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ISBN 9781591843351 Published April 2010
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Posted May 3, 2010 4:51 a.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
Every month, Penguin/Portfolio posts a new free podcast that you can download from iTunes or listen to on their site called The Business Beat. It was exciting news to hear that The Business Beat was featured in USA TODAY’s “Watch, Listen and Read” column today--it’s on 6B of the Money section, if you have a paper copy on hand--, not only because we love the work that Portfolio does with its business books, but because at the end of every program, Jack reviews a classic business book in his Just Jack! section.
The past month's episode...
answers the questions that many new business school graduates are asking themselves: How can we maintain our ethical standards while succeeded in our careers? How do we continue our business education after graduation? What do we do with the rest of our lives? And does an MBA even matter these days? To answer these questions, co-hosts Courtney Young and Laura Clark brought in a panel of experts. Portfolio president and publisher Adrian Zackheim talks about the significance of an MBA in today's business climate. Peter Escher, co-author of The MBA Oath, discusses the efforts of a group of Harvard Business School graduates to bring ethics back to business. 800-CEO-READ's Jack Covert, author of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, explains why everyone needs to read Po Bronson's What Should I Do With My Life. And Michael O'Malley, author of The Wisdom of Bees, shares some business lessons from an unexpected source.
The next edition, available May 18th, will find Jack reviewing Guy Kawasaki's The Art of the Start.
USA Today writer, Michele Archer, describes The Business Beat as such: "Clocking in at about 25 minutes, The Business Beat makes a fine commute accompaniment." And we agree wholeheartedly.
Friday Links
Posted April 30, 2010 12:02 p.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
➻ C.K. Prahalad passed away earlier this month. The best obituary I've found of the great professor and author came from Adi Ignatius at the Harvard Business Review. Luckily, Prahalad left us many books—including The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits—but business scholarship, in this country and all over the world, has lost a great teacher with Mr. Prahalad's passing. Which brings us to our next story...
➻ After working as a reporter for many years, Philip Delves Broughton decided to get his MBA, and published a really interesting book two years ago about the experience called Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School. So, it was with an insider's knowledge that he reviewed Max Anderson and Peter Escher's The MBA Oath in the Financial Times. He didn't pull any punches, though:
Prominent business people have a habit of demanding acclaim for activities that most of us consider normal rather than praiseworthy. They champion their environmental activity, while we quietly sort through paper and plastic waste. They boast of their honesty and transparency, as if they had run a four-minute mile. Some talk of ethical business practices and “doing well by doing good” as if it were an achievement to possess a conscience.
Now we have the MBA Oath, an effort instigated by the Harvard Business School Class of 2009 to “set a higher standard for business leaders”. Not a high bar to clear, one might think, after these past few years.
Regardless of the reasonable disdain he opens his review with, Broughton does come around to a favorable review of the book, writing:
The MBA Oath, however, turns out to be a thoughtful response to the situation in which thousands of MBA students found themselves, and far better than anything managed by the tenured faculty of their schools. A generation of students went to business school to learn about business and found themselves portrayed as villains because of the misdeeds of their predecessors. Business schools don’t give refunds, so what do you do?
The beginning of the answer might be picking up this book.
➻ Milwaukee's Will Allen was named one of TIME's 100 The World's Most Influential People of 2010. This is in addition to being named one of Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in 2009 and being awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, or "Genius Grant," in 2008. He also appeared with Michelle Obama at the White House when she kicked off her childhood anti-obesity campaign earlier this year. I fully expect that soon, instead of referring to "Milwaukee's Will Allen," we will be talking about "Will Allen's Milwaukee." I, for one, would welcome Will Allen as our new overlord, though I suspect he wouldn't want the job. If you'd like to learn more about Will Allen and his philosophy, we published his Good Food Manifesto for America on ChangeThis last July.
➻ Until Will Allen's urban farming techniques become the norm, the economics of food will probably continue to be rather distasteful, something well-documented in Patrick Westhoff's new book, The Economics of Food: How Feeding and Fueling the Planet Affects Food Prices. Westhoff, the co-director of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute, recently wrote a guest post for the Freakonomics blog about China’s Role in Worldwide Food Prices. But it isn't just about food prices:
... China uses more fertilizer than any other country, so it has a big impact on world fertilizer markets, with implications for farm production costs around the world. Likewise, when Chinese farmers buy and use more machinery, it impacts the prices of everything from steel to oil.
I've only taken a brief look at the book, reading the introduction and flipping through the rest, but it certainly looks fascinating.
➻ I think I'm going to start linking to everything Umair Haque writes. Not only can he write intelligently about things like Strategy's Golden Rule he does so with sentence as brilliant as:
My Macbook Air recently developed the dreaded cracked hinge problem. Getting it fixed? A Kafkaesque task fit for an existential Hercules.
It's my favorite sentence of the week.
➻ The New York Times' Paper Cuts blog asks, "If children are taught to prize reading, then what does it matter if they read on a computer or e-reader versus good old-fashioned paper?" And the answer is, "because I like paper, damn it!" (Stomps away childishly...)
➻ And then there's this, from the UK based Whitevinyl. (Tipping my hat to Cool Hunting.)
Friday Links
Posted April 16, 2010 9:35 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
➻ Justin Fox, author of The Myth of the Rational Market, pondered Improving the Let's-Persuade-Business-to-Improve Movement in a recent Harvard Business Review post. There's a lot of folks out there writing about we can persuade business and those in it to behave more ethically, but Fox thinks its still a hard sell:
I don't think anyone has come up with an argument for or description of better business behavior that has anything like the elegance and power of the economists' "incentives matter."
He ends, understandably, on a slightly defeated note, writing: "Clearly, I'm stuck here. Can somebody help me out?" Umair Haque, his colleague at HBR tried to answer his call for help, making The Case for Being Disruptively Good, arguing for the forces of information, discipline, competition, disruption and rule-making. He writes:
So why don't more businesses see these forces? It's the wrong question. The right one is: because there will be some organizations that are quicker to get it than others, what do the forces above mean for the economy? Well, they suggest that businesses who can do more good will survive, thrive, and prosper — and those who do more bad will stumble, falter, and fall.
I think he's definitety right, but he is taking a pretty long view of history when he writes: "Yesterday, the global economy was built on debtors' prisons, usury, expropriation, colonialism, and slavery. Today, it isn't." and "Yet even two hundred years from now, I'm sure incumbents will ask—what, you want us to do more good? And then, as ever, from under their patrician noses, revolutionaries who can do better will disrupt them." And while Umair's language speaks to me, I don't know if it is as catchy as "incentives matter" to those marching off to Wall Street. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
➻ Richard Florida also takes a longer view in his works about the creative class—such as The Rise of the Creative Class—and he has a great new book coming out in May called The Great Reset. You can get a taste of the book in his March article in The Atlantic, How the Crash Will Reshape America, or by reading his recent interview with Conor Clarke for the same magazine.
➻ Portfolio has posted a new issue of The Business Beat. Featured this month are Peter Escher, author of The MBA Oath, Michael O'Malley, author of The Wisdom of Bees, and, as always, our own peerless leader Jack Covert in his Just Jack corner. Jack discusses Po Bronson's What Should I Do With My Life, one of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time and a close second (in my mind) to Studs Terkel's Working as the best book of interviews ever created about work.
➻ Speaking of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, you can now read it in Indonesian.* Muhammad Mishbah penned a review for Seputar Indonesia Daily writing:
Books 100 Best Business Books of All Time provides 100 units with a discussion of book selection of different problems. This book is like a "dictionary" of business books that point us in order to save time, money and energy before seeking appropriate books.
(Shakes fist at Google Translate.)
*This applies only to those of you that can actually read Indonesian.
➻ Peter Elkind's new book, Rough Justice: The Rise and fall of Eliot Spitzer, is embargoed until next Tuesday, but you can get a preview at Fortune, blessed as they were with an an exclusive excerpt. "'Is there a way to wire money where it's not evident that it's coming from me?' the governor asked."
➻ The Web Designer Depot posted a great overview of Scott Belsky's Making Ideas Happen by Cameron Chapman. He writes "Making Ideas Happen is an excellent resource for those of us who have no shortage of ideas but often have a hard time seeing those ideas through to completion." That is everyone I know, including me and probably you.
➻ Roger C. Parker has a novel idea: Learn to write a business book by studying 800-CEO-READ’s Top 25 Business Books.
➻ "Some people seem to think life is all about the I, and the Me, Me, Me." The WePad begs to differ. (HT to Siobhan O’Leary at Publishing Perspectives.)
➻ Following the Freakonomics trend, America's finest news source, The Onion, reported recently that "last month's quarter-inch drop in height among Mexican dead-lift competitors in the middle-heavyweight division could spell disaster for GE's aviation and software subsidiaries." "But, like anything else, a shrewd investor must always ask himself one thing: How many hot dogs did I eat last year?"
➻ I'll ask her someday.
