September « 2009 « 800 CEO Read

September 14, 2009

Jack Covert Selects – Exploiting Chaos

Filed under: Jack Covert Selects — 800-CEO-READ @ 12:26 pm

Exploiting Chaos: 150 Ways to Spark Innovation During Times of Change by Jeremy Gutsche, Gotham Books, 271 Pages, $20.00, Paperback, September 2009, ISBN 9781592405077

Without a doubt, this is one of the best books on sparking ideas that I have ever read. Jeremy Gutsche has written and designed an excellent book for an uncertain time—a time when all of our instincts scream at us to retreat. Instead, Gutsche all but demands that we act, reminding us that companies such as Disney, CNN, HP, GE, Apple, Sun, Eli Lilly and many more were founded during periods of economic recession.

The great motivational stories are here, from the boiling frog story to a more obscure tale about Smith Corona. You’ll find great motivational quotes here as well, including Edison’s “I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to not make a light bulb.” and Michael Jordan’s “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.” And, while we may have heard these before, Gutsche presents the gathered material in an energetic and fresh manner.

Beyond the motivational material, Exploiting Chaos doesn’t serve up the same old examples of innovation and success. Gutsche points out that “IBM, GE, Wal-Mart, Dell, and Southwest Airlines were referenced in 1,304 of the most recent 2,000 Harvard Business Review articles” and states what you’re probably thinking after reading that sentence—“Holy crap! That’s excessive.” Accordingly, Exploiting Chaos brings you more rare examples, applicable to both big businesses and new ventures.

Exploiting Chaos is a different type of business book in terms of design as well. The presentation is truly special. The author explains the reason for this:

Our reading habits have entirely changed in the last decade. Driven by media clutter and our shrinking attention spans, our world has become headline obsessed. Hence, this book is visual and action packed, offering two ways to read:

Consume the content end-to-end.
Just read the headlines on each page. They flow together and will help to spark your next big idea.

I read it from cover to cover, but believe that even good skim will have you reaching for a blank piece of paper and pen or a fresh Word document. Get yourself a copy of Exploiting Chaos. It could be the difference going forward.

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Jack Covert Selects – Borrowed Brilliance

Filed under: General Business,Jack Covert Selects — 800-CEO-READ @ 12:23 pm

Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others by David Kord Murray, Gotham Books, $26.00 Hardcover, 304 Pages, September 2009, ISBN 9781592404780

You may have heard the cynical expression “There are no new ideas.” Well, David Kord Murray wouldn’t necessarily disagree with that sentiment, but he would argue that it isn’t such a bad thing either. In Borrowing Brilliance, he tells us that when Isaac Newton was accused of stealing the creation of calculus, Newton defended himself by saying, “Yes, in order to see farther, I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”

For a more contemporary example, Murray tells the following story:

Bill Gates had pulled off the business deal of the century. IBM would sell millions of PCs, each running MS-DOS, and each triggering a royalty check to Microsoft. Others would copy, or clone, IBM’s machine and they, too, would turn to Gates for his borrowed operating system … Gates had borrowed the code from Seattle Computer, which had borrowed it from Digital Research, and used it as a beachhead into the desktops of millions of computers, brilliantly solving the problem he had identified … The business deal of the century had made him the richest man in the world and for us is the perfect example of what I mean by the term borrowed brilliance.

Murray’s many intriguing examples also include the Google guys creating their Empire by using existing search engines to discover a pattern in the results that allowed them to ultimately create the algorithm that became the keystone to the Google search engine and Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin based on the work of many other scientists. The glue that supports Murray’s theory and holds your interest throughout is these wide-ranging and well-told stories.

In Dan Pink’s great book, A Whole New Mind, he suggests that the primary worker in this new economy is the creative worker. And, to survive the innovation wave that is coming, the creative worker needs to become the creator of ideas—not just the manager of them. In Borrowing Brilliance, Murray demonstrates that these ideas can and should be inspired by the ideas of others, and lays out the tools you need to build on them.

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A View Inside Publishing

Filed under: Publishing Industry — Todd Sattersten @ 9:55 am

The Barnes & Noble Review published an essay this morning by Daniel Menaker, the former editor-in-chief of Random House.

The piece disassembles publishing into its sub-optimized pieces: Editors competing with editors. The chasm between creative and commercial, both in acquisition and execution. The author’s search for acceptance and recognition in a shrinking pool of readers who care.

People in publishing read these sorts of pieces because they are refreshingly honest and give voice to the frustrations we all have with the competing interests of profit, pride, and potential.

Authors, both current and want-to-be, are well served by reading Menaker’s words. Jonathan Karp, the publisher at Hachette’s Twelve imprint, delivered a similar, but more prescriptive missive in April equally worthy of your attention.

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Jack Covert Selects – The Leap

Filed under: Jack Covert Selects — 800-CEO-READ @ 9:17 am

The Leap: How 3 Simple Changes Can Propel Your Career from Good to Great by Rick Smith, Portfolio, 224 Pages, $24.95 Hardcover, September 2009, ISBN 9781591842569

Rick Smith starts The Leap by telling the story of how he went from co-writing a best selling book to being unemployed within a very short period of time. Unfortunately, this is a pretty common situation these days. While Smith had moderate success in his previous work, he considered himself a completely average person with no extraordinary skills. He decided to find out how people who had great success, but weren’t considered special or gifted at an early age, succeeded.

Through his research, Smith found out that these seemingly average Joes and Janes actually had some traits in common. In particular, these successful people have found their personal “sweet spot.” This is the place where their best ability intersects with what most inspires them.

Smith fills his book with inspiring stories of success. First, he tells the second half of his own story. Remembering the explosive growth of networking groups that he researched while working on his first book, The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers, he starts a senior executive networking company called World 50 which blossoms in just a year.

We also meet Sara Blakely who created Spanx, a $250 million women’s clothing company. She was a successful salesperson of copiers who got very annoyed when she couldn’t find the right clothes, and so she decided to invent them.

Interspersed with the personal stories, Smith presents practical lessons about shaking up your career that you can take to the bank. For example, to break out of the “Now Trap” you need to confront these myths:

To make a great change in your life, you must change who you are
To make a great change in your life, you must go it alone
To make a great change in your life, you must take a great risk

Smith goes on to show us a step-by-step process that we can follow to make our own personal leap toward success.

Over the past few months, we’ve recommended many books to help you through this current recession. The Leap might be just the book you need to spread your wings and take flight under your own power.

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September 11, 2009

Jack Covert Selects – Total Recall

Filed under: Jack Covert Selects — 800-CEO-READ @ 9:36 am

Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, Dutton Books, 304 Pages, $26.95, Hardcover, September 2009. ISBN 9780525951346

Imagine that you are in your doctor’s office complaining about an ache or pain and, to help her in her diagnosis, she asks you what activities you’ve engaged in lately. Did you lift something awkwardly or eat something odd two days ago? It can be tough to come up with truly accurate answers to those questions because, if you are like me, you are a busy person and have a hard time remembering what you did an hour ago! When you add age into the mix, it becomes doubly hard. Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell present the answer to this problem in their book, Total Recall.

Gordon Bell, a preeminent computer scientist, and Jim Gemmell, his colleague at Microsoft, decided in the late 90’s to create a digital record of Bell’s past. That digital record would include all of his artifacts—high school yearbook, family memorabilia, emails, writings, and doctor records—going forward. This data would be stored offsite and access would be available on all his devices, from smart phone to desktop. The authors envision a “personal digital memory collection-and-management system that will (if you choose) be able to record just about everything you see, hear, and do and keep it all in one big virtual collection in the cloud. The uses of such an archive are limitless.”

The book’s chapters are laid out around the application of this data storage and retrieval system to your work, your health, your learning and your everyday life. Then they show you how to get started with your own digital record with step-by-step instructions. The final forty pages of the book are annotated references and other valuable resources.

Total Recall has really stuck with me and I find myself agreeing with the authors that this revolution could be life changing. “Biological memory is subjective, patchy, emotion-tinged, ego-filtered, impressionistic, and mutable,” they argue, while “Digital memory is objective, dispassionate, prosaic, and unforgivingly accurate.” Now imagine the efficiency of that next doctor’s visit.

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September 10, 2009

Awesomely Simple Interview with John Spence (800-CEO-READ Podcast)

Filed under: General Business — Todd Sattersten @ 10:41 am

I recently talked with John Spence, the author of Awesomely Simple: Essential Business Strategies For Turning Ideas Into Action.

John believes if you concentrate on a small set of simple things and get those right that you’ll have more time for the complicated tasks. His six simple principles for success are:

Vivid Vision
Best People
Robust Communication
Sense of Urgency
Disciplined Execution
Extreme Customer Focus

We talk about how John reads more business books than I do, how mantras can make great mission statements, and what the next thing you do is after you read the book.

The interview lasts 38 minutes.

[podcast]http://media.800ceoread.com/view/9780470494516/audio/Awesomely_Simple_Interview_with_John_Spence.mp3[/podcast]

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Riches Among the Ruins

Filed under: General Business,Jack Covert Selects — Jack @ 10:20 am

Every once in awhile I read a business book that I find a really fascinating read but don’t write a Jack Covert Selects on the book. I want to tell you about such a book.

Riches Among the Ruins by Robert Smith is the tale of a guy who was early into emerging markets. What made this book stand out to me were the stories of what Smith had to go through to ply his trade. I mean, check out www.richesamongtheruins.com and I bet this is the first author Web site that has the author wearing a bulletproof vest.

This is the book you want to read for a history lesson on how business was conducted before information technology and the Bloomberg’s changed that world forever.

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September 9, 2009

ChangeThis: Issue 62

Filed under: General Business — dylan @ 2:38 pm

The 62nd issue of ChangeThis has been published for your autodidactic pleasure. Excerpts and links below.

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Breaking Organizational Codependence: Downsizing’s Liberating Wake-Up Call by David Noer

“I’m told there is an ancient Chinese curse that translates into ‘May you live in interesting times.’ That it is a curse certainly rings true as we experience today’s global pandemic of downsizing. Layoff victims and survivors alike react to this new reality with a toxic stew of debilitating emotions such as anger, fear, anxiety and depression—what I call layoff survivor sickness. We can change that though. We can reframe the death toll of the old paradigm into a wake-up call that will help us create an exciting world of work that is more autonomous, personally relevant, and more in congruence with our unique gifts.

We first need to understand the nature of the change and the insidious power of organizational codependency. Then we need the courage to break its stifling grip on our human spirit and creativity. Part of our ‘interesting times’ involves living through the most fundamental change in the psychological contract that has connected employee to employer since the industrial revolution. Like it or not—and initially, most of us find a lot not to like—in this new paradigm people are viewed as short term costs to be reduced or eliminated, as opposed to assets to be nurtured and developed over a career. Despite our cultural conditioning, we need the courage to face this fact and reconceptualize our identity.”

Click here to visit the site.
Click here to download the PDF.

What’s Your CQ and Why Should You Care? by David Livermore

“You’ve heard about IQ and EQ. But what’s your CQ? CQ, or cultural intelligence, is more than just a kitschy catch phrase for cultural competence. It’s a fresh, new approach to leading in our multicultural, globalized world. Cultural intelligence is defined as the capability to function effectively across national, ethnic, and organizational cultures. And research demonstrates a leader’s CQ may easily be the single greatest difference between thriving in the 21st century world and becoming obsolete.”

Click here to visit the site.
Click here to download the PDF.

Below C-Level Strategy by John Spence

“The CEO and her senior management team have just come back from a three-day offsite in Palm Beach with the new ‘global strategy’ and now it’s your job as a business-line or mid-level manager to figure out how to take these lofty ideas and long-term plans and build an organization to effectively implement them in the real world. Or, you’re a small business owner/manager and may never have had a ‘three-day strategy off-site’ at a high-end resort, but you still need to figure out how to create a company that can profitably compete in the marketplace. This sort of a situation calls for a different type of strategy, one that is less about looking at ‘external’ factors like differentiation and positioning; and more about looking at the ‘internal’ strategies of how to build an agile organization that can flawlessly execute on the key business objectives. This sort of strategic planning requires someone who is down in the trenches and understands how the business really works, far away from the ivory tower. Whereas C- level strategic planning is for people that ‘make’ budgets; below C-level strategic planning is for those of us that are given a budget. Folks at the C-level make broad reaching decisions that direct people and departments across the entire organization, while those of us below C-level often have to focus on the few places within the organization where we do have impact, influence and some level of control. Luckily, the most important strategies for creating a highly successful organization fall into a handful of key result areas, most of which are completely within your control.”

Click here to visit the site.
Click here to download the PDF.

Change Master: Why Adapting is the Most Crucial Skill You’ll Ever by MJ Ryan

“In a very real way, what is being asked of us now is no more or less than to become consciously aligned with what life has always required on this planet. In 1956, the father of stress research, Hans Selye wrote in his seminal work, The Stress of Life, ‘Life is largely a process of adaptation to the circumstances in which we exist. A perennial give and take has been going on between living matter and its inanimate surroundings, between one living being and another, ever since the dawn of life in the prehistoric oceans. The secret of health and happiness lies in successful adjustment to the ever-changing conditions on this globe; the penalties for failure in this great process of adaptation are disease and unhappiness.’

In order to not merely to survive, but to thrive during the greatest period of transformation humans have ever experienced, we are all being called on to stretch mentally, emotionally, and spiritually into the future. It’s my hope that this manifesto offers you both comfort and practical support as you take on this challenge and become a Master of Change.”

Click here to visit the site.
Click here to download the PDF.

The Importance of Discovering Your Plan B by John Mullins & Randy Komisar

“If the founders of Google, Starbucks, or PayPal had stuck to their original business plans, we’d likely never have heard of them. Instead, they made radical changes to their initial models, became household names, and delivered huge returns for their founders and investors. How did they get from their Plan A to a business model that worked? Why did they succeed when most new ventures crash and burn?

Every aspiring entrepreneur, whether they desire to start a new company or create something new within an existing company, has a Plan A—and virtually all of these individuals believe that their Plan A will work. They can probably even imagine how they’ll look on the cover of Fortune or Inc. magazine. Unfortunately, they are usually wrong. But what separates the ultimate successes from the rest is what they do when their first plan fails to catch on. Do they lick their wounds, get back on their feet, and morph their newly found insights into great businesses or do they doggedly stick to their original plan?”

Click here to visit the site.
Click here to download the PDF.

Green Design with Life Cycle in Mind by Kimi Ceridon

“It is not impossible to integrate sustainability into early stages of design. Cradle-to-grave environmental impact analysis methods are rarely used as a metric during product development. In early stages of a project, companies measure feasibility according to money, performance and time metrics. Sustainability is commonly measured at a design cycle’s end on finished products when design features cannot be easily modified for sustainability measures. It is ineffective to apply new design metrics to finished products. Evaluating the ‘greenness’ of products is typically done to market the ‘greenest’ product in a line. This does not address the need to create sustainable products at project onset; thus, products remain ‘un-green’ and unsustainable.

It is time for new feasibility metric—Green Design with Life Cycle in Mind. Green design thinking must be accessible and applicable to product development through a set of tools designed for early stages of product development.”

Click here to visit the site.
Click here to download the PDF.

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September 8, 2009

Get a Conference Call With Tim Sanders and 100 of Your Friends

Filed under: Blog — Jon @ 10:55 am

Starting today, we’re offering a couple nice deals when you purchase bulk copies of Tim Sanders’ book Saving the World at Work. Offer 1 gets you a conference call for up to 100 people directly with the author. Offer 2 gets you free copies of his DVD series. Which option is best for your team? Check out the details here and start making a difference within your organization today.

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September 4, 2009

Twitterville Book Launch and Podcast

Filed under: Blog,Communication,Current Events,Customer Service,Information Technology,Internet,Marketing,New Releases — Jon @ 8:15 am

Today I had a nice conversation with Shel Israel about his new book, Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods, which also, coincidentally was released today via Portfolio. In both our conversation and the book, Shel talks about how companies are becoming involved in Twitter to do better business.

He tells stories about companies like Dell, who are getting a better grasp on those dissatisfied with service they’ve received – and it’s better than customer service, where a center waits for a call, and then attempts to deal with it as quickly as possible. Twitter, on the other hand, opens up a conversation that takes place in public, clearing not only the problem at hand, but building credibility and trust at large.

Check out the podcast here, and pick up a box of the book here, and get your team informed about and involved in something that can truly change your business.

[podcast]http://media.800ceoread.com/view/9781591842798/audio/Twitterrville_Interview_with_Shel_Israel.mp3[/podcast]

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