800-CEO-READ Blog: Jack's Thoughts

Seinfeld on Carlin

Jerry Seinfeld talks about George Carlin's death here.

Sad Day

It was very sad for me to wake up this morning and hear the news. George Carlin is dead.

He was my generation's comedian. Before Steve Martin and after Lenny Bruce, George Carlin was there.

Another local connection was that he was busted for disorderly conduct in Milwaukee for expressing his "Seven Words" on stage and was hauled off to the poky. Not one of our city's better days.

Just check out youtube to see why he will be missed.

Where I Wish I Could Be

Happy Birthday Mr. Zimmerman

Robert Allen Zimmerman AKA Bob Dylan is 66 today. All the best and Happy Birthday!

We really are lucky to have lived during his lifetime. At least, I feel lucky

Jack in Newsweek

Jack was quoted in Newsweek a few weeks ago, in the February 19 issue. The article was about Ram Charan, a long-time consultant to top CEOs and the author of several books--most recently of Know-How: The 8 Skills That Separate People Who Perform From People Who Don't.

The article, The CEO Whisperer, demystifies this nomadic, private man who sleeps in hotels 365 days a year, rarely lectures, and has acted as a quiet consultant to dozens of top executives--most notably Jack Welch, when he ran General Electric.

Here's Jack's quote (we added the spotlight):

P.S. You might not have seen this article in your issue - it was only featured in the Enterprise edition of Newsweek, a special edition for executives and businesses.

Jack on IBM and Business Development

From Jack....

I am currently reading The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. He tells an interesting story about what Tom Watson, the founder of IBM, attributed IBM’s success to. He is said to have answered:

IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream—my vision—was in place.
The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done.
The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there.
In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one.
From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we are and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference.
Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business.
We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one.

Happy 65th Birthday, Muhammad Ali

View a great tribute here.

This year instead of FRUITCAKE!

If you need a “stocking stuffer� for your business friend check this out.

Jeffrey Gitomer is a phenomenon. He is the hardest working man in the business of motivation. I have known Jeffrey for well over a decade. In fact, the updated version of The Sales Bible still carries my name on the cover. Weird but true. Jeffrey called and asked if I would give him a plug for the hard cover of the book and I did (and that is why my quote is on the cover).

For the past two years he has been flooding the market with a series of brilliant books on laser focused issues. The Little Red Book of Selling started things, and that book was quickly followed by The Little Red Book of Sales Answers, then The Little Black Book of Connections (read my review here), and now The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude.

The reason I decided tell you about this library is that I spent some time with the YES book and loved it. So I went back to the other books and found that there is a reason that Jeffrey is the only person, that I know of, who has every had three different books on The Wall Street Journal weekly best seller list during the same week.

Now, what makes his books so special? They are a perfect size. They fit in your hand and feel comfortable. The pages are four color. The takeaways in each book are bite-sized and just perfect to read on an airplane—that is why you have seen these books stacked on the shelves at airport bookstores. Jeffrey's writing is extremely conversational and fun to read. Plus, the books have rounded edges and those cool ribbon page markers. They also lay open without breaking the spine. What’s not to like about that?

These books are the perfect gift for the business person in your life. Honest!

Jack's Best Business Books of 2006

It is that time of year. What are the “bests� of this year? As with all great awards, I am going to give you my “short list� of the best books of the year. Then, in a few weeks, I will announce—with a huge fanfare—my best business book of 2006. Yeah, I know, I have some non business books listed on my short list, but I liked the books and thought you should know about them. In no particular order:

China Shakes the World by James Kynge

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Chasing Daylight by Eugene O’Kelly

The Box by Marc Levinson

The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World by Joshua Prager

Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

The Wal-Mart Effect by Charles Fishman

These are all great reads and worth being called out as extraordinary books. What are your "bests of" 2006?

Thanks for listening.

Reinvention

As readers of this blog know I like music. I like all kinds of music. I have to tell you all that, at the ripe age of sixty five, Bob Dylan has done it again. His new album called Modern Times is about as perfect an album as I have heard in a long time. Now we know that Mr. Dylan may not have the best voice on the planet but what he has, he uses brilliantly.

When you think back over his career and how he has always never followed the pack. How he has always been the dog leading the pack. The Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home really documented this.

This album reminds me of what it would be like to be sitting on the porch and grandpa Bob was playing music to his grand kids on the front porch right after dinner on a warm summer night. The music is deceivingly simple, amazingly melodic, and just fun to hear.

Now I understand that this blog is about business books and business. Think about the fact that Bob Dylan has been doing the exact same job for forty five years and does something this different and good. Do we still have that creative burst in us after forty five years? I hope so. Drucker did, Deming did, Buffett does, Bennis does, Peters does.

What is it about Baseball Books?

When a baseball book is done right, it is unbelievably good. I mean like Boys of Summer and pretty much anything Roger Angell wrote. Nine Innings by Dan Okrent. I could go on but...

When we created a marketing piece this year I was asked to display the ISBN of my favorite all-time book. Now this is the best book of all time! Dickens, Hemingway, Hiaasen. Who would get the call? I did spend serious thinking about this because the marketing piece was going to authors and publishers so the book had to be pretty cool or I would look goofy. My choice was another baseball book. Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella. A portion of the book was made into Field of Dreams. Baseball books can capture a smell, a feeling, a mood extremely well and both Shoeless Joe and Echoing Green do that.

What has brought this rambling on? Over the weekend I finally finished another baseball book. The book is called The Echoing Green by Joshua Prager –sad to say the book is being published in September of this year but you can pre order it here.

The book is the story of the “shot heard around the world.� For you youngsters or non baseball fans, that is the home run that decided the National League Pennant in 1951. It was the final inning of a three game playoff to decide who would go to the World Series. It is also the story of two baseball players Ralph Branca and Bobby Thomson. The hitter and the pitcher of the shot. But as in most great baseball books, this is a book about an era, about a team and about a world that seems more in control. An aside, I actually got to see Bobby Thomson play for the Milwaukee Braves before a young player came up and moved him. That player was Henry Aaron. Yeah, I’m that old.

The book came from a Wall Street Journal article in 2001 where the author reveals that the Giants were stealing the catcher’s signs to the pitcher in the Polo Grounds with a telescope and they had been doing that for a chunk of the year of 1951.
Why am I writing about this on a business book blog? I have no idea but it is kind of like “why does a dog licks its butt, because it can� because I can, I guess is the answer.

Seriously this is a great read that you will remember for a long time.

Jack's Thoughts on the Book Expo

BEA impressions

I think this might be the 15th Book Expo America which used to be called American Booksellers Association convention. The convention switches cities each year. In my decrepitude I forget how many shows I have been to but I do know the last time I was in D.C. for a convention Tiananmen Square happened.

Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail will be big. Carly’s new book Tough Choices could be good but she is amazing—Kate, Todd and I spent some face time with her thanks to her publisher—also Bill Taylor of Fast Company fame along with Polly LaBarre have written a book we are excited about called Mavericks at Work.

Washington DC’s Metro is great. Clean, easy to navigate and the stops seem to be perfectly placed—at least for the stops we needed. No cabs for the whole convention.

Lots of celebrates—Leonard Cohen, I missed him-much to my sadness, Jim Belushi, I saw all over the convention floor. Saw Newt Gingrich, Tim Russert, Sen. Bill Frist and heard that VP Chaney showed up at a party and Rumsfeld showed up also. Some people saw Tracy Ullman.

It was a great show for the books that I LIKE to read with galleys of a new Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Nelson Demille and a collection of Dylan interviews from Rolling Stone showing up.

Next year back in the Big Apple.

Chasing Daylight Part 2

A while ago I posted my thoughts about a book called Chasing Daylight. Today's New York Times reviews the book here. After thinking about the book for the past week, I continue to love the book. Check it out. Read it.

Chasing Daylight Part 1

I am reading a profoundly moving book. I will write at least a Jack Covert Selects later but I hope to excerpt it and do other stuff to get the word out. The book is called Chasing Daylight, How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life by Eugene O'Kelly. I quote from the backcover

"On May 24, 2005, Eugene O'Kelly stepped into his doctor's office with a full calendar and a lifetime of plans on his mind. Six days later he would resign as CEO of KPMG. His lifetime of plans dwindled to 100 days. leaving him just enough time to say goodbye. Chasing Daylight is O'Kelly's honest, touching and ultimately inspirational memoir completed in the three-and-a-half months between his diagnosis with brain cancer and his death in September 2005."

Folks, I gotta tell you, this is a book that needs to be read by all of us who think that we have a chance to slow down later. I can't remember being moved by a book like I am being moved by this book. More later...

hackoff.com

I am currently reading a book that I am not sure will be reviewed as a Jack Covert Selects because the book is actually a murder mystery with a business favor. But I like the book a ton, in more ways than one. For one, the bloody thing weighs a ton, OK actually 2 ¼ lbs. But it feels like a ton considering I have been carrying it back and forth to home in work for the past two weeks. That is very unusual for me because I seldom take business books home. The book is also very unique because of its marketing plan. The author is giving the book away on the web. He has almost as many blogs as we do. His main blog is now one of my morning reads. He is also not interested in having the book published by a mainstream publisher. He has a special offer for a signed book when it is published in March.

hackoff.com is about an entrepreneur who is a real character, he was arrested in the early 90s for hacking into banks' computers to show their vulnerability. After being released from jail, he started a consulting company and then created a company called Hackoff.com in 1996 which went public during the go-go years. He is found dead in his office in 2003. The book is the story of the IPO and his life from a paper billionaire until the collapse of the bubble. If you are interested in a long, well written, fly-on-the-wall view of the growth and decline of a business with some remarkable characters, this book is for you.

Best of the Year for Jack

It is that time of year. What was really extraordinary this past year was...

Movies

Capote with Walk the Line a close second. My only issue with the Cash film was I wanted more music and less drugs…but that’s just me. Capote was as close to a perfect movie as I have seen in awhile. The place was perfectly drawn, the acting was superb. Loved it.

Music

This is a tough one. I thought the new Neil Young was really good. I also liked the new The White Stripes. I think the newly found Monk and Trane concert is a treasure. My Morning Jacket has brought out an album that is pretty much a consensus best of 05. I liked it a lot but my best of the year is……Crooked Fingers, Dignity and Shame. If the cut Call to Love isn’t the most perfect pop song, I don’t know what is. And nothing works for me more than a perfect pop song.

Books

Business book of the year is the book Travels Of A T-shirt In The Global Economy. This book meets my criteria for a great business book. It is really well written and takes a subject we think we know about and teaches us tons we didn’t realize. I love books like this book. Blue Ocean Strategy is a great second book.

What I Did On My Vacation

I have been on vacation this week. Now I take two kinds of vacations. Vacations where I go away and turn everything off and veg. Then I have vacations where I read in bed for an hour in the mornings, cook soup, putter in the garden and hit the links; these are the vacations where the Blackberry is turned on and I stay in touch with the office. This has been that kind of vacation.

I want to tell you about two books that I have read this week and loved. They aren't my typical suggestions for you as they aren't books about business. I actually read other kinds of books, too. Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer is the best lawyer/courtroom book I have read in ages. This guy has been writing really good noir books for years. This is a brighter book with a great plot.

The other book is a coffee table book called The Works: Anatomy of a City by Kate Ascher. This book is hard to explain. As she states in the dust jacket,

All cities, big and small, rely on a vast array of interconnecting systems to take care of their citizens’ most basic needs; keeping water bubbling through the pipes, traffic moving on the streets, power flowing to businesses and homes. Largely invisible, and almost always taken for granted, these are the basic building blocks of urban life. But how exactly do these systems work? Using New York City—among the largest and most complex of world cities—as its point of reference, The Works answers that question.

Now, I have to depart because I have tee time shortly.

A Little History

Yesterday afternoon, Todd and I were discussing the day before we left for home. I told him the story about how 8cr went from the corner of an independent bookstore that sold books to business folks to a company that uses direct marketing to sell business books. This is a piece of history Todd thought I should share.

It started with a book, doesn’t almost everything? Richard N. Foster’s Innovation, The Attacker’s Advantage, long out of print, arrived and it had a dynamic cover. I love to collect information about my customers and in those days I collected business cards. I took the dust jacket to our local copy place and copied the cover and the fly leaf and then hand typed—on a really crappy typewriter—38 letters stating "I thought you would be interested in this book" and included the copies of the dust jacket. I sold 64 books for a world class response rate and set a standard that I have not yet been able to duplicate.

Maybe later I’ll tell you more about how we became what we are today before I forget.

Katrina

Reading the WSJ during the past two days about the hurricane has really hit me. I fell in love with New Orleans and Louisiana by reading James Lee Burke’s detective series featuring Dave Robicheaux. My wife and I went to the Big Easy for a great vacation a few years back. To read about the recent devastation is simply heartbreaking. Articles in the WSJ have brought home the size and scope of this nightmare. We need to respond. Here are links to The Salvation Army and The Red Cross. I encourage you to actively respond to this disaster and give.

Kurt Eichenwald

Let's start with the truth. I love Kurt Eichenwald's writing. I have read his three books and have loved them. Serpent on the Rock was about Prudential in the 80s, then The Informant about ADM in the 90s. Now he has written THE book on Enron—as I have read a few—called Conspiracy of Fools. The one thing all three of these books have in common is that they show a side of American business that is seldom seen and shows that side in an almost fictional way—but if it was fiction, I expect Eichenwald would have been sued more than once—which he hasn’t been.

Eichenwald and Ken Lay were on 60 Minutes this Sunday and I got to tell you Ken Lay really gets my blood boiling. I think Eichenwald’s title is spot on. Lay is one of the shrewdest people on the planet or a fool. I vote for that later after reading this book.

I haven’t posted anything about Martha Stewart but putting this book and Martha Stewart’s recent legal travails together makes you wonder… She may have made some money that she shouldn’t have but she DIDN’T cost anybody much. How many people went on the street unemployed and mutual funds lost huge amounts of money believing this guy and he is still on the streets. Enough ranting!

Read this book and enjoy a fascinating yarn.

Marcus Buckingham's next book.

I have the best job in the world. I can sit and read books—now granted they are business books. Every once and awhile, someone writes something that I especially like and want to share and I have the entire blogsphere to share it with. Does it get any better than that—for an ex-disc jockey?

Buckingham’s next book The One Thing You Need to Know : ... About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success is due in March and I was reading it and came to this description of what is a great manager:

“The chief responsibility of a great manager is not to enforce quality, nor to ensure customer service, nor to set standards, nor to build high performance teams. Each of these is a valuable outcome, and great managers may well use these outcomes to measure success. But the outcomes are the end result, not the startling point. The starting point is each employee’s talents. The challenge: to figure out the best way to transform these talents into performance.

That is the job of a great manager.

Tsunami

We in America have been following the events in Asia truly with "shock and awe." Evelyn Rodriguez, a guest blogger and friend, puts a human face on the nightmare that we are seeing in the news. She is/was there. Again, read from the bottom up. Evelyn's blog

We have to do something and it looks like the best way is to give money to the Red Cross or Salvation Army.

Happy Holidays and the coming week

This is the slowest week in publishing. Nobody is working and seldom big books come out. Because of that Todd is gone and I am planning on spending some time with family. I’ll be posting and I think I have a Jack Covert Selects or two to post but I just wanted to let you know why we are quieter than usual.
All the best and thanks for everything.

Jack

Tom Peters Re-Imagine Summit 2004

Todd posted the notes from the weekend in Vermont but I just wanted to say that the get together has inspired both Todd and I to do some serious and exciting changes in the 800CEOREAD ecommerce web site. We are meeting this week with our web designers and will tell you all about the changes when it closer to completed.

Todd and I were so lucky to be invited to this event and to be able to sit in a room with this really diverse group of people was an amazing experience. Out of this will come some exciting stuff.

My Best of 2004

Every year everybody does a 'best of' list. I/we are no different. The 800CEOREAD best of 2004 compiled by sales will be published in January after the December sales are compiled.

These are my personal favorites, right now. Things change and if you asked me next week, I may have a different answer.

My favorite business book is Unstuck by Keith Yamashita, Sandra Spataro, Portfolio publisher…as I said in my review:
"Some people have had issues with business books not being prescriptive enough. This is the perfect book for them. I have a feeling this will be a book that will be around a long time because it deals with a universal problem, being stuck, brilliantly!"

My favorite fiction book for 2004 is Boyos by Richard Marinick, Justin, Charles, & Co. Pub.
"This is a gritty mystery from Boston written by a guy with a huge future. Imagine Clockers by Richard Price meets Robert B. Parker."

My favorite non-fiction book is Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, Penguin Press—The most consistantly excellent publisher publishing right now— in my ever so humble opinion.

Now the hard one…my favorite tunes of 2004.
I have picked three. They are
The Clash’s 25th Anniversary Edition of London Calling,
Brian Wilson’s finally finished and released classic Smile,
now for something a little more contemporary,
I like Green Day's American Idiot.

That’s it for now. This is a dynamic list so I will add to it.

Lucky or Smart?

When I go to New York to meet publishing types, I always try and connect with Jonathan Karp. His title is Senior Vice President, Editor-in-Chief, Random House. He has acquired and edited some really good books. Seabiscuit was one of his books. Jon doesn’t do a lot of business books but he sent me his latest title called Lucky or Smart? by Bo Peabody? I am just a few pages into it but the Table of Contents is such fun, I thought I would share it before I actually finished the book and write a Jack Covert Selects review on the book.

BTW, the book is being published in January and is 58 pages long and just loaded with fun, valuable information--real "rubber meets the road" stuff.

1 Lucky or Smart
2 Entrepreneurs are Born, not Made
3 Entrepreneurs are B-Students, Managers are A-Students
4 Great is the Enemy of Good
5 Start-Ups Attract Sociopaths
6 Practice Blind Faith
7 Learnt to Love the Word “No”
8 Prepare to be Powerless
9 The Best Defense is a Gracious Offense
10 Don’t Believe Your own Press, In Fact, Don’t Read it
11 Always be Selling Your Stock
12 Know What Your Don’t Know

My Job

There are many joys in my job. One of the real treats is meeting the authors and publishers. This week I got to be involved in two interviews—that will shortly be posted on this blog—with two guys that I have respected for quite awhile. Ram Charan and Larry Bossidy are fascinating guys. Just wait until you read what they have to say about their forthcoming book Confronting Reality. I think it is going to be as big at Execution. Trust me, these guys have a lot of very interesting stuff to say. I also want to thank Tom Ehrenfeld for all of his help with the interviews.

Next week I will be going to meet publishers, agents and PR people in NYC. I love the city, especially when somebody else is paying, but historically I always seem to try to cram to much into the time I have. As I gracefully age, I am learning and I am going to take it easy this trip. It is also getting easier to do just that as publishers continue to consolidate and the cream continues to rise to the top. I can skip certain publishers and concentrate only on the best.

The reason I go is to try and get a feel for what books are really resonating in the marketplace this Fall. Often times a book that a publisher gave a two page catalog listing—which means high hopes—doesn’t sell well to the book buyers and a title that only got a half page really sold well. That is information that I like to have and compare to my thoughts on the books. I also get to sit in on some acquisition meetings where editors decide what book proposals they will acquire for the Fall of 05.

Great book coming this Fall

Folks,

Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan have done it again.
First they wrote Execution which was and still is a huge best seller.
Now they have written Confronting Reality and it is also brilliant. It is due to pub in October of this year.
Remember, I told you about the 2004 business book of the year in July!

Enron

One of the joys of this week was hearing that Ken Lay is finally walking the perp walk. My favorite book about the debacle that was Enron is 24 Days: How Two Wall Street Journal Reporters Uncovered the Lies That Destroyed Faith in Corporate America by Rebecca Smith, John R. Emshwiller.

From the comments

Evelyn asked Jack - "I don't think this is the first time that you or Todd have referenced the fact that the business book business is not as healthy as it could be. Not being in the industry could you enlighten me and share with readers what are the factors that make this so? I could make assumptions, but I'm not sure I'd be right."

Jack's response was - "As I have been doing this for twenty years I have seen this cycle hit, I think, three times before. In the early nineties, Reengineering changed the landscape and business books became something that many publishers wanted to publish. The Bull market in the late nineties brought out the last cycle.

Right now, some publishers have disappeared like Addison Wesley/Persues. They still exist as an imprint but they don’t publish business books. One of the biggest blows was what Simon and Schuster did, making one of the best business book imprint—The Free Press—into a general trade publisher, doing a few business books but also cook books and novels. That is the downside, the upside has been the creation of Portfolio Publishing. They are a big reason for our tremendous growth this year. Adrain Zackheim, ex of HarperBusiness—publisher of Good to Great, most of the Noel Tichy leadership books—, has came out of the chute a couple of years ago running and continues to publish important books.

Because of the consolidation in the genre, often times I find good books from unusual publishers. Friday I finally cleaned off my desk and put a pile of galleys I really want to look at and of the eleven books that made the cut are two Harvard University Press books, two Portfolio titles, two Wiley books, an MIT book, Little Brown—Malcolm Gladwell’s new one, a Berrett Koehler and a Crown Business and a Harvard Business School Press.

To close this rather long winded reply, I think the quality will still rise to the top but it will come from someplace unexpected—which my life interesting.

Sadness

Today is the end of an era. A. David Schwartz, my boss and best friend, died from complications of lung cancer, as a non smoker, at 65. His obit is here. He had been in remission for the past nine months and then it came back with a vengence and he died within a week at home with family and friends.

Three different times at this weekend's book convention, I was told that I should write a book about what I do. If it ever happens, which I doubt, the book will be about the creation of the friendship between two of the most different people you can imagine and the company we created together.

I and we will miss him.

Introducing Dennis, My Mechanic

I was at my mechanic yesterday and he was lamenting being a small business person. He has gone to some classes put on for mechanics, which has helped. I sent him the Jeffrey Fox new book on small business and I told him that I would like him to review the book for the blog. He is extremely computer literate and he said he would.

BTW, I consider a good mechanic more important than a good doctor. You need a mechanic many more times..that said, now that I am officially a senior citizen, that may change. Dennis has been my mechanic for twenty plus years and I love the fact that I can say that the car does something and I know it will be fixed and what it costs is in fact what I should pay. He is really good.

Fun Reading List

In the past--pre-Internet--we used to publish a catalog called the Gazette. One issue we asked Thought Leaders to submit a list of five books on the subject of "What every leader should read in the next 18 months." After seeing Todd's listings of BusinessWeek books, I remembered this list.

I ask the Blog world, do you really care what Peter Drucker thought in 1997? BTW, he picked the most interesting titles of all the respondents. They were:

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Man who Ruled India by Philip Woodruff (out of print)
My Years with General Motors by Alfred Sloan
this is a brilliant book about creating the Sloan book A Ghost Memoir by John McDonald
Character above All: David McCullough on Harry S. Truman Out of print

Now everybody realize that if you asked Scott Adams, Ken Blanchard, Michael Hammer, Sally Helgesen et al, what books they would pick today, chances are they would pick different titles. But still it is fun to see where people's heads were at in 1996/1997.

Let me know if you are interested in more listing.

Signed business books

Lawrence Block has been writing books forever. He has won everything a mystery writer can win. Edgar's et.all. His Matt Scudder books are some of the best noir books written since Chandler and Hammett. He has written a fun piece about book touring I want to share.

How does this relate to business books? I don't know. I just like to read Lawrence Block...Also I don't think an autographed business book really has any value in the market place.

That made me remember the last "business book" event I was involved in. The retail chain I am connected with had Jack Welch for a signing at one of their stores for the really not very good “Jack” book and they had 700 people attend. That was the good news, the bad news was that GE Medical Systems is located 20 miles away and I would have expected more people. Still 700 people stood in line for quite awhile to chat with Jack. I must admit, Jack Welch was a real trooper to have his picture taken with anyone with a camera and was incredibly personably with everybody. I think he was the last business “superstar” to tour.

Surprisingly good read

As, God forbid, we all age--some of us, like yours truly, are REALLY aged--we need to consider retirement. Couple of weeks ago I got a call from Howard Stone and he was pitching a book that he had self published in '02. The mainstream publisher Plume has picked up the paperback to be published in May 2004 called Too Young To Retire. He wanted me to look at it.

After spending an afternoon reading the book I must say I am seriously impressed with Marika and his stories and how they present the concept that in fact we don't need to retire. We can continue to grow and prosper into our dotage. I am not a fan of self help/personal finance kind of books but this book surprised me with the insights it supplied.

Check out their site 2 Young 2 Retire