January 11, 2010
“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.
January 7, 2010
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.
January 6, 2010
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.
January 5, 2010
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.
January 4, 2010
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.
- 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.
- Linchpin: Are You Indispensible? by Seth Godin – I’ve read it already and loved it. Portfolio releases it on January 26th. More soon.
- 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.
- 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!
January 2, 2010
I posted my Favorites of 2009 over on my Tumblr blog.
Music, movies, books, TV, food, and tech is represented.
Nothing super shocking, but you might be interested in a quick look.
January 1, 2010
Tucked in Neal Stephenson’s wonderful book Snow Crash is this comparison in a fictional future where all highways are owned by corporations:
CSV-5 has better throughput, but Cal-12 has better pavement. That is typical—Fairlanes roads emphasize getting you there, for Type A drivers, and Cruiseways emphasize the enjoyment of the ride for Type B drivers.
Author Kevin Maney recognized that we make comparisons and choices like this every day, sometimes taking for the fastest route while other times opting for the best ride. Maney says in his book Trade-Off the only path to success is for companies to concentrate on one of two those needs. Pursuing both is the path of failure.
Maney uses the words convenience and fidelity to describe the opposing needs. The wide availability and low cost creates convenience, while fidelity combines the experience of purchase with the prestige of the brand and the way it reinforces our identity. Our choice of easiest versus best is complicated, flipping back and forth based on the needs of the moment.
Think about hiring an employee. A call to Kelly Services will conveniently fill the open position tomorrow. Pick up the phone, dial Spencer Stuart, and they’ll start a comprehensive search for the best candidate in the world. Both approaches fulfill the need in completely different ways and with understandably different results.
If this sounds familiar, the convenience/fidelity trade-off is another route at the well worn discussion of transactional versus relationship-driven businesses. Others have described the tension as price versus prestige. John Hagel and Marc Singer went as far as suggesting that companies should be broken up along the lines of infrastructure management (convenience), product innovation (fidelity), and customer relationships (fidelity) because the demands of each where so unique.
Maney addresses the challenge of trying to do both, describing it more as an impossibility. In the dual pursuit of convenience and fidelity, Maney says companies chase a mirage and over time are sucked into a place of increasing irrelevance where customers understand less and less why they need your products. 35mm film, movie theaters, and Starbucks all serve as anecdotes.
Some are going to read Trade-Off and say they have seen this play before. Maney is surely tapping a recognized strategic tension, but the updated vocabulary and examples are refreshing, a good reminder to the challenge that all companies face between satisfying the convenient now and the high-resolution, 700 horsepower, oceanfront, 24K gold plated image floating in their customers’ heads.
January 1, 2010
Jack and I are coming up on the one year anniversary of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.
To celebrate on my end, I have decided to tweet about each of the 100 books we choose. This was one of the ideas we had when we initially launched the book but just didn't get it done.
Each day from now until April 11th, I'll post a new tweet on my twitter account about one of the books. I am going to run them down in alphabetically from Age of Unreason to Zag.
Hope you'll follow along.
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Getting Things Done