June « 2010 « 800 CEO Read

June 29, 2010

The Zeroes

Filed under: Book Reviews,Current Events — dylan @ 3:43 pm

Just when you think the stories of excess and insanity on Wall Street can’t get any more unseemly, along comes The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane by Randall Lane, released today by Portfolio. In particular, there is the chapter entitled “Nails” about his business relationship with Lenny Dykstra. If you’ve never heard of Mr. Dykstra, let me introduce you…

“That’s my f*****’ ashtray money, bro, I don’t even know if I flew on their plane.”

—Lenny Dykstra

Apparently, Lenny should have transferred that money from his ashtray to his checking account because f*****’ ashtray money to him at the time was the $7,000 dollars Halycon Jets claimed he bounced a check to them for.

Lenny Dykstra earned the nickname “Nails” by smashing headlong into outfield walls and spitting profanity and tobacco juice on Major League baseball diamonds in the ’80s and ’90s. He was a member of two of the most excessive and raucous pennant winning teams in baseball history—the 1986 Mets and 1993 Phillies—so he fit right in when he retired into one of the most excessive and raucous cultures to ever exist on Wall Street. He was considered by Jim Cramer, who took him on as a columnist for TheStreet.com, as “one of the great ones” in investment advice. Cramer praised him as “a guy who is applying the same skills to money that he applied to sports.” And what skills did he bring to baseball, you might ask? Maybe it was his reckless abandon? As John Stewart joked last year, maybe “somebody gave him the sign to steal.”

Because, as detailed by Lane later in the book, Dykstra was not, in fact, “one of the great ones.” Cramer’s declaration on Dykstra was about as prescient as his defense of Bear Stearns’ position just before that once-great firm collapsed. It turns out the stock advice Lenny Dykstra was offering in his “Nails on the Numbers” column was taken from an professional marketing analyst, Richard Suttmeier, and written up by a ghostwriter. Lane also alleges in the book, and in a related article posted at The Daily Beast yesterday, that Dykstra accepted cash to hype stocks on TheStreet.com and in exchange for promised access to Cramer (though he goes out of his way to state that he’s sure Cramer had no knowledge of this). Lane ends his Daily Beast piece by stating that “Cramer … continues to draw hundreds of thousands of followers, via his CNBC show Mad Money—one of the few in the industry who managed to escape the past decade unscathed.” He must mean unscathed financially, because with his picks of Bear Stearns and Lenny Dykstra, you have to wonder… Is Jim Cramer dumb as Nails?

As for “Nails” himself, Leonard Kyle Dykstra has now exited his financial career the same way he exited his playing career—broken. When he was done with baseball, it was with a broken body. Broke financially, Dykstra claimed last year to be living in his car and hotel lobbies. With between $10 and $50 million worth of liabilities, he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last July. I hope that he at least still has that money stashed in his ashtray.

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The Doorbell is Dead: A Guest Post from Ed Muzio

Filed under: Guest Post — dylan @ 9:00 am

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear, nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life … ”

—Henry David Thoreau

I’ve always loved Thoreau. But, if not an outright misanthrope, he was certainly not what you would call a “team player.” Instead of working to change the culture he was so uncomfortable living in and opposed to (as his essay on non-violent Civil Disobedience would later influence Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. to do) he escaped into the woods. His influence on the world was through his writing, not his actions.

It may be a bit pretentious of me to use a Thoreau quote to introduce an article from Ed Muzio, author of Make Work Great: Supercharge Your Team, Reinvent the Culture, and Gain Influence—One Person at a Time, but I found myself thinking about the idea of “living deliberately” a lot while reading Muzio’s chapter on “Overtness About Task.”

Just as Thoreau desired to “live deliberately,” Muzio counsels us to work overtly. And, instead of documenting the ills of the culture we work in (otherwise known as complaining), he teaches us to use overt purpose and action to change it. To understand Muzio, you can take the Thoreau quote above and change it to “I did not wish to undertake what was not work, time is so dear, nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.” And it is never necessary.

Muzio describes six specific types of overtness, beginning his section on overt purpose by asking “What are trying to do? It’s amazing how difficult it can be to answer that question in a meaningful way … We often overlook this question because we mistakenly assume that the answer is self-evident. It rarely is.”

Now, without further digression, here is Ed Muzio.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

The Doorbell is Dead by ED MUZIO

Literally, my doorbell is dead. It’s one of those battery operated wireless ones. I think it got some water in it, and it doesn’t work. Plus, my front door is fifteen feet behind a locked gate, so there’s no way to knock. Conventional wisdom says, if you drop by my house unannounced, you’re not getting in. It’s been this way for over a year and it has yet to be a problem.

I should perhaps be embarrassed by this, but I recently realized why it really doesn’t matter, while giving a friend a ride across town. When my car stopped in front of our destination—a relative’s house—my friend stepped out of the car, thanked me, and immediately initiated a cell phone call. As she was putting her phone away, the front door cracked open and she strolled in, carefree user of the new-age doorbell.

That’s why nobody has yet complained about mine: nobody uses it anyway! Figuratively as well, the doorbell is dead. And its death has bigger implications to our daily lives than many of us care to consider.

There’s a reason we call this the information age, and it’s not because we’re all so much smarter. It’s because we all have access to so much information, at our fingertips, all the time. I can track my package, check the status of my flight, and monitor my stock portfolio or my company’s financial status, all in a second, all with a click. I’m more informed than anyone in my position in history has ever been. And yet, being so informed has not made my life easier. If anything, I think I’m probably busier than a counterpart in my position would have been 20 years ago.

For one thing, I’m constantly doing things like checking the status of my packages and my flights! That didn’t used to be an option, but now that it is, it seems foolish not to avail myself of it. Why in the world would I choose to be uninformed, when it’s so easy to rectify my ignorance by learning exactly which city my all-important box is traversing at the moment?

Worse yet, everyone now has the expectation of immediacy. At times it feels like I’m fielding client questions and queries day and night, all of whom expect an instant answer. I pride myself on customer service, but it can be a challenge! If you supplement “client” with “customer,” “manager,” or “stockholder,” I’ve probably described your job too.

And it’s not just business contacts. Some loved ones have also come to expect an instantaneous reply when they call. I vividly recall a time when I returned calls to friends and family after I got home for the evening, or if it was a particularly long day, the following evening. Now, the calls come into my cell phone at all hours. If I don’t respond within a few hours, I end up on the receiving end of a concerned and vaguely annoyed follow-up call: “didn’t you get my message? I thought you would call me back over lunch.”

The problem is, my capacity for handling information has not expanded commensurately with the information explosion. I still have only two hands, only two ears, only two eyes, and only one brain. I may read a few hundred more emails per day than I used to, but I don’t read them a few hundred times faster. And my decision-making capacities still have limits as to how much information they can incorporate. For better or worse, I’m still just human.

And you, my friend, are in the same boat as I am. Admit it! You haven’t grown four extra hands or two extra brains either. That’s why it’s crucial for all of us to walk around with a well rehearsed script of what’s we’re trying to do, what I call a Verbalized Summary Objective Statement, or VSO. The VSO is a script that you play to others, and to yourself, as a reminder of what you’re working on. It’s also a filter that helps you turn on—or turn off—your most important sources of information. And, it’s a statement of your output that you can use at the end of the day to check that you’re making progress. If you are, you can feel satisfaction. If you’re not, you can make an adjustment. Either of those options is preferable to just going home exhausted, vaguely wondering when you started working so hard, and why you can’t seem to stop.

Tomorrow morning, when you first get to your desk and before you start doing anything, see if you can articulate your purpose for the day, or maybe the week, in about 90 seconds. Try writing it down, or better yet, say it to yourself a few times until you’ve memorized it. Then, use your little infomercial as your blueprint for the day. Whenever you’re about to engage with information — either a source of it, or a request for it — first check the contents of your VSO, and see how that source or request aligns with what you really want to be doing. In other words, pay attention to where you invest your mental and physical effort.

Probably, like me, you’ll find that not all of what is clamoring for your attention is in line with your own priorities. Although saying “no” is never easy, it is much easier when you have a burning “yes” to focus upon instead. Now that you know where you’re trying to head, you can begin to make the difficult decisions about what not to do. From here, the rest is up to you.

Actually, I do have one more suggestion. As you go through the day sorting through information, take a moment to check your calendar. If your evening plans include a visit to my house, be sure to take my cell phone number with you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edward G. Muzio, CEO of Group Harmonics, is the author of the award winning books Make Work Great: Supercharge Your Team, Reinvent the Culture, and Gain Influence—One Person at a Time and Four Secrets to Liking Your Work: You May Not Need to Quit to Get the Job You Want. An expert in workplace improvement and its relationship to individual enjoyment, Muzio has been featured on Fox Business Network, CBS, and other national media, and he has been cited in many publications including the New York Post, the Austin American Statesman, and Spirit magazine. He lives in Albuquerque, NM.

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June 28, 2010

Tough Love interview with John Moore

Filed under: Blog,Interviews — Jon @ 11:18 am

As announced last week, we’ve launched our first digital book over at ChangeThis.com. Tough Love, by John Moore is a business inspired screenplay, and follows his straight-up business book Tribal Knowledge. Both deal with an industry the author knows well – coffee. After years of marketing for Starbucks, Moore has seen a lot of changes and struggles both from inside and outside perspectives, and tells great stories about how people’s relationship to coffee has shifted and developed over the years.

Particularly, Tough Love is a prime example of Moore’s storytelling ability. Written in true screenplay style, what appears to be fiction on the surface ends up feeling more real than non-fiction as you begin to ‘hear’ the character’s voices, and identify those voices with the accompanying sketches of each person involved. A great new format, revealing a powerful way to absorb the complexity of a multitude of business issues – leadership, marketing, teamwork, and much more.

Here’s a Q&A I did with the author about the book and his experience. Great stuff all around, and of course we recommend checking out the book in full.

Doing and thinking differently is a common theoretical approach, but you’ve applied this within your writing by creating a new genre – the business screenplay. How did the idea come about?

I’ve always been one who looks to gain inspiration from concepts outside of my comfort zone. Last year I sought to improve the flow of my presentations and decided to learn how screenwriters craft a story. Ended up reading “SAVE THE CAT: The Last Book On Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need” by Blake Snyder. Great book. It’s like PURPLE COW for aspiring screenwriters. Meaning, Blake breaks down the art of screenwriting and arranging a story into easy-to-follow ways.

As I was reading SAVE THE CAT, I learned some tips to improve my presentations but I also became inspired to follow his structure to write a screenplay. But not a Hollywood script, rather a screenplay as a business book.

After reading hundreds of business books, and writing one myself, I’ve grown tired of the typical business book. They are too long, too pedantic, and too boring. A screenplay, on the other hand, is a different way to tell a story and I became excited about the idea of sharing business lessons inside a screenplay.

Then I thought with all the drama Starbucks was going through in a rough economy, it would make for a great screenplay story. That brings us to TOUGH LOVE, a story about Galaxy Coffee and its struggles to manage its brand growth in good times and bad.

One of the issues within the screenplay is how a company manages its brand, or what’s at the core of it’s purpose. How does the title Tough Love relate to that?

A problem I’ve experienced first-hand working inside brands like Starbucks and Whole Foods is there are too many company cheerleaders who refuse to challenge ideas. People who wear, in classic Edward de Bono ideology, the “black hats” and offer judgmental critiques during meetings aren’t seen as team players. These “black hats” can love the company they work for but they should still feel comfortable in offering “tough love” feedback.

There’s a scene in TOUGH LOVE where a company cheerleader chides a former employee for criticizing the actions of Galaxy Coffee. This former employee responds back that no business is perfect and the reason he is critiquing the company is because he loves the company.

There is also an entrepreneurial side to the screenplay. What is the main lesson for the entrepreneurially minded you hoped to communicate through the characters?

At Starbucks I knew a lot of smart and die-hard company loyal people like “Vivian Kane.” Vivian is a main character in TOUGH LOVE, she’s a classic company cheerleader—probably to a fault. She suppressed her entrepreneurial aspirations to take the easy way and stay at a company she secretly is losing faith in. The lesson being… gain experience and confidence at some company and then scratch your entrepreneurial itch, if you have one.

Because of the format, readers get a sense of the personal perspective of the characters. Talk a bit about one example of personal success that’s revealed in the story.

An important storyline revolves around David Pearl, Galaxy Coffee’s charismatic CEO. Many years ago, David scratched his entrepreneurial itch to leave a string of sales jobs to eventually become the driving force behind Galaxy Coffee. The public image of David is one of confidence and competitiveness. However, the private image of David reveals his lack of self-confidence. David masks his insecurity by being revengeful and overly competitive. He will go out of his way to prove doubters wrong, even if it costs him dearly.

By the end of the story David’s life is turned upside down. What he thought was right, turned out wrong. He ends up learning, the hard way, life rewarding and business saving advice. David becomes a better man and a better businessman from all the trials he faces in leading Galaxy Coffee through its growing pains.

From the story, and of course your own experience at Starbucks and Whole Foods, what is your overall advice for companies to better understand and adhere to their mission AND remain profitable?

When I talk to businesses I ask them if they have a “Do Not Compromise List.” I ask this question because every business makes compromises as it grows. The trick is not to compromise anything sacred. But to know what’s sacred, a business needs to first write it down.

For example, Whole Foods maintains “Do Not Compromise List” of all the artificial and chemical ingredients it finds unacceptable in food products. Under no circumstances is Whole Foods to sell any product that contains ingredients on their “Do Not Compromise List.” This list acts as a compass for Whole Foods to follow as it grows.

I recommend businesses maintain a “Do Not Compromise List.” And more importantly, I recommend businesses continuously refer to this list every couple of months to keep them on track to grow with purpose true to their beliefs.

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June 25, 2010

The Shallows of a Cognitive Surplus

Filed under: Uncategorized — dylan @ 1:59 pm

I think most reviewers will find that Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows and Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus hold very different, and possibly opposing, views of the Internet. But I found them to be perfect compliments to one other. Taken together, and read simultaneously, I think they provide a more nuanced and intriguing perspective of the potential effects of the Internet on our intelligence than when read alone (though they both undoubtedly stand tall in their regard). I wrote a short comparison of the books for our monthly newsletter, the KeenThinker, but a better way to give you an idea of the books may be to take a random, slightly absurd paragraph seemingly unrelated to the topic of both books and publish them next to eachother. So, without further ado, here is Nicholas Carr:

It’s 1968. I’m nine years old, a run-of-the-mill suburban kid playing in a patch of woods near my family’s home. Marshall McLuhan and Norman Mailer are on prime-time TV, debating the intellectual and moral implications of what Mailer describes as “man’s acceleration into a super-technological world.” 2001 is having its first theatrical run, leaving moviegoers befuddled, bemused, or just plain annoyed. And in a quiet laboratory at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Michael Merzenich is cutting a hole in a monkey’s skull. The Shallows, page 24

And Clay Shirky:

The sitcom has been our gin, an infinitely expandable response to the crisis of social transformation, and as with drinking gin, it isn’t hard to explain why people watch individual programs—some of them are quite good. What’s hard to explain is how, in the space of a generation, watching television became a part-time job for every citizen on the developed world. Cognitive Surplus, page 5

For further illumination, here are two (more sensible) paragraphs on the effects of the invention of the printing press.

If you had seen Gutenberg’s shop in the 1450s, when its output was indulgences and Bibles, you might have thought the printing press was custom-made for strengthening the economic and political position of the church. And then a funny thing happened: just the opposite. Cognitive Surplus, page 188

And Carr:

After Gutenberg’s invention, the bounds of language expanded rapidly as writers, competing for the eyes of ever more sophisticated and demanding readers, strived to express ideas and emotions with superior clarity, elegance, and originality. The vocabulary of the English language, once limited to just a few thousand words, expanded to upwards of a million words as books proliferated. The Shallows, page 77

And, finally, on the uncertainty of what revolutionary new technology will bring, here is Shirky:

The early print revolution also reminds us that at the beginning of the spread of a new tool, it is too early to know how (and where and how much) society will change because of its use. Big changes can stall. After the initial spread of indulgences, the increased volume of their production dramatically decreased their value. Small changes can spread. The Ninety-five Theses, nailed to a single door, were reprinted and translated and reprinted again, spreading far and wide. What seems to threaten uniformity actually creates diversity. Cognitive Surplus, page 189

And Carr:

Like our forebears during the late Middle Ages, we find ourselves today between two technological worlds.

[...]

But the world of the screen, as we’re already coming to understand, is a very different place from the world of the page. A new intellectual ethic is taking hold. The pathways of our brain are once again being rerouted. The Shallows, page 77

The point of this exercise was not to infuriate Nicholas Carr by fragmenting his work and mashing it up into a blog post, but to show that, when read in their entirety, you’ll see that these books’ arguments and conclusions are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they share similar thoughts. Neither man is an ideologue or absolutist. Neither man claims to have all the answers. Both are big thinkers and wonderful writers. And, lucky for us, they are adding their voices and intellectual weight to an important conversation at the same time.

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June 23, 2010

Tough Love on ChangeThis | A Business Book Masquerading as a Screenplay

Filed under: Big Ideas,ChangeThis — dylan @ 12:49 pm

You have always known ChangeThis for our free manifestos. Today, we are happy to announce the release of Tough Love: Scripting the Drive, Drama and Decline of Galaxy Coffee by the incomparable John Moore—our first foray into offering full-length books for download.

We feel fortunate to have been able to team up with John Moore on this project, as talented a writer and fresh a thinker as there is in business today, and the only author ever to send me clips of Melle Mel & the furious Five doing “Beat Street” live. We’re truly honored that he chose ChangeThis as his vehicle of distribution, and would like to thank him publicly here for his patience with us as we learned how to do it.

As you’ll see, the piece of work he provided is truly unique. It is a screenplay, telling the story of a Seattle coffee shop that has changed the world of coffee, but allowed its growth to change the culture that made the company so special to its customers and employees in the first place. By following the drama of the company’s leaders and long-time employees as they struggle, in tough economic times, to right the ship, you’ll learn valuable business lessons.

If you appreciate the free content on the site, we think you’ll love our first offer for sale. Head on over to the store and get your copy today.

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June 22, 2010

Being Wrong: a New inBubbleWrap offer!

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: InBubbleWrap — Sally @ 1:23 pm

Can a doggedly-researched book that relays the historical lineage of error, attempts to uncover the truth beneath truth, and even discusses something as impenetrable as “The Optimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Everything,” be charming, accessible and eminently readable? Apparently so because Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz is just that.

Many of us remain uncomfortable with being wrong, in admitting that time and experience won’t necessarily prevent us from buying that lemon of a car or hiring the wrong person or adding yet another self-help book to our shelves that will teach us how to stop making the same mistakes. But, “[e]ven if you can’t be brought to believe that error itself is a good thing,” Schulz says, “I hope to convince you by the end of this book that it is inseparably linked to other good things, things we definitely do not want to eliminate–like, say, our intelligence.” Your intelligence will certainly be fueled by reading this book and you may even recover some of your good-humor about the times you were…and the times you will be…wrong.

Keep Reading and sign up to win your free copy of Being Wrong. We have 20 copies to give away this week!

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June 21, 2010

Being a Friend

Filed under: Blog — Jon @ 12:29 pm

Last week, while hanging out at Translator, we talked about corporate use of social media, and how if used poorly, can actually hurt your business more than help it. The lesson being that just because the tools are available, doesn’t mean you necessarily need to use them. For instance, I’ve never used a conche, and don’t think I’ll ever need to, while it’s likely totally useful for others.

But social media is different, of course, and we should consider how we can strengthen our relationships online. What’s important to understand is that the etiquette between friends online and off shouldn’t be too far apart. If it’s all about building relationships (either case), you simply want to be a friend. Amber Mac would agree. Her new book Power Friending: Demystifying Social Media to Grow Your Business uses that philosophy as its premise.

Being friends actually involves a bit of strategy, and this book addresses it from the business standpoint – creating a listening plan, being authentic, messaging execution, and building long-lasting credibility. While being friends comes as part of human nature, the history of business can make us confused as to how to act when behind the face of a company. By rethinking the issues Ms. Mac discusses in the book, we can begin to see how businesses might be overcomplicating the process. A jam-packed, but easy-to-read guide on how your business can connect with people online and turn them into friends for life.

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Help Support the Creative Commons’ Catalyst Campaign

Filed under: Big Ideas,ChangeThis — dylan @ 10:45 am

If you follow what we do over on ChangeThis, you may have noticed that we publish each manifesto under a Creative Commons license. It is an innovative and easy way to spread ideas and information, letting readers know exactly how they can use and redistribute the work while protecting the author’s copyright. And it is work we couldn’t do as easily without the Creative Commons.

Recently, the folks at Creative Commons launched the Catalyst Campaign to support Open Educational Resources even further. If you value what you find on ChangeThis, please consider helping them do this important work with a donation today. Read on to learn more.

The Catalyst Campaign: Donate Now to Help Fund CC’s Catalyst Grants

We’re thrilled today to announce the launch of the Catalyst Campaign – from now through June 30, Creative Commons is raising money to fund our recently-launched Catalyst Grants program.

Catalyst Grants will make it possible for individuals and organizations to harness the power of Creative Commons. A grant might enable a group in a developing country to research how Open Educational Resources can positively impact its community. Another could support a study of entrepreneurs using Creative Commons licenses to create a new class of socially responsible businesses. Anyone may apply for a Catalyst Grant, which ranges from $1,000-$10,000.

But we can’t do it without your help. Our goal is to raise $100,000 from CC supporters like you to fund the grants that will make all this possible. Donate today to help spread our mission of openness and innovation across all cultural and national boundaries.

Thanks to the Milan Chamber of Commerce which has generously donated EUR 10,000 to jumpstart the effort!

Will you join in?

Advocate: Take a moment to spread the word about the Catalyst Campaign and Grants program on your blog and social networks with our banners and buttons.

Donate: If you give $75 or more, you can become the proud owner of one of these bright and cheerful, limited edition “I Love to Share” t-shirts. Every bit helps so give what you can today to ignite openness and innovation around the world!

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June 17, 2010

Holy Water: An Excerpt

Filed under: Excerpts and Essays — dylan @ 2:52 pm

Like great fiction, good advertising tells a story. It creates an alternate reality we want to enter. So when an ad man like James P. Othmer writes fiction, he does so with a practiced skill set. You may know Othmer from his brilliant book on advertising from a year ago, Adland: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet, which was named one of Fast Company‘s Best Business Books of the Year and just came out in paperback. His new book, Holy Water, was released this week, and is his second novel (his first, The Futurist, was released in 1996).

When Chris Brogan visited our offices and saw the books scattered everywhere, he asked if we ever tire of reading all the business books that come through the office. My answer to him, and to the problem in general, is to read fiction at home. It’s always a pleasure to have those two worlds meet, when an author you like works successfully in both genres. And with the darkly comic and satirical Holy Water, Othmer has returned to fiction flawlessly, making me a very happy reader.

If you liked Adland, I’m sure you’ll like Othmer’s fiction. He was kind enough to share a sample with us. The following excerpt, the book’s introduction, sets the scene.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

Riverfire

The river is burning down.

Or is it up? The river is burning up. More than a hundred feet up. And since his boat is upwind from the night-burning pit furnaces to the south and stars are shining defiantly in a sky that rarely allows them to and the white-tipped lesser Himalayas loom on either side of the valley to the east and west, he thinks that this is a disturbingly beautiful thing. This riverfire.

They didn’t tell him about this phenomenon at the executive briefing in Manhattan. The exit interview at the home office. Nowhere in the Winning Business Abroad Six Sigma Powerpoint presentation does he recall hearing anything about a body of water consumed by flame.

All they told him was, In this economy, be thankful you have a freakin’ job.

His groin aches. The epicenter of phantom pains. The karmic vortex. The fleshy receptacle of damaged memories. Formerly known as his testicles.

The fire is highest where debris collects in the crooked river’s bend.

He is a big believer in the symbolic weight of what song is playing at a particular moment. And if a song isn’t playing, he will assign a song to the moment and force the symbolism, revel in the false epiphany. His suggested soundtrack for this moment would be Spoon’s “The Beast and the Dragon Adored”.

“That’s beautiful. Is it some kind of welcome ceremony organized by the villagers?” he asks, even though he knows that this isn’t some kind of welcome ceremony organized by the villagers. He knows that the river up here was coated with a black skin of waste that was waiting to burn. Daring someone to light the match.

Like what? The Cuyahoga. Near Cleveland in 1969. He is too young to remember the actual fire but not too young to get his history from REM’s “Cuyahoga”.

This is where we walked, this is where we swam. . .

“It is not a ceremony,” explains his corporate liaison/host/executioner. “It is toxic, this river.” The man waves at the flaming water, as if it is a hyperkinetic child. “Sometimes it does that.”

Henry and the corporate liaison exchange a glance that signals a transition in their relationship. The end of bullshit. Previously the liaison had told him that a pro-democracy demonstration in the capital city was a birthday celebration for the King, that the black ash that fell like nightmare snow on Shangri-La Square was volcanic and that his country was a human rights champion despite the fact that it still hasn’t abolished slavery.

Let’s put our heads together and start a new country up. . .

He sees this as a bad thing, this sudden telling of the truth. He decides that the end of bullshit means they no longer care what he thinks. His hosts. His corporate partners. The diminished bureaucrats of a fading monarchy. Because someone to whom they have decided to tell the truth is obviously someone who no longer matters. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the Madison Avenue PR exec brought in to work the same spin magic her firm did for the Beijing games staring at her out of service iPhone and quietly weeping.
He decides to give the corporate liaison another chance to lie. To help matters, he even spells out the premise of the lie for him. “Maybe there was, you know, an accident. A tanker spill or a factory mishap. Perhaps the Chinese…”

The liaison shakes his head, lights an American cigarette. “No,” he answers. “Even rivers burn. This one… toxic, 24/7.”

Cuyahoga gone. . .

No one told him about any of this. No one told him about the corruption, the poverty, the malaprop billboard in the half-built “Free Zone” touting “Quality Manufactured Gods”. No one told him that the non-party constitutional democracy to which he was being extra-sourced was actually an unhinged monarchy which is, when the U.N. and Amnesty International aren’t looking, a dictatorship. No one told him about the delusional, profit and Bollywood-obsessed-despot in waiting. And no one told him that his five-star “spiritual eco lodge” with a private bathing garden, infinity pool and extensive spa menu was also a whorehouse that sat on a hilltop less than a mile from water-challenged village with one occasionally working pump that tapped into an aquifer of the most polluted and, as it turns out, flammable river on the planet.

Which would have been nice, since he works for a recently purchased subsidiary of an American held bottled water company whose mission statement, printed on the cover of its stunningly produced annual report, is “Bringing fresh water to a thirsty world.”

No one told him. But then again, it’s not like he’d asked a whole lot of questions.

“What do you put it out with?” Henry asks. The liaison doesn’t answer. He just watches the flames.

But the front man from the yet to be dispatched U.S. Congressional delegation, a young Republican who had vomited over the side of the boat less than ten minutes ago, does have an answer. “You put it out with truth,” he says. “And courage.”

This elicits laughter from the in-country deal maker for the biggest brand at the gates, the Wal-Mart delegation, which is just waiting for the proverbial green light. The wink and nod from the Palace. He removes the stem of a silver hashish pipe from his lips that had been passed to him by an Australian corporate mercenary. “Courage? My God, son. Don’t start going all John McCain on us now.”

Randy Newman had a Cuyahoga song, too. “Burn on, Big River”

He squirts a glob of Purel into his left palm and rubs as if it can kill nightmares and coup d’etats as well as 99.9 percent of most common germs.

Before he left New York he did the most perfunctory of searches. Google. Lonely Planet. An old atlas. It’s all he had time for, considering what he left, how fast it all happened. His old boss called it a chance to start over, opportunity to lose his inherent wussiness. His new boss, whom he is yet to meet, called it, via email, History waiting to happen, the next Bangalore. Wikipedia called it, “a secret and mysterious kingdom, long isolated from international politics and commerce.”

“Wow, what a shit-hole,” he hears the Wal-Mart guy say as they skirt east of the fire and drift past a shoreline village. Women with buckets are wading into those sections of the water that are not burning. Children are running along the river’s edge, keeping pace with the slow-moving boat.

He’s not sure where they’re taking him. Either to a party in his honor, he thinks, or to kill him, to preserve what’s left of theirs.
His soon to be ex-wife called it the perfect place for him to suffer the slow and painful death he deserves.
The woman with whom he thought he was falling in love called it something, too, but he can’t be sure because she said it in a language he doesn’t understand.

He doesn’t know and no one told him anything.

Yet here he is. A newly made VP of Global Water, Investor Relations, for a company whose headquarters he’s never seen, whose founders he just met and one of whom is huddled somewhere in the hold of this boat, on a burning river in a country he didn’t know existed three months ago.

As they reverse engines and slow alongside a floating dock at the far end of the village that his suspiciously beaming host had just called a shit-hole, he looks at the people gathering to meet them, to throw them a line, their faces aglow with hope and reflected riverfire.

Or is that hate instead of hope?

He listens for the symbolic song to accompany the moment. Perhaps a chant supplied by the locals or faint notes from a far-off boom box. Then, hearing only the wailing of strangers, he attempts to assign one. But this moment needs more than one song, he decides. It needs a soundtrack. A playlist.

A Mixtape for the Apocalypse.

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June 16, 2010

Jack Covert Selects: Delivering Happiness

Filed under: Jack Covert Selects — 800-CEO-READ @ 9:37 am

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh, Business Plus, 270 Pages, $23.99 Hardcover, June 2010, ISBN 9780446563048

I have always believed that great customer service is remembered long after the purchased product has been forgotten. My goal at 800-CEO-READ has been to create a company focused on the customer experience, not only connecting customers with the books and knowledge they need, but also offering top-of-the-line customer service as modeled by such outstanding service companies as Nordstrom and Lands’ End.

Just as we have based our customer service mission on other successful retailers, any company looking to up its concentration on the customer experience should look to Zappos as an icon. The (originally) online shoe company’s leader, Tony Hsieh, has written the best book on creating a customer experience I have read in quite awhile.

Hsieh not only created an astoundingly successful online retail that strived to “deliver WOW through service,” he also created an incredible corporate culture. As the title of the book states, delivering happiness is the company’s main goal—happiness both beyond and within the company. Committed to helping employees grow both professionally and personally, Zappos was picked, in 2009, by Fortune magazine as one of the top 25 companies to work for.

So, in terms of this book, how is all this “happiness” delivered? Just like everything else Hsieh has done: successfully. Hsieh tells his life story and weaves his experiences into his description of how Zappos is run. For example, Hsieh is a poker player of some regard, and he applies that expertise to his business strategy: “I’d realized that whether in poker, in business, or in life, it was easy to get caught up and engrossed in what I was currently doing, and that made it easy to forget that I always had the option to change tables. Psychologically, it’s hard because of all the inertia to overcome. Without conscious and deliberate effort, inertia always wins.”

Delivering Happiness is a real take-to-the-bank book about developing a truly customer-centric, as well as an employee-centric, organization, all delivered with insight and humor.

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