There is quite a list of resources at the end of The 100-Mile Walk. There is an extensive list on leadership and a great list on zen practice.
The list is pretty long, so I am going to put it in the extended entry.
Click through if you are interested…
I thought we had seen all of the lists for 2005, but Forbes published their selections on Tuesday.
To determine the very best of the crop, we polled a dozen writers, editors and publishers from Forbes. Thirty-three books were nominated, which we then winnowed down to the five very best, with the help of the editors of Forbes magazine and Forbes.com. We did not attempt rank the top five–all of them are excellent in completely different ways. Try these tomes, and you’ll be all caught up on your 2005 business reading.
Their selections are:
Hat Tip: BizBook Nuggets
Milton Hershey — an almost universally recognized name, typically one that is printed in silver on a dark brown background. Yep. You know the one. The infamous Hershey bar, kisses and miniatures and of course, the town — Hershey, Pennsylvania.
Some call him A Real Life Willy-Wonka but few know all the details behind his life story. So, without permission or sponsorship from the Hershey Company, Michael D’Antonio set out to tell the story behind the chocolate bar everyone knows. The book: Hershey: Milton S. Hershey’s Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams.
Prior to being published earlier this January, the book fell under a bit of fire from the Hershey Co. Hershey was concerned that “consumers might think Hershey authorized the book, the dust jacket of which also includes a Hershey’s Kiss and two older advertising images“. Apparently, the Hershey book provides a little more depth to Mr. Hershey than that obtained through a typical Hershey Co. visit. Accordingly, the book’s publisher–Simon & Schuster, and booksellers have worked to ensure that customers do not believe that Hershey sponsored the book. This has included making a special sticker on the book cover that reads, “Neither authorized nor sponsored by the Hershey Company” and by copying the same quote into product pages.
You can check out a BusinessWeek review here or find out more information on the lawsuit here.
Biography or not, Mr. Hershey has left a lasting legacy — chocolate bars and kisses.
“For me the hiring is the easy part. I don’t run a multi-national corporation, so I’m right here all the time. For me the hard part is letting go and avoiding the temptation to micro-manage everything they do. You’ve got to keep telling yourself you hired them for a reason, and then give them the freedom to go out there and do what’s right, even if it means making a mistake now and then.”
Bill Mossontte
Mission Hill Bowl
Mission Hills, California
From Satisfaction: How Every Great Company Listens to the Voice of the Customer by Chris Denove and James D. Power IV (Feb. 2006)
What’s your favorite brand? Do you prefer Pepsi or Coca-Cola? Starbucks or Seattle’s Best? Target or Wal-Mart? Adidas or Nike? I could go on and on.
Me, I’m often in favor of a Starbucks tall skinny vanilla latte, Target’s Isaac Mizrahi line and Nike’s running shoes. Have I bonded with the brands I just named? Perhaps. Admittedly, in some cases, yes. In others, the brands equate higher quality or lower price for better quality and there’s something about the froth that lightly floats on top of my latte. Okay, so perhaps I am attached to the brands.
There’s a new book called Primal Branding that recently came out. The author, Patrick Hanlon — founder and CEO of Thinktopia — did an interview in Entrepreneur magazine in February’s edition. To sum up the book in a sentence, it’s about the DNA of brands divided into seven parts. The seven parts in collaboration work to create the “primal code”.
Hanlon believes that with the hundreds of choices consumers have, it “boils down to whom customers feel better about. That’s called preference and preference creates sales.”
To give you an idea of Hanlon’s background, he’s worked with Absolut, Barnes and Noble, Best Buy and more. One could easily conclude that the primal code works only for big companies such as those aforementioned.
This is not the case. Branding “actually gives small businesses a huge competitive advantage, not just at a functional and benefits level, but at an emotional level. This is really a way to manage the intangibles of the brand and make it operational.”
What do you think?
I got a great conversation with Sander and Jonathan Flaum about their new book The 100-Mile Walk: A Father and Son on a Quest to Find The Essence of Leadership. They have what they call their nine P’s of leadership (People, Purpose, Passion, Performance, Persistence, Perspective, Paranoia, Principles, Practice) and we talk about a number of them.
What makes the book and this podcast so great is hearing two very different perspectives on what it means to be a leader. We talk about finding meaning, Sandy Koufax, and “how we’ll never get it right”.
mp3, 40:26, 27.8MB
Sander’s Book Picks
Jonathon’s Book Picks
On Friday, Daniel Akst wrote a business book review for the Wall Street Journal. It was titled “O Captain, My Captain” and looked at three titles: The Servant Leader, The 360° Leader, and Executive Intelligence.
It is rare that WSJ will review business books. For being the leading business publication in America, it is something that only happens about once a month. It makes no sense to me.
What makes it worse is they generally want to torpedo the books. This is again something I don’t understand. Why not look for business ideas and thoughts that you can support? Is it that rare? Why not just tell your readers about new books and let them make their own judgement?
In this case, one out of three make the cut. Akst likes The Servant Leader saying, “Although it rambles in places, it contains an excellent synopsis of just what a leader is supposed to do”. John Maxwell’s latest book gets “[after 40 books], is there really that much for any one person to say on the subject?” and Justin Menkes is told that there is no evidence that executive intelligence exists or played a role in any of the examples he mentions.
At first glance, it will look like we are just disagreeing with the reviewer. Jack selected The 360° Leader in January as one of his books of the month. I liked Executive Intelligence having interviewed Justin in November (read the HBR article if you don’t have time for the book).
I want to get at a deeper point. At 800ceoread, we at read and review business books to find the good. There is almost always something I can pull out of a book to share with you. Sometimes, it reinforces commonly held beliefs of how business should be done. Sometimes, it flies in the face of it. Either way, it all helps us down the path of understanding how we can be better business people.
We had Chris and VG (10 Rules for Strategic Innovators) over for a podcast in December. You can now see VG in full color over at Business Week Online. The interview is about eight and a half minutes long.
Pat Lencioni (Five Dysfunctions of a Team; Silos, Politics, and TurfWars) does Three Answers with Publishers Weekly.
Welcome to a new week (and for those in Wisconsin–new snow!).
We are going to be getting back on the podcasting bandwagon this week. We have recorded a number of new interviews with fun and interesting folks. This week, we will be posting an audio Q&A with Sander and Jonathon Flaum, authors of 100-Mile Walk.
I am also going to get a post up about the book you should be looking for in 2006. There is alot of great stuff coming out.
And then there will be the normal stuff…
Have a great week!
