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Hardcover
335 pages
ISBN 9781591842408 Published Feb. 2009
Portfolio
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Posted Dec. 5, 2011 7:59 a.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
Five years ago, Jack Covert, founder of 800-CEO-READ, and Todd Sattersten, then president of the company, chose and reviewed the 100 best business titles of all time--the ones that deliver the biggest payoff for today's busy readers. The resulting book, aptly named The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, puts each book in context so that readers can quickly find solutions to the business problems they face. In addition to the book reviews, "they recommend other books (both inside and outside their top 100) that you should read next. Sprinkled throughout are sidebars that take you beyond business books to movies, novels, and children's books."
Our company is proud that the book has been a success on many levels. As Jack explains in his new Preface to the Paperback:
Writing The 100 Best Business Books of All Time was the culmination of my twenty-five years of reading, reviewing, and recommending business books. It thrills me that the book has continued to sell consistently and has been reprinted in ten languages....I am happy to say that as we updated the material for the paperback, I am still excited by every book, ever nugget of information we've included here.
While the definitive list of the best business books remains the same in this edition, over the past five years, the business world has changed, so we felt this book too must change. In this updated paperback edition of The 100 Best,
➻ We expanded the book reviews we originally included in the final chapter of the hardcover called Takeaways, and moved those deserving books and their reviews into their respective chapters.
➻ We have updated the sidebars to keep them timely.
➻ And we have added new pieces of writing that include the answers to such questions as why 1982 was such a critical year in business books, which books will help you learn how to make better choices, why sometimes pictures work better than words, and how to read a business book.
(from the "Preface to the Paperback Edition")
The 100 Best will help you make connections, will present you with a map to help you wisely and efficiently explore the increasingly vast terrain of business thought. As Todd explains in his closing essay, "How To Read a {Business} Book:"
Books are about context, the greater meaning. Being able to connect multiple books improves our ability to compare and contrast approaches and philosophies.
The 100 Best Business Books of All Time does just that.
Friday Links
Posted Sept. 23, 2011 11:41 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
➻ Only one of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time has been made into a movie before—The Smartest Guys in the Room by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, and that was a documentary. That all changes this weekend with the movie release of Moneyball. And while Brad Pitt, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jonah Hill certainly don't need my help promoting it here, I'm just too excited about this not to mention it. To get a good grasp of the movie outside of all the web ads, commercials and talk show appearances, I'll turn you over to Joe Posnanski, a man who practices sports writing as a fine art. After he wrote about Moneyball and The Ballad of Bill James, ("What would a formula for Bill James’ career look like? I’ve thought quite a lot about this and have finally came up with one:
(Cu * D) / (CoW) = Bill James") he moved onto Moneyball the Movie, writing:
[T]this, I think, was the great challenge of Moneyball—perhaps even the unwinnable challenge. They were making a movie largely about baseball statistics, for crying out loud, but they were making it with a star-studded Hollywood cast (Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Chris Pratt and Robin Wright ... ), a terrific director (Bennett Miller, who did Capote), and an incredible writing team (Aaron Sorkin wrote The Social Network and Steven Zaillian wrote Schindler’s List, among others). They were making a Brad Pitt movie without a love interest, a baseball movie without a climactic home run, a buddy movie about on-base percentage and a big Hollywood movie about a general manager who has never led his team to the World Series.
It’s no wonder that Michael Lewis himself never thought that Moneyball the movie could be made. “With The Blind Side,” he says about his last book-to-movie, “it was a no-brainer. I would say to the Hollywood people: ‘What took you so long?’ But I really never thought they could find a way to turn Moneyball into a movie.”
They did. And, I have to admit, seeing it was one of the strangest movie experiences of my life.
[...]
There’s [a] scene in Moneyball that I am quite sure is unlike anything that has ever appeared on screen, and in many ways encapsulates everything I think about the movie. In the scene, David Justice is at the plate. ... Justice plays a fairly substantial role in the movie—he is the old guy brought in to help the 2002 A’s replace Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon. And the scene is an artistic at-bat, with music playing in the background, with a voiceover—it is quite an impressive bit of moviemaking. There is some slow motion, the camera angle is striking, everything about the scene is as drawn out and carefully crafted as the light-crashing scene in The Natural or the final shot of Hoosiers.
Except this: In the scene, David Justice walks.
Yes: An ultra-dramatic movie scene in which our hero takes four balls, one a close pitch, and walks.
I'm really looking forward to this movie.
➻ Michael Lewis's Moneyball, the book the movie is based on, is all about innovation and the business of baseball, about taking the reevaluation of the basic metrics of baseball that people like Bill James had been working on for years and bringing that into the front office to determine what kind of a team to put on the field.
Publishing is going through a similar transition, with people like Richard Nash at Red Lemonade blowing up the status quo, reevaluating the metrics of the business and putting a new model into play. Seth Godin is trying something new with his Domino Project, as well. With his latest release, We Are All Weird, he's messing with the traditional print run. He explained the print run this week on the Domino Project Blog.
We only have 11,000 hardcover copies on sale at Amazon, with no plans to print more. ... Why limit the number printed?
Conventional publishing wisdom says that the first 10,000 copies are the hardest. In fact, you don’t make money until after that. The goal is to prime the pump and then, if you get lucky, sell millions and millions of hardcovers, day after day, year after year. That’s what pays the bills at all the large publishing houses.
The thing is, digital is better at infinity than paper ever will be. Digital is easy to keep in stock, easy to replenish, easy to connect with. Paper, on the other hand, benefits from scarcity. If you know that there are only a few books and then they’re gone, you’re more likely to hurry up, more likely to grab yours now, more likely to treasure it once you get it. And in a digital world, a book that’s not worth treasuring is not worth owning, is it?
So the bet I’m making is that the scarcity of the hardcover will help you decide to read it right now.
Now, There's obviously nothing to stop Seth from printing more hardcovers if there's enough demand and dollar signs in Amazon's eyes, but he's not planning any additional print runs and I think creating scarcity in this way while letting the digital release do the job of spreading the ideas more widely is an interesting idea to consider. Independent record labels have been doing small vinyl pressings like this for years, and while they'll never make billions doing so, it does seem to keep many of those enterprises going.
➻ strategy + business recently ran an excerpt from The Method Method, which is a book that tells a similar story in yet another old and sometimes dusty industry.
Method is one of those delightfully quirky entrepreneurial stories. In the late 1990s, two 24-year-old guys—an ad man and a climate researcher—take off on a ski weekend and decide that the home cleaning products industry is ripe for a shakeup. Never mind that it’s a mature, relatively stagnant market dominated by powerful brand names like Procter & Gamble and the Clorox Company. Never mind that everybody else is starting e-businesses. Never mind that they are two 24-year-old guys on a ski weekend talking about cleaning products. By 2010, their privately held company is generating annual revenues somewhere north of US$200 million; it counts major retailers, including Target, Whole Foods, and Auchan, among its accounts; and the big dogs are tracking it.
The book was chosen by Theodore Kinni, coauthor of Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service, as part of s + b's Author's Choice series. To learn more, continue with the story about how method is Bottling Customer Experience.
➻ Caleb Melby posted an exclusive preview of Four Pages From The Zen Of Steve Jobs this week.
The Forbes-written, JESS3-designed book re-imagines Steve’s relationship with his friend and mentor, Kobun Chino Otogawa, a Japanese Soto Zen Buddhist priest.
The full 60-page book is scheduled to be released digitally later this year. Judging by the previews, it looks like something to look forward to.
➻ In honor of banned books week, a Mark Twain story was formally 'unbanned' at the Charlton Library in Massachusetts. Alison Flood of The Guardian explains:
Twain's comic short story told from the perspective of Eve was banned from Charlton Library in Massachusetts in 1906 after its trustees objected to illustrations of a naked Eve – or as the New York Times put it at the time, "her dresses are all cut Garden of Eden style". When Richard Whitehead became a trustee of the library in 2008, he stumbled across the century-old controversy and decided to track down a copy of the banned book, complete with illustrations.
"Knowing that Banned Book Week was coming up in September [he] proposed the idea of having an official 'unbanning' of the book," said the library's director Cheryl Hansen. "On Tuesday, September 20, 2011 the board of library trustees unanimously voted to unban Eve's Diary. I think that Mark Twain would be very pleased and I'm sure that he would have something humorous to say about it." At the time, Twain wrote in a letter that "the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me".
The article also tells the story of two other books that were unbanned this week, and provides a list of the most challenged books of 2010.
➻ Why? Innovation is A Sky for Shoeing Horses Under.
The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: Updated & Expanded!
Posted Sept. 2, 2011 7:41 a.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
We're excited to announce an updated and expanded paperback version of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time available 11/1/11 from Portfolio.
More content--expanded reviews of the Takeaway chapter books (including Thinkertoys, The First 90 Days, Beyond the Core, and The Lexus and the Olive Tree); new sidebars (including decision-making, visual thinking, and 1982, the watershed year for business books); and a new introduction and closing manifesto--means more for you to learn and enjoy. The perfect book for you to put on your Christmas list and read to inspire you for the new year!
Stay tuned for more announcements and even some giveaways as the book release date approaches!
Wharton Digital Press and The Leader's Checklist
Posted May 26, 2011 10:32 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania made a big announcement last month, launching Wharton Digital Press. From that release:
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania announces the launch of Wharton Digital Press, an innovative global all-digital publishing initiative that will publish books electronically, including ebooks, enhanced ebooks, mobile apps, and print books available through print-on-demand technology. In collaboration with Knowledge@Wharton, the School’s online journal of research and business analysis, Wharton Digital Press will take advantage of the Wharton School’s global presence to communicate relevant business knowledge from experts throughout the world to readers wherever and whenever they need it. Knowledge@Wharton reaches 1.7 million subscribers in 189 countries in five languages.
You can find more information and the full release on their website.
Their first book will be from Wharton Professor Michael Useem, the author of one of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time—The Leadership Moment. It will be available June 21st, and is entitled The Leadership Checklist. According to the promotional copy, it "provides 15 guiding principles that form the core of the Leader’s Checklist, [helping] you to personalize your checklist to the unique needs and demands of your organization." For those of you (us) that can't wait until next month to get started, we have posted the introduction to the book below.
Or envision this situation: For decades, your financial services firm has sailed along. Not only have revenues soared; your company has also earned a treasured AAA credit rating while creating an extraordinary wealth engine: a little giant of a division that insures against debt defaults, including subprime mortgages. Continuing prosperity seems predictable, but suddenly the market implodes. Subprime mortgages turn noxious. Lehman Brothers goes under. Your AAA rating slips to AA, then A-. With the downgrades, you have to post billions of dollars in collateral that you simply do not have. This boat is sailing straight toward a roaring waterfall, and you are standing at the helm.
Or this one: The enemy has surrendered after a four-year conflict that has left more than half a million dead, and your army commander has assigned you to arrange one of the war's crowning moments, the formal surrender of the enemy's most venerated army. The tone, the texture of the ceremony, the formalities of receiving the enemy -- they are entirely for you to craft.
These are not, of course, hypothetical or anonymous events. Laurence Golborne, the new mining minister for the Republic of Chile, was visiting in Ecuador on the night of August 5, 2010, when his chief of staff back in Santiago sent him a simple but urgent text message: "Mine cave-in Copiapó; 33 victims." Twenty-eight hours later, at 3:30 a.m. on August 7, Golborne arrived at the remote site of the mining disaster in the Atacama desert of northern Chile. Soon, hundreds of millions of people around the globe would be witnessing one of the greatest mining rescues of all time.
Like the miners in Chile, American International Group (AIG) -- the financial services giant heading for the cataract -- was ultimately rescued through direct government intervention. The company was deemed "too big to fail," though it was almost too toxic to save. When the subprime mortgage market in which AIG was deeply invested began to collapse, top AIG executives had taken few protective measures. Their tone-deaf response to the tumultuous events that unfolded left the company vulnerable to one of the greatest corporate collapses in business history.
How different the actions taken by Union officer Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain when Ulysses S. Grant handed him the historic duty of coordinating a follow-up ceremony to Robert E. Lee's April 9, 1865, surrender at Appomattox. Instead of humiliating the Confederate army, as might have been expected after four years of civil war, Chamberlain ordered a respectful salute and launched a healing process that would help reunite a country.
Two of the leaders we have just met were well prepared when summoned to moments of crisis. The other, recent history shows us, was obviously not. To be sure, few of us are likely to have our mettle tested in such trying circumstances. But all of us can and should prepare for less- public crises in our own spheres of serving, and thus it behooves us to ask why: Why did Laurence Golborne and Joshua Chamberlain rise so effectively to the challenge? Why were the AIG executives unable to steer an effective course? Is the skill set that served Golborne and Chamberlain teachable, even transferable and applicable, to leaders who will never be called to scale the kinds of mountains these men had to face?
The animating premise of this book is that effective leadership can be learned, and indeed should be learned, by those with responsibility for the performance of their enterprises and their employees. The further premise is that leadership benefits from an approach built upon specific guiding principles that, taken together, create a clear road map for navigating any situation. That is why I advocate and in these pages lay out the Leader's Checklist, a complete set of vital leadership principles that are tried, tested, and true.
The Leader's Checklist is composed of 15 core principles applicable to most leaders, in most endeavors, in most circumstances. I provide guidance to help you customize this list to specific situations and missions. Given the vast diversity of leadership roles, one size definitely does not fit all in this endeavor. Taken collectively, the Leader's Checklist and its precepts should prepare you well for building an enterprise in good times but also for facing a worst-case leadership scenario, even if (thankfully) you are never called to face one. Finally, I offer an Owner's Manual, so you can put these principles to practice in your own domain of leadership.
From The Leader's Checklist, by Michael Useem, © 2011 by Michael Useem.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Useem is Director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management and William and Jacalyn Egan Professor of Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Leadership Moment, Investor Capitalism, and The Go Point, among other books. The Leadership Moment was included in The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, written by the business book experts at 800-CEO-READ, and listed as one of the 10 best leadership books on the Washington Post's "Leadership Playlist." Useem's articles have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Fast Company, Financial Times, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, McKinsey Quarterly, New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.
Useem has presented programs and seminars on leadership development with American Express, China Minsheng Banking Corporation, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, Comcast, Eli Lilly, Estée Lauder, Fidelity Investments, GlaxoSmithKline, Goldman Sachs, Google, Grupo Santander, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Motorola, National Football League, New York Fire Department, The New York Times, Nokia, Pew Charitable Trusts, PriceWaterhouse Coopers, Samsung, U.N. Development Programme, U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Military Academy, World Economic Forum, and other organizations.
For more information please visit wdp.wharton.upenn.edu, and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter.
Friday Links
Posted May 13, 2011 7:28 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
➻ Peter Buffet—musician, son of Warren and author of Life Is What You Make It: Find Your Own Path to Fulfillment*—will not be attempting to succeed his father as the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. The reason why can probably be deduced from the title of his book, but he went into more detail, talking about Growing Up Buffett in today's Freakonomics podcast with Stephen Dubner. Discussing his degree of interest in the company growing up, he says:
Well, you know, growing up we really didn’t know what my dad did. It was quite mysterious. He read a lot, which he still does. And I will say if you walk in the house today you will see the same thing that I saw in 1965. He’s just this consistent human being in spades. It was incredible. But we didn’t know what he did. In fact, when my sister filled out a form, I think in fourth or fifth grade, about what our parents did, she put “security analysis,” and it was assumed that what he did was check alarm systems.
He also explains why he is living proof that investing in yourself and growing your own life is much more important and satisfying than having a pile of money that belongs to someone else's success. And, though he didn't follow in his father's career path, Peter Buffett is a philanthropist like his father, which brings us to our next link.
*If you're interested in learning more about the book, Jon wrote a short review and discussed what it was like having Peter as a client when he worked for a digital media company on this blog last April.
➻ The Economist reviewed three books this week about Giving For Results. One of them is Do More Than Give, which is the follow up to a book we greatly admired when it was released in 2007—Forces For Good. The review begins by taking a look at the state of philanthropy in America.
Whether America’s famed philanthropic tradition is all it is cracked up to be will become much clearer during the next few years. Superficially, that tradition has emerged from the global financial crisis in remarkably good shape. In the past year some 69 of America’s billionaires and billionaire families have promised to give away at least half of their fortunes by signing the Giving Pledge championed by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, two of the world’s richest men. Among them is 27-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, a founder of Facebook, proof that America’s giving gene has passed to the next generation.
The question is, will all that giving, by the billionaires and the thousands more Americans with far smaller amounts of money, actually do any good? There is rather a depressing history of well-intentioned donations often doing nothing to alleviate society’s problems, and sometimes even making matters worse. As Mr. Buffett has said many times, “making money is far easier than giving it away effectively.”
Looking at how Do More Than Give addresses this issue, the review states:
Of the six practices of effective philanthropists described in ">Do More Than Give, two stand out as being unusual. To achieve real change—what the authors, Leslie Crutchfield, John Kania and Mark Kramer, call “catalytic philanthropy”—the best course may be to engage in political advocacy to change government policy, they argue. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing this a lot more than most, on issues ranging from education reform to international aid. But the advice also works at a local level, as the book illustrates through the story of how the Tow Foundation improved juvenile justice policy in Connecticut. Their second sound piece of advice is that philanthropists should work together more often. This seems obvious, but as the authors rightly ask, “Why don’t more foundations actively collaborate with their peers?”
We brought Leslie Crutchfield to Milwaukee a few years ago to speak to local non-profits. You can find video of that event on our YouTube page, or read the Jack Covert Selects review of her first book if you're interested in learning more.
➻ Named after Edison's idea that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, the third annual 99% Conference was held last week in New York. Their list of speakers was really impressive this year, so I've been keeping my eye out for video and roundups. And while I can't find a whole lot, there are a few things trickling out such as Cool Hunting's recaps of Day One and Day Two and Nora Herting's Illustrated Takeaways of a few of the presentations. I'll share more as I find it, but the links on the speaker pages themselves have some interesting material to dig through in the meantime, including an interview with Chris Guillebeau about how Balanced People Don’t Change the World.
➻ You might call Andrew Kessler's Novel Approach to Bookselling a bit unbalanced. He opened a bookstore in Manhattan whose shelves contain about 3,000 books, but they're all copies of the same book—his own history of Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days with the Phoenix Mars Mission. Inc.'s Eric Markowitz tells us more:
The store opened on April 12, its shelves loaded with about 3,000 copies of Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days With the Phoenix Mars Mission. There is no café, there are no readings. The chalkboard outside reads: "We have one book, but we are not Scientologists." A passerby wondered aloud on a recent Saturday morning, "What the hell is this place?" [...] At around 3 p.m., a young women wanders into the store.
"Can I help you find anything?" Kessler asks.
"I'm looking for a book," she says.
"Is it this one?" Kessler responds.
I have no idea why we didn't do this with The Hundred Best Business Books of All Time.
➻ If you liked Nora Herting's Illustrated Takeaways from the 99% Conference above, you'll love Mike Rohde's Chick-fil-A Leadercast Sketchnotes. And if you love Mike Rohde's Chick-fil-A Leadercast Sketchnotes, you'll absolutely fall apart when you see Wendy MacNaughton's Meanwhile, The San Francisco Public Library at The Rumpus.
➻ So, NASA Announced the Results of Epic Space-Time Experiment last week. And, well...
"The space-time around Earth appears to be distorted just as general relativity predicts," says Stanford University physicist Francis Everitt, principal investigator of the Gravity Probe B mission.
I think this should have been the soundtrack of that epic announcement:
Barn Owl & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma Live At The Cube (Bristol) from Dan Crossley on Vimeo.
