August « 2008 « 800 CEO Read

August 29, 2008

Steven Levy's Top 10 Technology Titles

Filed under: Uncategorized — dylan @ 3:20 pm

You may know Steven Levy for his many books–his most recent is The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness–or from his work covering technology for various magazines. He made the move to writing full time for Wired after 12 years at Newsweek just this year (I linked to his recent review of Anathem last week).
A true expert on the matter, he recently published his list of the top 10 general-interest technology books over at ieee spectrum online, writing:

Any great nonfiction book combines education with entertainment. In drafting my A-list of general-interest books about technology, I considered impact and significance but gave still more weight to the reading experience. This is a collection where lay readers can appreciate each entry–and engineers, programmers, and other tech professionals can’t afford to miss a single one.

His choices are:

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance

Mirror Worlds: Or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox…How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean

A New Kind of Science

Godel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

The Design of Everyday Things

The Soul of a New Machine

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

The Making of the Atomic Bomb
You can find the original article, with detailed reviews of every book on the list, here.
Have a great Labor Day everyone!

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The Age of Speed

Filed under: Uncategorized — dylan @ 9:30 am

Vince Poscente understands the opportunities speed offers. At age 26, he took up speed skiing, and merely four years later, he would race to a Canadian national record of 135 miles per hour at the Winter Olympics in Albertville, France.
That was 1992. Three years later he hit the road as a motivational speaker, and would land in the Speaker Hall of Fame after only eight years on the circuit.
Last year, he released The Age of Speed: Learning to Thrive in a More-Faster-Now World with our good friend, business book publisher/sage Ray Bard of Bard Press. The title quickly became a national bestseller, making The New York Times, The USA TODAY, and Wall Street Journal lists.
Ballantine picked up the paperback rights to the book, and it was released on Tuesday, updated “with 20 brand-new tips to help you make the most of your time.”
If you’re looking for a great holiday-weekend read, I would certainly consider The Age of Speed. As Poscenti says, “Speed is the only way to get more time, more life.” His book aims to help you harness the power of that speed, instead of drowning in its current. Take The Age of Speed with you for the weekend, and come back to work Tuesday morning and hit the ground running while everyone else is moping back into a shortened workweek.

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August 28, 2008

Nick Hornby on Naked Economics

Filed under: Book Reviews — dylan @ 9:30 am

In Naked Economics, Charles Wheelan makes an analogy between music “piracy” and farming, writing “You spend all summer tending to your corn crop and then your neighbor drives by in his combine, waves cheerily, and proceeds to harvest the whole crop for himself.”
Though an overall fan of the book, Nick Hornby disagrees with that specific sentiment. Writing about it on his blog on Tuesday, he grabbed hold of Wheelan’s analogy and took it to a hilarious conclusion. After making a concise point about the very different nature of corn and music as products, he goes on to write:

(One reason why people–OK, evil people–feel it’s OK to download, say, a Jay-Z album without paying for it is that there are few outward signs that Jay-Z is suffering as a result.) Or is the record company the farmer, in Wheelan’s analogy? Well, if the farmer had spent decades overcharging grotesquely for corn, … then perhaps the thieves would have been cheered all the way to the bootleg farmer’s market.

This being a family blog, I cut out what exactly the record company execs spent their “grotesque” profits on, but Hornby continues from there, comparing some of the more innovative ways musicians have been releasing their music to traditional farming (and pointing you to online resources for free music along the way).

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The Myth of Multitasking

Filed under: Book Reviews — dylan @ 9:00 am

It seems we all “multitask” these days… talking to a coworker while writing a blog post (Kate), answering the cellphone while crunching the monthly numbers, reading a new email while taking a phonecall. In fact, you’re multitasking right now, aren’t you? Dave Crenshaw would so no, you’re actually not… he would say you’re “switchtasking.” You see, his Myth of Multitasking (watch out, it’s a parable) not only exposes the inefficiencies of multitasking, it states that it doesn’t even exist. Why? Well, in his words:

Because the truth is we really cannot do two things at the same time–we are only one person with only one brain. Neurologically speaking, it has been proven to be impossible. What we are really doing is switching back and forth between two tasks rapidly, typing here, paying attention there, checking our “crackberry” here, answering voicemail there, back and forth back and forth at a high rate. Keep this up over a long period of time, and you have deeply engrained habits that cause stress and anxiety and dropped responsibilities and a myriad of productivity & focus problems. It’s little wonder so many people complain of increasingly short attention spans!

The quote above is taken from Dave’s guest-post at The Cranky Widgets Blog.Since its release on the 18th, the book and author have been on a “blog tour,” being reviewed and interviewed all over the blogosphere. If you’re interested in learning more about Dave and his ideas, I’ve put links to many of those posts below.
Interviews:
Virtually Organized
Black Belt Productivity
Reviews:
awake@thewheel
Get Rich Slowly
Slacker Manager
Change Your Thoughts

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August 27, 2008

New Excerpts from Brand Digital and What's Stopping You?

Filed under: Uncategorized — 800-CEO-READ @ 11:58 am

There are two new excerpts up on that blog devoted to them. The first is from What’s Stopping You: Shatter the 9 Most Common Myths Keeping You from Starting Your Own Business by Duane Ireland and Bruce R. Barringer, and shares three insights into why starting a business is not as expensive as you think.

The other excerpt is from Allen Adamson’s BrandDigital: Simple Ways Top Brand Succeed in the Digital World, and provides the “four criteria by which a good brand driver can be judged.” You may recognize Allen as the author of the popular BrandSimple: How the Best Brands Keep It Simple and Succeed.
The direct links are below:
What’s Stopping You
BrandDigital

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Creative and Personal Mastery coming to Los Angeles

Filed under: Uncategorized — 800-CEO-READ @ 10:18 am

Srikumar Rao, author of Are You Ready to Succeed?, is offering his Creative and Personal Mastery course in Los Angeles for the first time this fall. The course has been wildly popular in its previous incarnations at Columbia Business School, the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley and London Business School.
What is it all about? Let me quote the syllabus:

The thesis of this program is simple. Life is short. And uncertain. It is like a drop of water skittering around on a lotus leaf. You never know when it will drop off the edge and disappear. So each day is far too precious to waste. And each day that you are not radiantly alive and brimming with cheer is a day wasted.
Stop right now and evaluate your life. YOUR LIFE. As it is right now. Are you, by and large and daily variations aside, happier now than you have ever been? Do you have the inner conviction that you are on the path that is just right for you, the one that is transparently leading you to fulfillment in many dimensions–in your career, in relationships, in spiritual development?

If the answer is, NO, ask yourself WHY NOT? The first step to getting there is to refuse to accept anything less.

This program is designed to be that first step for you.

The deadline for application is next Friday, September 5th and there is a deliberately cumbersome application process, so if you’re interested in attending, head over to areyoureadytosucceed.com right away and read the syllabus to see if the course is right for you.
If you do not live in Los Angeles or cannot take the course, you can take the audio version of The Personal Mastery Program, offered on six compact discs.

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How the Wise Decide: Final Post

Filed under: Leadership — Kate @ 8:56 am

For the past few days, we’ve been joined by Bryn and Aaron, authors of How the Wise Decide. If you’d like to catch up on their blog posts, start here. This is their final post for our blog.
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How Wise Leaders Can Help You Make Better Decisions
At a time when business decisions are more challenging than ever before, we set out to answer a simple question: How do the really successful leaders make the tough calls?
Our method was straightforward: Go to the source. We would find people who had made great decisions consistently–people like former American Express CEO Harvey Golub, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and The Blackstone Group chairman and CEO Stephen Schwarzman–and ask them how they did it. We figured that if we could ask enough successful and experienced leaders about their toughest decisions, surely the essence of decision making would emerge. As it turned out, our first inclination–Go to the Source–became our first principle, confirmed time and again by many of the 21 leaders we interviewed.
When it was all over we had distilled six core decision-making principles that have guided wise leaders across functions and industries and brought them through various crises. The six principles–Go to the Source, Fill a Room with Barbarians, Conquer the Fear of Risk, Make Vision Your Daily Guide, Listen with Purpose and Be Transparent–are the guiding lights by which the CEOs in our book, How the Wise Decide, drove the value of their companies up an average of 15 times the S&P 500 during their tenures. They are the basis for how four of our leaders became self-made billionaires, and two won the National Medal of Technology.
The principles sound deceptively simple. But when you read the book you will see, in the stories of how these leaders made their decisions, that executing the principles is the hard part. Following through on any single imperative with the dedication and drive that our wise leaders apply to it requires focus, effort and time. Doing it with all six might seem impossible. Don’t worry. It isn’t.
The principles we outline in How the Wise Decide are universal and timeless. But everyone’s situation is different and there are probably some lessons that will be more useful or easier to execute in your present situation than others. Start there. As you master one principle, begin working on another. But keep all six in mind, perhaps written on an index card you carry in your pocket or purse, because there will always be opportunities to apply them to specific decisions. Even the most cursory use of the six principles will lead to better decisions.
How the Wise Decide isn’t a book about business theories. Rather, it is a practical guide written for managers by managers that provides the advice we all need to make great decisions consistently. Our goal from the start has been to help accelerate you along the path to wise decision making and successful leadership. We believe that in these demanding times, when choosing the right decision is critical, the principles at the heart of How the Wise Decide can help you do just that. Please visit our website, www.wisedecide.com, to learn more.
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Many thanks Aaron and Bryn!

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August 26, 2008

How the Wise Decide: Dermot Dunphy, Part III

Filed under: Leadership — Kate @ 3:31 pm

This blog post comes from the authors of How the Wise Decide. To read part I, click here and part II. Here’s part III:
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Dermot Dunphy, Part III
The real challenge confronting Dermot Dunphy as he pursued his vision for Sealed Ait was how to keep the technological edge that allowed Sealed Air to charge premium prices. Dunphy knew from his own experience that R&D was essentially a joke among most packaging companies. They knew what was important: cutting costs so they could cut prices, then doing it all over again. Conventional marketing wisdom would see Bubble Wrap as a built-in advantage to get Sealed Air in the door among new customers. Then it could grab a bigger share of each customer’s wallet by offering an expanded portfolio of more conventional products.
And then, of course, Sealed Air would be back in the thick of cutting costs in order to cut prices.
Again, Dunphy chose a different direction. He didn’t want to compete with anyone in the commodity business. Instead, he saw Bubble Wrap as only the first of a full line of package protecting products that would emerge from vigorous R&D. Sealed Air would hire researchers in chemistry and mechanical engineering to develop products that didn’t yet exist for customers who knew little or nothing about Sealed Air at that point. And like his decision about the sales force, this solution would be costly and time consuming. But Dunphy knew technology was the only thing that separated Sealed Air from the price cutters.
The combination of a sales force that understood that it sold a benefit rather than a product and a research and engineering team that applied creativity to what was otherwise a moribund business launched Sealed Air on a course from which it hasn’t deviated in more than three decades.
“Every other company in the industry sent people out with catalogs saying ‘How many bags do you need? Here’s our price.’ We sent people out with engineering studies who said ‘Let us look at your back room, let us into your factory. We’ll show you the economic benefits of adopting our thought processes, our designs, and, of course, our products.”[i]
If Dunphy had used his vision’s objectives selectively he might have hired the best sales force but skimped on product R&D, thus wasting the sales team’s talents. Conversely, without smart sales people Sealed Air’s technologically sophisticated products might have languished on warehouse shelves or been sold at unsustainably low prices. By applying his vision every time he made a call, Dunphy ensured that Sealed Air’s decisions were coordinated.
Yet even someone as dedicated to following his vision as Dunphy found himself occasionally tempted to take a short cut. When a company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that produced stretch film to wrap and anchor boxes on pallets came on the market, Dunphy wanted to take a look. He chartered a small jet to ferry the top management team from its New Jersey headquarters to visit the Tulsa company. On the ride home Dunphy reflected on the day, pleased with what he had seen, and began talking about the next steps to move forward with the deal to acquire what he described as a “decent, high-margin business.”
Then Sealed Air’s senior vice president in charge of international activities, a key executive in the company, spoiled Dunphy’s reverie. He told Dunphy that their trip to Tulsa had confirmed what he already suspected: there was no cutting edge technology involved in stretch wrap. To acquire the company Sealed Air would have to deviate from its long-standing vision embodied in Dunphy’s Seven Principles.
“He was slightly shocked that I was considering breaking away from our high standards,” Dunphy recalls. “He half seriously, half amusingly, but rather bitingly accused me of trying to build a bigger company so that I could boast about it to Harvard Business School friends at my forthcoming reunion. That got the message across pretty clearly!” Needless to say, Sealed Air didn’t make the purchase.
There may have been some short-term cost from following Dunphy’s vision so relentlessly, but the long-term benefits were tremendous. By the time Dunphy retired in 2000 his relentless focus on making every decision according to his vision had paid huge dividends. Sealed Air had more than 350 employees in R&D labs scattered around the world and had developed an array of innovative new products in such diverse areas as food and medical packaging. The unprofitable little turnaround that he joined in 1971 had more than $225 million in net income on more than $3 billion in sales and was generating gross margins of 35 to 38 percent in an industry that typically saw returns in the low 20s.[ii,iii] The original investors who hired him saw their holdings rise 8,300 percent over the CEO’s three decades of leadership.[iv] As we point out in How the Wise Decide, packaging may not be a glamorous business, but returns of 8,300 percent certainly are.
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More tomorrow from the authors of How the Wise Decide.

footnotes
^[i] Dunphy interview with Harvard Business School, page 8
^[ii] Sealed Air press release, January 25, 2001, http://ir.sealedair.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=74113.
^[iii] Dunphy interview with Harvard Business School, page 13.
^[iv] Sealed Air press release, October 25, 1999, http://ir.sealedair.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=74279.

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How the Wise Decide: Dermot Dunphy, Part II

Filed under: Leadership — Kate @ 11:58 am

This blog post comes from the authors of How the Wise Decide. To read part I, click here. Here’s part II:
: : : : : : :

Dermot Dunphy, Part II
Formulating a vision is one thing, executing it quite another. The first thing Dermot Dunphy had to decide when he became CEO of Sealed Air was how to build a sales team that could best take advantage of the Bubble Wrap opportunity. He knew dozens of top-notch packaging salesmen, the kind who had Rolodexes bulging with the names of good customers. If he could lure them away from their perches at established companies to join an unknown, unprofitable company they would give Sealed Air an instant foot in the door of the purchasing departments at hundreds of potential customers. Yet he knew they also would bring with them ingrained ways of doing business: discounts, price cuts, deals.
No thanks. Dunphy’s vision of what he wanted Sealed Air to become sent him down a different path. “We didn’t hire anybody from other packaging companies,” he explains. “We started off with the assumption that we wanted our people to be superior. Somebody from the packaging industry would just bring with him the same old mindset. Instead, we only hired people just out of school or people who worked at technical companies like Hewlett Packard or superior sales companies like Procter & Gamble. Then we taught them packaging.”[i]
Finding and training a cadre of sales people to sell benefits, not products, was a costly and time consuming solution, but Dunphy believed it was the only way for Sealed Air to succeed. The sales team would bring a fresh approach, selling promises of protection in an industry in which price had prevailed. But was that all it would take?
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Next up, the lesson.

footnotes
^[i] Dunphy interview with Harvard Business School, page 8.

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Excerpt from BrandDigital

Filed under: Misc. — Zach @ 10:14 am

The excerpt below is from Allen Adamson’s BrandDigital: Simple Ways Top Brands Succeed in the Digital World. It is excerpted from Chapter 10, “Start with a Simple Idea.”
Allen certainly believes in branding simplicity… his first book was BrandSimple: How the Best Brands Keep it Simple and Succeed. Read on for the “four criteria by which a good brand driver can be judged.”

Start with a Simple Idea
The best brands on the planet know the importance of basing their promise and their branding on a simple, relevantly different idea. However, the fact that it’s relevantly different will become irrelevant if you cannot capture this simple idea in a blatantly clear and evocative brand driver. The fact that an idea is simple is also simply not enough. To generate branding that expresses everything you want consumers to associate with the brand, your brand driver must be intuitive enough for everyone doing the branding to understand and sticky enough for them to pass along while keeping its intent intact. Branding today is not linear: it’s everywhere. A succinct, sticky, intuitive brand driver will ensure that your branding will be easily understood by those doing the branding and those influenced by the branding: the consumers. There are four criteria by which a good brand driver can be judged. To make it a snap, they all start with the letter S.

1. Simple. A brand driver must be, above all, simple in nature. It must capture the essence of the brand’s promise in a way understandable, if not explainable, by a fifth grader. This is not a simple task. It’s not that people aren’t smart. Quite the opposite. It’s that it’s very difficult to get a roomful of smart people to agree on the one word, the one thought or notion that captures the essence of the brand. The very dynamics of big business, small business, any business with more than three people works against you. Group decisions are tough. The bigger the room, and the more people in it, the harder it gets. One exercise that we use with clients at Landor to meet the criterion of “simple” involves building a “story pyramid.” You begin this exercise by having the group members write single words, or singular thoughts or notions about the brand’s attributes or characteristics on index cards. The first task for the group is to determine which index card contains the word or notion that best conveys the point of the brand “story.” This exercise will force the team to make hard choices. And that’s okay. Establishing a brand driver requires making hard choices. Your brand can’t stand for everything. Your goal is not to end up with a run-on sentence. The second task for the team is to use the remaining cards to build the supporting argument to the story in ascending order; to demonstrate why the idea on the pinnacle of the pyramid deserves to be on top. A good test of whether you’ve succeeded in your efforts is to run the idea by that fifth-grader. If the kid says, “Oh yeah, I get it!” chances are everyone else will, too. On the other hand, if the precocious kid asks, “So, what’s your point?” your simple idea simply isn’t ready for prime time.
2. Specific. If you tell me your brand is innovative, I’ll ask you to be more precise; “innovative” in what way? When you use boilerplate words like “innovative” to describe a brand, they can be interpreted any number of ways. The words you use in a brand driver must be absolutely unambiguous in meaning and clear in intent. Because it can be very difficult for people to articulate something as precisely as necessary, we often use pictures to help our clients get to the specific word they’re after. Visual cues can assist people who are trying to capture the difference between innovative as in a paper clip, and innovative as in the Click Wheel on an iPod. Another exercise to help people be more specific in their articulation of an idea is to have them express it in a book title or a movie poster. A similar exercise is to have them write a headline for an ad that succinctly and accurately captures the intent of the idea. You’ll find that exercises like these help people self-edit. Once people learn to think beyond the obvious, they’ll be able to hone ideas to their core.
3. Surprising. If something is surprising, it’s easy to remember. Buzz words and jargon are forgettable. That’s why brand drivers or mission statements filled with buzz words and jargon are often laminated or framed to hang on office walls. People forget what they say. The objective of a brand driver is to be memorable. By giving your brand driver a clever or surprising twist, it will be easy for people to remember and it will live and grow organically within the organization. A good brand driver is meant to inspire people. If it’s not inspiring on its own, it will never intuitively lead to appropriate and brilliant branding executions. To determine whether your brand driver is memorable enough not to have to be laminated and framed, tell a random group of people in the organization what your intended brand driver is. Go back the next day and ask them to recite what you’ve told them. If the words you hope to hear trip liltingly off their tongues, you’ve got it. If they don’t, go back to the drawing board.
4. Story-worthy. In my last book, BrandSimple, I wrote about British Petroleum which, after changing its name to BP, became associated with the phrase “Beyond Petroleum.” These two simple words tell a story. If you were to write a story about an energy company that’s about more than petroleum as an energy source, it might include content about solar energy or wind energy. Being about more than petroleum as an energy source implies that the company looks for new and innovative ways to power the world. Being an innovator in this respect means the company would most likely be an innovator in other respects: in the way it runs its retail establishments, treats its employees, builds its own buildings, does its advertising, or supports philanthropic organizations. A brand driver must be inspirational to the people who do the branding. To see if it is, get folks together and have each of them write a story about the brand driver and what it implies about the company. The objective is to see if they pick up the key factors. Use these stories to see if people “get it.” If they do, the branding should be right on.

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