InBubbleWrap

A Michael D. Watkins Twofer

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:48:39 -0600

As the economy transitions from apocalyptic to merely distressing, many of our careers are in transition. It can be an anxious time, even if it's for the best—even if if the transition is upward.

One of the more popular offers since we began our attempt to give away each of the books in The 100 Best Business Books of All Time was Michael Watkins First 90 Days. But, since giving away the book in June, he has put out another book—Your Next Move: The Leader's Guide to Navigating Major Career Transitions, released last month by Harvard Business Press—so we're revisiting Mr. Watkins.

Like The First 90 Days, it has much to do with becoming a successful manager of others, transitioning from being a productive member of a team to leading a team of your own. But, whereas The First 90 Days offers more across-the-board advice covering transitions in general, Your Next Move is more specifically tailored toward specific types of transitions and direct challenges, such as how to handle a promotion and manage your former peers. Watkins explains in his introduction:

"This book is about how leaders can survive and thrive in classic career changes that virtually everyone faces on their road to the top. The chapters that follow build on my work in The First 90 Days, but delve much more deeply into the distinct, tough transitions that leaders face. You will get clear road maps—advice and tools—to surmount the challenges associated with your next move ... and every on after that."

This week, we're offering you both Your Next Move and The First 90 Days. We have 20 copies of the set.

If you'd like to learn more about The First 90 Days, or read what I think of the 24-hour news cycle, head back to our original offer. If you're interested in getting a head start on Your Next Move, you can find an excerpt (and an interview with the author) at businessweek.com.

The Art of Innovation

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 23:40:43 -0600

We called it "the porch" but, in reality, it was just a small, windowless room. It was unheated and had a concrete floor that we sometimes covered with that awful, outdoor astroturf/carpet that was far too prevalent in my childhood. The room's only practical use was to house the dryer (The wash-machine itself was in the kitchen next door). For my three brothers and I, however, it was a starting point. It was an empty box that we eventually filled with childhood memories.

We have 25 copies of The Art of Innovation to give away this week. It was authored by IDEO general manager Tom Kelley with Jonathan Littman (who this year released a book entitled I Hate People, which makes one wonder how he pulled off coauthoring this book). IDEO, of course, is the rock-star design firm of Palo Alto, California—"Silicon Valley's design firm of choice" as Todd writes in The 100 Best. IDEO wins so many awards it's hard to keep up with their accolades, but I do know they were just this year ranked #10 on Fast Company's list of The World's Most Innovative Companies. The Art of Innovation begins with the story of this great company, but quickly turns to processes and practices your company can implement. Again, from Todd's review:

The opening pages read more like a company biography than a guide to product transformations, but by chapter three, The Art of Innovation picks up speed and shows why this book is a prime example of what can make a business book so valuable.

Keep Reading...

Questions of Character

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:48:50 -0600

It wasn't looking good. They were behind for most of the bout, and were now trailing by 30 points with only six minutes left in the game. I thought the Milwaukee cause might be lost, and was beginning to worry about the car ride home the next day, driving three very disappointed and very likely hungover roller girls all the way home from St. Paul.

The book we have for you today is Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr.'s Questions of Character. Badaracco's approach is different than most in the business genre, in that the stories he uses to inform us aren't taken from research and real-life success stories, but pulled from the pages of great literature. "How does serious fiction help us understand leadership?" he asks. "It open doors to a world rarely seen ... It lets us watch leaders as they think, worry, hope, hesitate, commit, exult, regret, and reflect. We see their characters tested, reshaped, strengthened or weakened. These books draw us into leaders' worlds, put us in their shoes, and at times let us share their experiences."

Keep Reading...

When Genius Failed

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:41:20 -0600

Irving Fisher, like many others beside him, lost pretty much his entire fortune in the stock market crash of 1929. That's not the story of Irving Fisher, though... his is much more complicated. You see, more than 20 years earlier, in 1906, he wrote The Nature of Capital and Income, one of the first books to ascribe reason and scientific order to markets. Fisher's work has had a great deal of influence on economics in academia over the years, and his work is part of the foundation of complex financial mathematics and instruments we see on Wall Street today. In a recently released book, The Myth of the Rational Market, Time magazine editor-at-large 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."

Well, if by "permanently high plateau," Fisher meant "about to fall drastically, plummeting the country into a prolonged depression," he was spot-on.

The book we have for you today, Roger Lowenstein's When Genius Failed, is a more recent example of academic faith in the rationality of markets going disasterously awry. It tells the story of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), a hedge fund started by John Meriwether that lured the best and brightest minds of American academia to Wall Street—Nobel Laureates of economics Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton among them.

Keep Reading...

The Story Factor

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:49:37 -0600

The telling of stories separates us from other earthly creatures. The ability to know a past we've never seen and the desire to be a part of the story moving forward gives us a perspective and ambition to do great and memorable things. The stories we collect and pass down form our collective memory. It is our stories that shape us—personally, culturally or otherwise. This is no less true in business. A company's story—told both internally and externally—is a vital part of that company's identity.

Annette Simmons' The Story Factor reminds us of the power of stories and illustrates how we can use them to influence, inspire and motivate. She provides the techniques and inspiration to begin telling your own story more effectively, personally and proffessionally.

When asked where I work, I always reply "Well, do you remember Schwartz Bookshops?" That answer is partly due to the fact that Milwaukeeans will almost always know of Schwartz, which makes it easier to begin the explanation of how 800-CEO-READ formed (as Schwartz's business book division) and what we do. But that's not the only reason I invoke the bookshops... Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops is where our company's culture was formed, and we consider the bookshop history our own. When I speak of our company in those terms, I think it gives them a better idea of what our company is like—what our company is—lthan just telling them that we sell business books.

I've told the story here before...

Keep Reading...

Positioning

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 15:56:53 -0600

Though its cover and subtitle (The Battle for Your Mind) would feel at home gracing an Isaac Asimov novel, Al RIes and Jack Trout's Positioning is not science-fiction. First published in 1980, it has likely had more influence on the advertising world than any book ever written, and forever changed the way we think about marketing. The book stands out amongst and above the cacophony of books published over the years, and will teach you how to rise above the cacophony of the marketplace.

To do this, the authors counsel that "The best approach to take in our overcommunicated society is the oversimplified message." See, according to Ries and Trout, it is "not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind ..." We discussed the physical retail environment a few weeks ago when we were offering Paco Underhill's Why We Buy—a book that perfected the science of designing retail space, ridding it of any clutter that may dissuade a prospective customer from a product they want to buy and simplifying their route to it. And, that is precisely what Ries and Trout have done for the mental retail environment, the world of marketing and advertising. They expertly describe how to position whatever you're selling in a prospect's mind—whether that be a product, service, idea, or (with chapters on career advanement and improvement) even yourself. There are even chapters on the positioning of a country (Belgium) and chuch (the Catholic).

Keep Reading...

Chasing Daylight

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:01:12 -0600

It had been some time since I'd taken a vacation, so our road trip the week of the 4th of July was a more than welcome respite... it was a necessary one.

Camping the first night on a small peninsula jutting into Rend Lake in southern Illinois, basking in the moonlight with a cold beer next to a warm fire, I knew it was going to be a fine trip. Then it was on to the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis and a quick tour of Biel Street. After driving to the Natchez Trace State Forest from there and being met in battle at our campsite by kamikaze stinging flies dive-bombing our vehicle, we decided to drive on to Nashville. The flies won the battle, but we won the war that night. (What is up with the AT&T building in Nashville, by the way? It looks like the headquarters of a supervillain, what with its sinister, villainy spires and whatnot. All it needs is a windy mountain road leading up to it and some lightning in the background.)

Well, we found that windy mountain road the next morning off highway 129 in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee and North Carolina, where we would camp next to a cold, clear creek in a dry county. Cherokee for the "land of noon day sun," The Nantahala National Forest was the perfect place to rest up for the remainder of our vacation, and close to our final destination—Hendersonville, NC. We found that lightning for the background on our way home, driving through a brief thunderstorm in the Great Smokey Mountains, and when the rain cleared and mist rose so beautifully off the mountains, I thought we might have driven straight into the pages of a fantasy novel. But we were heading west, back home to our beloved Milwaukee, knowing our journey was nearing its end, just chasing daylight.

Chasing Daylight is the story of a man coming to the ultimate journey's end. Unlike The First 90 Days, which we featured recently here on this site, Chasing Daylight is all about one's last 90 days. It is the extraordinary memoir of a dying man, former KPMG CEO Eugene O'Kelly, written in the short span between when he was diagnosed with brain cancer and his death just three-and-a-half months later.

Keep Reading...

Why We Buy

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:41:28 -0600

We Americans love to buy stuff, even if it means refinancing our mortgages and dipping into reserves that don't exist to do it. We love it soooo much, we've effectively bought ourselves a recession. But why? Well, when we're at home, we're more likely than not to lounge around taking in messages that teach us how fun, sexy, original and hilarious it is to consume things. And, when we step outside of our homes, we do our best to emulate that life, and we enter a retail world that does its best to satisfy our desires—to feel sexy, funny, original, exotic. It's why I bought that novelty tee shirt last week that lets everyone know that "It's not a bald spot, it's a solar panel for a sex machine." Funny, sexy and original... right?

Keep Reading...

The First 90 Days

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:03:11 -0600

It's widely accepted—and shoved down our collective throats by the news media—that a president's first hundred days are the most important of their term. This is partly because those first 100 days set the tone and momentum of their presidency, and partly because 24 hour cable news networks need to manufacture something to yammer about all day, and they seem to like round numbers.

You probably don't have as many headaches or the same job-security as the president, though. And, if you're changing jobs—whether moving within your company or to a new one—Michael Watkins contends that you don't have as long to prove yourself. In his classic, The First 90 Days, he lays out the do's and don'ts of transitioning in the workplace.

Keep Reading...

The Age of Unreason

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 10:00:48 -0600

We are living through The Age of Turbulence, opines Alan Greenspan; The Age of Abundance, says Lindsey Brink; An Age of New Possibilities, argues Reinhard Mohn; Art Kleiner documents brilliantly the "Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management" in The Age of Heretics; Vince Poscente will show you how to thrive in The Age of Speed; and George Magnus will explain the shifting demographics of The Age of Aging. It's an Age of Ages, folks, that is what this really is.

Keep Reading...

The Rise of the Creative Class

Thu, 14 May 2009 09:56:35 -0600

There's a Class War on, people, a freakin' Class War! The creatives are coming—with their (our) sharp pencils and t-squares, old-timey typewriters and newfangled laptops, bohemian mindsets and lens-enhanced eyesight—and they're (we're) out to ruin us (you)!

Okay, that's not what Richard Florida's seminal book on the Creative Class is about at all. It's actually a intensely researched and well-reasoned chronicle of "the ongoing sea change in people's choices and attitudes and describes a society in which the creative ethos is increasingly dominant."

The Creative Class is the new Third Estate, except that Estates of the Realm don't exist anymore. There's no real nobility to speak of, and no clergy tithing our income or telling us what to read (that's our job now... bwuh hahahaha). In fact, no one even uses the word "realm" these days unless it's preceded by "in the" and followed by "of." But, like the Third Estate, the Creative Class is an amorphous amalgamation of "the everyman"—full of folks working in different professions, income brackets and regions throughout the realm. It consists of engineers, artists, architects and IT professionals. It's the woman who works in marketing at the natural foods store who lives above you and the Montessori school teacher next door; the couple who owns the landscape business across the street and the dancer who lives down the block. It's increasingly likely that it's you.

Keep Reading...

Competing for the Future

Thu, 07 May 2009 10:52:31 -0600

Very few teams can throw money at their immediate problems and organizational shortcomings like New York's Yankees can. After failing to make the playoffs for the first time in 13 years in 2008 (with a $207 million payroll—by far baseball's largest), they went out and signed free-agent first baseman Mark Teixeira, along with starting pitchers CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett. These three men alone will make a combined $52,410,714 this year to play in the $1.5 billion bandbox called (New) Yankee Stadium. The Yankee organization spends this kind of money because, despite General Manager Brian Cashman's recent attempts to build up a decent farm system, the Yankees are expected to win now, this year, today, this inning. When they don't, their fans get finicky and the New York press becomes downright apocalyptic. There is no tomorrow in New York, only today.

Chances are, your business can't afford this kind of wild abandon. You're the hometown Milwaukee Brewers (this is meant as a great compliment). And, though you want to be successful now, there's always next year to hope for and always tomorrow to consider. Instead of throwing money at the best talent in the world every year, you have to build up what Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad call "core competencies" and look toward the future. And, Hamel and Prahalad's Competing for the Future is just the book to help.

Keep Reading...

Titan

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 09:22:17 -0600

Bill Gates was on Charlie Rose last night with his father, Bill Gates. Gates has come to represent great wealth and philanthropy in our time, but before the rise of the computer, the name Rockefeller, more than any other in this country's history, has epitomized dynastic wealth, power and prestige. And it is Ron Chernow's riveting biogrpaphy of John Davison Rockefeller, Sr.—aptly titled Titan—that we have for you today.

By the time of his death in 1937, John D. Rockefeller, Sr. had amassed 1.4 billion dollars; this when the GDP of the entire country was 91.9 billion (according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis statistics). Let's take a moment to put that in perspective. Last year, the GDP was 14,264.6 billion, and the world's richest person—according to Forbes recent 2009 list—was none other than Bill Gates himself, whose fortune is estimated at 40 billion. If I'm doing my math right, which I must tell you is dubious at best, then Rockefeller was roughly five times wealthier (relative to GDP) than Bill Gates is today. For all the talk of a new gilded age and executive compensation today, the original "robber-baron" dwarfs his modern day counterpart.

Keep Reading...

Only the Paranoid Survive

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 10:15:59 -0600

Andy Grove is one of the most successful and intriguing figures in Silicon Vally. While not as popularly known outside the valley as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, Grove—as one of the founding members and the former CEO of Intel—has had as much to do with shaping the hi-tech industry as anyone. He was, in fact, TIME Magazine's Man of the Year in 1997, a year after the book he wrote—and that we have for you today—was released. The book is Only the Paranoid Survive, and it focuses largely on what Grove calls Strategic Inflection Points, or "a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change." And that pretty much describes all of us right now, doesn't it?

Depending on how these sea changes are managed, a company will either be provided with a wealth of new opportunity or dashed about in an ever-changing business climate. These points come everywhere and in every industry, and according to Grove, only the paranoid survive them—those who see them coming because they are aware of and attuned to the constant flux not only their business position, but of the of the entire business world itself. In business, Grove contests, you simply need to keep looking over your shoulder. Or, as Black Sabbath so eloquently put it in 1970's "Paranoid":

"All day long I think of things
But nothing seems to satisfy
Think I'll lose my mind
If I don't find something to pacify

Can you help me occupy my brain?
Oh yeah!"

Unfortunately, this book does not have wicked Tony Iommi solo in the middle of it, but it will satisfy your business paranoia by encouraging it and help keep your brain occupied in strategic thinking. The paperback edition we have for you today also has a "new chapter about the impact of strategic inflection points on individual careers—how to predict them and how to benefit from them" that I don't believe any Black Sabbath album contains. Maybe if you play "Iron Man" backwards...

Keep Reading...

The Knowing-Doing Gap

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 11:24:56 -0600

As Todd writes in his review for The 100 Best:

"Knowing what to do is not the problem. 11,000 business books, 80,000 MBAs, and $60 billion worth of corporate training each year show the wide avenues by which knowledge is dispensed and acquired."

11,000 business books a year! Staggering, isn't it? That number was the motivating force behind Jack and Todd's book—they wanted to use their combined quarter century's worth of experience in the business book industry to sift through and find, evaluate, recommend and review the best business books ever written. Really, it's the key motivation behind everything we do—to act as a quality filter, making it easier for you to find the books truly worthy of your time and attention, books that will help you at work and in life. It's the reason Jack Covert selects a series of books each month for review as, well, Jack Covert Selects. It's the reason our daily blog exists, and it's certainly the reason we're giving away books here for free every week. And, while it's scope is broader than business alone, it's a big part of the reason we continue to spread the ideas and hard-won knowledge of authors and others on ChangeThis.

But, while acquiring ideas and knowledge is a critical step in business, it is only the first step. Without action to follow it up, business literacy is about as useful as a screen door on a submarine... or sonar listening gear on your back porch. It is the action that ideas drive, and the innovation that knowledge enables, that is of true value to your business and our economy. And, it is how to turn that knowledge into action that our offer today, The Knowing-Doing Gap, discusses. It was written by two Professors of Organizational Behavior at Stanford, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton. (You may know Bob Sutton from his more recent bestseller, The No Asshole Rule, which the iBW OG covered upon it's release in 2007.)

Action usually means change, and change can be scary, especially to those who grew up in and have benefited from the way things have been done in the past. How often have you been frustrated at work, having had a new idea or better way to address a problem shot down by a superior who was all too comfortable with the status quo. Or, perhaps you've experienced that so many times you don't even bother to take your ideas to anybody anymore, feeling you know what the outcome of that conversation would be. Perhaps you've stopped looking for new ideas and solutions altogether and confine yourself within the parameters of convention, even if you feel you know better than those who designed the system you're working in. Pfeffer and Sutton know your pain... they've actually studied it.

Keep Reading...