Book (Not So) Short: Raise Your Hand If You’re Sure I couldn’t get the catchy jingle from the 80’s commercial for Sure deodorant (you remember, the one with the Statue of Liberty at the end of it – thanks, YouTube) out of my head while I was reading the relatively new book, Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End. Written by HBS professor Rosabeth Moss Kantor, Confidence is one of the few business books I’ve read that’s both long and worth reading in full. The book has scores of examples of both winning and losing streaks, from sports, business, politics, and other walks of life, and it does a great job of breaking down the core elements…
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Books
Book Short: A Primer on Viral Marketing
Book Short: A Primer on Viral Marketing “People talk about Andy,” writes Seth Godin in the foreward to Andy Sernovitz’s new book, Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking. “He’s a living, breathing example of the power of word of mouth.” Andy’s the CEO of WOMMA, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, and a former colleague of mine. Ever since reading The Tipping Point, I keep looking for the secret sauce around viral marketing. What is it that makes something cool enough to buzz about? My conclusion from reading Andy’s book is that secret sauce doesn’t exist. Like everything else, being buzzworthy comes from hard work, being inherently good, AND using the techniques and understanding in Andy’s…
Book Short: Another 8 Habits
Book Short: Another 8 Habits Besides having a fantastic title, Richard St. John’s Stupid, Ugly, Unlucky, and Rich is a fun and quick read. It’s a completely different style than Stephen Covey’s “habits” books (The 7, The 8th). It’s a little cartoony and list-oriented, and it’s a much quicker read — and also easier to put down and pick up without feeling like you’re losing your place. The book’s foundation is interviews, mostly by the author, of successful people who span many different careers, from artists to actors and models to athletes to politicians to business leaders. The organization is very solid, and the content is highly motivating. It’s a good guide to success in any field, and in particular…
Book Short: You’d Never Run Your Business This Way…
Book Short: You’d Never Run Your Business This Way… I am an unabashed conservative, so you might wonder what I was doing reading A Country That Works, by union chief Andy Stern, the President of SEIU (Service Workers International Union) this weekend. Well, part of it is that my mother-in-law Carmen works for him. Part was that he was quite inspiring during his recent appearance on the Colbert Report a week or two ago. And part was that I always like reading about different points of view, especially with the current, somewhat dismal state of the Republican leadership in Washington. The book was very short and a worthwhile read. I may not agree with Stern on some of his illustrations…
Doing Well by Doing Good, Part IV
Doing Well by Doing Good, Part IV This series of posts has mostly been about things that people or companies do that help make the world a better place — sometimes when it’s their core mission, other times (here and here) when it becomes an important supporting role at the company. Today’s post is different — it’s actually a Book Short as well of a new book that’s coming out later this fall called Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage, published by Yale Press and written by Daniel Esty (a Yale professor and consultant), and a good friend of mine, Andrew Winston, a corporate sustainability consultant. Green to Gold…
Book Short: Just One Minute
Book Short: Just One Minute What The One Minute Manager does for basic principles of management and goal setting, The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey does for delegation. Both are blessedly quick reads (the classic “airport” book), and Ken Blanchard really nails some of management’s most critical components with simplicity and grace. I’m a fan of the One Minute Manager school, and it does work well for some of the basics, but it has its limitations in terms of how broadly it can be applied. My colleague Whitney McNamara‘s words in an email to me a few months back say it all: OMM has actually been useful. I have to agree that it’s got a bit of a “Jonathan…
Seth Responds
Seth Responds About an hour after I posted a not so flattering review of Seth Godin’s new book this morning, I got an email from Seth with a couple good points worth responding to here. His main points (other than offering me a refund, which was nice) were that (a) the book itself was very clear about its content — on the book itself (back cover, inside flap, marketing copy), kind of like a ‘live album’ for a recording artist; and (b) if I thought the blog postings were worthwhile, why did I still feel like there was a downward trend in his writing? Ok, so these are fair points. Let me try to clarify. I am 99% sure that…
Book Shorts: One Up, One Down
Book Shorts: One Up, One Down I read new books by two of my favorite authors today: Geoffrey Moore and Seth Godin. Moore’s was his best book in years; Godin’s was his worst. Geoffrey Moore’s latest book, Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of their Evolution, is Moore’s best book in a while. While I loved Crossing the Chasm and thought Inside the Tornado was a close second, both The Gorilla Game and Living on the Fault Line didn’t do it for me — they both felt like a pile of Silicon Valley buzzwords as opposed to the insightful and groundbreaking market definition in his first two books. But Darwin is a gem. It goes back…
Book Short: And It’s Not Just Because I’m In It
Book Short: And It’s Not Just Because I’m In It Debbie Weil’s The Corporate Blogging Book is a good super quick read for any CEO or senior executive who is contemplating starting a blog — or even better, for those who have decided not to do so. Weil’s writing style is great and very informal (blog-like, in fact) – a representative snippet is where she tells readers that there are two types of information to worry about posting on a blog, in her words, “stuff you don’t to reveal and stuff you could get sued for.” And her range of topics is great and deals with issues head-on. Things like fear of losing control, time commitment, and ghost writing are…
Book Short: It Sounds Like it Should be About Monkeys, Doesn’t It?
Book Short: It Sounds Like it Should be About Monkeys, Doesn’t It? The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, is a must-read for anyone in the Internet publishing or marketing business. There’s been so much written about it in the blogosphere already that I feel a little lame and “me too” for adding my $0.02, but I finally had a chance to get to it last week, and it was fantastic. The premise is that the collapsing production, distribution, and marketing costs of the Internet for certain types of products — mostly media at this point — have extended the traditional curve of available products and purchased products almost indefinitely so that it has, in statistical terms, a really long tail….
Book Short: Choose Voice!
Book Short: Choose Voice! I took a couple days off last week and decided to re-read two old favorites. One –Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead — my fourth reading — will take me a little longer to process and figure out if there’s a good intersection with the blog. One would think so with entrepreneurship as the topic, but my head still hurts from all the objectivism. The second — Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, by Albert O. Hirschman — is today’s topic. I can’t remember when I first read Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. It was either in senior year of high school Economics or Government; or in freshman year of college Political Philosophy. Either way, it was a long time ago,…