In the Books « 800 CEO Read

February 27, 2013

In the Books, 2012 – The Digital Edition

Filed under: In the Books — dylan @ 12:48 pm

Jon and Sally have both spread the good word about In the Books, our annual review of business books, offering copies to anyone that asked and provided an address. Jon offered them here on the blog while I was out on paternity leave, and Sally offered them up in our latest Keen Thinker (the monthly newsletter she releases that, if you’re reading this, you really should be following).

I’m the one responsible for the project here, and now that I’m pretty sure everyone that cares enough to ask for a paper copy has received one, I am making the digital copy available to any and all takers. Simply click on the cover image below, or anywhere it says In the Books in this post, and the download shall (or at least should) commence.

I can’t say enough about Joy Panos Stauber at Stauber Design Studio (our wonderful designer) or the good people of CrossTech Communications (our printer) that help us bring this project to life every year. If you’re looking for partners on a design or print project, I don’t think you could do any better. They are true professionals and a delight to work with—and we here at 800-CEO-READ think they make us look pretty darned good every year. We hope you agree.

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January 26, 2012

In The Books

Filed under: In the Books — Jon @ 3:48 pm

It’s that time of year again. We’ve compiled all the great books, ideas, and activities that 800-CEO-READ was involved in over the past year and published them in our annual In the Books publication.

As the intro states:

“At 800-CEO-READ, we don’t come to work everyday just to sell business books. We go to work to try to improve the way business is done.”

This publication is the clearest example of that. Featuring the winners, shortlist, and candidates from the 2011 Business Book Awards, ChangeThis highlights, 8cr events and activities, 100 Best book updates, Author interviews from our blog, and various Jack Covert Selects reviews (as well as some photos from our annual croquet tournament…), this year’s In the Books is another useful (and nice looking!) guide put together by Dylan Schleicher of 800-CEO-READ and Joy Panos Stauber of Stauber Design Studio.

If you’d like a physical copy, send me a note at jon (a) 800ceoread (dot) com and introduce yourself.

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January 13, 2011

In the Books – Off to the Printers XIII

Filed under: Book Reviews,In the Books — dylan @ 1:57 pm

The article below was printed in last year’s In the Books—our annual review of the best in the business genre. It my (possibly ill-advised) attempt to look at how some of the books published in 2009 tackled the macroeconomic issues, with a (possibly ill-advised) splash of Candide thrown in awkwardly, for emphasis. If you don’t feel like reading the entire essay on the topic, you can skip to the end of the post and see F.A. Hayek and John Maynard Keynes argue the points much more eloquently in a battle rap.

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Garden Economy BY DYLAN SCHLEICHER

Voltaire’s Candide was released in 1759, largely as a rebuttal to Gottfried Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds” version of determinism, or Leibnizian optimism (since God is good and omnipotent, and since He chose this world out of all possibilities, this world must be good—in fact, this world is the best of all possible worlds). Candide’s tutor, Pangloss, schools him in this optimism, but after he is forced out of his “magnificent and most agreeable of all possible castles,” he is painfully disillusioned by the great hardships he endures and bears witness to in the real world.

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“This is the worst economic crisis we’ve faced since the great depression.”How many times have we heard that phrase, or a variation thereof, uttered in the past year and a half? And it rings all too true in our lives. Unlike past economic downturns, we’ve all felt the effects this time around—rich and poor alike, and everyone in between (or what’s left of the in between). We all have friends who have lost their jobs, and the scourge that began and spread this crisis—the real-estate bubble and so-called securities that surrounded it—has turned many of our neighbors out of their very homes.

There were many outstanding books this year that chronicled the collapse, from those focused on the bigger actors like Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail to those that focus on individual companies (Lawrence G. McDonald’s A Colossal Failure of Common Sense:
The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers and Kate Kelly’s Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear Stearns … are among the best of that category). This essay is not about those books. It would take more space than I have to get into those details, and there is a larger discussion happening that I think deserves attention here.

I will look at what this year’s business books have to say on how, exactly, we came to this point in economic history, and what some of the authors in the genre offer as a way out. The issues dealt with in these books are many, but I will distill them into three of the bigger themes: whether markets are inherently rational and should be treated as such; what that may have to do with the crisis we find ourselves in and; what the government’s role should be in the matter.

THE BACKGROUND
To start that story, we have to go back to just before the Great Depression. It was then (in 1906 to be exact) that Yale Professor Irving Fisher published The Nature of Capital and Income, an academic tome that was one of the first
works to claim that there was a fundamental rationality—even scientific order—to markets. He attempted to create mathematical models that would reveal that order and predict it’s movements (primarily, of course, to play in the market). It wasn’t a bestseller by any means, but Fisher’s work had a great deal of influence on economics in academia over the years and is part of the foundation of the complex financial instruments we see on Wall Street today. In The Myth of the Rational Market, the editor-at-large of Time magazine, Justin Fox, tells the story further:

“He is perhaps not the father, but certainly a father of modern Wall Street. Hardly anyone calls him that though. Economists honor Fisher for his theoretical breakthroughs, but outside the discipline his chief claim to lasting fame is the horrendous stock market advice he proffered in the late 1920s. Read almost any history of the years leading up to the great crash of October 1929, and the famous Professor Fisher serves as a sort of idiot Greek chorus, popping up every few pages to assert that stock prices had reached a ‘permanently high plateau’” (5).

Though Fisher was thus debunked in the real-world environs of Depression-era Wall Street, Fisher’s theories had garnered enough serious academic attention to gain a following amongst those interested in economic theory around the world. Fox follows this thread of influence through academia to its ideological apex—the campus of the University of Chicago in the 1960s. This “Chicago School” of economists, most notable among them Milton Friedman, believed not only that the market was fundamentally sound and rational, but that government involvement was a negative interference best left out of the equation. As Fox puts it:

“ … most economists of the day saw government as the solution to economic problems, while the Chicagoans were convinced that government was the problem” (90).

This was a pretty drastic departure from the Keynesian orthodoxy that had ruled in Washington since the depression.

John Maynard Keynes believed in government involvement in markets—indeed, thought it essential. Robert Skidelsky explain it simply in Keynes: The Return of the Master:

“Keynes gave governments two tasks: to pump up the economy with air when it starts to deflate, and to minimize the chances of serious shocks happening in the first place.” (xiv).

As Fox notes in The Myth of the Rational Market, the root of the Chicago School’s disbelief in government involvement stemmed partly from their real world experience of having worked in New Deal Washington, “where they became disillusioned with government attempts to manage the economy.” It also stemmed from a more academic experience, as they themselves stated, from reading Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom. Again, from Fox:

“Having experienced the socialist ‘Red Vienna’ of the 1920s and watched the Nazi takeover of his homeland from afar, Hayek was appalled by the equanimity, even enthusiasm, with which Keynes and other English liberal intellectuals greeted the growth of government” (90).

As to whether or not the government should step into the markets during recessions, there seems to be agreement there. Even Milton Friedman, who believed government is the problem and not the solution to problems, believed it should step in when panic strikes. David Wessel explains in In Fed We Trust—his book on Ben Bernanke and The Federal Reserve’s response to the current crisis:

“The lasting lesson [of the Great Depression]—taught by economists with views as different as John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, the leading economic minds of the twentieth century—is embraced almost universally by politicians and economic policy makers: government can and should act to prevent such a dangerous downward financial and economic spiral” (46).

In fact, Bernanke cited Friedman often in his arguments for government intervention:

“The government might, [Bernanke] suggested, cut taxes, increase the federal deficit, and issue bonds that the Fed would buy by printing money. This, he said, was ‘essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ (Friedman used the line in 1969 to argue that depression and deflation were avoidable. If nothing else worked, the Fed could send a helicopter to drop dollar bills to get people spending.)” (78).

THE SCIENCE?
So, though he felt the government, in the form of the Fed, should step in when panic struck the country, he believed the market was normally rather rational and should be unfettered by government. Heinrich Hayek, however—the man Friedman partly credited for his general lack of trust of government meddling in the market—wasn’t himself a proponent of the Chicagoan’s bedrock philosophy that the market is inherently rational, that economics itself was a “science.” Joshua Cooper Ramo, in The Age of the Unthinkable, relates Hayek’s response to winning The Nobel Prize in 1974:

“‘The Nobel Prize,’ he began, ‘marks a significant step in the process by which, in the opinion of the general public, economics has been conceded some of the dignity and prestige of the physical sciences.’ But Hayek said, he wondered just how much of that prestige was really justified. ‘Economics are at this moment,’ he continued, ‘called upon to say how to extricate the free world from the serious threat of accelerating inflation, which, it must be admitted, has been brought about by policies which the majority of economists recommended and even urged governments to pursue. We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things’” (38, 39).

As Hunter Lewis writes in Where Keynes Went Wrong:

“The question of whether economics is a science is briefly discussed in this author’s Are the Rich Necessary? The conclusion reached there is that economics is and never shall be a science. Why? In the first place, when we observe an apple fall from a tree, or deduce the force of gravity, it will not affect what an apple does. But human action, the subject of economics, is entirely different. It is very changeable; it is even changed by what economists tell us about ourselves. If economists tell us that stocks are the most reliable long-term investment, we all buy stocks and the prices will soar. Eventually there will be no more sellers, the price will collapse, and we will discover we have made a very bad investment. We saw that well enough in the 1920s and 1990s. So, on a whole, it is much better to accept that economics is trying to sort out possibilities, not truths, and is closely aligned with moral philosophy, also known as values” (44).

THE SOLUTION?
As we’ve seen, the financial instruments that have been put to use on Wall Street recently have not made money—they have engineered it. They have not made profits, but engineered them, sometimes with Keynesian motives for greater well-being, but with disregard to Keynesian principles.

In Free the Market!, Gary L. Reback looks to strike a balance, writing:

“Most markets neither require nor profit from extensive government regulation” (2).

But he goes on to argue that the proponents of systematic deregulation—specifically calling out the Chicago School and the weakening of anti-trust laws—has made markets less free:

“In our modern economy, Chicago School policies only serve to damage free market capitalism (and consumers specifically) by entrenching incumbents, retarding innovation, and making life miserable for entrepreneurs. Yet the Chicago School has been difficult to dislodge, notwithstanding its questionable record of protecting consumer welfare, because it is much more than just an enforcement policy. It is what one conservative economist called ‘a system of belief’” (4).

Both Keynes and Friedman, the two giants of economics in the 20th century, had something that will be invaluable to us in the 21st—intellectual flexibility. Friedman, who was staunchly opposed to government meddling in markets, knew there was a time for it. Keynes is often viewed as more of a philosopher than an economist. And Hayek, a strong proponent of deregulation (and, remember, the man The Chicago School of Economists credited for forming their stance against government involvement in the market) counseled a “nurturing” flexibility. Returning to The Age of the Unthinkable and his Nobel speech:

“Hayek warned, ‘If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible.’ Politicians and thinkers would be wise not to try to bend history as ‘the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner a gardener does for his plants’” (40).

But, if the markets can’t be trusted to be rational, and the government can’t be trusted at all, how exactly is the economic garden to be tended? Who, exactly, are the “gardeners” of our federal economy? Does the responsibility go to the economists at the Federal Reserve—who Stephen H. Axilrod defines as “independent within the government”—and, if so, how exactly will they tend the economic garden? Will they allow it to flourish wildly in it’s natural environment, sticking to the strictures of a rational market that can tend itself, or will they weed out what they see as undesirable elements with regulatory measures, creating a rational response to and oversight of the market? Axilrod describes the actors within the Fed in his insider’s account of the institution, Inside the Fed:

“I have often thought to divide the members of my often all too dour profession of economics between those whose approach might be very loosely considered poetic (not too many of them) and those who are basically scientific (large in numbers). The former are more intuitive, more prone to the sin of ‘casual empircism,’ and often more involved in the practical aspects of economics, such as (in my case) interactions between, on the one hand, monetary policy and, on the other, the behavior of often skittish and unpredictable market participants and the public more generally” (18).

He sees the “poets” as artists who can take the public stage and articulate the need for the Fed’s actions to control inflation and restore confidence in the market (and in the population itself) when it wanes.

As Reback stated in Free the Market:

“The benefits of the free market don’t come free. Competition must be nurtured and protected by the government, as Americans first discovered more than a century ago, in a turbulent time driven by technological change, an era not unlike our own” (2).

THINKING OUTSIDE THE BANKS
I’d feel remiss not mentioning at least two authors that counsel throwing our current system completely out the window. On the libertarian front, there is Ron Paul. Though most current observers see the government and Fed as indispensable, Ron Paul sees it as corrupt, counterproductive and even unconstitutional. Contrary to what the Fed itself sees as it’s primary role—controlling inflation—Paul believes it only adds to the problem by printing more money. In End the Fed, he writes:

“Ending the Fed is the one sure way to restore sanity to economic and political life in this country. It doesn’t mean that our political disagreements and fights in Congress will go away. Ending the Fed is not a magic pill to usher in Utopia. But it does mean that our disagreements and discussions will occur within the context of reality, not in the illusory world created by the unlimited printing of money” (8).

On the liberation front, there is Douglass Rushkoff who suggests that not only would we be better off having let banks fail, but that we need to break the hold the corporate model has on our very lives. He takes the narrative back all the way to the Middle Ages, when monarchies began replacing local currency with state currencies and setting up monopolies.

“The Renaissance was never about extending … prosperity but about monopolizing it. … the chartered corporation was at its core a scheme to lock in the recent success of … rising merchants” (167).

THE CONCLUSION
In some circles over the last three decades, to question the fundamental soundness of free markets was akin to questioning America itself—and “free market” was narrowly defined as unregulated, unfettered markets. The view seemed to be “This market is the very best of all possible markets.” And to meddle in it was to interfere with the “invisible hand” guiding it, which was economic blasphemy.
The pendulum seems to be swinging heavily the other way. It’s hard for many to see what has happened since the markets have been largely deregulated as anything nearing “rational.” The idea of a free market itself is being redefined. Just as traffic laws allow one to drive down the street safely—free from reckless road conditions—the government now seems intent on reestablishing order on Wall Street so that the general public feels safe there again. To many, it looks like the only rational thing to do.

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Like us, Candide once lived in great splendor, with an abiding faith that he inhabited the best of all possible worlds. When he was forced from his home and assaulted by the ugly realities of an often unjust world, he lost some of that faith, and stresses the work it takes to maintain vitality. Near the end of the book, his old mentor Pangloss tries to put a Leibnizian spin on the ordeals of Candide’s life:

“There is a concatenation of all events in the best of all possible worlds; for, in short, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle … ; had you not been put into the Inquisition; had you not traveled to America on foot; had you not run the Baron through the body; and had you not lost all your sheep … you would not have been here to eat preserved citrons and pistachio nuts.”

“Excellently observed,” replied Candide; “but we must cultivate our garden.”

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PREVIOUS POSTS FROM IN THE BOOKS

I: Financial Markets: Their Promise and Failure (and Promise) BY DYLAN SCHLEICHER
II: When Ecology and Economy Meet BY KATE MYTTY
III: Why We Love Business Books More Than Ever BY ERIKA ANDERSEN
IV: Odd Intersections: Fiction Captures the Complexities of Business BY REBECCA SCHLEI HARTMAN
V: Explorations Into the Human Psyche BY ROBBIE HARTMAN
VI: For Women Only? A Look at Trends in Business Books Written by Women BY SALLY HALDORSON
VII: Real-World Lessons in Leadership BY ROBERT MORRIS
VIII: We the Internet BY DYLAN SCHLEICHER
IX: The Shifting Landscape of Moving Ideas: The Art of Publishing in a Socially Empowered World BY JON MUELLER
X: The Information Age
XI: Finding Opportunities: Re-examining Personal and Organizational Strength in Challenging Times BY JON MUELLER
XII: The Five Universal Themes in Business BY TODD SATTERSTEN

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January 11, 2011

In the Books – Off to the Printers XII

Filed under: Book Reviews,In the Books — dylan @ 1:53 pm

In another installment from the annual review of business books we produced last year, we have an article from friend and former president of the company, Todd Sattersten. In it, he discusses the meta-themes in business thought that he and Jack uncovered as they spent 18 months compiling, reading, choosing and writing The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.

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The Five Universal Themes in Business BY TODD SATTERSTEN

What happens when you spend 18 months reading the best in business literature? In our case, two things happened—one expected, the other quite unexpected.

The expected was the creation of a list of the 100 best business books of all time, which led to a book by the same name. The unexpected came as we uncovered a number of meta-themes the books share that exist beyond any predictable grouping by subject matter. For example, Michael Useem’s The Leadership Moment has surprising connections with as Taiichi Ohno’s Toyota Production System and Gary Klein’s The Power of Intuition. Ultimately, we found five persistent meta-themes across our selection of the 100 best business books. Each meta-theme appears horizontally across traditional publishing categories, bridging such divisions as sales, management, narrative, and finance. Each meta-theme also scales in a vertical sense, applying to individuals, teams and organizations equally. So profound are these meta-themes, we argue, that these five universal insights act as the foundation for a leader dealing with any aspect of business, whether starting a new job or developing the next year’s corporate strategy.

1. Clarity of Purpose
Purpose provides direction and brings clarity to all work. For the individual in pursuit of purpose, author Po Bronson asks the ultimate question in his book, What Should I Do with My Life? Organizations struggle with the same kind of question when they craft their mission statements and massage their marketing slogans.

2. Wisdom in Decision Making
The process of making decisions is often overly deliberate or completely unconscious. In both cases, we base our decisions on past experience and judge the success of those decisions only on the success rate of the outcomes. In Influence, Robert Cialdini alerts us to how we use unconscious routine to make even the smallest decision, while in The Power of Intuition, Gary Klein provides a map to some of that scripting and shows how we can improve our gut instinct.

3. Bias for Action
Tom Peters and Bob Waterman pointed out in In Search of Excellence that a quality of excellent companies was “the bias for action.” This assertion that action trumps all appears in many great books, so what keeps us from taking action? Author David Allen (Getting Things Done) would say a person’s focus is misplaced on time and priority, rather than action. Authors Jeffery Pfeffer and Bob Sutton (The Knowing-Doing Gap) would say organizations suffer from a gap between knowing and doing.

4. Openness to Change
Understanding change is essential because change affects individuals and organizations constantly. Sales is about change. Marketing is about change. Corporate strategy about is about change. Lou Gerstner says it was changing IBM’s entitlement culture that was his biggest challenge. In The First 90 Days, new job guru Michael Watkins describes the waves of change that new managers must instigate. In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffery Moore shows how products are adopted and what different constituents need to accept change.

5. Giving and Getting
Feedback Imagine throwing a baseball in a dark room. You would miss seeing the trajectory the ball took or where it landed. Our success depends on feed-back. Did we make the right choice? Did the action have the intended effect? Are things changing? Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence) says self-reflection is a form of feedback and an essential piece of emotional intelligence. Engineering professor Henry Petroski, author of To Engineer is Human, says failure is a critical part of learning. And in Secrets of Closing the Sale, Zig Ziglar says listening is the most important part of selling.

These themes are likely to persist as business and business literature evolves further, because companies continually fail to absorb the simple lessons: Find a clear purpose. Be aware that past experience and a mass of information can interfere with wise decisions. Maintain a bias toward action. Be open to change. Seek feedback. These behaviors link together: Clarity of purpose provides wisdom in decision making, which informs action, which in turn, creates change, while feedback informs them all.

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PREVIOUS POSTS FROM IN THE BOOKS

I: Financial Markets: Their Promise and Failure (and Promise) BY DYLAN SCHLEICHER
II: When Ecology and Economy Meet BY KATE MYTTY
III: Why We Love Business Books More Than Ever BY ERIKA ANDERSEN
IV: Odd Intersections: Fiction Captures the Complexities of Business BY REBECCA SCHLEI HARTMAN
V: Explorations Into the Human Psyche BY ROBBIE HARTMAN
VI: For Women Only? A Look at Trends in Business Books Written by Women BY SALLY HALDORSON
VII: Real-World Lessons in Leadership BY ROBERT MORRIS
VIII: We the Internet BY DYLAN SCHLEICHER
IX: The Shifting Landscape of Moving Ideas: The Art of Publishing in a Socially Empowered World BY JON MUELLER
X: The Information Age
XI: Finding Opportunities: Re-examining Personal and Organizational Strength in Challenging Times BY JON MUELLER

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January 6, 2011

In the Books – Off to the Printers XI

Filed under: Book Reviews,In the Books,The Company — dylan @ 1:16 pm

After an always busy year-end of hosting our Author Pow-Wow, reading and judging books for our 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards, producing our annual review of business books, planning our Book Awards Party in New York City, trying to keep up with our more mundane and unsung daily tasks, and working on our secret, obviously unannounced plans of world-domination, we’re beginning to see the light here in the New Year. One big recent step was sending our annual review off to the printers*, and in a tradition I started last year to wrap up the project, I’d like to share with you here some of what we have written in previous issues. (I’ve also put links to previous entries in this series at the end of this post.)

*We are lucky to have Stauber Design Studio and CrossTech Communications in our corner on this project every year. This year’s theme for the piece is “Work Better,” something both organizations help us do. If you have anything you need to communicate in this world, the smartest first step you can take is to contact these wonderful Chicago companies.

First up, we have our General Manager Jon Mueller and his piece on the struggles we all faced as the economy tanked in 2008, and the books written in 2009 to help us out of it. Without further ado…

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Finding Opportunities: Re-examining Personal and Organizational Strength in Challenging Times BY JON MUELLER

As 2009 dawned, instead of the kind of high hopes and fresh starts the beginning of a year typically brings, the economy was crashing harder each day. Businesses crumbled, people lost jobs, and nearly everything lost value as spending froze and budgets dried up. 800-CEO-READ was intimately affected, as the company painfully let staff go in the downsizing of an already-lean group. Around the world, reality became surprisingly bleak, and no one seemed to have any solid answers.

Despite being bombarded by negative news regarding the economy, a counter-attack seemed to be developing and people started to come out of their temporary collective daze. Instead of giving in to the pessimism, people began to address the issues, rethinking what it means to run a business, manage a group of people, and develop and apply personal skills. For many, individuals and businesses alike, this crisis became an opportunity for change, for chasing dreams, even for just waiting out the storm as they planned for something better. Which is not to say there haven’t been painful decisions made, that there haven’t been casualties, but if change is the only certain thing, then the challenge is to transform dire circumstances into dramatic successes.

In January, Martha Finney released her timely book Rebound: A Proven Plan for Starting Over After Job Loss to encourage just such a thing. The book seemed eerily prophetic in some ways, but nonetheless offered an immediate salve to the wounded. For many, finding a new job was not at all in the plan, but the advice and insight in Finney’s book was miraculous in its ability to provide current and profound advice to those that needed it unexpectedly quick.

Rebound not only plunges headfirst into tactical advice, but also addresses financial and emotional issues, like how to manage spending during unemployment, how to explain your job loss to your children, and other issues that are often overlooked in the more common discussions about beefing-up one’s resume, networking, and refining the interview process. Those critical skills are covered, too, but it’s Finney’s knack for understanding and addressing the broad scope of the situation that makes her book stand above the rest.

Finney subscribes to the idea of using the negativity a job loss to address one’s true self-interest and passion. She states:

“Figure out where you stand, how much time you have to explore possibilities, what you love, and where you really want to go next” (103).

Now, let’s be honest, most people who find themselves jobless in the current economy are likely looking for a way to get that next paycheck. But it seems true that those who take this seemingly soft advice will be the ones who rise to even greater heights when the economic crisis settles.

For those who made the decision to leave the unfriendly confines of the corporate office, either by choice or by demand, Pamela Slim’s Escape From Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur is the guide for you. Slim concurs with Finney that it is crucial to align one’s professional life with one’s personal goals:

“If you don’t consider your life as a key part of your business model, you may find yourself outwardly successful and inwardly miserable. The way to avoid this is to create a plan that outlines in great detail the kind of life that will make you happy and healthy. Over time, as your life changes you can adjust the plan. The important thing is to think about your ideal life before you make any serious decisions about your business plan” (83).

From there, Slim outlines varying types of business models, and asks the reader to consider questions like, “what is really needed? What could make this experience better? How could I improve this?” in order to establish how their business can have a positive impact and increase its chances of surviving. Slim then gets serious about how to figure out the finances needed for the business, how to develop the business, and how to strategize for growth. All in all, this is a clear, direct, and serious book for those who want to start their own business, and it couldn’t have come at a better time for those among the newly disenchanted workforce looking to try their own venture.

These are exciting times for those daredevils willing to take a risk in the face of such uncertainty, as economist Tyler Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World encourages:

“This book will start and end with the idea of the value and the creative power of the individual” (1).

While Finney and Slim’s books advise individuals on finding their next path, Cowen addresses how technology has allowed for a tremen-dous shift in power to the individual. This power is something we all have access to, but might not necessarily understand how it all works, how we work within it, and how information can be both consumed and controlled to have a profound effect on our business and lives.

Because so many new channels exist, the better we become at communicating through them will be revealed in how good we are in our business. A final quote from Cowen sums up the great opportunities that this technology, and our involvement with it, provides:

“As our inner lives become richer, the idea of creating your own economy is becoming a reality. We’re learning how to use filters to get the information we really want and we are learning how to avoid information overload. We’re learning how to cultivate intellectual patience. And every day we are getting better at using the web to connect with other human beings and improve our personal relationships” (211).

These three books are but a small sampling of the useful information that became available to help individuals through the economic downturn, but what about the companies that held on for dear life? For those that stayed in business, it might be assumed that they foresaw the coming disaster, knew how to prepare, and can continue to weather any storm. But of course, it’s not that simple. Most companies were hit hard and had to make tough choices, and there are some timely books released that address how leaders and managers within companies can find positive results in a negative situation.

Bill George’s 7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis bridges the gap between individual and organization, offering a solid resource of insight for those who want to lead as part of a team. George separates his book not by chapters, but by “lessons,” lessons that offer a tactical approach to distinct areas of leadership. He stresses those lessons are best learned by participating, and thus leaders must discover firsthand the risk and opportunity that the word crisis implies. And it is important to note that George offers an interesting translation of the word “crisis”:

“In Chinese, the character for the word crisis is made up of two symbols, danger and opportunity. That’s exactly what it represents for you as a leader. Although there is always the danger of failing, guiding people through a major problem is your best opportunity to develop your leadership” (4).

Throughout 7 Lessons, George talks candidly about the global meltdown, its roots, and how leaders can learn from it. He emphasizes the need to recognize that crises have deep roots, and addressing those roots is crucial for leaders; dealing with problems on the surface only creates a larger mess down the road. It’s profound advice that goes beyond the recent economic meltdown to many ongoing challenges that leader’s face.

Steven Little’s Duck and (Re)Cover: The Embattled Business Owner’s Guide to Survival and Growth makes no promises for instant solutions. The author is extremely forthright when he begins:

“I know you want answers. If you are embattled, you could be reading this book because you want me to tell you what to do … No embattled business owner, I can’t tell you what to do … What I can do is point you toward those areas that most need your focused attention and efforts” (28). After reading a statement like this, readers might question why they should continue. Little explains that he offers “two things most business owners don’t have: an outsider’s perspective and a long history of pattern recognition” (20).

With this approach, Little seemingly offers to be the struggling business owner’s partner during this trying time, and it’s a comfort to share the burden as Little discusses how to better manage cash flow, customer service, strategy, marketing, pricing profitably, and exploring other business models (ex., the green industry). He covers a lot of ground, but in a readable, intelligent style that gives the right amount of consideration to these serious times. Perhaps most importantly, he pushes the reader to remember the importance of purpose:

“The purpose of your organization is to identify and serve the changing needs of the marketplace. A recession doesn’t change that ultimate purpose; it simply changes the nature of the opportunities that are created. This current crisis may be unique in some ways, but it also is much the same as the previous economic storms we have weathered. Attrition and changing market needs are creating vacuums that somebody is going to fill. The question is: Which ones represent the best opportunities for you?” (131).

Questions like Little’s are what businesses need to be asking to prepare themselves for recovery. The challenge is to embrace a sense of opportunity and adventure. Focusing on the opportunities, the upside, and not wallowing in the doom is where the success lies.

Two other notable books reference this same optimism: Geoff Colvin’s The Upside of the Downturn: Ten Management Strategies to Prevail in the Recession and Thrive in the Aftermath and Donald Sull’s The Upside of Turbulence: Seizing Opportunity in an Uncertain World.

Colvin’s book is an effective practicum; encouraging continued training and employee development, stressing that after (both human and budgetary) cuts have been made, focusing on the human resources that remain is paramount. He states:

“Continuing to offer training—adapted to the new environment—can help a company gain competitive advantage in the downturn. After all, in this changed world the requirements facing many of your people have probably changed also” (47).

Employees are the front line, so it is imperative that CEOs and managers keep them well-prepared for the flux.

The Upside of the Downturn goes on to suggest ways to find opportunity in a recession, from managing for value and finding solutions, to customer’s new problems and understanding risks to personal growth—the last of which aligns surprisingly with Slim and Finney’s more personal approach mentioned above. Now, more than ever, there seems to be a focus on personal development as a method to avoiding further mistakes and problems down the road.

Sull’s Upside encourages innovation by combining existing resources. He elaborates:

“A tight definition of innovation, however, consists of a novel combination of existing resources, in the spirit of the sandwich. Innovations come in many flavors—they can reconfigure a technology, process, supply chain or business model; sustain or disrupt an existing trajectory; extend existing practices; or break with the past. But all are examples of novelty from recombining existing resources” (20).

The good news here is that it might not take new ideas or investment to save a company that has survived but is not thriving; instead simply re-examining what it is they do well, and what else exists within, may lead to unexpected riches. Of course change does not come free, and Sull, like Colvin, encourages companies to invest, not freeze.

“To conserve cash in a downturn, companies retreat from attractive opportunities, leaving them open for rivals” (35).

Ideally a company should be open to doing both—pursuing new opportunities and exploring more options from within.

The Upside of Turbulence is not only a book for these times, but likely for the future as well. It infuses historical stories with current case studies and reveals patterns. Sull claims that being both aware and prepared to deal with these patterns is a key component to success. Using a metaphor about comedians, he notes:

“Seasoned improvisers attempt to discover a pattern that emerges in the course of a skit, rather than imposing a preexisting idea on the action” (115).

In fact, a theme throughout Sull’s book is agility, both personal and as an organization, in structure, communication, and strategy.

There is certainly no need to detail again what a turbulent year this was, both for individuals and organizations, but what is worth repeating is the value in the collective focus on some of the deeper issues at play: the emphasis on individual talent, skill, creativity, passion, and fulfillment, as well as a similar analysis of an organization, and tapping both the known and previously unknown resources and abilities therein.

Each of the books discussed in this essay share common themes of re-examination, development, and determination, fitting terms for everyone to consider putting into play in these challenging times. In doing so, both people and organizations will discover opportunities, new directions, and the substance to take their selves, their businesses, and eventually the economy itself to higher ground.

BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS POST

PREVIOUS POSTS FROM IN THE BOOKS

I: Financial Markets: Their Promise and Failure (and Promise) BY DYLAN SCHLEICHER
II: When Ecology and Economy Meet BY KATE MYTTY
III: Why We Love Business Books More Than Ever BY ERIKA ANDERSEN
IV: Odd Intersections: Fiction Captures the Complexities of Business BY REBECCA SCHLEI HARTMAN
V: Explorations Into the Human Psyche BY ROBBIE HARTMAN
VI: For Women Only? A Look at Trends in Business Books Written by Women BY SALLY HALDORSON
VII: Real-World Lessons in Leadership BY ROBERT MORRIS
VIII: We the Internet BY DYLAN SCHLEICHER
IX: The Shifting Landscape of Moving Ideas: The Art of Publishing in a Socially Empowered World BY JON MUELLER
X: The Information Age

Stay tuned to this here blog for more from In the Books, spread out over the next week.

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