This past weekend I took the weekend off to visit some friends in Hoboken and whilst traveling around to various hot-spots on the Jersey shore and Manhattan, I stumbled upon our book: The 100 Best Business Books Ever all over the place!
Well 2 places, but still, kinda neat! I took some pictures of it amongst the masses of other books!
Here it is at New York City’s Port Authority:
And here it is at Grand Central Station:
Aaron and I are headed to New York City tomorrow to attend Book Expo America, the yearly event for book publishing in North America.
Many are holding their breath wondering what it will be like this year. Exhibitor space is down 25% and attendees registered is down almost 30%. Some business book publishers like Amacom and Berrett-Kohler have chosen not to participate this year.
We still looking forward to going. The tribe needs an event like this to gather and share.
Channel Insider recently posted a slide show of 21 Must Read Books for Business Success. It was compiled by asking “successful solution providers what books have both inspired them and shaped their approach to making their businesses a success.” You can get detailed descriptions of the books by viewing the slide show, but the list itself, with links, below. If you’re interested in knowing which books are also in The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, they are starred.
The question that caught our attention was:
Q. So you find that people make business more complicated than it is?
A. No doubt about it. I think that all of us read far too many business books. I’ve worked 30 years now in management roles, and a number of times I’ve seen a new C.E.O. come in, and the first act is typically to get the leadership team to an offsite. And you get a consultant – because you can’t do it without a consultant – and the consultant then helps the team design a vision. And then you’ve got all these words, and several thousand dollars and a couple of days of golf later, you go back to the company to actually try to communicate that vision throughout the organization. So you hire another consultant to do that. It shouldn’t be like that.
What’s interesting to me is that Castro-Wright blames one thing, when the problem is something all together different. Reading business books can cause people to hire their authors, but the inability to implement a vision/strategy/plan falls back on the leader.
Later in the Q&A, Castro-Wright was asked about what he would change in business school education. He laments that everyone with an MBA has taken classes in accounting, operations, and strategy, and have had no exposure to the skills needed to lead and manage people. “How do you talk with the person who comes to your office late at night to tell you that her daughter is sick and she might not be able to come in the following day?,” he asks. Here is an example where business books do a great job of supplementing the knowledge of new leaders. Books like Quiet Leadership, 12, and Growing Great Employees are perfect for the task.
So, I am not sure this was really about business books, and if it was, then the problem is seeing business books in the right context: they deliver knowledge, not results.
Here is a little something for you on the Friday afternoon. In the States, we have a three day weekend. I thought this was a nice way to end the week.
You can buy Smile & Move on givemore.com.
If you have seen any of our print materials over the last few years, you’ll recognize our new look.
There are a number of things we are trying to do with the new site:
Use this post as a place to leave comments on things that aren’t working. We are still tweaking some things and you will probably see more changes over the next several days.
Thanks and we hope you enjoy!
Minding the Store: Great Writing About Business From Tolstoy to Now edited by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge, The New Press, 299 pages, $25.95, Hardcover, August 2008, ISBN 9781595583550
Many of the best-selling business books of the last thirty years are not based on exemplar companies, Fortune 500 CEOs or academic breakthroughs. Instead, they are completely made up; stories fabricated to make a grand point about how business should be practiced. Business fiction clearly attracts large audiences given the success of books like The One Minute Manager and Who Moved My Cheese? The biggest problem with this subgenre is formulaic writing that leaves the reader wondering if they haven’t already read this one before (or in some cases, many times before).
However, fiction can still be a wonderful and intriguing tool for teaching business. Joseph Badaracco proved this in his book, Questions of Character, which we reviewed for Jack Covert Selects in 2006 and chose as one of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. Based on a course Badaracco taught at Harvard Business School, Questions of Character uses literature to explore the difficult questions leaders often face.
Before Badaracco, Pulitizer Prize-winning author Robert Coles was using fiction to teach ethics at Harvard. The dean of the business school caught wind of his work and asked Coles to develop a class for his students. That successful seminar is now also available in book form: Minding the Store, edited with Albert LaFarge, a collection of fiction stories and excerpts that illuminate the ethical and philosophical aspects of business.
The editors divided Minding the Store into five parts. The first section is on “the hard sell,” followed by life in the office and how business affects life at home. The final two parts cover failure and death. Not the typical agenda items for the weekly brown bag lunch, but then Willy Loman (from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman) is not your typical field representative. From Flannery O’Connor to John Cheever to Vladimir Nabokov, this book features some of the best in literature, all of whom teach us a surprising amount about business through their insights into human nature.
And that is one of the results of reading good fiction; we become invested in the characters and wonder what we would do faced the same dilemmas. Minding the Store is a stimulating self-study course during which you will be challenged to construct the questions, as well as provide the answers. Some questions are clear and familiar, while others require deeper contemplation and personal resolution. Consider this your invitation to do some needed soul-searching, with these incredible stories as the guide.
No, I am not talking about our book.
Twitter was a-flitter with this message today:
RT @TPEntrepreneur Possibly the BEST list of business books ever. Totally unexpected stuff! http://budurl.com/xl2s
Mike Michalowicz, author of the Toliet Paper Entreprenuer, pulled together a list of 66 books recommended by the TPE community. I am always sucker for a good list of business books.
Mike says the problem with business books is “chances are you have read 90% of them already.” Based on our experience with The 100 Best, people have generally not read more than ten of our recommended books, so I am not sure that holds water. The biggest problem is that people don’t read the right books (check out our essay in Gitomer’s Sales Caffeine this week about this very problem).
Anyway, here is the list for you to look over and you can jump over to the TPE site for further commentary on each book:
(I wanted to get the list up quickly. We’ll add links and some comments over the next day or so.)
Greater Than Yourself: The Ultimate Lesson of True Leadership by Steve Farber, Doubleday, 170 pages, $19.95, Hardcover, March 2009, ISBN 9780385522618
Steve Farber is a master storyteller, and he uses this skill to teach us about business through his well-crafted tales. It’s not uncommon these days to see business novels, fables or allegories, but what sets Farber’s books apart from the rest are the vibrant characters he creates. I gravitated to a character named Edg in Farber’s outstanding Radical Leap; you’ll be just as drawn to Big Jeff, Plumeria Maple and Sucky Chucky (a high school nickname) in this new book, Greater Than Yourself.
Greater Than Yourself (GTY) is a simple idea, as many of the best ideas are. If we focus on helping people to become greater than ourselves, Farber teaches, we all receive rewards. The three core principles of GTY are: Expand Yourself, Give Yourself, and Replicate Yourself. These three seemingly simple concepts help lead us toward a reexamination of our relationships which, in turn, maximizes our own potential. Since stepping down as president of our company, I have taken on the title of Chief Mentor. This isn’t just some title to have on my business cards. Instead, it reflects my philosophy that it is now my job to share what I’ve learned about the business of business books over the past 25 years. So I was particularly drawn to Give Yourself, which is about “philanthropizing” your life, creating and giving to a GTY project and investing in that relationship.
In Greater Than Yourself, Steve Farber (he is his own main character) buys a used guitar and, finding a charming note in the guitar case, he embarks on a journey to find the original owner of the guitar. Along the way, he learns about GTY through a chorus of interesting characters. For example, the author of the note is a woman named Cat, and she is a brilliant, well-respected leader of a fast-growing company—and also a heck of a guitar player in her spare time. She explains to Steve that:
GTY is really just a form of very personal, one-on-one philanthropy. It comes from the same deep impulse, except that you don’t have to be rich to undertake it … The rest of us can give our talents, time, knowledge, contacts—whatever resources we have—to other worthy people in our lives at work and at home.
As you take this GTY journey with Steve, you too will learn the value of being Greater Than Yourself. Greater Than Yourself is one of my favorite books of this year: it is about a subject I strongly believe in and the presentation is perfect. As you take this GTY journey with Steve, you too will learn the value of being Greater Than Yourself.
Loved this on Twitter today from Outdoor_Girly:
Theory: successful people read best selling business books, wildly successful read random books (philosophy), normal people just don’t read
