Read about our pricing and services
List Price:
| Price | Quantity |
| $20.76 | 1-24 |
| $15.57 | 25+ |
Bulk discounts are non-returnable. | |
Customize It
FREE Shipping
Hardcover
335 pages
ISBN 9781591842408 Published Feb. 2009
Portfolio
See all formats
Tweet
Posted Dec. 10, 2010 10:23 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
I know you might be thinking, “Another book on the financial crisis… really?” But this is the one that many have been waiting for, and after reading it for myself, I can safely say that Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera have delivered the most comprehensive documentation to-date of the many pieces that built the puzzle of our financial system over the decades. And from CEOs to politicians, government officials to mortgage lenders, borrowers, ratings agencies and traders, all the devils are truly in there.
The authors are a dream-team of reportage. A contributing editor to Vanity Fair, Bethany McLean may be most well known for coauthoring The Smartest Guys in the Room, which is the definitive work on the Enron scandal and an easy choice for us when picking The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. And Joe Nocera, a columnist for The New York Times, ranks with Michael Lewis as one of the best pure writers on business working today. His 2008 book, Good Guys and Bad Guys, is one of the best collections of business journalism—and study of American business personalities—ever put together.
Their new effort, All the Devils is Here, is a complex tale, almost dizzying in scope, but is handled with such skill and so chock-full of magnificent and memorable stories that you’ll know the full story inside-out by the time you put the book down. The tale of John Breit in the book’s prologue will give you an idea of what I’m talking about.
Breit had once been the head of market risk management at Merrill Lynch, with easy access to the company’s directors. But, over the past decade, Breit and all other significant risk management was basically relegated to a broom closet—which is why it was a surprise when Merrill CEO Stan O’Neal asked to see him in September of 2007 to get his calculations of Merrill’s exposure to risk. McLean and Nocera recount the end of that meeting beautifully:
Listening to him, Breit realized that O’Neal seemed to have no idea that Merrill’s risk management function had been sidelined.
The meeting finally came to an end; Breit shook O’Neal’s hand and wished him luck. “I hope we talk again,” he said.
“I don’t know,” replied O’Neal. “I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be around.”
O’Neal went back to his desk to contemplate the disaster he now knew was unavoidable—not just for Merrill Lynch but for all of Wall Street. John Briet walked back to his office with a strange realization that he—a midlevel employee utterly out of the loop—had just informed one of the most powerful men on Wall Street that the party was over.
I would never use the words “if you’re going to read one book on the financial crisis,” because there are just too many must-reads in the category. And because its attention is so all encompassing, this book requires a good deal more patience than others. But McLean and Nocera have done something important, special and singular in All the Devils are Here, and I really hope you all read it.
Jack Covert Selects – What Technology Wants
Posted Oct. 15, 2010 4:12 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
in-its-entirety issue—technology.
Business changes. We don’t do business today in the same way we did it at the turn of the century—either 1900 or 2000. And though it’s not specifically about business, the inevitability of change is why you should pick up Kevin Kelly’s latest book, What Technology Wants.
in-its-entirety issue—technology.
Kevin Kelly has written big idea books before, most notably Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World, which we chose for The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. And like Out of Control, What Technology Wants is vast in scope. It attempts to break down old ways of thinking by clarifying a large, hard-to-grasp-in-its-entirety issue—technology.
This isn’t the first book this year to try to tackle the subject holistically. In Linchpin, Seth Godin challenged us to redefine work, to give up the industrial era mindset that new technologies have made obsolete. The Shallows by Nicholas Carr and Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus both looked at the way technology affects the very way we think. But Kelly takes it a step further, defining technology as part of our thought process, as a natural extension of evolution and a natural, living system. In fact, technology is not a sufficient word for what Kelly is trying to grasp, so he’s coined a new word—the technium.
For the rest of this book I will use the term technium where others might use technology as a plural, and to mean a whole system (as in “technology accelerates”). I reserve the term technology to mean a specific technology, such as radar or plastic polymers. For example, I would say: “The technium accelerates the invention of technologies.” In other words, technologies can be patented, while the technium includes the patent system itself.
He then traces the technium back to our hunter-gatherer past to document how it evolved to its current state.
The technium gains immense power not only from its scale but from its self-amplifying nature. One breakthrough invention, such as the alphabet, the steam-pump, or electricity, can lead to further breakthrough inventions, such as books, coal mines, and telephones. These advances in turn lead to other breakthrough inventions, such as libraries, power generators, and the internet.
The technium is “human extended,” something we’ve been building and evolving since we have been building and evolving. It is the “extended body for ideas.” And to be in business today, to truly innovate, it is important to have a grasp on that “extended body for ideas”—to know that the answer to your business’s troubles isn’t to get on Twitter, but to understand the changing environment that bred it. You won’t find any immediately applicable business solutions in What Technology Wants, but you will find something that could much more important to your business—a new way of looking at the world.
Jack Covert Selects - Still Surprised
Posted Sept. 9, 2010 10:24 a.m. by dylan
When you look at the greatest business thinkers from the second half of the last century, Warren Bennis would have to be in the conversation. When you focus on the field of leadership, he would have to be on the top of that list. In the past fifty-plus years, Bennis has written some of the seminal books on leadership. We included On Becoming a Leader in The 100 Best Business Books of All Time because, as we said in the book, “Bennis treats leadership with a certain gravitas that is perspective changing.”
Now, after writing twenty-seven books on business thought, he tells us his leadership story. It begins when, as a 19-year-old second lieutenant, he commanded a platoon during the final days of the Second World War in Europe and was awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star. It was his first real lesson in leadership:
I had been changed and enriched by the advance course in leadership the war had thrust on me. It is no accident that the war produced so many authentic leaders in the second half of the 20th century. Nobody who has to make choices that result in the deaths of others takes leadership lightly.
He then used the G.I. Bill to go to college at Antioch, a small “free-thinking institution that championed both learning and social justice” in Ohio where he met Douglas McGregor, who would become his early mentor. He went on to do his graduate work at MIT. These two experiences in higher education would transform his life:
One of the first and most critical things those two institutions did for me was radically alter my definition of work. … Work—paid work at that—could be the activity of an engaged mind or a group of minds collaborating to solve a worthy problem.
So inspired, he has spent the rest of his life in higher learning. As he recounts his journey, we meet an incredible group of people—like Nobel Prize winner Paul Samuelsson, counter-culture guru Werner Erhard and writer Norman Mailer. We also find out how Bennis developed his beliefs surrounding team-focused leadership instead of the hierarchical leadership model. All of this along with the tale of a life well lived. There are no new theories here, just great stories. But, like all of Warren Bennis’s books, it finds the heart of leadership.
Jack Covert Selects - Getting Naked
Posted March 11, 2010 9:14 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
For over ten years, Pat Lencioni has helped define the genre of the business fable. He is most famous for The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which I thought so highly of that I included it in our collection of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. When Lencioni’s newest book came across my desk I was curious about the title, but also cautious: the title is eye-catching and memorable, but how was Lencioni going to pull this one off?
I needn’t have worried. What makes Lencioni’s fables so compelling is his skill at creating a real world populated by characters you believe in. Then into that world, Lencioni presents a common problem that you can relate to and a series of problem-solving decisions that you can then apply to your own experience. Time and again, Lencioni succeeds at teaching through storytelling and Getting Naked is no different.
Getting Naked is about vulnerability and transparency. Nakedness in this case is a counterintuitive approach to presenting yourself to a client or customer. Instead of going into a sales call loaded for bear with a PowerPoint presentation and all sorts of hype about who you are, you should go into the meeting naked, asking questions, being open, and nearly giving your expertise away. Every meeting should be about the client, not about you.
Lencioni’s story is about a big consulting firm that buys a little, but very successful, boutique consulting company. The executive responsible for the incorporation of the merger discovers that the small consulting firm has little or no sales costs, because most of the small firms clients are referrals from existing clients. The reason? Outstanding service derived from shedding the three big fears that drive customers away: fear of losing the client, fear of being embarrassed, and fear of being inferior. The executive then brings all he has learned back to the big consulting firm—and to you.
Besides being an outstanding storyteller, Pat Lencioni speaks a language that works perfectly for training. In fact, Getting Naked will be read by my staff and will be the basis of a new training program—that’s how valuable I think this book is.
Jack Covert Selects - Switch
Posted Feb. 12, 2010 6:29 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
Chip and Dan Heath, brothers and scholars, won the inaugural 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year Award with their first book, Made to Stick. That book, despite being a newborn, also made our list of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. When the publisher sent me the advance copy of Switch, I was concerned about the “sophomore slump” that happens in sports and music, whether due to a true drop in quality or critical backlash due to expectations. Still, I dropped everything and stretched out on my couch to read, and I can tell you that Switch might even be better than Made to Stick.
In Made to Stick, the Heaths offered a methodology for how to make your ideas memorable. And, of course, one of the things the Heath brothers excel in is creating their own sticky ideas. They use clever acronyms, catchy phrases, and unusual connections that we can easily remember and reference for future situations. In Made to Stick, it was SUCCESs, and the “curse of knowledge” among other memorable lessons. Switch is about making change happen, despite our tendency to fight it. Here the Heaths teach us about the Rider—or rational mind—and the Elephant—our emotional mind— and how change needs a partnership between the two in order to “shape the path” ahead. We also learn about TBU—true but useless—which, undiagnosed, can lead to decision paralysis.
To explain an antidote to decision paralysis, the Heaths tell of a small community in South Dakota that had been losing young people at an unsustainable rate. A group of high school students decided to do something. In the past, decision paralysis ruled efforts like this because the problem was so overwhelming and the potential answers so numerous. The students commissioned a survey and discovered that half the residents shopped outside they county. The first step was to ask the residents to support local businesses, which in turn became the first step in a successful revitalization program.
The Heath brothers are teachers at heart, and Switch features the same high level of research-driven data brought to life through world-class stories as Made to Stick, while also offering loads of practical, how-to advice on how to start and maintain your next change initiative, whether in your business or in your personal life. The ultimate takeaway is that by recognizing that oftentimes it is the situation that must change, not the person, we are able to take action and not fear the unknown.
