August « 2008 « 800 CEO Read

August 26, 2008

How the Wise Decide: Dermot Dunphy, Part I

Filed under: Leadership — Kate @ 9:00 am

It’s day two of Aaron and Bryn’s, authors of How the Wise Decide, joining us to share the problems, lessons and solutions garnered from their interviews with 21 leaders. Today, they’re talking aboutDermony Dunphy, the former CEO of Sealed Air.
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Dermot Dunphy, Part I
Most companies today have vision statements, idealistic slogans intended to guide their management and employees. But it is easy for vision statements to degenerate into mere words on paper, lost in the short-term fog of day-to-day business decisions. A great vision can and should be stated simply, but implementing it won’t be easy. We make the case in our book, How the Wise Decide, that you have to maintain the constant discipline to let that vision guide every decision you make, even seemingly innocuous day-to-day tactical choices. The benefit of that discipline is that choices become easier. All you need do is ask if an option furthers the vision. If the answer is no, even with short-term profits at stake, it isn’t really an option. Let us show you how one of our wise leaders, Dermot Dunphy, created and implemented a vision that resulted in immense value.
In 1971 Dunphy had sold his packaging company and was thinking about what to do next. Investment bank DLJ asked him to take over a small packaging company that had just lost its CEO, the result of stumbling financial performance. Understand that in 1971 the packaging industry wasn’t exactly a hotbed of innovation. Cardboard boxes and wadded paper about sums it up. But the company Dunphy took over was different. Sealed Air was the brainchild of two inventors who a decade earlier had created a textured wallpaper consisting of little air bubbles trapped between layers of plastic. The wallpaper went nowhere, but Sealed Air had changed course and targeted the packaging market with a product called Bubble Wrap.
Dunphy’s previous company had been a commodity business that was constantly squeezed between giant raw materials suppliers on the bottom and demanding, powerful customers on the top. Sealed Air was nothing like that. “I decided, when I found Sealed Air, that I kind of woke up in heaven and that focusing on the technological edge, combined with a marketing edge, was the way to control my destiny and control the company’s destiny,” he says.
Dunphy quickly formulated his vision of what Sealed Air could become: a company selling not a product, but a benefit. “The strategic vision was that we were in the business of protecting our customer’s products from damage caused by shock, vibration and abrasion. And the bubble was our core business.”

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August 25, 2008

How the Wise Decide: Bill George, Part III

Filed under: Leadership — Kate @ 4:30 pm

Part III of the Bill George story, brought to you by the authors of How the Wise Decide.
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Bill George, Part III
Bill George calls his traumatic experience in the Lenox Hill operating room a “power-of-one” observation. That single catheter failure crystallized in a way that no report ever could the problem confronting Medtronic. But George wasn’t basing his decision to overhaul the catheter business on that one experience. Instead, he was considering it in the context of everything else he knew about the business. He was able to see not only the flaws in the catheter, but also the flaws in how Medtronic handled information.
Other power-of-one observations sparked more changes at Medtronic. One day George was watching a surgeon implanting an early version of Medtronic’s defibrillator, a device that restores normal rhythm to a wildly beating heart. The device was large and the electrodes were delicate. The surgeon was having difficulty fitting the defibrillator into the patient’s chest cavity. Finally he pushed hard and suddenly blood was everywhere. The surgeon had perforated an artery.
“Surgeons are good at cutting, but they’re strong, both in personality and in physical strength. He was trying to force the device when what was needed was the refined touch of a cardiologist,” George says. The patient survived, but Medtronic’s technicians began focusing on making smaller defibrillators that cardiologists could easily implant without having to do deeply invasive surgery.
Bill George knew the tremendous value that derives from making power-of-one observations. In any given year he spent an astounding two thirds of his time in the field gathering first-hand information. Not many CEOs can find a way to do that, but George set up a senior management team that took care of other matters to allow him to get out of the office. As we recount in How the Wise Decide, George had many other similar experiences during his tenure as a result of visiting doctors in their offices and surgeons in their operating rooms all over the world. His observations showed him not only how to fix faulty products, but also a faulty organization and they gave him the insights that spurred the development of new products before competitors saw the potential. He spent so much time with primary sources because he knew he didn’t have enough information from other sources to make intelligent decisions.
What George and other leaders who diligently practice the principle of Going to the Source understand is that firsthand information is the best information. It is unfiltered by others, it provides subtle details and nuances that are lost in Power Point presentations and, most important of all, it shows us reality in all its messy details and emotion. Without face-to-face encounters with the people who are driving the future of your business, you will miss out on the power of emotional input.
In case you’re wondering about the financial impact of George’s ambitious efforts to Go To the Source, during his 12 years of leadership from 1989 to 2001 Medtronic’s market capitalization soared from $1.1 billion to $60 billion. That’s an average annual growth rate of 35 percent!
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Stay tuned for day two of the blog hosting by Aaron and Bryn, authors of How the Wise Decide. Tomorrow, they’ll be talking about Dermot Dunphy, the former CEO of Sealed Air.

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Excerpt from What’s Stopping You?

Filed under: Misc. — Zach @ 1:30 pm

The following excerpt is the beginning of Chapter Three from the book What’s Stopping You?: Shatter the 9 Most Common Myths Keeping You from Starting Your Own Business by Duane Ireland and Bruce R. Barringer. The June ’08 issue of Publisher’s Weekly states:

This book is refreshingly pragmatic while still being encouraging; it addresses the obstacles at each stage of entrepreneurship, including overcoming psychological barriers to quitting a day job, identifying and developing the right idea, financing and running effective public relations and marketing campaigns on shoestring budgets. Simultaneously upbeat and instructive, this book offers the aspiring business owner a practical push toward taking the entrepreneurial plunge.

The book is nine chapters long, with each chapter exposing one of the “9 most common myths” and revealing its correspong truth. The myth of Chapter 3 is that “it takes a lot of money to start a business.”

C H A P T E R 3
Myth No. 3:
It Takes a Lot of Money to
Start a Business

Truth No. 3:
It Might Not Cost as
Much as You Think

How much do you think it costs to start a business? If you’re thinking about a biotechnology, semiconductor, or medical product firm, you’d probably say a lot, and you’d be right. But how much do you think it costs to start an average business, like the privately owned businesses you deal with every day? And where do you think the majority of the start-up capital for these businesses comes from? According to the Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index, the average small business is started for about $10,000, with the majority of the money coming from the owners’ personal savings.^[1]
If this figure strikes you as low, you’re in good company; it strikes most people as low. That’s because when most people think of businesses, they think of the types of businesses that they interact with the most frequently, like grocery stores, restaurants, gas stations, and large retail stores. These types of business do take a lot of money to start and run. But chances are if you start a business, it won’t be like these businesses–at least initially. It will be more like the businesses highlighted so far in this book. Most of these businesses didn’t take a tremendous amount of money to start. Even aggressive growth firms, in most cases, don’t take an arm and a leg to get started. Each year Inc. magazine compiles a list of the 5,000 fastest-growing privately owned firms in the United States. In 2006, the medium amount it took to start one of the businesses on the list was $75,000.[2] That means that half of them were started for less than $75,000. And these firms cover a wide swath of businesses, from building contractors to advertising agencies to retail stores.
There is somewhat of a catch, however, involved with starting a business with limited funds. The catch is that most people simply don’t have any experience or insight when it comes to determining how much it will cost to start a business, how to economize on start-up expenses, or how to raise money if needed. These are topics that there is no reason to think about until you start seriously thinking about starting a business. To provide insight regarding these issues and to further dispel the myth that it takes a lot of money to start a business, this chapter is divided into three sections. The first section provides insights into how to think about money as it relates to starting a business. The second section focuses on the techniques that enable business owners to minimize the costs associated with starting a business. The third section focuses on the choices that small business owners have for raising start-up funds if needed.
Insights Into How to Think About Money as
It Relates to Starting a Business
For most people, the topic that consumes the majority of their thinking as it relates to money and starting a specific business is “How much money will it take to get the business off the ground?” While this question makes perfect sense, there is no concrete answer. The same exact business might cost one person $10,000 to start and another person $25,000–trust us, this isn’t an exaggeration. The amount needed typically depends on how a person thinks about money as it relates to starting a business, how frugal a person is, and how resourceful a person is in gaining access to money and other resources.
While money is obviously needed to start even the most basic business, many of the observations that successful business owners make about money are surprising. While you’d think money would be held in high esteem, many business owners discount the importance of having plentiful funds as a key to new business success. Instead, they tend to see the absence of money as a motivator for developing qualities such as resourcefulness, creativity, focus, frugality, and drive.
The following are three insights about the role of money in the start-up process. As you read through each insight, think carefully about how each topic relates to your own attitudes about money. One of the reasons that many businesses are started for as little money as they are is that people adjust their attitudes about money as they become more acquainted with the start-up process.
Now let’s look at three insights regarding the role of money in the start-up process.
Skimpy Finances Can Be a Blessing
Rather Than a Curse
The first insight regarding money and the start-up process is that there is a silver lining to having limited start-up funds. Many successful business owners, when they reflect back on their start-up years, feel that having limited funds forced them to focus, become self-reliant, and develop a mindset of frugality–qualities that have served them well as they’ve grown their firms. The importance of focus is affirmed by Caterina Fake, cofounder of Flickr, the popular photo-sharing Web site, which was started in 2002. In reflecting back on the role of money in the early days of her firm, Fake said:

The money was scarce, but I’m a big believer that constraints inspire
creativity. The less money you have, the fewer people and resources you
have, the more creative you have to become. I think that had a lot to do
with why we were able to iterate and innovate so fast.[3]

Flickr’s first product was a multiplayer online game called Game Neverending. At one point mid-way through the development of the game, the programmers, on a lark, added an instant messenger application to the game’s environment, which allowed users to form communities to share photos. Surprisingly, the photo-sharing feature quickly passed the game itself in terms of popularity. As the photo-sharing feature continued to gain momentum, the game itself was dropped because the company couldn’t afford to work on both projects simultaneously. Flickr, as a photo-sharing Web site, became extremely popular and was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005 for somewhere between 20 and 30 million dollars. Ironically, it was the lack of money, rather than the abundance of it, that caused the founders of Flickr to drop the game and focus on the photo-sharing site, a decision that turned out to be very profitable for the company.
In regard to developing a culture of self-reliance, having limited start-up funds often instills discipline in a firm and forces the founders to substitute ingenuity and hard work for financial resources. An example of how this played out in one firm is provided by Doris Christopher, the founder of The Pampered Chef. Christopher started The Pampered Chef in 1980 and ran the company out of her home well beyond its start-up years. Explaining how having limited start-up funds helped set her on a lifelong track of financial discipline, Christopher wrote:

With a bankroll of only $3,000 to start my business, I didn’t have any choice; I had to watch my overhead. It taught me discipline, which I have been mindful of throughout my business career.[4]

The Pampered Chef, which was started in 1980, has been an enormously successful company. It sells kitchen utensils through home parties, utilizing a direct sales approach (like Tupperware). At last count, the company had nearly 70,000 Pampered Chef consultants and 12 million people attending its home parties each year. To this day, the main theme of Christopher’s speaking and writing is to caution business owners to avoid debt, minimize overhead, and remain self-reliant.
Finally, limited funds at the outset often help a firm develop a mindset of frugality–a quality that is often very helpful as a firm grows and expands. For example, many businesses that are started on a shoestring learn to function very inexpensively and continue to watch their money very carefully, even after they become successful.

Raising or Borrowing Money Is
Trading One Boss for Another
The second insight regarding the role of money and the start-up process has to do with raising equity capital or borrowing to fund a business. One of the first things that many people do when they decide to start a business is to try to raise money through a bank or an investor. There are several choices that business owners have for raising money, including commercial banks, SBA guaranteed loans, investors, grants, supplier financing, and several others. Of these choices, many people automatically assume that the only way they’ll raise the amount of money they need is via a commercial bank or an equity investor. While the other choices might hold promise, most people’s initial reactions are that the alternatives pale in comparison to the amount of money that can be raised from a bank or through an investor.
While in some cases it is necessary to go the bank or investor route, the problem with obtaining money from these sources is that there are consequences that business owners often don’t fully anticipate. Bankers and investors typically assert considerable control over the businesses they provide money to as a means of protecting their investments. While the majority of bankers and investors have good intentions, the level of scrutiny and control their investments allow them often has an impact on the firms they fund. For example, banks are inherently conservative and often caution their clients to grow slowly, while investors are the opposite and regularly pressure the companies they invest in to grow quickly to increase their valuations. What’s missing here is what the business owner wants. So for people leaving traditional jobs to start their own businesses, obtaining money from bankers or investors is often like trading one boss for another. You might be freeing yourself from working for a boss in a traditional sense but could have an equally influential boss in the form of a banker or an investor.
An additional consideration when taking money from an investor is that you exchange partial ownership in your business for funding. This aspect of the small business owner–investor relationship can also be problematic. Unlike the business owners introduced in this book, who started their businesses to fulfill personal aspirations or follow their passions, the majority of investors are not in it for the long term–they want their money back in three to five years along with a sizeable return. This means that a business owner like Daryn Kagan, the former CNN reporter who started a “good news” Web cast, will probably have to sell her business in three to five years from the time it was started if she accepted investment capital. Although this scenario will undoubtedly net Ms. Kagan a handsome financial return, assuming her business is gaining traction and is profitable, she’ll lose direct control of the business she was so excited to create.
The solution to avoid these potential problems is steering clear of bank financing or equity funding or, at the minimum, having a clear understanding of the nature of the relationship you’ll have with your banker or investors. It’s possible for a small business owner to have a healthy relationship with a banker or an investor. The overarching point, however, is that small business owners should go into these relationships with their eyes wide open, fully understanding the parameters of the relationships they’re developing.
Excess Funds Can Enable a start-up to Operate
Unprofitably for Too Long
The third insight regarding money and the start-up process is that having excess funds often masks problems and enables a firm to operate unprofitably for too long. Many businesses lose money their first several months while they ramp up and gain customers. That’s normal. But at some point, a business has to operate profitably to prove that it is a viable, ongoing pursuit. People who start businesses with limited funds typically find out quickly if their businesses are capable of turning a profit. Because they don’t have excess funds to rely on, they must make adjustments quickly, like cutting expenses or increasing sales, to turn a profit. Ultimately, if the business doesn’t work, it is shut down. In contrast, if a person starts a business with abundant funds, the business can operate for months at a loss and stay open if the owner relies on excess funds to keep the business afloat. The owner may never feel pressured to cut costs or generate additional sales, thinking that the business simply needs more time to prove itself. If the business ultimately fails, it will normally lose more money and more of its owner’s time and prestige than the less well funded startup.
A related complication associated with having abundant funds is that a business’s cost structure and clientele is often determined by the amount of money it has initially. For example, if you decided to open a clothing store and were offered $200,000 by an investor to start the business, you might rent space in an upscale mall, hire experienced salespeople, buy the latest computer equipment, and launch an expensive advertising campaign. While this sounds good, once the business is started and the $200,000 is gone, you might be locked into a high overhead business that has to sell high margin products to an affluent clientele to make the business work. Conversely, if you had started with less money, you might have signed a shorter term lease in a more modest facility, hired your initial salespeople part-time to see which ones worked out the best, bought used computer equipment, and found inexpensive ways to spread the word about your store. Utilizing this approach, you’d actually have more flexibility and room to maneuver than the better funded scenario.
Collectively, the purpose of these three insights is to put the importance of money in starting a business in its proper perspective. While many people think, “If I only had the money, I’d start my own business,” the insights provided here show that having money isn’t a panacea. In fact, the discipline imposed by having limited funds is often an advantage and creates a healthier business in the long run.

Endnotes
^[1]“How Much Money Does It Take to Start a Small Business?” Wells Fargo/Gallup
Small Business Index, (San Francisco: Wells Fargo Bank), August 15, 2006.
^[2] “Inc. 500,” Inc., Special Issue, 2006.
^[3] Jessica Livingston, Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days (New York: Apress, 2008), 259.
^[4] Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur’s Soul (Deerfield Beach: Health Communications, Inc., 2006), 47.
Excerpted from What’s Stopping You?
Copyright © 2008 by Pearson Education, Inc.
Publishing as FT Press

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How the Wise Decide: Bill George, Part II

Filed under: Leadership — Kate @ 11:30 am

Part II of the Bill George story, brought to you by the authors of How the Wise Decide.
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Bill George, Part II
After having a faulty Medtronic catheter thrown at him by an angry surgeon, Bill George began investigating why he hadn’t known about quality problems plaguing the catheter business. What he found was a tortuous path that routed the sales reps’ field reports about failing catheters through seven layers of bureaucracy before they reached the people who designed the products. When George questioned the engineers about the reports they denied any design flaws and blamed the surgeons for misusing the equipment. George quickly reached two conclusions. First, there clearly was a problem with the quality of the catheters. He had seen the problem with his own eyes, had been shocked by the incident and had even brought the ruined device back to headquarters in his baggage.
“It’s an overstatement, but field reports are a dime a dozen,” George told us. “There’s no emotional association with them. But when you’re in a medical environment like an operating room all your senses–sight, sound, smell, taste–are working. It’s a totally different experience than reading a field report.”
Second, and more importantly, there was something dangerously wrong with Medtronic’s ability to handle critical information. “It was a systemic problem,” he explains. “What was wrong was that the system wasn’t getting quality information from the operating room to engineering, quality control and manufacturing, the people who could fix the problems. People don’t want to pass on bad news and engineers can be in denial about a problem.”
George immediately ordered up a solution. Within a few months the catheter sales force was split off from Medtronic’s centralized sales operation and attached to the catheter division where sales people were in much closer contact with engineering, quality control and manufacturing. At the same time George ordered engineers to get out of their offices and spend at least one day a month in operating rooms observing how the equipment they designed was being used. A few engineers complained to him that they were too busy to waste time watching doctors. “I said ‘if that’s the case, you’re working on the wrong things’.”
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Stay tuned for today’s final blog entry on Bill George.

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Welcoming Aaron Sandoski and Bryn Zeckhauser: How the Wise Decide

Filed under: Leadership — Kate @ 9:25 am

Joining us this week on the blog are Bryn Zeckhauser and Aaron Sandoski, authors of How the Wise Decide. They conducted 21 interviews of wise business and government leaders – including, Bill George of Medtronic, Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court, Daniel Kahneman a Nobel Prize Winner in Economics, Shelly Lazarus of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide and many more. They found six decision-making principles. Over the next few days, Bryn and Aaron will share examples of problems, solutions and lessons gained.
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Bill George, Part I
Former CEO of Medtronic
The success of every business and every career turns on the decisions people make. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t making very good decisions. An estimated 80 percent of new products fail after launch and more than half of all mergers and acquisitions destroy more value than they create. We set out to learn how to make great decisions. Our book, How the Wise Decide, taps the thinking and experiences of 21 extraordinary leaders who consistently made great decisions. We have distilled their wisdom into six fundamental principles these leaders share and that have enabled them to create enormous value. In fact, the eight retired public company CEOs outperformed the S&P by 15 times and four of the leaders became self-made billionaires. The principles sound simple, but they’re extraordinarily difficult to execute because they require rare devotion and relentless practice.
We’ll show you what “easy to state, difficult to execute” means by introducing you to our first principle–Go To The Source–and one of its best practitioners, Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic, the Minneapolis medical device manufacturer.
When George arrived at Medtronic he knew that new and innovative medical instruments were the company’s lifeblood and that he needed to understand how Medtronic’s products were used. To develop that knowledge firsthand he devoted most of the first 90 days on the job to observing actual surgical procedures. It was in a surgical suite at New York City’s massive Lenox Hill Hospital that George had a rude awakening. A cardiologist was going to use a Medtronic balloon catheter in an angioplasty to open a patient’s clogged arteries. Gowned and gloved, George stood only a few feet away from the operating table as the doctor carefully inserted the catheter into the patient’s femoral artery. But just minutes later the handle of the catheter fell apart! Ever so carefully, the cardiologist withdrew the catheter from the patient. Then, his face scarlet with rage, he hurled the bloody device at George, who ducked just in time to avoid being hit in the face. The operation resumed, this time with a competitor’s catheter.
George had been aware that Medtronic’s catheter sales weren’t what they should have been. The company was losing market share and the sales force had been complaining about product quality. But the engineers had said the product was fine and getting better. Maybe the sales force was just looking for an excuse for not doing a good job, he had thought. Now, shaken by what he had just seen, George sat down with the Medtronic sales rep who had been with him in the operating room. The rep told him that the problem he had just witnessed wasn’t an isolated incident. The catheters had been failing with disturbing frequency. All the sales reps knew that, he said, and they had all filed the required field reports.
If all those reports had been filed, George thought, why didn’t I know about them?
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Stay tuned for Part II of the Bill George story. For more from Bryn and Aaron, check out their website.

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Bunches of Business Book Recommendations

Filed under: Lists — Todd Sattersten @ 9:00 am

There has been quite a run in the blogosphere in the last two weeks with people recommending business books.

Josh Kauffman may have started this tidal wave with his updated 2008 version of The Personal MBA. His list is 77 books long with the mantra “skip b-school and the $100,000 loan: you can get a world-class business education simply by reading these books.”

BusinessPundit followed with their 25 Best Business Books Ever post, placing Adam Smith at #25 and In Search of Excellence at the top spot.

For The Best Business Book of 2008 (so Far), Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog directs people to The Opposable Mind, Presentation Zen, Rain Making, Groundswell, Senior Leadership Teams and Brain Rules.

And then people started finding old lists to highlight. A “Business Book” hit on tweetscan directed me to a October 2007 post at Newly Corporate titled “15 Books For Rogue Professionals and How To Read Them At No Cost.” Their no-cost solution is the library, and they recommend everything from Carnegie to Chris Anderson to China Inc.

This led me to another tweetscan hit where Melissa Woo, inspired by this post, spent the morning tweeting her favorites. As a fellow Milwaukeean, I thought I would list all of her favorites.

Leadership and Self Deception by The Arbinger Institute
First, Break All The Rules by Buckingham and Coffman
The Thin Book of Naming Elephants by Hammond
Getting to Yes by Fisher
Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Lencioni
Crucial Conversations by Patterson
Cultivating Careers by Cynthia Golden
We Are Smarter Than Me by Libert and Spector

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August 22, 2008

The Surprise Element of Our Countdown Book Club

Filed under: 100 Best — Kate @ 3:55 pm

Last week we launched the official countdown to Jack and Todd’s book, The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. We thought about hiring the New York City New Year’s Ball and then decided on a book club, to help you gear up for Jack and Todd’s book.
As Todd mentioned, it’s a six-month book club. And since we launched it last week, a few questions have come up.
A few folks asked how the book club worked internationally. Dylan answers that here.
And a few folks have asked why we’re keeping the five books a secret (the sixth book being Jack and Todd’s book). For us, the element of surprise is part of the package.
I say this realizing that people are worried about, (a) receiving a book they already have; (b) receiving a book that’s not applicable to theirself.
While I won’t give away the book names, let me try to disperse some of that fog. First, the likelihood of someone owning these titles is quite slim. A hint, Good to Great, a great, common business title, isn’t in this club. In choosing the titles, we considered the likelihood of people having had read the book, their applicability and whether they’re a good read.
And second, on the question of whether the books are worth reading. Their subject lines follow that of Management, Leadership, Communication, Marketing, and Entrepreneurship. I’m sure you’ll find a subject (or six) that work for you.
Hope that helps in your decision! Any other questions, shoot them my way. Happy to help. Here’s the link, if you’d like to join our club.

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Honest Feet and Other Non-Verbal Cues

Filed under: Personal Development — Kate @ 10:14 am

We’re always giving off nonverbal cues. From rolling our eyes, as teenagers, when our parents asked us to help with dishes. To putting our elbows on the table at dinner time. There’s a message we send our beyond that of our words. And oftentimes, sent out louder than our words.
Kai Ryssdal over at Marketplace recently interviewed Carol Kinsey Goman, who wrote The Nonverbal Advantage.
One discussed position is the comfort pose of crossing our arms and legs simultaneously. Carol pointed out that, while “it sends a signal of resistance or ‘I don’t like what you just said.’ It also, by the way, cuts your retention down to about 38 percent.” And clarified that it means, “How much you’re retaining of what you’ve heard in the meeting. So you really need to be aware that your body and mind, or brain, are not on separate planets, that what you do with your body affects your brain, but it also, right or wrong, it sends a signal to the rest of the people in your group.”
And of course, there’s that our feet give off the most honest cues. (Perhaps, we should direct our attention to people’s feet, rather than their eyes?) Why’s this true?

Goman: Because they are the least trained part of the body. So feet are probably the most honest part of the body. They will bounce when you’re nervous or happy, they will cross, they will do that ankle lock and pull back when you feel not included in a conversation or a meeting, your toes will turn up if you’re seated and you get great news.

If you’re a podcast subscriber, you can listen here. Or you can read the full text.

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BusinessWeek review of Hell's Cartel

Filed under: Book Reviews,History and Biographies — 800-CEO-READ @ 8:34 am

Last week BusinessWeek reviewed Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine by Diarmuid Jeffreys. Hell’s Cartel is about IG Farben’s decision to utilize death camp labor during WWII to speed up efforts to develop synthesized plastics. The German chemical group was famous for discovering ammonia and (at Bayer, a subsidiary) sulfa, the first antibiotic.
Jeffreys, author of Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug, details the journey this once highly esteemed company took once it made a deal with the devil. Part corporate biography, part history, and part moral tale, Hell’s Cartel is, as the reviewer puts it, “not a pretty history. But it is gripping, full of warnings about the potential of corporations to mutate into criminal enterprises.”
Here’s a snippet from the review:
“IG Farben and Hitler: A Fateful Chemistry
How a company whose Nobel-winning scientists discovered vital medicines became a Nazi collaborator”

IG Farben traced its origins to the efforts of men such as Carl Bosch of BASF Group, who led the effort to mass-produce synthetic ammonia. The work was crucial to solving a worldwide shortage of fertilizer and preventing mass starvation. He and other scientist-managers made Germany the dominant producer of drugs and chemicals in the years before World War I. Bosch was a man of conscience but also deeply patriotic. During World War I he became a national hero after leading a crash effort to develop synthetic nitric acid, essential to producing explosives. Most notoriously, BASF chemist Fritz Haber, who had developed the processes used to make ammonia, came up with the idea of using chlorine gas as a weapon.

Read the entire article here: businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_34/b4097098922518.htm?chan=magazine+channel_opinion
If you like books in this vein, also check out The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor’s Heroic Search for the World’s First Miracle Drug by Thomas Hager.

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August 21, 2008

Wired Reviews

Filed under: Book Reviews — dylan @ 2:31 pm

Wired Magazine doesn’t review books in depth that often, so I was surprised that they were the first (that I’ve seen) to review Thomas Friedman’s upcoming book, Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–And How It Can Renew America.
It is reviewed by Garret M. Graff, author of The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House. The most interesting piece of the review is the story he relates from the book:

Friedman tells the story of a Marine Corps general in Iraq who requested solar panels to power his bases. Asked why, he explained that he wanted to win his region by “out-greening al Qaeda.” Instead of trucking in gas from Kuwait at $20 a gallon–money that fuels oppressive petro-dictatorships–in convoys that are vulnerable to roadside bombs, why not beat the insurgents by taking away their targets and their funding?

Also reviewed in this issue, and given four whole pages to Friedman’s one, is Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. Anathem is not a business book–it’s a 960 page powerhouse of science-fiction. If you love good science-fiction, however–or just really good writing–our sister company‘s book buyer tells me it gets no better than Stephenson. It will be the next non-business book I read.
If you missed the links above, links to the reviews are below.

Hot, Flat and Crowded
Anathem

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