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Posted Dec. 31, 2008 4:22 a.m. by kate
In Book Reviews - 800 CEO Read Blog
With the end of the year comes reflection on the highs and lows. This week three more rankings of the best of business books were published. The lists of Gary H. Rawlins from USA Today, Richard Pachter from the Miami Herald, and the readers of ASTD.
From these three lists and the lists of days past (Todd's picks, our awards, Roxanne J. Coady's and Business Pundit's), these are the reigning and often appearing good reads of the business book section from 2008.
- The Game Changer by A. G. Lafley and Ram Charan
- A Sense of Urgency by John Kotter
- The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam
- The Adventures of Johnny Bunko by Dan Pink, the first manga business book. You'll see more manga next year.
- Tribes by Seth Godin
- Art Kleiner's The Age of Heretics, a new edition and a complete history of business thinkers.
- Buying In by Rob Walker.
- Crowdsourcing (I interviewed Jeff earlier this year.)
- The Snowball on Warren Buffett's life.
What's on your list of best of from this year?
Happy New Year. Goodbye 2008. Welcome 2009.
The Best Books of 2008 - Business Pundit Edition
Posted Dec. 17, 2008 3:24 a.m. by dylan
In Uncategorized - 800 CEO Read Blog
Business Pundit knows business books well, and has chosen the 10 from 2008 they think are the best. I think they have the right idea in describing the popular feelings of the year:
2008 came in two parts. Part I, which ran through Bear Stearns, carried the vestiges of prior years, when we thought we could get away with everything, never anticipating that in actuality, everything would get away from us. Some of the books on this list reflect that optimistic, braced mentality, when words like "social networking" still gave us more jitters than "401K."
The chosen 10 are:
The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash by Charles R. Morris, PublicAffairs Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe, Crown The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation by A. G. Lafley & Ram Charan, Random House (Jack Covert Selects) Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, Little Brown Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein, Yale University Press (Jack Covert Selects) Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely, HarperCollins (Jack Covert Selects) The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam, Portfolio (Jack Covert Selects) A Sense of Urgency by John Kotter, Harvard Business School Press (Jack Covert Selects) The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr, W.W. Norton The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder, Bantam
No qualms with that list here. As you can see, half of them were Jack Covert Selects. And I think they're right in stating "If these books don't cover every event of the year, they certainly cover the thought processes that trace through it."
I would also recommend today's Business Pundit post on The Personal MBA. We've been big fans of the idea for some time, having published Josh Kaufman's Personal MBA Manifesto on ChangeThis in late 2005.
And, we've posted it before, but here is the link to Business Pundits 25 Best Business Books Ever.
Review Roundup
Posted Oct. 10, 2008 6:43 a.m. by dylan
In Book Reviews - 800 CEO Read Blog
David Brooks had praise of the highest order for The World is Curved in his op-ed on Tuesday, writing:
In his astonishingly prescient book, The World Is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy, David M. Smick argues that we have inherited an impressive global economic system. It, with the U.S. as the hub, has produced unprecedented levels of global prosperity. But it has now spun wildly out of control. It can't be fixed with the shock and awe of a $700 billion rescue package, Smick says. The fundamental architecture needs to be reformed.
We posted an excerpt of the book when it was released last month, which you can find here.
The writers at The Economist have covered a number of intriguing books in their last few issues. In the last issue, they reviewed Yasheng Huang's Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State. It tells a story of China's shift from the rural, entrepreneurial capitalism that existed in the '80s to "the 'Shanghai model' that dominated the 1990s: rapid urban development that favoured massive state-owned enterprises and big foreign multinational companies."
The issue of September 27th-October 3rd has reviews of both The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs (here) and Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is driving the Future of Business. The Partnership's been released at an unfortunate time, but The Economist gives it a good review, offering that "... amid the torrent of negative news, Charles Ellis's exhaustively researched history of Goldman Sachs paints a convincing picture of an institution that has got most of the important things right." We've covered Crowdsourcing a few times in the past, and you can listen to Kate's interview with Jeff Howe, the book's author, here. The Economist review is here. And Wired had this video of Jeff Howe on the front page of their blog today.
On the 26th of last month, I listed 8 books that Jia Lynn Yang at Fortune wrote "belong in everyone's briefcase." Sadly, I couldn't find a link to his synopsis of each book at the time, but that has now been remedied and you can find the list and book descriptions here.
The October issue of Inc. contains a skimmer's guide to Changing the Game:How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business Leigh Buchanan specifically suggests:
Chapters Five though Eight describe how games can be used to manage and motivate employees. Edery and Mollick believe that even the most tedious task can be made fun if they incorporate elements of gaming. Their examples include Microsoft's in-house competition to find bugs in Vista and a program that allows IT administrators to destroy errant code using an interface similar to Doom.
I'm assuming "Doom" is a videogame, otherwise that doesn't sound very pleasant. So, Jack and Todd, how about that office Wii™?
Reviewing Reviews
Posted Sept. 26, 2008 6:30 a.m. by dylan
In Uncategorized - 800 CEO Read Blog
Heather Green has written a wonderful review of Jeff Howe's Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business for the September 29 issue of BusinessWeek. After observing that "Books about the crowd are becoming a crowd unto themselves," Green writes:
What sets Howe's book apart is his focus on business, an examination of different crowdsourcing models, and a deep dive into academic research to explain why people work together. It's a welcome and well-written corporate playbook for confusing times...
In his most recent article for Portfolio, "In Praise of Big Brother," Roger Lowenstein casts a somewhat leery eye at Stephen Baker's The Numerati. He begins:
Stephen Baker envisions a world in which our email and blog postings, our credit-card and grocery purchases, our pulse rates and facial expressions, and even our physical movements (handily tracked by our cell phones) will be fed to a new Brahmin class of math geeks devoted to sending us customized shopping choices, targeted political ads, real-time medical alerts, and the names of potential dating partners, not to mention (lest we be shirking on the job or hiding an illness) alerts to our bosses and insurance companies.
While that sounds awfully scary to me, the author is of the mind that this technology will one day empower us. Regardless of how you feel about these issues, the book does seem very informative and worth a read. Lowenstein describes Baker a "charming writer," and ends the review by calling the book "eye-popping and chilling."
David K. Hurst reveiws four books in the Autumn issue of strategy + business's Books in Brief. The first, Richard Bookstaber's Demon of Our Own Design, was awarded the top spot in the Finance & Economics category of our first annual book awards. The other three books are Stall Points: Most Companies Stop Growing--Yours Doesn't Have To by Matthew Olson and Derek Van Bever, Michael O'Leary: A Life In Full Flight by Alan Ruddock, and Tad Waddington's Lasting Contribution: How to Think, Plan, and Act to Accomplish Meaningful Work.
Fortune's Jia Lynn Yang has picked "eight volumes [that] belong in everyone's briefcase." Of course, Fortune doesn't make this list available online, but the chosen titles are:
Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America by Walter A. Friedman
Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story by Jerry Weissman
Hug Your Customers: The Proven Way to Personalize Sales and Achieve Astounding Results by Jack Mitchell
Selling to Big Companies by Jill Konrath
The New Strategic Selling: The Unique Sales System Proven Successful by the World's Best Companies by Robert B. Miller & Stephen E. Heiman
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher & William Ury
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Rich Karlgaard has written an update to his "Books to Get Rich By" for Forbes. (You can find the original list of 53 books here.) The lists are broken up into six categories: History and Heroes, How Capitalism Works Today, Instructional Tips, Management Secrets, Food for the Soul, and Useful Entertainment. While the list is too long to list all of the titles, I have listed the entire "Management Secrets" section below.
Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company by Andrew S. Grove
Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths That Are Destroying Your Property by Garret B. Gunderson
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher, William Ury & Bruce Patton
What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith
Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazzi
The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything by Stephen M.R. Covey with Rebecca M. Merrill
Did you notice that Stephen Covey picked up an initial sometime between 7 Habits and Speed of Trust? (edit: As the brilliant Seth Godin has pointed out in the comment section, Stephen M.R. Covey is the eldest son of Stephen R. Covey. I had not known this previously. Don't let it be said business books aren't a family business.) Notable titles from other sections are John Kao's Innovation Nation and Fareed Zakaria's Post American World from "How Capitalism Works Today," Dan Pink's Adventures of Johnny Bunko from "Instructional Tipps," Randy Pausch's Last Lecture form "Food for the Soul," and Michael Lewis's Blind Side from "Useful Entertainment."
The power of crowdsourcing.
Posted Sept. 4, 2008 9:24 a.m. by kate
In Innovation - 800 CEO Read Blog
Jeff Howe's Crowdsourcing is now out. I planned on starting this post with an F. A. Hayek quote on a community's ability to bring widely dispersed knowledge together; then I realized I had already posted it here. And so I'll go a different route.
Earlier this summer, I had a chance to talk about Crowdsourcing with Jeff. That is, using the power of crowds to do work. Wikipedia is a good example. Or Threadless, the t-shirt company that's raking in over $10 million every year.
What fascinates me about crowdsourcing is the level of passion. People (consumers) don't want to stand by on the sidelines and passively consume. People want to be involved. They/we want to share what we know.
Crowdsourcing creates what Jeff calls, the perfect meritocracy. If you go back to F. A. Hayek's idea, it's impossible for each one of us to amass unlimited amounts of knowledge. In crowdsourcing, it matters not whether you are a rocket scientist or a high school dropout. What matters is what you know and how that knowledge is applied.
That's the story shared in Jeff's book. It was just released last week. Here's a trailer for the book. If you're interested, check out our conversation.
