➻ One of the finest books of the year was released this week, Steven Johnson’s Where Good Idea Come From. The author has rounded up some of The First Reviews over on his blog. We will have our own review for you this coming Thursday.

➻ Chris Brogan advises that we should Appreciate the Wild Minds and skip The Social Network in favor of We Live in Public. Find out why in Chris’s original post.

➻ Spike Jones, one of the coauthors of the brilliant Brains On Fire, has had two very interesting posts recently that may prompt you to rethink how much time you’re putting into online efforts. The first is about Why you care about Twitter too much, and features beautiful infographics from Information is Beautiful. Spike sums it up:

Over 70% of users (which, let me remind you, is still a very small sliver of the population) aren’t active users. And, on average, only 8% of content on Twitter is considered “good.” (And yes, I know that’s subjective.)

My point? That Twitter is a drop in the bucket of word-of-mouth. That you don’t need a Twitter strategy first. You need a STRATEGY first.

The second post pulls it back even further, noting that 93% of Word-of-Mouth happens offline. That is, entirely offline.

➻ strategy + business magazine interviewed Raghunath Mashelkar about A Gandhian Approach to R&D. As Mashelkar explains:

It’s a term I coined for getting more from less for more people, a new way of expressing one of Gandhi’s teachings: “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.” In other words, Gandhian engineering is inclusive innovation: developing products and services that improve life for everyone, innovation that doesn’t leave out the poor.

Check out the interview for real-world examples of this philosophy in practice and the breakthroughs on the horizon.

➻ The Wall Street Journal‘s Bill Kauffman wrote about The Labor of Living in a swell review of Hardy Green’s new book, Company Town.

When Tennessee Ernie Ford gave the full weight of his bass-baritone to “Sixteen Tons” and boomed that he owed his soul to the company store, the phrase evoked images of stooped miners living in tar-paper shacks under what Hardy Green calls the “super-exploitative conditions of life in a coal-mining company town.” But Mr. Green shows, in “The Company Town,” that such communities have also been social experiments, alternative forms of capitalist enterprise that encompassed everything from prophet-blaring to profit-sharing.

He continues later in the review:

… Mr. Green’s survey is a useful one, though the early utopian ventures he profiles are far more interesting than his pallid examples from the postwar era. Classic company towns could not withstand automobiles and suburbanization. No one owes his soul to an industrial park or a corporate campus.

➻ If you’re looking for a way to spruce up that next job application, why not take a lesson from Hunter S. Thompson’s brutally honest Canadian job request. Applying to the Vancouer Sun in 1958, he wrote to then editor Jack Scott:

By the time you get this letter, I’ll have gotten hold of some of the recent issues of The Sun. Unless it looks totally worthless, I’ll let my offer stand. And don’t think that my arrogance is unintentional: it’s just that I’d rather offend you now than after I started working for you.

I didn’t make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham. The man despised me, of course, and I had nothing but contempt for him and everything he stood for. If you asked him, he’d tell you that I’m “not very likable, (that I) hate people, (that I) just want to be left alone, and (that I) feel too superior to mingle with the average person.” (That’s a direct quote from a memo he sent to the publisher.)

Nothing beats having good references.

Tip of the hat to Boing Boing for the story.

➻ Tattered Cover posted a video about literary tattoos from the authors of The Word Made Flesh. I wonder if the trend will ever become popular among business book readers. I long to see folks walking around with Peter Drucker quotes on their necks

➻ It was either this, The Free Design, Emperor Tomato Ketchup or The Noise of Carpet.