The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Freres & Co.
The Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book Award was announced at a gala dinner last night at the British Library in London, and William D. Cohan took home the prize. That is pretty remarkable considering that this is his debut effort, and an impressive debut it is, weighing in at a hefty 742 pages. The book tells the story of Lazard Freres & Co., where Cohan worked for six years as an associate. It is not a very flattering look at the culture on Wall Street. In fact, looking at the shortlist as a whole, no one is making a case for that status quo. Both The last Tycoon and The Black Swan take on Wall Street–though The Black Swan does so on a more intellectual than cultural level. Both Zoom and Wikinomics make the case for a paradigm shift in how we do business, and in Immigrants, Philippe Legrain argues for more open immigration policies. Even Alan Greenspan, in The Age of Turbulence, heads in directions you wouldn’t expect. Taken together, these six books are (borrowing Greenspan’s subtitle) “adventures in a new world”. Congratulations to Mr. Cohan for winning amongst such company.
Here is a good interview with him about the book, the award, and Wall Street in general.
October 26, 2007
And the Winner is…
October 25, 2007
Jack Covert Selects – The Future of Management
The Future of Management by Gary Hamel with Bill Breen, Harvard Business School Press, 288 pages, $26.95 Hardcover, September 2007, ISBN 9781422102503
Gary Hamel is a smart man. After he published his best selling book, co-authored with C.K. Prahalad, called Competing for the Future, I saw him speak to a bunch of booksellers at our annual convention, and trust me–this guy knows what he’s talking about. He talked about business to a bunch of people who really dig pretty much anything but business, and he got a standing ovation after his presentation.
In the past I struggled with reading Hamel because it felt as though his books had not been written to me. I had a hard time reading and understanding them because I felt like I couldn’t relate to the subject. But The Future of Management is a book about a subject I have lived with for quite awhile.
Hamel believes that along with operational and strategic and product innovation, management innovation is essential to going forward. He believes that:
What ultimately constrains the performance of your organization is not its business model, not its operating model, but its management model. Hence this book. My goal is to help you become a 21st century management pioneer, to equip you to reinvent the principles, processes and practices of management for our post-modern age. I will argue that management innovation has a unique capacity to create a long-term advantage for your company, and I will outline the steps you must take to first imagine, and then invent, the future of management.
Gary Hamel is not afraid to make bold statements. He spends a big chunk of the first half of the book showing us how bad things currently are and how everything has changed but not the way we currently manage people. Then he gets to some really interesting stuff when he profiles Whole Foods, W.L.Gore and Google, shows how they became management innovators, and points out the benefits they received from this change.
Another part of the book I found truly useful was Hamel’s discussion of “learning from the fringe,” where, by going out on your own, “you can find amazing feats of ‘organizing’ and ‘managing’ that don’t involve ‘organizations’ and managers.’” On the fringe, Hamel says, “you will see the shadow of the future.”
links for 2007-10-25
-
Yum Brands Inc. chairman and chief executive David Novak isn’t your typical corporate chieftain. Any doubts about that should have vanished when, in celebrating the company’s initial public offering 10 years ago this month, he wore a yellow foam cheese he
-
The book’s first half is a memoir; the rest is essays on the main economic issues confronting governments over the next few decades [ link].
-
But niches do not need to imply narrow-mindedness. On the contrary, as Mr Sunstein accepts, the internet holds far more promise than risk. Mr Penn, for his part, remains an optimist [link].
-
When [Feeney] became a philanthropist, his gifts came on condition that his name never appeared on any press release or plaque [link].
October 24, 2007
If you liked A Whole New Mind…
Dan Pink’s publishing a new book in April. This one’s a bit different.
It’s actually a manga — a type of book started in Japan that has become widely popular throughout Europe. What is a manga, from Dan’s lead piece in this month’s Wired:
Published on flimsy newsprint and often as thick as a Baltimore phone book, these magazines can contain 25 different serialized stories that run about 20 pages each. The most popular series then get repackaged as paperback graphic novels. These books dominate long stretches of Japanese bookstores, and their sales figures would make American authors and publishers weep with envy. One example among many: The paperback editions of Bleach, a series about a ghost-spotting teenager that has been running in Weekly Shonen Jump for the past six years, have sold some 46 million copies (in a country of 127 million people).
And manga, unlike most American comics, isn’t reserved for freaks, geeks, and pip-squeaks. Ride the Tokyo subway and you’ll see passengers peering at their mobiles. But you’ll also inevitably spot gray-haired businessmen, twentysomething hipsters, and Japanese schoolgirls alike paging through a manga weekly or a graphic novel. The city of Hiroshima even has a bustling public library devoted entirely to manga.
Dan spent two months in Japan researching mangas and their popularity (which keeps falling in Japan even while manga’s following raises elsewhere). And so, Dan will use that research as he unveils the first American business manga in April. Can’t wait to see it!
Chip Conley on Maslow
I have a new podcast posted where I interview Chip Conley, author of Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow.
October 23, 2007
Ask 8cr! – Let's have a meeting!
Welcome to “Ask 8cr!” – a new section of our blog where we’ve created a forum to find out what kinds of issues and challenges people are having in the workplace. We then take these issues and apply a business book we feel offers a viable solution. Others then chime in via the comments section. The person with the selected challenge gets a free copy of the book, but everyone who reads these posts, wins. Do you have a challenge at work? Send it to me at jon(a)800ceoread(dot)com.
Today’s challenge deals with the habit of unproductive meetings. Here’s the brief challenge sent from one of our readers:
“Working with a team of people who have meetings that never accomplish much.” – Nathan
Short and to the point, it’s maybe obvious that Nathan is fed up with long, dull meetings where much is discussed, but little is accomplished. I’m sure many of us have experienced this scenario, reminding us of our least-favorite high school class: meetings as pure formality, and nothing inspiring or changed because of them.
Business fable writer Patrick Lencioni tells a similar story in his book Death by Meeting. The strong title implying not only a humorous take on boredom, but also revealing that as meetings accomplish less and less, the fate that the business will face is inevitable. If that isn’t enough to scare your group into waking up and taking meetings seriously, Lencioni paints an even darker picture by portraying this story via a group of people who, by normal standards, initially would be considered to be doing a “good job.”
Complacency is the key issue here. Oftentimes, employees (especially those that work for successful companies) assume that somehow things will always work out, meeting or not. And if that’s true, then who really cares about the meeting? Meaning, important questions are left unasked, attendance becomes voluntary, and accountability all but disappears. Enough is contributed to “get by” and the meetings continue on and on, just for the sake of having them, with no real results attached.
In the book, the company portrayed is going through a traumatic change (I won’t give the whole story away), but all seems well, outside of those in-the-know. Their meetings should be important on many levels – to address the issues within the change that’s occurring, but also to keep the company culture and productivity moving forward, and remaining profitable. But as the employees show up (or not) dreadfully each week, the biggest accomplishment they produce by meeting is physically sitting in the same room together. Hopefully, Nathan’s scenario isn’t as severe, but as the book points out, if meetings are continuously happening, with no results attached, things for the group, and the company, won’t proceed positively.
Lencioni details how this company turned their situation around via their meetings, and in doing so, lays out a clear method for changing how meetings function (comparing them to movies) and how their results can be improved by adding a crucial element: conflict. Seems strange at first, but the author identifies how conflict is exactly what draws our interest to movies. If we add conflict to meetings, in the appropriate way, at the right time, the attendees will be captivated, involved, and willing to act (something they can’t do with all the emotion they get during a movie). As a fable, the book realistically presents this process, identifying the typical characteristics, the common human patterns, the everyday world of conference rooms, and shows how one company tapped into this thinking to completely transform their company. Now, how about all of us?
Peak Interview with Chip Conley
This week’s interview is with Chip Conley, author of Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow.
Chip runs San Francisco based hotelier Joie de Vivre Hospitality and he is a big fan of Abraham Maslow. Chip has adopted Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to apply to employees, customers, and investors. It is intriguing stuff.
[podcast]http://www.800ceoread.com/blog/audio/peakinterview.mp3[/podcast]
October 22, 2007
New Excerpt – The Engine of America
We’ve got a new excerpt up on the Excerpts blog, chapter 4 of The Engine of America: The Secrets to Small Business Success from Entrepreneurs Who Have Made It! by Hector V. Barreto. CEOs of 50 successful small businesses, some of which have become large corporations, share their experiences of growing their own business.
This chapter is about challenging conventional wisdom and accepted practices.
The author profiles two women who in traditionally male-dominated positions, at a time when it was an accepted belief that they would fail, became successful leaders of major corporations.
Conventional wisdom often stops people in their tracks. This is not necessarily bad. If the conventional wisdom is that a small business will not survive and grow without proper financing — a truism that has been shown to be true countless times — and this rightly should act as a stumbling block to the nascent small business owner who intends to start a venture on a shoestring and hope for the best.
But conventional wisdom should not stand in the way when the belief is based on outmoded facts, wrong premises, or prejudice.
Here’s a direct link to the excerpt: http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/007422.html
Demystifying the Best-Seller List
The Best-Seller List is one of the most fascinating and confusing aspects of the book publishing industry. Almost every time we work with a business book author, a conversation comes up about what being on the list means, and how a book can “hit” it. Having a best-seller can really make an author’s success and drive future sales of the book, and future sales of future books…while at the same time many truly wonderful books will never hit the list.
Sunday’s New York Times had a great article about the its Best-Seller List: “Books for the Ages, if Not for the Best-Seller List” by Clark Hoyt. One question we’re often asked is, How many books do I have to sell to make the list? It’s a tough question to answer because the list is such a complicated beast. Booksellers report their sales in different ways, long-standing best-sellers might be taken off the list to give new books a chance to shine, and even books with very high sales numbers might not make the list because of timing–especially when several big books hit the shelves at the same time. Hoyt explains some of these discrepancies:
There are usually differences between the Times list and others, often, apparently, because of timing or because different lists put books in different categories. USA Today, for example, combines all books — fiction, nonfiction, paperback and hardcover — into a single list. No book is ever banished as an “evergreen,” meaning “Night” can be found at No. 129 this week, nine spots below “The Official SAT Study Guide.” But “for what The New York Times is doing,” Sorensen said, “it’s very accurate.”
Why banish a book just because it has been around a long time? The Times wants a list “that’s lively and churns and affords new authors the opportunity to be recorded,” Hofmann said.
I encourage you to check out the article if you’re at all interested in how certain books end up on that list in Sunday’s book section of the newspaper. While the article doesn’t go deep into the science of the bestseller list, it does show it has been set up to generate an interesting list that is a reflection of real sales and consumers’ current interests.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/opinion/21pubed.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
