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June 23, 2008

Excerpt from Branded Male – Attacking Mr. JetSet

Filed under: Misc. — 800-CEO-READ @ 9:25 am
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This excerpt is taken from chapter 6 of Branded Male: Marketing to Men by Mark Tungate. From the publisher: “Branded Male discusses the evolution of the male consumer and the efforts of marketers to tap into the underdeveloped male market. Using a typical modern male’s weekday as a template, the book considers all the opportunities for marketing to him and the best ways to exploit these opportunities. Through this template, Branded Male examines male-centered branding in areas as diverse as cars, restaurants, technology, fashion and grooming, bars, gyms and books. Tungate also traces the evolution of the male consumer over the course of the past years, providing insight into how marketing experts have successfully targeted men.”

ATTACKING MR JETSET
In Europe, many travelers are beginning to ask themselves whether flying is really the most efficient solution. Security phobia has turned most airports into Kafkaesque labyrinths, with Heathrow topping the list of travelers’ least-loved hubs. Interminable check-ins, brusque security staff, the indignity of forced shoe removal and the injudiciously applied liquid ban are all encouraging consumers to snub airports — at least for short-haul destinations.
The alternative is Europe’s growing network of high-speed rail services. With tickets growing more affordable and technology advancing apace — trains now travel at up to 330 km/h — gliding is becoming hipper than flying. In July 2007, seven of Europe’s high-speed train operators formed an alliance called RailTeam, whose goal is to offer seamless rail transport across the continent (www.railteam.eu). At the time of writing, the service links France with the UK, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany and Austria. By 2010 it expects to carry 25 million customers and serve 65 cities. It is estimated that actual travel now accounts for 20 per cent of the flying experience, so for trips of a short to moderate length, the train makes more sense. With security kept to a minimum, business travelers can use the time they would have spent in a queue tapping away at their laptops while verdant countryside zips past their window.
One of the main brands to benefit from this rail revolution is Eurostar, which in November 2007 opened its new terminal at St Pancras International. The station served a newly operational stretch of high speed rail line that cut journey times between London and Paris to two hours and fifteen minutes — and between London and Brussels to just over an hour and fifty minutes.
Eurostar UK marketing director Greg Nugent can list numerous reasons why the train is better than the plane, concern over climate change being one of them. ‘Business people are well-informed and the debate about emissions certainly won’t have escaped them. Many will opt for the train to reduce their carbon footprint, perhaps at the prompting of their employers. In general, though, they just hate being seen as out of date.’
Eurostar has created a program called Tread Lightly, which aims to reduce carbon emissions by 25 per cent per customer by 2012. But this is by no means the first time the rail service has attacked air travel.
In 2002, it embarked on an initiative to ‘relaunch’ the Eurostar brand with a campaign that directly targeted business travelers. At the time, there were already several factors in Eurostar’s favor. The business world was tightening its belt after 9/11, with restrictions on travel expenditure. The image of flying was still wobbly, with residual paranoia about possible terrorist attacks. Eurostar was seen as relatively stress- and hassle-free compared to flying, and punctuality was at an all-time high — an obvious plus for the business community.
At the same time, however, Eurostar was being forced to compete with low-cost airlines. Many business travelers were locked into frequent flyer programes that delivered air miles. Worse than that, they considered Eurostar ‘basic and functional’ compared to the VIP service they were used to getting on long-haul business travel. Overseas trips were so linked to the executive lifestyle that some passengers felt that flying conferred status — to fly for work was to have arrived. (‘Eurostar — How Mr JetSet made Eurostar. mean business’, IPA Effectiveness Awards, 2006.)
Greg Nugent recalls: ‘When I came to work at Eurostar, it had very little experience in targeting business travelers. I felt they shouldn’t be too much of a problem to reach because they were easy to spot and had obvious needs. We worked with a psychologist called John Armstrong to identify exactly what they got out of flying. Among several insights, we found that they felt flying on business gave them some sort of elite status, while secretly admitting that it was boring and stressful.’
Business travelers demand special treatment. They do not like to be associated with tourists — in fact, they like to remain as far away from the herd as possible — and they demand certain comforts that help them work more efficiently either during or at the other end of their journey. But Nugent and his team unearthed another insight, which is that business travelers are not just business travelers.
‘Looking at a crop of advertising campaigns at the time, we realized that business people were essentially being treated like idiots. They were all lumped into this Wall Street, hard-nosed executive category and they were expected to blindly buy into that. It was always the guy sitting on a plane in his shirt and tie being served a glass of champagne, or punching the air after sealing a deal.’
Internally, this character was referred to as ‘Lufthansa Man’. He later morphed into ‘Mr JetSet’.
‘We wanted to target the intelligent business traveler. After all, business people are just people. Yes, many of them will work on their way to a meeting — but often, on the way home, they’ve loosened their ties and are getting stuck in to a good book, or a magazine, or a DVD. They’re not the one-dimensional work machines you see in most of the advertising aimed at them. We felt that somebody like David Brent [the clueless boss in the TV series The Office] would take the plane just because he thought it was cool. But the more informed traveler would opt for the train.’
Eurostar wanted to build a reputation around its business service, which includes stylish lounges, efficient online booking and a frequent travelers’ program. Nugent adds: ‘We worked on getting the experience right first, because if we’d just relied on the media, the campaign would not have succeeded. There has to be a very strong element of word-of-mouth.’
Nevertheless, the print advertising campaign devised by Eurostar and its agency TBWA London was a key element. It featured an obnoxious cartoon character called Mr JetSet, who retained his fixed grin and self-satisfied demeanor despite the privations of flying. His catchphrase was, ‘I came by plane, you know.’ Other captions included: ‘With no space for his laptop, Mr JetSet can demonstrate his mental agility’; and ’35 missed calls only prove to Mr JetSet how important he is.’ A closed check-in gave Mr JetSet ample opportunity to bellow about how crucial it was that he made his meeting. Each of the posters asked: ‘Fed up with flying? Fly Eurostar.’
In this way, the business traveler was practically shamed into choosing the train instead of the plane for reaching Paris or Brussels. Eurostar saw a subsequent sharp increase in the sales of business class tickets.
While airlines are clearly safe from the challenge of rail on most routes, high speed trains are now criss-crossing Europe — just as bullet trains are streaking across Japan, China and South Korea. The United States has long languished behind — but airport misery, rising petrol prices and traffic congestion have brought the issue to the fore. The wait on the platform could be lengthy, however. ‘U.S. passenger trains chug along at little more than highway speeds — slowed by a half-century of federal preference for spending on roads and airports,’ moaned The Chicago Sun-Times. It observed that although Congress is considering a six-year Amtrak funding bill, the measure proposes US$100 million in first-year grants, ‘paltry considering that California alone needs US$40 billion for a mammoth bullet train project that would link San Francisco and Sacramento with Los Angeles and San Diego’ (‘Still on training wheels’, 7 September 2007).
In the United States and around the world, Mr JetSet will remain a familiar figure in the well-appointed executive lounges that are his natural habitat. But the Eurostar experience in the UK demonstrates that he is developing a conscience — and that marketing to him requires more imagination than it did in the past.
BRANDING TOOLKIT

  • Business travelers are enthusiastic airport shoppers.
  • They expect a luxurious travel experience.
  • This includes sophisticated in-flight entertainment.
  • In-flight marketing initiatives should add to their experience.
  • Sleep, privacy and legroom remain important marketing tools.
  • Frequent flyers are becoming concerned about their ‘carbon footprint’.
  • In Europe and parts of Asia, the train is threatening the plane.
  • Business people are tiring of the ‘inhumanity’ of air travel.

This excerpt is taken from chapter 6 of Branded Male: Marketing to Men by Mark Tungate (c) 2008. Published by Kogan Page Ltd.

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Sad Day

Filed under: Jack's Thoughts — Jack @ 8:45 am
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It was very sad for me to wake up this morning and hear the news. George Carlin is dead.
He was my generation’s comedian. Before Steve Martin and after Lenny Bruce, George Carlin was there.
Another local connection was that he was busted for disorderly conduct in Milwaukee for expressing his “Seven Words” on stage and was hauled off to the poky. Not one of our city’s better days.
Just check out youtube to see why he will be missed.

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June 20, 2008

Open Position: Customer Service Representative

Filed under: The Company — Todd Sattersten @ 3:49 pm
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Customer Service Representative

We are looking for an individual to join our operations group as a customer service representative.

Your job will be to take care of our customers, managing their orders from the time they are taken until the time the shipment arrives. This will involve obtaining all the pertinent information for the order, placing the purchase order with our suppliers, and tracking the order during shipment.

Some important things to keep in mind:

  • The job involves an enormous amount of communication over the phone, through email, and with other members of the office.
  • The position requires patience and empathy as you work with expected and unexpected situations constantly that can impact the customers you work with.
  • You will be working in an open office with 12 other people. This works for us. It may not work for you.
  • We sell and promote books. Liking books will help you like the job.

800-CEO-READ is a division of Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops and specializes in selling business books to corporations, universities, and individuals. The company was started in 1984 and located in Milwaukee’s Historic Third Ward. In the last five years, we have experienced double-digit growth each year and tripled the size of the business.

We have a lot of fun things planned. Come join us!

Location: Milwaukee, WI

Salary Range: $30,000 to $35,000 per year

Benefits: Health, Dental, 401K, and profit sharing

Please respond to by sending a resume and cover letter to todd a t 800ceoread d o t com.

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New excerpt up – from Divide or Conquer

Filed under: General Management,Leadership,Strategy — 800-CEO-READ @ 12:32 pm
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There’s a new excerpt up on our Excerpts Blog. The excerpt is taken from Divide or Conquer: How Great Teams Turn Conflict into Strength by Diana McLain Smith. This chapter examines the the Steve Jobs/John Sculley breakup at Apple in the 1980s, a conflict that nearly destroyed the company.

The story begins:

More than 20 years have passed since Steve Jobs and John Sculley’s much-publicized breakup at Apple. Yet it still serves as a cautionary tale. In two short years, their celebrated camaraderie turned into an antagonism so great it escalated hostilities between divisions, put the firm at risk of a takeover, and sent Steve Jobs into a 12-year exile, from which the firm has only recently recovered. How these leaders went from soul mates to adversaries in such a short time shows how relationships, even those touted as a perfect match, can self-destruct under pressure, leaving a firm to pay the formidable price of a failed relationship.

This case study is one of many found in Divide or Conquer. From the publisher: “Smith shows us how to build work relationships that are flexible and strong enough to survive the toughest challenges… This book will break the myth that relationships are too mysterious to decode and too difficult to change. It offers powerful tools that can help anyone, from new recruits to CEOs.”
Here’s a direct link to the excerpt: http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/008261.html

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Excerpt from Divide or Conquer

Filed under: Misc. — 800-CEO-READ @ 10:50 am
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The following excerpt is taken from Divide or Conquer: How Great Teams Turn Conflict into Strength by Diana McLain Smith. This chapter examines the the Steve Jobs/John Sculley breakup at Apple in the 1980s, a conflict that nearly destroyed the company. From the publisher: “Smith shows us how to build work relationships that are flexible and strong enough to survive the toughest challenges. This book will break the myth that relationships are too mysterious to decode and too difficult to change. It offers powerful tools that can help anyone, from new recruits to CEOs.”


The Life and Death of a Relationship
More than 20 years have passed since Steve Jobs and John Sculley’s much-publicized breakup at Apple. Yet it still serves as a cautionary tale. In two short years, their celebrated camaraderie turned into an antagonism so great it escalated hostilities between divisions, put the firm at risk of a takeover, and sent Steve Jobs into a 12-year exile, from which the firm has only recently recovered. How these leaders went from soul mates to adversaries in such a short time shows how relationships, even those touted as a perfect match, can self-destruct under pressure, leaving a firm to pay the formidable price of a failed relationship.
When the Jobs and Sculley relationship fell apart, most people chalked it up to personalities: Jobs was too volatile, Sculley too cautious. Others cited circumstances: mounting competitive pressures put otherwise kindred spirits at odds. Still others said their chemistry wasn’t right: they may have seemed the perfect match, but Sculley was way too corporate, Jobs too iconoclastic. While each explanation holds merit, all overlook the most intriguing and instructive aspect of what happened: the way their relationship developed over time.
Only by understanding how relationships form, develop, and die can you see why people form ill-fated matches, why certain personalities clash, and why some relationships break down so quickly and completely under pressure. And only by understanding how relationships form, develop, and die do you stand a chance of altering the course a relationship takes. By looking closely at how the Jobs and Sculley relationship developed over the course of three stages, we can extract timeless lessons about the life and death of a relationship–and its impact on the firm.
Stage 1: How a Relationship Forms
When someone joins a team, everyone spends a good deal of time defining their formal roles in relation to each other. In some cases, they’ll spend anywhere from weeks to months negotiating everything from tasks to responsibilities to financial rewards to decision rights. Unbeknownst to all involved, as these negotiations unfold, another deal is being struck: people are also defining their informal roles by signaling to each other through their interactions the emotional responsibilities they’ll each assume, the psychological rewards they’ll each need, and the interpersonal rights they’ll each claim.
It is the interplay between these two deals that sets the foundation of a relationship. By paying attention to both deals, you’re much more likely to get a relationship off to a good start. Conversely, as the Jobs and Sculley relationship shows, when you ignore the informal deal you strike, you’re much more likely to get into trouble, and you’re much more likely to be stunned and amazed when you do.
The Story: The Perfect Match
When Steve Jobs and John Sculley first met at a January 1983 dinner following a private preview of Apple’s new Lisa computer, their mutual attraction was obvious to everyone. One Apple chronicler, Frank Rose, tells the story of that midwinter evening in New York:

After an hour or so they went downstairs, where Sculley’s limousine was waiting to take them to the Four Seasons for dinner. It was a car that seemed as big as an airplane, with a bar and a TV and a driver named Fred, all on call twenty-four hours a day…. They swept down Park to Fifty-Second … and pulled up at the discreetly canopied entrance to the Four Seasons. Sculley led them into the travertine anteroom, up the stairway to the reservations desk, past the enormous Picasso stage curtain, and into the stark opulence of the Pool Room.
Over dinner the unlikely chemistry between Jobs and Sculley became readily apparent. Despite their obvious differences in age and background–Sculley was strictly Ivy League and corporate, having graduated from Brown University and the Wharton School and having spent most of his professional life at Pepsi; Jobs, seventeen years his junior, had dropped out of Oregon’s funky little Reed College during his freshman year–they somehow clicked. It was almost as if each tapped something unrealized in the other. There was a cool, crisp professionalism to Sculley that Jobs respected, a utopian fervor to Jobs that Sculley found intriguing. Sculley was a man who knew how to run a multimillion-dollar enterprise. Jobs was a kid who proved he could change the world. Put them together….

Earlier that same day, the differences between Sculley and Jobs were as apparent as their affection was at dinner. While Jobs was jumping up and down with enthusiasm for his spanking-new product, Sculley held back. He was looking at the product through the eyes of a corporate executive at the helm of a traditional company in an industry where winning depended more on cost efficiencies and marketing know-how than on product innovation. Says Rose:

…he didn’t take to it wholeheartedly. He was cautious. He had reservations. He wasn’t sure that this new technology, dazzling as it was, would have much impact at a big corporation like Pepsi, because it didn’t have the IBM logo. No one ever got fired, the saying went, for buying an IBM.

To this side of Sculley, Steve Jobs gave no notice. All he saw was a savvy, ingenious marketer, whom he alone described as “very charismatic.” After all, Sculley was the one who had revived the Pepsi Generation campaign in the late sixties, spurring unprecedented growth for the next six years. By 1978, Pepsi Cola was surpassing Coke in sales for the first time in the firm’s eighty-year history. Perhaps at Apple, Sculley could do the same thing–invent the Apple Generation. That would certainly advance Jobs’s vision of changing the world by resetting the balance of power between the individual and the institution. One person, one computer: that was his motto. Since Apple’s inception, he’d dreamed of bringing power to the people, as the saying from the sixties went. Only, he was going to do it by putting an Apple computer in the hands of every person. With Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak gone and CEO Mike Markkula anxious to move on, the decision whether to hire Sculley was largely up to Jobs. And it looked to him as if Sculley had all the right stuff.
Two months later, the deal was done. In April 1983, Sculley accepted the offer to join Apple as its new president and passed up the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to succeed his mentor, Donald Kendall, as chairman of PepsiCo. To make the jump more palatable, Apple agreed to give the forty-four-year-old Sculley a $1 million salary along with a promised $1 million bonus, a $1 million severance package (in case things didn’t work out), an option to buy 350,000 shares of stock, a $2 million loan to buy a Tudor-style house in the California hills, and $1.3 million for Sculley’s Greenwich (Connecticut) home to save him the trouble of selling it.
Although no small amount in 1983, the money is not what sealed the deal. Nor was it the opportunity to lead a company that was growing at a breakneck pace. No, what sealed the deal was the bond they’d forged out of their mutual attraction to power. For Sculley, Jobs held the awe-inspiring power to change the world; for Jobs, Sculley held the key to unbounded corporate power. It was a heady match, says Frank Rose, seducing them both and preoccupying everyone else:

For weeks they had been gazing worshipfully at each other, finishing each other’s sentences, parroting each other’s thoughts. It was as if they were on a perpetual honeymoon which they had to share with a great many unruly children…. The summer honeymoon between Steve and John was the talk of the company. The two were inseparable. John was listening and learning, and the person he was learning from was Steve…. He seemed so in awe of Steve–his brashness, his charm, his charisma–that he saw everything through Steve’s eyes…. But the infatuation wasn’t one-sided. It was almost like a father-son relationship in which the two adopted each other.

But theirs wasn’t just any father-son relationship. As Sculley later wrote: “I felt that part of my role was to nurture Steve from a prince to a king, so he would someday be able to run the company he cofounded.” That first summer, they were so absorbed with each other that they failed to see what those around them feared most–that their father-son indulgences might demolish a useful, if delicate, balance of power within the firm. Says Rose:

In the original triumvirate–Scotty [Mike Scott] as president, [Mike] Markkula as chairman, and Jobs as visionary–Jobs’s brash enthusiasms had been leavened by Scotty’s stern hand and Markkula’s persuasive manner…. Sculley’s arrival changed all that. John made Steve his partner, not realizing that Steve had never been a partner in running Apple before. Suddenly there were no restraints. Sculley unleashed him, and Steve unleashed what was an astonishing spectacle. People began to liken it to Godzilla being let out of his cage.

But Sculley saw no trace of a monster in the hyperkinetic Jobs. He didn’t understand there was a reason no one had ever granted Jobs unchecked access to power. Nor did he see what he later came to believe: that Jobs was often “stubborn, uncompromising and downright impossible.” All he saw was a prince entitled to inherit the throne of the kingdom he’d cofounded. Similarly, Jobs didn’t see in Sculley what others saw: a cautious leader unlikely to make the bold moves that were second nature to Jobs. Nor did he see what he later came to believe: that Sculley wasn’t really a leader but a “manager,” preoccupied with control and unwilling to provide Jobs the support he needed. At the time, all he saw was a powerful, supportive benefactor committed to helping him realize his dreams.
What the Story Teaches Us
The one characteristic that marks the beginning of all relationships headed for trouble is obliviousness to the informal side of a relationship. Like most executives, those negotiating Sculley’s entry into the firm focused on business matters. They discussed ideas for growing the business; they debated how Apple’s technology might change the world; they talked roles and responsibilities; they negotiated compensation. And in the end, they came up with a deal so full of potential upside and so buffered against downside risk that Sculley couldn’t refuse.
What they didn’t do was take a close look at the relationship between Sculley and Jobs. Sure, everyone could see the two were enamored with each other, but no one questioned why they’d clicked so quickly and so completely. While some found their instant intimacy unsettling and others worried that each was not seeing the other for who he really was, no one could say why or do much about it. All they could do was chalk it up to chemistry and leave it at that.
Most of us do the same thing. When people click or clash, we chalk it up to chemistry and leave it at that. But it is possible to identify and analyze the seemingly mysterious ingredients that go into the makings of a relationship. As this book shows throughout, given the right tools, it is possible to understand what happens when a relationship forms and anticipate what might happen next. For now, let’s look more closely at what happened with Jobs and Sculley in this first stage.
Understanding what happens when a relationship forms. We all bring to relationships our own characteristic ways of interacting with others given our behavioral repertoires. Built out of experience, these repertoires are organized around key themes, such as power, conflict, control, or success. When we negotiate the informal terms of a relationship, these themes give rise to patterns of interaction, through which we signal to each other:

  • the emotional responsibilities we’ll assume (“I’ve gotta help this guy!”) and those we’ll reject (“No way I’m doing that!”)–regardless of formal roles.
  • the interpersonal rights we’ll claim (“You can’t treat me that way!”) and those we’ll relinquish (“Don’t worry about it”)–regardless of any formal deal.
  • the psychological rewards we’ll want to receive (“Just once I wish she’d give me a pat on the back!”) and those we’ll be willing to give (“You did a great job. Thanks.”)–regardless of financial rewards.

When people first meet, their themes intersect to give rise to distinctive patterns of interaction. Acting like DNA, these themes shape the way a relationship’s patterns of interaction evolve over time, defining the formal and informal sides of a relationship. One strand of DNA defining the relationship between Sculley and Jobs was a shared preoccupation with power, leading each of them to see in the other a form of power he coveted. Before Sculley joined Apple in the spring of 1983, the effusive Jobs saw in the more cerebral Sculley the corporate power he needed to change the world. Dazzled by the limousine, the chauffeur, and the opulence of the Pool Room, Jobs paid little attention to Sculley’s more reserved, controlled side. To Jobs, the “charismatic” Sculley must have seemed more thoughtful than controlled, more sophisticated than reserved. And given how low-key Sculley acted, it must have been hard to imagine that he’d ever pose much of a threat. As to how Sculley made it to the top of a highly competitive–some might say cutthroat–firm like Pepsi, Jobs apparently gave little thought, perhaps assuming it was due to his marketing talents. All Jobs saw was a perfect match.
Similarly, Sculley saw in Jobs a brilliant visionary with the power to change the world. Like Jobs, Sculley paid little attention to the behaviors he later found so unacceptable, even though they too were evident right from the start. Jobs’s jumping up and down at the unveiling of Lisa, his unpredictable emotional outbursts, his caustic ridicule of Apple’s competitors all must have seemed part of an otherwise attractive package–rough edges that could be smoothed out over time. Just how that smoothing out would occur, well, that too was assumed rather than anticipated. All Sculley saw was an opportunity to do more than sell sugared water for the rest of his life. With Jobs’s help, he was going to change the world.
Anticipating what might happen next. Two themes in Jobs’s and Sculley’s repertoires not only failed to form a matching set, they downright clashed: Jobs’s well-known disdain for institutional authority (you could say he built the firm and its products upon this disdain), and Sculley’s corporately honed preference and talent for institutional control (to which his tenure at Pepsi was a tribute). As Frank Rose recounts:

[Sculley] liked to tinker with structure. Maybe it was his architectural training, maybe just his natural cast of mind, but he was always thinking about how things fit together. Jobs’s thinking tended to be more intuitive, emotional, and visionary; Sculley was more a systems man, rational and analytical. Form and process were what interested him.

Had anyone paid attention to these differences, they might have given more thought to how they might play out over time. As it was, no one asked what might happen should Sculley seek to impose the kind of corporate controls at Apple he’d imposed at Pepsi. Nor did they ask what might happen should Jobs bristle under that control. Intent on finding a seasoned executive to counterbalance and contain Jobs’s more intuitive, even impulsive leadership style, Apple’s board didn’t think through how all this counterbalancing and containing would occur.
Nor did they anticipate the events their relationship might set in motion or the effect those events might have on the firm’s delicate balance of power.
Excerpted from DIVIDE OR CONQUER: HOW GREAT TEAMS TURN CONFLICT INTO STRENGTH by Diana McLain Smith by arrangement with Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., Copyright (c) Diana McLain Smith, 2008.

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The Future of the Internet

Filed under: Book Reviews — delicious @ 10:02 am
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You guessed it! Another book was brought to my attention the other day when someone called and placed a mass quantity order for their employees to read, the other day. The book was: The Future of the Internet….And How to Stop It. The title alone made my ears tingle, which urged me to find out more about this book and what Zittrain could possibly mean by this ominous title. Well, turns out, he suggests in this book that the internet has set itself up for ‘a complete meltdown’. With all the ‘wiki’-stuff, ‘I”-stuff, etc., the web is getting increasingly muddled.

In just a few years, how we perceive the net is going to be quite dramatically different. It’s already started to morph. Zittrain offers solutions in how we can maintain or even keep ahead of this great change. He also, which was very interesting to me, tells of how this happened (and still is happening) in the first place. Then, he even goes on to tell us about the ‘next best thing’ and how this is going to further breakdown the net. It’s call the XO laptop, and well, you’ll have to read the book to find out more about that. It’s just in several countries right now, but what it can do will (and should) astound you.

Here’s what some people said about this book:

“Jonathan Zittrain does what no one has before – he eloquently and subtly pinpoints the magic that makes Wikipedia, and the Internet was a whole, work. The best way to save the Internet is to turn off your laptop until you’ve read this book.” – Jimbo Wales, Founder, Wikipedia
“Zittrain provides a compelling account of the changes that have shaped the Internet and where it is heading. His assessment of the future of communications, collaboration, and privacy provides important food for thought for everyone who will shape – or be shaped by – the future of this thechnology.” – Brad Smith, General Counsel, Microsoft Corp.

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June 19, 2008

Moneyball Author Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair

Filed under: Big Ideas — dylan @ 3:19 pm
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If you are a baseball fan, or even just a fan of great writing, I highly recommend you check out Michael Lewis’s recent article for Vanity Fair about sports agent Gus Dominguez, who has been convicted (wrongly, Lewis believes) of smuggling Cuban baseball players to the United States. In it, he follows the story back to Cuba and paints a fascinating portrait of baseball there. Peter Gammons recently stated on Baseball Tonight that the most exciting baseball experience of his life was watching a game in Havana, and you can almost taste that kind of excitement in this piece by Lewis.

Other than the incomparable Bill James, Lewis may be the man most responsible for popularizing the sabermetric approach to analyzing baseball. His seminal book Moneyball, in which he profiled the work of Billy Beane–GM of the Oakland Athletics–led many baseball fans to a better appreciation of just how valuable walks and On Base Percentage are. Joe Posnanski, of the Kansas City Star and author of The Soul of Baseball, described that phenomenon recently on his blog.

One of the reasons the book Moneyball was such a success, I think, is that it gave us a fascinating glimpse at how the magic trick worked. Yes, there was a lot of stuff in there about the draft, a lot of stuff about finding pitchers who throw funny, a lot of stuff about not selling jeans. But it seems to me the epiphany was that the Oakland A’s just walked a whole helluva lot. [...] They walked and walked and freaking walked, And those walks turned a fat, limited, defensively challenged, John Jaha, Matt Stairs, Giambi Brothers bunch into a good enough offensive team to back up the Big 3 pitchers and win 87, 91 and 102 games.

With walks playing a starring role in Moneyball, many people just then started to realize how valuable and under-appreciated walks have been through the years. Not only does the walker get to go to first base, but he he uses up some of the pitchers valuable pitch count, he creates frustration, he has a chilling effect on the stadium atmosphere. I’m not suggesting that an increase in walks is good for baseball … it is not, nothing in the game is more boring than a walk. But years ago, Pat Riley discovered that his New York Knicks could win basketball games by bullying and clawing and shoving and making basketball boring beyond pain. Sure, walks are boring. But they work.

Although you’ll find it in the Sports and Recreation section of your local bookstore, Moneyball will be one of the books featured in Jack and Todd’s 100 Best Business Books of All Time (which now has an ISBN and amazon page!) because it is essentially about managing an organization and changing an entire field of business with fresh thinking and new approaches. Jack contends that Michael Lewis is in the class of Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion as a contemporary non-fiction writer. The Vanity Fair story certainly has me convinced.

VF Daily also interviewed Lewis about this recent article, and you can read that here.

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June 18, 2008

First Stop in the New World

Filed under: Book Reviews — delicious @ 1:03 pm
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I’ve commented before on how small the world is getting and how business attitudes have and must change to comply this fact. Many places around the globe are either losing their stance with the global economy because they may have not recognized the need for change or they just lost the “IT” factor; while other countries are picking up the flack, so to speak. First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century gives such a locale as an example that many people have either not thought about being in a power position or just written off because they don’t know much about the city.

According to David Lida, Mexico City is such a place that may be a viable place for business of the future to take a stronghold in. He has worked in the city for many years and his book reads like a sharp-witted, David Sedaris type memoir, making it accessible to just about everyone. Lida projects Mexico City as a key player in the twenty-first century and gives graphic details of its culture, sex, politics, economics, corruption, and “the brutal interactions of everyday commerce”.

Think of it: Paris in the nineteenth century. New York in the twentieth. Mexico City in the twenty-first?

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Pecha Kucha Night – Slideshow – June 17, 2008

Filed under: Big Ideas,Innovation,The Company — 800-CEO-READ @ 11:28 am
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Our first Pecha Kucha Night was a great success! We had a ton of fun–check out the pictures–and were impressed with each of the presenters. I’m sure we’ll share more thoughts this week, but for now we invite you to enjoy Pecha Kucha Night as we experienced it. You can also view the show over at our Flickr site.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
The next Pecha Kucha Night is August 26 at the Hi Hat Garage.

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June 17, 2008

Fall book preview – Relevance by Tim Manners

Filed under: Marketing — 800-CEO-READ @ 11:12 am
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A crop of books about brand marketing has sprung up this past publishing season. We’re starting to receive galleys of the fall books. This one just came across my desk and caught my eye: Relevance: Making Stuff That Matters by Tim Manners. It was the marketing copy on the back cover that drew me in. “Branding expert Tim Manners says that marketers should give up the flashy practices and groupthink of the last fifty years–the demographics-driven strategies, fashion-obsessed things, and old-fashioned advertising. Today’s customers don’t care about those things. All they want to know is, “Why should I care? What’s in it for me?”
This is a book we’ll be keeping our eye on when it pubs in September. Here’s a snippet from the working introduction:

An epidemic of irrelevance has brought once-powerful brands to their knees. The virus is an inordinate fixation on demographics-driven strategies, fashion-forward images, and media-focused communications.
The autopsy points to a lack of organic growth.
The cure is a reaffirmation of the essence of marketing, which is simply to help people solve problems and live happier lives. Interestingly, at least a few brands have managed to make comebacks after years in the wilderness.

  • Levi’s reasserted relevance when it created wardrobe solutions for men.
  • Hasbro reasserted relevance when it reinvented board games for today’s time-pressed consumers.
  • Staples reasserted relevance when it stopped wasting its shoppers’ time with extraneous products.

Manners goes on to describe a number of precepts that have shaped marketing practices for the past half century, and then offers a solution: six principles relevant brands understand and embrace.
Side note: Did you know that you can sign up for RSS updates on the books you’re interested in? You can receive notices when we post an excerpt, blog post, interview with the author, or other news about a particular book. Relevance comes out September 18, but you can pre-order it from us or sign up for notifications from our blogs.

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