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Paperback
307 pages
ISBN 9780553384734 Published Aug. 2008
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Posted June 15, 2009 3:33 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths For Winning At Business Without Losing Your Self by Alan M. Webber, HarperBusiness, 270 pages, $24.99, Hardcover, April 2009, ISBN 9780061721830
Books like The Wisdom of Crowds and Super Crunchers show that groups and algorithms beat gurus and experts consistently in the decision-making department. It seems the usefulness of the sage is waning, but maybe something is being lost. Logic trees and collective aggregations may be more accurate, but they lack the compelling richness of a person's life experience. In the case of Rules of Thumb, missing out on Alan Webber's insights would be a terrible loss.
Webber spent his initial years out of college in Portland city politics. From there, he landed at the Harvard Business Review, where he worked under the legendary Ted Levitt and met his future business partner, Bill Taylor. Alan and Bill left HBR, and in 1994, founded Fast Company magazine. The duo sold the magazine in 2003 for $350 million to the magazine division of German media giant Bertlesman.
In Webber, you have someone who has sailed in the sea of business ideas for thirty years, as both discerning editor and successful entrepreneur. His new book, Rules of Thumb, is a compilation of the wisdom he collected over the years on 3"X5" index cards. He says he learned this technique of note-taking from Levitt, who used it as a way to organize all of the ideas he was exposed to each day.
Fifty-two rules fill the 270-page book and the stories Webber tells to illustrate each insight are personal. Webber's Rule #19 is "Focus on the Signal to Noise Ratio." He quotes Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer to help explain: "Too much measurement is no different than no measurement all. Pick a few metrics and stick to them." The same rule applies for purpose and values: identify two or three that represent what you do, and live by them. But, in contrast to the problem of too many metrics, it's often the lack of values or the absence of purpose that causes confusion.
Here is a sample of a few of the other rules:
Rule #15 - Every change needs four things: change, connections, conversation, and community.Rule #16 - Facts are facts; stories are how we learn.
Rule #34 - Simplicity is the new currency.
Rule #43 - Don't confuse credentials with talent.
Read Rules of Thumb slowly, in increments of ten or twelve pages. Spend some time contemplating a few of Webber's rules in those following days, as these truths need some time to sink. Then go do something. Do something different with the knowledge you've gained. As Webber says, "It's the best chance of creating the future we all want."
Writing About Numbers
Posted Sept. 6, 2008 5:46 a.m. by todd-sattersten
In Information Technology - 800 CEO Read Blog
In watching the del.icio.us feed for the business+book this week, there have been a number of webizens that are paying attention to Stephen Baker's The Numerati.
The Sept 8th cover story of BusinessWeek titled "Managing By The Numbers" was an excerpt adapted from the book about amazing work being done at IBM:
"I'm here to find out how Takriti and his colleagues go about turning IBM's workers into numbers. If this works, his team plans to apply these models to other companies and to automate much of what we now call management."
You can find the introduction excerpted and an active weblog on The Numerati website.
The book I would correlate this with is last year's Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres, which is out in paperback now.
