tale, Hell's Cartel is, as the reviewer puts it, "not a pretty history. But it is gripping, full of warnings about the potential of corporations to mutate into criminal enterprises."

Here's a snippet from the review:

"IG Farben and Hitler: A Fateful Chemistry
How a company whose Nobel-winning scientists discovered vital medicines became a Nazi collaborator"

IG Farben traced its origins to the efforts of men such as Carl Bosch of BASF Group, who led the effort to mass-produce synthetic ammonia. The work was crucial to solving a worldwide shortage of fertilizer and preventing mass starvation. He and other scientist-managers made Germany the dominant producer of drugs and chemicals in the years before World War I. Bosch was a man of conscience but also deeply patriotic. During World War I he became a national hero after leading a crash effort to develop synthetic nitric acid, essential to producing explosives. Most notoriously, BASF chemist Fritz Haber, who had developed the processes used to make ammonia, came up with the idea of using chlorine gas as a weapon.

Read the entire article here: businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_34/b4097098922518.htm?chan=magazine+channel_opinion

If you like books in this vein, also check out The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug by Thomas Hager.

Wired Reviews

Wired Magazine doesn't review books in depth that often, so I was surprised that they were the first (that I've seen) to review Thomas Friedman's upcoming book, Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--And How It Can Renew America.

It is reviewed by Garret M. Graff, author of The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House. The most interesting piece of the review is the story he relates from the book:

Friedman tells the story of a Marine Corps general in Iraq who requested solar panels to power his bases. Asked why, he explained that he wanted to win his region by "out-greening al Qaeda." Instead of trucking in gas from Kuwait at $20 a gallon--money that fuels oppressive petro-dictatorships--in convoys that are vulnerable to roadside bombs, why not beat the insurgents by taking away their targets and their funding?

Also reviewed in this issue, and given four whole pages to Friedman's one, is Neal Stephenson's Anathem. Anathem is not a business book--it's a 960 page powerhouse of science-fiction. If you love good science-fiction, however--or just really good writing--our sister company's book buyer tells me it gets no better than Stephenson. It will be the next non-business book I read.

If you missed the links above, links to the reviews are below.

Hot, Flat and Crowded
Anathem

Podcast interview with Jonathon Flaum

We were very lucky to have Jonathon stop in on his way to see the Dalai Lama a month ago. We took a stroll to Lodge 300, and Todd did a fantastic interview with Jonathon about his new book, How the Red Wolf Found Its Howl, (recently self-published by Lotus Way Press). Stay tuned next week, we'll be posting the fable from the book for everyone's enjoyment.

Listen to the podcast interview HERE.

The Countdown Book Club (International Edition)

A few readers have asked us whether or not we can ship The Countdown Book Club internationally. Well, indeed we can--we would do anything for you guys. However, because it is more expensive to ship the books, we do have to add $30.00 to the cost on international orders.

If you would like to subscribe to the book club from an international location, you can do so here.

Tuesday in Miwaukee: Pecha Kucha Night #2

This coming Tuesday, August 26th we're hosting round #2 of Pecha Kucha Night in Milwaukee. What is Pecha Kucha, you ask? Well, here's Jon's description.

If you're not in Milwaukee, there's a high chance that a Pecha Kucha Night is being hosted near you. It's presently in 136 cities around the world. Check it out. I guarantee you'll learn something, meet new folks and enjoy yourself.

And if you're in Milwaukee, do join us on Tuesday. Here's why the night will be worth it. You can grab tickets online. Bring friends.

Our friendly local independent radio station, 91.7 WMSE, has been helping us get the word out. You might recognize the theme to which they set the PK promo (mp3) (promo written by former inBubbleGuy). Their station manager, Tom Crawford, presented in the first round. More PK presentations shown here.

New Harbinger Titles

Here are some titles that I found a must-read from Harbinger Press. They deal with how to perform better in your current job situation and offer many different perspectives on what to expect from coworkers and bosses. The books go from simple disorganization to dealing with co-workers that are difficult. Hopefully, you'll find one that you may want to read more about - here they are:

Watercooler Wisdom: How Smart People Prosper in the Face of Conflict, Pressure, & Change by Keith Bailey and Karen Leland - The authors of the book surveyed 20,000 executives, managers, and staff from around the world and discovered how everyone from CEOs to secretaries can flourish despite the stresses of the workplace. It's a practical guide that offers powerful techniqes for coping with conflict, pressure and change.

The Well-Ordered Office: How to Create an Efficient and Serene Workspace by Kathleen Kendall-Tackett, Ph.D. - According to the author's research, there are about an average of 150 hours spent every year looking for things in offices or cubicles. Taking the time to organize is making time to enjoy the things you really love. Kendall-Tackett draws on her own experience as an organizer and practicing psychologist and offers simple strategies for overcoming these issues once and for all.

Working with the Self-Absorbed: How to Handle Narcissistic Personalities on the Job by Nina Brown, ED.D, LPC, NCC - In this book, you learn to manage the destructive behaviors of narcissists in the workplace and to ensure that your work gets the credit it deserves. Brown helps the reader to find realistic strategies for ignoring outrageous narcissism and help to establish a seperate-but-equal working environment with that coworker.

Thinking Outside the Cubicle: How to Change the Job You Have into the Job You Want by Norman J. Meshriy, MS - Meshriy helps to find tips and strategy to increase job satisfaction by transforming the workplace from within. He tells how to deal with frustrating bosses, difficult coworkers, and hone job skills. Restructure jobs to match goals, build rewarding business relationships, and become more secure to leave the office at the end of the day.

Ahead of the Curve - Part Two

I pointed to some reviews of Ahead of the Curve by Philip Delves Broughton last week, but I may have missed the best. Written by Land of Lincoln author Andrew Ferguson for The Wall Street Journal, the review is no kinder to the institution that Broughton profiles in the book than the previous reviews had been, but it is funnier and Ferguson reviews author Broughton as much as he derides Harvard Business School culture. He begins:

As Paris bureau chief for the London Daily Telegraph, Philip Delves Broughton had one of the most desirable jobs in newspapering--indeed, one of the last remaining desirable jobs in newspapering--and he did it well enough to earn the admiration of boss and colleague alike. He shared an apartment on the Left Bank with a charming and beautiful wife and a burbling baby boy. He dined with heads of state and traveled widely on his employer's dime. Despite the volatility of the journalism business, his professional future seemed exceedingly bright.

So he quit and went back to school to study accounting.

Ferguson also wonders aloud whether Broughton was even a bit too taken in by the HBS experience, despite his relatively unflattering take on the institution.

... as the semesters wear on and he unspools his story, he shows signs of succumbing to a version of Stockholm Syndrome--a hostage identifying, if not with his captors, then at least with his professors, even those who pretend to teach "leadership skills." His prose, usually breezy and ironic, begins to sprout words like "team-focused."

Although he takes his quick jabs at the author and institution, Ferguson comes off as thinking the book is well written and entertaining, which seems to be the overall consensus so far.

The Second Annual 800ceoread Business Book Awards

On December 15, 2008, 800-CEO-READ will announce the winners of the second annual "The 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards." These awards will recognize the best business books of 2008 and the authors who committed time and energy to the books' creation.

Thousands of business books are published each year, each with the potential to promote change and enlighten the way people think about business. 800-CEO-READ honors this practice by recognizing work from a number of categories: Sales, Leadership, Human Resources/Organizational Development, Entrepreneurship/Small Business, Finance/Economics, Advertising/Marketing, Globalization, Parables/Fables, Biographies/Memoirs, Personal Development, Innovation/Creativity, Industry Books, and New Perspectives.

There will be a winning title for each category, as well as an overall Best Business Book choice for 2008. Each book will be judged on the originality of its ideas and content.

A celebration for the winning titles in each category, as well as a launch party for Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten's new book The 100 Best Business Books of All Time will also take place in NYC on January 26, 2009.

The deadline for submissions is October 15, 2008. Publishers or authors can find more info and make submissions directly online by clicking here.

Be in touch with Jon (jon@800ceoread.com) if you have any questions. May the best books win!

Divide or Conquer video

Diana McLain Smith has a nice new video overview of her book, Divide or Conquer. The book, which we've written about in other posts, talks about how personality differences, conflicting interests, and other working relationship scenarios, can drastically affect the success or failure of an organization. As she states, in successful relationships, the focus on those relationships is as strong as the focus on the company mission.

Much more insight into her perspective and approach can be seen in the video below:

Jack Covert Selects - The Levity Effect

The Levity Effect: Why It Pays to Lighten Up by Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher, John Wiley & Sons, 229 pages, $22.95, Hardcover, March 2008, ISBN 9780470195888

Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher have written a book whose tone perfectly matches its subject--levity. It isn't a word you often hear when discussing business strengths, but The Levity Effect makes a compelling and often hilarious case for why fun should be more common in the workplace. The effects of levity and a sense of humor have on one's career and a company's bottom line have been extensively researched and the authors have gathered it all in these pages.

Most notably, the Great Place to Work Institute, which produces Fortune's "100 Best Companies to Work For," has found that "employees in companies that are denoted as 'great' responded overwhelmingly--an average of 81 percent--that they are working in a 'fun' environment" (13). And, as the authors point out, "If you had invested your beloved dough in the '100 Best' companies to work for over the past decade, you would have earned almost two times the return to the S&P 500" (19).

On a more personal note, "the Harvard Business Review reported that executives with a sense of humor climb the corporate ladder more quickly and earn more money than their counterparts" (137). This all makes sense, of course. People who are happy in their jobs are bound to be more productive and personable, more likely to dive into a project with excitement and have success doing so.

The case made in the Levity Effect--and research documented therein--is not only compelling, it's convincing. Part One of the book makes "The Case for Levity." After introducing the topic and providing some of the preliminary research, the book delves into chapters dedicated to each component of levity and the positive effects they have on the workplace: Humor improves communication; Fun inspires creativity; Respect engenders trust; Lightness positively affects health; and Wit creates wealth.

Part Two of the book is entitled "Getting Lighter" and is where the authors provide some actionable applications companies and managers can use to provide more levity in an organization. Chapter Seven is entitled "142 Ways to Have Fun at Work," and is literally a laundry list of suggestions for the less levity-prone management teams out there.

While much of the business world is still so "buttoned up," seemingly worried that people won't take their jobs seriously if they're enjoying themselves, having fun may just be your new competitive advantage.

Jack Covert Selects - Sway

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman, Doubleday Business, 206 Pages, $21.95, Hardcover, June 2008, ISBN 9780385524384

Sam Bowie over Michael Jordan. It's the 1984 NBA draft and the Portland Trail Blazers choose a promising 7-footer over the future face of basketball. It's one of the great "what were they thinking?" coulda/woulda moments in sports history. But, as Sway informs us, the thought process that led to that decision may very well point to many of our own boneheaded shortcomings in business and everyday life.

The Brafman Brothers--Ori, the coauthor of The Starfish and the Spider, and Rom, with a Ph.D. in Psychology--team together their professional insights of behavior to outline the ways in which (and why) "we're much more prone to irrational behavior than we realize" (4).

In the preface, the authors joke that, along with their lawyer uncle, they form the Jewish mother's equivalent of the holy trinity--lawyer, doctor, businessman. This anecdote is indicative of the casual, pickup-and-skim nature of the work, but the conclusions they come to are striking, pertinent, and universal to our very nature as human beings. There are certain mistakes we simply seem prone to: we tend to go to great lengths to avoid possible loss, we give people and things qualities based on initial perception, and we are largely blind to all evidence that contradicts our initial assessments. For instance, researchers have found that "the variable most responsible for an NBA player's time on the court ... was his draft selection order"(69).

This book is far from a copy-and-paste work of case studies, though. Instead, the Brafmans guide the reader through a chilling tale of a doomed KLM flight, an era of college football dominance, and a deaf ear turned to one of the greatest violinists alive. And their conclusion? We are basically out of tune with the inherent subconscious nuances that really shape so much of our decisions and world. The authors expose many of those nuances, providing insights and lessons that should help the reader avoid similar lapses in judgment.

Sway is more than a worthy addition to the emerging canon of "way we think"
literature. It is part history lesson, part psychological query, and part catalog of some of the greatest foibles of recent human history--and why they were made (Vietnam, unveiled!). You'll also find within these pages that personal applications abound, including ways to prevent a repeat of the Trail Blazer's historic misjudgment of talent. As the Brafmans point out, the entire way your company hires may be obsolete, and you wouldn't want to let insignificant factors prevent the hiring of the future Michael Jordan of your sales team.

Launching The Countdown Book Club

Our communication has been sporadic on the book project. Kate, our air traffic controller, is imploring us to get with it and start telling you what we have been up to. She's right and there is a lot that has happened.

The book has a name:

The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You

It has a beautiful cover:

The words have been written and most have survived the first round of edits. We are now in the polishing stage known as copyediting.

While we found ways to personally celebrate the completion of the manuscript with our families and the 800-CEO-READ team, we now want to share our growing excitement about the book with you.

The title is a bit of a giveaway, but our book is about business books. So we decided the best way to celebrate is to give you a sneak peak of some of the books we've included in The 100 Best.

We invite you to join The Countdown Book Club: Six Months To The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.

You'll receive six books. The first book will be sent to you in September. We'll send you five books, one a month, through January. And then in February, you'll receive your copy of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.

The cost is $99, which includes the six books and all the stamps to get them to you.

Now, we won't tell you which books we will send to you, but we promise you that they are more than worth your time and dollar.