Bradford Wieners was tasked by Bloomberg BusinessWeek to profile Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen and talk about Christensen’s new book How Will You Measure Your Life? for the May 7, 2012 issue of the magazine.

In describing Christensen’s latest book, Weiners writes:

“More accessible than Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, How Will Your Measure Your Life? is provocative but reassuring: Peter Drucker meets Mitch Albom. Landing as it does at the nexus of two abominable genres, self-help and business how-to, it earns easy credit for being low on psychobabble and casually self-aware.”

So, the new book is not bad, but that is easy given how horrible the entire category is.

If there is any question whether Wieners has bias, we only need to look at a Q&A published last week where he opens with:

“Yvon Chouinard, the 73 year-old founder of Patagonia, has a low opinion of business books. “I quit reading them 20 years ago,” he says, “when I realized that they had one simple idea that they expanded to fill the required space.” All the same, he has now written two.”

How exactly does that make the case for a reader to want any business book, let alone Chouinard’s new book that the rest of the interview speaks of?

I bristle when writers dismiss business books and I always take the bait, having to highlight the travesty and hyperbole of their statements. Abominable was the trigger of this episode. Moral revulsion is not the reaction most people have to business books. The majority are indifferent, but there are few of us who feel enriched by what gets published.

I was in New York City last month and stopped into The Strand just south of Union Square. I went down into the basement, as I always do, to see what I might find on the shelves of the business section. They always have a fascinating selection of new, old and very old. A young gentleman looking at the same shelves turned and said “It is good to see another person concerned about improving themselves.”

A few weeks ago, Alex Payne, CTO of Simple, wrote a post titled How Not To Sell Software in 2012.

In the post, Payne berates wide swaths of the software industry for their gatekeeper sales practices, convoluted product explanations and the intolerable distance between the customer and someone who can really help answer technical questions about the product. “[I]t should be as easy as humanly possible to try it, pay for it, and start using it…” Payne says.

In looking at Payne’s list of Don’ts, I wondered what sorts of things the book publishing industry might be doing that causes similar grief among customers.

• Books are made of code that is designed to solve a problem, whether that is entertainment, navigation or skill-building. The code is complicated and requires a specific cranial device but the file size is small. Being able to start using the code right now to solve my problem is expected. If not, I will look to other sources.
• Amazon has made it simple to buy books. I press one button and the digital file shows up in 60 seconds or the paper device shows up in two days. No one else comes close to this speed of how quickly I want to use the code contained in books in my life.
• Books are hard to sample the quality of the code and the promise in the marketing copy often fails to translate in the book itself. The introduction and first chapter to almost every book should be available everywhere, including when I am standing in front of the shelf at the bookstore and I want to read the beginning of a book on another device.
• Maybe what is included in the sample should change. Joe Wikert has all sorts of thoughts like including the index.
• On a standard publisher’s website, you might have the option to buy the book, and beyond cover art and a book description that is all you can find about the book. What if I just want more information now or to get an email remainder when the book comes out? Adding a Kickstarter-like Remind Me button wouldn’t seem all that hard and then publishers could start a conversation with readers.
• There are times when I often want to give the author and the publisher more money. I would gladly pay more for a collectible edition or a further extension of the book I just read. The trick here is that this normally after I read the book and am fully bought in. Sadly, there is no mechanism to capture the value of that newly generated enthusiasm.

What I am missing? How could buying a book be more like buying an app?

The Greeks had the idea of pitching figured out long ago. Aristotle talked about the concept in Poetics, though he wasn’t thinking about selling to customers. Aristotle was concerned with the construction of literature, in particular tragedy, and with how people often end up in a state of misery and then find a way back out. The three–act story we know and love is built on this idea.

• 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.

What happens when you spend 18 months reading the best in business literature? In our case when The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, two things happened—one expected, the other quite unexpected.

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?

On On February 15, 2011, I wrote a post called Every Book Is A Startup. I talked about how books were entrepreneurial endeavors and that authors need to think more in these terms. I have discussed this idea with hundreds of authors over the years, but never quite articulated the problem in that manner before.

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!