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Posted April 8, 2009 10:03 a.m. by todd-sattersten
In Lists - 800 CEO Read Blog
Inc. Magazine is celebrating 30 years of publication this month and as a part of their coverage have put together "The Business Owner's Bookshelf" - 30 books people running small businesses should read.
Here is the list in its entirety:
- Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, by Peter Bernstein (1996)
- The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything, by Guy Kawasaki (2004)
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, by Marc Levinson (2006)
Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers' Trust from Wedgwood to Dell, by Nancy F. Koehn (2001)
The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads, and Other Workplace Afflictions, by Scott Adams (1996)
The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It, by Michael Gerber (1995)
The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done, by Peter Drucker (1967)
The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization, by Peter Senge (1990)
First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently, by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman (1999)
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don't, by Jim Collins (2001)
The Great Game of Business: The Only Sensible Way to Run a Company, by Jack Stack (1992)
Growing a Business, by Paul Hawken (1987)
Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage, by Daniel Esty and Andrew Winston (2006)
How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie (1936)
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, by Clayton Christensen (1997)
Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations, by Thomas A. Stewart (1997)
The Knack: How Street-Smart Entrepreneurs Learn to Handle Whatever Comes Up, by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham (2008)
Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, by Yvon Chouinard (2005)
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Don't, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (2007)
The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story, by Michael Lewis (1999)
Nuts! Southwest Airlines' Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success, by Kevin Freiberg and Jackie Freiberg (1996)
Ogilvy on Advertising, by David Ogilvy (1983)
On Competition, by Michael Porter (2008)
Personal History, by Katharine Graham (1997)
Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, by Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang (1997)
Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big, by Bo Burlingham (2005)
Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder (1981)
The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith (1776)
What Management Is: How It Works and Why It's Everyone's Business, by Joan Magretta and Nan Stone (2002)
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 (2004)
Jack and I think it is a pretty good list. Eleven of their 30 books match with selections from The 100 Best. The editors provide some big challenges for readers recommending The Wealth of Nations, On Competition, and The Fifth Discipline. Nuts! and Let My People Go Surfing are great for business owners (also check out Raising The Bar). And their fun add of The Dilbert Principle is a great one, showing us what to do by showing us what not to do.
The first of the podcasts with authors in The 100 Best
Posted Feb. 10, 2009 4:23 a.m. by curt-rosengren
In 100 Best - 800 CEO Read Blog
This last week has been a bit of a whirlwind here! Much is going on with The 100 Best. Lots of folks are talking about it and tweeting about it. Jack and Todd made their debut on NPR Marketplace with the famous Kai Ryssdal last evening. And we've been doing a bit of traveling to launch the book.
Our goal with the book has always been to create the most comprehensive set of information around The 100 Best. One of the pieces we've been working on is interviewing every living author with a book in The 100 Best. We posted the first interview with Jack Stack, author of The Great Game of Business today.
For the next few weeks, we'll post an interview a day. Follow along as you please.
Fine Tune Your Company
Posted Jan. 8, 2009 3:30 a.m. by dylan
In 100 Best - 800 CEO Read Blog
Inc. Magazine has a great feature in their Jan/Feb 09 issue in which they asked their "favorite entrepreneurs for the tips and tricks they have used to pilot their business through difficult times." One of the twenty three respondents just happens to be one of our favorite authors. Jack Stack, author of The Great Game of Business, which happens to be one of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time (you may have heard of it) writes:
Here's an example of leading your company through the woods. My daughter has a small clothing shop in Missouri. It could be struggling. Upscale clothes are not a necessity, especially in a recession. As a business owner, she can have one of two attitudes: the woe-is-me, the-markets-are-so-bad attitude. Or the what-can-I-do-to-get-people-in-my-store attitude. She chose the latter. Her answer was to make her seven employees financially literate. She now has seven people who think like her. Instead of telling them how to arrange skirts and bras, she is telling them about inventory turns and margins and the relation between the two. Now it's the associates who are selling. It isn't a result of more money in advertising or marketing. It took me three years and a lot of persuading to get her to do this, but she finally has. In October 2007, the business did $55,000 in sales. In 2008, in this climate, it did $81,000. Those numbers say it all.
Other respondents include Chip Conley, author of Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow (runner-up in the New Perspectives category of our 2007 Business Book awards), John Mackey of Whole Foods and Bernie Marcus of Home Depot. You'll either have to pick up the magazine to read the rest or wait until it's published online, because they still have the December issue up on the website.
InBubbleWrap - The Great Game of Business
Posted Dec. 2008 10:02 a.m. by dylan
In 100 Best - 800 CEO Read Blog
I'm sure you already know that Jack and Todd have a book coming out in February about the best books the business genre has produces over the years. Well, on top of the The Countdown Book Club, we've thought of another way we can get some of the books they discuss in their book in your hands.
We're starting a new series of special giveaways over on InBubbleWrap. What we're doing is getting our hands on as many The 100 Best Business Books of All Time as possible and simply giving them away to you. Hopefully, by the time The 100 Best itself comes out in February, you'll have a decent library of the books Jack and Todd cover in the book.
We're getting started today by giving away The Great Game of Business, written by Jack Stack with Bo Burlingham, and we'll continue giving away books from The 100 Best once a week until the book's release (and even after).
So, get on over to InBubbleWrap and try you're hand in the offer. We have 25 copies up for grabs.
Bill and Bo on Small Giants
Posted March 8, 2006 2:47 a.m. by tom-ehrenfeld
In Small Business - 800 CEO Read Blog
I would love Small Giants even if I didn't know the author, Bo Burlingham. After all, Burlingham has been the co-author of several of the best business books of the past two decades, The Great Game of Business and A Stake in the Outcome, not to mention the force behind the editing and writing of literally hundreds of important articles for Inc. magazine.
As Burlingham said at a recent reading/discussion for Small Giants, "This book challenges people to think about what makes a great company." How? He focuses on 14 dynamic companies that all made conscious decisions not to growbut rather to control their size so as to concentrate on more important matters such as the soul of the company, the ties to the community, the community of employees, the quality of the work. In so doing the companies retained that quality of charisma that makes them so attractiveand which in turn drives so many great companies to make bad choices when faced with the tradeoffs from growth.
The huge crowd included Fast Company Founding Editor Bill Taylor, who posed Bo a provocative question. Bill (who recently completed a book of his own that will be published later this year) kindly shared his question, which follows. And Bo has been good enough to reply.
Here's Bill Taylor's question: It's easy to understand what your small giants gain by choosing not to grow as fast as they might. But did many of the entrepreneurs you chronicle--or did you yourself--think about what these companies give up by staying small? I'm not thinking about money, I'm thinking about impact--the chance to have a big effect on the world. Imagine if Herb Kelleher of Southwest had decided to stick to flying routes within the southwest. Or if John Mackey, the cofounder of Whole Foods Market, had decided to stop at a couple of stores in Austin, rather than spread across the country--and, in so doing, raise the bar for nutritional standards, the treatment of animals, the future of organics. Isn't it almost selfish, in a sense, or at least a missed opportunity, if you're a passionate company-builder who believes in what you're doing and thinks it's important, to do less than what's possible, to have less of an impact than you might have otherwise?
Bo Burlingham replies: First, let me be clear about one thing: In no way do I mean to suggest that a company cant be great if it grows fast, gets big, goes public, does acquisitions, and so forth. The two companies you cite are prime examples of great, publicly traded companies, although its worth noting that they are striking exceptions to the rule. They have been able to resist the pressures to compromise their values only because they have so far managed to deliver consistently great returns to shareholders, who have thus been willing to let the companys management teams operate as they see fit. Most other companies that have started out with similar valuesThe Body Shop, Ben & Jerrys, and People Express come to mindhave eventually been forced to make compromises that have utterly transformed their cultures and ways of doing business.
Its also important to recognize that there are always trade-offs. Although Southwest and Whole Foods are both great corporate citizens, neither one is rooted in a community anymore, and theyve both lost some of the workplace intimacy they had when they were smaller, not to mention the intense relationships with customers and suppliers. My point is simply that there are sacrificeslost opportunitiesno matter what you decide to do. Company owners have to choose which opportunities they want to focus on and which pressures they want to deal with.
That said, it may be true that a couple of the Small Giants owners/leaders have given up an opportunity to have a greater impact on the world by choosing to remain private and closely held and by staying (relatively) small. I say a couple because extremely few people are capable of building a Whole Foods Market or a Southwest Airlines without losing control of the company along the way. In any case, I certainly wouldnt describe the decision to remain small and private as selfish. For one thing, most of these people work extremely hard to make the greatest contribution they can to their employees, their customers, their communities, and the world.. Saying their decision is selfish implies that people who try to get their companies as big as possible, as fast as possible, are somehow being selfless, or at least less selfish. We both know that the motivations of company-builders, even the greatest ones, are far more complicated than that, and that altruism or selflessness seldom enters into the equation.
