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Paperback
267 pages
ISBN 9781401309664 Published July 2008
Hyperion Books
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Long Tail
Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (Revised, Updated)
By Chris Anderson 

Related Blog Posts
Friday Links
Posted Nov. 5, 2010 11:41 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

➻ I'm a big fan of strategy + business's author choice excerpts. The most recent recommendation, by Who Killed Health Care? author Regina E. Herzlinger, is John Torinus Jr.'s The Company That Solved Health Care: How Serigraph Dramatically Reduced Skyrocketing Costs While Providing Better Care, and How Every Company Can Do the Same. The excerpt's title, Beer, Brats and Butterfat, was enough of a hook for my accurately stereotypical Wisconsin tastes.

Kurt Eschenfelder, a former college football player and engineer at Serigraph, stands 6 feet 4 inches and tipped the scales at 330 pounds. He looked indestructible. That was until his required health screening showed his blood sugar count at 177, which meant he was pre-diabetic.

Guys like Kurt are commonplace in Wisconsin, where we like our beer, bratwurst, and butterfat (translate: cheese and other dairy products). Typically, in the passive U.S. health care model, Kurt’s doctor would have given him a lecture, and Kurt would have been essentially on his own to head off a diabetic condition.

In the proactive model Serigraph has developed, Kurt was surrounded with help. He consulted with Tammy Ertl, our on-site nurse practitioner, Rachel Topercer, a dietician, and Sandy Stockhausen, the diabetes educator from Aurora Health, one of the two big health providers in our area.

Kurt listened, and, unlike most diabetics or near-diabetics, he started a disciplined regimen. He dropped about fifty pounds over approximately six months and lowered his blood sugar to around one hundred without medications. Now, Kurt has no other warning signals for diabetes in his physical makeup.

I can assure you that the book's title is not hyperbole. John Torinus and his company really have figured this stuff out. Working with the author last week in the run up to publishing his ChangeThis manifesto, Through the Fog: Solving Healthcare in Companies, I only received one correction from him:

Looks good. One change: we can now say [that we've had] only three premium increases in eight years (vs. seven in the copy). We will have no hike to employees in 2011. Hooray.

Hooray, indeed.

➻ The latest issue of The Business Beat has been released by the good people of Portfolio. This month the focus is on technology, and Courtney Young set herself the envious task of interviewing Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants. They also have a takeaway from Lisa Gansky, author of The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing, which I think is a book of as much importance as The Long Tail and Wikinomics. We the have the usual suspects, Adrian Zackheim and our own Jack Covert. Adrian discusses the role of technology in book publishing and Jack Covert takes a look at Geoffrey Moore's classic, Crossing the Chasm. Rounding out the issue is Penguin's Manager of Inventory and Operations, Matthew Pavoni, on how Cali Ressler and Jodi Thompson's Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It made him a better manager.

➻ The Largehearted Boy has begun posting his annual Online "Best of 2010" Book Lists, in which he aggregates every online "best of" book list he can find. I have one to add: 50 Books About Books from Fine Books Magazine.

➻ In other book nerd news, The Design Observatory took a look at The Library: A Museum. Apparently university libraries are awash in antiquarian delight.

I shouldn't be reading this book—I shouldn't even be touching it. It is a fragile copy of Oliver Twist from 1841, printed only three years after it was written. Dickens himself might have held it. The pages are paper-towel thick and velvety soft. The typography makes an impression, both literally and figuratively. Tissue protects its many engravings—elaborate scenes of beatings—to ironically save them from injury. To read the text is to time-travel. One gains insight into grammar from the past: "To-morrow" is hyphenated in the annals of yesteryear. Colons : surrounded on either side by spaces : are used unfamiliarly : as in parenthetical thought. Every eighth page is numbered—possibly to track signatures. The contemporary mind fills with intrigue and wonder.

And where did I find such a treasure? Quite conveniently, right in the stacks.

He goes on to ask what such books can teach us about design:

Let me rephrase that: what can't they teach us about design? Inspiring page layout; unusual language; informative content; unrecognizable typefaces; unfamiliar color palettes; styles of illustration that have long been forgotten; historical connections; echoes from designers that—products of their own time—we couldn't possibly recreate. It is cognitive overload.

If any of that even slightly stirs you, go read the rest of the post. There is much more going on there than I can do justice to here.

➻ And there's this news from Publishers Weekly about the exact opposite—the cutting edge of digital book distribution (though the link above does discuss digital design):

More unusual is a new app from the publishing imprint of Pearson, FT Press, which was launched on Monday on LinkedIn, the business social network, making FT Press the first company to launch a LinkedIn app.

If it can help me with their recent release Invisible Forces and Powerful Minds: Gravity, Gods, and Minds from The Chicago Social Brain Network, then I'm all for it. Go to the original announcement to learn more.

➻ In McSweeney's Internet Tendencies' latest open letter to people or entities that are unlikely to respond, Mark Rook wrote a depressingly touching Open Letter to the Homeless Man Who Witnessed Me Totally Lose It Last Week. It is one of those small pieces that you think is going to be good for a quick laugh, but ends up wiping any trace of smile off your face and taking you to a much deeper place. It's ending is sweet enough that you may just end up smiling once again, though. Much better than a quick laugh.

➻ Coming home late last weekend, I put on a record that I hadn't listened to in a very long time and remembered something important I had forgotten.



Friday Links
Posted Oct. 15, 2010 10:51 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

➻ Last week, I pointed you to early reviews of "One of the finest books of the year ... Steven Johnson’s Where Good Idea Come From." If you followed that link, you may have found The Economist's review of the book, Well, what a good idea!. And, if you did, you discovered another one of the best books to be released this year (or any year), Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants. Both of them were Jack Covert Selects this month, and both are absolutely essential reading. Seth Godin thinks Kelly's is The book of the year, saying that "If there's justice, it will win the Pulitzer Prize."

Most reviewers are mentioning the fact that Kevin was the founding editor of Wired magazine, but I think it's just as important to note that, in the '80s, he freelanced for Whole Earth Catalog, "a publication that used it's own readers to select and recommend appropriate tools picked out of the ocean of self-serving manufactured stuff"—which is essentially what Kevin has recreated today with his Cool Tools site. Learn more about What Technology Wants at the book's website, and be sure to check out the Jack Covert Selects review we released today.

➻ Besides thinking that Kevin Kelly deserves a Pulitzer Prize, Seth Godin wonders, What does "pro-business" mean? After dispelling some oft-pronounced answers to that question as "pro-factory policies," short-sighted, backward-looking, anti-solutions. He writes:

Perhaps we could see pro-business strategies looking more like this:

  • Investing in training the workforce to solve interesting problems, so they can work at just about any job.

  • Maintaining infrastructure, safety and civil rights so we can create a community where talented people and the entrepreneurs who hire them (two groups that can live wherever they choose) would choose to live there.

  • Reward and celebrate the scientific process that leads to scalable breakthroughs, productivity and a stable path to the future.

  • Spend community (our) money on services and infrastructure that help successful organizations and families thrive.

Once you’ve seen how difficult it is to start a thriving business in a place without clean water, fast internet connections and a stable government of rational laws, it’s a lot harder to take what we’ve built for granted.

This is one of the longest posts Seth has written lately and I imagine he could go on for a great deal longer on the issue.

➻ If you'd like to read more about Where Good Idea Come From before you pick it up, Salon's Michael Humphrey interviewed him this week. From that interview:

MH: Why don't you agree with the notion that most good ideas come from epiphanies?

SJ: What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else. Their concepts take time to develop and incubate and sit around in the back of their minds sometimes for decades. It's cobbled together from other people's ideas and other people's technologies and other people's innovations. It's a remixed version of something.

Read more about howEpiphanies are overrated over at Salon.

➻ Jonathan Fields, blogger-extraordinaire and author of Career Renegade, posted an interview he did with Lisa Gansky today. Lisa Gansky is the author of The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing, a great new book in the tradition of books like The Long Tail and Wikinomics—that is, a book documenting a paradigm shift in the ways technological connectivity is reshaping business. Though the interview is somewhat short, it is what you'd expect from such intelligent people—an in-depth exploration of the topic characterized by poignant questions that are answered in paragraph form, not talking points or soundbites. Here is one exchange:

JF: People have been forming buy groups, sharing rent, running collective farms and organic food coops for generations. Is that meshing, too, and if so how is it different than what you’re talking about?

LG: In many ways it is ‘meshing 1.0’. Sharing is at the heart of all the examples you suggest. Yet, one important aspect of the Mesh which is not necessarily incorporated into the types of businesses you mention is using the data and partnership opportunities inherent in Mesh business models. These data (generated from the company directly or shared via partnerships), provides a company with the capacity to see the customer more clearly.

You can see where she is heading, physically and technologically, to ensure that you are able to continue to delight her. For example, RentTheRunway, ThredUp and Swapaholics each specialize in providing clothing to their customers without the need to ‘own’ the wardrobe. Second-hand shops have been around for a long time. What makes these three Mesh fashion businesses different is that they are web based (which expands their reach and convenience to the customer), they actively create partnerships, and they use data.

They also are experimenting with a variety of business models, giving them far more ability to define and refine their offers to customers, evolve their service, and delight customers and customers’ friends—aka, future customers!

Head over to the original posting, The Mesh: Business Revolution or Shiny Object? to read more.

➻ If you're interested in what the businesses of the future will look like, you may want to join Karie Willyerd, co-author of The 2020 Workplace, for a one-hour webinar next Tuesday.

➻ Ahmad Jamal, Vindicated. That's the verdict from Francis Davis at The Village Voice.



Jeff Hayzlett's Business Library
Posted April 27, 2010 8:35 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

If you know who Jeff Hayzlett is, it is probably from his appearances on television or his Twitter footprint. But the chief marketing officer of Kodak is now venturing into the wonderful world of analog with his new book, The Mirror Test: Is Your Business Really Breathing?, being released by Business Plus in May. And he has done something in that book that I wish more authors would do. He has included an appendix in which he lists his "Business Library 'Must' List." It gives you an idea of what has influenced him most over the years (and, just maybe, an idea of what to expect from his book). It includes:

Not only does his book get extra points from me for including a list of his favorites, Hayzlett himself gets extra credit for using a Garrison Keillor quote to introduce the list: "A book is a gift you can open again and again."



In the Books - Off to the Printers VIII
Posted Jan. 8, 2010 5:36 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

I wrote the following article for our first issue of In the Books, released two short years ago, but it seems unbelievably quaint now. Though it has mostly died down, the rise of Web 2.0 and the effects it would have on our culture and the creative economy was a huge debate two years ago. I tried to capture some of those discussions by looking at the books published on the issue in 2007.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

We the Internet BY DYLAN SCHLEICHER

It has been quite a few years since Al Gore invented the Internet in the hope of creating a more involved, engaged, and responsive democracy. And while his political dreams for the world wide web have yet to be realized, I think we can agree it has changed how we interact and do business.

The advent of what tech-guru Tim O’Reilly has dubbed Web 2.0 is now changing the rules and very nature of the Web itself. Web 2.0 is the new Internet of web blogs, open source technology and “wikis,” social networking and user-generated content. It is something other than the “publish and browse” Internet where people act as passive spectators of company brochures and magazine articles. It is something we interact with, a community that anyone who has access to a computer can be a part of. One thing this new Internet can’t yet capture and contain, however, is an extended and nuanced conversation about its own existence, and so in an ironic twist, books—a six hundred-year-old technology—are being written about it.

Web 2.0 is many things to many people. It has been described most famously in business literature as The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowieki, and by Chris Anderson as The Long Tail of commerce. This year, David Weinberger has written that it is where Everything is Miscellaneous, and Andrew Keen has called it The Cult of the Amateur.

In Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger discusses how this new incarnation of the Internet is scattering information into miscellaneous networks, where items are “jumbled digitally and sorted out only when and how a user wants to look for them.” He sees the rise of this digital (dis)organization as the liberation of information from its confinement in the physical space of books and libraries. This web of information is as scattered as it is in the natural world, and we must gather and interpret it for ourselves, and with each other, accordingly:

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 (143).

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 (147).

Andrew Keen has a different take on the subject. In The Cult of the Amateur, he counters what he sees as the irrational exuberance of Web 2.0 utopians with a warning about the economic viability of the new Web and the destructive effect it may have on our culture as a whole. He has seen the Web’s decimation of the traditional music industry, and doesn’t foresee much better for other traditional media outlets. Despite his possibly overly disparaging view of bloggers as “infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters,” he does raise valid concerns about the Internet as it presently exists. He laments the poor quality of most amateur-created content currently available on

the Internet, and wonders how and where credentialed, vetted and substantiated reporting has a place in the brave new world of Web 2.0:

Before Web 2.0, our collective intellectual history has been one driven by the careful aggregation of truth—through professionally edited books and reference materials, newspapers, in radio and television. But as all information becomes digitalized and democratized, and is made universally and permanently available, the media of record becomes the Internet on which misinformation never goes away. As a result, our bank of collected information becomes infected by mistakes and fraud (74).

Wikipedia exemplifies these layers of debate inherent in Web 2.0 products. Now the largest encyclopedia in the world, Wikipedia is, as most proponents of Web 2.0 technology say all information wants to be, free. Andrew Keen has many criticisms of the site—and even

its inventor—in his book, but the crux of his argument is as follows:

By empowering the amateur, we are undermining the authority of the experts who contribute to a traditional resource like the Encyclopedia Britannica—experts who over the years have included the likes of Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and George Bernard Shaw. Indeed, what defines “the very best minds” available, whether they are cultural critics or scientific experts, is their ability to go beyond the “wisdom” of the crowd and mainstream public opinion and bestow us with the benefits of their hard-earned knowledge

(The Cult of the Amateur, 43).

Weinberger would counter by saying, “At Wikipedia, credibility isn’t about an author’s credentials; it’s about an author’s contributions.” In Wikinomics, authors Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams speak to the issue of accuracy and credibility:

Nature magazine’s comparative analysis of forty-two science entries in both showed a surprisingly small difference [in accuracy]: Wikipedia contained four inaccuracies per entry to Britannica’s three.

Britannica has disputed the finding, saying that the errors in Wikipedia were more serious than Britannica errors, and that the source documents for the study include the junior version of the encyclopedia as well as the Britannica yearbooks.

Unfortunately for Britannica, its complaints really miss the point—errors cited on Wikipedia have long since been fixed, while the Britannica errors remain. In the same way that open source programmers swarm together to identify and fix bugs, Wikipedians can easily catch errors and set the record straight. According to an MIT study, an obscenity randomly inserted on Wikipedia is removed in an average of 1.7 minutes (75).

Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams approach the issues of Web 2.0 from a perspective different from Weinberger and Keen’s. The culmination of five years and $9 million of research, Wikinomics looks at the Web through an economic lens. They see a world and economy constantly connected in mass collaboration. They share Keen’s belief that Web 2.0 is changing the very nature of how we do business, but they see this as a step in the right direction. They focus on how peer-to-peer networks and mass collaboration are opening companies to the world and advancing not only their bottom line, but human development as well. They point to examples of companies sharing what used to be closely guarded intellectual property in open source communities. It’s collaborative capitalism, and there are many examples of it working effectively in the real world. One of the best examples is IBM and its collaboration with the open source community of Linux developers.

Open source has enabled IBM to speed innovation and off-load tremendous costs. From a strategic perspective, this approach to peer production is a form of collaborative outsourcing [...] IBM provides a surprising example of how a large, mature company with an ingrained propriety culture can embrace openness and self-organization as strategic weapons. (Wikinomics, 83)

IBM, out of competitive necessity, turned to the open source community and in return contributed its own expertise to improve hardware that had previously been developed by individuals. “Linux-related hardware and services produce billions of dollars of revenue annually, and now IBM, Motorola, Nokia, Philips, Sony, and dozens of other companies are dedicating serious resources to its development” (Wikinomics, 65). But what do the unpaid contributors to the hardware get for doing this work, and why do they do it?

People who work on Linux during their spare time are usually employed in some other facet of the industry. Participating in Linux gets them experience, exposure, and connections, and if they’re good, they can earn status within the community that could prove to be highly valuable to their careers. What’s more, a growing number of people are paid to participate in Linux by the companies they work for. In fact, IBM and Intel are two of the largest contributors to Linux in terms of manpower. (Wikinomics, 70)

Tapscott and Williams believe that if companies open up some of their propriety information and share it, it can be a major benefit to both themselves and others, creating innovation where there had been privacy. They also see economic possibilities in open source technology for new and smaller companies that haven’t been able to afford sophisticated software.

Open source application vendors could be the force that brings affordable enterprise solutions to the masses of business that could never afford an Oracle database or an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from SAP. And who knows, they just might empower a whole new revolution in business productivity, and perhaps even kick-start a renaissance for the small and medium sized business. (Wikinomics, 84)

Because it is miscellaneous, sometimes misleading, and mired in anonymity, the new Internet is one where personal responsibility and individual discernment are paramount. We cannot accept every word published as fact or every line of code as precise. We have to find sources we trust, whether it’s the Wall Street Journal, a programmer from Long Island or a blog about business books from a small company in Milwaukee. If we search intelligently, we may even begin to get at some truths. (We might learn that Al Gore didn’t really invent the Internet.) What we have gained is the ability to interact and join the conversation—however banal it may become—whether it’s on Wikipedia or in a Linux chat room. More than ever, the Internet does reflect who we are as a society, with all our blights and blemishes, all our wit and wisdom. As Wikinomics shows, it can also reflect the innovative, entrepreneurial spirit our economy was built upon.



Improve Knowledge Rentention: Brown Paper Bag Mind Map
Posted June 16, 2009 3:26 a.m. by todd-sattersten
In Big Ideas - 800 CEO Read Blog

Check out this awesome mindmap of Made To Stick.

Sean at StickyBusinessBooks.com also has a paper bag mindmap for Chris Anderson's The Long Tail.

Sadly, it looks like he did those two reviews and stopped. Love the reviews and the effort.






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