Best business books of 2008 (so far)

Click here for my end of year 2008 list. Continue reading for the half-year list.

It's been a great year for business books, in my estimation, so rather than hold off till the end of the year, here's a first-half "best of" list for your perusal:




"The Opposable Mind" - Roger Martin. How the greatest business innovators can resolve paradoxes and therefore create new markets.

"Presentation Zen" - Garr Reynolds. Radical rules for creating and delivering powerful business presentations.

"Rain Making" (2nd edition) - Ford Harding. Finally, a book about selling that doesn't shout, but quietly gives commonsense, useful advice on every page.









"Groundswell" - Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. Describes the business impact of social media technologies like blogs, social networks, forums, etc. It would be important just for the subject matter. Delightfully, it's also very well researched, documented, and written.






"Senior Leadership Teams" - Ruth Wageman, Debra Nunes, James Burruss, Richard Hackman. Illuminating a hidden corner of company dysfunction--the leadership team that can't work together--and demonstrating the practices that can overcome it.






"Brain Rules" - John Medina. A delightful, story-filled book that illuminates how the brain works, and how we can change our behaviors to be nicer to our brain and to others'.

Tags:
reading list, best of, business, 2008

Fortune 500 Corporate Blog Review: Interpublic Group (#348)

Interpublic Group (NYSE: IPG) is the third-largest advertising/marketing holding company in the world. So they know something about blogs. The closest thing to a "corporate" blog they have is from their Emerging Media Lab, so that's what we'll talk about.

Name: "The Future of Media"

History: regular posts since June 2006.

Frequency of posts: About eight per month.

Nature of posts: Unsurprisingly, the blog deals with the future of media. Post subjects include Second Life, mobile advertising, video games, etc.. They present good analyses of fake user-created content here and here. As befits a research lab, there's no overt selling in the blog. Just talking about what's happening in new media, and why.

Design/functionality: A nice, clean design, with good use of graphics (as one would expect). The text is well organized and formatted. The left column includes categories, recent comments, frequently used tags, a blogroll and a reading list. In short, a very professional-looking blog. Offers an RSS feed. They allow comments (unmoderated, but requiring email verification) and trackbacks. The administrator is not identified. There are a handful of different posters, but Jeff Berg is responsible for more than half the posts.

Links etc.: The blog is unclaimed in Technorati and is ranked #223,757. Technorati's information is more than six weeks out of date. There are a few links from other blogs, mostly small ones.

A good blog on a timely topic. I will add "The Future of Media" to my reading list. Thanks, guys.

blogs, corporate blogs, marketing, Interpublic Group

Champy's "Outsmart"--less than meets the eye

We talked some about business gurus last week, and while the name Jim Champy wasn't on the WSJ list, he would have been in the past. So when I was sent his new book, "Outsmart," I put down the other books I was reading to take this one up.

The good news was, at 165 pages with ample white space, it didn't take long to read. The bad news was that it fell far below my expectations. "Outsmart" is the business-literature equivalent of those new paper-like mint strips you lay on your tongue. The ideas dissolve in an instant.

Why? The book lacks the rigor of other recent books in the strategy literature, "The Opposable Mind" and "Big Think Strategy." It fails to paint the far-reaching vision of "The Future of Management." It is a collection of inspiring stories, and that has value. After reading it, however, I had difficulty taking away any lesson other than to be an extraordinary success, you had to be an extraordinary person with a strong vision and have excellent timing--not a very useful blueprint for most leaders.

At the end of each chapter is a summary of learnings. In "Compete By Doing Everything Yourself," Champy offers this lesson:

Control what matters. Doing everything yourself speaks to a very human impulse. When Cappello [the CEO of S.A. Robotics, the company that competed by doing everything itself] talked to me about his need to control his company's processes, I immediately understood that he was really talking about his distaste for losing control, especially for the kind of product he makes.

If you manufacture a complex, customized product, the need for control is clear. If you are providing a more commoditized product or service, however, outsourcing part of your work might be a legitimate option or, in some cases, a competitive necessity.

In other words, you can succeed by doing everything yourself, or by having others do work for you. It depends.

And in another chapter he writes, "I'm a strong believer that a company must be a low-cost producer to compete." Really? Is S.A. Robotics, which builds everything internally, a low-cost provider?

To me, these are indications of a book without a center. Compared to "The Opposable Mind" or "Big Think Strategy," "Outsmart" is lightweight. There's no science behind the theories other than a Darwinian metaphor in Chapter 1. The explanations are anecdotal (most times, a single anecdote). And no unifying theme.

"The Opposable Mind" described founders or CEOs who could reconcile contradictory ideas and thereby create new markets. Each example (and there were many) reinforced that idea. So did the cognitive research cited. "Big Think Strategy" supplemented its case studies with a strategic method.

By contrast, "Outsmart" is a brief, easy to read, set of success stories, that together don't add up to an important book, sad to say.

Related Posts:
"Big Think Strategy" is a fun, inspiring read
The first great business book of 2008 ("The Opposable Mind")
On Gary Hamel's "The Future of Management"

Tags:
innovation, strategy, reading list

Rendering Authenticity

I've been struggling through the new book “Authenticity” by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, and I've been wondering why I've struggled. It's not a badly-written book, and I remember reading and liking some articles adapted from their earlier book, “The Experience Economy.” I'm also interested in the idea of authenticity (link to prior post). But nonetheless, I've read the book in fits and starts. It's been a chore.

As I was reading it this week, an idea hit: It's not just this book. I would have trouble reading any book that tells companies how to “render authenticity” through their products and services. (You can find a dictionary definition of the word authentic here. The third and fifth definitions most closely match what we're talking about in this post.)

The term “render” brings to mind soap factories--heavy processing, reformulation.

Authenticity is or should be natural, intrinsic, emerging from the essence of the thing. It's also, to some extent, in the eye of the beholder. Facebook has squandered some of its authenticity by its recent attempts to monetize. MySpace's is long gone. This is probably true of many internet startups. In growing out of hobbies or cult experiences to real businesses, they surrender authenticity. This is natural and maybe not a bad thing.

Large companies trying to conjure authenticity is a fool's errand, in my mind. One example of “perceived authenticity” cited by the authors is the HOK-designed baseball park, such as Camden Yards in Baltimore and its brethren. Camden Yards, when built, was authentic—a one-of-a-kind, new “old-style” ballpark. But when similar HOK designs emerged in Texas, San Francisco, Cincinnati, etc., it became merely a template. A good experience? Yes. Authentic? No. If you want baseball authenticity, go to Fenway or Wrigley.

I recall a Jay Leno comedy routine that he performed on David Letterman many years ago. It went something like this:

“Have you seen the new item they have in the supermarket? Soft cookies in a package. Now, this is interesting. Fresh cookies are soft. Stale cookies are hard. Now the food companies have discovered a technology that allows them to make stale, soft cookies.” Spoken this way, packaged soft cookies are not only funny, they're unappetizing.

Authenticity is a fresh cookie. “Rendered authenticity” is a stale, soft cookie.

marketing, authenticity, product development, reading list

(Bonus: the Jay Leno routine mentioned above. The way the food company discusses the soft-cookie idea seems like how a meeting on rendering authenticity would go.)

Giving myself the "Getting Things Done" treatment

I knew I had to improve my organizing skills early in the summer when I missed two scheduled conference calls in the period of a month. In the moment, I blamed the meeting organizers, who had not attached reminders to the meeting requests, so my Blackberry didn't buzz 15 minutes in advance. After reflection, I realized it wasn't the responsibility of the meeting organizers to account for my time-management peculiarities. I also realized that making a habit of missing conference calls I had committed to attend was bad business.

Around the same time, I listened to a podcast interviewing David Allen, author of Getting Things Done. I liked what he had to say, and a few mouse clicks later I had ordered his book, determined to give myself the GTD treatment.

It wasn't painless, and it took quite a while, but I've been more or less successful at organizing my work and home commitments. I feel like I'm getting more done, and the stress level has decreased because I have all my commitments (work & personal) documented in the same list, and I review that list regularly (though the review could be more regular and more thorough).

First, a look at Allen's key prescriptions:

1. Collecting all items that need to be looked at in your inbox
2. Emptying the inbox frequently
3. Deciding what to do with an inbox item immediately (acting on it if it can be done in 2 minutes or less, disposing of it if no action required, scheduling action or adding to task list otherwise)--i.e., no returning items to the inbox!
   
4. Filing inbox items where they can be easily retrieved
5. Organizing task lists by context (computer, phone call, errand, on-line, reading, waiting-for)
6. Reviewing your calendar and task lists regularly

There's a lot more, obviously, that you can find in the book, but those are the highlights.

In my experience implementing GTD, here's what I found:

• Collecting all my stuff and processing it took a long time--upwards of two weeks. I had to-do's written on note cards in my bedroom, written on my white board, in notebooks, on existing task lists, and in the inbox already. I had piles of unread books in several places, and articles I wanted to read scattered in my computer directories. At the end, the collection pile measured more than one foot high in my inbox and another three feet or so on the floor beside it.
  
  
• Filing was easier than I thought. Allen recommends one alphabetically-arranged filing cabinet, rather than files organized by some subject (like home, work, finance, etc.). This works for me, although I keep my finance files in a separate accordion file. All the others are in one cabinet.
  
  
• I ended up with a large task list (probably 75-80 items), and it hasn't gone down much if at all. Some people find such a large list intimidating (God, what a lot I have to do!). For me, it was a relief to know that I had everything on paper, and didn't need to carry it in my head--a key benefit that Allen cites for his system.
  
  
• Personal organizer systems don't deal with the Allen approach very well. I tried both the Macintosh iCal system, which didn't allow for even a first-level categorization, and Microsoft Entourage. Entourage allowed two levels of categorization with manageable sorting problems, but couldn't handle three at all... and I wanted three for my list. I was able to work around the problems, but it would be nice to have an automated application that could sync with a mobile device and handle the entire GTD system.
  
  
• Like many people, I don't review the lists enough. I schedule a brief review every day, and a more comprehensive review on Friday. I usually get through the every-day review, but the Friday review is frequently no more substantial than the dailies. I need to work on that.

Like any major change in habits, GTD takes a lot of commitment, time and persistence. For me, at least, it was worth it. I feel more in control of my life and prepared to take on more work than I was a few months ago.

Would anyone out there like to comment on their GTD experiences?

Getting Things Done, productivity, organization

It's time for the "Numerati" to step back

I've been reading the book "Einstein's Mistakes" by Hans Ohanian and though it's been a lot different from my expectations (I was looking for mistake stories and through 150 pages haven't found many) it has proved useful in spurring some thoughts.

One such thought has been the consequences of the growth of science and logical thinking. The first part of "Einstein's Mistakes" describes the roles of Galileo, Newton, Maxwell and others in setting the stage for Einstein's relativity theories. What this brief physics history reinforced to me was the gradual rise to preeminence of logic and mathematics in the processes of human thought--at the expense of philosophy, sociology, anthropology.

Interestingly, even in these legendary clear thinkers there was the all-too-human urge to self-protect and rationalize. Notable was Galileo's effort, according to Ohanian, to fudge the numbers so that his calculations would match what he knew to be correct about the heavens.

Next on my list to read (around "War and Peace") is Stephen Baker's "The Numerati." I find I come to this book with loads of prejudgments. From the press and the jacket copy, the book celebrates the numerization of our thinking. Which I believe is mostly bad news.

This kind of number-worship has brought us financial risk mitigation that paradoxically increased risk, created AAA-rated bonds which were actually of junk status, and any number of other examples of solid financial and numerical logic that under examination simply failed the common-sense test. In other words, a hedge fund that studied human nature might have made a lot of money these last few years.

To me, "The Numerati" is behind the times. We've seen the apotheosis of the logical/mathematical revolution, and it ain't pretty.

It's time to put numbers into their context, and begin to shift more investment to understanding people, how they think, feel and relate to one another. This is where the money will be in the future, and this is what society needs now.

As Dave Snowden writes, "It's not that social computing has created some completely new form of human interaction, what it has done is to enable conversations across barriers and boundaries. We can now be a global tribe (or rather tribes), if we can make the changes that the technology permits."

Tags:
reading list, logic, thinking, social media

Everything you ever wanted to know about private labels: What I'm reading now #3

Unless you're a consumer-packaged-goods marketer or retailer, you probably have no idea how pervasive private labels have become in the stores you frequent. But the next time you go to the drugstore, see if you pick up a bottle of Aleve or the CVS naproxen sodium placed right next to it.

Professors Nirmalya Kumar of London Business School and Jan-Benedict Steenkamp of Duke University have satisfied the curiosity of everyone who ever wanted to know about private-label goods by writing Private Label Strategy: How to Meet the Store Brand Challenge.

According to the authors, the opportunities for private labels are vast, and the challenges to branded goods are daunting. Private label goods provide a point of differentiation for the retailer (such as Target or Tesco), and they create powerful leverage when negotiating terms with brand manufacturers.

Leading packaged-goods companies, like Procter and Gamble, Unilever and Nestle, are responding to the challenge. How? Four main ways:

1. partnering with retailers to produce exclusive specialty offerings
2. innovating like crazy to stay ahead of copycat private-label offerings
   
3. divesting laggard brands
   
4. increasing investment in advertising and marketing for the brands they retain
   

To point (4), the authors point out a most interesting development: as a result of the increasing size and scale of retailers, brand manufacturers' marketing dollars have been drawn away from advertising and other brand-building activities toward point-of-purchase and promotion investments. The latter help the retailer and sales (in the short term), but at the cost of the long-term value of the product--and as a side effect improving the prospects for private-label copycats.

The book is essential reading for any consumer-packaged goods companies or retailers, and for anyone else who wants to study up on a dimly-lit corner of the marketing world.

innovation, branding, marketing, retail, private label, reading list

"Senior Leadership Teams" is essential reading for executives

I recently related a story for the Mistake Bank about my experience as a senior leader with a medium-sized IT company. It involved a particularly difficult senior team meeting and my nasty reaction to a colleague's questioning a decision I'd made regarding a member of my team.

I recalled the story because I was reading "Senior Leadership Teams" by Ruth Wageman, Debra Nunes, James Burruss and Richard Hackman, which discusses that peculiar species--the team of leaders. One of the themes of the book is that senior leaders, left to their own devices, will prioritize their individual work and give little to the team. Another is that senior leaders rise to prominence based on their talents to achieve results with teams that work at their direction, meaning their teamwork skills are rusty at best. A third is that CEOs don't take many of the basic actions required to form a cohesive and productive team--things like explicitly choosing team members, setting explicit standards and norms for behavior, or providing adequate information for teams to act effectively.

My senior team experience bears this out. I focused on my team and my results, and preferred to leave my colleagues to clean up their own sandboxes. And when a colleague got too involved in "my" area, I didn't take kindly to it. I didn't know what the senior team was for, nor what was expected of me and how I should behave. In retrospect, I didn't behave well some of the time--even if I felt I was doing what was best for the company.

Perhaps you see why a book is needed to instruct people in this area. And, thankfully, "Senior Leadership Teams" is an excellent effort. The authors, affiliated with the Hay Group and with Harvard University, studied more than 100 senior teams and tried to understand why many performed poorly, while others--a smaller number--worked well. They found six conditions--three "essentials" and three "enablers"--that excellent teams had in common:

The essentials:

1. A real team
2. The right people
3. A compelling direction

The enablers:

1. A solid structure
2. A supportive context
3. Team coaching
   

The six conditions might sound simple, but the book is filled with insight as to why these simple things are hard to do, and what's necessary to make them real. As an example of the commonsense yet counterintuitive advice throughout "Senior Leadership Teams," read this section regarding selecting the right people to be on the team:

An executive suite is not a schoolyard. Just because someone wants to play on your team, has always been on the team, or was considered the heavy hitter of a past team does not mean that you are obligated to have him on your team. What's more, just because you have been chosen to lead an established team does not mean you must keep all the players when you take it over. (p.79)

There is wisdom like the above all over the book--on reward systems, team purpose & objectives, and prioritization. And interesting stories of real CEOs and how they made their teams effective.

One minor complaint--the book is addressed to a CEO, and as such gives lots of advice about selecting, coaching and enabling the team, and less advice about being an effective member of the team. Perhaps this is a topic the authors can explore in a future book.

But this is no reason to avoid "Senior Leadership Teams," no matter what your role. If you are an executive, or want to be an executive, read this book--before your next senior team meeting.

Related posts:
The Mistake Bank Manifesto
"Stay the f--- out of my department":

Find more videos like this on The Mistake Bank


Tags:
management, leadership, teamwork, reading list

The deep attraction of the locally-produced

While reading a review of Rob Walker's "Buying In," in today's New York Times Book Review, I got to thinking about why I buy a certain type of beer.

The review points out Walker's description of the rebirth of Pabst, which after decades of decline began to grow again, led by young people seeking an unpretentious and less heavily-advertised beer to drink. Picking up on the weak signals, Pabst marketing shrewdly capitalized on the image by embarking on a low-profile campaign focusing on small-scale sponsorships of happenings favored by their market segment.

Yesterday, I took the kids and some friends and went on a tour of the Troegs Brewery across the river in Harrisburg.

I only drink local beers--Troegs, Stoudt's, Lancaster Brewing. And reading the book review made me ponder why this was so. Local beer is fresh, sure. Brewed in small batches. It has more taste than the mass-produced beers. But this didn't explain it all to me. To me, the local aspect is predominant.

Was there a "deep metaphor" at work here? With apologies to the Zaltmans, authors of "Marketing Metaphoria" and coiners of the phrase "deep metaphor," I think so. Something deep in my psyche makes me yearn for Troegs Sunshine Pils and revolt at the thought of Miller Genuine Draft.

Similarly, we get our vegetables much of the year from Spiral Path Farm, a CSA farm located about an hour from here, which we've visited.

At any rate, if this is so, it perhaps explains another phenomenon--when a big national bank buys a local bank, within two years a new local one springs up to take its place. Or does that only happen in my town?

Related Post:
"Marketing Metaphoria": Deep yearnings about the products we buy

Tags:

metaphor, marketing, viral marketing, psychology, reading list

Michael Dell on generating sales leads

I found this great Michael Dell story in "Lessons Learned: Starting a Business." In case you thought his success with Dell Computers was a complete accident, read this:

The first job I got when I could actually drive...was with the Houston Post newspaper. My job was to call people on the telephone and convince them to buy the newspaper. The first partial month I worked there, I figured out that when people wanted to buy the newspaper, either they were moving into a new house or an apartment, or they had just gotten married.

The way to find people who'd just gotten married was to go to the county courthouse. They have the applications for marriage licenses, which are a matter of public record in the state of Texas. And there is a place on the application form where you could request the license be sent. So that turned out to be a really good place to find people to whom I could send an offer to get the newspaper.

The other thing I found was that you could actually get lists of people who had applied for and received mortgages. And that was another great list of people. My first full month at the paper, I was the top salesperson of newspapers, and I had a great time. This was a summer job. I started hiring my friends and sending them out to all the surrounding counties to collect all these lists of people who had applied for marriage licenses and just had a blast. I was sixteen years old. I saved my money and bought a BMW.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Press. Excerpted from Lessons Learned: Straight Talk from the World’s Top Business Leaders--Starting a Business. Copyright (c) 2008 Fifty Lessons Limited; All Rights Reserved.

For more information about the "Lessons Learned" series, including a showcase of 50 Lessons video stories, please follow this link.

Related Posts:
The value of not caring in the workplace
A new midlife crisis story from Williams-Sonoma
Be careful using other people's money to make acquisitions
Bosses, choose your words carefully

Tags:
narrative, career, sales, resourcefulness, lead generation, reading list

Top 5 Best Business Books of 2007

(If you'd rather see the 2008 list, you can find it here.)

It's December, and "best of" lists are appearing everywhere. Here, too. So, if you are still searching for great gifts for the business-book reader in your family, you can't go wrong with any of these titles:

5. "Reinventing Project Management," Aaron Shenhar and Dov Dvir. A look at project management that goes way deeper, and is far more useful, than "on time, on budget, to requirements." Here's what I wrote about "RPM" earlier this year: 1, 2.





4. "Smart World," Richard Ogle. Innovative breakthroughs are not created by solitary thinkers toiling in the lab, but by people or groups interacting with their networks and environments. Prior posts on "Smart World": 1, 2.






3. "X-Teams," Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman. How great teams orient themselves externally and encourage dissent. Here's what I wrote about it back in May and June: 1, 2, 3, 4.






2. "Negotiation Genius," Deepak Malhotra and Max Bazerman. The best one-volume negotiation book you can buy at any price. Read a fuller review here.






1. "The Future of Management," Gary Hamel. (It's in stock at Amazon.) How to build a change-adaptable business in the 21st century. I did five posts on this book last year: start here.






negotiation, innovation, creativity, project management, organizational behavior, reading list

What I'm reading now #2

When I got two recommendations in a month's time to read a book about comics, I couldn't resist. And Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is about more than comics. It's about communication, graphic and written; about icons; and about the spaces between words and pictures, where yet more communication occurs.

Did I also say it's funny and entertaining? And in the format of a comic book?

P.S., Scott has a new book out, and is writing a blog about his current book tour.

reading list, communication, comics, visual, graphics

Why don't I love "Made to Stick"?

"Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die" by Chip and Dan Heath is one of those books that is continually name-checked in good business blogs. (It's clear that the book itself is "sticky.") Here's a sample of bloggers who have raved about it:

Lines from Lee
Anecdote
Bob Sutton
Presentation Zen
9GiantSteps
Community Group Therapy
Guy Kawasaki

Those should be enough references to tell you that people really, really like this book. And not just people--people whose judgment I respect. And its subject matter is right up my alley--communication & storytelling in a business context.

So why don't I love the book "Made to Stick" as much as the ideas in it? It's a question I've been asking myself from time to time in the months since I read the first 180 pages, placed it in my bookshelf, and left it there since.

It was a bit too long and not surprising enough (after chapter 1), I guess, for my restless mind. The structure of the book is a bit relentless--laying out the criteria for "sticky" ideas: SUCCES (Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, Stories) and using them as chapter titles, in order.

It's a book that I felt could have been as effective (no, more effective) if cut down to 80 pages.

And it felt redundant to me. Unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotional content--all are characteristics of good stories. (It felt as if they employed the old--and wrong--presentation maxim: say what you're going to say, say it, then tell them what you just said.)

It's good that the Heaths discussed what good business stories are and presented such effective examples of those stories. Reading it helped me to scrutinize how I was presenting my ideas to the outside world. And I'll probably refer to it again in the future.

But, for me, it didn't add up to the business book of the year.

reading list storytelling narrative marketing

Marketing for good--and for ill

I can't wait for the upcoming book by Harvard Business School marketing professor John Quelch (his blog is here) and Katherine Jocz called "Greater Good"--because I am fully expecting to disagree with it.

I read the abstract last month and have been stewing over it since then. Here it is in full:

Marketing has a greater purpose, and marketers, a higher calling, than simply selling more widgets, according to John Quelch and Katherine Jocz. In "Greater Good", the authors contend that marketing performs an essential societal function--and does so democratically. They maintain that people would benefit if the realms of politics and marketing were informed by one another's best principles and practices. Quelch and Jocz lay out the six fundamental characteristics that marketing and democracy share: (1) exchange of value, such as goods, services, and promises, (2) consumption of goods and services, (3) choice in all decisions, (4) free flow of information, (5) active engagement of a majority of individuals, and (6) inclusion of as many people as possible. Without these six traits, both marketing and democracy would fail, and with them, society. Drawing on current and historical examples from economies around the world, this landmark work illuminates marketing's critical role in the development, growth, and governance of societies. It reveals how good marketing practices improve the political process and--in turn--the practice of democracy itself.

The ennobling of marketing--connecting it with vital societal interests--got my attention. I am a marketing professional, and I like to feel good about myself and my profession, and as such I liked the book's idea--for about five minutes, after which it lost its flavor faster than a free after-dinner mint.

What lingered was this thought: there's an awful lot of bad marketing out there (not ineffective marketing, but "marketing-for-ill"), and I'd wonder whether Quelch and Jocz would do more for society by writing about that.

Here are some fundamental principles of marketing-for-ill that I bet won't appear in Quelch's and Jocz's book: (1) bombard people with buy messages for commodity products such as credit cards, (2) use selective language to play up one's product while disparaging the competitors'--as with any Oracle ad, (3) craft deceptive messages to get people to buy something that is not in their best interests--exhibit A: low-introductory rate mortgages, (4) create multilevel marketing networks to make revenues primarily via self-consumption of the networks, (5) use complex pricing schemes to make it difficult to assess total costs before buying--e.g., "my cellphone plan."

It's unfair, of course, to judge the book without reading it. So I promise I'll read it when it comes out, and I'm pretty sure it will be a good book and unworthy of my scorn.

At minimum, it has caused me to confront a lot of what I don't like about my profession, and reflect on what I can do not to promote those ideas.

democracy, marketing, corporate social responsibility, reading list

"Brain Rules" rules

I'm happy to use my sons' favorite expression to headline today's post. If something is really, really good, it "rules." I guess kids wish for monarchy (or feel as if they live under one). For example:

"Spongebob rules."
"Indiana Jones rules."
"Swim team rules."

And, similarly, John Medina's "Brain Rules" rules. (And I'm not the first to say so.) It performs an amazing trick--besides being informative and insightful...it's also a delight to read.

The book sets out twelve rules about how our brains work (#1: Exercise boosts brain power; #8: Stressed brains don't learn the same way), cites study after study to back up the rules, and demonstrates how our current lifestyles often aren't particularly good for our brains. Mixed in is advice for students, parents, presenters, executives, drivers--everybody--about how to act more in support of your brain rather than in opposition to its needs.

I gravitated to the section about attention (#4: We don't pay attention to boring things), especially his description of the 10-minute rule for his university lectures:

I decided that every lecture I'd ever give would come in discrete modules. Since the 10-minute rule had been known for many years, I decided the modules would last only 10 minutes. Each segment would cover a single core concept--always large, always general, always filled with "gist," and always explainable in one minute. Each class was 50 minutes, so I could easily burn through five large concepts in a single period. I would use the other 9 minutes in the segment to provide a detailed descrtiption of that single general concept. The trick was to ensure that each detail could be easily traced back to the general concept with minimum intellectual effort. I regularly took time out from content to explain the relationship betwen the detail and the core concept in clear and explicit terms. (p.89)

The book is full of stories, blessedly, and also demonstrates Medina's innate grasp of rule #4 by creating suspense in passage after passage, for example:

To explain how timing issues figure into memory formation, I want to stop for a moment and tell you about how I met my wife. (p.133)

How could anyone close the book there? Devices like these (used seamlessly and delivered in a deadpan voice) propel you through the book, so that at times it feels like you're reading a thriller, not a book about neurology.

Enough said. Great book. Read it. Do something nice for your brain.

Related posts:
The first great business book of 2008
A must-read for people who present

Tags:
storytelling, learning, neurology, presentation, reading list

"Three-Story Laurie" and remembering to repeat

I'm having fun reading "Brain Rules" by John Medina. It's interesting, funny and--unexpectedly--not the least bit dry. I'll write more about it in the next few days. But for now, one of the rules, #6 (Long-Term Memory: Remember to Repeat) made me recall someone named Three-Story Laurie.

It was one of my favorite nicknames ever, because while it sounded like it might have referred to an apartment building, Three-Story Laurie referred to her tendency to repeat the same few stories again and again. She showed up at various gatherings of my college friends over the years, and always had a collection of three new stories that she'd tell and retell over the course of the weekend. By repeating the stories, she made sure she remembered them. In doing so, Laurie was employing this advice from "Brain Rules":

...The relationship between repetition and memory is clear. Deliberately re-expose yourself to the information if you want to retrieve it later. Deliberately re-expose yourself to the information more elaborately if you want the retrieval to be of higher quality. Deliberately re-expose yourself to the information more elaborately, and in fixed, spaced intervals, if you want the retrieval to be the most vivid it can be. (p. 133)

This idea of remembering via repetition has a lot of uses. I've found, when recording stories for the Mistake Bank, that a second or third retelling is better, tighter and richer than the first.

And, oftentimes, I write in this space about something I've read, in order to understand it and remember it better.

Sort of like now.

memory, narrative, learning, reading list

Blame it on the I-Team

Last night I was reading a new book, "X-Teams: How to Build Teams that Lead, Innovate and Succeed" and I got this weird lightness in my stomach, a small vacant feeling just beneath the rib cage. The authors, Deborah Ancona of MIT's Sloan School and Henrik Bresman of INSEAD, were describing a common phenomenon: teams that worked hard to improve their performance had more fun, became happier but often failed miserably at their missions.

The feeling in the pit of my stomach was deja vu. I've been on one of those teams. Back in my EDS days, I worked for a sales VP who studied a lot of Peter Senge's Learning Organization principles and took them to heart. He applied them to our team and to its relationships. We had periodic offsite sessions to create strategy, we "checked in" to meetings, and we built close bonds both inside and outside of work.

Yet we didn't succeed, ultimately. The team was broken up within a year or so. Many of us left the company soon thereafter (me included). What happened? It's something I wondered about for years, and until this book lacked an explanation that made sense to me.

The paradox of great teams, according to Ancona and Bresman, is that they frequently focus internally, on their relationships with teammates and on their assignments, and lose perspective and context. They lose sight of other groups in the company and, most dangerously, of customers' evolving needs. The team begins to work better together, and the problem is compounded--other teams are seen as ineffective, "us vs. them" develops, and at some point external support for the team dissipates. You're left with a high-powered vehicle that can't go anywhere. Call it the "I" (for internal) Team.

And that's what happened to our team. We are still in touch ten years after the breakup. We have good feelings about that year. But in the pit of my stomach, at least, is a twinge of regret about what we could have done.

(Cover photo courtesy of Harvard Business School Press)

leadership learning management organizational behavior organizational development teamwork reading list

A must-read for people who present

I have sat through, by my estimate, more than a thousand lousy presentations. You know the ones: someone in a suit stands at a lectern and dryly reads PowerPoint bullets for a half-hour, or an hour, or sometimes even longer. The slides use a garish corporate template and contain unreadably-small text, save for a few lame clip-art images. Ugh.

Even worse, I've given hundreds of similar presentations.

Luckily for me and other poor presenters, Garr Reynolds has been providing expert critique, tips and examples to help people present better on his Presentation Zen website. (I've written about Garr's work a number of times: 1, 2, 3, 4.)

Now, he's assembled his ideas into a book.

As you might expect, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery is beautifully designed and laid out. With lots of white space, beautiful pictures, and a nice variety of page layouts, it reinforces its theme by its very look. [Similar to Edward Tufte's books, Presentation Zen is fun to flip through just to look at the pictures.]

If you didn't think you could say more with less text, or didn't know how to find cool photographs that would actually enhance your message, or didn't know how to make your subject as compelling to the audience as it is to you, Presentation Zen has insight you need.

While Reynolds echoes themes and specific advice he's presented in his blog, the accrual of the information between the book's covers has a more powerful effect than reading the same material over a long period of time in several blog posts. For example, throughout the book he shows side-by-side comparisons of poor slides and improved ones, or shows a number of different ways of conveying the same information with different slide designs. By the time you get to the end, the message is clear.

In other words, if you read Reynolds' blog regularly, you should still invest in the book. And if you don't read the blog, you should buy the book right away. And start applying the lessons today. [Please! I'm going to another seminar at the beginning of April.]

storytelling, design, presentation, PowerPoint, reading list

What I'm reading now...

I saw this book at Barnes & Noble last week while buying a Christmas present. (Orange cover, memorable title in a huge typeface--great marketing.) I was skeptical--most business books, especially ones that seem this sales-y, turn out to be poorly-written rehashes of business cliches or outdated ideas.

Not this one.

It's well-written, and the subject is very important to any executive or entrepreneur: how to discover, nurture and build relationships. What Keith Ferrazzi reveals is that with good and deep relationships one can make and close great deals. And without them, it's tough sledding indeed. (Usefully, he also tells you how not to be a "networking jerk"--a mercenary who collects business cards like big game trophies, not caring a whit about the people who carry the cards.)

The style is that of a how-to book, but with lots of concrete examples, using real names. I could have done without the "Connectors' Hall-of-Fame Profiles," where legendary networkers such as Vernon Jordan and Bill Clinton are discussed--it almost seemed as if that was a suggestion from the publisher rather than an organic component of the book. But that's a small complaint.

You also get a good sense of the author, and he's very likable. You realize quickly why he has so many useful and valuable relationships.

So pick up this book. It might help you create some new and valuable relationships.

And there's a related blog.

reading list,
relationships, marketing, networking, strategy, psychology, entrepreneurship, sales, business, alliances

Yahoo having trouble with the vision thing

Something in this NY Times Bits post about Yahoo's downbeat earnings call and resulting stock swoon reminded me of a book I'm reading now. Here's the bit that triggered the connection:

...Mr. Yang and Ms. Decker’s strategy is essentially “vision goes here.” They want to be the “starting point” for users on the Web. They want to be the “must buy” for advertisers. And Mr. Yang said he would assume an “aggressive investment posture.”

The only thing missing from that is the substance. Why would users start at Yahoo? How are advertisers going to find Yahoo superior? And what will the company invest in?

...Maybe Yahoo simply has a communication problem. Perhaps it will emerge with great products for users and advertisers. But my take is that it will be much harder if its customers, employees and stockholders don’t understand what it is doing and why they should care.

The book is "Executing Your Strategy" (I'm going to have to post on clunky titles affixed to good business books) by Mark Morgan, Raymond Levitt and William Malek. The book says that to create a vision, a company must answer three critical questions. These questions drive and prioritize the handful/dozens/hundreds of projects that will help the company achieve its strategies. They are:

1. Who are you?
2. Why are you here?
3. Where are you going?

From the earnings announcement and conference call, if Yahoo has deeply considered and answered these questions, they're not saying.

strategy, reading list