➻ Justin Fox, author of The Myth of the Rational Market, pondered Improving the Let’s-Persuade-Business-to-Improve Movement in a recent Harvard Business Review post. There’s a lot of folks out there writing about we can persuade business and those in it to behave more ethically, but Fox thinks its still a hard sell:
I don’t think anyone has come up with an argument for or description of better business behavior that has anything like the elegance and power of the economists’ “incentives matter.”
He ends, understandably, on a slightly defeated note, writing: “Clearly, I’m stuck here. Can somebody help me out?” Umair Haque, his colleague at HBR tried to answer his call for help, making The Case for Being Disruptively Good, arguing for the forces of information, discipline, competition, disruption and rule-making. He writes:
So why don’t more businesses see these forces? It’s the wrong question. The right one is: because there will be some organizations that are quicker to get it than others, what do the forces above mean for the economy? Well, they suggest that businesses who can do more good will survive, thrive, and prosper — and those who do more bad will stumble, falter, and fall.
I think he’s definitety right, but he is taking a pretty long view of history when he writes: “Yesterday, the global economy was built on debtors’ prisons, usury, expropriation, colonialism, and slavery. Today, it isn’t.” and “Yet even two hundred years from now, I’m sure incumbents will ask—what, you want us to do more good? And then, as ever, from under their patrician noses, revolutionaries who can do better will disrupt them.” And while Umair’s language speaks to me, I don’t know if it is as catchy as “incentives matter” to those marching off to Wall Street. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
➻ Richard Florida also takes a longer view in his works about the creative class—such as The Rise of the Creative Class—and he has a great new book coming out in May called The Great Reset. You can get a taste of the book in his March article in The Atlantic, How the Crash Will Reshape America, or by reading his recent interview with Conor Clarke for the same magazine.
➻ Portfolio has posted a new issue of The Business Beat. Featured this month are Peter Escher, author of The MBA Oath, Michael O’Malley, author of The Wisdom of Bees, and, as always, our own peerless leader Jack Covert in his Just Jack corner. Jack discusses Po Bronson’s What Should I Do With My Life, one of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time and a close second (in my mind) to Studs Terkel’s Working as the best book of interviews ever created about work.
➻ Speaking of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, you can now read it in Indonesian.* Muhammad Mishbah penned a review for Seputar Indonesia Daily writing:
Books 100 Best Business Books of All Time provides 100 units with a discussion of book selection of different problems. This book is like a “dictionary” of business books that point us in order to save time, money and energy before seeking appropriate books.
(Shakes fist at Google Translate.)
*This applies only to those of you that can actually read Indonesian.
➻ Peter Elkind’s new book, Rough Justice: The Rise and fall of Eliot Spitzer, is embargoed until next Tuesday, but you can get a preview at Fortune, blessed as they were with an an exclusive excerpt. “‘Is there a way to wire money where it’s not evident that it’s coming from me?’ the governor asked.”
➻ The Web Designer Depot posted a great overview of Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen by Cameron Chapman. He writes “Making Ideas Happen is an excellent resource for those of us who have no shortage of ideas but often have a hard time seeing those ideas through to completion.” That is everyone I know, including me and probably you.
➻ Roger C. Parker has a novel idea: Learn to write a business book by studying 800-CEO-READ’s Top 25 Business Books.
➻ “Some people seem to think life is all about the I, and the Me, Me, Me.” The WePad begs to differ. (HT to Siobhan O’Leary at Publishing Perspectives.)
➻ Following the Freakonomics trend, America’s finest news source, The Onion, reported recently that “last month’s quarter-inch drop in height among Mexican dead-lift competitors in the middle-heavyweight division could spell disaster for GE’s aviation and software subsidiaries.” “But, like anything else, a shrewd investor must always ask himself one thing: How many hot dogs did I eat last year?”
➻ I’ll ask her someday.
