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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.

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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.

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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.

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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...

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"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.

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—from the Zen Koans Database

Indeed, where did this anger come from? It doesn't help that most of us are not exactly thrilled by the work we do and, therefore, with our lives. It doesn't help that many are so constantly burnt out, spending a large portion of our waking hours doing tasks we are not really passionate about, and spending more time in traffic getting to and from that sometimes thankless work. The burnt out corporate executive is becoming as cliché as the struggling artist, and it doesn't get any prettier as you climb down the corporate ladder to "the salt of the earth."

The fabled Midwestern work ethic has been brewed into most of the people I grew up with. We inherited it from our parents as we watched them trudge off to work jobs (that they didn't really want to do) to support their families with that quiet reservation, stoic pride and martyrdom so common in the Midwest (and so hilariously played upon on The Prairie Home Companion). It's not really unique to the Midwest, but it's strangely—and I think rightfully—an image we're proud of. The question is... is it really necessary, or even helpful?

This week's book is The Monk and the Riddle by Randy Komisar. Komisar is a Silicon Valley heavyweight. He has worked with and helped build WebTV, TiVo and Mondo Media as a "virtual CEO," was CEO of LucasArts Entertainment and was one of the co-founders of Claris Corporation. With that track record and experience, you can bet there is a lot we can learn from him. What may be unexpected is the lesson he offers and how he teaches it. No, he will not whack you with a bamboo pipe, but he may challenge some of your assumptions about what success looks and feels like.

Like last week's title, My Years with General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan, Komisar's tale is a memoir. But, it does not read like a business book and, unlike Alfred Sloan, who was entirely concerned with the minutia of "how" in business, Komisar states up front that he is much more interested in the "why." As Jack writes in his review of the book in The 100 Best:

"While he shares his own quest to discover the real meaning of work, he asks the readers this question: 'What would you be willing to do for the rest of your life...?'"

Or as, Komisar himself writes of the book: "It is about the need to fashion a meaningful existence that engages you in the time and place in which you find yourself. It is about the purpose of work and the integration of what one does with what one believes."

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General Motors was built with the labor of millions of American, and the vision of one man. If it weren't for Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., GM would probably not have lasted through the First World War to help us win the Second. He took over the company in it's infancy, when it was in as deep trouble as it is today, and engineered it into the keystone of the American economic engine, literally driving us into the 21st century. Unfortunately, it has been very nearly driven into the ground by those who have come after Sloan (or, possibly, by circumstances beyond their control—if you are of that opinion).
General Motors was built with the labor of a millions of American, and the vision of one man. If it weren't for Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., GM would probably not have lasted through the First World War to help us win the Second. He took over the company in it's infancy, when it was in as deep trouble as it is today, and engineered it into the keystone of the American economic engine, literally driving us into the 21st century. Unfortunately, it has been very nearly driven into the ground by those who have come after Sloan (or, possibly, by circumstances beyond their control—if you are of that opinion).

Regardless of how you believe we came to this sad point in the company's history, GM has a very influential past, and Alfred Sloan is largely responsible for that. He arrived at GM when the company he had been running at the time (in 1916), was bought by General Motors for $13.5 million dollars. Mr. Sloan would be running all of GM by 1923, and would remain at it's helm until 1956. In that time, he would: help win a war; be instrumental in changing public transit by buying up most of America's streetcar companies and slowly replacing them with buses; form the blueprint for how American Corporations bargain with Labor Unions; and make his company the leader of the incredibly powerful auto industry. And when he retired, he wrote a book about it, My Years with General Motors.

The book is a very serious undertaking, and one of the most boringly fascinating books (more on that later) you'll ever read. It is so detailed that Sloan literally recounts meeting minutes, from the records kept of them, throughout the book. And, it is that detail that is so valuable to anyone interested in the discipline of management, that helped define management as a discipline, and that has helped countless managers—from its publication in 1963 to the present day—understand the role they're stepping into and thrive in it. It should be required reading for the new leadership team at GM.

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Financial Intelligence is necessary for business, but let's face it, it's kind of boring. Intellectual intelligence, on the other hand, is intriguing and a great catalyst of human creativity and invention. But, as often as the highest intellect--Genius--is surrounded by creativity, mystery and eccentricity, it is rarely surrounded by cadres of close friends or collaborators. It is Emotional Intelligence that gives us the ability to learn from, interact with and improve the lives of others on a personal and professional level. It is Emotional Intelligence that allows us to live well-balanced, stable and contented, connected lives--opposed to the life of the poor, anguished Genius, misunderstood and miserly, slowly but surely going bat***t insane in a dark corner of their studio, paint in their hair and drool on their shirt, the dark recesses of their mind briefly flickering on a canvass the light they can't share with any living soul so that, though their paintings may be pored over and admired by some 15 year old goth kid in an art museum two hundred years from now, their current torment and destitution is such that... oh, am I taking this too far?

The original research in Emotional Intelligence that author Daniel Goleman draws from shows that there are five competencies of Emotional Intelligence: "Knowing one's emotions," or self-awareness; "Managing emotions," or emotional self-control; "Motivating oneself," or harnessing emotion; "Recognizing Emotions in others," or Empathy, and; "Handling Relationships," of which Goleman writes, "The art of relationships is, in large part, skill in managing emotions in others."

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The Experience Economy, written by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, was released ten years ago when all of the institutions I mentioned above seemed untouchable. Pine and Gilmore argued then that selling goods and services alone is no longer enough. They contend that what you are truly selling, what holds the real value in your company, is the experience you offer your customers. Among other topics, Todd touches upon the book industry in his review:

"Consider our industry of bookselling. Barnes and Noble's CEO Leonard Riggio is quoted in The Experience Economy, describing his superstores as theaters for social experiences. Amazon has experienced tremendous growth by creating its own unique experience, using personalized recommendations based on past purchases, customer participation in the form of reviews and wish lists, and unparalleled product selection impossible to replicate in retail."

These are good examples of what Pine and Gilmore discuss, of course, and these two companies have continued to offer a familiar, comfortable experience that has strengthened their grip on the American consumer's allegiance and increased their influence within the publishing world. But, well, I'm going to miss Schwartz.

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New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki Published The Wisdom of Crowds in 2004, and it made an immediate impact, showing that crowds are not as popularly mad and delusional as their previous biographers had made them out to be. Surowiecki uses many examples to bring his point home... the collective guessing of livestock weight at a county fair, the amazing accuracy of audience answers on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, The Iowa Electronic Markets prediction of political elections, and so on and so forth. For a more immediate example, I learned the that Michael Lewis and Bernard Barush were fans of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (facts stated in the previous paragraph) from Wikipedia. Wikipedia is, as we all know, the result of crowds.

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Sam Walton provided a blurb for the back of his own book, saying of it:

It's a story about entrepreneurship, and risk, and hard work, and knowing where you want to go and being willing to do what it takes to get there. And it's a story about believing in your idea even when maybe some other folks don't, and about sticking to your guns.

Incidentally, Wal-Mart is America's largest seller of guns.

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Leadership is an Art is Max De Pree's account of his experience at the helm of Herman Miller, Inc., a giant in the furniture business that has included work from such gifts to design as Gilbert Rhode, Charles and Ray Eames, and Alexander Girard. It is a book not of "hows," but of "whys." Or, as De Pree himself puts it in the Introduction, "It is more a book of ideas than practices." We promote the idea of business books as problem solvers a lot here at 800-CEO-READ, but all of the books put forward in The 100 Best are also problem definers and idea generators. And, although its practical in its approach, Leadership is an Art is a book with a great sense of purpose. It's a book that provides more than best practices and good ideas... it provides a moral strength with which to approach those practices and implement those ideas. In his review of the book, Jack relates the story of De Pree discovering, upon the death of a millwright, that this millwright had been a poet all his life. He asks "Was he a poet who did millwright's work, or was he a millwright who wrote poetry?" ... "When we think about leaders and the variety of gifts people bring to corporations and institutions, we see that the art of leadership lies in polishing and liberating and enabling those gifts." It is a great leader who considers employees this deeply.

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