December 7, 2009
Hal Varian is an economist. As a matter of fact, he is the Chief Economist at Google. Wired wrote a great piece on the auction system for Adwords, which Varian shaped after his hire in 2002.
Varian is also a writer, having composed articles for both academic journals and mainstream publications.
I ran across an essay Varian wrote about called What I’ve Learned about Writing Economics. which has some relevant advice about writing business books.
Business Books
Writing Information Rules was an experiment. Carl Shapiro and I were both very interested in reaching a new audience, and we spent a lot of time thinking about who, exactly, the book was for. We already had quite a bit of material that we had pulled together for our teaching, research and consulting, so we had a good base of material to start with.
One of the most difficult things about writing a “business book” is how you phrase things. One good piece of advice is: “Don’t say what is, say what to do.” As scientists, we naturally like to describe things; our goal, after all, is to develop a better understanding of the world. But the readers of a business book don’t necessarily share this goal. Their focus is on deciding what to do. So instead of saying “price discrimination can increase profits” you should say “charge users according to their value, not according to your costs.”
Whatever you do, don’t use the passive voice! “Profits can be increased through the use of price discrimination” is about the worst way to phrase the idea. The decision makers disappear when you use the passive voice–hardly the right way to think about either social science or management!
This price discrimination example also illustrates another important point: you should try to use terminology that is meaningful to the reader. I hate to say it, but economist terminology is terrible. Economic jargon just doesn’t convey much meaning to the average reader. “Rent” is a nice example. It’s an important concept, no doubt about it, but your typical reader just won’t understand the subtleties without a lot of explanation. “Profit” they understand (or at least think they do) and it’s probably a better term in most cases.
Finally there’s the point I made earlier about making things simple for the reader. Callouts (those phrases in bold scattered through the text) and takeaway lists (the lists of points to remember at the end of the chapter) are useful tools for this purpose. They’re also a big help to you as an author: if you find that you’ve written two or three pages and you can’t come up with a one-sentence summary of what you’ve said, you should worry that you are just treading water. Perhaps you should cut some of that excess verbiage. Similarly, if you come to the end of the chapter and you don’t have half-a-dozen non-trivial lessons learned, you should probably go back and rethink the chapter.
My final advice is to tell a lot of stories. Business readers can tolerate some abstractions, but what really grabs them are stories. And the closer these stories come to the problems they face, the better. Remember they want to know what to do–so stories about what others have done, and how these choices have turned out, send a powerful message.
This is all good advice for those thinking about writing their own business book.
December 4, 2009
I have been read The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth by Clay Christensen and Michael Raynor. This book is the follow-up to The Innovator’s Dilemma.
The authors say that companies need to build products and services that make a job easier for the customer invoking Ted Levitt’s Marketing Myopia. They also say that true growth comes from finding nonconsumption rather than battling for existing consumption.
Given the never-ending e-reader news of the last several weeks, including today’s news of Skiff, the Hearst-backed project, I thought this was a great excerpt to think about. This was written in 2003:
Hundreds of millions have been spent to apply new technologies–the Internet and e-book displays, specifically–to reshape the college textbook industry. Innovators have attempted to develop and sell tablets that can display downloaded e-books. And with many textbooks, you can click on a URL to obtain far more information about the topic than could possibly be included with the limits of a book. Would we expect these investments to generate significant growth? Our guess is that they will not. Although we would like to believe that all undergraduates students are really trying to get done, from our observation, is pass their courses without having to read the textbook at all.
These companies have spent a lot of money helping student do more easily something that they have been trying not to do. It would probably take far less money to create from the same technology a service called “Cram.com”—a utility that would make it easier and cheaper for students to cram more effectively for their exams. This would likely work because cramming is something that students are already trying to do, but with marginal efficacy. There are a lot of textbook-avoiders on campuses—a huge market of nonconsumption. (p94-95)
This got me thinking about what job The Kindle, The Nook, and the host of other devices are really solving. What Amazon is selling in its new commercial is that we need help getting our books faster, that there is a speed problem. For voracious readers, that might be true.
How many of those readers are there though? Forrester Research is forecasting that 900,000 units will be sold during this holiday season and that next year sales will reach 10 million units.
Where is the nonconsumption? Are these devices really going to bring people back to reading books?
December 3, 2009
I was in St. Louis yesterday and had the wonderful chance to catch up with a friend I hadn’t talked to in close to twenty years. She is a physical therapist and teaches at Washington University.
Our wide ranging discussion over coffee lead us to how some people are constrained by what life offers and other always look for what is possible. Professionally, that means hanging on tightly to our beliefs, whether professional, educational, or institutional versus keeping an open mind to what is possible.
My friend described the colleague she most like working with–a doctor who had no problem admitting when she didn’t know the answer and always welcomed input in diagnosis and treatment of patients. It’s the way the doctor collaborated that really struck me. Her questions matched almost perfectly the ones Matt Thompson believes we need to answer if we are to improve journalism.
Thompson says the news is really about telling what happened today, what is the new. Most doctors start by asking the same thing, “What is going on today?”
What’s missing from the news story (or the doctor’s questioning) is three things:
- The longstanding facts – Has this happened before?
- How do they know what they know? – My sources of information were…
- What things don’t we know? – We don’t have good explanations for…
While not explicitly following these rules, this is what the doctors go through on every episode of House.
I have been thinking about these questions as I proceed with my new projects. They seem like a good place to start with any new problem that you are trying to solve. The questions test your assumptions and through simple rigor open up the possibilities for your conclusion.
December 3, 2009
1 Snowbird | Rani Arbo & Daisy Mayhem | Cocktail Swing (2:59)
2 Run Rudolph Run | Chuck Berry | The Chess Box (2:44)
3 Sugarplum | Bond | Explosive (2:21)
4 Do You Hear What I Hear? | Whitney Houston | A Very Special Christmas Vol. 1 (3:33)
5 It Really Is (A Wonderful Life) | Mindy Smith | My Holiday (3:42)
6 The Day It Snowed | Amusement Parks on Fire | It’s Not Like Christmas (4:09)
7 No Christmas For Me | Zee Avi | This Warm Christmas (2:41)
8 Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree | The Smithreens | Christmas with the Smithreens (2:08)
9 We Three Kings | Building 429 | We Three Kings (4:54)
10 Last Christmas | Glee Cast | Last Christmas (3:38)
11 Bring Me Love | Marie Digby | Bring Me Love (3:25)
12 Medley | Bela Fleck & The Fleckstones | Jingle All The Way (5:41)
13 Winter Song | Sara Bareilles & Ingrid Michaelson | The Hotel Cafe Presents Winter Songs (4:27)
14 Christmas Island | Sixpence None The Richer | The Dawn of Grace (2:34)
15 River | Indigo Girls | 1200 Curfews (3:53)
16 The Christmas Can-Can | Straight No Chaser | Christmas Cheers (2:42)
17 The Hounds of Winter | Sting | If On a Winter’s Night (5:49)
18 Why Can’t It Be Christmastime All Year | Rosie Thomas | A Very Rosie Christmas (4:22)
Past Albums:
- 2008 XmasMix (Blues Traveler, Alabama, Hall & Oates, Sufjan Stevens, Barenaked Ladies)
- 2007 XmasMix (Perry Como, Jack Johnson, The Weepies, Leigh Nash)
- 2006 XmasMix (The Waitresses, Five for Fighting, Blind Boys of Alabama, Billy Mack)
- 2005 XmasMix (Louis Prima, Dolly Parton, B.B. King, Whitney Houston, Dixieland Ramblers)
- 2004 XmasMix (Guster, Bobby Vinton, The Eagles, Yutaka, Rhonda Vincent)
- 2002 XmasMix (Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Jars of Clay, Jimmy Buffet, Sting, Tina Arena)
P.S. All the song links send you to iTunes.
I co-wrote 
Getting Things Done