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Posted March 5, 2009 8:46 a.m. by dylan
In Business Imprints - 800 CEO Read Blog
Portfolio publisher Adrian Zackheim posted a year in review from that house's perspective on Monday that stands out as a beacon of hope amidst all the publishing gloom of late. (As you all probably know, Portfolio is the publisher of The 100 Best.) Adrian sums up 2008 as follows:
I'm going to simply list the books Mr. Zackheim referenced among the highlights of last year, just to give you a sampling of Portfolio's outstanding 2008 catalog.Despite reduced store traffic through the year, Portfolio reported topline sales growth of 22% and gross margin growth of more than 50%. Nearly half of our new titles achieved margin target in the year of publication. We placed two books on the printed New York Times bestseller list, and several more on the extended Times list, the Wall Street Journal list, the BusinessWeek list, and other bestseller compilations.
Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You With the Bill) by David Cay Johnston The Go-Giver: A Little Story About A Powerful Business Idea by Bob Burg and John David Mann The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam The Ten Commandments for Business Failure by Donald Keough The World is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy by David M. Smick It's Not About the Coffee: Leadership Principles from a Life at Starbucks by Howard Behar with Janet Goldstein Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition by Guy Kawasaki Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin Inside Steve's Brain by Leander Kahney Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin, Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years by Paul B. Carroll and Chunka Mui
If you'd like to know more about Portfolio's 2008 and what makes these titles such highlights, head on over to Adrian Zackheim's original post.
We can only hope that The 100 Best helps make 2009 a repeat performance.
The 2008 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards - Finance & Economics
Posted Dec. 12, 2008 7:46 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
In Book Awards - 800 CEO Read Blog
The books on our 2008 shortlist for the Finance & Economics Category are:
Michael Heller didn't have language to describe the tragedy he saw occurring due to too much ownership, so he coined the term "the tragedy of the anticommons"--a term that describes the overreaction to the "tragedy of the commons,"--when public resources are overused and degraded. In The Gridlock Economy, Heller cites time and again examples of stifled innovation and lost economic growth due to outdated patent law, underuse of resources and, in general, too much ownership. Charles R. Morris not only describes the sickness, but also diagnoses the causes of the economic meltdown, tracing it back to the beginning of deregulation in the '80s and the rise of the bafflingly complex financial instruments that have ruled on Wall Street since. He pulls back the curtain on these instruments, showing their irrationality in vivid detail and explaining that, though they temporarily improved market efficiency, they were built on illusions. Panic compiles literature from "before, during, and after the panics that have punctuated, often, the most recent financial era." It includes accounts from newspapers, magazines, books and government reports and covers the 1987 stock market crash, the bursting of the Internet bubble, the Asian currency crisis and others. The brilliance of the book is that it provides a real-time view into what was happening in the minds of those involved in and reporting on these events. Like many books here, When Markets Collide could have easily found itself in the Globalization category. Winner of the 2008 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, it is a masterful account of the changes occurring in the global economy and their background. It then charts the road ahead, discussing how potential investors should position themselves to benefit from these changes and avoid the risk side. Due to the current, global economic crisis, the dangers referred to in this book's subtitle are no longer hidden, but they may not be so well understood. Snick remedies that in The World is Curved, laying out the tremendous good globalization has achieved, its hidden dangers (now somewhat realized), and the danger of government overreaction and protectionism. This should be required reading for anyone interested in policy concerning global finance.
It's Andrew Carnegie's 173rd birthday, and the always excellent Jacket Copy recently had an insightful post on the man and his gargantuan importance to the free library system, pulling a quote from a speech of his from David Nasaw's excellent 2006 biography of the man, Andrew Carnegie. Gloria McDonough-Taub at Bullish on Books chooses the three books she's most thankful for this year. They are:
by Michael Heller (Basic Books, July 2008)
by Charles R. Morris (PublicAffairs, March 2008)
Edited by Michael Lewis (W. W. Norton, December 2008)
by Mohamed A. El-Erian (McGraw-Hill, July 2008)
by David M. Snick (Portfolio, September 2008)
Around the Web
Posted Nov. 24, 2008 10:11 a.m. by dylan
In Uncategorized - 800 CEO Read Blog
The Book Design Review, which rarely covers business books (though Outliers has also showed up there recently), takes a look at Harvard Business Review Classics. Basically, they're wicked cool.
Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, spoke at PopTech last month and you can watch the video online. (Hat tip to Tiny Gigantic.) Matt Mason, author of The Pirate's Dilemma, also spoke, as did Malcolm Gladwell.
And finally, brilliant reader Sara (who not only works for the excellent Cave Henricks Communication, but also bakes cakes) responded to Todd's Tweet of the Week by pointing us to a rather hilarious satire of business books from Capitalist Banter, who had another piece recently entitled Book Publishing Industry Attempts To Cash In On Circuit City Bankruptcy.
A Time to Read
Posted Oct. 30, 2008 6:31 a.m. by dylan
In Uncategorized - 800 CEO Read Blog
The inherent purpose of any business book is to be useful to the reader. It is a genre of tools and solutions, with business practitioners, consultants, professors and journalists all adding to the stew of ideas and insight.
Not many of us can sit down with Warren Buffet for the weekend, picking his brain on matters of business and life, but all of us can curl up on the couch with a copy of The Snowball by Alice Schroeder and have an intimate, 976 page conversation with the man. Mr. Peter Drucker has passed on, but you can still sit across the table from him at an Italian Restaurant with a copy of Inside Drucker's Brain.
Because books follow reality, though, there has been a flood of titles released recently to cover, assess, dissect and capitalize on the current economic crisis, tinting our economic lenses a little (a lot) darker. Publishers are currently scrambling to release even more, and release them ever more quickly (Time just had a great piece on this phenomenon). A lot of those already released are wonderful reads, such as David M. Snick's The World is Curved and Charles Morris's The Trillion Dollar Meltdown, and there are equally fascinating titles on the way, like Micahel Lewis's Panic. These kind of books fascinate me, but they're not going to help you solve any of the day to day problems you might be facing. (Unless, of course, you're the President of the United Stated or head of the IMF, in which case, read these books now!)
The fact is that the problems in the economy are above most of our paygrades. The solutions, on the other hand, are not. Each of us can make our companies and communities better. And there have been just as many books published on these issues this year as any other. If you're exhausted by the bad news glaring back at you from the nightly news, shut off the television and pick up one of the following books:
Saving the World at Work by Tim Sanders, Currency The Necessary Revolution by Peter Senge, Bryan Smith, Nina Kruschwitz, Joe Lauer & Sara Schley (Jack Covert Selects) We Are the New Radicals by Julia Moulden Creating a World Without Poverty by Muhammad Yunus (Jack Covert Selects) The Tactics of Hope by Wilford Welch Reality Check by Guy Kawasaki (Jack Covert Selects)
Reality Check doesn't necessarily seem to fit with the other titles, but I included it because Guy believes that if you start a busines, you should start one that's going to change the world, and because the book is hilarious which will keep the reader in a positive state of mind.
And finally... now, as always, is also a time to focus on family, and Patrick Lencioni's new book, The 3 Big Questions for a Frantic Family, can help with that. Lencioni was interviewed about the book by LA Times' book blog, Jacket Copy, yesterday.
Any other sugggestions?
Authors in the Press
Posted Oct. 27, 2008 6:11 a.m. by dylan
In General Business - 800 CEO Read Blog
Marci Alboher of The New York Times recently conducted a Q&A session with Guy Kawasaki via email. One exchange for you entrepreneurs:
Q. What is your advice to entrepreneurs seeking funding or growth opportunities if the credit and capital markets continue on their current course?
A. My advice is that they melt wax into their ears and go forward. If they are waiting for wonderful credit and capital markets, they probably aren't entrepreneurs. They're much more likely to be consultants and bankers looking to quickly flip a company.
Kawasaki's latest book, Reality Check, is being released this week by
Portfolio. The book's 94 chapters span 500 pages, but Guy is an extremely entertaining author and it's a surprisingly easy read. The book was one of October's Jack Covert Selects.
Geoffrey Colvin has an article in the October 27 issue of Fortune adapted from his new book, Talent Is Overrated, which was itself an expansion of his popular cover story for Fortune in 2006. The article makes the argument that discipline and training breed the skills that drive greatness, not innate talent--if such a thing even exists:
A number of researchers now argue that talent means nothing like what we think it means, if indeed it means anything at all. A few contend that the very existence of talent is not, as they carefully put it, supported by evidence. In studies of accomplished individuals, researchers have found few signs of precocious achievement before the individuals started intensive training.
To view a video by the author that sums up his ideas in 4:02 minutes, go here. He also has a guest post on the Fortune Blog.
For the latest "Creative Disruption" installment in Forbes, Scott D. Anthony, lead author of The Innovator's Guide to Growth, teamed up with Clayton Christensen, author of the best-selling Innovator's Dilemma and two more books this year--Disrupting Class (about education) and The Innovator's Prescription (about health care). They tell the story of Proctor & Gamble's Align group, which teamed with Innosight (a consulting firm the authors are affiliated with) and launched it's IBS medication online instead of the way P&G traditionally introduces products--in a huge box store.
Usually P&G product managers go big with a launch at a big chain like Wal-Mart (nyse: WMT - news - people ) backed up by a promotion and ad campaign costing tens of millions of dollars. Work with Innosight, including a two-day workshop, helped the Align group reframe its approach to one that was more "invest a little, learn a lot." Instead of trying to come up with a definitive answer about Align's potential, members of the group identified which assumptions would have to be true to create a business about which P&G could get excited. Two questions they zeroed in on: Would doctors promote the solution? Would consumers take the probiotic every day?
The article mentions that P&G's CEO "[A.G.] Lafley expects business units to allocate up to 30% of their innovative resources to disruptive innovation." Lafley himself has a great book on innovation out this year entitled The Game-Changer, co-authored with the brilliant Ram Charan.
And finally, if you haven't been keeping up with Charlie Rose lately, you're doing yourself a disservice. He had David Snick, author of The World Is Curved, on last Thursday's show (after 2008's Nobel Economics Prize recipient Paul Krugman). Other recent guests include Paul Volcker, Henry Paulson, Ace Greenberg, and, last Monday, a panel of John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins, Jeffrey Immelt, Anand Mahindra , Meg Whitman and James Wolfensohn. Good stuff. If you're trying to stay current with and understand the depth of the issues our economy is facing, stay up a little later each night and watch Charlie Rose.
