800-CEO-READ Blog

Snowball or Avalanche?

I am annoyed by the newswire stories that each day report causes for stock market fluctuations without any real substantiation.

I am surprise no one has connected some aspect of the 777 drop in the Dow Jones Industrial yesterday to the release of The Snowball, the new biography about Warren Buffet.

In writing about the new book, Marketwatch did manage to call out Buffet's Goldman Sachs investment as an example of his prowess for finding bargains.

Should you have any attention left to devote to the coverage of the 976 page biography, The Financial Times and The New York Times both ran reviews over the weekend, complimentary of author Alice Schroeder and the work she did creating a portrait of the "Oracle of Omaha".

I got my copy today (thanks John!) and will have more to say after I get done checking the latest from AP.

Dave Eggers Weighs In On the Future of Reading

Esquire recently asked one of my publishing heroes, Dave Eggers, what he thinks of the future of reading. It's an important and recurring concern for us here, and after so reading many doomsday scenarios for the publishing industry (like this one), Mr. Eggers vision is thankfully optimistic.

The truth is that American publishers put out 411,000 individual titles last year, an all-time record, and netted $25 billion--hardly a sagging industry. And those kids who have abandoned books for electronic media? Since 2002, juvenile book sales have shown compound annual growth of 4.6 percent for hardcover books and 2.1 percent for paperbacks.

Anecdotally, we know this. We know about Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, Eldest--these juggernauts of contemporary youth literature--but still we cluck with acknowledgment when some pundit tells us that books are being crushed by an all-powerful digital junta. It must be true, we think--just yesterday I saw some kid on the bus, and he wasn't reading a book!

In his response to the question, Eggers illustrates youth interest in literature by sharing a story from 826 Valencia, a non-profit he founded in San Francisco "dedicated to supporting students ages 6-18 with their writing skills, and to helping teachers get their students interested in the literary arts." What he modestly doesn't mention is that the organization has been so successful that centers have popped up in six other cities. There are now centers, under the 826 National umbrella, in New York, Los Angeles, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Seattle, and Boston. If you live in one of those cities, check out their website and mission. You may have children who would benefit from their programs, may be interested in donating some of your time, or may just love their brilliantly absurd (and profitable) storefronts.

Eggers was also one of 2008 TED Prize Winners. Each prize winner gets to share their "wish to change the world" at the conference. You can hear Dave Eggers' wish here.

A Thousand Things Matter

"...products of true enduring quality are not those that do one thing 1000% better but rather those products that do 1000 things 1% better."

-from The IBM Way by Buck Rodgers and Robert Shook [out of print]

[hat tip: PowerShell Team Blog]

Business Books For The Current Credit Crunch

Shelf Awareness, a great site that follows the book trade, requested book suggestions that would help explain the current credit crisis.

On Friday, they ran the piece under the heading Meltdown Lit: Recommended Books for the Wall Street Debacle. Please go check out the whole piece. There are great suggestions.

Below is our original submission, which they used extensively for the article:

--The Subprime Solution by Robert Shiller

Shiller's work on housing values is well-known and originally established in Irrational Exuberance. His latest book just released in August describes pretty clearly the mortgage crisis we are in and offers some solutions to get out.

--Essays on the Great Depression by Ben Bernanke

You want some insight into what the current Fed chairman is thinking, reading his perspective on the last event of this magnitude may help understand what he does in this one.

--The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan

Hearing from the latest Fed Chairman might also be useful. Many are laying the blame at Mr. Greenspan's feet. The paperback that was released on September 9th has a new chapter with his thoughts on the current credit crisis.

--When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein

This from a review I wrote:

"Throughout When Genius Failed, financial journalist Roger Lowenstein foreshadows the coming doom and so there is no surprise in how the story of Long-Term Capital Management ends. But what Lowenstein does best is show how blind arrogance brought down the company and almost the entire financial system. Building on the work of two Nobel Laureates and growing capabilities of computer technology, Long-Term Capital Management pushed academic theory further into real-world practice than had ever been done before, and becomes a case study for how markets defy formulaic explanation. Lowenstein’s narrative, while set in the complicated financial market of today, tells an ages-old story many will recognize." (P.S. This was peanuts compared to the current crisis.)

--Smartest Guys In The Room by By Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind

This from a review Jack wrote:

"In my research, I have not found any evidence that anybody colluded to rob the place. Smart, rich, influential men do not deliberately destroy the source of their wealth and influence. Instead, they got trapped in a nightmare of their own creation, or perhaps their own ego. Enron's failure was not deliberate; it was the result of a series of interconnected events. Can this happen again? Sure, when you have hubris at the CEO level, sales peoples’ compensation based on short term success, upper level people totally focused on growth to satisfy short term Wall Street success, an accounting system that supports this concept, and finally an accounting firm that doesn’t do a good job of oversight. Add to this a deregulated industry and watch what happens." (this sounds familiar too).

Taking the Show on The Road

800-CEO-READ is celebrating its 25th year this year and we have sold business books in almost every conceivable manner during that time. So, we thought it was time to share some of what we know with others.

Jack and I spoke on Thursday in St. Paul, Minnesota to the Midwest Booksellers Association and next week we are in Detroit giving a similar talk to the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association. The final trip for the fall is in a few weeks when we fly out to LA and talk to the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association.

The topic is how bookstores can sell more business books. This publishing sub-category has a number of unique aspects when compared to other parts of book publishing. We want to point those out clearly and give booksellers some ideas on how to make that uniqueness work for them.

If you are going to be at any of these upcoming events, we hope you'll come sit in on our session. If you can't see us live, we have an article on tap for next week, based on the speech we are giving, that we will post here.

New Buffet Book Bought and Being Blogged

At the Kempton Ideas Revolution blog, they have managed to get a copy of The Snowball: Warren Buffett and The Business of Life ahead of its Monday release date. It didn't sound very hard: a call to the local bookstore and a trip over to pick it up.

The blogger is going through the book's 62 chapters and posting their favorite quote. The quote comes with a photo of the page its on. You can find the flickr slideshow here.

As of this posting, they are four chapters into the book.

Reviewing Reviews: Part II

I have a few more links for you all before I leave for the weekend. There are only two actual reviews among them, but it's the end of the day on a Friday afternoon, and I had to name this post something.

First up, BusinessWeek's Jessica Scanlon penned an interesting profile of the incomparable Seth Godin--maketing guru, friend of the company, and the man who just today taught me the difference between Stephen R. Covey and Stephen M.R. Covey. I still can't believe I didn't figure that one out on my own.

In case you missed it earlier this week, Daniel Akst wrote this glowing review of Billion Dollar Lessons in The Wall Street Journal. Ankst writes:

Billion-Dollar Lessons is an insightful and crisply written book, one that offers wisely chosen and well- narrated case studies but also good advice, such as urging companies to appoint an in-house "devil's advocate" to challenge the unhealthy unanimity that accompanies many major decisions.

Guy Kawasaki (Art of the Start) has also interviewed one of the book's coauthors, Chunka Mui, over at the American Express Open Forum blog. Two brilliant human beings in conversation... how could that not be worth your time?

Chris Erikson of The New York Post recently sat down with the author of The 4-Hour Work Week, Timothy Ferris, and got this job description from him:

I view my job these days as a sort of professional experimentalist. I experiment with things I think are interesting, including investing, and then report my findings, generally through the blog.

Sounds like a sweet gig. You can read the entire interview here.

For the second time today, I came across a reference to "Big Brother" in a review. This time, it was in the Economist's review of Planet Google, and the language is remarkably similar to Roger Lowenstein's review of The Numerati I linked to earlier today:

From books to health records and videos, from your friendships to your click patterns and physical location, Google wants to know. To some people this sounds uplifting, with promises of free access to knowledge and help in managing our daily lives. To others, it smacks of another Big Brother, no less frightening than its totalitarian ancestors for being in the private sector.

Finally, we have an opinion piece on the magic trick that is the American Dollar by James Grant. He is author of Mr. Market Miscalculates: The Bubble Years and Beyond, being published by Axios Press in November. His is one of many books due out this Fall on the financial crisis and its causes. Next week, we'll take a closer look at some books that are already out on the topic and turn our eyes to some of the upcoming titles.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Plastic Logic

Here is a sneak peak at a new electronic device designed specifically for business reading. It will be formally named and announced at the beginning of next year. For now, they're calling it "Plastic Logic," and you can hit it with a shoe.

On a fictional note. Well, it's true. McSweeney's will be live on(line) air.

With 800-CEO-READ having a sister that's an independent bookstore, we hear about a fair amount of fiction titles. Some of those coming from McSweeney's -- a favorite independent publisher of many here.

On this day (Friday), one of our favorites will join another of our local favorites on a conversation (and possibly some music) revolving around McSweeney's. Milwaukee's independent radio station 91.7 WMSE is bringing in the McSweeney's folks from 1:30 - 3:00PM CST.

Feel free to tune in via terrestrial signal or stream. You can find both links over on the left-hand side of the WMSE website.

And, if you're in Milwaukee, McSweeney's book editor Eli Horowitz will join McSweeney's author Deb Olin Unferth over at our sister's bookstore this evening.

And on to the weekend!

Reviewing Reviews

Heather Green has written a wonderful review of Jeff Howe's Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business for the September 29 issue of BusinessWeek. After observing that "Books about the crowd are becoming a crowd unto themselves," Green writes:

What sets Howe's book apart is his focus on business, an examination of different crowdsourcing models, and a deep dive into academic research to explain why people work together. It's a welcome and well-written corporate playbook for confusing times...

In his most recent article for Portfolio, "In Praise of Big Brother," Roger Lowenstein casts a somewhat leery eye at Stephen Baker's The Numerati. He begins:

Stephen Baker envisions a world in which our email and blog postings, our credit-card and grocery purchases, our pulse rates and facial expressions, and even our physical movements (handily tracked by our cell phones) will be fed to a new Brahmin class of math geeks devoted to sending us customized shopping choices, targeted political ads, real-time medical alerts, and the names of potential dating partners, not to mention (lest we be shirking on the job or hiding an illness) alerts to our bosses and insurance companies.

While that sounds awfully scary to me, the author is of the mind that this technology will one day empower us. Regardless of how you feel about these issues, the book does seem very informative and worth a read. Lowenstein describes Baker a "charming writer," and ends the review by calling the book "eye-popping and chilling."

David K. Hurst reveiws four books in the Autumn issue of strategy + business's Books in Brief. The first, Richard Bookstaber's Demon of Our Own Design, was awarded the top spot in the Finance & Economics category of our first annual book awards. The other three books are Stall Points: Most Companies Stop Growing--Yours Doesn't Have To by Matthew Olson and Derek Van Bever, Michael O'Leary: A Life In Full Flight by Alan Ruddock, and Tad Waddington's Lasting Contribution: How to Think, Plan, and Act to Accomplish Meaningful Work.

Fortune's Jia Lynn Yang has picked "eight volumes [that] belong in everyone's briefcase." Of course, Fortune doesn't make this list available online, but the chosen titles are:

Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America by Walter A. Friedman
Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story by Jerry Weissman
Hug Your Customers: The Proven Way to Personalize Sales and Achieve Astounding Results by Jack Mitchell
Selling to Big Companies by Jill Konrath
The New Strategic Selling: The Unique Sales System Proven Successful by the World's Best Companies by Robert B. Miller & Stephen E. Heiman
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher & William Ury
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Rich Karlgaard has written an update to his "Books to Get Rich By" for Forbes. (You can find the original list of 53 books here.) The lists are broken up into six categories: History and Heroes, How Capitalism Works Today, Instructional Tips, Management Secrets, Food for the Soul, and Useful Entertainment. While the list is too long to list all of the titles, I have listed the entire "Management Secrets" section below.

Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company by Andrew S. Grove
Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths That Are Destroying Your Property by Garret B. Gunderson
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher, William Ury & Bruce Patton
What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith
Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazzi
The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything by Stephen M.R. Covey with Rebecca M. Merrill

Did you notice that Stephen Covey picked up an initial sometime between 7 Habits and Speed of Trust? (edit: As the brilliant Seth Godin has pointed out in the comment section, Stephen M.R. Covey is the eldest son of Stephen R. Covey. I had not known this previously. Don't let it be said business books aren't a family business.) Notable titles from other sections are John Kao's Innovation Nation and Fareed Zakaria's Post American World from "How Capitalism Works Today," Dan Pink's Adventures of Johnny Bunko from "Instructional Tipps," Randy Pausch's Last Lecture form "Food for the Soul," and Michael Lewis's Blind Side from "Useful Entertainment."

Freakonomics: Around the world in cover images

Check out these cover images. Each time a new edition of Freakonomics is published, Steven and Stephen add it to their online collection.

I'd love to hear the cultural reasoning behind each design. Any insight?

Profile of a Marketing Guru

This week BusinessWeek ran a profile of our friend Seth Godin.

Godin's ability to synthesize and combine topics helps account for his broad influence. "Some people want a deep dive; they want metrics. But if you want someone to take a complicated topic and boil it down to the core, that's Seth," says John Moore, a brand consultant and former Whole Foods Market (WFMI) marketing director. Godin finds patterns of behavior and general problems that exist in seemingly unrelated fields. He sees Mary Anne Davis, a potter at one of his seminars, grappling with the same problem as executives at Boeing (BA): How do you market effectively when your products aren't the kind people buy based on an ad? And this focus on the general rather than the specific explains part of Godin's wide appeal. "The big win is when I say something that's just vague enough that it's useful, but people think I wrote it just for them," he says.

Seth mentions the article on his blog, http://sethgodin.typepad.com/.

Our first Milkshake Moment

This is just a short post to give a shout out to our friend Steve Little. Today at lunch, when the waitress took our drink orders, Michele asked for hot chocolate. It's getting to be fall here in Wisconsin, so hot drinks are common requests. She said, "I'm not sure if we have hot chocolate, but I'll check." She came back a few minutes later and said no, she was sorry, but the restaurant wasn't offering hot chocolate, yet. That's a seasonal drink, and they're still serving summer drinks.

After she left, we all turned to each other and said "Milkshake Moment." Here's why.

Essay from Byrne Murphy, author of Le Deal

Byrne Murphy, the author of Le Deal: How a Young American, in Business, in Love, and in Over His Head, Kick-Started a Multibillion-Dollar Industry in Europe, graciously wrote this essay for our blog. Le Deal is best described as an entrepreneurship book, but there are elements of memoir, adventure, global economics, and business narrative here.

Murphy recounts his abrupt decision to move his life and family to Paris, his early struggles to gain a foothold in a foreign business culture, and his eventual success with McArthurGlen Europe, "which created nearly 8,000 jobs, opened 1,500 stores featuring 500 brands, and attracted nearly 40 million shopping visits per year." The Wall Street Journal calls Le Deal "a tale fraught with frustration and filled with insight." In the essay below, Murphy explains the challenges he faced when attempting to run an American business model in a European market, and the ways he had to both change and be changed by the work culture around him.

The Management Mirage: Creating Teams in Foreign Cultures
by Byrne Murphy

In late 1992 I found myself alone at the kitchen table of a rented apartment in Paris. I had just arrived in Europe with an idea for a new business. In front of me was a pencil, paper, and a phone. The only thing missing was someone to call.

I didn't know anyone to call; not in Paris nor anywhere in Europe. Yet, eight years later, McArthur Glen Europe had opened thirteen specialty retail centers in five countries featuring 1,200 stores, over 300 brands, and was generating nearly one billion euros of sales from almost three million square feet. Approximately eight thousand jobs had been created. The company had restored abandoned factory buildings in England, added revitalization to small towns in France and Scotland, created leisure destinations in Wales and Austria and much more. The company was a success.

But it was a success born out of agony...in fact many agonies.

The toughest challenge was not with the ruthless local politics nor with blackmail and graft nor even the grinding, endless hours. The most relentless, exhausting challenge was the most fundamental of all management tasks--creating an effective team from an ever-growing group of multi-national, multi-cultural, polyglot Europeans who held as many centuries-old biases about each other as they did about Americans.

The challenge was elemental but was also mission-critical: within a few years the company comprised nearly two hundred people featuring more than a dozen nationalities working from seven offices across Europe. The pressure was intense. Our success had attracted serious competition in every market. The race was on and time was not our friend. Effective teamwork was the key success factor. The question was how to get all those national oars rowing in the same direction and to the same cadence?

Americans have an advantage when operating overseas. Despite our reputation for being naive and heavy-headed there is respect for the longstanding success of American business. There is often a willingness to grant the benefit of the doubt to American managers regarding the many new concepts and innovations emanating from the States. But this benefit of the doubt is precariously balanced, as though on an old-style scale with two plates on which a new substance is measured against known values. On one plate is a heap of respect for America and what it stands for. On the other plate is resentment for what America has achieved and how it handles those achievements. When starting up an American-inspired venture abroad, if the listening and hearing skills of the American manager are not acute enough to take into real consideration the context of the culture in which the venture is operating, the weight of resentment will quickly outweigh that of the respect. The benefit of the doubt has worn off and the scale is out of equilibrium. The manager's task becomes infinitely more difficult.

At McArthurGlen we were most successful when we derived clear objectives and worked hard in listening to each office on how best to achieve them. We did put in place a classic, American-style profit-sharing scheme to reward success in one's home market and to encourage cooperation across borders. Interestingly, the plan met with only partial success and eventually lost credibility. Bare-bone entrepreneurial tools only go so far in most European settings. The more effective tactic was the listening and the hearing.

Europe is not America, not in its values nor in its practice. It is not the land of entrepreneurs but rather the land of large governments which play pivotal roles in the economy. Many Europeans--in some places most Europeans--do not live to work and to constantly achieve in the traditional American sense. Those differences must be taken into account. It is vital to realize that though it may be your concept, it's their country. Context matters--a lot. The host culture matters...a lot. If managers ignore the context in which they are working then surprises are surely headed their way--most of them unpleasant.

At the same time a manager is striving to understand the host culture he/she needs to quickly establish him/herself as the unwavering leader in the effort. And not just any leader but one exhibiting certain key attributes. These attributes include:

• Leading decisively from the front, ready to spearhead the struggle and, importantly, to absorb the first and the second wave of adversity, showing the team he/she is willing to suffer more than they are expected to suffer. They need to know when all the external responses to the team's efforts are "NO NO NO," that their manager insists on "YES YES YES"--they need to know, in effect, their manager is sincere. Over time, sincerity and integrity transcends all languages.


• Believing completely in "The Mission" in order to have others buy-in. If the manager does not truly believe in The Mission, the team will perceive that and will not commit themselves.


• Setting and maintaining simple and clear goals, easy for all to understand even with language barriers. A lack of clarity leads to debate, then to confusion, then to lack of buy-in and a "not my job" mentality. Once that sets in, there is no team.
  Our newly globalized world presents both significant challenges and great opportunities to American businesses and entrepreneurs. Only by recognizing that when operating abroad it cannot be business as usual can those opportunities be realized. After sixteen years of working overseas, I have found that the most important step to take is addressing management philosophy.

* * * * *

Byrne Murphy, MBA, is an entrepreneur who has created several companies across Europe over the last fifteen years. His book, LE DEAL: How A Young American, In Business, In Love, And In Over His Head Brought A Multi-Billion Dollar Industry To Europe, was recently published by St. Martin's Press.

Taking the Show on The Road

800-CEO-READ is celebrating its 25th year this year and we have sold business books in almost every conceivable manner during that time. So, we thought it was time to share some of what we know with others.

Tomorrow, Jack and I are speaking in St. Paul, Minnesota to the Midwest Booksellers Association and next week we are in Detroit giving a similar talk to the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association. The final trip for the fall is in a few weeks when we fly out to LA and talk to the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association.

The topic is how bookstores can sell more business books. The category has a number of unique aspects when compared to other parts of book publishing. We want to point those out clearly and give booksellers some ideas on how to make that uniqueness work for them.

If you are going to be at any of these events, we hope you'll come sit in on our session. If you can't see us live, we have an article on tap for next week, based on the speech we are giving, that we will post here.

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace died on September 12. I have read his collections of essays and I appreciated his, as The Wall Street Journal states "blending inventive language, intellect, humor, philosophy and cultural references in his writing." Someday I will tackle his novels.

In 2005, he addressed the graduating class of Kenyon College. Friday's WSJ has an abridged version of the speech here.

As Todd and I prepare for the publication of our book, I have come to appreciate the skill needed to convey thoughts in the spoken format. DFW was not only a remarkable writer but, as you can see, a remarkable speaker.

The world is a lesser place.

Got a meeting this morning?

Quick Meeting Openers for Busy Managers: More than 50 Icebreakers, Energizers, and Other Creative Activities That Get Results by Brian Cole Miller is an easy book to consult when you want to kick off a group meeting in a fun way.

Here are a few creative activities to get the group started:

Quotes

This is...
> A meeting starter in which participants share their favorite quotes with the group.

Use it to...
> Help the group warm up as well as get to know each other better.

Best group size...
> Up to about 20.

Materials you'll need...
> No materials are necessary for this activity.

Here's how...
1. Before the meeting, tell participants to bring their favorite quote (either written down or memorized).
2. In the meeting, have participants share their quote and then explain why it is important to them.

For example...
> "'To thine own self be true' is my favorite quote. When I was in my early 20s I realized that I was trying to be what others expected or wanted of me. I wasn't happy. When I came to terms with who I am, and then lived true to that, I found great joy as well as inner peace."

Tips for success...
> You go first to demonstrate how much detail you want them to go into. It doesn't have to be an actual quote, it could be a "saying" or "words to live by."

Try these variations...
> Make this more difficult by not giving participants advance warning. Allow them to paraphrase their favorite quote if they can't remember it word for word.
> Rather than a quote, have participants share their favorite saying or lesson learned from their parents while growing up.
> Divide larger groups up into smaller teams of 8 to 20 members to use this activity.

Map It

This is...
> An activity in which participants form a human map based on where they live.

Use it to...
> Help groups visualize their proximity to each other outside of work.

Best group size...
> Unlimited.

Materials you'll need...
> No materials are necessary for this activity.

Here's how...
1. Gather the group in a larger, open space.
2. Have participants create a map by standing relative to one another based on where their homes are.

Tips for success...
> Place something in the middle of the space to represent where they are now. All points should be relative to that point.
> Beyond that, don't help or guide anyone; let the group figure it all out. Don't be surprised if someone else steps up and starts to lead, though.

Try these variations...
> Have participants map where they were born, where they last went on vacation, where they plan to retire, or where their favorite restaurant is.
> Have participants map where their work locations are. Afterward, discuss what impact geographic diversity has on the work they are about to do, if any.

Find more lively activities in Quick Meeting Openers for Busy Managers: More than 50 Icebreakers, Energizers, and Other Creative Activities That Get Result.

Peter Drucker's Five Questions

Peter Drucker 's body of work is mostly recognized in the business community, but he spent an enormous amount of time thinking about the non-profit sector.

One of his many legacies is the New York-based Leader to Leader Institute, an organization that focuses on developing leadership in the social sector. The Institute has updated and reissued a book that was written for non-profits originally but works for any organization.

In the early 1990's, Drucker and the then Drucker Foundation published a self-assessment tool titled "The Five Most Important Questions". In writing why he created the tool, Drucker said:

Although I don't know a single for-profit business that is as well managed as a few nonprofits, the great majority of the nonprofits can be graded a "C" at best. Not for a lack of effort; most of them work very hard. But for lack of focus, and for lack of tool competence."

Let's not be fooled. Business needs plenty of help too.

Drucker's questions are simple, but as is always found in Drucker's writings, the simplicity is deceiving and the clarity of the questions forces you to reexamine your assumptions.

• What is our mission?
• Who is our customer?
• What does the customer value?
• What are our results?
• What is our plan?

The new book is titled The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization and the Leader to Leader Institute has enlisted some big names to expanded on Drucker's original message. Jim Collins, Phil Kotler, and Jim Kouzes along with Judith Rosen and Kasturi Rangan each provide an essay that follows one of five questions.

The book is a quick read; I was able to finish it during a flight back from the West Coast.

It's the answers to the questions that I am still working on.

Our Tribe

Things have been kind of quiet around here lately.

You haven't been talking much here. We get a random comment here or there, but I don't remember the last time we had a conversation that drew a couple dozen people out to share their thoughts.

We are failing you in some way. Maybe, we are not highlighting the right ideas. Maybe, what we find interesting isn't.

On Monday, the folks who write and edit the blog and our other sites are getting together.

Give us something to talk about.

Leave a comment and tell us how can we be more helpful.

Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year

The shortlist for the 2008 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award has been announced.

Lloyd C. Blankfein, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs, says of the finalists:

We chose from an outstanding selection of books. The finalists address what we think are the most important global issues spanning a broad array of industries and disciplines.

Lionel Barber, Editor of the Financial Times comments:

At no time has there been a greater need for books that provide an insight into modern business issues.

We couldn't agree more.

Their shortlist is:

And Africa Rises.

The GDP for the entire continent of Africa is greater than India's. And their populations are comparable -- Africa weighing in at 900 million people and India at one billion people.

The clout of the African economy has plenty of room to grow. For that very reason, Vijay Mahajan set out to research and tell the world about Africa with his book Africa Rising. He found like that, like many growing regions in the world, there's a growing middle class in Africa. It includes secretaries, computer gurus, merchants and others who by virtue of education, geography or luck have benefited from economic growth of around 6 percent annually in such countries as Uganda, Ghana and Kenya, and around 8 percent in Rwanda.

That group of people is numbered at 300 million. Vijay dubbed this group (Africa 2s) to describe people who are neither desperately poor (Africa 3s) nor obnoxiously rich (Africa 1s), and says the middle group is one of the most important drivers of economic growth in Africa.

Earlier this month, Jack wrote a review on Africa Rising. The book has since had plenty of media coverage. Perhaps it's because it's one of the first times we Americans are hearing about the upside of Africa. It's rare that the Africa portrait is painted with optimism rather than bleakness. Thanks to Vijay for giving us an opportunity to see the big continent through different eyes.

If you're looking for more on the book, start with Vijay's video.

Mapping Books

There are many different ways to read. For me, in college, it was a highlighter and ink notes on the side. Now it's post-its and drawings in the margin.

Luciano in Brazil has a different way of reading books. Instead of taking the traditional notes, he mind maps each book he reads. His theory is that by committing yourself to a mind map for a book, your mind is engaged and will remember more.

Luciano offers tips on getting started here.

And, in that line, of reading and noting, there's a new book out on what notes in a book reveal about the reader.

Book Review Roundup

We haven't taken a look at what books the big business magazines have been covering for awhile, in part because the coverage has been kind of slim. The Economist has covered some really, really, interesting looking books, but seems to have taken a hiatus from business books.

Even BusinessWeek is reviewing business books with a bent toward the larger picture rather than your more typical business book. Susan Berfield recently reviewed pollster John Zogby's The Way We'll Be:The John Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream, calling it "provocative but occasianally maddening." Although she believes "Zogby comes across as a serious man with his finger reliably on the pulse of the U.S. public," she doesn't agree with all of his assessments. Namely this quote from the book:

The people who are losing their jobs are adjusting. They're altering their ambitions . . . to bring them in line with the realities of their lives.

And, this one, concerning the growing disparity between the rich and poor:

Rather than boil with resentment that some have so much when others have so little, most Americans seem to accept the billionaires among us and even empathize with the problems that come with having too much of everything.

In effectively simple response, Berfield writes "We do?" However, due to the fact that Zogby has done polling for such corporate clients as Coca-Cola, IBM, and Microsoft, there are bound to be significant insights for entrepreneurs on the changing demographics of this country, and I know a few folks in the office were looking forward to checking that out.

Christopher Farrell's review of The Subprime Solution: How Today's Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do About It by Robert J. Shiller in the September 15th issue is more positive. This probably won't help with the nuts and bolts of your business, but if you're interested in a good look at broader economic issues and government policy, Farrell calls Shiller's diagnosis "one of the best cases ... for New Deal-scale short-term intervention by Washington."

Adam Aston's review in the September 22nd issue is given two pages, probably because he reviews Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded. He hilariously writes of the book that "if Fareed Zakaria and Al Gore met and co-authored a long-winded book, this would be it," but lavishes great praise on the book throughout, even suggesting sections of it if you're not going to read the entire thing. Many of you are going to read this book regardless, but for those of you on the fence, Aston's review might be persuasive.

Getting into your more traditional business book, Inc.'s "skimmer's guide" this month is to Billion-Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years by Paul Carroll and Chunka Mui, and contains this summary:

The backstory: Mui is co-author of Unleashing the Killer App, among the best books about the business implications of technology. He and Carroll worked together at a consulting firm. If Killer App is Mui's Paradiso -- a celebration of the bold and innovative--this new book is his Inferno--an indictment of the bold and chowderheaded.

And, although they don't post book reviews online, Jia Lynn Yang also wrote briefly and positively of Billion Dollar Lessons in Fortune's September 1 issue, and Daniel Okrent reviewed Randall Stross's Planet Google in the issue of September 15, writing:

Though Stross's eyes occasionally pop at the wonders being concocted in the Googlian halls, this isn't a fan book; he's as insightful on the company's failures (the oafishly naive start of it's book-scanning operation, the financial swamp of its video efforts) as he is on its triumphs.

I'd just like to say that "the oafishly naive start of it's book-scanning operation" gave more than a few people in the book publishing industry prematurely gray hairs. That's just how intimidating the force that Okrent describes as "the 21st century's most notable company/employer/verb" has so quickly become.

In The Books on InBubbleWrap

We're giving away 30 copies of 2007's In The Books--our review on the year's best business literature--over at InBubbleWrap this week. For all you kids who missed out on this resource the first time around or couldn't spring the dough for it, here's your chance to make it right and get your very own copy at absolutely no cost.

To go directly to the offer, click here.

Remembering Mike Hammer

REMEMBERING MIKE
By Jim Champy

My co-author, Mike Hammer, passed away a couple of weeks ago. It's hard to believe that he is no longer with us--he was a person of such presence and force. For years, we did good work together and produced what is considered one of the most important business books of the last twenty years, Reengineering the Corporation. The book sold between 2 and 3 million copies. (The publishing industry has a hard time keeping accurate counts.)

We didn't start out to write a best seller. We knew we had developed some important ideas about changing the nature of work. We just wanted to claim the intellectual territory. We worked for years, researching, developing methods for process change, and writing. Our first publisher didn't believe that we would ever finish the book, cancelled the project, and asked for the return of its cash advance. We gave the publisher its money back and immediately resold the manuscript to Harper Collins.

We worked hard on the book, writing and re-writing. Mike and I never had any disagreements or arguments. We were good partners. The biggest challenge was getting the book's voice right--not sounding like consultants. Mike was a master of metaphor, but sometimes the metaphors didn't read well in print. I remember Mike's saying that many companies had costs embedded in their operations, like fat is marbled into a piece of meat--and that the only way to get the fat (and the costs) out was to grind up the meat (and the company) and fry it. The metaphor was colorful, but it didn't read like serious management stuff. When I told Mike that we could not use it in the book, he acquiesced.

Business Week and Fortune immediately praised the book. Peter Drucker said "reengineering must be done." Business needed a big idea for change, and we had it. After the book was published, Mike and I agreed that he would become reengineering's principle spokesperson and I, its principle practitioner. But Mike also consulted, and I continued to write and speak.

Our work was both admired and vilified. Some people saw reengineering as just downsizing, and we continued to campaign for years to get managers to understand the importance of process change. I believe that the ideas around reengineering are more important today than when we wrote the book. The internet and technology enable profound process and work change.

Mike never stopped his campaign to change business. He had a unique power of expression. Behind that power was an extraordinary intellect. The Reengineering book stands as testimony to his insight and brilliance.

Jim Champy
September 2008

Article from Jim Champy, author of Outsmart!

Thanks to Jim Champy, author of Outsmart!: How to Do What Your Competitors Can't. The article below describes some shared characteristics of great companies.

WHERE ARE THE GREAT COMPANIES?
By Jim Champy

For years I have been searching for great companies. What I have found is that there are none. Greatness is an aspiration - a very honorable one. But no company is perfect, even if it performs well year after year.

Greatness, like, many objectives, is in the eye of the beholder. One simple test for greatness is how a company is experienced by its constituents - its customers, its associates, its owners, and business partners. In my most recent research, I looked at over a thousand high-growth companies and found many companies that are very good. They treat all of their constituents well and, in their own unique ways, aspire to greatness.

My search was driven by a desire to find companies that have new business models, delivering new products and services to customers and executing in new ways. I have written about my discoveries in OUTSMART!, my latest book. Although I could find no single formula for what creates a good - or great - company, I did find some shared characteristics.

Ambition: The leadership team of every good company has a great ambition for the company - usually one that addresses an unmet customer need. The ambition is not one of personal greed; it's about building a company that delivers on its promise and does it with a unique quality. My experience over the years is that it takes a great ambition to create even a good company. I was inspired in my research by a company called Minute Clinic, whose ambition is to change how healthcare is delivered, for the benefit of everyone involved in the healthcare system.

Customer: Every good company begins by meeting a customer need. That need is often deeply understood by the company's founder because they, themselves, experienced the need - and saw how that need was not being well met. Sometimes the founder hands off the leadership of the company to someone else who operationalizes the idea. But that wasn't the case in the example of Sonicbids, a company that saw the unmet needs of thousands of independent musicians and performers and whose founder has led the company to a unique position in the music business. This music business for independent performers is a 13 billion dollar a year market, that no one saw or had the appetite to organize until Sonic bids came along.

Focus: Good companies stay focused on what they know and can do well. When companies search for new ideas, they often drift into unknown territory and get in trouble. Good companies just keep growing and expanding into familiar territory. Shutterfly is a wonderful example of a company that's growing, but it grows by expanding within the social expressions business, helping communities of people share photographs in hundreds of ways. Niches can be very large markets.

Execution: Satisfying a customer requires relentless attention to execution. Building a company's capability to deliver makes the difference between turning a great idea into a business or failure. But execution is not just about delivering a product. It's also about service. Over the years, I have observed that technology companies are particularly bad at recognizing and responding to the service needs of their customers. Counter intuitively, high-tech requires a lot of high-touch. Partsearch is a company that knows what it's doing with customer service, helping customers find what they need in an ocean of millions of parts and accessories for consumer electronic products. Partsearch has tamed chaos in its industry.

Inspiration: Smart companies engage all of their associates in building the business, from idea creation though delivery. Ideas don't just come tops-down; they also come bottoms-up and from every other direction. Everyone in the company feels that they own a piece of the action and are accountable for how the company performs. The inspiration for a company starts at the top, but good leadership drives that inspiration deep into the company by engaging people broadly in decision-making. People are more than mechanical parts of the enterprise, and the more they are allowed to see customers, the better their business sensibilities.

These are some of the behaviors that I have found in the good companies I have studied. My ultimate test of the quality of a company is whether I would like to work there. The good news: I see many high growth companies where I would work. They are smart companies, in multiple industries, that are operating quite brilliantly.

Author Bio
Jim Champy is one of the leading thinkers in business. His first book, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, helped transform the corporate world. For more information, please visit www.jimchampy.com.

Check out Outsmart!: How to Do What Your Competitors Can't!

Five Free Spots in The Countdown Book Club

We are giving away five memberships to The Countdown Book Club over on InBubbleWrap. Jump over and drop your name in the hat.

A new offer goes up on Monday.

Attend the Tribes book launch!!!

Yes, you heard us correctly. Seth Godin has 200 seats available to people who buy a 3 Pack of Tribes or a 10 Pack of Tribes. It's quite simple, just add either offer to your cart on our website and place your order. Make sure to include your phone number and email address, and you'll reserve your seat to this spectacular event.

**This is a SPECIAL limited time offer. 200 seats are going to go quickly, so take advantage of this offer now**

Yes, it really is that easy! Ready........set...............GO!!!!!!!!!

Jack Covert Selects - A Sense of Urgency

A Sense of Urgency by John Kotter, Harvard Business School Press, 196 pages, $22.00 Hardcover, 190 pages, September 2008, ISBN 9781422179710

In 1997, Harvard Business School Press released the best book on change that I have ever read, entitled Leading Change. Authored by Professor John Kotter, it is so good that Todd and I included it in our book, The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, due out in February of 2009. In Leading Change, Kotter gives the reader an eight-stage process needed for a successful change initiative.

In the decade since that book's release, his audiences asked him time and again about the first stage of that process, "establishing a sense of urgency," and how to accomplish it. Change cannot be accomplished without urgency, and A Sense of Urgency was written to answer that difficult problem. As Kotter states:

The Strategy [is to] create action that is exceptionally alert, externally oriented, relentlessly aimed at winning, making some progress each and every day, and constantly purging low value-added activities--all by focusing on the heart and not just the mind.

The author proceeds to lay out four sets of tactics to help you undertake creating this sense of urgency within your organization. The stories Kotter uses to illustrate these tactics are generally stories you haven't heard before, like that of the successful grocery chain that didn't notice the change going on around them until it was too late. This story helps to illustrate Kotter's first tactic of "bringing the outside in." If you are lucky enough to have had "historical success," it can lead to a "we know best" culture, which can insulate organizations from the outside world. Another issue is with a relatively strong position compared to others; you have a tendency not to look outside for disruptions. Finally with success often comes size, which adds to the lack of looking outside.

One of the reasons I like John Kotter and his teaching style is that he knows the job is never done. Let's assume you've created a sense of urgency and had a change initiative succeed. How easy is it going to be to keep a sense of urgency strong after that initial success? Well, it's not easy, and Professor Kotter knows it. The final chapter of the book covers this problem.

The ultimate solution to the problem of urgency dropping after successes is to create the right culture. This is especially true as we move from a world in which change is mostly episodic to a world in which change is continuous.

This concise, easy-to-read book, written by one of the premier minds on the subject, will be the perfect roadmap to successful change, both for now and for the long-term.

Jack Covert Selects - The Breakthrough Imperative

The Breakthrough Imperative: How the Best Managers Get Outstanding Results by Mark Gottfredson and Steve Schaubert, Collins, 367pages, $26.95, Hardcover, March 2008, ISBN 9780061358142

Bain & Company have produced some of the best books coming out of consulting industry over the last decade. Chris Zook's trilogy--Profit from the Core, Beyond the Core, and Unstoppable--is a treatise on the benefits of strategic focus in any organization. Fred Reichheld simplified customer surveying and satisfaction metrics with The Ultimate Question, and Chairman Orit Gadiesh shared experiences from Bain Capital in Lessons from Private Equity Any Company Can Use. Somehow, though, we missed one.

In March, Collins Business published The Breakthrough Imperative by Bain partners Mark Gottfredson & Steve Schaubert. The neutral title and lack of media attention caused most (including ourselves) to miss this book and this review is our way of going back and rectifying that.

The authors believe there are four laws that great managers use to diagnose a business and plot a successful course. The first law, "Costs and Prices Always Decline," is a lesson familiar from college economics classes, but not one you normally associate with management. "Competitive Position Determines Your Options" is reminscint of Porter's Five Forces but goes further to define the realistic options for a company given its place in the market. The third law is a cornerstone Bain concept, "Customer and Profit Pools Don't Stand Still," stressing the emphasis on net income potential versus indiscriminately capturing sales and gaining market share.

The final law is the most surprising: "Simplicity Gets Results." "Keep it simple" is a message we appreciate in the communications and manufacturing processes, but often overlook in corporate strategy. The temptation is to offer whatever customization the customer requests. Bain's research finds that this is a mistake. Looking at industries ranging from aerospace to fast-food, Bain found the companies with the least complex offerings (i.e. less items on the restaurant menu) grew 30% to 50% faster than the average and 80% to 100% faster than the companies with the most complex offerings.

The Breakthrough Imperative reads like a mainstream business book with writing that is clear and concise, but the described analysis you'll find plays to the MBA crowd. The book is best read by managers with profit and loss responsibilities (or those soon hope to obtain those responsibilities). But, we are reviewing The Breakthrough Imperative to encourage others to take a chance and expose themselves to new ideas that will help them compete and grow business.

Jack Covert Selects - Africa Rising

Africa Rising: How 900 Million African Consumers Offer More Than You Think by Vijay Mahajan, Wharton School Publishing, 288 pages, $29.99, Hardcover, September 2008, ISBN 9780132339421

We tend to get an overly negative picture of Africa from its coverage in the press and on the silver screen, with stories focused on war, poverty, disease and corruption. This book awakens its reader to the great potential hidden by--and sometimes resulting from--the many challenges Africa faces, challenges innovative entrepreneurs are quietly addressing.

Author Vijay Mahajan took a "consumer safari" to explore what opportunities exist in Africa and lays them out in great detail in this book. He doesn't shy away from the continent's many obstacles, and recognizes time and again the need for better governance and charitable work on the continent. But, in detailing the promises and successes business has had in positive transformation, he shows that entrepreneurs aren't waiting for their governments to get on board. As Mahajan states:

While politicians look to change regulations and charitable organizations look to make up deficiencies, entrepreneurs create wealth. They ask: What are the opportunities?

Africa Rising is a hopeful book. Instead of the bleak picture we so often see on the news, the reader is immersed in stories of African business success and given a detailed picture of its markets. After recognizing that:

Just as it does not make sense to talk about an Asian market, or even an Indian, Chinese, or U.S. market, we need to be aware that discussing the African market covers up a multitude of complexities.

The author begins peeling away those layers, splitting the population into three consumer groups, looking at the continent's regional markets, and discussing opportunities in specific markets and industries.

Many in China have already seen the light, and Chinese businesses have been flocking to Africa--not only for the continent's resources, but also to meet its consumer's needs. This book will hopefully awaken more in the West to the promise and importance of Africa.

Majahan stresses again and again that as Africans begin to tell their story, our understanding of Africa will begin to change. He paints a vivid picture of a continent that he believes is, economically, where China and India were 20 years ago--on the brink of a great transformation.

ChangeThis: Issue 50

That's right folks, Issue number 50. For this landmark issue, we brought ChangeThis founder Seth Godin back to discuss Tribes, the opportunities now available to lead a tribe of one's own, and what the Grateful Dead has to do with any of it. Next up, we have