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Posted March 26, 2010 11:07 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
➻ If you haven't read Texts Without Contexts, Michiko Kakutani's piece from last Sunday's New York Times yet, I can't recommend it highly enough. It's almost counter to the point of the story to quote an excerpt, but I am going to anyway:
Now, with the ubiquity of instant messaging and e-mail, the growing popularity of Twitter and YouTube, and even newer services like Google Wave, velocity and efficiency have become even more important. Although new media can help build big TV audiences for events like the Super Bowl, it also tends to make people treat those events as fodder for digital chatter. More people are impatient to cut to the chase, and they’re increasingly willing to take the imperfect but immediately available product over a more thoughtfully analyzed, carefully created one. Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite—never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.
Now go read the entire article.
➻ Michael Mace wrote a very lengthy, veritable dissertation on the subject of The future of publishing: Why ebooks failed in 2000, and what that means for 2010. It's certainly the most in depth analysis of the situation that I've read. But, being a lover of short stories, there's one possibility he raises that really struck me:
Short fiction is a great fit for e-readers because it can be consumed in small bites, and if authors could sell directly to their readers, the revenue could eventually be good enough that people would go back to writing short fiction. Plus it would give e-reader devices a real benefit -- content that you can't get anywhere else.
What's missing is the marketplace to make that happen. We need the equivalent of an iTunes store for short stories, tied to a mass market tablet device.
➻ strategy + business has a new article up from Edward Tse, adapted from his new book, The China Strategy: Harnessing the Power of the World's Fastest-Growing Economy.
➻ In a case of one author of one of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time talking to another, The New Yorker has video of James Surowiecki (The Wisdom of Crowds) speaking with Michael Mauboussin (More Than You Know) about "common investment mistakes, how to improve decision-making, and what investors can learn from the recent stock-market woes."
➻ AN INTERESTING LETTER FROM DAVID MAMET TO THE WRITERS OF THE UNIT ON WHAT MAKES FOR GOOD DRAMATIC WRITING HAS BEEN MAKING ITS WAY AROUND THE INTERNET THIS WEEK.
➻ It quite old now, but I love Nicholas Carr's Tweet fantasy:
How cool would it have been if Twitter had been invented a couple hundred years ago so our forebears could have used it?transcendo: RT @emerson new idea: "the making a fact the subject of thought raises it" http://bit.ly/cAhzDL (expand)<----interesting!
His book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, coming out in June, might be my favorite of the year so far.
➻ I was hoping we could end this week talking a little bit about health care reform. (Also, if you could hit me with a hammer, that would be great.) Eschewing the hyperbole and vitriol coming over our public airwaves lately, The Christian Science Monitor's Marjorie Kehe put together a fine list of books that could provide ground for a more civil debate, writing "For those hoping to gain a wider grasp of the American healthcare reform debate, here's a (beginning) reading list. The authors below do not offer common prescriptions, but they do share some lucid analyses of the problem:"
- Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis--And the People Who Pay the Price by Jonathan Cohn, HarperPerennial
- Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer by Shannon Brownlee, Bloomsbury Publishing
- Boomerang: Health Care Reform and the Turn Against Government by Theda Skocpol
- The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care by David Gratzer, Encounter Books
- The Health Care Mess: How We Got Into It and What It Will Take to Get Out by Julius B Richmond & Rashi Fein, Harvard University Press
➻ The GalleyCat reports that LeVar Burton may have Reading Rainbow 2.0 in the works, which I mention only in an cruel attempt to get the original theme song stuck in your head for the next week.
➻ The New York Times' Jeffrey Scales put together a very cool audio slide show about W. Eugene Smith and The Jazz Loft Project.
➻ One of the very best 8cr excursions in company history was in NYC two years ago (we were there for our first awards event), when three separate groups of us all converged on the very hard-to-find, practically unmarked Issue Project Room in Brooklyn to see Jonathan Kane.
Marty Neumeier (and Other 100 Best Authors) on ChangeThis
Posted Jan. 15, 2009 8:31 a.m. by dylan
In ChangeThis - 800 CEO Read Blog
You may have noticed that we released a new issue of ChangeThis yesterday. What you may not have realized is that Marty Neumeier, the author of The Aesthetics of Management, is also the author of Zag: The #1 Strategy of High Performance Brands, one of The 100 Best Business Books of All TIme. The manifesto is a "look at a few of the principles that artists have used successfully, [to] see how they might apply to management." If you're looking for a new and refreshing view of management, I would definitely recommend it. And when you're done with that, I'd highly recommend his new book, The Designful Company.
In no particular order, here are other 100 Best authors who have published manifestos:
Whew... when I started this list, I didn't remember all of these manifestos. I guess I have some reading to catch up on this weekend.
- Seth Godin, founder of ChangeThis and author of Purple Cow, has written many, including How to Sell a Book (or Any New Idea), Marketing Mismatch: When New Won't Work With Old, Do Less, Pushing Past the Dip: How to Become the Best in the World, Polkas, Pyrotechnics and Point D's and The Bootstrapper's Bible.
- Kevin Kelly, author of Out of Control, published Better Than Free just last month.
- Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, wrote The Talent Myth.
- Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, wrote A Creative Manifesto: Why the Place You Choose to Live is the Most Important Decision of Your Life to partner with his latest book, Who's Your City.
- Michael Useem, coauthor of The Leadership Moment, wrote Going for the Go Point to partner with his book The Go Point, which will be out in paperback in March.
- Chip Heath & Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick, wrote Talking Strategy: Three Straightforward Ways to Make Your Strategy Stick for ChangeThis.
- John Kotter, author of Leading Change, wrote It All Starts With A Sense of Urgency.
- Bob Sutton, coauthor of The Knowing-Doing Gap, has written two manifestos: Management Advice: Which 90% is Crap? and The Upside of Assholes: Is there Virtue in Bad Workplace Behavior?, which went with his book The No Asshole Rule.
- Jay Conrad Levinson, author of Guerrilla Marketing, wrote a manifesto of the same name, Guerrilla Marketing.
- Guy Kawasaki, author of The Art of the Start, also wrote a manifesto of the same name, The Art of the Start.
- Michael Mauboussin, author of More Than You Know, wrote Getting Out of Embed: The Role of Social Context in Decision Making.
