Featured authors of books we've talked about include:

• Randy Pausch, author of The Last Lecture
  I'm sure you've heard of Randy's moving lecture on following childhood dreams, teamwork and his time at Disney. If not, check it out. It was the basis for this book.
• Sir Richard Branson, Virgin founder and daredevil
• Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia

Lots more over at TIME, including one to come by The Office star Steve Carell. Enjoy!

Why do you think there aren't more influential women business thinkers on today's list? How can this change? If you're a man, would you be motivated hearing a female speaker? If no, why? If yes, who? Women, what about you?

These aren't easy questions to answer, but not for lack of examples or role models. A few of the names mentioned in the comments include author Laura Ries (co-founder of Ries & Ries, with her father, Al Ries), co-author of Blue Ocean Strategy Renee Mauborgne, prominent gender and workplace issues expert Sylvia Ann Hewlett, strategic sourcing expert Mary Lacity, and others.

A question I might add is, Why does it take lots of time and a historical perspective to give women the credit they deserve? Perhaps the issue isn't that there is a lack of influential women thinkers, but that we're all--men and women alike--still uncomfortable with acknowledging their influence. We can admit that female leaders of the past made a profound impact on our society; why not the leaders of today?

In our line of work, we encounter this issue over and over again. Why aren't more women business book authors? Why don't their books hit the big-time like Gladwell, Friedman, and Hamel's books? (All made the top 5.) And, perhaps more constructively, what will it take for us to issue women the same credit we quickly hand over to male business gurus?

Who do you count among the most influential women thinkers of today?

And while it’s overblown to compare him with Shakespeare as a canon of world literature, reading Drucker invariably triggers a sense of executive déjà vu. His ideas feel so familiar compared with every major business idea that has come upon the scene…since his work. As the Economist says, “The biggest problem with evaluating Mr. Drucker’s influence is that so many of his ideas have passed into conventional wisdom—in other words, he is the victim of his own success.�

The intellectual debt to Drucker dwarfs that of the US trade deficit. Case in point: I’m re-reading The Effective Executive, which contains the key ideas of Brian Tracy, The One-Minute Manager, and much of David Allen, for starters. And there in chapter five, “First Things First,� which deals with prioritizing, Drucker riffs on the need for companies to make brutal strategic choices when pursuing opportunity. His assertion that “in business the successful companies are not those that work at developing new products for their existing line but those that aim at innovating new technologies or new businesses� basically sets the table for the works of Clay Christensen, Adrian Slywotzky, Chris Zook, and Blue Ocean Strategy, to name a few. And catch this gem from his brief intro to My Years with General Motors: “Leadership is not charisma. It is not public relations. It is not showmanship. It is performance, consistent behavior, trustworthiness.� Searching for A Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs anyone?

Unfortunately there’s been some backlash to the myriad Drucker tributes that have appeared over the past few weeks (I’m not going to link to them). Essentially, a few folks have complained about the sentimentality of some of the tributes, while others have argued that if Drucker was so influential, more people would be benefiting from his ideas today.

Point one rebuttal. Yes, many folks are verklempt about Drucker’s passing, even those who never met him. But why gripe about his ability to spark a personal response? I always admired Drucker for more than his ideas; his life was instructive and inspiring as well. Peter Drucker was a rare business guru who actually lived according to the powerful principles he counseled to others. It’s hard enough to articulate a set of ideas that help other people get things done in the world, and tougher still to find a way for them to take root. And yet those accomplishments are mere training wheels compared to the X Games bicycle stunt competition of actually living by the ideals you preach. The lifecycle of consultancies fueled by fads is about as short and heated as Vinnie “the Microwave� Johnson’s hot spells for the Detroit Pistons. For a number of very good reasons, when it comes to the world of management thinking and consulting, genius doesn’t scale. The think tanks preaching speed-to-market take twice as long as others to produce articles and books; the guru preaching flat organizations creates companies with more job titles than your basic film credits. There’s rarely much intellectual alignment between great business ideas and the secular practice of spreading these principles, let along living them.

That’s where Drucker taught by example. He wasn’t just productive, he was effective. He didn’t do things or projects, he got results. And he realized them on a massive scale by communicating his ideas to people who applied them powerfully. He focused his time and energy on what he did best. Simple and sensible, and yet so difficult. My current hero in this regard is Jim Collins, who makes a conscious effort to apply this ideas to his life (that’s a subject for another post.)

Finally, to reply to folks who gripe that Drucker should have been more influential. Bunk. The barriers to excellence here have nothing to do with the quality of his thinking or the way he delivered it. To paraphrase a guy I already cited, the fault, dear brute, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

In December of 1994, I pulled up to Peter Drucker’s house in my rental car. I rechecked the address because the house just didn’t seem big enough. It was a nice house in a neighborhood near the Claremont Colleges, bordered tightly by similar suburban houses, with two small Toyotas parked in the drive. It would have been a perfect, modestly proportioned home for a professor from the local college. But I wasn’t looking for a professor from the local college; I was looking for Peter Drucker—the leading founder of the field of management, the most influential management thinker in the second half of the twentieth century, the founding father of the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management...

it continues here...

We'll have a lot to say next week about his contribution to business and management next week.

Here are articles from Bloomberg Press and the LA Times.

Innovation = Easy. (True.)
(Message: Hang out with Freaks!)

About the book's background:
When Tom Peters turned 60, he reflected upon his life and compiled a list of 60 things he believed (TIB = "This I Believe"). Sixty is the full-color compilation of these 60 TIBS available only at the WOW!Store for a limited time. Check out Tom Peters' blog for more about the book.

An afternoon quote from Sixty:

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it. --Michaelangelo

I enjoyed it so much that I may just borrow Jack's copy for my coffee table.

1. This is the business book equivalent of related short stories. It's not one concept over-sold in 300 pages, it's 11 short stories of approx. 20 pages each. In some you will dog-ear 10-pages, in others just 1 or 2, but you'll never be bored.
2. The book is filled with mini-chapters (even shorter stories) these cover topics from presentation, which I disagreed with, to better email use. These chapters alone are worth the price of admission.
3. Guy Kawasaki writes really well, my favorite line in the book, "I'd rather be poor than play golf." Hell yeah!

Don't take my word for it though, head off to ChangeThis and download Guy's Art of the Start manifesto, or just watch this clip of Guy speaking, these will give you an idea of what your in for, but I personally can't recommend it enough.

Last word: Outstanding

In an interview I did with Block for Management Consulting News, I asked him to elaborate on the traits of an authentic consultant, one of the key concepts in his book. Block replied that, “Authentic behavior is simply the willingness to be who you are and to tell the truth. This is the consultant’s most powerful tool for building client trust and commitment. Many consultants try to be too clever in communicating with their clients, seeking to convince clients to their point of view.”

Thanks for the feedback. Block’s book is a classic.

You’ll get more than a bargain from these classics. If you’re in any professional services business, make sure these books are in your library.

George Leonard: Mastery
David Maister, Charles Green, Robert Galford: The Trusted Advisor
Mick Cope: The Seven Cs of Consulting
Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen: Difficult Conversations
Andrew Weil, M.D.: Eight Weeks to Optimum Health
Barbara Minto: The Minto Pyramid Principle
Philip Kotler Ph.D.: Marketing Professional Services
William Zinsser: On Writing Well
Nick Morgan: Working the Room

I just got a galley. I'll let you know my thoughts next week.

Book: Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters to Get Things Right
Authors: Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan
Reviewer: johnmoore (from the Brand Autopsy blog)

Does Confronting Reality suffer from sequelitis?

I ask because a few years back Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan co-authored Execution, a business book best seller that focused on execution being THE critical element between strategic plans and their tactical outcomes. But now, the authors have come to the understanding that baking realism into a company’s business plan is more important than execution in achieving effective results.

In essence, Confronting Reality is a sequel to Execution and as with most sequels ... this sequel is not near as good as the original.

A better title for this book would have been, “Confronting Reality: A Guide for CEOs by CEOs” as Bossidy and Charan have written a book which will appeal more to E-level business professionals of Fortune 100 companies than to aspiring entrepreneurs, high potential middle-managers, or energetic sole proprietors.

In Confronting Reality, Bossidy and Charan claim, “… the greatest consistent damage to businesses and their owners is the result not of poor management technique but of the failure, sometimes willful, to confront reality.” And so, the authors set forth to teach executives how to bake reality into their business plans by showing them how not to misread external realities, internal realities, and financial targets.

One of the problems I have with this book is Bossidy and Charan spend too much time talking theoretically and not enough time talking tactically. (This non-MBAer could not relate to the majority of insight-through-hindsight case study examples referenced by the authors.) Another issue I have is the length of Confronting Reality. Sure it is less than 300 pages, but I think that the topic could have been covered more succinctly and with greater impact as a whiz-bang ten page Harvard Business Review article and not as book.

Now, if you make it to chapter 12 of Confronting Reality, you’ll discover a book inside the book. In this chapter titled, “Leading for Reality,” the authors take companies to task for valuing the wrong skill sets of their executives. Bossidy and Charan write,

“They (executives) advance because they’re articulate. They have good presentation skills and communicate well. They have (to use a word headhunters love) ‘heft’ – meaning the energy and forcefulness to bull their way through opposition and prevail. They’ve got vision, perseverance, the ability to motivate and inspire, and good track records.

Such people are usually indeed talented and hardworking. They just may not have what it takes for leadership today. They’ve advanced on the basis of past performance but haven’t been tested for their business savvy or their ability to anticipate and deal with new and disruptive business conditions. Companies won’t fully succeed in confronting reality until they make a priority of revising their leadership criteria.”

Good stuff, eh? I wish the other passages in the book were as tasty as that one. But unfortunately, that’s not the case. Ugh.

Hmm… maybe Bossidy and Charan need to confront reality and reexamine the purpose, the direction, and the execution of Confronting Reality.

Our friends at Fast Company have weighed in with an interesting article on strategy. Great "rubber meets the road" stories about strategies that are getting traction in the real world.