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Posted Dec. 14, 2011 8:09 a.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
One of the most fascinating trends to follow in business literature is the continual expansion of what a business book actually is. The parameters have widened significantly from the influential management and theory books of the 1980s. While there are still books made available each year on such practical matters as team building, developing a social media strategy, making a new hire, and sensible budgeting, there are also a great number of books that study decision-making from a neuroscience angle or theorize about how social and environmental influences affect human behavior. Malcolm Gladwell is a pioneer of this type of book.
In The 100 Best Business Books of All Time review of The Tipping Point, Jack writes:
The Tipping Point is the type of book that helps us make sense of the world around us. It is a practical, nonacademic guide to the social epidemics going on around us, and perhaps to how we might take advantage of them. As people try to stay in step with a rapidly evolving business landscape, they are turning to journalistic books that bring the big picture into focus, like Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat, Gladwell's next book, Blink, and Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's Freakonomics. Not only is the context broader, but the writing is significantly better than in traditional business books. The Tipping Point is the book that started this trend, perhaps its own epidemic, and continues to carry the banner as the best.
And "the best" it nearly is. In our compilation of six years of data* from Nielsen BookScan of the 10 top selling business books, The Tipping Point comes in second (behind the aforementioned Friedman title.) Gladwell's Blink? Well, it is 3rd on the list. It may only be a matter of time before Gladwell's 2008 book, Outliers, makes the list.
If it has been awhile since you've revisited Gladwell's writing, or you'd like to introduce someone to it, now all three of Gladwell's outstanding books are available in a new boxed set from Hachette, just in time to be the perfect gift for the business thinker in your life.
*1/4/04-11/14/10
Friday Links
Posted Feb. 11, 2011 1:53 p.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
➻ McSweeney's offered Some Good News from the World of Books this week:
The good news is that there isn't as much bad news as popularly assumed. In fact, almost all of the news is good, and most of it is very good. Book sales are up, way up, from twenty years ago. Young adult readership is far wider and deeper than ever before. Library membership and circulation is at all-time high. The good news goes on and on.
And the good news does indeed go on and on, with reports on the state of libraries, the state of book production, and the state of global literacy, and more reports planned.
➻ As is evidenced once again in his story of When Irish Eyes Are Crying in Vanity Fair, nobody distills in writing the sweeping economic history involved in a moment better than Michael Lewis:
Ireland’s regress is especially unsettling because of the questions it raises about Ireland’s former progress: even now no one is quite sure why the Irish suddenly did so well for themselves in the first place. Between 1845 and 1852, during the Great Potato Famine, the country experienced the greatest loss of population in world history—in a nation of eight million, a million and a half people left. Another million starved to death or died from the effects of hunger. Inside of a decade the nation went from being among the most densely populated in Europe to the least. The founding of the Irish state, in 1922, might have offered some economic hope—they could now have their own central bank, their own economic policies—but right up until the end of the 1980s the Irish failed to do what economists expected them to: catch up with their neighbors’ standard of living. As recently as the 1980s one million Irish people—a third of the population—lived below the poverty line.
What has occurred in Ireland since then is without precedent in economic history. By the start of the new millennium, the Irish poverty rate was under 6 percent and by 2006 Ireland was one of the richest countries in the world. How did that happen? A bright young Irishman who got himself hired by Bear Stearns in the late 1990s and went off to New York or London for five years returned feeling poor. For the better part of a decade there has been quicker money to be made in Irish real estate than in investment banking. How did that happen?
For the first time in history, people and money longed to get into Ireland rather than out of it.
I really wish he would write a book about baseball.
➻ So, I don't know if any of you out there watched the Super Bowl last Sunday (I know Americans aren't that into it), but Wisconsin's own Green Bay Packers football squadron won the contest. Now, I was raised a Bear fan in Packer territory, so this didn't feel like as much like a personal triumph to me as it did to so many others in our fine state, but I was definitely pulling for them (sorry, Dad). And I was pulling for them not only because I knew that many of my friends and coworkers would have been devastated by a loss, but also (and maybe more importantly) because, with the prospect of an impending NFL owner's lockout of its players, Green Bay offers a different way to do business. You see, Green Bay doesn't have an owner, they have 112,158 owners—people who own at least one share of Green Bay Packers Inc., the nonprofit behind the team. Commenting on Those Non-Profit Packers in The New Yorker on January 25th, Dave Zirin wrote:
The Packers’ unique setup has created a relationship between team and community unlike any in the N.F.L. Wisconsin fans get to enjoy the team with the confidence that their owner won’t threaten to move to Los Angeles unless the team gets a new mega-dome. Volunteers work concessions, with sixty per cent of the proceeds going to local charities. Even the beer is cheaper than at a typical N.F.L. stadium. Not only has home field been sold out for two decades, but during snowstorms, the team routinely puts out calls for volunteers to help shovel and is never disappointed by the response. It doesn’t matter how beloved the Cowboys are in Dallas; if Jerry Jones ever put out a call for free labor, he’d be laughed out of town.
Here are the Packers: financially solvent, competitive, and deeply connected to the hundred thousand person city of Green Bay. It’s a beautiful story ...
It certainly is, even to a Bear fan.
➻ Of course, being a Bear fan, I feel I should link to an interview from Weekend Edition on Scorecasting: Saying Sports Cliches Ain't So. The book was written by Tobias J. Moskowitz, behavioral economist and professor of finance at the University of Chicago, and L. Jon Werthem, senior writer for Sports Illustrated. The authors debunk some widely accepted sports myth, like "the hot hand," and talked in the interview about why the Bears shouldn't have punted the ball so much in their NFC Championship game against the Packers weeks ago:
[T]hey were ... in Green Bay territory around the 40-yard line or so—can't kick a field goal from there. Fourth, I think, and a couple of yards, three or four yards, and, of course, they punt. Now, what happens when they punt? The most likely outcome, which is exactly what did happen, is it went into the end zone and the Packers got it at the 20. So, they gained something like 15 yards for giving up on fourth down, versus going for it. Even if they had failed, they would have been only slightly worse off—15 yards. And they had a very good chance, perhaps, of making it and prolonging that drive. And those are things that can be difference makers.
Everybody's calling Scorecasting the Freakonomics of sports, including Freakonomics coauthor Steven D. Levitt, who calls it "the closest thing to Freakonomics ... since the original." If you can't, or don't feel like listening to the interview, you can find the transcript online.
➻ Also on NPR last week, on At Issue with Ben Merens, were 800-CEO-READ's Jo[h]ns—Covert and Mueller—discussing the best business books of 2010, why we chose Rework as the best, and taking questions from listeners. To my knowledge, there is no transcript of the interview, but you can listen to an MP3 file of the program.
➻ Grace Bonny of Design*Sponge has a really good take on online etiquette and ethics, and she's put her views into two very thoughtful posts recently: Part 1: Comments (Good and Bad), Copying/Stealing and Crediting and Part 2: Submissions, Sponsorship, Giveaways & Freebies. Called the "Martha Stewart Living for the Millennials" by the New York Times the site mostly covers DIY craft and design, but the issues discussed in the posts are universally relevant to anyone selling or promoting anything online. (Tip of the hat to Faythe Levine for pointing me to the story on Twitter.)
➻ You must give more than you take away.
Friday Links
Posted April 16, 2010 9:35 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
➻ Justin Fox, author of The Myth of the Rational Market, pondered Improving the Let's-Persuade-Business-to-Improve Movement in a recent Harvard Business Review post. There's a lot of folks out there writing about we can persuade business and those in it to behave more ethically, but Fox thinks its still a hard sell:
I don't think anyone has come up with an argument for or description of better business behavior that has anything like the elegance and power of the economists' "incentives matter."
He ends, understandably, on a slightly defeated note, writing: "Clearly, I'm stuck here. Can somebody help me out?" Umair Haque, his colleague at HBR tried to answer his call for help, making The Case for Being Disruptively Good, arguing for the forces of information, discipline, competition, disruption and rule-making. He writes:
So why don't more businesses see these forces? It's the wrong question. The right one is: because there will be some organizations that are quicker to get it than others, what do the forces above mean for the economy? Well, they suggest that businesses who can do more good will survive, thrive, and prosper — and those who do more bad will stumble, falter, and fall.
I think he's definitety right, but he is taking a pretty long view of history when he writes: "Yesterday, the global economy was built on debtors' prisons, usury, expropriation, colonialism, and slavery. Today, it isn't." and "Yet even two hundred years from now, I'm sure incumbents will ask—what, you want us to do more good? And then, as ever, from under their patrician noses, revolutionaries who can do better will disrupt them." And while Umair's language speaks to me, I don't know if it is as catchy as "incentives matter" to those marching off to Wall Street. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
➻ Richard Florida also takes a longer view in his works about the creative class—such as The Rise of the Creative Class—and he has a great new book coming out in May called The Great Reset. You can get a taste of the book in his March article in The Atlantic, How the Crash Will Reshape America, or by reading his recent interview with Conor Clarke for the same magazine.
➻ Portfolio has posted a new issue of The Business Beat. Featured this month are Peter Escher, author of The MBA Oath, Michael O'Malley, author of The Wisdom of Bees, and, as always, our own peerless leader Jack Covert in his Just Jack corner. Jack discusses Po Bronson's What Should I Do With My Life, one of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time and a close second (in my mind) to Studs Terkel's Working as the best book of interviews ever created about work.
➻ Speaking of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, you can now read it in Indonesian.* Muhammad Mishbah penned a review for Seputar Indonesia Daily writing:
Books 100 Best Business Books of All Time provides 100 units with a discussion of book selection of different problems. This book is like a "dictionary" of business books that point us in order to save time, money and energy before seeking appropriate books.
(Shakes fist at Google Translate.)
*This applies only to those of you that can actually read Indonesian.
➻ Peter Elkind's new book, Rough Justice: The Rise and fall of Eliot Spitzer, is embargoed until next Tuesday, but you can get a preview at Fortune, blessed as they were with an an exclusive excerpt. "'Is there a way to wire money where it's not evident that it's coming from me?' the governor asked."
➻ The Web Designer Depot posted a great overview of Scott Belsky's Making Ideas Happen by Cameron Chapman. He writes "Making Ideas Happen is an excellent resource for those of us who have no shortage of ideas but often have a hard time seeing those ideas through to completion." That is everyone I know, including me and probably you.
➻ Roger C. Parker has a novel idea: Learn to write a business book by studying 800-CEO-READ’s Top 25 Business Books.
➻ "Some people seem to think life is all about the I, and the Me, Me, Me." The WePad begs to differ. (HT to Siobhan O’Leary at Publishing Perspectives.)
➻ Following the Freakonomics trend, America's finest news source, The Onion, reported recently that "last month's quarter-inch drop in height among Mexican dead-lift competitors in the middle-heavyweight division could spell disaster for GE's aviation and software subsidiaries." "But, like anything else, a shrewd investor must always ask himself one thing: How many hot dogs did I eat last year?"
➻ I'll ask her someday.
Friday Links
Posted April 2, 2010 11:19 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
➻ Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, is "here to report: Book tours are not dead." Not here, precisely, but over at Powell's blog.
➻ Eoin Purcell believes "Publishers should be platform agnostic," and explained why in a Publishing Perspectives article earlier this week: E-books are a Cul-de-sac.
➻ Roger Lowenstein's The End of Wall Street hasn't gotten the buzz it probably deserves yet, which Janet Maslin began to remedy in the New York Times book section recently, writing:
It is a complex but imaginative book, an especially useful piece of the jigsaw puzzle that current Wall Street books are busy creating.
The author has documented economic history before in When Genius Failed, one of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. His new book will be out next week, and if you liked Too Big to Fail or The Big Short, you'll appreciate Lowenstein's addition to the genre.
➻ Harvey Mackay, author of Swim With the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive (also one of the 100 Best) showed up on Larry King Live recently with some great advice on how to break through an overcrowded job market and get noticed (and maybe even hired).
If you like what he has to say in the interview, his new book, Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door, delves into the issues more deeply and intimately and, as Larry King says "there isn't a more important book out." Now, Larry King is no stranger to hyperbole, but that remark is spot on for so many Americans right now, and it's great to see him spread the gospel of Mackay. If you want to find out how to network without being annoying, check out Part 2 of the King interview or head over to harveymackay.com.
➻ Jon has tried to convince a few of us in the office that Kell on Earth is worth watching. I respond with a quote from a recent interview with Ms. Cutrone in Inc. Magazine:
I think one of the greatest gifts for me professionally and for my clients was to learn the word “no.”
➻ I'm really looking forward to diving into the advance copy of Mark Frauenfelder's Made by Hand that showed up here recently. You'll here more from us on it eventually, but if you can't wait, you can whet your appetite on this week's Treehugger review. And if you're interested in a different DIY project, such as say a college education, check out Salon's interview with Anya Kamenetz, author of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education.
➻ There is one more interview I want to point you to this weekend (or whenever you can get to it)—Michael Bungay Stanier interviewing Matt May.
➻ Walter S. Mossberg was amazingly able to review the iPad without chopping vegetables with it.
➻ Freakonomics the movie? Yep.
➻ Aaron isn't going to like it, but I've got nothing else, and the rest of the gang has already left for Conference Room H for a week-ending beer or four. So, here is Milwaukee's own, Juniper Tar. (This goes out to Shawn, Nancy and Mack.)
Matthew May's Five Books That Defined the Decade
Posted Jan. 14, 2010 3:49 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
In Pursuit of Elegance author Matthew May reads around 200 books a year. That means he's read approximately 2000 books since the year 2000. Of those, he has picked five that he feels defined the last decade, writing "these 'big idea' books stand out because not only did they help us better understand the world, they gave us a new lens through which to view it."
- The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization by Thomas Friedman
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malclom Gladwell
- Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself by Daniel Pink
- 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
- Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner
Though you're picks may look slightly different, it's a difficult list to argue with, and one I like all the more due to the fact that—as Jack and Todd did in the 100 Best Business Books of All Time—he eschewed Friedman's more popular The World is Flat for The Lexus and the Olive Tree.
To read more about why May chose these books, head over to the original post: Five Books That Defined the Decade.
