Reading, Writing re: Management: December 2013

Monday, December 23, 2013

Corporate partnering like a pro

My weekly book post on s+b blogs is about BP executive Luc Bardin's new book on creating partnerships capable of delivering transformational value:

The Price and Prize of Strategic Partnering

There’s no shortage of books on creating and managing strategic partnerships, but Luc Bardin’s new one caught my eye for its where-the-rubber-meets-the-road practicality. Bardin has been sales and marketing chief at BP since 2007, and he founded and leads the energy giant's strategic accounts organization. In Strategic Partnering: Remove Chance and Deliver Consistent Success (Kogan Page, 2014)—a handbook written with his sons, Raphaël and Guillaume—Bardin offers a model and methodology for building successful organizational alliances, based on his experiences and bolstered by the insights and advice of 30 noted executives and consultants.

These days, it seems like the ability to create and manage strategic partnerships is becoming a prerequisite of corporate success. Witness the current volume of announced corporate alliances (more than 10,000 annually, according to Bardin) and plans for future alliances (more than two-thirds of CEOs expect to partner more extensively in the near future, according to a 2012 IBM survey cited in the book).

More strategic partnerships do not necessarily translate into more profits, however. Bardin reports that more than 70 percent of business relationships fail over time, and less than 10 percent deliver on their original targets, so I asked him how a company can beat the odds...read his answer here

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Apple's most valuable asset

My weekly book post on s+b's blogs is about a new biography of Apple design chief Jony Ive, which offers valuable lessons to leaders seeking to develop strategic capabilities:

How Apple Built Its Design Capability

In the world of industrial design, 46-year-old Jony Ive is a star. He even received a knighthood for his services to “design and enterprise” in 2012. And he certainly deserves the accolades: As the design chief at Apple, he was instrumental in creating the iMac, iPod, iPad, and iPhone.

That in itself is a good reason to read Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products (Portfolio, 2013), by Leander Kahney. But corporate leaders may find the back story more valuable than the designer’s life story. That’s because starting in chapter four, as Ive moves to California to work for Apple, the book’s backdrop becomes the development and evolution of what is arguably the company’s most valuable asset: its strategic capability for design...read the rest here

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Dave Eggers gets Orwellian

My weekly book post on the s+b blog is about a novel that does a better job of driving home the dangers of digitization than any nonfiction polemic to date:

How Creepy Is Your Company?

The Circle, Dave Eggers’s creepily engrossing novel—about a Google-like company with a user base and product portfolio so broad that it begins to transform the world into a techno-dystopia—got a lot

of attention when it was published in October. It was widely compared to George Orwell’s 1984—a comparison that Eggers purposefully elicits by utilizing, for example, Orwellian slogans, such as “SECRETS ARE LIES” and “PRIVACY IS THEFT.”

Using a model that is currently driving exuberant valuations for real-world social media companies like Snapchat (take the money if you still can, boys!), Eggers’s fictional company provides free services that offer convenience, security, and the warm embrace of society in return for the attention and personal data of their users. Want to know where your kid is? Implant the Circle’s ChildTrack chip at birth. Want to eliminate crime? Place the Circle’s SeeChange wireless micro-cameras all over your neighborhood. Want to ensure a tension-free first date? Use the Circle’s LuvLuv database to ferret out your date’s likes and dislikes in minute detail. There are, of course, a few minor downsides to these services: the death of privacy, dogged commercialism, and the velvet fist of a corporate Big Brother. But, in Eggers’s world, only an anti-social Luddite or a criminal would be so ungrateful as to complain... read the rest here

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

A rationale for blockbusters

My weekly book post on s+b's blogs is about Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse's new book, in which she argues that putting all your muscle behind a few big gambles is a safer long-term strategy than making many small investments.

Make Big Bets

Pop quiz: You’re the CEO of a trade publishing house. Do you split your company’s acquisition

budget among as many promising authors as you can find and launch their books with minimal hoopla, or do you spend the lion’s share of your budget on huge advances for one or two authors who have already published bestsellers and then spend big bucks promoting and advertising their new books?

I lean toward the former strategy. I’d sign a lot of authors—limiting my downside on each and keeping my pipeline full of new product, while betting on my own ability to pick the next Stephen King or J.K. Rowling out of the slush pile.

Unfortunately, however, I’d be wrong. Not just because I’m a snooty reader who would have chucked most of the mega-selling manuscripts of recent years into the trash can after reading a couple of pages, but also because Anita Elberse says so.

Elberse, the Lincoln Filene Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, is the author of Blockbusters: Hit-Making, Risk-Taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment (Henry Holt, 2013). In it, she argues that the most successful media and entertainment companies are those that make big bets on big names and then concentrate all of their marketing might on selling them... read the rest here.

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

The best of the best business books, 2013

Check out the strategy+business slideshow featuring the seven "Top Shelf" selections -- the best of the year's best business books -- here.

And the top seven books are:

	Strategy The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business by Rita Gunther McGrath (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013)
	Company Stories Story of My People by Edoardo Nesi (Other Press, 2013)
	Globalization Rough Diamonds: The Four Traits of Successful Breakout Firms in BRIC Countries by Seung Ho Park, Nan Zhou, and Gerardo R. Ungson (Jossey-Bass, 2013)
	Digitization Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013)
	Marketing Simple: Conquering the Crisis of Complexity by Alan Siegel and Irene Etzkorn (Twelve, 2013)
	Managerial Self-Help Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling by Edgar H. Schein (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2013)
	Leadership Everybody Ought to Be Rich: The Life and Times of John J. Raskob, Capitalist by David Farber (Oxford University Press, 2013)

Monday, December 2, 2013

The year's best business books

This is the sixth year that I've edited strategy+business's review of the year’s best business books and as always, it was an honor and a pleasure to work with our team of expert reviewers. Here's my intro and a link to this year's essays:

Best Business Books 2013

Welcome to the 13th annual edition of strategy+business’s best business books. Every year we strive to assemble a reading list that will not only engross and entertain you, but also provide concepts, tools,

and insights that can help you lead your company to a better future.

This year’s best business books section includes seven essays by expert guides. Walter Kiechel III, former Fortune managing editor, reviews books on strategy that reflect two realities: Competitive advantage is transient, and continuous innovation is an imperative. David Hurst, s+b contributing editor, selects books that tell company stories, each a chronicle of failure, but not always recovery. John Jullens, a Booz & Company partner working in China, presents books that explore the three waves of global competitors that are emerging from developing economies. Howard Rheingold, who’s been surfing the leading edge of digitization since the early 1980s, picks out books that examine three emerging digital phenomena—big data, socialstructing, and spreadable media. Catharine Taylor, a journalist who has been covering the sea change in marketing in the past decade, offers a set of books that eschew the hoopla of social media and instant ads for the essence of marketing: the customer experience. Sally Helgesen, an author and leadership consultant, takes on self-help books for managers. And James O’Toole, a senior fellow in business ethics at the University of Santa Clara’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, finds leadership lessons in the biographies and memoirs of auto industry executives who made the Motor City roll. You can read their essays here...

Killer quotes #5

"I ain't no monkey but I know what I like"

-- Bob Dylan

Business in Fiction

"And by this time his financial morality had become special and local in its character. He did not think it was wise for any one to steal anything from anybody where the act of taking or profiting was directly and plainly considered stealing. That was unwise — dangerous — hence wrong. There were so many situations wherein what one might do in the way of taking or profiting was open to discussion and doubt. Morality varied, in his mind at least, with conditions, if not climates." --Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (1912)

"Had not a long, practical struggle with life taught him that sentiment in business was folly?" --Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (1925)

"Be nice to incompetents and they'll be nice back. Be nasty and they'll still be incompetent, so what do you gain by making an enemy?" --John Burdett, Bangkok 8 (2003)

"The world has no pity on a man who can't do or produce something it thinks worth money." --George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891)

"Even the building was creepy: long windowless corridors and flights of stairs that stripped your sense of direction to nothing, tepid canned air with too little oxygen, a low witless hum of computers and suppressed voices, huge tracts of cubicles like a mad scientist's rat mazes." --Tana French, In The Woods (2007)

"Only a lunatic would fail to distinguish between himself and his representative self. This banal distinction may be most obvious in the workplace, where invariably one must avail oneself of an even-tempered, abnormally-industrious dummy stand-in, who, precisely because it is a dummy, makes life easier for all others, who are themselves present, which is to say, represented, by dummies of their own." -- Joseph O'Neill, The Dog (2014)

He had indeed conversed so entirely with money, that it may be almost doubted whether he imagined there was any other thing really existing in the world; this at least may be certainly averred, that he firmly believed nothing else to have any real value." -- Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1749)

"You invariably find among CEOs that life is business. There is an operative cruelty which is seen as an entitlement." -- E.L. Doctorow, City of God (2000)

"Employers are like horses. They require management." --P.G. Wodehouse, Carry On, Jeeves (1925)

"SECRETS ARE LIES
CARING IS SHARING
PRIVACY IS THEFT"--Dave Eggers, The Circle (2013)

"A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world." -- John LeCarré, The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)

"I can well imagine forms of servitude worse than our own, because more insidious, whether they transform men into stupid, complacent machines, who believe themselves free just when they are most subjugated, or whether to the exclusion of leisure and other pleasures essential to man they develop a passion for work as violent as the passion for war among barbarous races." -- Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian (1963)

"Because if you truly want to become filthy rich in rising Asia, as we appear to have established that you do, then sooner or later, you must work for yourself. The fruits of labor are delicious, but individually they're not particularly fattening. So don't share yours, and munch on those of others whenever you can." -- Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, (2013)

"They copied all they could follow,
but they couldn't copy my mind.
So I left 'em sweating and stealing,
a year and a half behind." -- Rudyard Kipling, The Mary Gloster (1894)

"The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is you're a salesman, and you don't know that." -- Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

(1949)

"Every exercise of power incorporates a faint, almost imperceptible, element of contempt for those over whom the power is exercised." -- Sandor Marai, Embers (1942)

"Go to a tea shop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that tea shop--men, I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties but still 'boys.' But that is your fate if you do your job well--with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would have done it, no doubt.

I did my job with near total dishonesty, lack of dedication, and insincerity--and so the tea shop was a profoundly enriching experience." -- Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (2008)

"'Alex. Are you still buying advertising space?'
'For as long as the job doesn't require one to have a brain.'
'It's always nice to talk to a man who enjoys his work.'
'Fortunately I enjoy the money a whole lot better.'" -- Philip Kerr, The Pale Criminal (1990)

"'Oilmen are gamblers, most of them, and they'd rather take a little chance than spend a lot of money. Or wait for the technology to catch up.' He added after a moment, 'They're not the only gamblers. We're all in the game. We all drive cars, and we're all hooked on oil. The question is how we can get unhooked before we drown in the stuff'" -- Ross Macdonald, Sleeping Beauty (1973)

"I'm tempted to point out that our dealings, however unusual and close, were the dealings of businessmen. My ease with this state of affairs no doubt reveals a shortcoming on my part, but it's the same quality that enables me to thrive at work, where so many of the brisk, tough, successful men I meet are secretly sick to their stomachs about their quarterlies, are being eaten alive by bosses and clients and all-seeing wives and judgmental offspring, and are, in sum, desperate to be taken at face value and very happy to reciprocate the courtesy." -- Joseph O'Neill, Netherland (2008)

"I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all."
-- Ogden Nash, Song of the Open Road, Happy Days (1933)

"When I go into the back entrance to our business, I smell the beans and the roasters and antiseptic-lacquered-with-fruit smell of the floor cleanser, and then, even more faintly, the strange bleary artificiality in the air, characteristic of enclosed shopping malls. The ion content in the oxygen has been tampered with by people trying to save money by giving you less oxygen to breathe. You get light-headed and desperate to shop. The air smells machine-manufactured, and the light looks manufactured or maybe recycled from previous light." -- Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love (2000)

"Some of us loved killing an hour of the company's time and others felt guilty for it afterward. But whatever your personal feelings on the matter, you still had to account for the hour, so you billed it to a client. By the end of the fiscal year, our clients had paid us a substantial amount of money to sit around and bullshit, expenses they then passed on to you, the consumer. It was a cost of doing business, but some of us feared it was an indication that the end was near, like the profligacy that preceded the downfall of the Roman Empire. There was so much money involved, and some even trickled down to us, a small amount that allowed us to live among the top one-percent of the wealthiest in the world. It was lasting fun, until the layoffs came." -- Joshua Ferris, Then We Came To The End (2007)

"The last line was so far away that the men were specks-bobbing bug-like fixtures, moving in what seemed to be a rainbow-haze of reds and yellows and blues. Those were the spray-painters, Simpson explained, and some of them made as much as seven dollars a day. He did not explain that they had no teeth after six months, little eyesight after a year, and that their occupational expectancy was about three years. In all likelihood he was not acquainted with these facts, and he would have been annoyed at their recital. To the best of his knowledge, there wasn't any law compelling a man to be a spray-painter." -- Jim Thompson, Heed the Thunder (1946)

"Since those birds were up around the top, the top numbers in one of the three biggest agencies in the country, with corner rooms at least twenty by twenty and incomes in the six figures, it had of course been years since any of them had personally dialed a number in an office. To expect them to would be against all reason" -- Rex Stout, Before Midnight (1955)

"What I'm getting at, Bobby, is you may notice, over time, as you study and learn, a certain amount of chicanery in this business of ours. But don't let that dismay you. It's just the nature of the business we're in, part and parcel of the good old capitalist system that's gonna make us both rich men before we die." -- Clancy Martin, How to Sell (2009)

"I'm a bookkeeper, and, the way I see it, there's nothing to life but bookkeeping...One rule is this: that if the risk of a transaction is very great it should not be considered at all, no matter what profit it offers if it is successful. That's one of the basic rules that should never be broken. You apply that rule to the idea of committing a murder and what do you get? There's too much risk, so you don't do it. The idea is no good. It's all a matter of debit and credit..." -- Rex Stout, Prisoner's Base (1952)

"I must look Ralph up and question him. He'll be in hiding by now, of course, but he's worth hunting out. He always has the most consistently logical and creditable reasons for having done the most idiotic things. He is" - as if that explained it - "an advertising man." -- Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse (1929)

What Ted has read lately

The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

Terrific novel set in North Korea-Orwellian and Dickensian at the same time.

Dealstorming: The Secret Weapon That Can Solve Your Toughest Sales Challenges

Dealstorming: The Secret Weapon That Can Solve Your Toughest Sales Challenges

by Tim Sanders

First book I've seen on what has to happen backstage--within the seller's company--to close big, complex, winner-take-all sales.

American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

Great read that marries mythology with modern-day America

Shakey: Neil Young's Biography

by Jimmy McDonough

A great bio, a must-read for Young fans, and terrific insight into the creative process and how to keep it alive

The Blackhouse

by Peter May

Terrific murder mystery set in Hebrides

Agile Talent: How to Source and Manage Outside Experts

Agile Talent: How to Source and Manage Outside Experts

by Jon Younger

Addresses a big problem: the inability of companies to get full value from external talent. Academic-style read. The solutions are aimed at big companies that hire a lot of outside help.

Some Buried Caesar

by Rex Stout

Nero and Archie get embroiled in a double murder on the way to an orchid competition upstate. Good one

City on Fire

by Garth Risk Hallberg

Adding Hallberg to my authors to watch list. Ambitious and mostly terrific novel set in NYC in late 70s. Could have been cut by a third, but the characters and story-telling pulled me thru.

Reading, Writing re: Management