I started this blog on June 8, 2003.
It’s kind of crazy the impact it has had on my life.
It was the start of a new direction in my career, a trajectory that continues to this day.
This work taught me to be a better writer.
It introduced me to friends I still have to this today.
A website did all that. Kinda crazy.
In 2010, Seth Godin asked people to make a list of what they shipped. I have been doing this exercise each year since then. You can see my past #YearInReview posts here. I continue to believe this reflection is one of the most important exercises I do all year.
Things I (Re)Learned While Traveling in 2022
Happy Twosday!
So, this morning I woke up and decided that I wanted to share the news about the one book coming from Bard Press in 2022.
It got a little weirder when I found that my personal newsletter here is on issue #22, and as far as I can tell, the Bard Press newsletter also appears to be on issue #22.
So, to go all in, I am post this at 2/22/22 22:22 Pacific Daylight Time.
I really just wanted to tell you that the Bard Press 2022 book is…
P.S. Happy Birthday, Dad!
I have written extensively about pricing over the years and it seemed like a good idea to pull all of that material into one place with current links.
This is a 10 page visual essay on how pricing can be employed many ways and involves decision beyond how much something costs. This essay is heavy on models and frameworks.
This is a longer essay I wrote about pricing that pulls together a set of ideas that are still relevant. From the introduction:
“Fixed has been replaced with flexible. Control of a product category, distribution channel or branding message no longer exists. While this is being heralded as a boon for customers, companies have been slower to adapt to the new terrain. Companies with multi-national presence and individuals with multitudes of projects both need to create a new set of strategies.”
After I published Fixed to Flexible, Phil Libin, then CEO of Evernote, reached out to me to correct a bit of my math. I took the opportunity to interview him and capture some of the current thought of the time around freemium tactics and startups.
Welcome to the landing page for The Nature Preserve!
The Nature Preserve is an unofficial game campaign for Wingspan Board Game. The campaign has a series of seven interconnected games. Each game has a set of conditions that makes the gameplay unique from the standard rules for Wingspan, and in some cases, actions from one game can affect subsequent games.
Or click here to download the instructions.
The Nature Preserve is also available now in French.
On this page, you can find all the information you need to play and download instructions for The Nature Preserve.
What do I need to play?
To play The Nature Preserve, you need:
Where can I buy Wingspan?
We believe you should buy your copy from Stonemaier Games. They ship globally! You can also find it at many other retailers.
What is a game campaign?
A game campaign is a series of games designed to be played in sequence toward an end goal.
Each game has a set of conditions that makes the gameplay unique from the standard rules for Wingspan, and in some cases, actions from one game can affect subsequent games.
Is The Nature Preserve a legacy campaign?
The Nature Preserve is not a legacy campaign. In most legacy games, components are permanently altered to signify changes in rules or gameplay. With The Nature Preserve, you can continue to use your Wingspan base game and any expansions after playing any part or all of The Nature Preserve campaign.
How does this campaign work?
The Nature Preserve is designed to be played as a campaign of seven consecutive games.
You will always start with using the standard rules for Wingspan involving birds, food, and eggs. If there is ever a question about gameplay, you should always use Wingspan’s standard rule set.
For each game, you will get a short description and a set of modifying instructions for that game. Read those instructions carefully and set up the modifications in the order they are listed. This will help with clarity and continuity of gameplay.
How do you win?
Players accumulate campaign points through four methods:
In the event of a tie, total points earned in the campaign serves as the tie-breaker.
Does The Nature Preserve work with the one-player automa version of Wingspan?
We designed the campaign with two or more players in mind. There are some playtesters who have modified the instructions to work with the automa mode. My guess is that more work is needed to make the campaign work well with automa. If you have ideas, please reach out to us. We would love to include that. We know there are lots of single players out there!
What do I do if I am not sure about the rules in one of the games?
When in doubt, our recommendation is to always use the standard rules in Wingspan.
Who created The Nature Preserve?
The campaign was created by the husband and wife team of Todd Sattersten and Amy Buckley.
How did you come up with the idea for The Nature Preserve?
Thanks for asking. I wrote a whole essay about that here.
What is The Nature Preserve like?
Well, we don’t want to say too much. Part of the enjoyment of the campaign is the surprises that each game offers. From the feedback from our testers, I can tell you that if you enjoy Wingspan, you will really enjoy The Nature Preserve.
Does The Nature Preserve work with the Wingspan expansions?
The campaign works with the orginal base game and European expansion. We have even incorporated some of the items from the European expansion into the game. And don’t worry, you do not need the European expansion to play The Nature Preserve.
We also feel good about the Oceania edition. We don’t see major conflicts. There might be one game where nectar production is affected.
Are you aware of other multi-game campaigns for Wingspan?
Yes!
My first recommendation would be Balanced Sanctuary. This is a five game campaign created by a father/son team. The games are fun, thematic modifications to the Wingspan base game.
There is another campaign available called Wingspan Legacy, designed by Kristina Zivanovic. Kristina takes an approach of modifying rules and having players engage as “characters” with special abilities. Kristina’s work was part of the inspiration for The Nature Preserve.
What if I have other questions about The Nature Preserve?
We recommend the following:
Or click here to download the instructions.
Amy and I are excited to have The Nature Preserve out and in the world for people to play.
I wanted to share a little bit about how this happened, both as a record to look back on later and share with others how creativity makes its way into the world in many ways.
With creativity, I think sometimes we want to create the conditions for amazing things to happen. Sometimes, we also find ourselves in the conditions. In this case, it is more of the latter.
Over the last few years, as my kids have moved into their teens, we’ve been playing more board games as an antidote to screens. We quickly found the games of my youth like Monopoly and Life weren’t much fun and didn’t keep us playing.
Early on, we looked for alternatives and found games like Munchkin and Smash Up!. If you are not familiar both are card games where you collect create combinations to do cool things and accomplish game objectives. The gamers call these Euro-style games—a style of game that has some randomness but put more emphasis on the actions a player can take with the options they are given. Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride are two Euro-style games that are very popular and you might have played.
So, I started to look for more games that we could add to our collection as birthday and holiday presents. And once you start that search, it is like stepping through The Looking Glass into another world. Dominion, Tokaido and Dixit all started to get play at our house. We start visiting a board game museum in Portland to play even more games.
Now, if you don’t play board games, I get it. You have never heard of any of this and this sounds like a crazy geek-ish obsession. In our case, it has become a fun obsession, but it lead to other things too.
So, a couple years ago, I was hired to work on a book project. I can’t say a lot about the project because it hasn’t made it into the world yet and I don’t know if it ever will. I can say this board game hobby played a major role and was incredibly helpful. During that time, I researched the board game industry. Now, I can name popular game publishers. I read books on board game design. And for the board game lovers reading this, I, too, want to go to Essen someday 🙂
During that research, I ended up meeting Jamey Stegmaier, the guy who runs Stonemaier Games in St. Louis. I wanted to get some more background information on how board game publishing worked. Jamey’s strategy of one or two games a year also matched our one book a year publishing strategy at Bard Press. It’s been great getting to know Jamey and the games he is publishing.
Another condition that influenced things was the pandemic, like it has affected so many things this year. For our family, board games became a way connect when it got harder to connect with others. We added more boxes to our board game closet. Our oldest son pulled us into escape room style games like Exit The Room and T.I.M.E. Stories. Our middle son likes engine building games like Machi Koro. Our daughter puts up with all of this by pulling us into more straight forward games like Uno and Sushi Go Party.
With so much time, we also started a playing Pandemic: Season 1. Yes, the theme matched the times. There was a strange kind of agency that we got fighting back against a fictional global pandemic. P:S1 is also a multi-game legacy campaign, where the game changes as make decisions and win games. The game is also cooperative, so every player is working with a character to reach a collective goal. We’d never played anything like that and once we got started everybody was interested in seeing what happened next.
Birds In The Forest
I got introduced to Wingspan when it got written up in The New York Times. It was another year until we bought it. Our copy arrived in April as we were really starting to settling into #pandemiclife. We were pretty familiar with euro style games by this point and after the initial game (which has a great tutorial module), we were hooked. More accurately, my wife and I were hooked. Lots of two-player games followed. My wife was so intrigued that she learned the automa version, so she could play the one player version even more often.
I joined the Wingspan Facebook group to see what other fans were talking about and not long after getting our copy, I saw a post from Kristina Zivanovic. She has created a campaign scenario for the game called Wingspan Legacy. Being in the middle of our Pandemic: Season 1 campaign, I was very intrigued. Kristina mapped out multiple games that were connected with player types that had different abilities. We immediately downloaded it and played through it.
After that something clicked—board games, Wingspan, legacy games and the strong desire to create something new during the pandemic all led to creating The Nature Preserve.
For Amy and I, we wanted our campaign to have a few things:
From there, we did lots of play testing of different versions of the various games. We worked on the right order to play the games to create a compelling campaign. And then we set out to write the instructions. I have a whole new appreciation for game designers and their skills at writing clear rules for players.
When we had a prototype, we put the instructions in a Google Doc and invited folks from the Wingspan Facebook group to play test the campaign. This was one of the most satisfying parts of the whole project. Players gave us great feedback on campaign and helped us make the instructions even clearer. We had over 75 play testers from all over the world try out The Nature Preserve. And now it is your turn 🙂
Thanks for listening and if you are interested in trying out The Nature Preserve for Wingspan, you can click on the link below to download the campaign instruction booklet.
Or click here to download the instructions.
You can also find more information with a full list of frequently asked question on The Nature Preserve campaign page.
I live in Portland and I am getting notes from friends and family.
The nature of the questions varies but they fall along the spectrum from “What the hell is going on?!” to “Are you ok?”
Most of the time downtown Portland looks like the photo above. This is outside the Apple Store.
The nightly protests are taking place just south of there, in a 12 block area surrounding the federal courthouse. The lower floors of courthouse were damaged in the first weeks of the George Floyd protests and has been boarded up ever since.
Each night for almost two months, protestors have shown up to make their voices heard. There is a point each night when one side starts to throw fireworks and the other throws tear gas.
My conversations fall in a similar duality with demands for real change and expectations of a return to law and order. Ask about thoughts on the presence of federal law enforcement and those lines start to blur. The energy downtown has been refueled by people all over the city who believe in the protests and don’t believe federal forces should be here.
This is day 56 and it is not ending any time soon.
Quick note: If you’d like more updates with trends and case studies from business book publishing, you can subscribe by clicking through to the newsletter sign-up form.
And if you missed it, please check out my post from March 22nd and follow-up post on April 6th on the shift in the business book market.
I wrote my last report on April 6th and at that point, we were starting to settle into a new normal of depressed sales in business and self-help. There had been four weeks with sales down almost 50% and the trend continued into the following week.
But then a funny thing happened—sales increased.
And the same thing happened the following week.
And again the following week.
You can see in the chart below that those increases have been significant and we are starting to return to pre-COVID-19 sales levels in business and self-help.
This is good news for this corner of the world. The return of business books reflects the same resilience that has been seen in the book publishing market throughout the COVID-19 period.
In my market reports, I have been discussing business and self-help as a singular category. I have a long standing theory that the two categories are starting to look more and more like each other and that the decision a publisher makes to classify a book in one group or the other may not reflect in what part of their life the reader is helped. This last part is very important. What business books look like today, or maybe more accurately what books people read to help in them in business, differs greatly from ten or twenty years ago.
But in digging into the winners and losers in the larger group, I started to notice that books classified as self-help were recovering more strongly than business titles. So, I went back to the full dataset and broke out the books by business and self-help.
Business books lost sales, have started to return, but have not yet fully recovered, down over 20% from early March.
Self-help also lost sales, has recovered, AND selling better now than before COVID-19, up 19%.
Well, that’s interesting 🙂
It’s impossible to aggregate the felt need of thousands of readers and try to explain with one grand unifying theory to explain everything going on in the market, but I am going to offer a few ideas to consider.
After the initial COVID-19 shock, many people are returning to more normal routines. We are leaving immediate forms of media like websites and cable news and returning longer formats like books. Like the trend in journals, books help us reflect on our experiences.
Business books have recovered from lows in April but not fully because there are important channels that are not operating. Retail outlets like Barnes & Noble and airports stores like Hudsons are either closed or suffering from drastically decreased foot traffic. Almost all B&N stores are still closed to in-store purchases. Airlines passengers are down 90% from a year ago this time. And the events channels connected to speaking, coaching and training are way down. The authors I know are pushing hard to create virtual alternatives to in-person events and interactions. Some are connecting books to those events.
There is an interesting question around how COVID-19 will affect product mix. Sales data for digital products is hard to come by, but anecdotes from several sources point towards an increased demand for ebooks.
I plan to keep posting updates. You can sign up for my newsletter on trends and case studies from the world of book publishing by clicking on this link.
Quick note: If you’d like more updates with trends and case studies from business book publishing, you can subscribe by clicking through to the newsletter sign-up form.
And if you missed it, please check out my first post from March 22nd on the shift in the business book market.
We now have three weeks of retail sales data from March and can compare February and March sales.
Overall, the categories of business and self-help are down 33%.
NPDecisionKey has been highlighting business and self-help in the last two weeks as among the most negatively affected categories in book publishing.
And to use a Wall Street method of comparison, the ratio of losers outnumber winners in a ratio of 9 to 1.
The categories is the largest drops in business and self-help are the most popular ones:
The lone mild but notable category of growth is Creativity in the Self-Help category. This group is where you find guided journals like Burn After Writing by Sharon Jones, the various versions of Wreck This Journal by Keri Smith, Create This Book by Elizabeth Moriah. This demand feels like a corollary to the huge increase in sales of children’s coloring and activity books. In the case, they are activity books for teenagers and adults.
If the top-selling categories are being affected, individual titles in those groups are too.
Titles with the biggest drops in units sales include:
It is very interesting to see the books people are moving to as we work to understand and deal with the current state of the world. Here are the notables on the list.
Speaking of timely tiles…
Mark Manson is a bestselling author with two books in the market.
His 2016 bestseller The Subtle of Art of Not Giving a F*ck has been a huge success with over three million copies sold. This book has been adversely affected at similar levels to other bestsellers listed above, with sales down 30%.
Everything Is F*cked, Manson’s follow-up from 2019, has done well but not reached the levels of his first book. The interesting part is that, in the last month, sales have been up 11%.
Like The Obstacle Is The Way, this most recent book from Manson, is titled in a way that speaks to the particular felt need that people have right now around fear and uncertainty.
The timeless lesson for developing books: be clear and direct when you title a book.
I have been thinking a lot about what’s going on in the business book market and if there is a way to adjust to those changes. Here are the biggest factors in my estimation:
Well, books are still selling. In March, the market was 1.9 million copies. The market isn’t going to go to zero.
Books are still launching. The Blueprint by Doug Conant, The Catalyst by Jonah Berger, and Upstream by Dan Heath all launched in March with more than 10,000 copies sold in their first month.
…BUT (and this is a huge point) all of these books launched before March 10th. Launches since then have been very modest. The business book publishers, like all media firms, are pushing publication dates into the fall, which creates another risk with the certain preoccupation we will all have with the presidential elections in the U.S.
One test will be the business book launch of Joy At Work by organizing phenom Marie Kondo and her co-author Scott Sonenshein. It will be released April 7th.
I think it is a tough mix for business books right now. Lack of attention and lack of money are slowing the market.
Books are a long lead time product. If you have written something that can help clients adjust like the Winners above, you are in a good spot right now. Share and promote to create awareness. You likely have new customers for your work.
Get close to your clients and find out what is arising for them right now. Beyond the coronavirus, everyone is finding weaknesses in their businesses. I know several examples of companies that are using this time to get their processes fixed to be ready when we get to the other side. Don’t look for the book they need now; write the book that people need next.
I’ll keep posting updates. You can sign up for my newsletter on trends and case studies from the world of book publishing by click on this link.
Dr. Clayton Christensen died on Thursday January 23rd, 2020.
I was sad to hear the news. He was management thinker that changed how companies think about innovation. He created a consulting practice, an investment firm and a think tank to fully explore all of the implications of that ground-breaking research.
The best obituary I read was in the Salt Lake City’s Deseret News.
The best profile is Larissa MacFarquhar’s 2012 piece that ran in The New Yorker.
As an author, Christensen wrote ten books over his lifetime. His most famous was the cornerstone for all of it. If you are not familiar with it, here is my review of The Innovator’s Dilemma from The 100 Best Business Books of All Time:
“Many in book publishing have a romanticized view of the industry’s origin, beginning with Johannes Gutenburg and the movable-type press he invented in 1453. While that treasured form has changed little in the past five and a half centuries, the way the book is sold and distributed has changed dramatically in the last thirty years. Independent bookstores first struggled against the mall chains of Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, then the big-box retailers such as Barnes & Noble and Borders, and now the online superstore, Amazon. And these retail redistributions pale in comparison for the tectonic shifts that lie ahead in the form of print-on-demand and electronic distribution of books. In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen shows how management practices that typically serve executives will fail in the face of just such disruptive innovation.
Christensen begins by drawing a distinction between two types of innovation. In the first, everything from new products to customer service is designed to meet customers’ demands. In the normal course of business, customers pay the bills, and writing those checks gives them significant influence over an organization’s decision making. New ideas and new opportunities, evaluated on their ability to serve existing customers and earn the necessary margins to support the company, are called sustaining innovations and are always successful ventures for existing (and dominant) firms.
But sometimes, innovation creates a new technology or reveals a new way to organize a firm’s resources. This disruptive innovation does not offer the performance needed in the existing market, and entrant companies are forced to find a new set of customers who value innovation on a different set of metric than those of the traditional market. Existing companies disregard the disruptive innovation because of the lower margins, and the newcomers find a small beachhead outside the existing market, using that market space to develop further. As the performance of disruptive innovation outpaces the sustaining innovations, entrants move into established markets and their lower cost structures forces incumbents further up-market, forfeiting existing profitable markets.
Clayton Christensen provides an array of case studies in The Innovator’s Dilemma, including how the steel industry is still at the mercy of the disruptive innovation of minimills. Using scrap steel over iron ore, minimills require one-tenth the scale and can produce steel at 15 percent lower cost than traditional integrated steel mills. When minimills first emerged in the 1960’s, they were able to produce only low-quality rebar. The integrated mills were happy to cede this low end, price sensitive market. What the incumbents missed was the minimills’ desire to move further into their markets. With a completely different cost structure and technology that was improving faster than existing methods, minimills began producing structural steel and sheet metal. Minimills now account for 50 percent of the steel made in the United States, and here is the amazing part: at no point did an existing steel company using integrated mills construct a minimill to take advantage of the disruptive innovation.
To suggest that the integrated steel mills simply hid their heads in the sand would be too easy. Christensen says most markets that serve as the launch point for disruptive innovation are too small for large organizations to concentrate on. These emerging markets lack clear evidence that they will turn out profitable. When disruptive technologies are being developed, the applications for them are unpredictable, and worse, companies are misled when they attempt to use the same tools from their mature markets. In nearly every case, disruptive innovation, a new set of companies rises to dominate the industry.
For disruptive innovation to flourish, says Christensen, companies need to create the right organizational structure. Companies often start by promoting successful managers to lead new efforts, but without addressing the processes and values of the new group, the leadership will start to make decisions the same way it always has. Disruptive innovation requires an autonomous organization with the appropriate cost structure to address the emerging markets. In the 1970s, the motor controls industry was disrupted by programmable logic controllers (PLCs), and the only company to successfully traverse the disruption was Rockwell Automation. The Milwaukee-based company did so by investing in two smaller companies shortly after the introduction of PLCs and combining them into a separate division, which pitted them against its existing electromechanical division. Rockwell showed that it is possible to establish dominance during a period of disruptive innovation while maintaining market leadership in the traditional product.
While the innovator’s dilemma stems from uncontrollable external pressures, dealing with it is an internal dilemma. Managers lack the information and experience needed to make confident investments in disruptive technology. The tried and true resource allocation process favors current customers and their needs., starving incubatory projects of needed love and attention. And to survive the innovation pipeline, the disruptive technology needs the marketing leader to new clients who appreciate the current capabilities. As performance improves, the customers who showed no interest in the initial idea are exactly the ones who will be clamoring for it.”
Happy New Year!
I have been thinking and writing about habits over the last two weeks.
I wrote a piece for Medium called 8 Essential Books for Creating New Habits.
There is great advice in all of those books, but the one piece that stuck with me was Charles Duhigg’s description of “keystone habits”.
In this interview with Harvard Business Review, Duhigg describes the effect of keystone habits:
“Some habits seem to have a disproportionate influence. When a keystone habit starts changing, it seems to set off a chain reaction that changes other habits.
And in a lot of people’s lives a keystone habit is exercise. When they start exercising, they start using their credit cards less. They start procrastinating less. They do their dishes earlier. Something about exercise makes other habits more malleable.”
I like this topic of keystone habits because of the asymmetry. What are a small set of things that we can do that can have a big effect on our lives?
In his book The Power of Habit, Duhigg describes some examples from the research:
“Studies have documented that families who habitually eat dinner together seem to raise children with better homework skills, higher grades, greater emotional control, and more confidence. Making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget. It’s not that a family meal or a tidy bed causes better grades or less frivolous spending. But somehow those initial shifts start chain reactions that help other good habits take hold. [p109]”
Duhigg says keystone habits do three things:
“Wins are the molecules of results. They’re the proof of progress. Some wins are big, some are small – all wins are motivators.” -John Kotter
In Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg says you should build small wins into your process for creating new habits. Fogg says habits depend on ability (or maybe our perceived ability) to do the new behavior. To start a habit find the smallest thing you could do—complete one pushup, floss a single tooth, read one page. Do the smallest thing for the first couple days and even after you add more to a new habit, always make sure to complete the smallest thing each day. Get the small win.
In The Power of Habit, Duhigg tells the story of a study run by The National Institute of Health in 2009 that looked at weight loss. The researchers wanted to take a different approach to the problem. Their idea for participants to write down everything they ate. After six months, the results were clear. Those who kept daily food logs lost twice as much weight as everyone else. Food journaling gave everyone the ability to see patterns they were previously invisible. For some, it was the foods they ate. For others, it was when and how often they were snacking. The keystone habit of writing things down created new ways for people to think about their eating.
Last year, I took on a project to write a write a 25,000 word book with a client. Writing was not foreign to me, but the scope of the project and the definitive timeline created some new challenges for me. I needed to consistently produce writing each day to meet a deadline.
The best thing I did early on was to track my daily word count. This gave me good visibility to how much work I was producing over time and how it matched up to various project deadlines. Within two weeks, I could see that I needed to make some significant changes, and committed to create a daily habit of writing helped make all of the tough decisions that followed.
I found needed to produce a consistent word count each day, too much daily variability in my word count created even more variability in the following days. And that required moving writing to first thing in the mornings, right after the kids were off the school. All my calls and meetings moved to the afternoons. I wrote until I had the word count. Some mornings that was by 9:30am, other days I was still writing at 3pm. Each of those decisions to change my routine was made easier by my deliberate habit of daily writing.
Now, there is no magic set of keystone habits. Duhigg says a search for them can be tricky.
For me, meditation has been a keynote habit over the last ten years. Similar to my writing habit, I found I needed to make it a routine. I get up an hour earlier than I used to and the first thing I do after I get out of bed is meditate. I have a place in the house, a cushion to sit on and a timer that runs for 30 minutes. As a habit, meditation lets you see each day what your mind is doing and how quickly it shifts between thoughts. Seeing that malleability gives me more flexibility in how I meet all aspects of my life.
It’s interesting that the idea of self-reflection shows up in many of these keynote habits. Dinnertime conversation and spending budgets let us see the effects of our decisions in a different way. Tracking the foods we eat or journaling about the gratitude we feel draws us into introspection about our lives. Actively noticing and deliberately analyzing the daily run of quick, borderline unconscious actions uncovers a set of patterns that can be used to inform and reinforce the new habits we want to create.
I know I am making a big promise in the headline, but stay with me on this one. There are several reasons these three books can help narrow down your “I’m behind on my 2019 reading” list.
In this post, I’ll share some good sources I use every year to help with choose what I read, tell you why these books are good selections and give you a few reasons to pick up each one.
I mentioned in a post earlier this week that we are in the heart of the “Best of” Season. Everyone is posting their favorite things of the year. I love it. You get to see what is important to people. With these curated lists, you can see if there are themes that arose out of the past year.
In the world of business books, there are a handful of outlets that I watch each year to see what they are recommending when the year closes. Let me share each of them and tell you why you should pay attention.
First, Porchlight Books (the fine folks formerly known as 800-CEO-READ) are in the 13th year of the Business Book Awards. Some of you know that I spent several years working there and starting the Awards program is one of the things I am most proud of. Last week, they announced their longlist with forty books across eight categories. In December, they’ll announce their category winners and at their New York City gala in January, they’ll crown their Business Book of the Year.
Going on even longer has been the Strategy + Business Best Business Books feature, now in its nineteenth year. The publication from PwC and its partners keeps seven categories, selecting three books for each category and choosing one title in each as their TopShelf pick. The category winners are generally curated by industry experts, as seen in their choices of Bethany McLean, James Surowiecki, and Sally Hegesen to serve this year.
Given the headliners, many consider The Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award to be the most prestigious. The judging has a nice Trans-Atlantic feel with the awards ceremony alternating locations between New York City and London. The visibility also comes from the £30,000 in prize money given to the winner. Their format is to start with a 16 title longlist announced in August, the six title shortlist shared in September, and the winner celebrated in December.
Amazon has a comprehensive set of year-end selections. These are picked by a set of editors at the company. They choose 20 books across a range of what they call “business and leadership books”. Their list is always good balancing bestsellers and practical problem solving. Already this year, they named Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac as their business and leadership book of the year.
In the world of small business, I want to mention the list that comes from Leigh Buchanan at Inc. Magazine. She covers business books for the magazine and she often write articles that look ahead to upcoming book seasons, or as she did earlier this month, she wrote an eleven title Must-Read list for entrepreneurs in 2019.
The final list is from Bookpal, a West Coast best book retailer. They have the newest awards program, The Outstanding Works of Literature (OWL) Awards, which they started in 2017. There are five categories from their OWL awards that fit into the world of business books and on their longlist, they nominate five books for each category.
Each of the lists above have different flavors. FT McKinsey is global and conglomerate. Strategy + Business is corporate and smart. Amazon plays it straight to the core of the business book category. Inc. Magazine leans toward small business. And Porchlight digs deep into their indie bookstore roots. Bookpal highlights books across the breadth of categories they sell.
The lists also have things in common. They are created by people who care about the business book category. They are journalists, booksellers, academics and business leaders who all believe they have a stake in helping readers find the best titles.
Personally, I always find myself drawn to the spaces between. With the common interests and divergent preferences, I always want to know where the business book lists intersect. A good book is a good book. And if multiple groups see that, there is something worth paying attention to. Looking at the intersections between those lists was particularly interesting this year.
Using the longlist from each group, the six groups recommend a total of 102 books. The majority of those books, 80 titles or 78% of titles, only appear once across the five lists. That represents the wonderful variety in both what these entities believe is a book that will appeal to a business audience and what represented a good book among what was published in 2019.
There were 19 books that appeared twice on those five lists. I am not sure I have pattern or conclusion I can draw from those. Porchlight nominated twice as many (or more) books and they are the common partner in 13 of the 19 titles that were selected twice. When you look at the other half of those pairs, they are evenly spread among the other five lists. The categories of those 13 books are also spread across general business, economics, current events and narratives. I believe this set of books shares the same effect of judges’ preference, as can be seen in the single titles.
This is where it gets interesting.
There were no books that were appeared on three of the lists.
There were no books that were picked by four lists.
And there were no books that were chosen by all six lists.
That leaves us with only three titles that were chosen by five lists. That’s where I want to focus the rest of the attention.
[If you’d like to see all the titles and some of the analysis, I have put all the data in a Google Sheet that you can find by clicking on this link.]
Let’s start with the books:
As I said, these were chosen by four different arbiters of business books. The last bit of analysis that I’ll share is that each book was chosen by a different combination of those five players. So, there was no voting block of perspective that led to these three titles.
I’ll admit there is randomness and probably pattern bias in trying to focus on these three titles. I am not going to try to justify these picks with any statistics or additional analysis. Let’s just say that the bubbling up of these three books is convenient.
It’s handy that there are only three books with such overwhelming support. Anyone can get these three titles and be through them between now and the end of the year. If that sounds hard, go read my essay on How To Read A [Business] Book.
Another convenience is this small group of books touches on the three things we should always be working to improve. First, we always need to put some focus on ourselves and Range provides an interesting thesis for how we should position ourselves in today’s world. Next, we always need to be working on how we work with others. Nine Lies pushes hard on some commonly held wisdom and turns it on its head. Finally, I don’t know anyone who isn’t touched by change and doesn’t need a way to bring new ideas and approaches into the world. Loonshots addresses that.
After I saw the broad agreement on these three titles, I decided to dig into each of them again. I’ll be posting reviews on each one of them between now and the end of the year. I hope maybe you’ll read along. When I share more about these books, I’d love to hear what you thought of them and how they helped you.
Update (11/26/19): I added the longlist selections from Bookpal’s OWL awards to the year-end lists for this article. They also chose the three common titles are well.
My reading list is never short, but as the year comes to a close, there are so many Best Of The Year lists that get published and I am left wondering how I missed so many good books.
Most lists cover fiction and creative non-fiction in an exhaustive way. I wish more outlets covered practical non-fiction. There is so much to recommend.
Here are a few places to look for your business and self-help needs:
Here is my current list of books to read that covers a pretty wide range of topics
