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Hardcover
288 pages
ISBN 9780060889579 Published Oct. 2009
William Morrow & Company
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Posted Feb. 5, 2010 2:49 p.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
➻ Today is the first birthday of what we call in the office "our book," The 100 Best Business Books of All Time by Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten. Todd wrote a happy birthday post for the book, and I gave away the last of the 100 best books we have to give away today on inBubbleWrap.
➻ The new issue of Portfolio's Business Beat is out. As usual, our dear Mr. Covert has his "Just Jack" corner. This month, he discusses Discovering the Soul of Service by Leonard Berry. You can read more about the other features of the latest Business Beat on The Portfolio Javelin.
➻ Kids these days... are apparently reading decent nonfiction. Superfreakonomics and What the Dog Saw both made The Chronicle of Higher Education's bestseller list.
➻ Jeannie Bliss, author of I Love You More Than My Dog, has just launched a slick new website.
➻ Our friend Stacie of The Boswellians wants you to read more foreign literature, and I'd like to help her sway you. After asking us to "Imagine if we had never read the words of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Albert Camus, Jorge Luis Borges, Anton Chekhov, Naguib Mahfouz, Vladimir Nabokov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Isabel Allende, or Leo Tolstoy," she points to the University of Rochester's Three Percent project, a resource for international literature. It's so named because that's the percentage of books published in the U.S. translated from foreign languages—three. If you’re ever in Milwaukee, you should stop in at Boswell and see their international literature display. In fact, you should come to Milwaukee just to do so.
➻ The Washington Post's Short Stack had a great guest post recently from Ray C. Anderson, author of Confessions of a Radical Industrialist. In it, he wrote:
It must be sacrilege to challenge the great man, but Milton Friedman was wrong. A generation of business people has grown up believing and following his mantra, "Business exists to make a profit."
Anderson then replaces that mantra with a new (not as catchy) one:
"Business makes a profit to exist, and must surely exist for some higher purpose,"
➻ If you're reading this blog, chances are you've been following the Macmillan and Amazon kerfuffle. One of the greatest things to come out of it was the ad stating that Atul Gawande's Checklist Manifesto is "Available at booksellers everywhere except Amazon." (picture from GalleyCat, who did a wonderful job chronicling the fight blow-by-blow.) It is not only hilarious, but a very serious challenge to Amazon's pricing model at the same exact time Apple is coming out with the iPad to challenge the Kindle. We haven't talked about the iPad at all here. If you're interested in it, I would highly suggest the discussion on last night's episode of Charlie Rose.
➻ Why? Why not?
Hudson Booksellers Best Books of 2009
Posted Nov. 23, 2009 9:13 a.m. by dylan
In General Business - 800 CEO Read Blog
If you travel often, you have probably bought a book from an airport bookstore. And, if so, chances are it was from Hudson Booksellers. Because they have so many people traveling on business visit their stores, they probably have a better idea of what is popular in the business genre than most retailers. And, lucky us, they've been releasing a "best books of the year" list the last few years which includes a business interest category. This years list is:
- The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times by Scott D. Anthony, Harvard Business Press
- What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell, Little Brown and Company
- Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner, William Morrow & Company
- Adland: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet by James P. Othmer, Doubleday
- Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell, Penguin Press
You can find the rest of this year's winners on Scribd (thanks again to GalleyCat for pointing the way), or find our coverage of the past two year's winners here: 2007 | 2008
Jack Covert Selects - Superfreakonomics
Posted Nov. 13, 2009 5:18 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner, William Morrow & Company, 288 pages, $29.99, Hardcover, November 2009, ISBN 9780060889579
This could be the shortest Jack Covert Selects ever: Great book; end of story; next!
Well, let me offer a little more information to help explain my enthusiasm. Levitt and Dubner are the authors of the international best selling Freakonomics, a book that transcended the business book genre because of its approachable economics lessons via quirky storytelling. Superfreakonomics is more of the same, but unlike most sequels, the same is quite welcome and can stand tall on its own merits.
First and foremost, Superfreakonomics offers more of Levitt and Dubner’s “read to the stranger in the seat next to you” stories. These stories make accessible rather arcane economic terms like “price discrimination” and “the principal-agent problem” and the examples used to illustrate these terms are fun, unexpected and memorable. Thumb through the chapters, “How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?” and “Why should suicide bombers buy life insurance?” and you’ll quickly get the picture.
No one can accuse Levitt and Dubner of playing it safe with their material. As well as using rather esoteric subject matter, they also tackle such topics as the often sensitive and still confounding issue of why women MBAs earn less than men. Ultimately, they discover that it may come down to the fact “that many women, even those with MBAs, love kids.” They explain that women MBAs with children work 24 percent fewer hours than men (this after experiencing the obvious job discontinuity that comes with having a child) and that this slows down their career trajectory.
The authors’ also argue, rather convincingly, that it is safer to drive drunk than to walk home from the bar—with the obvious caveat that “a drunk walker isn’t likely to hurt or kill anyone other than her- or himself.” Using government statistics, they find that on a per-mile basis, “a drunk walker is eight times more likely to get killed than a drunk driver.”
They’ve taken the most heat (no pun intended) from environmentalists for suggesting that we can possibly “geoengineer” our way out of global warming, and challenging the dogma that reducing emissions is the only way to save the planet. Uncomfortable deductions? Yes. But you won’t soon forget them and they will certainly make you look at what principles fuel our culture a bit differently.
As with Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner use sharp analysis, unpredictable stories and discomforting deductions to enlighten (and delight) readers. The authors have also done something that is very hard to do: they have created a second book that is as good, if not better than, the first one.
