Book Short: More on Email Marketing My friend Bill Nussey’s The Quiet Revolution in Email Marketing is a good read for those in the industry. It’s a little different in focus than our recently published book, Sign Me Up!, and in many ways is a good complement. Bill develops a good framework for Customer Communication Management (CCM) based on his experience as CEO of SilverPop, one of the leading email marketing companies. He builds on Seth Godin’s permission framework and applies it directly to email marketing, point by point. He addresses head on every email marketer’s nightmare, when you tell someone what you do for a living, and the person replies “oh, you’re a spammer.” The book also has a…
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Books
Book Short: Are You Topgraded?
Book Short: Are You Topgraded? I read a decent volume of business books (some of my favorites and more recent ones are listed in the left hand column of the blog). I have two main pet peeves with business books as a rule: the first is is that most business books have one central idea and a few good case examples and take way too many pages to get where they’re going; the other is that far too many of them are geared towards middle and upper management of 5,000+ person companies and are either not applicable or need to be adapted for startups. Anyway, I thought I’d occasionally post quick synopses of some good ones I’ve read recently. Topgrading,…
Playing To Win
Playing To Win This weekend’s reading included Hardball, by George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer, which started as an article in Harvard Business Review sometime last year. The book is a fleshed out version of the article, so don’t expect meaningful new revelations if you’ve already read it, but it is an incredibly valuable read, with lots more and more detailed case studies. As with most business books, it’s not really geared towards small, entrepreneurial companies, but that doesn’t matter. Most of the principles of competition — and how to win — are timeless. The basic principles, each of which gets a chapter, are on Unleashing Massive Force, Exploiting Anomalies (perfect for the data junkie within), Threatening the Competition’s Profit Zones,…
From Blog to Book – Beyond Bullets
From Blog to Book – Beyond Bullets Hats off to fellow blogger Cliff Atkinson, who has just published a book called Beyond Bullet Points. Cliff and his company, Sociable Media, consult on PowerPoint and presentations and have a great theory about how to do great presentations. They follow the “clear, simple, and please God not so boring” guidelines espoused by a number of us in the business world, including Brad and of course Seth. (BTW, if you haven’t read Seth’s e-book/treatise on Really Bad PowerPoint, you should do that as well, although I can’t find a link to it at the moment.) One of the coolest parts of the book is that it really started out as Cliff’s blog, Beyond…
Complex Collaborations
Complex Collaborations I just read a new book entitled Business Without Boundaries: An Action Framework for Collaborating Across Time, Distance, Organization, and Culture. I happen to know one of the authors, Don Mankin, who was on our trip to Antarctica last year. The book is a good, quick read for anyone running an organization that requires any degree of complex collaboration, whether in the form of multiple offices with a single company, close relationships with suppliers or customers or channel partners, or even a joint venture. Mankin and his co-author Susan Cohen present three case studies: John Deere, Radica, and Solectron. They then tie their learnings together into a solid framework that’s almost a how-to checklist for organization leaders to…
Taylor Made for this Blog
I haven’t done a book review yet on this blog because I haven’t found a very relevant one. I will do more as I go here — I’ve actually read a few pretty useful business books lately — but there’s no better book to kick off a new category of postings here than the one I just finished: The MouseDriver Chronicles: The True-Life Adventures of Two First-Time Entrepreneurs. The book details how two freshly-minted Wharton MBAs skipped the dot com and investment banking job offers to start a two-person company that produced the MouseDriver (a computer mouse shaped like a the head of a golf club) back in 1999-2000. It’s a great, quick read and really captures the spirit of…