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Posted April 13, 2010 3:54 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
Business narratives took home the Pulitzer Prize in two separate categories this year—Biograghy and History.
If you're interested in more business histories and biographies, check out Jack's recent review of Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West by Stephen Fried.
The Economist's Page-turners
Posted Dec. 7, 2009 1:12 p.m. by dylan
In General Business - 800 CEO Read Blog
The Economist has released their Best Books List of 2009. In their Economics & Business category, they chose:
- Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial Systems—and Themselves by Andrew Ross Sorkin, Viking
- Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed, Penguin Press
- How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy, Farrar Straus Giroux
- Poorly Made in China: An Insider’s Account of the Tactics Behind China’s Production Game by Paul Midler, John Wiley & Sons
Check out The Economist's Page-turners for summaries of these titles and their picks in other categories including Politics & Current Affairs, Biography & Memoirs, History, Science & Technology, Culture & Society and Fiction.
Friday Links
Posted Dec. 4, 2009 11:02 a.m. by dylan
In General Business - 800 CEO Read Blog
◊ Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, wrote a compelling post on the future of bookstores called Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization on the 17th that we missed. Here is an important paragraph to whet your appetite:
Online bookselling improves on many of the core functions of a bookstore, not just price and breadth of available books, but ways of searching for books, and of getting recommendations and context. On the other hand, the functions least readily replicated on the internet—providing real space in a physical location occupied by living, breathing people—have always been treated as side effects, value created by the stores and captured by the community, but not priced directly into the transactions.
His conclusion is that book sellers should be looking at the nonprofit model to stay in business. (I can assure you, many book sellers I know would say they're already functioning as a "nonprofit" of sorts already—and have been for years. We're not exactly the most affluent segment of society.)
◊ Cory Doctorow weighed in on the topic on Wednesday with some half-formed thoughts on one future for bookselling (his words, not mine), pointing to the "ends of the market [that] are ripe for heavy localization." Mr. Doctorow is an especially interesting addition to the conversation, as he has been at the forefront of authors getting their books to readers online. If you're a book seller, or just love bookstores, I would highly recommend both authors' takes on the situation. (And thanks to Vroman's Bookstore for the heads up on both.)
◊ If you're looking for a success story from the book selling arena, pick up the December issue of Inc. Magazine and turn to page 86. (I know, I know... so analogue, but I'll post the link when the story is online.) There you'll find the inspiring saga of Portland's Broadway Books by John Brant.
◊ If bookstores do go extinct, Jacket Copy's Carolyn Kellogg may have found the answer—phone booth libraries.
◊ NPR's Morning Edition reminds us that You Can't Put A Bow On An E-Book.
◊ Speaking of NPR and bookstores, here are NPR's bestsellers of the week, compiled "from weekly surveys of close to 500 independent bookstores nationwide in collaboration with the American Booksellers Association:" Hardcovers | Paperbacks
◊ The New York Times Book Review has chosen their 10 Best Books of 2009. Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World was the sole book that would fit in the business category on the list.
◊ The Onion's A.V. Club has posted its best books and its best films of the decade. The business books that made their list are:
- Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Steven J. Dubner, published originally by William Morrow & Company in 2005.
- Nickel And Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, published originally in 2001 by Metropolitan Books
- The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, originally published in 2000 by Little Brown & Company
- The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, originally published by Doubleday Books in 2004
◊ I'm really interested in Anna Jane Grossman's Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By, illustrated by James Gulliver Hancock, but since we've not received a copy here (ahem, Hachette, ahem), I guess I'll have to go out and buy one. Until then, the Washington Post's Jacket Copy has provided us with a little fix of Ms. Grossman discussing executive chairs, laughtracks and payphones.
◊ Niall Ferguson, author of The Ascent of Money: An Economic History of the World wonders if "economic weakness is endangering our global power." Read his recent article in Newsweek to learn more.
◊ And, finally, in celebration of the second anniversary of their online store, Nonesuch Records is having a sale. In a nod to vinyl, everything is now 33 1/3% off the list price. They have an eclectic mix of musicians, from the Americana of Wilco and Emmylou Harris to the wonderful Oumou Sangare and wonderfully bizarre Alarm Will Sound. They also have Bobby McFerrin’s first album in their catalog, giving me an excuse to post the video below, which we first came across on tiny gigantic some months ago.
World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.
Amazon's Best of 2009
Posted Dec. 4, 2009 6:11 a.m. by dylan
In General Business - 800 CEO Read Blog
Amazon does an interesting thing every year, putting their best selling books in each genre on the same page as their editors' pick so you can easily compare the two.
I am sure that, were I an author, I'd hope to see my name on the bestsellers list. It would mean that I had not only done well financially for the year but, more importantly, that my book had made it into the hands of more readers—my ideas into the minds of more people.
That said, as a reader I always look at the editors' list first. I don't know who Amazon's editors actually are—come to think of it, the only person I know works for Amazon is Jeff Bezos—but I'm guessing that, like us, they spend their days at work poring over the many books that come across their desks, and they've probably become pretty damn good at picking which ones they're going to take home and focus on. There are a lot of books every year that will never see the light of a bestsellers list—that will never catch the popular eye—that nonetheless contain provoking insights for thought leaders and have a greater long-term effect on our lives than a flash-in-the-pan bestseller.
Ideally, of course, you'd make both lists. Congratulations to Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft, and the authors of Animal Spirits, George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, on that feat.
Here are the complete lists in Amazon's Business & Investing category for 2009:
The customer favorites:
- House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street by William D. Cohan, Doubleday
- The Ultimate Depression Survival Guide: Protect Your Savings, Boost Your Income, and Grow Wealthy Even in the Worst of Times by Martin D. Weiss, John Wiley & Sons
- Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse by Thomas E. Woods, Regnery Press
- Suze Orman's 2009 Action Plan: Keeping Your Money Safe & Sound by Suze Orman, Spiegel & Grau
- The Great Depression Ahead: How to Prosper in the Crash Following the Greatest Boom in History by Harry S. Dent, Free Press
- Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford, Penguin Press
- Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Princeton University Press
- How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In by Jim Collins, HarperCollins
- Strengths-Based: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow Leadership by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, Gallup Press
- I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi, Workman Publishing Company
The editors' list:
- The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox, HarperBusiness
- Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe by Gillian Tett, Free Press
- Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford, Penguin Press
- How Did That Happen?: Holding People Accountable for Results the Positive, Principled Way by Roger Connors & Tom Smith, Portfolio
- Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher, Penguin Press
- In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic by David Wessel, Crown Business
- Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan & Julien Smith, John Wiley & Sons
- Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Princeton University Press
- SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Crown Business
- Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod, Portfolio
Other notable editors' picks are T.J. Stiles' The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt published by Penguin Press, winner of the NBA in nonfiction and put in the Biographies & Memoirs category by Amazon's editors, and Greg Grandin's Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, published by Metropolitan Books, which was the number one editors' pick in the History category.
Other customer favorites include Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed and The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes by Bryan Burrough, both published by Penguin Press, and This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Kenneth S. Rogoff and Carmen M Reinhart and published by Princeton University Press. All of these were in the History category.
To delve into the lists more, head on over to Amazon's Best of 2009.
Lords of Finance Wins FT Goldman Sachs Book Award
Posted Oct. 30, 2009 4:50 a.m. by jon
In Blog - 800 CEO Read Blog
Last night, it was announced at the Goldman Sachs Business Book Award ceremony in London that Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance won business book of the year. Lloyd Blankfein said of the book, “Lords of Finance is a timely reminder that turmoil and instability in financial markets are not an invention of the 21st Century.” A refreshing statement as the economy makes a slow turnaround from the past year.
The book details the economic collapse of the 1920s, through the stories of four men whose positions in the financial industry shaped the future. More attention to books such as Ahamed's can help how we think about the economy, and if we're in any position to effect it, make the right decisions.
