Hardy Green at BusinessWeek has a quick piece on their website about big names with business books in the fall.

• Call Me Ted by Ted Turner was the splash at BEA in June, which included a party hosted by Larry King.
• Richard Branson follows Losing My Virginity and Screw It, Let’s Do It with Business Stripped Bare.
• There is a new Warren Buffet book called The Snowball written by Alice Schroeder, who got a $7 million advance for the book.
• T. Boone Pickens’ The First Billion Is The Hardest arrives as he promotes his plan for how the U.S. can become energy independent, an idea reflected in the subtitle: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America’s Energy Future.
• Historian Steven Watts delivers a Hugh Hefner biography, titled Mr. Playboy.

As many of you know, legendary winemaker and benefactor Robert Mondavi died last Friday. The Mondavis have been called the “Kennedys” of American wine. They transformed Napa Valley from a small, family-owned network of wine producers into the huge hub it is today, helping to establish America as one of the world’s great wine producers. Mondavi and his wife have spent the past several years donating to and building up various wine schools and performing arts instututes.
It feels a bit timely, then, that Julia Flynn Siler’s biography of this family and its business, The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, has just been released in paperback. This book is considered both a family saga and a dramatic tale of America’s foothold in a competitive global industry.

There’s a lot of controversy surrounding yesterday’s release of Steve Miller’s book, The Turnaround Kid: What I Learned Rescuing America’s Most Troubled Companies. Miller is the former CEO of Delphi Corp., the auto-parts supplier; he was called in to help bail out the company. Miller was also the man Lee Iaccoca called to help with Chrysler’s downturn. And Miller worked for Bethlehem Steel while they went bankrupt.
Miller began writing back in 2005 long before Delphi’s fate had been determined. From the WSJ: “The book was intended to outline the wisdom he has gained over the years as a turnaround artist, and to tell the inside story of how he rushed into Delphi, used Chapter 11 to force tough medicine on its unions and whipped the giant auto supplier into shape.”
The somewhat ironic and, imaginably, awkward situation is The Turnaround Kid was written from the perspective that Miller had already turned Delphi around. As it turns out, that prediction (and the book release) is a bit premature as presently Delphi is still fighting it’s way through bankruptcy court.
Nonetheless, yesterday the 40,000 printed copies went out into the world for the public to buy.

The new biography, Robber Baron, is about the streetcar magnet, Charles Tyson Yerkes, who was instrumental in Chicago’s Loop Elevated and the London Underground. Check out the life of one of the most interesting entrepreneur’s of the nineteenth century in this new book. It was put out earlier this year and promises to by quite a read! Personally, I always think by going forward in life and business, we do need to look back on occasion to get perspective and insight from those who have led the way before us. The life of Mr. Yerkes is a great one and well worth some attention paid to him.

Here’s what was said about the book by John Franch so far:

“A superb biography: The research is thorough, the prose is clear, the narrative is compelling and the judgments are fair.”
- Wall Street Journal

“Robber Brown is a welcome addition to the surprisingly small shelf of full-length biographies of Chicago’s storied entrepreneurs and can be read for profit by anyone intrigues by one of the most notorious of the men to have built the material foundations on which the city’s prosperity has come to rest.”
- Chicago Tribune

So far this is my favorite book for the year. OK, I know it’s only January, but that means a lot of books will have to live up to this one. It’s an insightful look into the life of one of the best managerial writers and observers in the business book world.

Book Excerpt from: Myself and Other More Important Matters by Charles Handy:

Tom Peters was the first management teacher to turn public performer in a serious way. Fortune called him the ‘Ur-guru’ or original guru. The Economist described him as the ‘Ober-guru’. Peter Drucker had written more and for longer (he died aged ninety-five in 2005, writing to the end) and was probably the wisest of all, but he preferred to describe himself as a writer and was, in truth, a poor performer on a platform. Who first coined the word ‘guru’ to describe Peters and his like is unclear, and the word is not in any case particularly appropriate. Peter Drucker once quipped that journalists only came up with the word because ‘charlatan’ was too long for a headline. These management gurus do not cultivate groups of acolytes nor do they hold forth in any sort of management ashrams, but they do lay claim to certain truths about organizations and how they should be manged, and they are certainly not shy about their beliefs and ideas. There are now guru tables that rank the top fifty or so performers according to their popularity among managers, and there is a recognized core of people on the ‘guru circuit’ rather like professional tennis players. Some of these gurus reckon to do at least one hundred performances a year, usually at opera-star fees with the same sort of billing.

It is unclear how one comes to be a guru. You cannot apply to join the club, for there is in fact no formal club. Nor can you nominate yourself as a guru. It is a title that is given to you by the media or the speaker agencies that manage these folk. Most of them are American, because the circuit of conferences mostly exists in America, although it is now expanding alongside the spread of the global marketplace…

There’s a new excerpt up on the Excerpts Blog. It’s from the book Guinness: The 250 Year Quest for the Perfect Pint. The first thought I had when I saw the book was, “Wow, I think my dad would like this book.” How ironic, given the excerpt below:

Waldron observed that in Ireland, Guinness has been so ingrained in the culture for so many years, that it presents an interesting marketing challenge. This challenge is to market a beer to younger people who may perceive it as being their “father’s beer.”

We have seen a lot of good industry books over the past year or so. Here are a few we’ve enjoyed:
Flower Confidential
The Sushi Economy
The Cigarette Century
Travels Of A T-shirt In The Global Economy
But also be sure to check out the excerpt: http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/