In the WSJ book review today, they also talk about The Transparent Leader by Herb Baum, CEO of Dial Corporation. A little birdie told me that we are going to have a review of this book next week. Stay tuned…
October 26, 2004
Worth* Reads
The coroners at Brand Autopsy have posted their 3rd edition of the Worthy and Worthless Reads.
Regardless of their review, here is a list of what they reviewed if you need help finding them:
- The Rules of the Red Rubber Ball by Kevin Carroll
- Writing the Breakthrough Business Book by Tom Gorman
- MBA in A Box by Joel Kurtzman
- Wordcraft by Alex Frankel
- Lovemarks by Kevin Roberts
- Secret Service by John Dijulius
- Clued In by Lou Carbone
- Creative Company by Andrew Law
- Mass Affluence by Nunes and Johnson
- We The Media by Dan Gillmor
- Confronting Reality by Bossidy and Charan
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Wall Street Journal agrees with me
In Tuesday’s WSJ they reviewed Bad Leadership By Barbara Kellerman and say it is “elegantly written and a pleasure to read” [sub. needed]. That is something you don’t often see in describing a business book.
You can read my review by scrolling down to the post on October 22, 2004 or by clicking here.
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Kawasaki Video Interview
Guy Kawasaki is interviewed by ZDNet Editor in Chief Dan Farber on news.com. The video interview runs 19 minutes 16 minutes.
[via Scoble's Linkblog and Chris Woodruff]
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October 25, 2004
Supporting Firefox
We like what the Mozilla folks are doing with the Firefox NY Times campaign. Jack has decided to support the effort and make 800-CEO-READ one of the business sponsors for the campaign.
After listing all of us and our best friends, we still have two open slots left for names we can submit for the ad. We have decided to offer those slots to our readers who blog.
It is very simple: link to this entry.
The first slot will go to the first person who links to this entry. The second slot will go to a random person who links to this entry in the next 24 hours. The selection process will be pulling names out of a hat.
I have trackbacks turned on. I’ll be looking at Technorati for results. If you want to be certain your entry is counted, send me an email at todd at 800ceoread [dot] com with the subject title “NYT link” and the link in the body.
You’ve got until noon tomorrow.
Good Luck!
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Perseus Books and the WSJ
In todays WSJ they have a special section on Leadership. In that section they have an overview of one of the newer publishers that started as an acquirer. They put together a nice stable of mid level publishers. As I have mentioned in previous posts, Perseus was an important business book publisher that has made the strategic decision to leave our segment. What makes the article is especially interesting is it highlights many of the problems with the publishing industry – backlist and returns. Check it out here [sub. needed].
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Scoble interviews Zagula
Robert Scoble interviewed John Zagula this weekend. They talk about John’s new book The Marketing Playbook.
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October 22, 2004
Jack Covert Selects–Bad Leadership
Bad Leadership: What it is, How it Happens, Why it Matters by Barbara Kellerman, Harvard Business School Press, 250 Pages, $26.95 Hardcover, October 2004, ISBN 1591391660
Clever title. It was eye-catching enough for me to grab it from the stack of Harvard Business School Press books I had been sent recently. First, I wanted to know what bad leadership is. Looking at the table of contents gave me a pretty solid clue. Names like Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, David Koresh, Andrew Fastow and Leona Helmsley gave me a good idea of where the author was going.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part, The Bad Side, discusses and explains the reasons behind bad leadership. The second part, Leading Badly, deals with the seven types of bad leadership, and this part alone is well worth the price of admission. The seven types of bad leadership she identifies are: Incompetent, Rigid, Intemperate, Callous, Corrupt, Insular and Evil. As she elaborates:
dividing the universe of bad leadership into seven types gives us certain advantages. First, the ability to distinguish among the ways of being bad orders an untidy world, where the idea of bad leadership is as confusing as it is ubiquitous. Second, the seven types serve a practical purpose. They make it easier to detect inflection pointspoints at which an intervention might have stopped bad leadership or at least cut it short. Finally, the types make meaning of being bad. They enable us to know better and more clearly what bad leadership consists of.
Each type of bad leadership has a chapter that starts with a brief example, and offers us illustrations of very recognizable people with the story behind their bad leadership. Each chapter follows a logical template that gives context, history and hindsight of the leader and his/her followers. The last part, From Bad to Better, sheds light on how to rid ourselves from bad leadership.
This is a very well-written, easy-to-understand, scholarly look at leadership from the underside. It shows us that we have to recognize bad leadership, and in doing so, dares us to not only examine the dark side of leadership, but to become better leaders ourselves.
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Looking for help
I am looking for good books on open source. There have been a lot written about the movement and the personalities. I am specifically looking for a good book(s) on how to run a open source project. What I am trying to do is see if there are wider business applications of how open source projects are run.
Here is what books I have thus far (and have only just started reading):
- Rebel Code: Inside Linux and The Open Source Revolution by Glyn Moody (ISBN 0738206709)
- Just for Fun by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond (ISBN 0066620732)
- Managing Open Source Projects by Jan Sandred (ISBN 0471403962)
- Understanding Open Source Software Development by Joseph Feller and Brian Fitzgerald (ISBN 0201734966)
- The Success of Open Source by Steven Weber (ISBN 0674012925)
- Free Software Free Society by Richard Stallman (ISBN 1882114981)
- Open Source: The Unauthorized White Paper by Donald Rosenberg (ISBN 076454660)
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I second that.
I just want to second Jack’s endorsement of Bo Peabody’s “Lucky or Smart?: Secrets to an Entrepreneurial Life”.
The first thing I would say is this book should not be confused with the other titles that have been released this fall on the subject of luck. Peabody does start the book by saying, “Lucky things happen to entrepreneurs who start fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive companies.” and “…the best way to ensure that lucky things happen is to make sure lots of things happen.”
The rest of the book is about the things you should be doing. Peabody thinks you should figure out if you really are an entrepreneur. If you are, make sure you have friends that aren’t – they are the one you are going to run your company. He says you also need faith and perseverance. He says some other things too.
It looks like the book is coming out right around New Year’s. We’ll let you know when you can get your hands on a copy.
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