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Posted May 2, 2011 12:13 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
ChangeThis preparations and office birthday celebrations kept me from posting links on Friday, so I thought I'd remedy that by rustling some up for y'all this afternoon.
➻ "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." So begins Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." I was reminded of those words last week while reading Ashlee Vance's feature in Bloomberg Businessweek on why This Tech Bubble Is Different. She interviewed Jeff Hammerbacher, a math genius from Harvard who ended up at Facebook one year out of college.
Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google , and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks."
You might even say it's madness. To be fair, though, a lot of the best minds of our generation are quants on Wall Street—something Hammerbacher also did for a time.
So, why is This Tech Bubble ... Different? Let's look at the extremes: It may cure cancer, and it has produced the fastest growing company of all time—a company whose "legacy is cute e-mail." (It will make more sense once you've read the article.)
➻ Beside curing cancer and perfecting the art of the cute email, "Silicon Valley execs, entrepreneurs, and activists are helping advance America's overseas goals through technology." E.B. Boyn and Rachel Z. Arndt interviewed a number of these folks about "techplomacy" for Fast Company's May issue. They include:
- Alec Ross from the State Departmert, Senior Adviser for Innovation
- Padmasree Warrior of Cisco, Chief Technology Officer
- Josh Nesbit, CEO and co-founder of Medic Mobile
- Adriana Lucia Suarez Grajales, a coordinator with Casa De Justicia
- Jason Liebman, co-founder of Movements.org
Jason Liebman, telling the story of his organization's beginnings, talks about an unlikely inspiration: "In 2007, coalition forces found an Al Qaeda manual on how to be a terrorist. We said, 'Hey, let's create an alternate manual to use tools to promote nonviolent social change.'"
➻ Michael Totty asked three experts for help Making Sense of It All: Getting Knowledge From Information. They each gave him a recommended reading list on "how businesses can harness technology to make the most of information." Amit Basu, the Carr P. Collins chair in management information systems at the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University, chose The Adventures of an IT Leader by Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan and Shannon O'Donnell, and The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Thomas H. Davenport, the president's distinguished professor of IT and management at Babson College, recommended some very distinguished and cerebral texts in The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, and Making the Invisible Visible: How Companies Win with the Right Information, People and IT by Donald Marchand, William Kettinger and John Rollins. All good books to my knowledge—meaning I haven't read any of them, excepting Taleb's tome. Nilofer Merchant, the author of The New How, chose books that I know well and would definitely second for recommendation:
- The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing by Lisa Gansky
- Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz
- The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison
I've been trying to tell people how important Lisa Gansky's book is since it was published, and it seems Ms. Merchant agress. She writes:
This is an important book, in that Ms. Gansky helps us name an important trend that will shape our culture—and therefore our technology products—over the next several decades. She argues that the companies that will win will be the ones that enable sharing, via community participation and trust.
To get the summaries of the other recommendations, head over to Michael Toddy's piece in the Wall Street Journal. (Tip of the hat to Portfolio Javelin for the story.)
➻ Between the Lines' Peter Cox and Jamie Mollart interviewed Seth Godin in April about The New Face of Publishing (and, of course, about his new publishing venture, The Domino Project). Comparing how the Internet and mp3 files changed the music industry to what may be around the corner for publishing, he says:
I am certain that a similar fate lies in the future of the book industry. We are re not going to necessarily read less. I think we are probably going to chop down fewer trees. But one thing I'm sure of is that the nature of publishing—which is based on scarcity and based on ... a top-down, corporate risk-taking mindset—is going to be replaced, as the Internet replaces everything, with one that's based on connection and abundance. And what we are trying to do with the Domino Project is experiment and fail and demonstrate some lessons. So, hopefully, people will copy our ideas because I firmly love books and I hope that they thrive for another 500 years.
I agree with that last sentiment. I plan on living until I'm 547 years old (so far, so good) so I can catch up with everything on my current reading list, but hope I'm still able to pick up a few new releases and new ideas in 2483.
➻ And how do we filter all of the information that continues to be published? Well, it turns out that what Eli Pariser has termed The Filter Bubble is doing some of that work for us already, and it may be doing a poor job of it. Speaking of the Internet (and how it's being tailored to our preferences) at this year's TED conference, he said:
I was sure that it was going to be great for democracy and for our society. But, there's this kind of shift in how information is flowing online, and it's invisible, and if we don't pay attention to it, it could be a real problem. I first noticed this in a place I spend a lot of time—my Facebook page. I'm progressive politically (big surprise), but I've always gone out of my way to meet conservatives. I like hearing what they're thinking about, I like seeing what they link to, I like learning a thing or two. And so I was kind of surprised when I noticed one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my Facebook feed. And what it turned out was going on was that Facebook was looking at which links I was clicked on, and it was noticing that, actually, I was clicking more on my liberal friends links than on my conservative friends links. And, without consulting me about it, it had edited them out—they disappeared. Facebook isn't the only place that is doing this invisible, algorithmic editing of the web. Google is doing it to. If I search for something and you search for something—even right now, at the very same time—we may get very different search results. Even if you're logged out, one engineer told me, there are 57 signals that Google looks at—everything from what kind of computer you're on, to what kind of browser you're using, to where you're located—that it uses to personally tailor your query results.
The problem with this, as Pariser sees it, is that "you don't actually see what gets edited out" or get a "balanced information diet." He goes on to explain how we've gone from human gatekeepers of information to algorithmic ones, and how we need the new gatekeepers to encode in their algorithms "a sense of the public life" and "a sense of civic responsibility."
The Filter Bubble is due out next week.
➻ It's like the echo of an echo.
Todd Sattersten's Top 10 Business Books of 2010
Posted Dec. 28, 2010 10:21 a.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
Business book expert (and former president of 800-CEO-READ) Todd Sattersten has picked his top 10 business books of the year. We agree heartily with his list--a mix of big idea books and practical methodology--and think that you can't go wrong choosing any of these fine books as a blueprint for your business goals in 2011.
Todd's Top 10:
Drive by Dan Pink
Switch by Chip and Dan Heath
Linchpin by Seth Godin
Rafi Mohammed's The 1% Windfall
William Poundstone's Priceless
Youngme Moon: Different
Lisa Gansky: The Mesh
The Big Short by Michael Lewis
Steven Johnson: Where Good Ideas Come From
Gamestorming: by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo
Click over to Todd's blog to read more about each of his picks.
The Mesh Holiday Gift Guide
Posted Nov. 23, 2010 6:59 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
I keep telling my friends in business that Lisa Gansky's book, The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing, is one of the most important reads of the year. It does more than document a trend. It explains a movement in business—a movement away from selling products and services outright to selling access to them, an emerging model she calls "The Mesh." As Gansky explains:
Fundamentally, the Mesh is based on network-enabled sharing—on access rather than ownership. The central strategy is, in effect, to "sell" the same product multiple times. Multiple sales multiply profits, and customer contact. Multiple contacts multlipy opportunity—for additional sales, for strengthening a brand, for improving a competitive service, and for deepening and extending the relationship with customers.
The book itself would make an outstanding gift, but now, just in time for the holiday season, Lisa Gansky has developed something beside it—The Mesh Holiday Gift Guide—for a "different kind of holiday giving." It profiles Mesh companies that you can sign your loved ones up for—"no boxes, no gift wrap, no batterries required."
So, instead of giving your loved ones more stuff to clutter up their lives (and landfills) this holiday season, why not free them of it by giving them an experience that keeps on giving? I know that one of the gifts I'm most grateful for was the free months of Netflix I received from a coworker years ago (thanks again, Meg!). Head on over to the Mesh Holiday Gift Guide to explore similar options. Your family and friends will be thanking you for for years to come.
Friday Links
Posted Nov. 5, 2010 11:41 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
➻ I'm a big fan of strategy + business's author choice excerpts. The most recent recommendation, by Who Killed Health Care? author Regina E. Herzlinger, is John Torinus Jr.'s The Company That Solved Health Care: How Serigraph Dramatically Reduced Skyrocketing Costs While Providing Better Care, and How Every Company Can Do the Same. The excerpt's title, Beer, Brats and Butterfat, was enough of a hook for my accurately stereotypical Wisconsin tastes.
Kurt Eschenfelder, a former college football player and engineer at Serigraph, stands 6 feet 4 inches and tipped the scales at 330 pounds. He looked indestructible. That was until his required health screening showed his blood sugar count at 177, which meant he was pre-diabetic.
Guys like Kurt are commonplace in Wisconsin, where we like our beer, bratwurst, and butterfat (translate: cheese and other dairy products). Typically, in the passive U.S. health care model, Kurt’s doctor would have given him a lecture, and Kurt would have been essentially on his own to head off a diabetic condition.
In the proactive model Serigraph has developed, Kurt was surrounded with help. He consulted with Tammy Ertl, our on-site nurse practitioner, Rachel Topercer, a dietician, and Sandy Stockhausen, the diabetes educator from Aurora Health, one of the two big health providers in our area.
Kurt listened, and, unlike most diabetics or near-diabetics, he started a disciplined regimen. He dropped about fifty pounds over approximately six months and lowered his blood sugar to around one hundred without medications. Now, Kurt has no other warning signals for diabetes in his physical makeup.
I can assure you that the book's title is not hyperbole. John Torinus and his company really have figured this stuff out. Working with the author last week in the run up to publishing his ChangeThis manifesto, Through the Fog: Solving Healthcare in Companies, I only received one correction from him:
Looks good. One change: we can now say [that we've had] only three premium increases in eight years (vs. seven in the copy). We will have no hike to employees in 2011. Hooray.
Hooray, indeed.
➻ The latest issue of The Business Beat has been released by the good people of Portfolio. This month the focus is on technology, and Courtney Young set herself the envious task of interviewing Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants. They also have a takeaway from Lisa Gansky, author of The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing, which I think is a book of as much importance as The Long Tail and Wikinomics. We the have the usual suspects, Adrian Zackheim and our own Jack Covert. Adrian discusses the role of technology in book publishing and Jack Covert takes a look at Geoffrey Moore's classic, Crossing the Chasm. Rounding out the issue is Penguin's Manager of Inventory and Operations, Matthew Pavoni, on how Cali Ressler and Jodi Thompson's Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It made him a better manager.
➻ The Largehearted Boy has begun posting his annual Online "Best of 2010" Book Lists, in which he aggregates every online "best of" book list he can find. I have one to add: 50 Books About Books from Fine Books Magazine.
➻ In other book nerd news, The Design Observatory took a look at The Library: A Museum. Apparently university libraries are awash in antiquarian delight.
I shouldn't be reading this book—I shouldn't even be touching it. It is a fragile copy of Oliver Twist from 1841, printed only three years after it was written. Dickens himself might have held it. The pages are paper-towel thick and velvety soft. The typography makes an impression, both literally and figuratively. Tissue protects its many engravings—elaborate scenes of beatings—to ironically save them from injury. To read the text is to time-travel. One gains insight into grammar from the past: "To-morrow" is hyphenated in the annals of yesteryear. Colons : surrounded on either side by spaces : are used unfamiliarly : as in parenthetical thought. Every eighth page is numbered—possibly to track signatures. The contemporary mind fills with intrigue and wonder.
And where did I find such a treasure? Quite conveniently, right in the stacks.
He goes on to ask what such books can teach us about design:
Let me rephrase that: what can't they teach us about design? Inspiring page layout; unusual language; informative content; unrecognizable typefaces; unfamiliar color palettes; styles of illustration that have long been forgotten; historical connections; echoes from designers that—products of their own time—we couldn't possibly recreate. It is cognitive overload.
If any of that even slightly stirs you, go read the rest of the post. There is much more going on there than I can do justice to here.
➻ And there's this news from Publishers Weekly about the exact opposite—the cutting edge of digital book distribution (though the link above does discuss digital design):
More unusual is a new app from the publishing imprint of Pearson, FT Press, which was launched on Monday on LinkedIn, the business social network, making FT Press the first company to launch a LinkedIn app.
If it can help me with their recent release Invisible Forces and Powerful Minds: Gravity, Gods, and Minds from The Chicago Social Brain Network, then I'm all for it. Go to the original announcement to learn more.
➻ In McSweeney's Internet Tendencies' latest open letter to people or entities that are unlikely to respond, Mark Rook wrote a depressingly touching Open Letter to the Homeless Man Who Witnessed Me Totally Lose It Last Week. It is one of those small pieces that you think is going to be good for a quick laugh, but ends up wiping any trace of smile off your face and taking you to a much deeper place. It's ending is sweet enough that you may just end up smiling once again, though. Much better than a quick laugh.
➻ Coming home late last weekend, I put on a record that I hadn't listened to in a very long time and remembered something important I had forgotten.
Friday Links
Posted Oct. 15, 2010 10:51 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
➻ Last week, I pointed you to early reviews of "One of the finest books of the year ... Steven Johnson’s Where Good Idea Come From." If you followed that link, you may have found The Economist's review of the book, Well, what a good idea!. And, if you did, you discovered another one of the best books to be released this year (or any year), Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants. Both of them were Jack Covert Selects this month, and both are absolutely essential reading. Seth Godin thinks Kelly's is The book of the year, saying that "If there's justice, it will win the Pulitzer Prize."
➻ Besides thinking that Kevin Kelly deserves a Pulitzer Prize, Seth Godin wonders, What does "pro-business" mean? After dispelling some oft-pronounced answers to that question as "pro-factory policies," short-sighted, backward-looking, anti-solutions. He writes:
Perhaps we could see pro-business strategies looking more like this:
- Investing in training the workforce to solve interesting problems, so they can work at just about any job.
- Maintaining infrastructure, safety and civil rights so we can create a community where talented people and the entrepreneurs who hire them (two groups that can live wherever they choose) would choose to live there.
- Reward and celebrate the scientific process that leads to scalable breakthroughs, productivity and a stable path to the future.
- Spend community (our) money on services and infrastructure that help successful organizations and families thrive.
Once you’ve seen how difficult it is to start a thriving business in a place without clean water, fast internet connections and a stable government of rational laws, it’s a lot harder to take what we’ve built for granted.
This is one of the longest posts Seth has written lately and I imagine he could go on for a great deal longer on the issue.
➻ If you'd like to read more about Where Good Idea Come From before you pick it up, Salon's Michael Humphrey interviewed him this week. From that interview:
MH: Why don't you agree with the notion that most good ideas come from epiphanies?
SJ: What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else. Their concepts take time to develop and incubate and sit around in the back of their minds sometimes for decades. It's cobbled together from other people's ideas and other people's technologies and other people's innovations. It's a remixed version of something.
Read more about howEpiphanies are overrated over at Salon.
➻ Jonathan Fields, blogger-extraordinaire and author of Career Renegade, posted an interview he did with Lisa Gansky today. Lisa Gansky is the author of The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing, a great new book in the tradition of books like The Long Tail and Wikinomics—that is, a book documenting a paradigm shift in the ways technological connectivity is reshaping business. Though the interview is somewhat short, it is what you'd expect from such intelligent people—an in-depth exploration of the topic characterized by poignant questions that are answered in paragraph form, not talking points or soundbites. Here is one exchange:
JF: People have been forming buy groups, sharing rent, running collective farms and organic food coops for generations. Is that meshing, too, and if so how is it different than what you’re talking about?
LG: In many ways it is ‘meshing 1.0’. Sharing is at the heart of all the examples you suggest. Yet, one important aspect of the Mesh which is not necessarily incorporated into the types of businesses you mention is using the data and partnership opportunities inherent in Mesh business models. These data (generated from the company directly or shared via partnerships), provides a company with the capacity to see the customer more clearly.
You can see where she is heading, physically and technologically, to ensure that you are able to continue to delight her. For example, RentTheRunway, ThredUp and Swapaholics each specialize in providing clothing to their customers without the need to ‘own’ the wardrobe. Second-hand shops have been around for a long time. What makes these three Mesh fashion businesses different is that they are web based (which expands their reach and convenience to the customer), they actively create partnerships, and they use data.
They also are experimenting with a variety of business models, giving them far more ability to define and refine their offers to customers, evolve their service, and delight customers and customers’ friends—aka, future customers!
Head over to the original posting, The Mesh: Business Revolution or Shiny Object? to read more.
➻ If you're interested in what the businesses of the future will look like, you may want to join Karie Willyerd, co-author of The 2020 Workplace, for a one-hour webinar next Tuesday.
➻ Ahmad Jamal, Vindicated. That's the verdict from Francis Davis at The Village Voice.
