If you want to write a business book and have it published, you won’t get very far into a conversation with an agent or editor without the word ‘platform’ coming up.

Right after you explain your idea, they’ll start to ask you to describe to the consulting business you have built, the clients you have worked with, the speaking you are doing, the size of your email list, and the number of Twitter followers you have. As you do that, those folks are constructing the size and reach of your platform in their head.

And it may sound strange but they want to estimate how many books they think YOU can sell. Business books are somewhat unique in that their authors generally arrive with people ready to buy their book and your platform dictates how many copies that might be.

Now lately, I have been writing about how the words we use matter. Platform is an interesting word to use in this instance. The term implies an author’s platofrm can be built, that it is sturdy, and the platform raises the author above others around her. The trouble is that platform is a emotionally neutral term, something we can talk about without anyone getting uncomfortable. The word has a jargony feel to it.

What we are really getting at when we talk about platform are things like this:

• How in demand are you as a media source in your area of expertise?
• How sought-after are you as a keynote speakers at industry events?
• How commercial is the idea you are trying publish?
• How marketable are you as an authority on this topic?
• Does this proposal feel like the next cool, big thing?

All the terms highlighted above are thesaurus alternatives for the word that fits the real question. Agents and editors want to know about your popularity.

Popularity is about your following, your tribe, your cult. The word popular comes from the Latin popularis or ‘people.’ You can’t avoid the emotion when you talk about the topic using these sorts of terms. Robert Cialdini’s book Influence is a one framework for thinking about how to build popularity.

What I also like about popularity is the word carries some negative connotations in American culture. We are forced to think back to high school and being in or out of the cool crowd. Many authors don’t like the effort and attention popularity requires and brings. They prefer to write books that magically find an audience. You also can’t avoid the fleeting nature of being trendy and fashionable when you use the wordpopularity, something that is counter to the concept of platform.

If an agent or editor asked you “How popular are you?” would that change what you were doing now? And is it possible to become popular without sacrificing other values that you hold? Both of those questions are very important in considering your approach to publishing.

I was reading a short piece written by Neil Robertson, the CEO of Trada, for the book Do More Faster this morning. Here are the first few paragraphs:

I first gave a talk about product management at TechStars during the summer of 2008. One of the things that I said that night caught the attention of all the founders, and we ended up talking about it for hours: “As long as I listen to my customers, I never need to have another original idea.”

It’s a simple concept. Go get customers, then listen. It really can be that simple.

The ability to listen is an important skill for any startup founder. We’re all accustomed to trying to persuade people to try our products, to invest in our companies, or to listen to what we have to say. If you’re doing that with customers, you’re doing it backwards.

Too many startups build things that they think their customers will want. If you’re looking for creative ideas that can make your company better, simply spend time with your customers. It’s not rocket science, but I’m always surprised by how few companies are really good at doing this.

I started thinking about how this might apply to publishing.

Philosophically, this is what editors do in the acquisitions process. They are looking for books that customers will buy, based on everything from past sales of books they have published to the popularity of the author to what is appearing in the haze of their zeitgeist.

The trouble in book publishing is one of both time and distance. Editors are shooting at a target 24 months in the future when they sign authors and their ideas. And publishers are often separated from the customers with the intermediaries of distributors and retailers, a chain which further lengthens the time before a publisher knows if a book is successful.

As authors more and more make the decision to self-publish their works, they are reducing both time and distance between them and the reader. While many authors cite control as the reason for going alone, what they should be considering is listening to what readers are saying and publishing two, three, or even four times inside the window of what would it would taken to have a single book published with a traditional publisher, AND THEN going the commercial route with a tribe of followers and a clear idea of what concepts would work for a broader audience.

There is an awful lot of educated guessing that goes on in book publishing and it just seems like getting a little closer to the person with the problem what help us figure out what book needs to be written.

• In an article about how Brazil’s economy is evolving, the Economist’s Schumpeter column visits Heliopolis, one of Sao Paulo’s largest shanytowns and finds”[a]mong the books in the favela’s surprisingly well-stocked library is Tom Peters’s The Circle of Innovation.”
• BusinessWeek profiled the fast-food chain Panda Express and its founders Andrew and Peggy Cherng in their November 22, 2010 issue.
  
  

  “[Andrew] Cherng is an avid consumer of self-improvement programs. He urges his Pandas to maintain health lifestyles and eat a well-rounded diet; he recently challenged the Pandas to run three miles in under 36 minutes. He has since 2003 been a participant in Life Academy, a Taiwanese organization that follows a “life manual” dedicated to the “advancement of the human spirit.” He is a devotee of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Deepak Chopra’s The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, and Don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements.

• And I have been looking for this – a visual map to financial crisis books that was published in BusinessWeek with their All The Devils Are Here book review:
  

I am trying a new review system in this month’s reads. There four components to help figure how if a book is right for you:

Audience: Who is the book meant for?

Rating: How good was it? There will be four ratings: Must-Read, Excellent, Good, and Pass

The Promise: What does the author offer the reader (in one sentence?)

The Review: 100-200 words to give you a bit more on the book

****

The Big Short by Michael Lewis

Audience: Everyone

Rating: Must-Read

The Promise: A subprime mortgage narrative about three parties that bet the system would collapse.

The Review: Like This American Life’s Giant Pool of Money, The Big Short is required reading. Lewis followed three groups of investors who predicted the fall of the subprime mortgage market, placed bets with their money on its pending collapse and made enormous sums of money. Lewis makes the technical details understandable and the characters very particular. Understand that he writes The Big Short as an extended epilogue to Liar’s Poker with the perspective that the whole Wall Street financial system should have blown up 25 years when he left Salomon Brothers.

Excellence by Design: Leadership by John Spence

Audience: Everyone

Rating: Excellent

The Promise: A snappy synthesis of the best concepts across the leadership spectrum

The Review: This is hard to admit: John Spence reads more business books than I do and a the beginning of EBD: Leadership he talks about his early mentor Charlie Owen and the routine Spence got into. The book itself is a synthesis of the hundreds of books Spence had read on the subject of leadership. The energy and inspiration of the topic combined with the author’s own enthusiasm are a compelling combination. I would love to see Spence use this same small trim, 150 page treatment to other topics in the business organization. His six point framework includes Dream Big Dream, Opportunity Is Everywhere, Embrace Risk, Believe In People, Attitude Is Everything, and Lifelong Learning.

The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau

Audience: The more daring half of the population.

Rating: Good

The Promise: Help people challenge authority and live unconventional, remarkable lives

The Review: Guillebeau catalogs all the roadblocks that could be keeping you from a better future and helps as much as he can to move them out of your way. His passion for micro-businesses and travel hacking make prominent appearances. If you read Guillebeau’s website and like his style, The Art of Non-Conformity is going to work for you.

The Global Detective by Alan Webber

Audience: Those who listen for the weak signals

Rating: Excellent

The Promise: Global tales from a seasoned trendwatcher.

The Review: Webber snuck out this ebook among New Word City’s growing catalog. The co-founding editor of Fast Company is at his best here as he takes the reader on a week long trip through Germany and Austria in the summertime. He visits friends and conferences while reporting on a proposal for Geneva Convention for economic warfare, a porn site that fights deforestation, and the challenges of teaching Eastern European social entrepreneurs about entrepreneurship. More installments are promised. The book is currently available on the Kindle and at the iBookstore.

Program or Be Programmed by Doug Rushkoff

Audience: Media mavens and the Digerati

Rating: Good

The Promise: If computers are channeling more of the media, isn’t it important to know how computers work?

The Review: I saw Rushkoff speak at TOC Frankfurt and bought the book as he walked off stage. He says the reason predictions about the media are so often off-base is that no one understanding how computers work or in other words, how to program computers. His book covers 10 biases that computers have ranging from how they force choosing between two things (at the lowest level the answer can only be 0 or 1) to how they reduce complexity to how digital is biased toward depersonalization and bad behavior online. In every case, the noted bias conflicts with what normally happens in the real world and the result is unexpected or detrimental, like how sharing and stealing are hard to distinguish. Rushkoff says we need to recognize these biases and compensate for them. The book is only available through OR Books.

Bury My Heart at Conference Room B by Stan Slip

Audience: Managers

Rating: Good

The Promise: Emotional commitment is the key to happy managers and successful organizations.

The Review: Slap uses a heavy dose of provocateur in Bury My Heart to deliver his message. The sell starts from page one and doesn’t stop. The introduction is testimonials and the first chapter is the description of a painful, must-solve problem of conflicted managers. Somewhere in Chapter Two we find out emotional commitment is the answer and the argument makes sense. Know your values, live your values, and find ways express those values at work, repeat with your employees. The values exercise on page 69 is worth the price of admission. I found approach a little too loud. Wish there was more insight from the final, outstanding notes section inside the body of the book.

I was talking to a publisher at The Frankfurt Book Fair about what makes business books successful and he said without hesitation, "The great ones are a catalyst that lead you to see the world differently."

I like that description.

He pointed to The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey as a catalytic example of a book that has done very well in his country. I immediately added Getting Things Done by David Allen and StrengthsFinder 2.0 from Gallup. And I thought more.

Good To Great and In Search of Excellence were organizational catalysts. Five Dysfunctions of A Team has been a catalyst that has changed how groups work. The First 90 Days changed how we approached those first few months in a new job. And the list goes on…

There was a comment at the O'Reilly's Tools of Change Conference the day before the Fair started that carried a similar tone. Jeff Jarvis was asking the questions during his Q&A at the end of his talk and posed to the audience, "What is the greatest thing publishing does?"

A man in the back of the room stood up and said, "We create the photography, but not the reality. We are the catalyst, not the experience–people have to search that out themselves." While that might sound cryptic, that riff has some deep insight.

The highest hope we can have when we write books (or blog posts for that matter) is that the reader will have an experience that changes the view of their world and forces them to seek out a new reality.

I guess Jack and I got it right in the introduction to The 100 Best Business Books of All Time–"Business books can change you, if you let them."

I have been working on a book proposal and everyone has been giving me the same feedback: “That is really interesting, but why does it matter?”

Getting that feedback is tough. The cause is what the Heath Brothers refer to as “The Curse of Knowledge”. This is when you write or explain something and don’t even realize how little those listening know about the subject. You think they have been with you the whole time as you have been researching the awesome idea. This causes the terminology to be too complicated and you leave out important steps that others need to understand what you are so excited about.

Good business books can always answer three questions:

• What?
• So What?
• Now What?

If you are reading a book, the first two questions should be answered before you leave the introduction. If those answers are missing, proceed cautiously and don’t be afraid to walk away from the book.

And, the Now What? is the reason you are willing to spend $20 on the book. The book needs a solution to the pressing problem the author has presented. Without the solution, the best the book can offer is interesting and while that might be fine for a magazine article, it is not enough for a book.

Gamestorming is a book about a problem you didn't know you had and a solution that you've unknowingly used since childhood.

When problems have a clear start point and end point, the steps between A and B are very clear. If you need to get groceries, a check of the pantry, writing a list and a trip to the market gets you to your end goal.

But, what if the end goal isn't clear? What if there are a range of possibilities? We face these sorts of problems every day and often try to use the same A to B approach without much success.

Enter Gamestorming. Authors Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo believe we need to use more play in these difficult to define situations. Games as activities can make apparent a variety of possible paths towards the fuzzy goal. The defined space, simple rules, and unpredictable outcomes of games make them ideal for this sort of work. Stringing together a series of different games moves us closer a solution.

Processes are rule-heavy. They prescribe a narrow range of activities and prohibit everything else. Games, on the other hand, are rule-light. In a game, anything not forbidden is permitted.

The book provides over 80 games that can be used in generate ideas, explore ideas, and decide which idea move us closer. The book also describes the qualities games have so that readers can develop their own games to match the situation. Active readers of the creativity genre will see games inspired by Thinkertoys, Six Thinking Hats and brainwriting as well as the authors' commentary on what makes the versions of these games particularly effective.

The first step is understanding many problems lack a clear path to the solution. The second step is understanding you need to use a different set of tools. Gamestorming helps with both.

Links:

• Gamestorming Website
• Dave Gray's website
• Sunni Brown's Website
• James Macanufo's website
• Amazon link for the book

Project Brief

With my first trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair, I wanted to create something I could give clients, prospects, and friends. Given my desire to grow my scouting business, I felt it was important that the object tie back strongly to my expertise in business books.

Solution

Compile my writings on business books over the last eight years and publish a short-run book called Everything I Know About Business Books using print-on-demand technology.

Tools Used

• Adobe InDesign – best tool for laying out books
• Lulu – print on demand service

Process

1. Compile my writings from a variety of sources including blogs, websites, magazines, and books.
2. Place and format content in InDesign.
3. Organize content making editorial decisions about organization and order of material.
4. Create pdf file for upload to Lulu.
5. Create cover art given specs provided by Lulu.
6. Order books

Final Book Specifications

• Trim Size: 6" x 9"
• Color: Black and White
• Page Count: 155 pages
• Fonts Used: Neutraface Text and Adobe Garamond Pro
• Number of Chapters: Six (Reading, Recommendations, 100 Best, Critiques, Images, and Lists)

Timeline

• 9/4 – Conceive Idea
• 9/6 – 9/14 – Compile material and layout book
• 9/15 – Submit to Lulu. Purchased expedited one-day printing (this is limited to 25 copies or less). 
• 9/20 – Received completed books in mail.

Project Cost 

Printing $172.75

Shipping $37.49

Expediated Printing    $35.00 

Total Cost $245.24 (Unit Cost - $9.80)

Closing

It was a great project to test the speed and quality of print on demand, With a little more time, I would have gotten a sample and then produced the full production run and avoided a few errors.

If you are interested in seeing how the book turned out,  a sample posted on my Scribd account.

Employees First, Customers Second by Vineet Nayar – ★★★★

This is four year memior of Nayar's transition into CEO of IT-services provider HLCT. The book has an almost-fable like quality to it with its simple and direct language and the narrative arc of Nayar's journey in his new role. The exact details and failures are sometime glossed over in favor of the big picture, but the book works as story of one's CEO journey to bring needed change to his organization.

Gamestorming by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo – ★★★★★

Gray and company start with the premise that many problems lack a clear, definable solution. To reach fuzzy goals you need to use a different set of tools based on gameplay.The book provides over 80 games that can be used in generate ideas, explore ideas, and decide which idea move us closer. The book also describes the qualities games have so that readers can develop their own games to match the situation. A great update to the idea generation literature.

Hacking Work by Bill Jensen and Josh Klein – ★★★

The idea here is that processes and procedures of large organizations are stopping good work from happening and the smart one are finding hacks to get the work done better and more efficiently. I found myself thinking back to a variety of times I have hacked work. The book successfully advocates hacking, even discusses the white hat/black hat dilemmas one can find themselves in, but lack the utility for how we can become better hackers.

I live in the future & here's how it works by Nick Bilton – ★★★★

Bilton's book is the latest in a line of prognostication about how technology will impact the future. When you read, start with the manifesto-like epilogue that strangely feels like it should have started the book. Bilton starts to gain steam about halfway through, his chapter on suggestion and swarms being my favorite and ends with both commentary on various segments of media and reporting some of the protoyping he did while working in the New York Times R&D lab. Technophiles may be frustrated by the early going but rewarded for sticking with it.

The Mesh by Lisa Gansky – ★★★★

As Lisa's friend Seth Godin said this book at Long Tail potential.The idea that we have gone from using the internet to sharing bits to sharing atoms whether that be spare rooms in our house to unused cars sitting in our driveway to charging others for idle hours in our day is very provocative. The companies that build these networks increase the number of transactions with customers, learning more and find ways to better serve them. Sharing means a completely different design mentality, one that emphasizes sturdy construction for repeated use and flexibility for varied usage. Gansky doesn't have Chris Anderson's platform but I hope her bringing together these ideas under one roof helps this insight find a wider audience.

Pleased But Not Satisfied by Dave Sokol – ★★★

This self-published book was written by one of Warren Buffet's top lieutants. and got quite a bump through a recent profile of Sokol in Fortune magazine. The message is basic with have emphasis on planning, budgeting, goal setting, and then executing. Sokol over and over stresses how often overly-optimistic assumptions will destroy projects and acquisitions. The book delivers on the utility side, but is weak on the unexpected. Sokol uses this book to familiarize managers with how he operate and I would expect that being surprising was not an important part of creating the book. For many managers, it would be worth tracking down a copy and spend couple of hours with the 100 or so pages.

What's Mine Is Yours by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers – ★★★★

This book "shares" precisely in the same space at The Mesh. Botsman and Rogers take a more corporate approach to their treatment of the topic using language like product service systems, redistribution markets and collaborative lifestyles. Fortune 500 types are going to dig this book more because it speaks their language and is more throughly researched. If you like square corners, go with this version.

Where Good Ideas Come Fr
om by Steven Johnson – ★★★★★

This is my favorite book of the fall. Anyone who reads business books should read this one. I am going to save my extended review for the October newsletter. If you would commentary on Where Good Ideas Come From and what makes the book work so well, sign up at the top of this page.

While watching this insightful and very funny talk from game designer and Carnegie Mellon faculty member Jesse Schell about the future of game design, I couldn't help but think how business books might be impacted.

http://g4tv.com/lv3/44277

I wondered how you could integrate a gaming system into a business book. And then it struck me that it has already been done.

The bestselling book of the last four years has been StrengthFinder 2.0. The book has sold somewhere between three and four times what the #2 title has sold over since 2007. The reason? When you buy the book (and if you are a manager, you actually buy a whole box and give one to each of your reports). there is an access code at the end of the book.

The access code unlocks the StrengthsFinder assessment tool, where the user answers a series of 177 questions. The test takes around 40 minutes to complete. After you complete the final question, the Gallup computers start churn, evaluating the answers you gave versus their 40 years of strength research and deliver the five best matches from a set of 34 strengths.

Now what the publisher Gallup calls an assessment has several gaming elements built into it:

• The length of time you have to answer each question is timing to improve the likelihood you will give the first answer that comes to mind, but also creates a sense of urgency that pushes you forward.
• The ranking of one's top five strengths from a pool of 34 potentials creates over 16 million possible combinations and a genuinely different result for each participant. This creates the unexpectedness that we love in games.
• In the original editions of the StrengthFinder 2.0, the protective pouch at the back of the book, that contained the access code, also held a set of stickers which had all of the strengths on them and the book with its dust jacket removed provided a place to display them. Here is my copy:

  
   
  In gaming speak, they call those badges. The book no longer comes with the stickers, but they have since added the ability for people to share their strengths with others.

Now, other books have used assessments like Bob Sutton's ARSE test for The No-Asshole Rule and Sally Hogshead's {F}Score for her book Fascinate, but StrengthFinder 2.0 has taken these gaming principles the furtherest and I think explains the amazing success of the book.

And, it makes you wonder the variety of other ways that gaming principles could be integrated into the business genre. Hmmm…

People are surprised when I tell them that ebooks for the most part don’t have page numbers. The primary reason for this is that any change in the font or screen size would immediately throw-off what “page” you were reading.

I have often wondered how you would recommend or cite a section to a fellow reader. It turns about I am not the only one pondering the AP Style Guideline implications to this technological quandary.

Ben Casnocha wonders and provides a pretty good answer:

“How will we cite pages from a book if books appear in formats (Kindle, Nook, etc) with different page numbering systems? I know on the Kindle there is no way to see what the corresponding page number is in the printed edition. Dave Jilk tells me: “It turns out that it rarely takes more than three or four sequential words to identify a unique signature for a location in a written work – even a long work. You can try it out by going onto Gutenberg and using your browser search. The advantage of this is that it crosses media and format boundaries.” Perhaps this will be the new citation standard?”

In 2008, Fast Company ran an op-ed by Elizabeth Spiers that described business books as "the modern era's second worst promulgator of intelligence reduction,"

My letter to the editor, which which was partially republished in the magazine, is below and describes how misguided Spiers arguments are.

⁂

Dear Editors of Fast Company,

I write to provide a needed counterpoint to Elizabeth Spiers April 2008 Not So Fast column titled “Library of The Living Dead.”

I will start where she ends, agreeing in fact with Spiers’ ultimate conclusion: Business books are self-help, by their very definition. The implication that business books fall strictly into the “I’m OK, You’re OK” segment of self-help is where Spiers and I diverge. A book publisher recently shared research with me that showed the number one reason people buy business books is to find a solution to a problem. Sitting at the educational crossroads between “I know nothing about this,” and “Let’s hire a consultant,” business books contain a high value proposition for the twenty dollars and two hours spent. Not, as Spiers says, to abdicate responsibility for the choices they make. Instead, it takes a great deal of personal awareness to look for answers from those who offer experiential lessons in books.

The packaging of those lessons receives the majority of criticism in Ms. Spiers column and I am always dismayed by the problems pundits have with this aspect of the industry. Human civilization is built upon stories and when an author chooses a fable as the delivery device, the writer is making the lessons more accessible to a wider audience.

The “12-step-ification” is a crutch that bloggers, business magazines, and book publishers certainly use alike, in the same way celebrity authors are used to garner attention and sell product. This is simply product marketing through concreteness and social proof.

The bestseller list as a guide to the “best” in the category is just another form of social proof. My optimism for the category would bring me to highlight Gallup’s research-based StrengthsFinder 2.0 or Jim Collins’ insightful and wonderful written Good to Great as evidence that some books that make the bestseller list really deserve the title.

In the case of John Kotter, we have the benefit of choosing either his current top-selling fable, or his 1996 book Leading Change, which has sold over a million copies. Both books tackle the same content, but offer options for the reader to choose his method of consumption.

Ms. Spiers overall indictment of the entire business book category is an easy mark and one that could be applied to any genre of media. Her elitism about what constitutes good reading compounds the problem further. While I can appreciate her hyperbole as a method to communicate some criticism about the genre, a more subtle treatment of the subject would, I believe, be more effective.

Beyond that, Fast Company is a magazine that has always supported business ideas. A simplistic column like Spiers’ goes against the very DNA of your publication. The mantra “WORK IS PERSONAL” matches well with Thoreau’s or Emerson’s definition of self-help. The publication of this column leaves me wondering just how that mission has been served.

I am always amazed by the love/hate relationship that media outlets have with business books. In 2008, Fast Company ran an op-ed that described business books as “the modern era’s second worst promulgator of intelligence reduction,” and in my letter to the editor, which was published, I describe how misguided the arguments were.

In the past few weeks, BNET’s columnists have chosen a similar hate stance to business books.

Dave Logan in his Tribal Leadership column wrote a post on August 25th that set Twitter abuzz titled 3 Reasons Why Business Books Are Bad for You.

He says 95% of business books “go on one of two lists: ‘if you don’t know this already, you should be working at the DMV’ and ‘if you do these things, your company will become the DMV.'”

This is the “if you are overweight, you deserve to be overweight” argument. It in no way accounts for where people are based on their education and their backgrounds. I know the college students I spoke to last month at the University of Illinois-Chicago, aren’t dumb and were going to be helped by being exposed to a new set of ideas through the business books they were going to be reading for the course in competitive strategy. I don’t think that is an isolated group in the world of business.

Logan suggest you avoid business books because most lack of insight, their stories offer messages that can easily be misinterpreted and their middles are made mostly of “air.” These are dangerous arguments for a business book author to make given the ease at which one can pick up their work and hold it to the same criteria.

In the case of insight, I could point to the striking similarity between the Tribal Leadership’s Five Levels of Leadership and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Does that similarity point to lack of insight? Does the same similarity that exists between Maslow and Gallup’s Q12 survey mean that First, Break All the Rules is not worth reading? Someone needs to be exposed to the insight to begin with and I think it is perfectly fine that Maslow appears in multiple ways across the business book genre (but I wish authors acknowledged the shoulders on which they stand a little more).

Logan ends his column with three best business books he’s ever read:

• The Odyssey by Homer
• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
• Ender’s Game by Oscar Scott Card

Reading great books is a steadfast recommendation to understanding better how the world works, but these are not business books and no one would refer to them as such. Business books have a specific audience and a very different intent. Again Aristole, Shakespeare, and Thoreau are all great works that should be read, but these folks did not write business books.

***

At the Sales Machine this week, Geoffrey James starts off his article titled The 10 Ten Worst Business Books of All Time, with the line:

“Most business books are mediocre; some are even useful. However, there are a few business books that are either so idiotic in concept that it’s incredible that they got published.”

In a Dave Letterman style countdown, James says:

#10: Reengineering the Corporation

#9: Jesus CEO

#8: The Fifth Generation

#7: Radical E

#6: Countdown Y2K

#5: Dow, 30,000 by 2008

#4: The Leadership Genius of George W. Bush

#3: In Search of Excellence

#2: Corporate Magick

#1: Leadership secrets of Attila the Hun

Here is the thing with doing a list like this: the reader needs to know the material. That is the only way for it to be funny or relevant. I, someone who reads more books than almost anyone, only know half of these books. If you want funny, read this.

And to callout In Search of Excellence and Reengineering the Corporation is just insane. Peters and Waterman’s book still provides the best, most accessible summary of the theory of organization behavior that I have read. And the eight practices are still practices that we should pursue.

As for Hammer and Champy’s book, this is what I said in my review in The 100 Best Business Books of All Time:

“Reengineering became the magic managerial term of the 1990s. Cover stories in business magazines touted Mi- chael Hammer and Jim Champy as the strategic gurus of the moment. Companies like Deere, Ford, and Duke Power all found huge success using the concepts. Even Lou Gerstner, in his autobiography Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?, calls out re- engineering as having played a role in his turnaround of IBM. The trouble with every fad is the ridicule that follows.

In the 1990s, the term “reengineering” became an easy substitute for the prior decade’s “reorganizing,” “restructuring,” “delayering,” “down- sizing.” The popularity of the term gave embattled executives needed cover when faced with media scrutiny and stock market pressure. The mere mention of a new reengineering initiative acknowledged the severity of a problem and indicated to shareholders that proper steps were being taken. But the actual results varied widely, and business leaders and journalists were quickly off to find and report on the next silver bullet. What’s left is general ambivalence for one of the most important business concepts in the second half of the twentieth century.”

In many ways, Reengineering the Corporation was a book that allowed the lean production concepts to be accessible to the entire corporation. Remove waste. Get rid of queues. Make small teams responsible for all aspects of a workflow. How exactly is that bad?

So, James and I agree on the ridicule; just not whether it was deserved.

***

I’ll admit that I might sound a little snippy here, these argument for why business books are trash are weak.

If you are interested in compelling critique of the business book category, read The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenweig.

Just watch this video of a younger Steve Jobs as he launches the Think Different campaign (Ken Segall has some great behind-the-scenes commentary).

What Steve is talking about applies to every product launch and branding discussion, which means it applies to books and and authors.

And here’s the tough part:

In one sentence, what do you stand for?