Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers–a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars–and on up through university. On the job, people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.
From a letter Edward Deming wrote Peter Senge when The Fifth Discipline was published in 1995. Senge talks about the letter in the introduction to the new edition.
Fans, Friends & Followers is a book with lessons and case studies about musicians, filmmakers, and authors who built their audiences independently online. We talk about creating remarkable content, how these creators involve their audiences in the creations, and the ways to use free material to build followers.
Be different. Create work only you can create. Since there are no gatekeepers, there’s no one to tell you that your art or music or video is unmarketable, too weird, too challenging. There’s no one to demand that you follow a proven formula, or conduct a focus group to see whether people like the way your movie ends.
Concord Free Press calls themselves the world’s first generosity-based publisher. Instead of a monetary exchange between reader and publisher, the Massachusetts-based non-profit asks that you give money to someone else when a reader receives a copy of one of their books. They make it all work through donations, low costs, and generously donated time on the part of designers, editors, and printers.
They ask that readers report their donation online and to date Concord Free Press has raised more than $130,000 for causes around the world. After factoring their costs, the publisher calculates their ROI at more than 800%.
Others are helped too. Founder Stona Fitch used her own novel Give + Take as the first book given away, after the book was orphaned following the departure of her editor. The success and publicity of the whole venture has caused St. Martin’s to pick up Give + Take. The book will be released in May.
There is so much that is interesting about this story. The fact that we could give one thing and expect something completely different in return is wonderful. We also see again that free is a powerful way to spread an idea, but it is not the mailing of free books that creates the success. No, the success comes from the story of what Concord Free Press doing for readers, authors, and the world at large.
Ariely manages to squeeze into 500 words how free is scary, that experiments mean someone is going to get short changed, short term myopia, and the illusion of expert advice.
Take clinical medical trials, I said to the team. When testing chemotherapy treatments, some patients suffer more so that, down the road, others might suffer less. I hoped this put it in perspective. Fortunately, I said, price testing household products requires far less suffering than chemo trials.
I want you to watch this episode of Wine Library TV.
Gary V. talks with the guys from Three Thieves. The 20 minutes or so is not about tasting wine, but rather how these three built their business.
Their company name comes from the fact the guys buys excess, premium wine from wine producers, create their own blends, and sell most of their wines for under $10. These three have been particularly innovative in their packaging and marketing.
The Newspaper Club in the UK founded their business on a similar excess. After developing a short run newsprint project, the founders discovered that most newspaper production facilities go unused during the day while the day's paper is being put together. Again, excess capacity creates a business model.
Every industry has their version of excess whether it is a machine waiting to be used or product that never found a customer. Is there an opportunity waiting there for you?
He started with the idea that everyone has seen a hockey stick in their data before; the ever rising, totally exciting period when users are flocking to your page or product. As Rolf point out, the trouble is that exponential growth is not sustainable and it is only a question of what will happen next.
Most growth curve level out and become the well-known S-curve of innovation. Some start to oscillate and indicate some cyclical nature to the usage.
The new one for me was the Gartner Hype Cycle (page 67 in the slidedeck below. There are five phases which will immediately sound familiar to anyone who has hang around technology:
Technology Trigger
Peak of Inflated Expectations
Trough of Disillusionment
Slope of Enlightenment
Plateau of Productivity
His final curve was the normal growth cycle (p81) and this is one we are all familiar with: Introduction, Growth, Maturity, Saturation, and Decline. Rolf called this one of the most helpful of all the curves. It matches the course of new projects, new teams, new companies, and to no surrpise, life itself. He even has assigned numbers to each phase and uses it as a vocabulary to locate things in their growth curve. He delivers career advice as well, pointing out that different people often work best in phases of growth (ie Rockstars like the growth, while Optimizers thrive in the saturation phase).
This was definitely one of the best talks I saw in Austin.
When 800-CEO-READ took over the stewardship of ChangeThis, our first order of business was to boost the profile of the site and we immediately contacted Tom Peters to see if he would contribute a new manifesto.
Tom kept writing, topping out at 176 tips, when Harper Studio contacted him about taking the tips and turning them into a book. The Little Big Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence is the fruit of that effort.
To describe Little Big Things as collection of blog posts would be a terrible misnomer. The titling on each tip may, at one time, have resembled something else, but all of these were rewritten and edited and written again and edited some more.
I go through all of this trouble of explaining, because many are going to say that this is just a rehash of things they have heard from Tom before.
“Excellence is the subtitle for gosh sake!”
And the answer is yes. This is going to sound familiar. The crazy acronyms are stamped throughout the book. Exclamation marks abound. That big chunky bold font appears on almost every page. The book is classic Tom Peters.
“But is there anything new?”
No, and there doesn’t need to be.
“Why?”
Because we don’t listen…no, we don’t act, we don’t do anything differently than yesterday or last month or three years ago when everything was going fine.
We don’t hire the S.W.P.s (seriously weird people). We don’t read enough. We don’t serve people. We don’t do enough WOW. We don’t do enough NOW. And there is always some lame reason why.
Tom has been always been about getting past the lame reason. If you don’t think there is anything holding back and you are only doing really cool stuff that everyone on the planet loves, Little Big Things is not for you.
If on the slightest chance, you could use someone to give you a little push, or you think reading something inspirational might help, then this book is for you.
My experience is that people fall into one of those two camps. Find your camp. You’ll know what to do.
I am finally getting out from underneath the pile that accumulated during my SXSWi trip.
This year, I found I learned the most by attending panels that had little to do with what I knew or what normally interested me. The publishing panels repeated perspectives that were widely available if you had been following along over the last several months, while attending a talk on how the internet is changing concert industry or how companies that are developing open source software can develop business models alongside free helped me think bigger.
This week, I am going to share some of my learnings from the conference.
One other housekeeping note: The Idea Arena podcasts started as a bit of an experiment on the site. We have done five now and I like how they have been turning out. Each is around twenty minutes which gives the author enough time to talk in the depth about the book.
I got some feedback last week that I need to watch my sound levels. If you have any other feedback or authors you would like to hear on the Idea Arena podcast, let me know.
[T]heir book is much better than a simple list, and their list is better than most. The two have reviewed, abstracted, and compared all the best 100 in the context of thousands of similar books, unlike say your average Amazon reviewer who may have only read one other business book in his or her life. You get context instead of content. Reading Covert and Sattersten’s summaries of these classics is often better than reading the book itself, and the review is always useful in pointing you to the few books or authors you might actually want to read in full.
The sales of The 100 Best have been up the last couple of weeks, and that doesn’t include all the remaindered/discount copies that were cleared off Amazon when Fixed To Flexible was released.
It is just great to see continued interest in the book over a year later.
P.S. As Kelly points out in his review, we included his 1995 book Out of Control just to make clear any conflicts of interest.
Poundstone says he started researching a book about Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two of the most important researchers in the area of decision making over the last fifty years. What he found was that pricing was a good point around which to tell their story and Poundstone covers much more than that Priceless. The narrative takes us from the field of psychophysics to a $72 steak in Amarillo, Texas, all along the way teaching us how easily we can be swayed one way or another.
Supermarket consultants leave few stones unturned in determining what boosts consumers' willingness to pay. One of the more intriguing of recent findings is that shoppers open their wallets wider when moving through a store in a counterclockwise direction. On average, these shoppers spend $2 more a trip than clockwise shoppers.
Each year I read more business books than most people read in a lifetime. My experience allows me to help readers know what to read, do book scouting for publishers...
Curent Project
Fixed to Flexiblee-book. Four Simple Lessons About Cost, Price, Margin and The Options Available to the 21st Century Business
I co-wrote 
Getting Things Done