Read about our pricing and services
List Price:
| Price | Quantity |
| $19.96 | 1-24 |
| $17.47 | 25-99 |
| $16.22 | 100-499 |
| $15.72 | 500+ |
Bulk discounts are non-returnable. | |
Customize It
Hardcover
238 pages
ISBN 9781401302375 Published July 2006
Hyperion Books
See all formats
Tweet
Posted Dec. 31, 2009 9:45 a.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
It's an admittedly worn device to use the alphabet to organize one's thoughts, but when reflecting over the past decade and trying to distill the most notable events and objects that affected our company and also the publishing industry and business sector into a brief blog post, I found such a device to be quite helpful. As Jack put it when we initially discussed writing a decade-in-review post, not only is it like opening a can of worms, it seems like whenever one harkens back to the Millenium, one can't help but get sidetracked into thoughts about 9/11. But of course there were many more ups and downs that we've all been a victim and/or a participant in, and this list is an attempt to do that chaos a little bit of justice.
Amazon (may not have its origins in this decade, but grew from 1.6B in 1999 to 19.1 in 2008; Annual 800ceoread Business Book Awards (Inaugural 2007); Erika Anderson, founder of Proteus International, Inc., author of Growing Great Employees, and great friend of 800-CEO-READ who introduced us to a new in-office vocabulary (2007)
Blue Ocean Strategy (our decade's Best Seller, 2005); Bill George, author of three 800-CEO-READ best sellers, Authentic Leadership (2004), True North (2007) and Seven Lessons for Leading in Crisis
ChangeThis (website presenting ideas via manifesto PDFs adopted by 800-CEO-READ from Seth Godin, 2005)
Disasters, natural and otherwise (Dot Com Bust, 2000; 9/11, 2001; tsunami, 2004; Hurricane Katrina, 2005; banking, 2009)
Enron bankruptcy (2001); Eight years of George W. Bush (2000-2008); Election of Barack Obama (2008)
Farewell, Schwartz Bookshops (2009); free/freemium changes everything; Facebook leads the herd.
Good to Great by Jim Collins; Green, Global and Google become top trends
Heath Brothers’ Made to Stick (2007) introduced us to a new language for the creation of ideas
InBubbleWrap offers free business books from 800-CEO-READ (2005); In the Books, 800-CEO-READ's yearly review of business books (2007); It's Your Ship by D. Michael Abrashoff (2002), an 800-CEO-READ bestseller with legs.
JackCovertSelects reviews (Inaugural 2000); Joy Panos Stauber, design extraordinaire and great friend of 800-CEO-READ.
Kindle (2007) and the advancing threat (revelation?) of digital books.
Lay-Offs (2009), Levitt & Dubner’s Freakonomics (2005), The Long Tail by Chris Anderson (2006); 800-CEO-READ's LeaveSmarter events (2006) kick off in Milwaukee.
Mega-Sales of Oprah’s Recommendations, Harry Potter & the Twilight series, lend hopefulness that books still beguile.
New York (book launch, company party, annual awards fete, 2009)
The 100 Business Books of All Time (written & anguished over during 2008, published 2009)
PechaKucha – 800-CEO-READ becomes the Milwaukee host for this exciting new way to present ideas in 20 images in 20 seconds (2008).
QbQ! The Question behind the Question by John Miller (2004), an 800-CEO-READ best seller that tapped into the perceived absence of personal accountability.
Rich Dad books populate the decade as the best selling personal finance books; Rehiring & Remodeling (2009)
Seth Godin (Unleashing the Idea Virus 2001 to Purple Cow 2003 to Tribes 2008); Strengths-based management books and strategies from Gallup.
Todd Sattersten (consultant 2004 - coauthor, 2008 - president, 2009), The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (2000); Twitter
Used books on Amazon (2001); The Ultimate Question by Fred Reichheld (2006) became the basis of some important questions we asked of our company and our customers.
Visit 800ceoread's Daily Blog for daily business insight (2001).
Wiki-anything; The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki (2004) and The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman (2005), two books that changed the way we think.
X-treme changes to news and publishing industry
You're a blueberry (2008), an 800-CEO-READ inside joke that encapsulates the relationships of the 800-CEO-READ employees.
Zero percent. The likelihood that 2010 will be anything but another exhilarating ride.
Okay, so in terms of adhering to the alphabetization of this list, some are a bit of a cheat. And some inclusions are events that had a direct effect on our company internally, but most were important occurrences felt by everyone in business. If there is anything I missed, feel free to add in comments.
Happy New Year everyone!
Defending the business book genre.
Posted March 19, 2008 4:18 a.m. by kate
In General Business - 800 CEO Read Blog
It seems just a bit ironic that the last page in April's Fast Company is a grueling review and warning of the business section of your local bookstore. Especially considering more than a handful of business book authors--including the Heath brothers, Dan Roam, Amy Sutherland*, Tim Ferriss, Robert Scoble, Fred Krupp--contributed to or were mentioned in the issue.
The last page is Elizabeth Spiers' (founding editor of Gawker and Dealbreaker) article "Library of the Living Dead." She starts out by contradicting all that our parents and teachers have taught us for years:
...reading does not necessarily make you smarter. Sometimes it doesn't even require you to think. I would send you a copy of Nicole Richie's novel, The Truth About Diamonds, as demonstrable proof, but there's a clause in my contract prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment. Instead I'll point you to the modern era's second-worst literary promulgator of intelligence reduction: your local bookstore's business section.
Next comes the critique of the business genre's cliches, "12-step-ification," and seemingly empty promises (four-hour workweeks, loads of money and personal growth); all of which, Elizabeth would say, don't amount to much or anything at all really. Rather "they [business books] create the illusion of progress simply by adding another layer of busyness." Ouch.
Really, a comparison of Nicole Richie's writings to that of business authors? Okay, I'll be the first to admit that many books lack in substance and rightly deserve such criticism. The first set of titles used to back up this point are Jim Cramer's Stay Mad for Life and Donald Trump's Think Big and Kick Ass both of which, she points out, have different formulas for success and both of which are currently on the best seller list.
To Elizabeth's point, the best seller list is certainly not where I'd start in my search of a business book. (And my apologies here to Surowiecki because I do partially adhere to the Wisdom of Crowds philosophy, just not in best sellers.) In business books, like in music, the top titles not always the best of the best, rather they're what the masses are buying. Take music. Though I haven't done any strict calculations or research, I'd imagine that only a small portion of the music covered by Rolling Stone appears on top 10 lists. Nonetheless, ask nearly anyone who follows music closely and they probably subscribe to Rolling Stone. I doubt the same crowd would consider Leona Lewis (currently toping iTunes best seller list as of 4pm CST yesterday) to be one of the greatest.
Good or bad, best seller lists operate in a catch-22 manner or more simply, inertia. Once a book is on the best seller lists (through a number of clever PR pitches, handing books out to each member of a packed audience, and special Amazon giveaways), people start talking about the book. That leads to more people buying the book, which leads to bookstore restocking. Which leads to more people buying the book and better placement on the best seller lists, ultimately starting the process all over again.
That's not to say every best seller fits in this category. There are a number of best selling business books worth reading, many of which have been featured in Fast Company and whose authors have regular bylines there. Case in point: The Wal-Mart Effect and Made to Stick. Yet, if a best seller list is your only reading guide, you'll miss a number of really great titles. Books that are provocative and will compel you to think or act differently.
Which brings me to another of Elizabeth's points:
Business books let us amble zombielike through our careers freeing us from responsibility for the quality of our own decision making. Better to delegate that responsibility to other people--Jack Welch, perhaps. It's a fresh spin on the old saw that no one ever got fired for buying IBM: No one ever will get canned for leaning on something with a Ken Blanchard blurb on the front cover.
Yes, we should stand on our own feet and rely on our own critical analysis. It'd be foolhardy for me to take Jack Welch's lessons and replicate them exactly here at 8cr. Not every lesson, as Elizabeth explains, works for every situation. I imagine it's for that very reason that 11,000 business books are published every year. There are at least 11,000 different ways to present a problem and solution; certainly not every one merits our time in reading nor application.
But we learn through exposure to and experience with both the good and bad, the smart and the not-so-smart. And certainly, being exposed to Welch's ideas makes me a better prepared, better informed business woman. Experience via a $24.95 hardcover is not a bad way to arrive at new ideas and solutions.
Elizabeth's last point is that if we cannot become more skeptical of and less dependent on business books, we should simply move business best sellers to the self-help section. I would argue that at least half of business titles are self-help (the other part being books on new ideas or trends, a la The Long Tail); and I mean this in the best of lights. Self-help has long been stereotyped as the answer for the spineless or those who need a more regular pat on the back.
Yet, many business books are meant to help us help ourselves--help us manage better, help us start up a company, help us communicate better, etc. That is the very definition of self-help. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Self-help doesn't have to be preachy (yes, you will find these preachy, self-help books on the best seller lists). If I'm a horrible manager, I'm going to pick up Growing Great Employees to learn how to improve my skills. If I'm not sure where to start when evaluating customer satisfaction, I might start with The Ultimate Question.
If the question is whether every best seller is worth reading, I'd respond without a doubt, no. If that were true, we (as a company) would not exist in the blogosphere. If the question is whether business books are worth reading, they are. Not every single one of them is worth reading. And finding the right one is not always easy. To stand on my pulpit here, that's what we endeavor to help with--finding the right business book for you. Please, don't be afraid of the business book aisle, many a title is worth a gander.
[Stepping off the pulpit.]
- - - - - - - -
* Amy's an animal trainer -- a whale trainer, in fact. The Heath brothers apply her lessons to the training of bosses. Hence, for the purposes of this post, she's listed as a business book author.
800-CEO-READ 2007 Best Sellers
Posted Feb. 5, 2008 2:12 a.m. by kate
In Lists - 800 CEO Read Blog
Below you'll find the list of our top 25 bestsellers for 2007. Congratulations and thanks to everyone on the list!
- The Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything
by Stephen M.R. Covey, Rebecca R. Merrill; Free Press.
Leadership expert Stephen Covey uncovers why trust is vital in professional and personal relationships. - True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership
by Bill George and Peter Sims; Jossey-Bass.
Former Medtronic CEO Bill George and coauthor Peter Sims share the wisdom of 125 outstanding leaders of today and describe how you can develop as an authentic leader. - It's Your Ship
by D. Michael Abrashoff; Warner Business Books.Business managers will benefit from Abrashoff's guiding belief that focus should be on empowering your people rather than on chain of command.
- Blueprint to a Billion: 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth
by David Thomson; John Wiley & Sons.Follow this blueprint to turn your idea into the next multi-billion dollar company.
- Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
by Chip Heath, Dan Heath; Random House.The brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier.
- Unlock Behavior, Unleash Profits: Developing Leadership Behavior That Drives Profitability in Your Organization
by Leslie Wilk Braksick; McGraw-Hill.Fortune 500 thought leader Leslie Braksick provides powerful tools to help you, whether you're an executive, entrepreneur, or manager, in any field, to unlock behavior and unleash unprecedented profits.
- Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message
by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba; Kaplan.A provocative new exploration of the ramifications of today's burgeoning social media.
- What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful
by Marshall Goldsmith, Mark Reiter; Hyperion.One of the nation's most sought-after executive coaches shows how subtle changes can make all the difference when climbing those last few rungs of the corporate ladder.
- The Power of Nice
by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval; Currency.In business, nice guys (and gals) really do finish first.
- Inside Every Woman: Using the 10 Strengths You Didn't Know You Had to Get the Career and Life You Want Now
by Vickie L. Milazzo; John Wiley & Sons.Discover and use your strengths to pursue your dreams.
- The Long Tail
by Chris Anderson; Hyperion.The Long Tail was coined by Chris Anderson to describe the recent development of endless niche markets.
- Mass Career Customization: Aligning the Workplace With Today's Nontraditional Workforce
by Cathleen Benko, Anne Weisberg; Harvard Business School Press.This book is centered on the powerful insight that career options in today’s economy need to accommodate the rising and falling phases of employee engagement as it changes over time.
- The Millionaire Maker's Guide to Creating a Cash Machine for Life
by Loral Langemeier; McGraw-Hill.Whether you want to partner with others or create your own team to start, fix, or buy a business, Langemeier shows you how to turn it into a Cash Machine that makes money from Day One.
- The Flip Side: Break Free of the Behaviors That Hold You Back
by Flip Flippen; Springboard Press.Flippen presents a simple process for learning how to identify our personal constraints and take the necessary steps to correct self-limiting behaviors. He shows that we will experience a dramatic surge in productivity, achieve things we have only dreamed of, and find greater happiness overall.
- Chocolates on the Pillow Aren't Enough: Reinventing The Customer Experience
by Jonathan M. Tisch, Karl Weber; Wiley.Chocolates on the Pillow Aren't Enough will show you how to improve every customer touch point; understand what customers really want and need; and design organizational structures to meet those needs.
- Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation
by James P. Andrew, Harold L. Sirkin, John Butman; Harvard Business School Press.Payback offers a new way to think about and manage innovation.
- Finding the Next Starbucks: How to Identify and Invest in the Hot Stocks of Tomorrow
by Michael Moe; Portfolio.Learn how winners like Dell, eBay, and Home Depot could have been spotted in their start-up phase and how you can find Wall Street’s future giants.
- The Strategy Paradox: Why committing to success leads to failure (and what to do about it)
by Michael E. Raynor; Currency.Raynor sheds light on the collision between commitment and uncertainty that many managers face in the pursuit for success. He presents a concrete framework for strategic action that allows companies to seize today’s opportunities while preparing for an uncertain future.
- The 4:8 Principle: The Secret to a Joy-Filled Life
by Tommy Newberry; Tyndale House Publishers.Whether you are at a low point or a high point in your life, the authors assert that The 4:8 Principle can help you experience joy by design--God's design.
- Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
by W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne; Harvard Business School Press.The authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors, but from creating blue oceans--untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.
- Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams; Portfolio.Smart firms can harness the collective capability and genius of online communities to spur innovation, growth, and success.
- StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup's Now, Discover Your Strengths
by Tom Rath; Gallup Press.This strengths reference, accompanied by a code for an online assessment test, is an extension of the original StrengthsFinder, now updated with a customized version of your top 5 strengths and a guide for applying your strengths in the world.
- QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability in Work and in Life
by John G. Miller; Putnam Publishing Group.QBQ! The Question Behind the Question, already a phenomenon in its self-published edition, addresses the most important issue in business and society today: personal accountability.
- I Didn't See it Coming: The Only Book You'll Ever Need to Avoid Being Blindsided in Business
by Nancy C. Widmann, Elaine J. Eisenman, Amy Dorn Kopelan; Wiley.The authors provide critical counsel and keen observation on how all employees can develop strategic insights, effective tools, and sharp instincts for reading the room and controlling their own career destiny.
- The Starbucks Experience
by Joseph Michelli; McGraw-Hill.Michelli reveals how you can follow the Starbucks way to...reach out to entire communities, listen to individual workers and consumers, seize growth opportunities in every market, and custom-design a truly satisfying experience that benefits everyone involved.
: : : : : : :
If you'd like a PDF of our 2007 bestseller list, click here. If you're interested, we publish a monthly bestseller list here.
Free!?
Posted Nov. 2007 8:53 a.m. by dylan
In Internet - 800 CEO Read Blog
Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert and author of the recently released Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain!, has an intriguing op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today. It deals with the complications of providing one's material on the internet for free. He began as an evangelist, offering his comic on the internet for free and generating great results by doing so. He has since become more of a skeptic, having had a negative experience when he put his first non-humor title online for free, hoping to boost sales of its sequel. Instead, that only led his fans to expect the sequel to be made available for free as well. He writes that "for the readers of my non-Dilbert books, I have inadvertently set the market value for my work at zero. Oops." He is also receiving some negative feedback from his fans with his new book. It's not because of the book itself, however, but the fact that the book is a compilation of the most popular posts on his blog, and he agreed to take down those posts when he signed his book deal.
This is the challenge many individuals, artists, and organizations are going to have as the internet continues to change the way we sell our work, our services, and ourselves. How much material should we provide for free to generate the maximum amount of interest in our work, and how do we use that interest in our work to make a living, i.e., gobs of money? Chris Anderson (author of The Long Tail) believes that all information wants to be free, and is even working on ways to release his next book, in print, for free. The name of the book? Free. He believes that offering his work for free is the best way to promote himself, and that has to help him make his living as a speaker. For anyone looking for new business models and creative ways to move forward in the burgeoning new environment of the internet, Wikinomics is very good source. Scott Adams' experiences as a humorist and novelist expose a nuance that is a large part of the Web2.0 debate, and the op-ed is worth looking at. Somewhat ironically, it is not free.
Miscellany
Posted Aug. 10, 2007 4:20 a.m. by dylan
In Book Reviews - 800 CEO Read Blog
Todd's post on Monday showed that we've referenced Chris Anderson's Long Tail more often than any other title in the past, so we obviously like the book. But what books does Chris Anderson like? Well, he liked David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous enough to write a blurb for it. You may know David as a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Praise from Chris Anderson off the back cover of Everything is Miscellaneous...
The world is messy, like it or not, and it's only going to get messier as the web destroys rules and rule makers. You can either complain about the chaos and wish for the good old days of order, or you can read this book and understand why delirious disorder will soon make us all smarter.
I took Chris's advice and read the book, and I really enjoyed it. One of my favorite chapters is entitled Social Knowing, in which he discusses the differences between Britannica and Wikipedia.
The trust we place in Britannica enables us to be passive knowers: You merely have to look a topic up to find out about it. But Wikipedia provides the metadata surrounding an article-edits, discussions, warnings, links to other edits by the contributors-because it expects the reader to be actively involved, alert to the signs. This burden comes straight from the nature of the miscellaneous itself.
Give us a Britannica article, written by experts who filter and weigh the evidence for us, and we absorb it passively. But set us loose in a pile of leaves so large that we can't see its boundaries and we'll need more and more metadata to play in to find our way. Deciding what to believe is now our burden. It always was, but in the paper-order world where publishing was so expensive that we needed people to be filterers, it was easier to think our passivity was an inevitable part of learning; we thought knowledge just worked that way.
Increasingly we're rejecting the traditional assumption of passivity. For ten years now, customers have been demanding that sites get past the controlled presentation of "brochureware". They want to get the complete specifications, read unfiltered customer reviews, and write their own reviews-good or bad. [The web site for the movie The Da Vinci Code made a point of inviting anyone to discuss the religious controversy of the film; by doing so, the studio reaped media attention, marketing buzz, and audience engagement.] Citizens are starting not to excuse political candidates who have web sites that do nothing but throw virtual confetti. They want to be able to explore politicians' platforms, and they reward candidates with unbounded enthusiasm when the candidates trust their supporters to talk openly about them on their sites.
In a miscellaneous world, an Oz-like authority that speaks in a single voice with unshakable confidence is a blowhard. Authority now comes from enabling us inescapably fallible creatures to explore the differences among us, together.
And this is how he ends the chapter...
For 2,500 years, we've been told that knowledge is our species destiny and calling. Now we can see for ourselves that knowledge isn't in our heads: It is between us. It emerges from public and social thought and it stays there, because social knowing, like the global conversations that give rise to it, is never finished.
There was a fascinating conversation about all this between David Weinberger and Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, that Todd linked to in a previous post. if you missed it the first time around, I'd highly recommend it.
