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ISBN 9780061763274 Published May 2010
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Posted Oct. 15, 2010 10:51 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
➻ Last week, I pointed you to early reviews of "One of the finest books of the year ... Steven Johnson’s Where Good Idea Come From." If you followed that link, you may have found The Economist's review of the book, Well, what a good idea!. And, if you did, you discovered another one of the best books to be released this year (or any year), Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants. Both of them were Jack Covert Selects this month, and both are absolutely essential reading. Seth Godin thinks Kelly's is The book of the year, saying that "If there's justice, it will win the Pulitzer Prize."
➻ Besides thinking that Kevin Kelly deserves a Pulitzer Prize, Seth Godin wonders, What does "pro-business" mean? After dispelling some oft-pronounced answers to that question as "pro-factory policies," short-sighted, backward-looking, anti-solutions. He writes:
Perhaps we could see pro-business strategies looking more like this:
- Investing in training the workforce to solve interesting problems, so they can work at just about any job.
- Maintaining infrastructure, safety and civil rights so we can create a community where talented people and the entrepreneurs who hire them (two groups that can live wherever they choose) would choose to live there.
- Reward and celebrate the scientific process that leads to scalable breakthroughs, productivity and a stable path to the future.
- Spend community (our) money on services and infrastructure that help successful organizations and families thrive.
Once you’ve seen how difficult it is to start a thriving business in a place without clean water, fast internet connections and a stable government of rational laws, it’s a lot harder to take what we’ve built for granted.
This is one of the longest posts Seth has written lately and I imagine he could go on for a great deal longer on the issue.
➻ If you'd like to read more about Where Good Idea Come From before you pick it up, Salon's Michael Humphrey interviewed him this week. From that interview:
MH: Why don't you agree with the notion that most good ideas come from epiphanies?
SJ: What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else. Their concepts take time to develop and incubate and sit around in the back of their minds sometimes for decades. It's cobbled together from other people's ideas and other people's technologies and other people's innovations. It's a remixed version of something.
Read more about howEpiphanies are overrated over at Salon.
➻ Jonathan Fields, blogger-extraordinaire and author of Career Renegade, posted an interview he did with Lisa Gansky today. Lisa Gansky is the author of The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing, a great new book in the tradition of books like The Long Tail and Wikinomics—that is, a book documenting a paradigm shift in the ways technological connectivity is reshaping business. Though the interview is somewhat short, it is what you'd expect from such intelligent people—an in-depth exploration of the topic characterized by poignant questions that are answered in paragraph form, not talking points or soundbites. Here is one exchange:
JF: People have been forming buy groups, sharing rent, running collective farms and organic food coops for generations. Is that meshing, too, and if so how is it different than what you’re talking about?
LG: In many ways it is ‘meshing 1.0’. Sharing is at the heart of all the examples you suggest. Yet, one important aspect of the Mesh which is not necessarily incorporated into the types of businesses you mention is using the data and partnership opportunities inherent in Mesh business models. These data (generated from the company directly or shared via partnerships), provides a company with the capacity to see the customer more clearly.
You can see where she is heading, physically and technologically, to ensure that you are able to continue to delight her. For example, RentTheRunway, ThredUp and Swapaholics each specialize in providing clothing to their customers without the need to ‘own’ the wardrobe. Second-hand shops have been around for a long time. What makes these three Mesh fashion businesses different is that they are web based (which expands their reach and convenience to the customer), they actively create partnerships, and they use data.
They also are experimenting with a variety of business models, giving them far more ability to define and refine their offers to customers, evolve their service, and delight customers and customers’ friends—aka, future customers!
Head over to the original posting, The Mesh: Business Revolution or Shiny Object? to read more.
➻ If you're interested in what the businesses of the future will look like, you may want to join Karie Willyerd, co-author of The 2020 Workplace, for a one-hour webinar next Tuesday.
➻ Ahmad Jamal, Vindicated. That's the verdict from Francis Davis at The Village Voice.
Progress or Paper Ceiling?
Posted Sept. 29, 2010 3:53 a.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
In the 2008 edition of our annual year-in-review, In the Books, I wrote an essay titled: "For Women Only? A Look at Trends in Business Books Written by Women." It's a topic that always intrigues me. Business has historically been a men's racket. Powerful women in business have been anomalies. This is not news to anyone. The tides are slowly changing, and while there are plenty of discrepancies that remain between the roles and the pay that women in business receive versus their male peers, high paid-high profile women in business are no longer so much of a surprise. This changing landscape is reflected in the number of business books published that are written by women.
In 2008, I was inspired by the male-centric best sellers lists to take a look at why female business authors were not having more success at the top of the charts. I asked the question: "Is there truly a paper ceiling that hinders if not blocks a woman from being a successful business writer? And if so, where does the fault lie for this discrepancy? Authors? Audience? Publishers? Society?" Since then, I have kept an eye out for new books written for and by and about women to see how they are presented and how they are selling. My co-workers, knowing my interest in the subject, drop new books on my desk periodically. As a result, I've developed quite a pile on my desk that demands some handling, and inspires me to do some recommending.
First, I checked out our Inc./8CR best seller list, and am happy to say that women authors (writing general business books) are enjoying some success! Our number one book for the month of August was The Corporate Lattice: Achieving High Performance in the Changing World of Work by Cathleen Benko and Molly Anderson. Coming in at #5 is Different by Youngme Moon and Lynn Carruthers. At #13 is The Right Fight: How Great Leaders Use Healthy Conflict to Drive Performance, Innovation, and Value by Saj-Nicole Joni and Damon Beyer. #15 is The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow's Employees Today by Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd.
To me, the success of the authors above indicates that women authors are slowly breaking through the paper ceiling I suspect has long limited authors and their publishers from thinking ambitiously about the size (and yes, gender) of audience their ideas can attract. But full integration of women in business at all levels is the goal and a number of books that have come out on the topic over the past 6 months or so indicates that we still have a ways to go.
If you've followed our blog regularly or read The Keen Thinker newsletter, you've probably had a chance to read the review of The Female Vision our owner, Carol Grossmeyer, wrote, declaring the book, "important for women who, after reading, will not only feel less alone as I did, but will find a helpful guide to begin tapping into their “real power at work;” and important for men who want to help create an environment for their female colleagues and employees to create and contribute their best work." This book is an example of a subset of books that have recently come out championing the value women's unique abilities bring to the workplace. In The Female Vision, authors Helgesen and Johnson (as well as Marshall Goldsmith, who introduces the book), warn that by turning a blind eye toward the needs of female employees (e.g. alternative work schedules) or their skills (e.g. a more broad-minded and less tunnel-focused approach to problem-solving), businesses deny themselves access to talent and growth.
Another book that tackles the same topic is How Women Mean Business: A Step by Step Guide to Profiting from Gender Balanced Business Author Avivah Wittenberg-Cox's book argues that "[a]ll the evidence shows that balance leads to more innovation and better business performance -- after all, women are most of the market and much of the talent." This book is geared directly toward leaders who want to transform their companies into more balanced organizations with Wittenberg-Cox's four steps to change: Audit, Awareness, Align and Sustain.
Coming at the issue from a slightly different direction is Lynn Cronin and Howard Fine's Damned If She Does, Damned If She Doesn't Rethinking the Rules of the Game That Keep Women from Succeeding in Business. "The corporate system--the way the business world operates--generates rules of behavior that create common guidelines for what is acceptable and what is not. These basic, respected rules of business work well for men but can inadvertently create paradoxes that put women in no-win situations and limit their opportunity to succeed in a manner comparable to men."
For Cronin and Fine (as well as Helgesen and Johnson, and Wittenburg-Cox), progress for women in business has stalled, and they are determined to reengineer the corporation to allow women to break through. Really, these books are for a gender-neutral audience, for all people who are interested in bringing in--and keeping--the best talent. In this next grouping of books, the authors lean toward guiding women executives and strivers themselves toward becoming more effective instead of concentrating on organizational change.
In December of 2009, Selena Rezvani brought us The Next Generation of Women Leaders: What You Need to Lead but Won't Learn in Business School which "encourages younger women to be their own advocates when it comes to professional growth and advancement, and it provides tangible how-tos on negotiating the workplace as a woman." This is a good primer for maneuvering through the first few years of employment and promotion.
High Octane Women: How Superachievers Can Avoid Burnout by Dr. Sherrie Bourg Carter comes out in November. Basing her approach on the greater number of women in leadership roles, Bourg Carter, a psychologist, echoes some of the concerns in The Female Vision, that many women in executive positions turn their backs on their careers, deciding a corner office simply isn't worth it. She strives to answer the question: "What causes them to give up, melt down, or just walk away when they seem to have it all? And more important, what can be done to prevent it?"
In a similar vein, Wander Woman: How High-Achieving Women Find Contentment and Direction by Marcia Reynolds, looks at the root causes for why women leave jobs and become "wander women," looking for greater satisfaction, trying to solve their restlessness by moving on, even when success has been or can be achieved. "Reynolds helps wander women understand the roots of their restlessness and make their wandering a conscious strategy, not a reaction."
Most people think of Sun Tzu's The Art of War to be aggressive and Machiavellian, but conflict was not the message The Art of War was meant to encourage. So Chin-ning Chu wrote The Art of War for Women: It's About the Art, Not the War. Chu clarifies, "It is a set of strategic thinking skills designed to help you achieve your objective in the most efficient way possible." This is particularly helpful for women, Chu asserts, because "[a]s intelligent and accomplished as we may be, there are very few of us who are comfortable with either direct confrontation or situations where our triumph means someone else's defeat. We are natural negotiators and problem solvers; most of us prefer win-win situations to winner-takes-all."
And for a picture of how a woman who has, one supposes, mastered all of the above situations, Meg Whitman, former president and CEO of eBay, has written The Power of Many: Values for Success in Business and in Life. And really, Whitman's book brings us full circle back to the points brought up in The Female Vision. Whitman based much of her decision-making on trust, not a strategy usually promoted in business schools. In her book, she encourages listening, teamwork and flexibility: strengths that women often bring to the table and should always be encouraged to use to their advantage.
***
I'm sure the above list of books is an imperfect one, with many other great new books by women authors available for both the innovative organization and the women who continue to swim upstream against a tide of conventionality--and I'd love to hear about them if you've got any recommendations. But the reality is, despite the stack of books that has gathered on my desk, the progress women authors have made into the upper echelon of best selling business books doesn't put them in the majority: a glance at this month's New York Times best seller list for business hardcovers shows no women authors (or even coauthors) at all. Perhaps the paper ceiling is still well in place.
International Best Selling Books: June 2010
Posted July 15, 2010 3:48 a.m. by the-roy
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
Summer may be the time for hitting the beach, visiting those in-laws or just plain relaxing in the shade, but that doesn't keep our customers from opening up a good book while doing so! Here's what people everywhere were reading this past June from 8CR's International Best Selling Book Listing!
FRANCE: Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently by Gregory Berns
BELGUIM: Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality by Scott Belsky
The NETHERLANDS: Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath
SPAIN: Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business by Erik Qualman
SOUTH KOREA: The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow's Employees Today by Jeanne C. Meister and Karie Willyerd
So, find yourself a good hammock, an ice cold drink of choice and tune out those relatives with one (or all) of these offerings.
Happy July, Everyone!
