Better by Mistake


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Hardcover
291 pages
ISBN 9781594487859 Published March 2011
Riverhead Books
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Better by Mistake
The Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong
By Alina Tugend 

Related Blog Posts
Introducing the Candidates: Personal Development
Posted Dec. 19, 2011 3:00 p.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

Over the course of this week, we will be introducing, by category, the candidates for the 2011 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards. Even though only one of the candidates can win the big prize, good business books deserve an audience, and perhaps one on this list will be the winning book..to you.

First, we take a look at the Personal Development category:

So which book is going to win the Personal Development category and be in the running for the 800-CEO-READ Best Business Book of 2011? We'll announce the shortlist and winner in January!

Stay tuned!



Friday Links
Posted July 29, 2011 8:41 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

➻ Our friend and former coworker Kate Mytty recently took a look at What Works in Poverty Alleviation with a review of Abhijit V Banerjee and Esther Duflo's Poor Economics over at MIT's Global Challenge Notebook. She writes:

Banerjee and Duflo are well-known here at MIT for their use of randomized control experiments to test the means of poverty alleviation and their co-starting of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-Pal).

The 273 pages of Poor Economics shares the results of their research—and starts to fill in the gap between economist Jeffrey Sachs’ (aid breaks the poverty trap!) and William Easterly’s ([develop] free markets and provide incentives, people will solve their own problems!) theories on development.

You can keep up with the important work the MIT Global Challenge is doing "at the intersection of innovation and entrepreneurship" over on their site.

➻ And speaking of innovation and entrepreneurship, our former president and friend of the company Todd Sattersten has a new project out with O'Reilly called Every Book Is a Startup. Jenn Webb interviewed Todd for O'Reilly Radar about What publishing can learn from tech startups.

My argument starts with the idea that entrepreneurship needs to be brought back to book publishing. As an industry, we introduced over 3 million new products to the marketplace in 2010. Each one of those books start in the same place: in search of an audience. Startups face the same problem.

The core set of ideas I plan to present will look familiar to people who work in publishing. The way I approach them will be very different. I dispel some myths and identify some trends that are important to understand as we search for new business models.

The initial release of the eBook is currently priced at $4.99. The price will go up as they add more to it, but if you buy it now, you get those updates for free so... well, buy it now.

➻ As Better By Mistake author Alina Tugend wrote in the New York Times today, it's easier than ever to enter the publishing marketplace, as the Options for Self-Publishing Proliferate, Easing the Bar to Entry.

Self-publishing is obviously taking off, but statistics on new titles are almost impossible to come by because so many books counted as part of “nontraditional” publishing include reprints of old books now in the public domain.

But Mr. Weiss said his company was on track to publish 26,000 new books this year, compared with 13,000 four years ago. CreateSpace, the self-publishing arm of Amazon.com, doesn’t release numbers, but a spokeswoman, Brittany Turner, told me in an e-mail that its books increased by 80 percent from 2009 to 2010.

There are many reasons potential authors want to publish their own books, Mr. Weiss said. They have an idea or manuscript they have passed around to various agents and publishers with no luck; they may just want to print a few copies of, say, a memoir for family members; they want to use it in their business as a type of calling card; or they actually want to sell a lot of books and make their living as writers.

We can attest to the rising quality of self-published titles. It was just a few years ago that the few that we received here didn't get much attention, and honestly didn't deserve much. But both the quantity and quality of self-published books that pass through our offices have risen dramatically in the last two years or so, to the point that we keep a section of our new arrivals shelf dedicated to those books just as we do for traditional publishers.

➻ And writing for the internet and digital mediums is changing, as well, as Calls for long-form nonfiction are on the rise—a vey welcome development to my mind.

➻ And because I feel compelled to link to the brilliant work of Nick Carr on a regular basis, here is a fascinating passage from his recent post about Marshall McLuhan at 100.

When you read McLuhan today, you find all sorts of reasons to be impressed by his insight into media's far-reaching effects and by his anticipation of the course of technological progress. When he looked at a Xerox machine in 1966, he didn't just see the ramifications of cheap photocopying, as great as they were. He foresaw the transformation of the book from a manufactured object into an information service: "Instead of the book as a fixed package of repeatable and uniform character suited to the market with pricing, the book is increasingly taking on the character of a service, an information service, and the book as an information service is tailor-made and custom-built." That must have sounded outrageous a half century ago. Today, with books shedding their physical skins and turning into software programs, it sounds like a given.

You also realize that McLuhan got a whole lot wrong. One of his central assumptions was that electric communication technologies would displace the phonetic alphabet from the center of culture, a process that he felt was well under way in his own lifetime. "Our Western values, built on the written word, have already been considerably affected by the electric media of telephone, radio, and TV," he wrote in Understanding Media. He believed that readers, because their attention is consumed by the act of interpreting the visual symbols of alphabetic letters, become alienated from their other senses, sacrifice their attachment to other people, and enter a world of abstraction, individualism, and rigorously linear thinking. This, for McLuhan, was the story of Western civilization, particularly after the arrival of Gutenberg's press.

If you're at all interested in these things, you really must head over to Carr's original post to watch video of the debate between Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan from a 1968 Canadian TV show.

➻ It's A Lull.

A Lull - "Weapons for War" from - SFVideo Productions - on Vimeo.



Failing Can Be Cool
Posted March 15, 2011 11:29 p.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

This week's inBubbleWrap giveaway is for an eye-opening book called Better By Mistake: The Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong. Alina Tugend, a New York Times columnist, realizes that we've heard this message before--most often from our parents and early teachers--that we can and should learn from our mistakes and those who are afraid to make them become stagnant with a fear of failure. But Tugend wanted to explore "the inherent tension between what we're told--we must make mistakes in order to learn, how all great leaders and inventors have embraced them--and the reality that we often get punished for making mistakes and therefore try to avoid them--or cover them up...." Because that's the true issue, right? We may laud mistakes in theory, but in reality, mistakes are, well, mistakes. It's what we do with them after they are made that counts! So what is refreshing about Tugend's book is that she not only presents numerous stories about failures that evolved into great accomplishments, but she concentrates the progression of her book toward a bigger issue: just how does a person or an organization use mistake-making as a learning tool, as an evolutionary starting point?

Tugend isn't the only person advocating failure. I titled this post "Failing Can Be Cool" because that is a line from an email our boss, Jack, sent to me last week. We have been discussing a new project we hope to launch soon, and of course there are always the internal doubts about its future success. Jack assured us that should any of those doubts become real failures, well, then we will learn from it and move on, because failing can be cool. It reminded me, somewhat indirectly, of a quote by the painter Jasper Johns that a friend had recently posted on Facebook: ""Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that." Projects are a process of development and faith and feedback and growth. If we dare to think that the evolution of such projects is ever complete, then they immediately depreciate. This is the message of an article by Seth Godin from the September 2010 Harvard Business Review. Godin argues that because we have been so trained to avoid failure, we have narrowly defined failure with catastrophic terms and become, as a result, incredibly fearful of failing catastrophically, when really failure is everywhere, is commonplace, and embracing failure's ubiquity is the only way we improve our products and services.

Consider it serendipitous then that a special issue of the Harvard Business Review appeared in our office this morning, its cover blaring: The Failure Issue: How to Understand It, Learn From It, and Recover From It. The issue is chockful of articles on failure, chronicles of failure, case studies of failure. What becomes apparent echoes what Tugend also is espousing: accepting failure or mistake-making as a part of the human experiences, as a part of organizational growth is one thing, actually learning from it requires some deliberate strategy, some refined communication, some dedicated time for reflection, analysis, and application of changes.

Indeed, failure can be cool, but getting better as a result of our mistakes is the real challenge, and something we all need to learn to do. Hop over to inBubbleWrap to sign up to win a free copy of Alina Tugend's Better by Mistake.




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