➻ Today is the first birthday of what we call in the office “our book,” The 100 Best Business Books of All Time by Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten. Todd wrote a happy birthday post for the book, and I gave away the last of the 100 best books we have to give away today on inBubbleWrap.
➻ The new issue of Portfolio’s Business Beat is out. As usual, our dear Mr. Covert has his “Just Jack” corner. This month, he discusses Discovering the Soul of Service by Leonard Berry. You can read more about the other features of the latest Business Beat on The Portfolio Javelin.
➻ Kids these days… are apparently reading decent nonfiction. Superfreakonomics and What the Dog Saw both made The Chronicle of Higher Education’s bestseller list.
➻ Jeannie Bliss, author of I Love You More Than My Dog, has just launched a slick new website.
➻ Our friend Stacie of The Boswellians wants you to read more foreign literature, and I’d like to help her sway you. After asking us to “Imagine if we had never read the words of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Albert Camus, Jorge Luis Borges, Anton Chekhov, Naguib Mahfouz, Vladimir Nabokov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Isabel Allende, or Leo Tolstoy,” she points to the University of Rochester’s Three Percent project, a resource for international literature. It’s so named because that’s the percentage of books published in the U.S. translated from foreign languages—three. If you’re ever in Milwaukee, you should stop in at Boswell and see their international literature display. In fact, you should come to Milwaukee just to do so.
➻ The Washington Post‘s Short Stack had a great guest post recently from Ray C. Anderson, author of Confessions of a Radical Industrialist. In it, he wrote:
It must be sacrilege to challenge the great man, but Milton Friedman was wrong. A generation of business people has grown up believing and following his mantra, “Business exists to make a profit.”
Anderson then replaces that mantra with a new (not as catchy) one:
“Business makes a profit to exist, and must surely exist for some higher purpose,”
➻ If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’ve been following the Macmillan and Amazon kerfuffle. One of the greatest things to come out of it was the ad stating that Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto is “Available at booksellers everywhere except Amazon.” (picture from GalleyCat, who did a wonderful job chronicling the fight blow-by-blow.) It is not only hilarious, but a very serious challenge to Amazon’s pricing model at the same exact time Apple is coming out with the iPad to challenge the Kindle. We haven’t talked about the iPad at all here. If you’re interested in it, I would highly suggest the discussion on last night’s episode of Charlie Rose.
➻ Why? Why not?
