Malcolm was tired of rock stardom and genius-dom (think Einstein and the White Stripes) written off as an unexplainable brilliance. Instead, outliers are savants; persistent people who studied and practiced extensively to achieve their success.

Outliers is not without its share of naysayers. Some like the NYTimes criticized Outliers, saying it was too general, not well thought-out and based on on old information. Katie Couric asked Malcolm if his theories were too simple and merely a re-statement of common knowledge. Gladwell responded,

Sometimes. I don't think that's a bad thing. I think my role is, I'm trying to start conversations. I want to start from a simplistic place and I want to complexify that and take you on a journey. I am trying to make complicated ideas accessible.

There's nothing more simple or accessible than what our mothers, fathers, teachers and coaches told us: practice makes perfect and persistence is necessary. It's the people willing to go the extra mile that become rock stars and musicians. Take Bill Joy, who enabled your computer to communicate with the internet or
Bill Gates or the Beatles. Most would consider these people to be iconic in their respective fields. Each one of them got to where they are with practice and persistence.

Last year Malcolm presented Genius at the New Yorker Conference comparing the achievements of two men: Michael Ventris and Andrew Wiles. The notion we have of genius is that it's made up of obsession, isolation and insight. There, he introduced the 10,000 hour rule; that it takes about 10,000 hours (roughly 10 years) of intense study and practice to master any subject, practice, sport, what have you. This is true across the board. World-class athletes. Musicians. Writers. Bobby Fischer took nine years but, well that's close enough. Even Malcolm, believes he hit sweet spot in journalistic writing 10 years after he started.

If Malcolm's theories hold true, it could be argued that with the Japanese spending 250 days a year in school and American children spending 185, that time deficit could be the very reason for our nation's deficit in education.

A contention point, and soft spot for most everyone, would be Malcolm's suggestion that success is also built on influences outside our control, like what year we were born or what happened around the time of our 20th birthday. Which is why Salon critiqued,

Gladwell's "Outliers" model -- the idea that success is shaped by environment, not genetics -- has two additional problems. First, it is insufficiently predictive...This leads us to the second problem with Gladwell's model: It is every bit as deterministic as the "genius" model.

Whatever you take away, here's what Malcolm hoped we'd take away:

My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances--and that means that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds--and how many of us succeed--than we think. That's an amazingly hopeful and uplifting idea.

Let me leave you with these links. Malcolm's site, where you can find three excerpts and an interview with Malcolm. The Guardian conducted a more in-depth interview with Malcolm. Salon's coverage and Fast Company's. And if that's not enough, The LATimes Jacket Copy shared more coverage.

Lessons Learned from Second Life

Virtual worlds give participants an opportunity to be whoever they want, wish or hope to be. With a custom designed "avatar," you can look, behave and speak any way you want. It's your "second life," after all.

Brands, however, don't have that luxury. They bring established reputations and perceptions into a realm where everything is new and anything goes.

The "Wild West" nature of virtual worlds frightens brand managers schooled in carefully crafted and controlled messages, and Second Life indeed chased many away.

But with technology -- and especially social media -- becoming more and more pervasive in consumers' lives, virtual worlds will get a second chance. Here's how to capitalize on it.

Second Life and other virtual worlds have enormous branding opportunities. In terms of social media, virtual worlds really are communities in the most literal sense, and it is the level of interaction and engagement that creates such a strong platform for branding. Some brands (like Vodaphone) have found ways to develop interactive spaces in world that intrigue and engage prospective customers. For these brands, virtual world marketing is much like participating in a sponsorship: the presence is valuable if there's a good fit between the space, the target market and the brand -- and if the brand can find a way to add value for those visiting the space.

For some brands, though, virtual worlds are not the most friendly of communities. They may find that other forms of social media marketing are better suited -- or at least simpler to manage (particularly if the virtual world in question is Second Life)! Here are a few factors that can help you understand "why" . . . or "why not."

Ease of Use
Second Life is complex and user-unfriendly. Time magazine called it a case of Fortune 500 companies trying too hard to be hip. A recent report from Forrester suggests that marketing in virtual worlds is still too complex for broad adoption as a business strategy, but that this is likely to change in the next five years. Complexity is an issue, not only from the marketer's perspective, but also from the consumer perspective. It is one of the primary characteristics that can slow the rate of adoption for innovators. Some virtual worlds are easier to learn than others; Second Life is likely the most difficult to learn.

Software Requirements
Second Life, and some other virtual worlds, requires users to install its software. Software installation could be a deterrent to growth beyond the innovators and early adopters already a part of the virtual world phenomenon.

Number of Active Members
Second Life, for example, does not have the reach that other online advertising venues garner. Despite the claim of millions of residents (with continual growth), under a million are active and engaged.

Opportunities for Negative Response
Residents of Second Life are known to dislike and distrust big brand promotion. "Griefing," vandalizing and harassing in world, is a common problem for brands. Linden Labs takes a hands-off approach to managing griefer attacks, relying instead on resident governance. How bad can griefing be? A helicopter crashed into a Nissan building, starting a fire that left a couple of dead bodies, and American Apparel customers were attacked by members of the Second Life Liberation Army armed with virtual guns.

Accuracy of Results Reporting
Second Life offers publicity and the value of free media impressions as social and other media cover new developments. However, no distinction is made between positive coverage and negative coverage. When the media attention is negative, such as reporting attacks on customers, the publicity does not build brand equity.

User Security
Aside from the security from griefers, Second Life has struggled to provide security to the real life people behind the avatars. In 2006, hackers obtained credit card information for some residents.

User Capacity
Second Life's infrastructure limits the capacity at some events. Your brand might do a phenomenal job of planning and executing a relevant brand experience with an outpouring of enthusiasm, only to find the system crashes when more than 70 avatars are present at a time.

Number of User Interactions
Of course, capacity concerns are only an issue if things go well. Spend some time walking or flying around Second Life. It is filled with exquisitely detailed representations of real and fantasy locations. Yet seeing other avatars is rare unless one is spending time earning free Linden $ (the currency of Second Life) at Money Island.

Tie-In to Real World Sales
Some brands have sold digital versions of their products. Toyota, Reebok, Adidas, and Dell are all examples. No brand has yet announced success at using the in world branding site as a direct response tool for real world sales. Bob Tedeschi, in his article entitled "Awaiting Real Sales from Virtual Shoppers," explains that brands experience little measurable influence on real world sales that can be tracked to virtual branding efforts.

Number of Media Outlets
There are still a limited number of Second Life media outlets and advertising opportunities (beyond supporting retail space, experiential facilities, and events). NPR and Reuters are there, along with the AvaStar newspaper, but for brands accustomed to buying ad space in hundreds of television networks, consumer and trade magazines, and national, regional, and local newspapers, this is not a rich media landscape. Ad inventory will develop over time. A "MetaAdverse" network has been established to provide in-world billboard advertising.

Scalable Branding Initiatives
It is difficult to gain economies of scale in branding initiatives. One cannot lower the average costs of products by making mass amounts of products, and there are no huge media buys to lower the costs of advertising.

Design Costs
There are expenses to brand building in Second Life. Linden Labs sells land and then requires ongoing maintenance fees. Those are minimal compared to the design expenses brands encounter. Alex Veiga points out that brand building requires artists, designers, writers, and marketers to develop all aspects of the brand's identity in Second Life. Scion City, a Toyota initiative, took about 10 weeks and probably cost in the range of $100,000. Importantly, brands that enter Second Life must be committed to operating there. It does no good (and in fact could harm a brand) to have a presence there that is not manned, managed, and leveraged towards accomplishing the brand's objectives.

In open worlds, economies are free markets. Brands are welcome to compete and the spoils go to the brands with the best strategy, the best targeting and the best engagement propositions for their target audiences (mindful, of course, to ensure the strategy is suitable for the virtual culture in question). The brands with the wherewithal to strategically plan a social media marketing campaign will also know to commit to the campaign and to provide ample time for the strategy to work prior to making judgments of success or failure and redirecting resources to other marketing executions.

In other words, they'll understand and capitalize on why . . . or why not.

(c)2008 Dr. Tracy L. Tuten

Here is a slideshow of photos from last night. The presenters were great, and the Sugar Maple was an excellent venue to work with.

You can also view the photos on our Flickr page: www.flickr.com/photos/800ceoread/

Today, this article on CNN (check out the photos) got me thinking about the different ways we can make our work lives healthier and ease the strain on our bodies, eyes, and minds, as well as our natural environment.

Oh, and to tie this post back to a business book...a few weeks ago our friend Cathy S. at HarperCollins sent us The Good Office: Green Design on the Cutting Edge, published by Collins Design. The Good Office is a beautiful photography book accompanied by short essays and information about architectural groups dedicated to bridging the gap between the working world and the environment.

The Good Office provides examples of sustainable design that creates "a more positive space for both the environment and the worker." We might not all be able to work in beautiful "green" buildings, but there are small steps we can take to make our work spaces healthier and more comfortable.

P.S. Kate--don't worry, we appreciate your "What if?s"!

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

Don't dismiss that premise as lofty and unrealistic, though. The success of sustainability efforts in this world depends on our adoption of idealistic standards and a vision for a healthier world. Ehrenfeld addresses the obstacles and problematic attitudes to this vision, and offers practical steps to adopting a sustainability mindset on both the personal and corporate levels. He suggests new, holistic approaches to sustainable design that won't act, as others have in the past, as Band-Aids. Instead, Ehrenfeld focuses on the routes we should take to ensure success.

Here is John Ehrenfeld on The Tao of Sustainability:

Flourishing can occur only if we pay close attention to the three critical domains that the forces of modernity have dimmed:

• Our sense of ourselves as human beings: the human domain.
• Our sense of our place in the [natural] world: the natural domain.
• Our sense of doing the right thing: the ethical domain.

And here are his suggestions about the Special Role of Business in becoming a sustainable society:

• Replace the rubric of sustainable development with that of sustainability as flourishing


• Stop publishing misleading advertisements hinting that ecoefficiency will solve the world's problems and save money at the same time


• Use the "Tao of Sustainability" as a strategic and operational template


• Create a culture of sustainability in the workplace


• Businesses should design their offerings to guide behavior toward ethical responsibility


• Social responsibility, like charity, begins at home.

You can read more about John and Sustainability by Design at: http://johnehrenfeld.com/index.html

The Sept 8th cover story of BusinessWeek titled "Managing By The Numbers" was an excerpt adapted from the book about amazing work being done at IBM:

"I'm here to find out how Takriti and his colleagues go about turning IBM's workers into numbers. If this works, his team plans to apply these models to other companies and to automate much of what we now call management."

You can find the introduction excerpted and an active weblog on The Numerati website.

The book I would correlate this with is last year's Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres, which is out in paperback now.

Yep! It's one of those things where "something came across my desk today". Well, today it was both the book and audio versions of Ten Commandments for Business Failure. Since I'm kind of a trivia geek and general dork - I'm going to offer a package deal of both items for FREE - - - If someone can offer me some information about the audio version of the book that is "a lighthearted cautionary bible for business leaders from a widely admired elder statesman who is sought out for advice by a wide circle of business luminaries".

I'm not going to make it hard and make people tell me all Donald Keough's ten commandments - so, here you go...Ready?

Name the narrator of the audio version of Ten Commandments for Business Failure and what was ONE television show he appeared in.

Not too hard right? The first person to e-mail me the correct answer at roy@800ceoread.com will get the FREE copies!! I'm looking forward to your responses! Have a GREAT Hump Day, all!

** NOTE ** - the contest is only good for today.... Good Luck!

A few weeks back, the NYTimes interviewed the Ori and Rom. Their talk is geared around job interviews, first impressions, and "overcoming sway" professionally.

To give you a bit of biographical information, Ori's background is in business; you might recognize his name from a previous book and manifesto he co-authored. Rom's background is in psychology. For more on their book, check out their blog.

If you're interested in the subject of human rationality (or rather, irrationality), there have been a few titles out in the same vein -- Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational and Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge.

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.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

The next Pecha Kucha Night is August 26 at the Hi Hat Garage.

PR Fairy Tales: Pitches Disguised as Children's Books

Entrepreneurs have a habit of describing their companies in David-and-Goliath terms. Now, some are taking cues from Eloise and James and the Giant Peach. A mini trend in the world of public relations has companies replacing their run-of-the-mill press releases with promotional materials that look and feel like children's books.

We occasionally see corporations buying large quantities of children's books for their employees, and recently Roy wrote about the Conservation International and Random House re-release of Dr. Seuss' The Lorax for Earth Day.

In which children's books do you find inspiration? Would you consider pitching your employees or clients with this format?

"When it unveiled the Windows Home Server, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) released Mommy, Why Is There a Server in the House?"

The Philadelphia Inquirer recently reviewed the book as well. You can find that here.

Also, If you missed it the first time around, it was one of March's Jack Covert Selects, and we posted the book's "missing chapter" over at ChangeThis. If you'd like to read an excerpt from the book, we have that too.

There is a widely held view out there that greening your lifestyle is an expensive and painful process. Bach deftly explodes this myth in 192 (recycled) pages. Early on in the book he revisits the Latte Factor concept, but tweaks it a bit and suggests we find our "Litter Factor."

I have long encouraged my readers to identify their Latte Factor and eliminate it to start saving money. But small changes such as not buying coffee in a disposable cup or water in a plastic bottle not only are good for your wallet, but they actually better the planet. In the same way that "little things" add up to drain your wealth, "small changes" add up to make a big difference for the Earth.

Consider this: Every year, Americans drink more than 100 billion cups of coffee. Of those, 14.4 billion are served in disposable paper cups, enough to wrap the Earth 55 times if placed end to end! Plus, those paper cups contain a plastic lining made from a petro-chemical that would produce enough energy to heat 8,300 homes a year.

He goes on to briefly discuss bottled water, referencing what I think was the best article published last year--Charles Fishman's Message in a Bottle. This is just a snippet of the first chapter, but it contains advice that, if taken, can lead to serious change... and save you money to boot. The rest of the book has equally clear and concise thinking and advice that ranges from how to save money by becoming energy smart, to shopping green, to going green at work. The steps to going green and energy-efficiency aren't necessarily going to be completely new to people, but Bach revealing how taking them is ultimately cost-efficient probably will be.

You'll be hearing much more from Bach on this issue. His first stop will be on the Today Show next Monday discussing seven green steps that can save you 3,000 dollars a year. The book itself will be hitting the shelves on Tuesday of next week, and I think you could consider it's $14.95 list price as an investment in the future of your finances, and maybe, even the future of planet as well.

It is an interesting experiment for him and his publisher Harvard Business School Press to see if you can give it away and improve sales of a two and a half year old book. Love seeing this kind of experimentation.

Frans wrote a series of posts filling in for us in September 2004 introducing everyone to the book, what sucks about business books, and what he was reading:

9/13/04 -The Medici Effect
9/13/04 -As Summer Fades Away...
9/14/04 -Inside The Medici Effect
9/15/04 -The Style of Writing
9/15/04 -#1: Business Books are often too long
9/16/04 -#2: Example are too well-known
9/17/04 -Unfair Advantage and The Apprentice
9/17/04 -#3: They are often dry
9/17/04 - #4: The Main Point Keeps Getting Repeated
9/19/04 - Some New Books