Monthly Archives: January 2010

“The 100 Best Business Books of The American CEO”

Posted on by under Books

Today, I got in the mail two copies of the Japanese translation of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time from my good friends at Portfolio.

The Japanese title is “The 100 Best Business Books of The American CEO” (playing off the authors from business book retailer 800-CEO-READ).

Our Japanese publisher Kodansha has done a great job with the book. There was some concern initially about being able to include all 100 books because of translation costs and book length. And it is understandable, the Japanese version comes in at 516 pages versus the American version at 316 pages. I even went as far as developing a shorter list with a new table of contents. It is wonderful to see they decided to include all the selections.

There are some nice details. Kodansha maintained the “Where to Next?” section with the choose your own adventure feature. They assigned a number to each book to help with organization, providing the number in the table of contents and then in the page header. The best part though is the addition of the cover art from the Japanese versions of these books. They kept the American version at the front of the review and added the local versions at the end.

Authors always talk about how cool it is to see their books printed in other languages. I have to agree. It is WAY cool.

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649

Ideas Need Air

Posted on by under Big Ideas

I got out of my basement office yesterday and spent time with people I know in Milwaukee.

I was reminded again that ideas get better when you talk about them. Face to face is better than phone and much better than email.

You can see immediately if they get it. If they are good listeners, they share with you what works and doesn't.

Better yet, new ideas or appear out of thin air.

Don't keep things to yourself. Find someone to talk about your crazy idea with today.

Book Review – Linchpin by Seth Godin

Posted on by under Books, You

In 2003, I was working with my father in his small sheet metal fabrication shop. We were struggling to keep customers and attract new ones. I read Purple Cow from a milk carton and it changed my life and the trajectory of our company.

Lightning does strike twice.

⁂

I keeping changing my mind as I think what Linchpin is about. Seth Godin is certainly writing about work, how it is changing and the opportunities that will create, but it is also about art and change and gifts.

The first part is available in any number of books. The Spring 2010 business book season is full of them. Dan Pink’s Drive, The Heath Brothers’ Switch and 37 Signals’ Rework are all about doing, what gets us to do things, and how we get ourselves to do things different. That is covered in Linchpin as well.

It’s the second part, the ‘what’ we should do, that deserves attention. Here Seth does what he always does: expands the meaning of words. Art is not a painting hanging on the wall in a museum, but rather “a personal gift that changes the recipient.” Art creates change, whether stump speech or chocolate cupcake, stone arch or science fair experiment. Everyone can see themselves as artists.

Artists give gifts, Seth says. On this point, most readers will struggle, but Seth comes back to it multiple times. We think of gifts with wrapping paper and bows, given on special occasions. Seth is not talking about the holiday reciprocity with we have come to expect. He says those expectations cripple art and creates an arms-length quid pro quo. Give without expecting anything in return.

⁂

Linchpin has done the same for me that Purple Cow did. Books are often about timing and hearing what you need to hear at the right point in time. I write this review as I start off on a new path in my life, and Seth told me a bunch of things that I needed to hear or maybe just needed to be reminded of.

(You can also listen my interview with Seth Godin here.)

Idea Arena Podcast – Linchpin Interview with Seth Godin

Posted on by under Books, Idea Arena Podcasts, You

Seth and I spend 20 minutes talking about the words he choose to use in Linchpin and what those words mean.

Art. Gifts. Emotional Labor. Shipping. Map Making.

http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsoundcloud.com%2Ftoddsattersten%2Fidea-arena-podcast-linchpin-interview-with-seth-godin& Idea Arena Podcast – Linchpin Interview with Seth Godin by toddsattersten

(You can also read my review of Linchpin here.)

Work and Play

Posted on by under Big Ideas, Technology

Today, I finished the main work for the ebook I have coming out in two weeks. Feels really good.

But I sent it out to some good friends for feedback, so we’ll see how I feel after that.

I also picked up Hipstamatic, an iPhone app that allows you to choose lens and films from plastic cameras of years past. I took a picture of the whiteboard I was working from, so you can get a little preview of both the app and the ebook.

Ebook Whiteboard with Hipsamatic

Tumbling Todd

Posted on by under Big Ideas, Design, Media

Just wanted to let you know that I also have a Tumblr blog where all of my del.icio.us links, twitter posts, and flickr photos get posted.

I also mention it because there are interesting photos, images and videos that I post there that don’t really fit here. Today I posted a great graphic analysis of the color changes to the Crayola over the last 100 years. In the past week, I have linked to a blog that is considering alternate designs for airline boarding passes, a set of college calculus cheat sheets, the fictitious Atari 2600 Avatar game, Sally Hogsheads’ Hog-isms, and a video of The Decade from the Covers of Magazines.

I can be a little noisy, but you might find some other interesting stuff there.

Five Business Books That Defined the Decade

Posted on by under Books

Matthew May writes a post yesterday listing his five selections for Books That Defined The Decade. He describes his list as “big idea” books [that] stand out because not only did they help us better understand the world, they gave us a new lens through which to view it.”

His choices included:

Matthew is directionally correct, but let me offer a different list for consideration.

  1. Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell was published in February 2000. This American Life Host Ira Glass has said that we are living in the Golden Age of non-Fiction writing. I don’t think Tipping Point marked the arrival of this Golden Age, but the publication of his first book surely heralded the work and growing popularity of many writers including Michael Lewis, Susan Orlean, Chuck Klosterman, and Michael Pollan.
  2. Good To Great was published in Oct. 2001. Jim Collins certainly had the momentum of Built To Last, but the book could have just as easily gotten lost in the aftermath of 9/11. Collins provides the management algorithm for the 21st century and his research hasn’t been without question, but Good To Great is hands down the business book of the decade.
  3. Thomas Friedman belongs on the list, but I would choose his 2005 book The World Is Flat as the book of note. Lexus and The Olive Tree was certainly important in reporting the developments from the field, but The World Is Flat marked the arrival of a new state; the description for how the planet would operate going forward. The World Is Flat might also be the title of the decade (Never Eat Alone is a close second). Interesting that Freakonomics and Gladwell’s second book Blink also arrive in 2005.
  4. Dan Pink described the trend in Free Agent Nation, but more importantly identified the work we should be doing in A Whole New Mind. Design, Symphony, Story, Empathy, Play and Meaning. When Oprah says “Last spring I read a book I just couldn’t put down,” you have hit on something. Interestingly, A Whole New Mind also came out in 2005.
  5. The final spot I would give to the folks at Gallup. Now, Discover Your Strengths and StrengthFinders 2.0 have created a cultural conversation around the need to pursue and enhance strengths while minimizing the criticism of weaknesses. The robust tools for identifying those strengths have made the meme that much more powerful. Marcus Buckingham deserves credit for driving that message as well during his time at Gallup and in his recent projects..

A couple final points…My list doesn’t exactly overlap with May’s given my emphasis on books that impacted business and his on big ideas.

Freakonomics is a great read and has plenty of stories to talk about at a cocktail party, but little we can take with us into our daily lives.

James Surowiecki certainly identified what Web 2.0 would bring and I loved the book, but still missed creating a greater cultural wake after The Wisdom of Crowds published in (again) 2005. I remember James say at SXSW in 2006 that Malcolm had outsold him 10 to 1. It could be that we like reading about individuals that we can mirror ourselves in versus amorphous collectives and group phenomenon that we have a hard time identifying with.

Seth’s Two Lemonade Stands

Posted on by under Marketing

Do yourself a favor and start by reading Seth Godin’s post titled The Lesson From Two Lemonade Stands, it is going to be a classic that people refer back to.

Will Weisser follows up with a great post on the Portfolio blog connecting Seth’s lemonade stands to every book he has written for the publishing imprint. Love that observation.

Jonathan Fields also wrote a great response and says having fun is what Seth is getting at.

Start with Being Annoyed

Posted on by under Big Ideas

“Most of my big ideas – and a lot of the small ones – start with my being annoyed.”

-Author Sarah A. Hoyt at Whatever

The same thing happens to me, maybe you as well.

I got annoyed by Chris Anderson’s Free.

This provided early fuel for the ebook I have been working on. I thought too much got mixed up in the no-price blender and that we had some how lost track of what was really important in the conversation about free. The book failed to pull the conversation together around a finite set of ideas.

I am going to make an attempt at talking about cost, price, margin, and free. And lock it together in a way that business people can think about it.

The ebook will be publishing on my favorite holiday of the year – February 2nd – Groundhog’s Day.

The Convenience of Good Enough

Posted on by under Marketing, Strategy

Robert Capps wrote a great piece for Wired in September called The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine.

He uses the Flip Camera, the MQ-1 Predator, and micro health clinics as examples of products that find huge success for providing the minimum level of capabilities to get the job done:

The attributes that now matter most all fall under the rubric of accessibility. Thanks to the speed and connectivity of the digital age, we’ve stopped fussing over pixel counts, sample rates, and feature lists. Instead, we’re now focused on three things: ease of use, continuous availability, and low price. Is it simple to get what we want out of the technology? Is it available everywhere, all the time—or as close to that ideal as possible? And is it so cheap that we don’t have to think about price?

This gives further support to Trade-Off framework with Capps’ Good Enough equating to Kevin Maney’s Convenience.

There is one thing I didn’t include in the original review of Trade-Off. Maney says technology is constantly pushing the outer edges of both convenience and fidelity. Capps’ piece illustrates that well.

New Harvard Business Review: Slight Improvement

Posted on by under Media

The new January-February issue of Harvard Business Review has a redesigned look and some new features.

Here is my take.

Pros:

  • The columns from Dan Ariely and C.K. Prahalad are going to be conversation starters. And they are being smart about making them available outside the firewall. Check out Prahalad’s piece on The Responsible Manager and Ariely’s article on The Long-Term Effects of Short Term Emotions.
  • The book review section is outstanding. The magazine is now sourcing their selection from the contributors in the issue. The method creates a wonderfully electic mix from Condoleezza Rice’s choice of Alexander Hamilton or Roger Martin’s pick of The Enlightened Eye by Elliot Eisner. Erin Meyer recommends the outstanding Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em as a cross-cultural tool for global executives to better understand how to manage American reports. Really like this approach to reviewing books.
  • The visual language is clear and crisp. The sidebars and graphs are easily understood. Not a huge step from the old format, but nice and simple.
  • The Defend Your Research column is good and they pick a great first choice in Alex Pentland’s work on social signals. I hope they’ll continue to push this feature and be willing to push researchers.
  • The bulk of the articles are familiar fare. Many will find this reassuring.

Cons:

  • The bulk of the articles are familiar fare. Some (like me) will want HBR to push more. More innovative thought is needed.
    • Where was the Dan Pink feature on his motivation findings from Drive?
    • Why hasn’t some researcher taken on Kevin Maney’s Trade-Off framework and either further supported with data or dispelled the theory as weak?
    • Why not a much longer piece on the counterclaims for Jim Collins’ Good To Great research that Michael Raynor and company are doing at Deliotte?
    • The book review of Chief Culture Officer was nice, but Grant McCracken deserved some space to make the case himself. See his ChangeThis manifesto to see what could have been done.
  • The magazine features works by sculpture Michel de Broin this month. While the approach of using modern art is interesting, the use of these sculptures is a stretch at creating meaning for the associated articles.
  • The Roger Martin piece on customer capitalism is more op-ed than constructive argument.
  • Yes, everyone loves lists, but the Best Performing CEOs countdown felt like something from you’d find Fortune, not Harvard Business Review.

Overall, I think this is an improvement. HBR won’t lose anyone, but I don’t think they we gain many either. Most will find it a facelift to the classic offering, rather than some redefinition of the magazine.

I hope we’ll see more tweaks and improvements in the coming months.

Don’t Be The Victim

Posted on by under Books, Media

Richard Nash, former publisher at Soft Skull Press and entrepreneur behind Cursor, wrote a set of predictions for what publishing will be like in 2020.

The highlight has to be:

6. In 2020 we will look back on the last days of publishing and realize that it was not a surfeit of capitalism that killed it, but rather an addiction to a mishmash of Industrial Revolution practices that killed it, including a Fordist any color so long as it is black attitude to packaging the product, a Sloanist hierarchical management approach to decision making, and a GM-esque continual rearranging of divisions like deck chairs on the Titanic based on internal management preferences rather than consumer preferences.

Notice that the adjectives are mostly people. I love that.

Contrast that with these statements:

  • Video killed the radio star.
  • The electric arc killed integrated steel mills.
  • The internet is killing newspapers.

Each of these statement relieves the decision makers of responsibility for their company's demise and instead lays the blame at the feet of innovation.

Not one existing steel company built an electric arc in the two decades that Nucor perfected the technology.

Michael Jackson and Madonna recognized what the rise of MTV would mean to the musicians.

The newspaper story is still playing out, but I would say it is not looking good for the incumbents right now.

Four Big Business Books To Start 2010

Posted on by under Big Ideas, Books

If you didn’t want to read about the collapse of the global financial system, there wasn’t a lot for you in the business book category in 2009. I have been posting reviews of the handful of my favorites over the last week (What Would Google Do?, The Four Conversations, and Trade-Off).

2010 is going to be different. In the next eight weeks, four big business books are going to be published, giving us plenty of ideas to talk about.

  1. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Dan Pink – The book was released last week (December 29th). I am about halfway through it and the book is working for me. I am going to be catching up with Dan later this month for an interview, so stay tuned.
  2. Linchpin: Are You Indispensible? by Seth Godin – I’ve read it already and loved it. Portfolio releases it on January 26th. More soon.
  3. Switch: How To Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath – I have the galley and I am not as far as I should be into the book, but it is hard to bet against the Heath Brothers. The book drops February 16th.
  4. Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson – The 37 Signals guys are taking their Getting Real message to the masses with this book from Crown Business due out March 9th.

I am going to be doing interviews with all of these guys, so watch for those as their books come to market.

Lots to look forward to as we start New Year!