• Act I: Girl Meets Boy
• Act II: Girl Loses Boy
• Act III: Girl Gets Boy Back

The reason we watch movies and read novels is to follow along with the characters to see what they will face and how it will change them. Loss and its cousin, absence, are the most common tensions in literature. The character discovers early in the story that something is missing—happiness, freedom, wealth, beauty—and that he or she needs to fill the hole in his or her pocket or heart—someone has a felt need that needs to be resolved.

A pitch is just a 30–second, three–act play that describes the current state, makes apparent the unsatisfied felt need of the customer, and shows how that need might be fulfilled by the work of your startup. As Y Combinator co–founder Paul Graham says, startups need to improve people’s lives and bring about some change for the better. If writing your pitch is hard, go back and find the poetic tension that drives the story of your company.

This is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of Every Book Is a Startup that ran in this week’s edition of O’Reilly’s TOC Newsletter. If you are going to be attending TOC in New York next week, I am going to be speaking on Minimum Viable Publishing in a workshop session Monday February 13th from 3:30pm to 5pm.

The expected was the creation of the list that made up The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, a book that was published in 2009 (and whose updated paperback edition was just released).

The unexpected came as we uncovered a number of meta-themes the books share that exist beyond any predictable grouping by subject matter. For example, Michael Useem’s The Leadership Moment has surprising connections with as Taiichi Ohno’s Toyota Production System and Gary Klein’s The Power of Intuition.

Ultimately, we found five persistent meta-themes across our selection of the 100 best business books. Each meta-theme appears horizontally across traditional publishing categories, bridging such divisions as sales, management, narrative, and finance. Each meta-theme also scales in a vertical sense, applying to individuals, teams and organizations equally.

So profound are these meta-themes, we argue, that these five universal insights act as the foundation for anyone dealing with any aspect of business, whether starting a new job or developing the next year’s corporate strategy.

1. Clarity of Purpose: Purpose provides direction and brings clarity to all work. For the individual in pursuit of purpose, author Po Bronson asks the ultimate question in his book, What Should I Do with My Life? Organizations struggle with the same kind of question when they craft their mission statements and massage their marketing slogans.
2. Wisdom in Decision Making: The process of making decisions is often overly deliberate or completely unconscious. In both cases, we base our decisions on past experience and judge our successes only on the outcomes. In Influence, Robert Cialdini alerts us to how we use unconscious routine to make even the smallest decision, while in The Power of Intuition, Gary Klein provides a map to some of that scripting and shows how we can improve our gut instinct.
3. Bias for Action: Tom Peters and Bob Waterman pointed out in In Search of Excellence that a quality of excellent companies was “the bias for action.” This assertion that action trumps all appears in many great books, so what keeps us from taking action? Author David Allen (Getting Things Done) would say a person’s focus is misplaced on time and priority, rather than action. Authors Jeffery Pfeffer and Bob Sutton (The Knowing Doing Gap) would say organizations suffer from a gap between knowing and doing.
4. Openness to Change: Understanding change is essential because change affects individuals and organizations constantly. Sales is about change. Marketing is about change. Corporate strategy about is about change. Lou Gerstner says it was changing IBM’s entitlement culture that was his biggest challenge. In The First 90 Days, new job guru Michael Watkins describes the waves of change that new managers must create. In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffery Moore shows how products are adopted and what different constituents need to accept change.
5. Giving and Getting Feedback: Imagine throwing a baseball in a dark room. Imagine not being able to see the trajectory the ball took or where it landed. Our success depends on feedback. Did we make the right choice? Did the action have the intended effect? Are things changing? Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence) says self-reflection is a form of feedback and an essential piece of emotional intelligence. Engineering professor Henry Petroski, author of To Engineer is Human, says failure is a critical part of learning. And in Secrets of Closing the Sale, Zig Ziglar says listening is the most important part of selling.

These five meta-themes are not only important on an individual level, but they also overlap and reinforce one another. For instance, Peter Drucker said in The Effective Executive that decisions are not truly made until someone is doing something different than they were the day before. And it is clear that feedback determines the success one has with any and all of the other meta-themes.

The five meta-themes feed into each other as well. Clarity of purpose provides wisdom in decision-making, which informs action, which creates change, while feedback makes everything work better. They also resonate with the stages of the “hero’s journey” made famous by mythology scholar Joseph Campbell. The archetypal heros of myth and popular culture walked more or less the same path as Jack Welch.

It’s painfully obvious that companies continually fail to absorb these simple lessons. The question is, what will it take for us to internalize the insights won by our heroes?

I never expected, a year later, that idea would become a book with O’Reilly’s Tools of Change, an experiment that embodied the virtues of entrepreneurial publishing, or a way to frame a set of ideas that is desperately needed in the world of book publishing.

Now, today happens to be my favorite holiday–Groundhog Day. Can you think of anything better than looking to a small woodland creature to determine the prospects for the remaining days of winter? And let me also say, I was a fan of Punxsutawney Phil long before Bill Murray got caught in his temporal loop of bad karma.

I decided a few years ago to start offering a gift on this glorious day of the groundhogs. In 2010, I published a short ebook called Fixed to Flexible that offered a variety of ways to think about pricing in the 21st century. Last year, I posted a set of sketches called Pricing Pictures that showed you can do more than just change what you charge.

This year, I have uploaded the first two chapters of Every Book Is a Startup to Scribd for you to read and share.

In this opening section, you’ll learn about black swans, long tails, and the one thing that every publishing startup must find to be successful.

Thanks as always for reading and Happy Groundhog Day!

1. Illumination A Trend
2. Dispel A Myth
3. Solve A Problem

I would make the argument that if your book doesn’t do one or more of those things, you probably shouldn’t write it either.

The payment was for a book that is not done yet, and the money was not an advance against my royalties. It was for copies that we have already sold.

Because we starting selling Every Book Is a Startup as soon as I had the first chapters complete, O’Reilly and I started to earn revenue immediately.

Minimum viable publishing turns a bunch of traditional ideas on their head, one being cash flow for the publisher and the author.

I have done a lot of teaching over the last fifteen years ranging from two hours to two days, but this will be the first time that I have to put together 20 sessions of instruction. Luckily, the course topic is the business of publishing, a subject I find endless fascinating. The students in the program have been exposed to the process steps of book publishing and, in a variety of courses, the commercial aspects of the business. The purpose of the class is to pull together those learnings, learning the business “rules” of publishing, and how those rules are changing.

During each week of the course, I am asking the students post links on Google+ that inform the rule-making and rule-breaking going on right now. Students will also be commenting on those links and creating some opportunity for more conversation outside the classroom.

Given what I know of the audience for this blog, many of you might also be interested in those conversations. The class will be using #psupubmgt as a hastag to mark posts, giving anyone on Google+ a way to find them. You can easily a search for the hashtag and save the search (there is a button in the header next to the search term) to go back to. You can also follow me on Google+ and see the posts that I am commenting on.

I hope you will also consider jumping in and adding your thoughts to our Google+ discussions.

“A self-published book is to commercial publishing what karaoke is to a live concert performance. There are some very good karaoke singers, but not many, and they’re not known outside of that bar.”

This quote is from the consultant to consultants Alan Weiss and with an initial look, his statement appears to be a slam against everyone trying to independently publish their work, but if you can get past your emotional response, Wiess’ simile brings out two important points.

First, self-publishing has created a way for all of us to write in public and some of us are just better than others. We need no more proof than watching the opening weeks to the upcoming season of American Idol to see the variability in talent that exists in the world. Worse, too many of us avoid any objective feedback that would show us where we rank against those who get a yellow ticket to Hollywood week.

Second, being big dog at Tuesday karaoke is not the same as playing the show on Friday or building a following that puts you on the road for two weeks playing a different club every night. Labels, studios, and publishing houses can help with making you bigger, but commercial media is about selling to thousands of people. Remember, editors and A&R execs want something that can be sold to more than the people who came to sing-a-long with you at the bar.

Jack and I lengthened several reviews. There are new sidebars about decision-making, visual thinking and the year that changed business book. Most importantly, The 100 Best is cost less than ever to purchase. The new paperback edition is $16 (or less on Amazon). The fully updated ebook edition is $9.99 and available for the Kindle, Nook, iBook, and Kobo.

The biggest question you probably have is if we have changed any of our selections and the answer is no. We still stand by the original 100 books we chose, but it has been five years since we made those selections. Thousands of business books have been published in that time and many are good titles that are worthy of your attention.

To fill the gap since our initial selection, we have a created a new ebook called 5-4-3.

We looked at the last five years, picked four books from each year, and choose three things to tell you about each book. Each book has a short description for those who haven’t bought the book, a suggested starting point if you own the book, and a highlight outside the book for those who are already fans.

5-4-3 is free and available at Scribd.com. We hope you’ll leave a comment there and share the ebook with others who might enjoy it.

P.S. I am also in Day Three of posting The 100 Best in 100 characters on Twitter. Check out my Twitter feed to follow along.

In 1959, a wealthy English industrialist named Henry Kremer established a £350,000 prize for the first person that could develop a human powered airplane that could fly a figure eight course around two markers spaced a half a mile apart. Several attempts had been made in the early part of the century but no one could develop an airplane that could travel any significant distance. Over the eight years, several more groups would make attempts without success.

At this point, the Kremer Prize was only open to the British, but in 1967 Kremer raised the prize to £500,000 and opened the competition to all nationalities. Ten more years passed before someone would pass Kremer’s challenge and complete the course with a plane powered by a human.

You probably know the winner more by his creations than his name. On August 23, 1977, The Gossamer Condor was the first human powered aircraft to complete the course. The larger Gossamer Albatross followed two years later with a successful flight across the English Channel and won a second Kremer Prize. This inventor’s work later shifted to solar powered aircraft with the creation of the Gossamer Penguin, the Solar Challenger, and NASA’s Helios Prototype.

Behind these marvels is a man named Paul MacCready and given it took over twenty years for someone to create the machine to accomplish the Kremer’s original challenge, it would seem proper to ask what was remarkable about MacCready.

First, MacCready was motivated. In this case, he needed the money. He was the guarantor on a loan on a family member’s failed business and was in need of $100,000 to repay the bank, but what was truly unique about MacCready was his approach to the work.

The teams who had attempted to create human powered aircraft all used the same approach. They would plan, conject, and theorize for a year and then build a machine that contained all of their assumptions. During shortly into the first test flight, those assumptions would come crashing down to the ground and the process would repeat.

As Aza Raskin and Alan Kay tell the story, MacCready’s radical approach was to build a prototype that could be quickly modified and rebuilt. His plane could be fixed in hours and the new assumptions could tested again the same day. With this approach, MacCready solved the twenty year old challenge and the age old dilemma of human powered flight in six months.

So, what happens when we can build things that can easily rebuild?

In my essay The Paperless Book, I lament the paradigm that governs our view of the book, the way it paralyzes the ability for the concept of a book to evolve.

Books aren’t built to be rebuilt. Authors labor in their sheds and their untested assumptions cause so many books to come crashing down from the sky. There is a better way.

I just finished a new chapter for Every Book Is a Startup called Minimum Viable Publishing. It will be added to the project in a few weeks and it will be my first attempt to get at the benefits of being able to test your assumptions and rebuild books as you create them.

#1 – My favorite was The Simpsons skewering of YA publishing in the episode The Book Job. The Ocean Eleven motif with Neil Gaiman as crew gopher is brilliant. Homer’s one liners are incredible and Lisa’s struggles writing her book will look painfully familiar to anyone who trying to put words together.

#2 – Lisa Kudrow has a web series called Web Therapy. She stars as a therapist helping people remotely using webcams. At the beginning of Season 4, Kudrow’s character Fiona Wallis is writing a book and she talks interacts with her publisher Maxine DeMaine (played by Rosie O’Donnell). Some of the hidden whys and hows of books comes through nicely in the arc.

Web Therapy Season 4 Episode 1 – Morals to the Max
Web Therapy Season 4 Episode 2 – I Heart New York
Web Therapy Season 4 Episode 3 – Tokens of Affection
Web Therapy Season 4 Episode 4 – Publishers Cleaning House

(Note: the links next to the videos on their site are messed up and take you to the wrong episodes.)

#3 – My final choice comes from xkcd and his strip titled Major In The Universe.