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ISBN 9781422166963 Published Sept. 2010
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Posted Nov. 21, 2011 2:41 p.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
Congratulations are in order for friend of the company Marshall Goldsmith, one of the really good guys in this business, on winning the 2011 Thinkers50 Leadership Award as the World’s Most-Influential Leadership Thinker.
Business Book Readers will know Marshall from his excellent and highly influential books, most recently What Got You Here Won't Get You There and MOJO. Friends and followers of the company might remember him from the LeaveSmarter event we held with him here in Milwaukee last year (you can find a video excerpt from that event at the end of this post).
Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution and, this year, The Innovator's DNA won the award in Innovaton and was number one in the overall rankings.
And there are other categories and awards in the Thinkers50 as well, including the Thinkers50 Book Award, which Pankaj Ghemawat won for his new book World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve It, in which he rejects "flat world" view of the global economy and offer a more nuanced, semi-globalized view.
Other Think50 2011 category winners include:
- Blue Ocean Strategy coauthors W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne in Strategy
- Vijay Govindarajan, author of Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators and The Other Side of Innovation, took the Breakthrough Idea Award
- Lucy P Marcus took home the Future Thinker Award
- Nirmalya Kumar, author of India Inside, won the Global Village Award
For a complete list of this year's Thinkers50 and where they all rank, a lot of great video with those who made the list and everyone who made the shortlist for the awards, head on over to Thinkers50.com.
Friday Links
Posted May 20, 2011 10:47 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
➻ They will cost you $6.95 each (unless you have a subscription), but if all you read over the weekend are this year's McKinsey Award winners, you'll return to work on Monday much smarter for the effort. The McKinsey Award is given out each year to recognize the best articles published in the Harvard Business Review. This year's overall winner is Clayton Christensen—Harvard Professor and author of The Innovator's Dilemma and the soon-to-be-released The Innovator's DNA —for his article asking his graduating class How Will You Measure Your Life?
My class at HBS is structured to help my students understand what good management theory is and how it is built. To that backbone I attach different models or theories that help students think about the various dimensions of a general manager’s job in stimulating innovation and growth. In each session we look at one company through the lenses of those theories—using them to explain how the company got into its situation and to examine what managerial actions will yield the needed results.
On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.
As the students discuss the answers to these questions, I open my own life to them as a case study of sorts, to illustrate how they can use the theories from our course to guide their life decisions.
Second place was shared between Roger Martin, author of the recently released Fixing the Game, and the authors of The Other Side of Innovation, Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble. Martin's article was on The Age of Customer Capitalism, Govindarajan and Trimble's on how to Stop the Innovation Wars
➻ I've linked to Umair Haques HBR posts before, and I'm doing so again because he asked a provocative and important question this morning.
Here's a question: What if, just maybe, it's our way of life itself that's a bubble?
To illustrate why I ask, consider this set of questions: How's your house price doing? Where would your 401K be, if central banks withdrew life support for banks? How steep is a college education this year (hint: on average, 10-15% more than last year)? How are weekly grocery and gas prices doing? Where are commodity prices—not to mention gold—headed? Bubble, bubble, toil, and trouble: these days, it seems, everywhere you look, there's a bubble inflating—or popping.
He calls this The Opulence Bubble, but he's not arguing that we stop growing or cease living comfortably, just that "'more, bigger, faster, cheaper' doesn't necessarily add up to or equal 'better, wiser, smarter, fitter, closer.'"
➻ Just one week after citing a University of Washington study in which E-textbooks flunked an early test, and stating that "schools may want to pause before jumping on the e-textbook bandwagon," Nicholas Carr is reporting that Florida schools are doing just that and will soon have Zero tolerance for print.
That's right: four years from now it will be against the law to give a kid a printed book in a Florida school. One lawmaker said the bill was intended to "meet the students where they are in their learning styles," which means nothing but sounds warm and fuzzy.
His closing remarks? "But remember: When print is outlawed only outlaws will have print." I really enjoy Nicholas Carr.
➻ Jon, Aaron, Carol and Jack are going to be outlaws from the office next week, at BEA in New York, and I really hope none of them are interested in How To Look for a Publishing Job at BEA because we need all of them here—very much. Please come home, guys.
➻ One reason I need Jack to come back is that he forwards videos like the one below of Paul Simon inviting a fan out of the crowd to play a song, writing "This is why music is special. It touches something inside us. Joyous."
Friday Links
Posted Oct. 2010 8:44 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
➻ Chris Trimble, author of The Other Side of Innovation, wrote On the Differences Between Innovation and Cooking Chili yesterday at the Harvard Business Review. He sums it all up at the end:
... I'm comfortable with my casual approach to experimentation with chili. I always get unambiguous, same-day feedback, such as bowls returned to the kitchen still full of chili.
Business experiments aren't like that. Results are usually delayed and incomplete, and you simply can't expect to learn under such conditions without discipline.
Also at the Harvard Business Review, Umair Haque picked up a topic from the authors of The Power of Pull—institutional innovation—and developed his own Institutional Innovation Manifesto. Eight institutions he cites as "musty, moldy, and stale, remnant of the industrial age ... failing to nourish the economy" are the mall, the bank, the stock market, the IPO, the job, the bottom line, the corporation, and the board. Those are all pretty solid institutions that define much of our economy at the moment, so the question about what replaces them are rather enormous. As Haque writes:
Perhaps because those questions are so big, they feel more than a little bit daunting. But the time to be dauntless is now. Because whether we like it or not, a Great Stagnation is choking us in the belching, noxious fumes of an industrial age, and it won't go away just because we want it to.
We certainly do need to experiment, add some new ingredients in, cut back on others. But, as Trimble says, While "Innovation is experimentation," experimentation does not always lead to innovation. The latter requires discipline.
➻ It also requires a good saleman, lots of them, to sell the ideas, products, and services of the new economy. Unfortunately, as James Ledbetter reported is Slate recently, there's been a Death of a Salesman. Of Lots of Them, Actually. Ledbetter discusses how, in the past, "Getting people to spend their money became a kind of secular religion that was necessary to overthrow an older Puritan order" and the more recent trend of cutting salespeople out of transactions—the most obvious being online sales—and how that may affect society.
We might be better off without that extravagance. But it's still the case that for much of recent American history, sales jobs functioned as a pillar of the middle class. Over the last few decades, the American economy has generated a large number of high-skill, high-paying jobs, and a large number of low-skilled, low-paying jobs. The middle, however, is being "hollowed out," in the phrase David Autor used in an economic paper published in April, and sales is a major component of that shrinking middle. The strength of sales jobs is that they can be reasonably high-paying but typically don't require technical training or other specialized skills. When those jobs disappear, the people who hold them will often be pushed down the wage ladder or even out of the workforce. Sixty years after Willy Loman, that is our tragedy.
As Willy Loman himself said "You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit."
➻ And it's not just salesman that may be on their way out. As many others do, Michael Drew believes the traditional publishing model is doomed, and that 2012 [will be] The End of the Publishing Industry as We Know It.
➻ Christopher Mims isn't convinced, writing at The Technology Review that The Death of the Book has Been Greatly Exaggerated.
"The backlash against e-books by those who aren't so in love with technology for its own sake has yet to begin, but it's coming. [...]
And as for the death-by-2015 predictions of [Nicholas] Negroponte, it's just as likely that as the ranks of the early adopters get saturated, adoption of e-books will slow. The reason is simple: unlike the move from CDs to MP3s, there is no easy way to convert our existing stock of books to e-readers. And unlike the move from records and tapes to CDs, it's not immediately clear that an e-book is in all respects better than what it succeeds.
Hat tip to Shelf Awareness.
➻ Regardless of what happens in publishing, the Great Recession is changing consumer buying habits. Inc. magazine's Leigh Buchanan sat down in August with John Gerzema of Young and Rubicam, author of the soon-to-be-released Spend Shift to try to get a better Understanding [of] the Consumer of the Future. Gerzema counsels that:
It's a mistake to assume that our country is composed of big blocs of people who hold wildly varying values. You could make quite a long list of values held in common across all social and economic groups. Transparency, honesty, kindness, good stewardship, even humor, work in businesses at all times.
He also says that "Irony isn't dead. ... Cynicism is dead." God, I hope so.
➻ The Atlantic's John Hudson asked this week, Is Malcolm Gladwell Wrong About Twitter? (And, if you're wondering, Gladwell thinks Twitter is Small Change.)
I don't really have anything to say about or add to the discussion.
➻ 800-CEO-READ went on a field trip to see Ride, Rise, Roar last night.
Friday Links
Posted Sept. 3, 2010 11:10 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
➻ Chris Guillabeau's The Art of Non-Conformity will be released on Tuesday—a book I hope everyone reading this blog will pick up. On his blog yesterday, he briefly discussed Seth Godin's departure from traditional publishing before laying out the Strategy, Tactics, and the Plan for the Next 97 Days he has devised for entering the publishing arena that Seth is leaving. And his plan is the only plan that has ever succeeded: think big; work hard. Responding to the notion that “The only authors who sell books anymore are those who have popular blogs,” he writes:
Where does a popular blog come from—does the blog fairy descend from the sky with a passionate group of readers, all eager to support a new writer?
It's a valid question, and we are glad this dedicated, unconventional (indeed, dedicatedly unconventional) individual has taken a step into traditional publishing, and we wish him the best on his Unconventional Book Tour.
If you'd like to learn more before picking up a copy of his book for yourself, you can read the interview Callie Oettinger did with him over at Steven Pressfield Online, or dig into some of his online offerings.
➻ Scott Stratten's UnMarketing also comes out next week, and in true social-media guru fashion, he did a 140-character interview on Twitter with new PR pros. Some advice:
@ssiewert: How can young pros/Gen Y apply their years of personal experience online to achieve business objectives?
@unmarketing: You have the advantage, since you’re already online. Be yourself, have an opinion but also be humble. You don’t know everything yet.
➻ The Bullish on Books blog had a great guest post from our dear friend Erika Andersen today, entitled You’ve Been Laid Off – Now What? She used the space to discuss how, once you declare an intention, or "put up your sail to catch the wind you’re looking for—it makes you available to other winds, as well." And Erika knows. She is one of the best advisers in country and the author of two outstanding books, Growing Great Employees and Being Strategic, the latter of which was recently made into a PBS special (Check your local PBS listings for the airtime, or purchase the DVD at shopPBS.org).
➻ The Economist recently took a look inside The innovation machine, reviewing Vijay Govindarajan & Chris Trimble's book recently released on the topic, The Other Side of Innovation. From the article:
Many would-be innovators deal with the trade-off between efficiency and innovation by rejecting traditional management entirely. They repeat mantras about “breaking all the rules” and “asking for forgiveness rather than permission”. They set up skunk works (small, autonomous units with a remit to innovate) and mock the boring corporate types who write their pay-cheques. But again this is counter-productive. Mocking the corporate establishment only encourages it to starve you of resources.
They also touch on Warren Bennis's Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership briefly, and thought it looks like a great book, I think they did so only to have an excuse to introduce the topic of innovation by writing "Today there is no hotter topic in management theory than 'sperm in the air.'"
➻ Bob Sutton, author of the soon-to-be-released Good Boss, Bad-Boss, wants to know... Is Your Boss A Certified Brasshole? And he has devised a test for you to find out.
➻ Mitch Joel, author of Six Pixels of Separation, writes a twice-monthly column for the Montreal Gazette and Vancouver Sun. His most recent post discussed the 10 Best Books For Back To School Business Reading, and his list is very solid:
- Brains on Fire: Igniting Powerful, Sustainable, Word of Mouth Movements by Robbin Phillips, Greg Cordell, Geno Church and Spike Jones, John Wiley & Sons
- Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur & Tim Clark, John Wiley & Sons
- Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell, Pantheon
- The Future Arrived Yesterday: The Rise of the Protean Corporation and What it Means for You by Michael Malone, Crown Business
- Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams, Portfolio
- Marketing Lessons From the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn From the Most Iconic Band in History by David Meerman Scott & Brian Halligan, John Wiley & Sons
- MicroMarketing: Get Big Results by Thinking and Acting Small by Greg Verdino, McGraw-Hill
- Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead by Charlene Li, Jossey-Bass
- The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself by John Jantsch, Portfolio
- The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely, HarperCollins
I personally think that if you have read all of these books, just go ahead and forgo going back to school and get on out there and start conquering the world.
➻ The 16th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style went on sale this week, but you can get the original edition (1906) for free. Head on over to Papercuts to figure out how.
➻ "In addition to being a bullfighter and magician, he's a lazy river, a slow moving train, a future hall-of-famer playing through the pain, he's a grizzly bear." And his son is a book reviewer.
