First, Break All the Rules


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Hardcover
272 pages
ISBN 9780684852867 Published May 1999
Simon & Schuster
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First, Break All the Rules
What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently
By Marcus Buckingham, Curt Coffman 

Related Blog Posts
Second Acts and our Paperback
Posted Aug. 24, 2011 10:41 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

With weary conviction, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote near the end of his life that "There are no second acts in American lives." He gets picked on a lot for that, mostly because it's an easy and somewhat eloquent introduction to the many stories that get written about second acts in American life. He also wrote that "All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath." If that one is true, our resident wordsmith and editor-extraordinaire, Sally Haldorson, has been holding her breath for quite a while now, making her way through the upcoming paperback edition of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.

It's the book's second act, and it has been reworked significantly with some additions we think you'll love. We're looking forward to the book's release later this year, but I'm sure we'll have to revisit it yet again for a third act someday, because business book publishing didn't stop after our book was finished and neither did the authors of the books that were chosen. And the authors aren't making future editions easier for us, either. They continue churning out wonderful new acts that add to the story and trajectory of their work.

Here is a list of the books coming out just this calender year from authors included in The 100 Best, along with the books that got them there:

And these are not just the second acts for most of these authors—this will be Michael Lewis's fourteenth book. With all of the great new authors entering the game today that we need to discover and read, this level of continued productivity and excellence seems almost unfair to our collective free time.



Friday Links
Posted March 4, 2011 6:27 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

➻ The latest episode of The Business Beat has been released, and it's an episode against conformity. It includes Publisher Adrian Zackheim discussing non-conformity in business, and the program's new hosts, Brooke Carey and Eric Meyers, who talk about two books that changed their perspective towards editing. It also has Josh Kaufman, author of The Personal MBA, and Hugh MacLeod, who talks about his Evil Plans (more on that book next up in the links). And, as always, our own Jack Covert talks about a business book classic—this time going with First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, explaining "the 12 questions every manager should ask their employees."

➻ I'm a big fan of Matthew May, and as he recently displayed in his Guru Review of Evil Plans, Matthew May is a big fan of Hugh MacLeod. After telling you why he's such a fan and explaining what he calls "the lunatic fringe," May gives one of the more succinct descriptions of Hugh's new book that I've seen:

There are roughly 40 five-page chapters, the content of which is not earth-shatteringly new. What's new, though, and what's so enjoyable and provocative, is the delivery of those messages, and the entertaining stories and cartoons that accompany them. In other words, it's not so much what MacLeod says, it's how how he says it. It's like music: there are about a half dozen recurring themes in songs, but it's the choice of words and style of delivery that makes us listen.

He then goes on to give you a "baker's dozen of [his] favorites for sampling," including "In the Internet era, if people on the other side of the planet aren't loving what you do, you're doing something wrong" and "The biggest problem of the Western world is oversupply. Don't let it be yours."

➻ I don't know if you've heard, but there's a lot of people carrying signs here in Wisconsin lately. I wasn't expecting a business book author to weigh in publicly on what's happening here in Wisconsin, but Samuel A. Culbert, author of Get Rid of the Performance Review! How Companies Can Stop Intimidating, Start Managing—and Focus on What Really Matters jumped into the fray on Tuesday with an op-ed in The New York Times about Why Your Boss Is Wrong About You.

In the raging battle over union rights in Wisconsin, those seeking to curtail collective bargaining for state employees have advanced an argument that seems hard to resist: It will make it easier to reward those workers who perform the best. What could be fairer than that?

If only that were true. As anybody who has ever worked in any institution—private or public—knows, one of the primary ways employee effectiveness is judged is the performance review. And nothing could be less fair than that.

Okay, so what's the solution then. Are there any "fair" options? Culbert believes so:

Is there a way out? I believe there is, and it works for both government and business. It’s something I call the performance preview. Instead of top-down reviews, both boss and subordinate are held responsible for setting goals and achieving results. No longer will only the subordinate be held accountable for the often arbitrary metrics that the boss creates. Instead, bosses are taught how to truly manage, and learn that it’s in their interest to listen to their subordinates to get the results the taxpayer is counting on.

The author went on to note that "the police department in Madison, Wis., has used such a program since the late 1980s with considerable effectiveness." It sounds like a reasonable systemic solution to me, but I'm not sure reasonable solutions are what anybody is after here anymore.

➻ Nicholas Carr, the author of The Shallows, recently reviewed James Gleik's upcoming The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood.

In his formidable new book, The Information, Gleick explains how we’ve progressed from seeing information as the expression of human thought and emotion to looking at it as a commodity that can be processed, like wheat or plutonium. It’s a long, complicated, and important story, beginning with tribal drummers and ending with quantum physics, and in Gleick’s hands it’s also a mesmerizing one.

Carr writes later in the review that "As a celebration of human ingenuity, The Information is a deeply hopeful book" but ultimately comes to the conclusion that when it comes to real understanding, we may Drowning in Beeps

In a previous post about GalleyCat's list of Top 10 Pirated eBooks at The Pirate Bay, Carr explains why his next book will be called The Code of Sex: Ten Secrets for Using Math to Keep Her Satisfied and Hungry for More, and promises that it will be the most pirated book of all time. (You really have to click on the GalleyCat link or Carr's original post for this to make sense.)

➻ Joe Posnanski, author of The Soul of Baseball and The Machine, offered up some random Thoughts In a Bookstore on his Sprots Illustrated blog. Like all of Joe's posts, it's "curiously long," and in some places ventures dangerously close to Andy Rooney territory (especially the part about the check out counter), but if you're a lover of bookstores as Joe is (and we are), I think you'll find it a fun read—even though it's conclusion is a little depressing. Speaking of book placement in stores, which publishers fight madly for, he writes:

One thing I learned after writing my books is that you have no chance to sell any quantity of books in the big bookstores unless those books are placed on a table in front of the store. It’s called placement, I guess, and it’s extremely important. Books that never get on one of those front tables are apparently doomed, and so publishers will do many things to get their books placed in front—on the “New Arrivals” table, on the “Stuff We’re Reading” table, on the “Critically Acclaimed” table, on the “Dean Koontz” table.

I have little doubt that the “front of the store table” theory is based on countless amounts of sound research. And the theory itself seems sound. You would expect that people looking to browse for books are likely to stay near the front of the store and see what new and interesting books have been put out for them.

I bring all this up because once again I’m in the front of the store looking at the books on the tables … and NOBODY ELSE is here. The bookstore is actually pretty jammed. People are milling around the fiction, the diet books, they are wandering through the kids section, there are one or two people in every aisle and a bunch in the history section. But nobody is up here with me browsing through the new books.

It's a crazy business, all right.

➻ One of the great things about the industry is that it contains people like Jack Covert, who sent me the following video earlier this week.



Inc. Magazine's 30th Anniversary Book Recommendations
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:

  1. Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, by Peter Bernstein (1996)

  2. The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything, by Guy Kawasaki (2004)

  3. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, by Marc Levinson (2006)

  4. Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers' Trust from Wedgwood to Dell, by Nancy F. Koehn (2001)

  5. The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads, and Other Workplace Afflictions, by Scott Adams (1996)

  6. The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It, by Michael Gerber (1995)

  7. The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done, by Peter Drucker (1967)

  8. The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization, by Peter Senge (1990)

  9. First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently, by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman (1999)

  10. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don't, by Jim Collins (2001)

  11. The Great Game of Business: The Only Sensible Way to Run a Company, by Jack Stack (1992)

  12. Growing a Business, by Paul Hawken (1987)

  13. Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage, by Daniel Esty and Andrew Winston (2006)

  14. How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie (1936)

  15. The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, by Clayton Christensen (1997)

  16. Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations, by Thomas A. Stewart (1997)

  17. The Knack: How Street-Smart Entrepreneurs Learn to Handle Whatever Comes Up, by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham (2008)

  18. Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, by Yvon Chouinard (2005)

  19. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Don't, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (2007)

  20. The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story, by Michael Lewis (1999)

  21. Nuts! Southwest Airlines' Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success, by Kevin Freiberg and Jackie Freiberg (1996)

  22. Ogilvy on Advertising, by David Ogilvy (1983)

  23. On Competition, by Michael Porter (2008)

  24. Personal History, by Katharine Graham (1997)

  25. Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, by Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang (1997)

  26. Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big, by Bo Burlingham (2005)

  27. Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder (1981)

  28. The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith (1776)

  29. What Management Is: How It Works and Why It's Everyone's Business, by Joan Magretta and Nan Stone (2002)

  30. 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.



Bunches of Business Book Recommendations
Posted Aug. 25, 2008 4:00 a.m. by todd-sattersten
In Lists - 800 CEO Read Blog

There has been quite a run in the blogosphere in the last two weeks with people recommending business books.

Josh Kauffman may have started this tidal wave with his updated 2008 version of The Personal MBA. His list is 77 books long with the mantra "skip b-school and the $100,000 loan: you can get a world-class business education simply by reading these books."

BusinessPundit followed with their 25 Best Business Books Ever post, placing Adam Smith at #25 and In Search of Excellence at the top spot.

For The Best Business Book of 2008 (so Far), Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog directs people to The Opposable Mind, Presentation Zen, Rain Making, Groundswell, Senior Leadership Teams and Brain Rules.

And then people started finding old lists to highlight. A "Business Book" hit on tweetscan directed me to a October 2007 post at Newly Corporate titled "15 Books For Rogue Professionals and How To Read Them At No Cost." Their no-cost solution is the library, and they recommend everything from Carnegie to Chris Anderson to China Inc.

This led me to another tweetscan hit where Melissa Woo, inspired by this post, spent the morning tweeting her favorites. As a fellow Milwaukeean, I thought I would list all of her favorites.



Tomorrow: Bosses' Day
Posted Oct. 15, 2007 5:39 a.m. by kate
In Leadership - 800 CEO Read Blog

Tomorrow's Bosses' Day. The level of enthusiasm for this Hallmark holiday varies from employee to employee -- I know folks who go so far as to buy their boss custom gift baskets to those who begrudgingly buy the boss a card from the corner store.

Whatever your level of enthusiasm, the core of the day's mission is admirable -- that of showing appreciation. Much like Mothers' and Fathers' Day, it is a day set aside to remind us that it's good to demonstrate -- verbally, through gifts, or whatever -- that we appreciate what the bosses are doing.

As Mike Robbins, author of Focus on the Good Stuff tells us:

One of the challenges for the C-level execs is they don't get a lot of appreciation themselves. So very few people walk into their offices in any genuine way and let them know what they're doing well.

The perception is that whenever that happens, people are kissing up or it's some kind of phony thing. They're under so much pressure to produce the results for the organization. I think the higher up you go, the harder it becomes for people to stop and genuinely appreciate what's happening because there is so much pressure.

It's good to be appreciated -- whether you're the boss or the lowest guy on the totem poll. While appreciation can be poo-pahed as unimportant and is often, easy to overlook in day-to-day communication, it plays a surprisingly large role in employee retention. Even the U.S. Department of Labor and The Gallup Organization support [that] very simple yet important claim. According to the DOL, 64% of working Americans leave their jobs because they don't feel appreciated, while Gallup research shows that 70% of working Americans say they receive no praise or recognition on the job.

That's a lot of under appreciated and unsatisfied employees out there. No wonder Bosses' Day was created. Just as bosses can forget to appreciate we employees so can we employees forget to say good job to the bosses.

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By the way, if you're still looking for a gift for your boss, try these: The Future of Management by Gary Hamel or First Break All The Rules by Buckingham and Coffman






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