August « 2010 « 800 CEO Read

August 18, 2010

This Is Mr. Elliot Speaking

Filed under: The Company — dylan @ 2:15 pm

One of our very best customers is not actually a customer at all. His name is Mr. Elliot and, judging from his voice, he is an older gentleman. Mr. Elliot has been leaving a message in our voicemail system every day for 15 to 20 years. Yes, that’s years. Roy has transcribed one of the messages he received.

Hello… hello this is Mr. Elliott speaking. Here is what I’m looking for then: Coyote Waits… The Dark Wind. Stories by Tony Hillerman. Might these items be available? Please return my call when you can. Good Bye.

He always asks “Might these be available?” He’s very kind, and it’s all very proper and gentlemanly. The problem is, Mr. Elliot has never once—in two decades of leaving us a message every day—left a phone number for us to return his call, or given us an address to mail his books to. He has never even given us his first name. And, after all these years of placing orders, he’s never—not once—actually bought a book from us.

But he goes on “ordering” books every day, sometimes two or three times a day. Until the last two days, that is. We’re legitimately worried that Mr. Elliot hasn’t called. We’ve never placed a physical order for him, never actually done any business with him, but he is a part of this company. We talk about him at meetings and, whenever we hire someone new, we forward them a few of his messages. Like going to dinner at Conejito’s, it’s an initiation rite at our company.

We have a lot of questions, though. The obvious one is “Who is Mr. Elliot.” Does “Mr. Elliot” really exist, or is it a friend of the company carrying out one of the greatest ongoing pranks in customer service history? If he really does exist, is he just bats in the belfry crazy? Simply bored? An overzealous dadaist? Where is he calling from, and why does he call every day. More importantly, why has he not called the last two days?

This is Dylan speaking, and here is what I’m looking for then: information about Mr. Elliot. Might this information be available? We’re all very worried about him. Please let us know when you can.

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August 16, 2010

When to take a hike

Filed under: Big Ideas,Blog,Information Technology — Sally @ 3:41 pm

Last night I had come to the conclusion that I was quitting Facebook and maybe I would delete all of my bookmarked blogs too. Not because anything drastic happened…just because I was sick of being entranced by it all, of being wooed to check just one more site, go back to Facebook for updates one more time. Twitter moves so fast and occupies so much of people’s time trying to be clever, succinct and trend-worthy that the quote from Macbeth “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” comes to mind. Sometimes it–all this social connecting online–comes at me so fast, I just want to shut down, step away, rest my eyes, take a walk.

A new article in the New York Times tells about a group of neuroscientists who have ventured outdoors on week-long rafting, hiking and climbing vacation. “It was a primitive trip with a sophisticated goal: to understand how heavy use of digital devices and other technology changes how we think and behave, and how a retreat into nature might reverse those effects.”

The ultimate prey the neuroscientists are hunting? Attention. Or rather, our lack of it after our brains have been continually submitted to technological output. And while it is interesting to monitor the affects of our 24/7 information cycle, these researchers hope to gain a better understanding of attention so as to affect future treatment of brain disorders where a lack of attention plays a significant role in mental health.

I used to joke (back in the 90′s when I was a customer service associate and emailing was so rare it was part of my initial job training) that FedEx had ruined the world, that that fine company had raised everyone’s expectations for immediate satisfaction. Over the past 12 years or so, urgency has taken on a completely different definition. Is there anything now that isn’t urgent? Don’t we insist on leaving our cell phones on vibrate during a movie so that we don’t miss anything? Even if we’ve entered the movie theater expressly to escape the demands of our lives for 2 hours?

Just one of the questions in this band of neuroscientists’ research is: “How soon do people need to get information and respond to it? The believers in the group say the drumbeat of incoming data has created a false sense of urgency that can affect people’s ability to focus.” But detractors argue that multi-tasking leads to distraction, to a brain that is just plain tired from all the input. That is certainly how I felt last night, and how I sometimes feel after a long day at work typing words into my computer and reading what comes back to me via multiple sites.

But perhaps the brain does or will adapt. Perhaps performance takes a hit only because we don’t yet have the right tools to manage the onslaught because, really, this is all so new. The dust jacket of the new collection of The Best Technology Writing of 2010, edited by Julian Dibbell, puts the newness of these challenges into perspective: “The iPad. The Kindle. Twitter. When the Best Technology Writing series was inaugurated in 2005, these technologies did not exist.” Basically we are learning as we go along, hoping to someday find balance for ourselves between tweeting and hiking.

In this collection, an essay by Sam Anderson, called “In Defense of Distraction,” speaks directly to the difficulty of the group of neuroscientists’ endeavor: “Although attention is often described as an organ system, it’s not the sort of thing you can pull out and study like a spleen.” Writing by Clay Shirky (Cognitive Surplus) and Kevin Kelly (What Technology Wants) are including within this contemporary, edgy and altogether riveting collection too. Fascinating material like this is certain to garner plenty of attention.

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August 13, 2010

Friday Links

Filed under: Friday Links — dylan @ 4:00 pm

➻ On a recent visit to the “sweltering, surreal wasteland that is Las Vegas [to] participate in a curious and fascinating event, one that did not at all involve strippers, donkeys or hallucinogenic unicorns on the moon,” Mark Morford found himself pondering The world’s most perfect product, “the book—the printed one, wood pulp and ink, glue and sweat and blood.” He believes the “big question is not if we can reinvent it, but rather, if our appetites have become too frenzied and distracted to save it.”

➻ Others don’t think it needs saving. Kent Anderson at The Scholarly Kitchen believes It’s the End of the Book As We Know It—and … Feel[s] Fine. He writes “We know what it’s like when things lose their physical attributes and the scarcity related to it. So far, it’s proven to be one of the best things that can happen to something we love.” (Hat tip to Eoin Purcell)

➻ Already, “To a young collector, … who does not see a book as the primary source of culture, it is essentially an artifact.” Or so says Fine Books magazine’s Jason Dickson when he pondered Young Collectors: An Emerging Market?

➻ Jonathan Franzen: Great American Novelist is worried about all this I’m sure, but “If they could talk, the otters would tell Franzen to man up.”

➻ Jim Powell, author of The Breaking of Eggs, wrote a synopsis of what his novel would be If It Was a Cookbook. The ingredients may be hard to find:

You will need at least 4 million Russians, 6 million central European Jews and a substantial sprinkling of assorted dissidents, gays, gypsies and anyone else whom you happen not to like particularly.

I would like to go on record here and state that I particularly like all of those groups.

➻ Ben Myers, writing for The Guardian, pondered The public role of the private writer, wondering “do readers expect their writers to be performers too?”

➻ Joe Lansdale wrote of The Workplace, Wet or Dry and the space a writer works in for Mulholland Books this week.

It’s not the place. It’s the story. And most of all, it’s the writer who tells the story, and how he tells it. Would-be writers often tell me how they’re waiting for the right time or a good place to work, and I think that’s all well and good, but most of them have been waiting a long, long time, and it is my guess they will continue to wait.

That seems right, but depresses me because I’ve been waiting until I organize my studio to start a painting for [a very, very long time].

➻ Chris Lehmann wrote of Rich People Things recently for The Awl. Writing of how “Unemployment, it seems, isn’t short enough on dignity all by itself,” he looks at the dangers of branding ourselves online in search for employment:

The sooner that we’re all our own self-maintained online brands, the more briskly we can be moved across the placeless, virtual frontiers of digital-age production, not as collectively bargaining workforces, but as roving bands of impression-managing personality glyphs. Brands, after all, principally exist to be consumed.

➻ Are you lonely? Do you love to read? Meet alikewise. (Hat tip to GalleyCat)

➻ The champion.

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Service Meltdown

Filed under: Blog — Jon @ 1:33 pm

In a recent conversation with author Raul Pupo, I described my surprise that there were no local customer service classes, workshops, events, or otherwise to take part in. “That’s no surprise,” said Raul. He believes the disconnect begins with education, and permeates business. And it’s causing a meltdown.

According to consulting giant Accenture, “59 percent of consumers quit doing business with suppliers for reasons having to do with poor service.” That’s huge. As Raul and I talked, he explained that after America lost it’s grip on technology and manufacturing, service was something it had left to offer. But, are we offering it the best we can?

I was intrigued, and spent some time with his book today, America’s Service Meltdown: Restoring Service Excellence in the Age of the Customer. The book is as sharp as the author was in conversation. Based on his 30 years of founding and operating IT companies, he begins by telling the tale of his family’s immigration from Cuba, and how he worked his way from a boy who couldn’t speak English, to a successful entrepreneur, serving Fortune 1000 companies with the philosophy: The customer comes first.

Yes, this is a mantra everyone knows, but is it practiced as much as it could be? Read the Accenture stat above and reconsider. America’s Service Meltdown identifies the problem areas, and then provides great detail on fixing the issues, from leadership, to hiring, providing more power to frontline employees, to accounting, to communication; a broad spectrum of business is considered.

From the book:

A customer’s judgment of a supplier’s overall service depends on his transactional experience – that is true. But it also depends on his experience with the supplier’s organization in areas unrelated to the delivery of service – the supplier’s accounting or credit organization, the supplier’s standing in the community, and so forth…Establishing a correlation between customer satisfaction and business profitability would clearly give those executive leaders who are still on the fence about where best to employ capital the rationalization needed to justify expenditures for service initiatives.

For those that think service books are a lot of fluff about being nice to people, you’ll enjoy the section “Service Is Not Surrender,” where the author describes the psychological implications of how our culture views service, and how different cultures (specifically Japan) see it entirely different (and to their advantage). Service is not about giving in. It’s about creating a scenario where no objection will arise to give in to.

There’s a lot here to contemplate, and I hope you’ll do that with this book as a guide.

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Predictable Magic

Filed under: Blog — Jon @ 9:02 am

What thoughts come to mind when you hear ‘Design Strategy?’ On the surface, it implies the shape, color, dimension, and placement of objects, but actually, it defines how emotional connections are managed through business. Sound like a big jump?

In Predictable Magic: Unleash the Power of Design Strategy to Transform Your Business, authors Deepa Prahalad and Ravi Sawhney discuss “Psycho Aesthetics” – how people emotionally engage in a situation. From products to interaction with a company, users have an experience, and that experience can help the company grow, or contribute to its downfall. On this level, it’s clear that design is about much more than how something looks. As the authors explain in researched detail, design can create meaning, engage interactivity, and develop new opportunities. It’s a fascinating study on what a company does, how it’s managed and lead, and how to do all those things better through design strategy. Read this book and find your golden egg.

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Jack Covert Selects – Bury My Heart at Conference Room B

Filed under: Jack Covert Selects — dylan @ 9:01 am

Bury My Heart at Conference Room B: The Unbeatable Impact of Truly Committed Managers by Stan Slap, 272 pages, $25.95, Hardcover, August 2010, ISBN 9781591843245

In 2010, 800-CEO-READ moved to our newly remodeled “world headquarters” and with all this new space, we had walls that needed filling. Lots of pictures of me, of course, but I’ve got to keep my ego in check. What to put on the rest of the walls? As you can imagine, we get lots of books through our door, so there are plenty of sources of inspirations for quotes to put on those walls.

In Bury my Heart in Conference Room B, we found the following quote, which will soon adorn the wall of our new conference room: “The irreducible essence of leadership is that leaders are people who live their deepest personal values without compromise, and they use those values to make life better for others—this is why people become leaders and why people follow leaders.”

In this one quote, I could tell that Stan Slap had penned one of the smartest and most compelling books on leadership I have been lucky enough to read. On Becoming a Leader by Warren Bennis has been my totem of the genre, though even in that excellent book, this amorphous subject remains slippery.

That is why this book is special: Slap uses his research with over 10,000 managers from seventy countries to point out dichotomies that encapsulate the problems the modern business manager faces. For example:

The personal values that an overwhelming number of managers in every position in every country reported as being most important to them:

1. Family
2. Integrity.

The personal values that those same managers reported as being the most under pressure to compromise in order to do their jobs successfully:

1. Family
2. Integrity

Bury my Heart in Conference Room B will help managers become better leaders and, on the way, become committed managers. Slap’s methodology is to help managers become committed first to themselves, to live their personal values at work which, as the quote in the first paragraph states, is why people become leaders in the first place, and why people follow them.

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Jack Covert Selects – The Man Who Sold America

Filed under: Jack Covert Selects — dylan @ 9:00 am

The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (But True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century by Jeffrey L. Cruikshank & Arthur W. Schultz, Harvard Business School Press, 435 pages, $27.95, Hardcover, August 2010, ISBN 9781591393085

The provocative and fiercely competitive ad world portrayed in the Emmy-winning television series Mad Men has captivated critics and viewers alike. Mad Men offers viewers a nostalgic (but not idyllic) look back at a time when advertising and business was unchartered territory. Jeffrey L. Cruikshank and Arthur W. Schultz have written an equally engrossing book about a real-life Don Draper, The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (But True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century. Without hyperbole, it can be said Lasker near-single-handedly built the advertising industry.

From Lasker’s early days of working in newspapers and his nervous breakdowns to his outspoken personality, alcohol abuse, political work, and reimagination of advertising (and making millions in the process), The Man Who Sold America has everything you’d expect in a sexy, glamorous TV show, but offers even more.

Through the book, we learn, alongside Lasker, what advertising is. An early meeting with John E. Kennedy revealed to Lasker that advertising is “Salesmanship in print.” Lasker put this philosophy to use, creating “reason-why” advertising, pursuing untouched industries like women’s sanitary products and revolutionizing cigarette sales which put him at the very top of the advertising game for many years—but not without a price. Along the way, he faced many challenges and intense failures, but Lasker persevered in the face of all adversity.

The Man Who Sold America is an interesting look at business through the brutally honest and turmoil-filled story of a man who had no interest of getting involved in the very industry he made millions in. Part biography and part inspiration (maybe success does indeed exist in the places we least expect it), The Man Who Sold America is about a man who relied on the power of ideas. Regardless of what industry you’re in, reading this book makes you realize how ideas can change everything.

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August 12, 2010

Jack Covert Selects – Brains on Fire

Filed under: Jack Covert Selects — dylan @ 3:45 pm

Brains on Fire: Igniting Powerful, Sustainable, Word of Mouth Movements by Robbin Phillips, Greg Cordell, Geno Church & Spike Jones, Wiley, 224 pages, $24.95, Hardcover, August 2010, ISBN 9780470614181

“Brains on Fire is not really a business book. It’s a love story …”

Those are the opening lines to an incredible collection of stories and insights that is, in fact, both business book and love story. Brains on Fire is also the name of a great company of people in Greenville, South Carolina from which the stories and insights originate. But, more than all that, it is what happens when you ignite movements that stir passion in people.

The online marketing environment is changing so rapidly that it can feel as if you’re tumbling down the rapids, sometimes above water and sometimes not, but never seeing very clearly what’s ahead. The authors know what’s happening to those conversations online, and have tips on how to join them, but they have a deeper knowledge of the fact that, eventually, that river empties into the ocean.

The authors know that what’s truly powerful in business (indeed, in society as a whole) is the creation of movements. And they know that “90 percent of word-of-mouth interactions happen off-line. Yes, you read that right. Nine. Zero. Percent. The good folks at the Keller Fay Group have done the homework, and it’s no joke.” They continue:

Look, social media is great. The Internet allows ideas to travel at the speed of light, and it connects us to both information and other like-minded people. But as great as all the Twitters and Facebooks and MySpaces and blogs and message boards and digital doodads are, they will never, ever replace the power of shaking someone’s hand, looking them in the eye, getting kindred spirits in the room (or better yet, at your brand’s Mecca), and laughing together, getting a drink, sitting at the dinner table—whatever.

The book clearly defines the distinction between campaigns and movements. And while making no call for the death of the campaign, the authors reveal how to ignite sustainable movements that build on and spread the passion that people already have for your idea, product or company. Those people are out there; you just have to get out and find them. Because “All it takes is one person to start a movement. … One. Passionate. Person.”

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Keeping the 800-CEO-READ Meeting Minutes

Filed under: Uncategorized — dylan @ 3:16 pm

In summary: two rainbows, pay attention, talk and listen, always connect, find their pizza, play catch in the dark, and gin.

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August 10, 2010

High Financier

Filed under: Book Reviews,Finance and Economics — dylan @ 4:04 pm

Niall Ferguson writes big books about really big topics—The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World and The Cash Nexus: Economics and Politics from the Age of Warfare Through the Age of Welfare, 1700-2000, just to name a few.

At first blush, his latest book, High Financier, seems different. It focuses on “The Lives and Time” of just one man, Siegmund Warburg. But, what you may not know (what I certainly didn’t) when picking up the book is just how big a life Siegmung Warburg lived, how close he was to so many events that shaped the world of the 20th Century, and how much he himself would come to shape the 21st. He came up in the South German countryside during World War I on the fringes of one of the most prominent banking families in Germany. He joined the family firm in Hamburg after The Great War, while the Weimar Republic was still in full bloom (which his uncle had a prominent position in), and spent time apprenticing with firms in New York in London during those days.

Ferguson writes of those years with the desire and idealism of youth. It is in this section of the book that he speaks more of Seigmund Warburg’s inner life. He begins the book speaking of Warburg’s lifelong love of German literature, particularly Thomas Mann and the Warburg family’s close resemblance to the family in Mann’s Buddenbrooks—a clever and literary way to pull you into the world Siegmund Warburg grew up in. The example of Buddenbrooks also foreshadows what happens next, as Weimar Germany collapses into Depression and, eventually, Nazi Germany. The former nearly collapsed the family business, which became almost a moot point when the Nazis moved in and Aryanized the bank, removing his uncle from leadership and the family name (M.M. Warburg & Co.) from the business.

Seigmund himself had already fled the antisemitism of Hitler’s regime, taking his family to England to build his own firm, S.G. Warburg, which would eventually become a force that would, in it’s own small way (through investment and intelligence), helped win the war effort and, in a very large way, shape post-war TransAtlantic and European finance.

Ferguson had access to over ten thousand letters and diarie entries that have been unavailable to others before him, and he uses these often to show Seigmund Warburg’s clarity of thought and unusually prescient reading of the political and financial winds of the time. And Ferguson simply knows how to write history, adding his own acute observations alongside those of Warburg. Consider the section on the similarity of the U.S. and German Depressions, and the huge disparity in their outcomes:

On the same day that Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his first inaugural address … another newly elected political leader gave a speech to another nation mired in the depths of the Depression. The second leader was Adolf Hitler and his speech … though in some respects surprisingly similar to Roosevelt’s in content, differed profoundly in its tone. [...] With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Hitler’s appointment was an event pregnant with future calamity not just for Germany but for the world—and particularly for the Jews of Europe. And we see that, for all the radicalism of Roosevelt’s rhetoric (which explicitly blamed the Depression on unscrupulous financiers and threatened to override the power of Congress to combat an economic emergency), his New Deal posed no meaningful threat to individual liberties in the United States. [...]

On 30 January 1933, Hitler was finally sworn in as chancellor at the head of a coalition government of Nazis and German Nationalists.

Historians generally see the Depression as the principal cause of this political earthquake. … Yet the historical puzzle remains: why did the Depression in Germany produce the Third Reich, while the other countries which were hit just as hard hit managed to retain democratic government and the rule of law? The rate of unemployment was nearly as high in the United States as in Germany in 1932; yet America voted for Roosevelt, who passed only two minor constitutional amendments in his twelve years as president, while Germans voted for Hitler, who overthrew not only the Weimer constitution but also the longer-established rule of law, deprived Germans of their political and civil rights, persecuted the Jews and other minority groups to the point of exterminating them and unleashed the most destructive war of modern times.

It is the ability to frame such questions that makes Niall Ferguson such an important author of financial history. He makes us aware of just how closely intertwined the history of economics and politics are, and what politics of hate and fear can do to a country (indeed, the world). And he does it all in an entertaining biography of what sounds to many like the most boring of topics—the life of a banker.

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