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ISBN 9781591843528 Published Dec. 2010
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Posted March 4, 2011 6:27 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
➻ The latest episode of The Business Beat has been released, and it's an episode against conformity. It includes Publisher Adrian Zackheim discussing non-conformity in business, and the program's new hosts, Brooke Carey and Eric Meyers, who talk about two books that changed their perspective towards editing. It also has Josh Kaufman, author of The Personal MBA, and Hugh MacLeod, who talks about his Evil Plans (more on that book next up in the links). And, as always, our own Jack Covert talks about a business book classic—this time going with First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, explaining "the 12 questions every manager should ask their employees."
➻ I'm a big fan of Matthew May, and as he recently displayed in his Guru Review of Evil Plans, Matthew May is a big fan of Hugh MacLeod. After telling you why he's such a fan and explaining what he calls "the lunatic fringe," May gives one of the more succinct descriptions of Hugh's new book that I've seen:
There are roughly 40 five-page chapters, the content of which is not earth-shatteringly new. What's new, though, and what's so enjoyable and provocative, is the delivery of those messages, and the entertaining stories and cartoons that accompany them. In other words, it's not so much what MacLeod says, it's how how he says it. It's like music: there are about a half dozen recurring themes in songs, but it's the choice of words and style of delivery that makes us listen.
He then goes on to give you a "baker's dozen of [his] favorites for sampling," including "In the Internet era, if people on the other side of the planet aren't loving what you do, you're doing something wrong" and "The biggest problem of the Western world is oversupply. Don't let it be yours."
➻ I don't know if you've heard, but there's a lot of people carrying signs here in Wisconsin lately. I wasn't expecting a business book author to weigh in publicly on what's happening here in Wisconsin, but Samuel A. Culbert, author of Get Rid of the Performance Review! How Companies Can Stop Intimidating, Start Managing—and Focus on What Really Matters jumped into the fray on Tuesday with an op-ed in The New York Times about Why Your Boss Is Wrong About You.
In the raging battle over union rights in Wisconsin, those seeking to curtail collective bargaining for state employees have advanced an argument that seems hard to resist: It will make it easier to reward those workers who perform the best. What could be fairer than that?
If only that were true. As anybody who has ever worked in any institution—private or public—knows, one of the primary ways employee effectiveness is judged is the performance review. And nothing could be less fair than that.
Okay, so what's the solution then. Are there any "fair" options? Culbert believes so:
Is there a way out? I believe there is, and it works for both government and business. It’s something I call the performance preview. Instead of top-down reviews, both boss and subordinate are held responsible for setting goals and achieving results. No longer will only the subordinate be held accountable for the often arbitrary metrics that the boss creates. Instead, bosses are taught how to truly manage, and learn that it’s in their interest to listen to their subordinates to get the results the taxpayer is counting on.
The author went on to note that "the police department in Madison, Wis., has used such a program since the late 1980s with considerable effectiveness." It sounds like a reasonable systemic solution to me, but I'm not sure reasonable solutions are what anybody is after here anymore.
➻ Nicholas Carr, the author of The Shallows, recently reviewed James Gleik's upcoming The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood.
In his formidable new book, The Information, Gleick explains how we’ve progressed from seeing information as the expression of human thought and emotion to looking at it as a commodity that can be processed, like wheat or plutonium. It’s a long, complicated, and important story, beginning with tribal drummers and ending with quantum physics, and in Gleick’s hands it’s also a mesmerizing one.
Carr writes later in the review that "As a celebration of human ingenuity, The Information is a deeply hopeful book" but ultimately comes to the conclusion that when it comes to real understanding, we may Drowning in Beeps
In a previous post about GalleyCat's list of Top 10 Pirated eBooks at The Pirate Bay, Carr explains why his next book will be called The Code of Sex: Ten Secrets for Using Math to Keep Her Satisfied and Hungry for More, and promises that it will be the most pirated book of all time. (You really have to click on the GalleyCat link or Carr's original post for this to make sense.)
➻ Joe Posnanski, author of The Soul of Baseball and The Machine, offered up some random Thoughts In a Bookstore on his Sprots Illustrated blog. Like all of Joe's posts, it's "curiously long," and in some places ventures dangerously close to Andy Rooney territory (especially the part about the check out counter), but if you're a lover of bookstores as Joe is (and we are), I think you'll find it a fun read—even though it's conclusion is a little depressing. Speaking of book placement in stores, which publishers fight madly for, he writes:
One thing I learned after writing my books is that you have no chance to sell any quantity of books in the big bookstores unless those books are placed on a table in front of the store. It’s called placement, I guess, and it’s extremely important. Books that never get on one of those front tables are apparently doomed, and so publishers will do many things to get their books placed in front—on the “New Arrivals” table, on the “Stuff We’re Reading” table, on the “Critically Acclaimed” table, on the “Dean Koontz” table.
I have little doubt that the “front of the store table” theory is based on countless amounts of sound research. And the theory itself seems sound. You would expect that people looking to browse for books are likely to stay near the front of the store and see what new and interesting books have been put out for them.
I bring all this up because once again I’m in the front of the store looking at the books on the tables … and NOBODY ELSE is here. The bookstore is actually pretty jammed. People are milling around the fiction, the diet books, they are wandering through the kids section, there are one or two people in every aisle and a bunch in the history section. But nobody is up here with me browsing through the new books.
It's a crazy business, all right.
➻ One of the great things about the industry is that it contains people like Jack Covert, who sent me the following video earlier this week.
