Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business by Frances Frei & Anne Morriss, Harvard Business Review Press, 272 pages, $29.95, Hardcover, February 2012, ISBN 9781422133316

As a service company, when we receive feedback about a negative situation, we immediately act to resolve the conflict and then try to put a process in place to avoid such a thing happening in the future. Most books on service describe ways to do this: how to react to or plan for customer service breakdowns.

Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business asserts that service is not about reacting, but building customer satisfaction into the business model itself, so that employees and the systems they work within provide excellent service as a matter of routine.

What is surprising about the case stories in Uncommon Service is that the authors focus on how the companies are really bad at something, and how that serviced the great things they did in ways that allowed them to be unapologetic about the bad things. Commerce Bank, for example, chose (proven) nice service people over smart financial service people. The cost of the employees was higher than the super smart ones, so unlike other banks who hired super smart people, Commerce Bank kept their fees high, didn’t budge on them, and banked (no pun intended) that word-of-mouth of their great service would end up making them successful—and it did. The bad (higher fees) serviced the good (awesome service).

As the authors’ explain:

This point is crucial to understanding how to design uncommon service. In our experience, the number one obstacle to great service—number one by a long shot—is the emotional unwillingness to embrace weakness. But it couldn’t be clearer that to win in one area, you must lose in another. Progress requires sacrifice. Some part of your service offering must be thrown under the bus. […] Choosing bad is your only shot at achieving greatness. And resisting it is a recipe for mediocrity.

This is not how most of us think, yet the authors make some very interesting and data-backed observations to support their theory. In typical Harvard Business Review fashion, the book is packed with lengthy case studies, making it an interesting and convincing read that will help you find your opportunity to choose “the bad” while achieving your own uncommon service success.

Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired—and Secretive—Company Really Works by Adam Lashinsky, Business Plus, 223 Pages, $26.99, Hardcover, January 2012, ISBN 9781455512157

Apple, one of the most iconic companies of this century, has created many life-changing products (products we mostly didn’t know we needed until they made them, and now can’t live without), yet we know little about the inner workings of this organization… other than what Apple wants us to know.

One thing I found particularly illuminating is Apple’s ability to say no. This company, with over $108 billion in revenue, and 30 years of business, can fit their entire product line on an average-sized conference room table. Their marketing and communications team continually simplifies their corporate message. Found at the bottom of a 2011 Apple press releas:

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced iPad 2 which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices.

That is the entire company in three sentences. This is a lesson we all can learn, from limiting our product line to crafting our elevator pitch.

Inside Apple follows through on its promised internal view of this unique company and is particularly intriguing due to the loss of Steve Jobs, Tim Cook’s new position at the helm, the criticisms of its current manufacturing system, and the dominance of i-everything instead of the Mac computer. What will Apple do next? Lashinsky makes it clear that even Apple doesn’t know.

Apple is a company of paradoxes. Its people and institutional bearing are off-the-charts arrogant, yet at the same time they are genuinely fearful of what would happen if their big bets go bad. The creative side of the business … is made up of lifers or near lifers who value only an Apple way of doing things—hardly the typical creative mind-set. The operations side of Apple runs like any company in America, but better, and is led by a cadre of ex-IBMers, the cultural antithesis of Apple. Apple has an entrepreneurial flair yet keeps its people in a tightly controlled box, following time-tested procedures. Its public image, at least seen through its advertising, is whimsical and fun, yet its internal demeanor is cheerless and nose-to-the-grindstone.

Adam Lashinsky is the senior editor at large for Fortune and as such is uniquely qualified “to hack into Apple’s closed world and to decode its secret systems so that aspiring entrepreneurs, curious middle managers, envious rival CEOs, and creatives who dream of turning insights into inventions can understand the company’s processes and customs.” He is also a compelling storyteller whose prose moves quickly and is never dragged down by exclusivity or jargon. At a time when books about Apple are flooding the market, this is the one to read.

The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation by Ron Adner, Portfolio, 231 pages, $29.95, Hardcover, March, 2012, ISBN 9781591844600

Of all that’s been written and espoused on innovation over the past several years, it seems a key consideration has often been overlooked, one that Dartmouth College professor Ron Adner has gleaned from years of studying the subject. Adner has now detailed his findings as well as his prescription for greater success at innovation in The Wide Lens, in which cites many examples of companies that failed to check the “innovation blind spot” of their innovation ecosystem and consequently failed with innovations that should have been wild successes.

In the case of Philips Electronics, the invention of HDTV in the mid 1980s was thwarted by a lack of television programing recorded in HD—cameras and even a broadcasting standard were not yet in place. Sony had a similar blind spot when it developed the first e-reader, only to realize that e-books were not yet readily available for purchase. Ditto Johnson Controls, which developed a new generation of electrical switches and sensors to dramatically reduce energy use in buildings. The blind spot in its ecosystem was a lack of architects, electricians and others willing to adjust their routines in order to specify the new money-saving technology.

Adner writes:

Welcome to the world of innovation ecosystems—a world in which the success of a value proposition depends on creating an alignment of partners who must work together in order to transform a winning idea to a market success. A world in which failing to expand your focus to include your entire ecosystem will set you up for failure. Avoidable failure.

Through more than 10 years of study, Adner has developed blueprints and systems to assess a company’s innovation blind spots, its innovation ecosystem, and its odds of success. The most effective way to set a wider lens, according to Adner, is to create what he calls a Value Blueprint, which identifies the players and intermediaries, clarifies the project and identifies risks and ways to assess and move around those risks. Though Adner acknowledges there will be unseen challenges and unknowns, the Value Blueprint will help take the foreseeable challenges out of a project’s execution.

The Wide Lens opens the readers’ eyes to the bigger picture and expands the mind to the possible pitfalls that have come to stand in the way of the success of many innovative products and services, including vehicle tires that can be safely driven on after a blowout, the electric car, and inhalable insulin. Had a wider lens been employed at the time of the creation of these valuable innovations, the world might be a better place. Don’t miss out on your opportunity to see your innovation go from conception to success by engaging a wider lens.

Emotional Equations: Simple Truths for Creating Happiness + Success by Chip Conley, Free Press, 288 pages, $24.00, Hardcover, January 2012, ISBN 9781451607253

Chip Conley bares his soul in his second book, Emotional Equations, and in doing so helps us understand our own. It is painful at times, as he recounts his own doubts and darker moments in life and business, tells us of four friends that took their own lives in one economically depressed summer, and relates the story of when his own heart literally stopped after a business presentation, landing him in the hospital.

But, as Conley discovered, what doesn’t kill us does indeed make us stronger.

As Winston Churchill advised during World War II, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Today, too, we all need to come to understand that we can use our seasons of darkness as a means to find new reservoirs of strength—strength we didn’t know we had.

One man who went through hell during WWII and made his way through it was psychologist Viktor Frankl, who made it through a Nazi concentration camp and would eventually write Man’s Search for Meaning, a work that greatly influenced Conley and this book. It is from Frankl’s work that Conley distilled the equation that began the journey that resulted in this project: Despair = Suffering – Meaning.

There are six parts of this book, on such issues as Dealing With Difficult Times, Getting the Most Out of Your Work Life, Defining Who You Are, and Finding Contentment. Within those sections are chapters broken up into individual emotional equations, such as Disappointment = Expectations – Reality, Calling = Pleasure/Pain, and Joy = Love – Fear. What the author does in the process is take us beyond the sometimes touchy/feely world of emotional literacy and into a simple emotional mathematics you can flip through like flashcards when your emotions begin to get the best of you. At the end of the book, he even guides you through how to create and use your own equations.

Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, a book we named as one of The 100 Business Books of All Time, showed that emotional intelligence (EQ) accounts for two-thirds of the success of business executives. Developing a true understanding of the people you’re working with or leading is critical for not only your business success, but for your personal happiness. Developing and maintaining a true understanding of your self is an important part of doing so.

This book, the equations it provides, and the ability it gives you to develop your own shorthand will help a great deal toward that end. I can’t sum it up any better than the author: “Emotional Equations provide a new, visual lexicon for mastering our age of uncertainty.”

Running the Gauntlet: Essential Business Lessons to Lead, Drive Change, and Grow Profits by Jeffrey Hayzlett with Jim Eber, McGraw-Hill, 256 pages, $26.00, Hardcover, December 2011, ISBN 9780071784092

Change often isn’t pretty and Jeffrey Hayzlett should know. In his second book, Running the Gauntlet, written in collaboration with business writer Jim Eber (as was his first, the best-selling The Mirror Test), he provides vivid detail of his adventures as a corporate change agent. Hayzlett isn’t prone to holding back, either. He lays it all out, warts and all: the resistance, the corporate infighting, the messy clean-up.

Hayzlett sets the tone of the book, and the attitude needed to change your corporate direction and/or culture, early with this dedication: “To all the naysayers, opportunists, and obstructionists who do their best to stop the progress of change in an organization. Note: We will beat you.”

Not too much farther in the book, he tells an anecdote about how he had been meeting regularly with a group in a conference room that had a wall clock that perpetually displayed the wrong time:

This time, after one too many discussions about why the clock was off, how to approach it, and how to go about requisitioning a change from Building Services, I had had enough. I challenged them. “Who has the guts to change it? Why doesn’t one of you just get up there and change the clock and get it done rather than talking and waiting for someone else in the company to fix it?”

Finally, one of them said, “You’re right.” She pulled a chair over, climbed up, and moved the hands. Done.

That’s how change in business gets started: someone sees a need, takes the challenge personally, and acts.

Hayzlett shares plenty of ideas on how to change attitudes and create momentum. One of his most important ideas has become his business mantra: “Repeat after me: no one is ever going to die from the changes you make in business. Say it: “No. One. Is. Going. To. Die.” He also advises you to Make It Personal! Get as Close To Your Customers as You Possibly Can, and Then Get Closer Still So You Can Give Them A Squeeze; and warns that Stampedes Lead to Fast Results, But They’re Expensive and Exhausting, so Create Scalable Plans That Unfold As You Grow. Hayzlett closes the book with twenty questions to ask yourself before you begin and four social media essentials for getting the word out.

It’s this kind of realism and action-oriented material that makes Running the Gauntlet so refreshing and motivating. His writing is high-energy, entertaining and insightful, and this is a great read to get you thinking about and implementing change in the New Year.

Hannibal and Me: What History’s Greatest Military Strategist Can Teach Us About Success and Failure by Andreas Kluth, Riverhead Books, 336 Pages, $26.95, Hardcover, January 2012, ISBN 9781594488122

The key thing to know about this book is apparent in the title: Hannibal and Me (emphasis mine). Andreas Kluth, a writer for The Economist, presents the biography of the great Roman military leader, Hannibal, then weaves in a parallel line of stories about other types of heroes, artists, writers, inventors and revolutionists, all the while developing insight about human behavior.

But the main vein in the book remains the remarkable story of Hannibal, and as we follow his life, the author discusses modern questions such as:

Do you need to have a goal in life as clear as Hannibal’s in order to achieve success? Hannibal, though young, knew (or thought he knew) exactly what success was: he defined it as the conquest of Rome. Everything else followed from that. … He had complete focus.

As he does throughout the book, he pulls it back to you:

Later in life, you may have to reappraise your dream and adjust it in a more mature and complex life context, perhaps even drop it all together if it no longer works. But at the beginning of the journey, it helps to start with something.

A well-written book about an interesting historical figure or event can give us hours of enjoyment. We marvel at the courage displayed or how a seemingly small event could have changed our world. Kluth explains that his book “is about those moments of impact, when triumph or disaster strikes, and about the aftermath, when the shock fades and lives change forever and character reveals itself.” And he does a fine job turning this adventure book into a personal development guide of sorts.

Take Kluth’s Chapter Two: on “The Influence of Parents.” He begins by recounting Hannibal’s childhood and his relationship with his father, Hamilcar, and the war for Carthage’s future. Added into this story, Kluth includes research on the psychology of adolescence.

To understand your life, you have to begin with your parents—just as you need to know about Hamilcar to understand why Hannibal made the decisions that led to his successes and failures.

Then, Barack Obama, Eleanor Roosevelt, Amy Tan all arrive into the chapter, and Kluth tells a bit of his own story, as well. This is the general structure of each of the chapters, with the goal of showing readers a way toward improving oneself by learning from others.

As Dan Pink said of the book, it is “full of lessons both profound and practical.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. But, what makes or breaks a book like this, with its uncommon structure and sometimes lofty subject matter, is the storytelling, and this book is one of the best in that regard that I have read in a long time.

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—For Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge, HarperBusiness, 464 pages, $29.99, Hardcover, November 2011, ISBN 9780061771132

Just from the title alone, you can tell that Masters of Management is a bit softer in tone than the book it revised and updated—a classic, The Witch Doctors by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, released in 1996. Micklethwait, now the editor-in-chief at The Economist, bowed out of this updated version, but Wooldridge carries the torch forward to cover the rise of the Internet, globalization, the explosion in entrepreneurship, and the ever-expanding field of management and leadership literature.

It is also the first comprehensive documentation of how the management field has transformed civil society and government—for better and for worse—in the last few decades. For instance, attempting to reward public servants whose initial motivation is working for the public good with incentive-based pay has proved to be somewhat disastrous in its results, while devolving power from central governments to local public servants has been a boon for efficiency.

Though its title emphasizes the positive over negative, Masters does not pull its punches and its critiques of management theory and its “gurus” are as fair and sober as you’ll find anywhere. When Wooldridge does go negative, he does so through surrogates by quoting prominent thinkers on the less savory characters in the field, such as:

The late Peter Drucker liked to quip that people use the word “guru” only because they cannot spell “charlatan.”

And:

“Never have so many labored for so long to say so little,” was [Warren] Bennis’s waspish verdict on the leadership literature.

This book is such an even-handed look at management theories and literature, and their implementation in the real world, that we couldn’t pass it by, though it almost does our work for us in sifting through the genre. It is a guide to everything management theory has produced—the good and the bad, the whirlwind of theories, jargon, and gurus that propagate the literature—and it comes out of that mineshaft holding a glittering handful of gold nuggets that will make your decisions about where to look for guidance much wiser and more refined. Masters of Management belongs on the shelf of every manager in the country.

Screw Business as Usual by Richard Branson, Portfolio, 384 pages, $26.95, Hardcover, December 2011, ISBN 9781591844341

By the time you get to page four of Richard Branson’s Screw Business as Usual, you will have already been treated to stories of Kate Winslett saving his mother from his burning home on Necker Island—literally carrying her soot-faced down the stairs as the fire rages behind them—and discussing the state of the world over dinner with the Queen and Barack Obama at Buckingham Palace. (And, to apologize for name-dropping, he shares a joke told to him by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.) So, right away, you’re under no illusion that Richard Branson lives a life similar to yours, but the book makes it very clear that we all live on the same planet.

Though he’s far from what most of us would find to be ordinary, Branson’s message in the book reinforces the sometimes-overlooked knowledge that we can each contribute to, create, and hasten change, and that “doing good is good for business.” In doing so, he champions the everyday:

[The] power of the ordinary, everyday person to become entrepreneurs and change-makers to set up their own businesses, to seek their own fortune and be in control of their own lives, to say—screw business as usual, we can do it! We can turn things upside down and make a huge difference.

There have been many monikers for this idea, but Branson has come up with his own, Capitalism 24902, explaining:

Every single business person has the responsibility for taking care of the people and planet that make up our global village, all 24,902 circumferential miles of it.

Screw Business as Usual is a chronicle of those who have done just that, and there’s a lot of good news to proselytize. Instead of ignoring the bad news, he shares stories of small enterprises like food retailer Jempson’s and Finisterre clothing company—excellent examples in terms of what they’re doing in local food sourcing and fabric innovation, but also because most of us have never heard of them, which makes the stories fresh, accessible, and their successes seemingly achievable. The book is chock-full of these small business victories and the successes of acting responsibility, stories of doing well by doing good, and demonstrates once again that Branson has a firm finger on the pulse of the entrepreneurial world.