800-CEO-READ Blog: Small Business

What is Wrong With Business Books?! - Part II

On the heals of my Fast Company news, I found a wonderful essay that berates business books. Yes, I said wonderful.

An anonymous writer under the byline "Uncle Saul" wrote The Author's Dilemma - Why Most Business Books Suck for socialtech.com. The piece is clearly written by a book reader as it points the vast number of ways business books fail the entrepreneurs. Among the reasons:

Entrepreneurs Need Tactical Guidance -- Obsessing about strategy is a luxury that only Big Dumb Companies ("BDCs") can afford. Entrepreneurs must define a series of skirmishes, they do not need to devise elaborate battle plans. Entrepreneurs need only develop a basic strategy and craft an evolving and iterative tactical plan which guides them in the general direction dictated by their overall strategy. Although a few books attempt to act as entrepreneurial field guides that offer tactics in specific areas (e.g., selling, marketing, PR, etc.), their usefulness is often limited. Books that highlight tactics are valuable for entrepreneurs whose specific circumstances match those outlined in the text. However, specific tactics are often difficult to translate into markets outside of those described in such books.

Entrepreneurs Have Corporate ADD -- A pithy format, offering bite-sized data, serves entrepreneurs well. If you prefer to pour through 400-page academic tomes, you may be a nice person, but you are probably not an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs "Get It" -- Consistent with their Corporate ADD, entrepreneurs tend to excel at digesting numerous disparate facts and making quick, gestalt decisions. This inherent impatience causes entrepreneurs to quickly become frustrated with books that repeatedly reinforce their central point through multiple examples, analogies and anecdotes.

Entrepreneurs Are Contrarians -- In general, the use of multiple examples is an appropriate means of convincing someone to change their behavior. However, since most entrepreneurs have no allegiance to the status quo, they find books which rely on numerous examples as a means of changing the reader's behavior to be frustrating and largely irrelevant.

Uncle Saul does like one book: Guy Kawasaki's The Art of the Start, saying, "Guy succinctly addresses a number of relevant startup issues in pithy chapters and offers concrete, tactical suggestions for addressing a number of typical challenges faced by most startups."

A Milwaukee Company

It has been a little quiet on the blog this week because most of our crew is in the Windy City to meet with business book authors and publishers. I was there yesterday and it was a blast - I'm sure we'll have more to tell you over the next few weeks.

I'll take this opportunity to mention something our sister company, Schwartz Bookshops, is participating in this winter. It's an alliance of Milwaukee businesses called "Our Milwaukee" and their mission is this: "Our Milwaukee advocates for locally owned businesses that provide a genuine, quality experience - in celebration of our community's unique character."

At 800-CEO-READ, we believe strongly in supporting our local economy. So if you're in town at all, we encourage you to check out some of our favorite establishments:

Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops
Alterra Coffee Roasters (It's scary how much of their coffee we consume each day.)
Beans & Barley
Lakefront Brewery
Laacke & Joys
Outpost Natural Foods
The Pabst Theatre and The Riverside
Brewers Credit Union

New Excerpt - from Beat the System

There's a new excerpt up on the Excerpts blog. It's taken from Chapter 2 of Beat the System: 11 Secrets to Building an Entrepreneurial Culture in a Bureaucratic World by Robert W. Macdonald.

In this follow-up to his first book, Cheat to Win, Robert MacDonald shows professionals, business leaders, and entrepreneurs how to overcome the bureaucracy that smothers the innovative, entrepreneurial spirit essential to long-term business success.

Beat the System provides real-world advice for building an entrepreneurial culture in your entire organization, your department, or in your individual position.

A true entrepreneur is not determined by the measure of his or her results, but by how those results were attained. Being an entrepreneur is more about attitude than aptitude. There have been some very talented business managers who failed because they failed the test of entrepreneurialism. (We call them bureaucrats.) Likewise, there have been some people with very little apparent talent who achieve remarkable success as entrepreneurs. (These types are usually abysmal failures in a bureaucratic world.)

Entrepreneurialism is a way of living life, not a way of managing life. The real entrepreneur has a certain spirit, an elan and an approach to issues that is just different. And that is the key. In a system that demands sameness, the entrepreneur is willing to be different. Only by being different can things be made better. That is the philosophy at the heart of being an entrepreneur.

Continue reading the excerpt here: http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/007487.html

New Excerpt - The Engine of America

We've got a new excerpt up on the Excerpts blog, chapter 4 of The Engine of America: The Secrets to Small Business Success from Entrepreneurs Who Have Made It! by Hector V. Barreto. CEOs of 50 successful small businesses, some of which have become large corporations, share their experiences of growing their own business.

This chapter is about challenging conventional wisdom and accepted practices.
The author profiles two women who in traditionally male-dominated positions, at a time when it was an accepted belief that they would fail, became successful leaders of major corporations.

Conventional wisdom often stops people in their tracks. This is not necessarily bad. If the conventional wisdom is that a small business will not survive and grow without proper financing -- a truism that has been shown to be true countless times -- and this rightly should act as a stumbling block to the nascent small business owner who intends to start a venture on a shoestring and hope for the best.

But conventional wisdom should not stand in the way when the belief is based on outmoded facts, wrong premises, or prejudice.

Here's a direct link to the excerpt: http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/007422.html

Fall book preview: No Man's Land

When the seasons change (and we're almost to that point here in Wisconsin), we start buzzing a little bit louder. The phones ring, the books move about the office, and we start asking each other questions like "When does that book pub?" and "Are we doing anything special with this new title?" A bunch of books are hitting the shelves starting this week, and you can will probably find an execerpt, review, or discussion for each on our blogs.

Keep this book on your radar: No Man's Land: What to Do When Your Company is TOO BIG to Be Small but TOO SMALL to Be Big by Doug Tatum.

Portfolio, the publisher, is really excited about this book. We first heard about it when we were in NYC in May. Here's a snippet from the introduction:

The entrepreneurs I encounter are routinely stymied by their inability to "get out of the weeds," to rise above chaotic operational firefighting and see their businesses in a new strategic light. To traverse No Man's Land, however, entrepreneurs need to become radically objective about their situation and knowledgeable about the strategic choices available to them.

They also need a plan.

Tatum proposes a four-part plan which he calls "the four Ms." These are "fundamental navigational principles for managing a rapidly growing company." Here they are:

• Understand the transition that will occur in the business's Market.
• Address the changes that will be required in its Management.
• Test its economic Model to assure continued profitability as the business scales upward.
• Understand the practical requirements for attracting the needed Money.

You'll hear more about the book after its pub date, but for now, you can hear about it from Doug Tatum himself in an Inc. Magazine interview here:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070901/welcome-to-no-mans-land.html

Reading For Firm Founders

The Small Business Special Section of Monday's Wall Street Journal featured recommended reading from Nitzan Shaer, entrepreneur-in-residence with IDG Ventures in Boston. The focus of his recommendations was to show entrepreneurs where they might look for inspiration to stay focused and preserve.

Here are the books and resources he recommended. Click through on the WSJ link to read Shaer's comments.

• Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
• The Lessons of History by Will Durant and Ariel Durant
• The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
• Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
• The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone: 1932-1940 by William Manchester
• Shackleton's Way by Margot Morrell and Stephanine Capparell
• Mao's Last Dancer by Li Cunxin
• TechCrunch
• Apollo 13 (the movie)
• An Inconvenient Truth (the movie and the book)

This Week: National Small Business Week

This week is National Small Business Week. We are going to highlight some books for those out there is the small business world and those who want to be.

I figured we should start with the definition of a small business. This is from the Small Business Administration website:

A Small Business is one that:

• is organized for profit;
• has a place of business in the United States;
• makes a significant contribution to the U.S. economy by paying taxes or using American products, materials or labor; and,
• does not exceed the numerical size standard for its industry.

  The business may be a sole proprietorship, partnership, corporation, or any other legal form.

  SBA has several general Size Standards. A business in one of the following industry groups is small if it is not greater than the size standard indicated.

  Industry Group	Size Standard
  Manufacturing	500 employees
  Wholesale Trade	100 employees
  Agriculture	$750,000
  Retail Trade	$6.5 million
  General & Heavy Construction (except Dredging)	$31 million
  Dredging	$18.5 million
  Special Trade Contractors	$13 million
  Travel Agencies	$3.5 million (commissions & other income)
  Business and Personal Services Except:	$6.5 million
  >Architectural, Engineering, Surveying, and Mapping Services	$4.5 million
  >Dry Cleaning and Carpet Cleaning Services	$4.5 million

Now that you know where you stand, we can move onto the books.

Specific Books For Specific Problems

I have a theory that people buy business books for one of two reasons:

1. They are trying to solve a problem.
2. They are looking for ideas.

We have a tendency to talk about idea books here. Those are what we are attracted to. Tom's essay this morning on the FT/Goldman Sachs Awards is case in point.

Problem solving books are just as important. If you have just been given a new project or a new job, there are all sorts of questions jumping around in your head. Often, you will just listen to those around you for advice. Books can give you a great third-party resource.

Amacom is good at these sorts of books. Sell Your Business Your Way by Rick Rickertsen is a perfect example. Here is a book that deals with a very specific subject - the things that business owners need to think about when they are deciding to sell their firm. Rickertsen talks about valuation, motivation, and what life after the business might be like. A couple other Amacom titles that match this profile are Effective Succession Planning by William Rothwell and The Complete Guide to Sales Force Incentive Compensation by Andris A. Zoltners, et al.

Moltz hosts Carnival of the Capitalists

Barry Moltz (You Need to Be A Little Crazy) is hosting the Carnival of the Capitalists this week. If you are not familiar, each week a different blog hosts a compilation of the business blog posts. The COTC has been going on for almost two years. It is a great way to keep up with everything going on and find some new people you should be reading.

Find us at Duct Tape Marketing

We have started writing for Duct Tape Marketing. This is old news, but it is the first time we have mentioned it here. John Jantsch asked if we would maintain a blog about small business books and we said yes.

It is called Small Business Reads. We are trying to post one or twice a week.

Our latest post is on a great list of summer reads from the National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship.

You might want to check out all the other channels running over there. They are up to 22 blogs now!

D.I.Y. (Design It Yourself)

Ellen Lupton and the students at the Maryland Institute College of Art wrote and designed a great book called D.I.Y. (Design It Yourself). The book's purpose is to make the idea of designing something less intimidating.

They start the book with a series of essays on designs and do-it-yourself design. It eases you into the idea that it is possible for you to design and that it is not just for the cool, hip kids who went to art school.

The rest of the book lays out 27 different products you can get your hands dirty with. They ranging from t-shirts to stickers to books. There is an overview and a series of projects in each chapter. The projects are rated by cost and difficulty so you know what you are getting yourself into. And there are LOTS of pictures.

The online version at designityourself.org is a wonderful compliment to the book. You will find condensed materials from the book. The resources section is alone worth the visit.

D.I.Y. is a definite How-To book, but it is really more about inspiration. I think Lupton and her students give readers the license to try their own stuff and see what happens.

Peter Who?

I have been getting on a kick lately to get people to read more classic business books. I classify these as books which are just as relevant as ever and can be read over and over.

I have been asking people lately if they have read anything by Peter Drucker and I am shocked by the number of people you have never read anything written by the Father of Modern Management. While I was getting my MBA, we were never assigned to read anything by him. I sit here shaking my head wondering how this can be.

I decided to do some more research. Last week, we asked the inBubbleWrap crowd two questions having to do with Drucker.

First, we asked if they knew who Peter Drucker was. It was hard to give you an exact answer by I would say 15% of the people did not know he is was. I don't consider that too bad considering the often reported polls showing people's lack of knowledge on current events and world geography.

The second question we asked was "Have you read any books by Drucker?". The following is a list of all the books that people listed and the number of times they were mentioned in the answers.

The Effective Executive - 52
The Essential Drucker - 45
The Daily Drucker - 28
Managing for The Future - 21
Innovation and Entrepreneurship - 18
The Practice of Management - 16
Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices - 11
Managing The Non-Profit Organization - 11
Adventures of a Bystander - 6
Managing in Turbulent Times - 5
Management in the 21st Century - 4
The End of Economic Man - 4
The Age of Discontinuity - 3
Temption To Do Good - 3
Classic Drucker - 2
Drucker On The Profession of Management - 2
Concept of the Corporation - 1
Effective Executive in Action - 1
Future of Industrial Man - 1

It was good to see one of Drucker's complete works beat the two "best-of" books. For my money, I would recommend The Effective Executive and Innovation and Entrepreneurship (both of which I am going back and reading again).

We have some plans for bringing back some of the classics. Stay tuned for that...

Jack at Duct Tape Marketing

Last week, John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing interviewed our own Jack Covert. The interview was posted as a podcast today. Jack talks about the origins of many things including our name and recommends books for small business folks. It is 22 minutes and will give you the essence of 800ceoread.

WSJ Recommended Reading: Build and Expand Your Business

In today's special section of the Wall Street Journal, the topic is small business. Writer Sarah Needleman asks Container Store CEO Kip Tindell what he would recommend for your reading list.

Tindell says that Co-Opetition is:

"probably the best business book I've ever read. It talks about not being typical, paranoid business people, but rather looking for ways that your competitors and you can cooperate to strengthen both your businesses. We've followed some of the principals in this book by putting our stores right next to some of our competitors. It makes the shopping center a stronger draw."

Here is his complete list:

• Minding The Store: A Memoir by Stenley Marcus
• Co-Opetition: 1. A Revolutionary Mindset That Combines Competition and Cooperation 2. The Game Theory Strategy That's Changing the Game of Business by Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff
• Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends On It by Al Ries
• Discovering The Soul of Service: The Nine Drivers of Sustainable Business Success by Leonard Berry
• A Thousand Barrels a Second: The Coming Oil Break Point and the Challenges Facing an Energy Dependent World by Peter Tertzakian
• Churchill on Leadership: Executive Success in the Face of Adversity by Steven F. Hayward
• Appetite for Life: A Biography of Julia Child by Noel Riley Fitch
• It's a Wonderful Life directed by Frank Capra

Two Business Beer Books

We are coming up on the annual booksellers convention. It is huge deal for us folks. It gives us a great opportunity to talk with publishers, find out what is going on, and see what they have planned for the fall.

At last year's convention, Wiley had an event at their booth which featured two books. The first book was Beer School by Brooklyn Brewery founders Steve Hindy & Tom Potter. The second book was Brewing Up A Business by Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery. The event was a hit, because they had a sampling of both breweries flagship brands.

For some reason I have hung on to these books for the past year, meaning to write a post about them. Beer School tells the tale of building the Brooklyn Brewery. Each chapter ends with lessons from the authors. Chapter Five for example is "Steve Discusses the Keys to Successfully Motivating Employees" and ends with Lesson Five: Feeling Goods Is No Substitute for Prudent Controls. These guys favor the Jack Welch style of management with annual performance appraisals and having no problem firing people if they don't work out. I particularly liked Chapter 10 and the story of them selling their distribution arm. It was complicated, emotional, and got to a point of needing lawyers.

I like Brewing Up A Business a little more though. Sam Calagione was an English major in college and knows how to spin a tale. Marketing on a Small Budget, Stalking The Killer App and Cash Is King (well sort of..) are typical chapter titles. He is also a maverick who has taken on Mothers Against Drunk Driving. I love this paragraph because he gets it:

Picasso once said, "The creative act is first and foremost an act of destruction." As a small businessperson I couldn't agree more. When you go into business for yourself, you are destroying preconceived notions. You are destroying business as usual in that it can only be created by you. For small businesspeople, our greatest challenge is gaining customers. The way you gain customers is by gaining attention. The way you gain attention is by standing out from the other businesses you compete with...If you can disrupt business as usual, you will attract positive attention while shifting the spotlight away from your biggest competitors.

Grab a cold one and kick back with one of these books to see the business behind the brew.

Donna Fenn's Favorites

I posted my interview with Donna Fenn over on the Podcasts Blog this afternoon. I also asked Donna what her favorite business books were. Here is the list she whipped up for me along with a thought on each.

• Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker. Still relevant after these years; still the entrepreneur’s Bible!
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. I know, I know – it’s on everyone’s list. But as someone trying to market a book in a wildly crowded marketplace, the lessons are very relevant to me.
• The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley. And anything else he writes because the guy is in the trenches at IDEO and understands innovation in a way that’s up close and personal.
• Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury Goods... And How Companies Create Them by Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske. Provides great insight on how entrepreneurs can differentiate themselves by catering to consumer lust for “new luxuriesâ€?.
• The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki. Thought provoking, highly original and superbly written.
• Hug Your Customers by Jack Mitchell. Jack is one of the most successful independent retailers in the country, and he’s also managed to keep the business in the family for three generations. Again, great wisdom straight from the trenches.

Bill and Bo on Small Giants

I would love Small Giants even if I didn't know the author, Bo Burlingham. After all, Burlingham has been the co-author of several of the best business books of the past two decades, The Great Game of Business and A Stake in the Outcome, not to mention the force behind the editing and writing of literally hundreds of important articles for Inc. magazine.

As Burlingham said at a recent reading/discussion for Small Giants, "This book challenges people to think about what makes a great company." How? He focuses on 14 dynamic companies that all made conscious decisions not to grow—but rather to control their size so as to concentrate on more important matters such as the soul of the company, the ties to the community, the community of employees, the quality of the work. In so doing the companies retained that quality of charisma that makes them so attractive—and which in turn drives so many great companies to make bad choices when faced with the tradeoffs from growth.

The huge crowd included Fast Company Founding Editor Bill Taylor, who posed Bo a provocative question. Bill (who recently completed a book of his own that will be published later this year) kindly shared his question, which follows. And Bo has been good enough to reply.

Here's Bill Taylor's question: It's easy to understand what your small giants gain by choosing not to grow as fast as they might. But did many of the entrepreneurs you chronicle--or did you yourself--think about what these companies give up by staying small? I'm not thinking about money, I'm thinking about impact--the chance to have a big effect on the world. Imagine if Herb Kelleher of Southwest had decided to stick to flying routes within the southwest. Or if John Mackey, the cofounder of Whole Foods Market, had decided to stop at a couple of stores in Austin, rather than spread across the country--and, in so doing, raise the bar for nutritional standards, the treatment of animals, the future of organics. Isn't it almost selfish, in a sense, or at least a missed opportunity, if you're a passionate company-builder who believes in what you're doing and thinks it's important, to do less than what's possible, to have less of an impact than you might have otherwise?

Bo Burlingham replies: First, let me be clear about one thing: In no way do I mean to suggest that a company can’t be great if it grows fast, gets big, goes public, does acquisitions, and so forth. The two companies you cite are prime examples of great, publicly traded companies, although it’s worth noting that they are striking exceptions to the rule. They have been able to resist the pressures to compromise their values only because they have so far managed to deliver consistently great returns to shareholders, who have thus been willing to let the company’s management teams operate as they see fit. Most other companies that have started out with similar values—The Body Shop, Ben & Jerry’s, and People Express come to mind—have eventually been forced to make compromises that have utterly transformed their cultures and ways of doing business.

It’s also important to recognize that there are always trade-offs. Although Southwest and Whole Foods are both great corporate citizens, neither one is rooted in a community anymore, and they’ve both lost some of the workplace intimacy they had when they were smaller, not to mention the intense relationships with customers and suppliers. My point is simply that there are sacrifices—lost opportunities—no matter what you decide to do. Company owners have to choose which opportunities they want to focus on and which pressures they want to deal with.

That said, it may be true that a couple of the Small Giants’ owners/leaders have given up an opportunity to have a greater impact on the world by choosing to remain private and closely held and by staying (relatively) small. I say “a couple� because extremely few people are capable of building a Whole Foods Market or a Southwest Airlines without losing control of the company along the way. In any case, I certainly wouldn’t describe the decision to remain small and private as selfish. For one thing, most of these people work extremely hard to make the greatest contribution they can to their employees, their customers, their communities, and the world.. Saying their decision is selfish implies that people who try to get their companies as big as possible, as fast as possible, are somehow being selfless, or at least less selfish. We both know that the motivations of company-builders, even the greatest ones, are far more complicated than that, and that altruism or selflessness seldom enters into the equation.

New Podcast from Bo Burlingham

I thought I would start your week with some new audio. The lastest over on the Podcasts Blog is an interview I did with Bo Burlingham, author of Small Giants. Go check it out. Our conversation went so long that I divided it into three parts. We talk about Inc. Magazine, companies he thinks are Small Giants, and mojo. I also have lots o' links to additonal interviews and articles on the book.

Alpha Dogs in Inc. Magazine

The January 2006 issue of Inc. has an article entitled (Re)born to be wild by Donna Fenn. It is about Mike's Famous, a Harley-Davidson dealership in New Castle, Delaware.

If you like the article, you might be interested in the book she wrote called Alpha Dogs: How Your Small Business Can Become Leader of the Pack. The article was adapted from this Collins title that came out in December.

Daily Drucker for August 10th

The Infant New Venture

Businesses are not paid to reform customers.

Above all, the people who are running a new venture need to spend time outside: in the marketplace, with customers, and with their own sales force, looking and listening. The new venture needs to build in systematic practices to remind itself that a "product" or a "service" is defined by the customer, not by the producer. It needs to work continuously on challenging itself in respect to the utility and value that its products or services contribute to customers. The greatest danger for the new venture is to "know better" than the customer what the product or service is or should be, how it should be bought, and what is should be paid for. Above all, the new venture needs willingness to see the unexpected success as an opportunity rather than as an affront to its expertise. And it needs to accept that elementary axiom of marketing: Businesses are not paid to reform customers. They are paid to satisfy customers. Lack of market focus is typically a disease of the "neonatal" the infant new venture. It is the most serious affliction of the new venture in its early stages-- and one that can permanently stunt even those that survive.

ACTION POINT: See the unexpected success of a new venture as an opportunity not as a problem.

This excerpt is from The Daily Drucker: 365 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done

The 7 Irrefutable Rules of Small Business Growth

Our friend Steven Little (The 7 Irrefutable Rules of Small Business Growth) has gotten some great ink. Check out his review in the current Harvard Business School.

Books for Small Business Month

May was Small Business Month. I know I am a day late with this post, but I have three books worth considering for the topic.

The first is Startup Nation by brother Jeffrey and Richard Sloan. These serial entrepreneurs have built a brand around helping others start their own businesses through a radio show, website, and newsletter. This book covers the basic from picking the idea through to funding expansion.

The second is a kit. It is the creation of Startup.com star Kaliel Isaza Tuzman. The Entrepreneur's Success Kit comes in a box and consists of 2 books, 2 audio CDs, and deck of cards. Tuzman takes a more spiritual approach with a series of visualization and mediation exercises. The books act as the roadmaps with the CDs and cards giving you supplemental information on your journey.

The final book is a self-published title called Six Disciplines for Excellence: Building Small Businesses That Learn, Lead, and Last by Gary Harpst. This is your 6-step process book for how to succeed in small business.

1. Decide What's Important
2. Set Goals That Lead
3. Align Systems
4. Work The Plan
5. Innovate Purposefully
6. Step Back

We will being doing a little more with this book later in the month.

More bloggers talk about The Art of the Start

Although it has been out since September, Guy Kawasaki's The Art of the Start continues to get kudos from bloggers who have read it. I ran across four recommendations just in the last week.

• Dana Epp - Book Review: The Art of the Start
• Lee LeFever - Guy Kawasaki's Art of the Start
• Rob @ Businesspundit - The Art of the Start
• Steve Rucinski - GUY KAWASAKI: A Guide to Anyone Starting Anything

National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship List

The Public Forum Institute support an initiative called National Dialogue on Entreprenuership. In this week's newsletter, editor Mark Marich recommends 2004 titles "for entrepreneurs or fans of entrepreneurship":

• The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki


• I Can't Believe I Get Paid To Do This by Stacey Mayo


• The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid by C.K. Prahalad


• They Made America by Harold Evans


• The Empire of Wealth by John Steele Gordon


• Public Policy and Economics of Entrepreneurship edited by Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Harvey Rosen


• Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System is Endangering Innovation and Progress, and What To Do About It by Josh Lerner and Adam B. Jaffe


• Ivory Tower and Industrial Innovation: University-Industry Technology Transfer before and after the Bayh-Dole Act by David C. Mowery, Richard R. Nelson, Bhaven N. Sampat, and Arvids A. Ziedonis

[via smallbusinessceo]

Recommended Reading from today's WSJ

In Monday’s 11-29-04 WSJ Hector V. Barreto, Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration, recommends the following books to help start, fund and expand your small business.

Strategic Selling

Conceptual Selling
Both by Robert E. Miller and Stephen E. Heiman with Tad Tuleja.

What They Don’t Teach You At Harvard Business School
By Mark McCormack

Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive
By Harvey Mackay

The Spirit to Serve
By J. W. Marriott Jr. and Kathi Ann Brown

I think these titles are a good selection but my only issue with the selection is that the list is rather dated. I should come up with a better list and I will some time soon. BTW, my best of 2004 will be listed this week.

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

Art of the Start Pitchkit Ships today

Hi Everybody

We got our inventory of Guy's book today and will ship all the books and "sticks" today. We only have a few left of the pitchkits so order soon. Guy Kawasaki and us have created a fun package. Check it out.

Spooky Action

Mike DeWitt at Spooky Action is a pretty big fan of Jay Abraham's book Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got.

Catching Up

I am back in Brew City and trying to catch up.

To show you how far behind I am, I am going to point you to the Monday Special Section of the Wall Street Journal from two weeks. The topic was small business and there were a couple books that showed up. In the opening article Lessons of Success -- and Failure [sub. needed], there are quotes from two biz book authors:

...While these are problems [IRS, loss of financing, personal trouble of owner] that can plague any size firm, "for small businesses, there is simply less margin for error," says Dave Anderson, a leadership consultant in Agoura Hills, Calif., and recent author of Up Your Business.

Offense as Well as Defense

Meantime, doing things right -- as opposed to just avoiding pitfalls -- is equally critical to real success. From his vantage point, Mr. Anderson believes the enterprises that become great -- not just good -- are the ones that "keep the hunger and stay in attack mode even when they succeed," which, as he points out, "is against human nature." The leaders who prevail over the long haul, he says, don't become "immersed in paperwork" but rather stay in the trenches and keep innovating.

"You can't build a great company by memo or voice mail," Mr. Anderson says.

Patience, too, it seems, can separate winners and losers.

About two-thirds of new employer firms survive at least two years, according to the SBA, but only about half make it to four years. The fortitude it takes to keep plugging along in the early, lean years runs deep in survivors, says Doug Hall, host of Brain Brew Radio, a show about American entrepreneurs on Public Radio International [author of Jump Start Your Business Brain and Meaningful Marketing]. He believes that standing one's ground, even if failure seems imminent, can be the deciding factor in a business owner's ultimate success.

Overcoming Naysayers

"The challenge with entrepreneurs is that they don't stick with it," Mr. Hall says. "It takes too much energy because the naysayers are whispering, 'It doesn't work, it doesn't work.'"

However, at the end of the day, he suggests, the most important distinction between those who fail and succeed lies in the DNA of the original brainstorm. "To borrow a phrase: It's the idea, stupid," Mr. Hall says. "Did you have an idea that's meaningfully unique?" He believes the most thriving entrepreneurs are the so-called American dreamers -- the ones who see a void in American commerce and try to address it rather than haphazardly chasing any inspiration. For instance, the guy who can't find a printer cartridge on a weekend and is moved to open an office-supply store; or the entrepreneur who goes to a dirty theme park and decides he can do better. That, Mr. Hall suggests, is where the Staples and Disneys of the world originate.

"Money isn't the ultimate measure of their success" in the beginning, he says. "It's the fulfillment of their goal."

BTW, there is also a profile of Arthur Golden, author of Memiors of a Giesha, and his struggle with success.

The Partnership Charter

I have run across a great book. It happened quite unexpectedly. Jack sent me another box of books to look at and asked me to look at one in particular (mainly because of peristant calls from some PR folks). I wasn't very impressed with the cover art and the title The Partnership Charter didn't blow me out of my seat.

I opened the book anyway and started to read the first chapter called "The Rewards and Risks of Going Into Business Together". These three points struck me as I read through:

1. "Researchers from the Center for Study of Entrepreneurship at Marquette University investigated a sample of nearly two thousand companies and categorized the top performers as 'hypergrowth' companies and those at the bottom as low growth companies. Solo entreprenuers founded only 6% of the 'hypergrowth' companies. Partner founded a whopping 94%, and many of those had three or more founders."
2. "In a poll taken a few years ago, Inc. asked businesspeople if they thought partnerships were a bad idea. Two-thirds of the respondents said they were. When asked why, the majority said they disliked co-ownership because of the partners' 'inevitable conflicts' and 'unmet expectations'."
3. "Business school could teach students how to minimize the risk of partner disputes, but they do not. They are schools of business administration. They teach students how to run large companies. Although they have started to do a better job of teaching students how to be entrepreneurial , they teach next to nothing about how to be a partner...Because most business schools' graduates who start their own businesses will have real partners some day, the school's neglect is hard to fathom. But business schools are not the only schools with this gap in their curriculum. Medical schools train physicians without regard to the fact that the vast majority of their graduates will have to struggle sooner or later with partners. The same is true of other professional schools."

I think all of three of those are very compelling points. Entrepreneurs have a better chance of being successful if they partner with others, but many don't even consider it because of the potential problems. On top of that, there is no place where people are trained to work together well as partners.

That is where The Partnership Charter comes in. Author David Gage talks about everything from roles and titles to ownership issues to the importance of understanding personal styles. The most important chapter in my mind is one on scenario planning. Gage lays out questions that would be easy for one entrepreneur to answer, but could be a nightmare for three or five people to agree on. What happens if one partner hires a key employee whom the other partner(s) dislike(s)? What happens if the company receives an unsolicited buyout offer from a competitor? What happens if the partners decide to close the business and the company has nothing but debt?

I recommend this book for all entrepreneurs. After reading the book, I think more people will consider partnerships and if they do, The Partnership Charter will give them a blueprint for creating a successful one.

Brand Autopsy's Worthy and -less Reviews

Today, our friend John at Brand Autopsy posted Worthy Reads and Worthless Reads II.

His books include:

• It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be by Paul Arden
• How to Make Big Money in your Small Business by Jeffrey J. Fox
• UNSTUCK: A Tool for Yourself, Your Team, and Your World by Keith Yamashita & Sandra Spataro
• Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin
• Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley
• Ideas Are Free by Alan Robinson & Dean Schroeder
• The 18 Immutable Laws of Corporate Reputation by Ronald Alsop

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.