Caveat emptor, CEO

strategy+business, March 6, 2020

by Theodore Kinni




Photograph by triloks

Purpose-driven organizations. Disruptive innovation. Reengineering. Five Forces analysis. Shareholder primacy. For better or for worse, many of the ideas that leaders adopt — and sometimes bet the future of their companies on — come from the academic world, and virtually all of them are promulgated by academic research. That’s why the rigor and validity of management studies should be as great a concern inside C-suites as they are in colleges and universities.

It’s also why Dennis Tourish’s take on the current state of management research is disturbing. “It has…become evident that various forms of research malpractice are common in our field,” writes the professor of leadership and organization studies at the University of Sussex in the introduction to his book Management Studies in Crisis: Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research (Cambridge University Press, 2019). “I’m talking about outright fraud such as inventing data, but also about plagiarism, self-plagiarism, poor-quality statistical analysis, and p-hacking.” Tourish goes on to support this contention with a tour of the current state of management research that is akin to Dante’s tour of hell.

Tourish has particular scorn for the research on two concepts currently in vogue — authentic leadership theory (ALT) and evidence-based management (EBM). ALT, an offshoot of James MacGregor Burns’s transformational leadership that was popularized by Harvard Business School professor and former Medtronic CEO Bill George, holds that leadership success derives from the alignment of who you are on the inside with how you behave on the outside. After examining the research, Tourish concludes, “ALT is little more than a series of fables, designed to reassure us that leadership is simpler than it is and that introspection can lead us all to salvation.” Be still, my cynical heart. Read the rest here.

Self-Publishing or Trade Publishing: Which is Best for Your Business Book?

LinkedIn, July 29, 2017

by Theodore Kinni



As a business writer and editor, I talk to lots of people who want a business book with their name on it. CEOs and other senior executives who are transitioning to new careers. Consultants who are establishing thought leadership platforms. Entrepreneurs who are building businesses. Speakers who want bigger audiences and something to sell at the back of the room. At some point or another, they all ask me the same question: Should I self-publish my book or find a publisher?

There is no pat answer. It depends on the book and what you want to achieve with it. But here are the three questions to ask to figure out the right answer for you. Read the rest here.

The Greatest Business Failure Of All Time Produced One of The Best-Selling Books Ever

Inc., May 8, 2017

by Theodore Kinni
 


On June 8, the original manuscript of one of the best-selling books of all time was supposed to have been sold at auction. Valued at $2-3 million, it's title is Alcoholics Anonymous, but it's better known as the Big Book and, for nearly 80 years, it's been helping alcoholics in their struggle to get and stay sober.

In late May, Alcoholics Anonymous sued to stop the sale, claiming it was the rightful owner of the manuscript. But that's hardly the most interesting part of this story. What you probably don't know about the Big Book is that it played an integral role in the greatest business failure of all time.

In 1937, Alcoholics Anonymous co-founders Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith discussed publishing a book to raise awareness about alcoholism, to help promote their program for combating the disease, and to attract investors for a for-profit chain of detox centers.

Recovering alcoholics themselves, Bill W. and Dr. Bob, as they are known, almost got the business off the ground. Read the rest here

s+b's Best Business Books 2014

It’s striking how quickly and directly the seven reviewers in our 14th annual best business books special section get down to brass tacks. In the opening essay, Strategy& senior partner Ken Favaro picks the three books that offer new thinking about strategy that is practical and compelling. Marketing expert Catharine Taylor peels away the hype and spin of her discipline to identify books that get to the essence of the brand experience. Veteran business editor and author Karen Dillon reviews the books that will help you hone your decision-making chops—with or without an assist from big data. James O’Toole continues his unbroken run of best business books appearances by taking on a perennially relevant topic whose parameters he helped define: organizational culture. Longtime s+b book reviewer and contributing editor David Hurst identifies three books that explore not only the how-to of technological innovation, but also how technology is driving innovation in every sphere of our lives. Triple-bottom-line pioneer and first-time contributor John Elkington reviews books that provide actionable means for dealing with the seemingly intractable challenge of sustainability. And in the final essay, another notable first-timer, economic columnist Daniel Gross, reviews three books that cut through the hot-button issue of global income inequality to get down to hard facts—the Cockney twist on which is sometimes pegged as the origin of the phrase get down to brass tacks. Enjoy the reading—then, put it to work.  --Theodore Kinni

 

INTERACTIVE FEATURE

Best Business Books 2014 – In Pictures

Click here for a slideshow of our picks for the Best Business Books of 2014 in seven categories.

Contents:

s b’s Top Shelf   

Strategy To the Nimble Go the Spoils by Ken Favaro Marketing Brand Diving by Catharine P. Taylor Executive Self-Improvement The Human Factor by Karen Dillon Organizational Culture The Nothing That’s Everything by James O’Toole Innovation Greasing the Skids of Invention by David K. Hurst Sustainability Tomorrow’s Bottom Line by John Elkington Economics All Things Being Unequal by Daniel Gross

Three core concepts for social media

My latest blog post on s+b:

Seeking Social Failures

The business shelves are crowded with books on how to promote ourselves and our companies on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, a professor of strategy and innovation at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) and formerly the Richard Hodgson Fellow at Harvard Business School’s strategy unit, takes a more robust approach in his new book, A Social Strategy: How We Profit from Social Media (Princeton University Press, 2014). Using three specific social media concepts, he creates a framework that marketers can use to craft an effective and innovative social media strategy.

Piskorski’s analysis of social platforms suggests these three concepts can account for their success and the success of companies that use them: social failures, social solutions, and social strategy. If you want to be tomorrow’s Mark Zuckerberg or piggyback on the triumph of the next big social platform, look for today’s social failures. Before the lunch invitations come flooding in, I should explain that a social failure isn’t a person—it’s an unmet social need, of which there are two categories. “Meet” failures, Piskorski says, represent constraints in our ability to make connections with new people; “friend” failures represent constraints in our ability to connect with people we already know. The first determinant of a social platform’s success is the commercial potential inherent in the social failure it aims to address.

Social solutions remedy social failures. An online dating service, like eHarmony, for instance, is a solution to a meet failure: the barriers to finding that special someone. An online messaging service, like Twitter, is a solution to friend failure: the barriers to communicating efficiently with your social network. Every solution, explains Piskorski, comes with “trade-offs that arise between different ways of helping us interact with people we do not know and with those we already do.” For instance, a company that is designing a social solution to a meet failure must decide whether it will offer its users private interactions with a few strangers, private interactions with many strangers, or unlimited public interactions. Decisions such as this one define the business concept for a social platform and its user base, and establish its competitive differentiation.

A social strategy, the final of Piskorski’s three core concepts, is the means by which a company can tap into the success of a social platform. For instance, how can a company like Ford or Procter & Gamble leverage the popularity of Facebook or Twitter? Too many companies use social platforms in ways that irritate, rather than attract, customers. “These commercial messages interfere with the process of making human connections,” says Piskorski. “To see why, imagine sitting at a table having a wonderful time with your friends, and then suddenly someone pulls up a chair and asks, ‘Can I sell you something?’ You would probably ignore that person or ask him to leave immediately. This is exactly what is happening to companies that try to ‘friend’ their customers online and then broadcast messages to them.” Now, that’s the other kind of social failure.

Piskorski says that an effective social strategy is one that helps “people do what they naturally do on social platforms: engage in interactions with other people that they could not undertake in the offline world.” So, if you want to market on say, Twitter, you need to understand the social solution it offers its users—for most people, the ability to communicate briefly and efficiently with a relatively small number of family members and friends—and craft your messages in ways that are aligned with and enhance their use of the platform. This is the deceptively simple, central idea behind a successful social strategy.

Being a closet Luddite, I’m amazed by the kind of user numbers that social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are reporting: 1.28 billion monthly users; 255 million monthly users; and 300 million members respectively. With user bases of this size, the reach of these platforms rivals and, in many cases, exceeds the media giants of yesteryear. Thanks to Mikolaj Jan Piskorski and his new book, companies now have a clear strategic framework for figuring out how to tap into their power.

Is investigative journalism dying out?

My weekly book post on s+b's blog covers two books--one that bemoans the dearth of muckrakers and one by a muckraker


Muckraking Is Alive and Well

Investigative reporting is the pinnacle of journalism, and has been ever since the early 20th century when writers like Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Ray Stannard Baker exposed systemic corruption in the United States and changed the nation. They helped bring down business trusts, provided the impetus for much-needed regulation and oversight (in Steffen’s case, the establishment of the Federal Reserve System), and created political platforms for reformers, such as Teddy Roosevelt, who named them muckrakers. Is there a business reporter who doesn’t aspire to follow in their footsteps?
 
And yet, less and less investigative—or accountability—reporting is being published, according to Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) editor and fellow Dean Starkman. In his fascinating, if somewhat flawed book, The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism (Columbia University Press, 2014), Starkman points to the subprime lending meltdown of 2007 as a primary example of his contention.

Although there has been no lack of high-profile investigative reporting since subprime lending imploded and caused a global recession, an examination of reporting on the subject in the years before the crisis tells another, rather curious, story. According to research that Starkman conducted at CSJ between 2004 and 2006—the period in which the worst lending excesses occurred—“mainstream accountability reporting [was] virtually dormant. The watchdog, powerful as it was, didn’t bark when it was most needed.”

But there’s more to the story... read it here

Scott Adams on ghostwriting

Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, has a new book out--How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (Portfolio, 2013)--which is a funny take on the memoir-cum-personal-success-manual genre. Paging through it brought to mind a Dilbert strip that my cousin clipped out of a newspaper and mailed to me, in an envelope through the US Postal Service--just like in the olden days. The strip cracked me up so much that I emailed Adams to see if I could buy a signed copy. (No answer. Bet he's never gotten one of those emails before.) Anyway, here it is: 

Elmore Leonard said...

Elmore Leonard passed away today at age 87. I haven't read any of his westerns, but I read many of his crime novels and always got a lot of pleasure from them. He was a crisp, clear, no-BS writer. He also published a short how-to book on writing back in 2007 that was based on the following 10 rules:

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" …he admonished gravely
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

s+b's Best Business Books 2009

Editing this year's Best Business Books special section for strategy+business was a terrific experience. We had an insightful and articulate team of essayists who winnowed through the stacks, and Guy Billout's illustrations are great. Here's my intro:

No matter what the future holds, the Great Recession of 2008–09 has had a seismic impact on the global business landscape and has called into question its philosophical and systemic foundations.

Certainly, it has been keenly felt among publishers and booksellers. In May 2009, year-to-date sales of professional books in the U.S. were down 6.8 percent from the year before, according to the Association of American Publishers. The recession also colors the writing — and the reading — of this year’s s+b best business books essays in ways both obvious and subtle.

The most direct manifestation is evident in the appraisal by Financial Times commentator Clive Crook of the books that seek to make sense of the recession, its implications, and its ramifications. In barely more than a year, the business section has become crowded with such books, but with the story still unfolding, none of them yet are comprehensive. Crook’s picks provide the multiple levels of perspective needed to appreciate the recession’s many facets.

Ayesha Khanna, managing director of Hybrid Realities, and Parag Khanna, New America Foundation senior research fellow, team up to review books on the changing topology of global business. They find changes in regional trading patterns and increasingly dynamic emerging economies that will challenge any established player — all evidence of an ongoing shift in competitive power that is sure to accelerate if the U.S. economy remains stagnant.

As one might expect, our management and leadership essays are rife with recession links. In the former, Judith F. Samuelson, the founder and executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program, searches out books that reveal the recession’s silver lining: its challenges to outmoded ways of thinking about management and governance. In the leadership essay, Charles Handy, whose memoir was one of 2008’s Top Shelf selections, mines books on topics as diverse as America’s Puritan settlers and the Buddhist Tzu Chi movement for insights into how to begin mending the torn fabric of leadership.

The University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business professor James O’Toole grounds his review of this year’s best biographies in a hefty tome about a 19th-century prime mover, John Stuart Mill, whose advocacy of free markets and private ownership resonates amid the dramatic government response to this economic crisis. IMD professor Phil Rosenzweig returns for an encore performance in the strategy category, pointing us toward books on intellectual property and dynamic capabilities in an effort to identify enduring strategic advantage. Rosenzweig also recommends a new book on Enron that takes us back to the last recession and explores the perils of stretching any strategy too far.

Marketing maven Catharine P. Taylor is back as well, with a proposition that should raise executive eyebrows: Branding is becoming an open source endeavor. She calls out Twitter — the subject of almost as many new books as the recession — as one of the leading technological mechanisms enabling this phenomenon. Steven Levy, senior writer at Wired and newcomer to our pages, broadens the thesis by reviewing books that explore the disruptive power of technology and what happens when companies such as MySpace don’t heed that power.

This year’s best business books help us understand current conditions and chart a secure course forward. With luck, next year’s best books will offer similar insight into a recovery of historic proportions.

Speaking of pirates

The movie studios complain bitterly about piracy, but it's hard to sympathize with them when you read a story like this one from Bloomberg:

J.R.R. Tolkien sold movie rights to his “Lord of the Rings” novels 40 years ago for 7.5 percent of future receipts. Three films and $6 billion later, his heirs say they haven’t seen a dime from Time Warner Inc...read the rest here

Tolkien's heirs are suing Time Warner for $220 million and I hope they get it all plus double or treble damages. But I'll give Harlan Ellison, one of the great sci-fi writers who worked in Hollywood for many years, the last word on this kind of piracy. Ellison is the subject of an entertaining documentary titled Dreams with Sharp Teeth that every writer should see. In it, he tells this story, which lo and behold was posted on You Tube.

The inscrutable ways of publishers

I stumbled on Ved Mehta's Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing (Overlook, 1998) at a library book sale -- 50 cents, such a deal! This book in Mehta's multi-volume memoir titled Continents of Exile deals with his years as writer for the New Yorker and his experiences being edited by William Shawn, one of the all-time greats. All writers and editors should read it for insights into their work.

It goes without saying that Mehta also has a way with a story, including this vignette about his adventures with book publishers:

I engaged in battles to get jacket designs in keeping with the spirit of the book. The battles eventually resulted in tasteful, if quiet, jackets, but publishers regard presentation as their preserve, and what they saw as my meddling seemed to have the effect of making them feel redundant. My interference was resented even more when it had to do with jacket copy. Yet the jacket copy that each of the publishers provided not only was completely at variance with the character of the book but was so badly written that when I showed an example to a colleague, Renata Adler, she exclaimed," It seems to have been written by a lower form of humanity!" The publishers and I went back and forth on several versions, and finally both just threw up their hands and told me to provide them with something.

This cracked me up because I have yet to get jacket copy from a publisher that looks like it was written by someone who actually read the book. I'm not sure that publishers even try to write good copy; maybe they send drivel knowing full well that the author will be compelled to fix it. I always have and thanks to Mehta, I now know I'm not the only one.

McIntyre's editing rules

John McIntyre, director of the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun, an affiliate faculty member at Loyola College of Maryland, and a former president of the American Copy Editors Society, pulled together a funny - and informative - list of 25 rules of editing. Here's the first five:

1. The project will require three times the planned time to achieve one-third of the desired result (McIntyre’s Ratio).
2. Writers will never straighten out it’s and its.
3. No matter how many times an article is edited or proofed, some reader will find a mistake in it.
4. To reporters, all deadlines are fungible.
5. Percentages will have been miscalculated 42 percent of the time...read the rest of the rules here.

P.S. I probably violated Rule 20 in the first sentence, but I like the way it looks.

Publisher taps into wisdom of crowds

I complained, a week or so ago, about the undue reliance of publishers on intuition to identify worthy book projects and now, Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster (whose author-unfriendly book contracts are in the news, too), is making me eat my words. It just announced the launching of Project Publish, a fantasy stock market in which online traders "buy" shares in actual book proposals. Basically, Touchstone will let the market pick the best proposal and then, if its editors agree with the pick come October, award a publishing contract. (More here from the NYT.) Pretty good test -- should be interesting to see what happens.

There doesn't seem to be any categorization of titles by genre, but there is an interesting business/self improvement proposal up for consideration already -- The Thirteen Virtues. It's a good idea for a book based on Ben Franklin's personal self-help program, although the proposal itself doesn't exactly sparkle.

Why can't publishers predict bestsellers?

There's an article coming in the NYT's Sunday Business section on the vagaries of publishing, which reprises the usual "publishing as a crap shoot" theme. All the editors talk about how it's impossible to accurately predict bestsellers and the ones who got lucky pat themselves on the back for their canny intuition -- the editor who acquired the mega-million copy bestseller The Secret describes feeling a tingling in her spine. Yea.

Anyway, Shira Boss, the author of the article, rightly points out that unlike most other businesses, publishing houses have simply never bothered to try to figure out what their customers want. Which means that we'll all be reading essentially the same article next year and the year after and so on...until some smart publisher, who is sick of single digit returns on capital, steps up and says, "Wait a minute, we can map the human genome, why can't we figure out whether people will buy a book" and transforms the business of publishing with some market research data and analytics. Now, that'll be worth a story.

Rand reprised

One of the fun things about being an author is having your books pop up unexpectedly. My wife and I have always been interested in Ayn Rand and in 2000, we wrote a short book about her philosophy of Objectivism and how it might be applied in business. The book came out in 2001 -- just after 9/11, in fact -- attracted a little interest, some good reviews, and as usual with anything Randian, some flack, too. The publisher folded shortly afterward and sold the book to a textbook publisher, which declared the book out of print after selling out the first printing. (So it goes, to quote the late, great Kurt Vonnegut.)

Anyway, I've been keeping an eye out for a publisher who might want to bring it back to life and copies of the book are still floating around. And, today, I ran across this blog post featuring a short review of the book and some pithy comments it generated. Thanks to Howard Hansen for reading and Ed Kless for posting!

Creative blurbing

If you aren't already highly suspicious of the praise that adorns the dust jackets of most books, read the essay on creative blurbing by Henry Alford in this week's NYT's book review section. He's focused on fiction, but the situation is no different with business books. Between the favor-doing and the doctoring, there really isn't any point to reading blurbs. I've gotten more than my share of blurbs from very generous folks, I've written a few myself (I have no idea why anyone asks), and many have been lifted from my reviews. But to be honest, as a reader, I don't find endorsements or review blurbs either helpful or credible. They just take up valuable space that could be used to tell readers something useful about what's between the covers and that might actually help them decide whether or not to buy a book.

By the way, you can sign up here for the Time's free weekly "Books Update" via email. They rarely cover business books, but it's a great place to keep track of what's worth reading in fiction and general non-fiction.

Guitar tabs are back

The music ogres bit a chunk out my world last year when they threatened to start suing websites that collect guitar tabs. Already hobbled by minimal talent, the inability to properly read music, and a lack of guitar playing buddies, I was a regular on these sites, which allow players to post and share songs in tab -- a simple system of musical notation for guitar that even I could figure out. The quality of the tabs varied wildly, but they were free and I would be still be playing "Old MacDonald" over and over again without them. Of course, the music publishers decided this was stealing (even tho they hadn't bothered to publish lots of these songs in the first place and the tabs were personal interpretations of the songs) and the best tab sites closed down.

Happily, it looks like they may be coming back, according to an article in yesterday's NYT. The owners of one of the biggest tab sites, MxTabs.net, worked out an ad revenue sharing scheme with the Harry Fox Agency, which represents 31,000-odd music publishers. Now, if the publishers sign up, they get some revenue for the music on which the tabs are based and I get to learn a new song or two thanks to the thousands of generous players who share the songs that they figure out how to play. Good deal.

What a racket!

Publishers Weekly reported this nugget yesterday:

In a deal inspired by current bestseller and Oprah phenomenon The Secret, Thomas Dunne has announced that his imprint at St. Martin’s will publish Karen Kelly’s The Secret of the Secret in August. This will be a wide-ranging analysis of Rhonda Byrne’s book; Madeleine Morel at 2M Communications sold world rights.

Kelly, a former editor at Warner Books who has also worked as a ghostwriter, will talk to media and publishing professionals, scientists, psychologists and philosophy experts to help explain the success of The Secret and whether its message, on the power of positive thinking, really works. Kelly will also reveal The Secret’s scientific and religious influences and investigate the lives of eminent figures like Shakespeare, Einstein and Plato to see if these men did, as Byrne claims, all share The Secret.

Do you want to know the real secret? The Secret is rehashed self-help that has been expertly marketed (check out the website) and The Secret of the Secret is based on a time-honored publishing stratagem: you can make easy bucks by glomming onto the success of another book.

The really real secret is you've gotta be crazy to buy either of these books. Did you read the Newsweek article on Rhonda Byrne and the book? Her advice apparently includes this gem: "If you see people who are overweight, do not observe them, but immediately switch your mind to the picture of you in your perfect body and feel it." I, for one, will never again gaze upon any book that isn't a Oprah pick. Instead, I look away and envision my very own bestseller.

The mark of a good agent

I promised a post on how to identify a good business book agent a while back and have been avoiding it ever since. But, it's Sunday afternoon and I finished an article early, so here goes.

1. A good bizbook agent doesn't charge a fee to consider taking you on as a client. I think good agents can take a quick look at your book proposal and your resume and decide if you are worth their time. If you want more than a 'yea' or 'nay,' however, they have every right to charge you for their professional opinions or to read and comment on a manuscript or any of the other stuff that writers seem to expect for free.
2. A good bizbook agent doesn't make you sign away your life in return for representation. A writer's output is his or her income flow. Don't ever give an agent or anyone else control over that flow thru options on your next work or any other contract clause.
3. Once you're signed up, a good bizbook agent tears you up. Unless you're great, a good agent should be able to offer suggestions for fine-tuning your work. You should challenge those suggestions to be sure they make sense, but you should also take them seriously.
4. A good bizbook agent sticks it out. Ask agents about their process. If they dangle proposals in front of the usual suspects once and if nobody bites, forget about the proposal, forget about them. Publishers reject and accept books for all sorts of nutty reasons that have nothing to do with the books. I had one proposal that was rejected and later, accepted by the same editor! Good agents know that the market and the players are always changing and they are always looking for the right opening -- even if it's a year down the road.
5. A good bizbook agent is honest about the offers you get. Many, maybe most, offers from publishers are lousy offers. If you find your agent is saying every offer is great, call him on it or get a new agent.
6. A good bizbook agent reads your contract, makes sure you don't sign anything that is not in your best interest, and is willing to negotiate with publishers as long as it takes. Your demands have to be reasonable, but if they are, your agent shouldn't be the one shutting you down. By the way, the only way you'll know whether agent is shutting you down is if you learn what should and shouldn't be in contracts, refuse to sign anything that is not in your best interest, and are willing to negotiate with publishers as long as it takes.
7. Finally, a good bizbook agent knows that it's far better for you to let off steam with him as opposed to your publisher. So, he lets you curse and yell all you want and never holds it against you. (Thanks for that, John.)

Puzzle pieces

If you've wondered about the origin of the sudoku puzzles that have sprouted like weeds in newspapers and magazines everywhere, check out today's NYT article on Maki Kaji, the father of sudoku and founder of what could end up becoming the next global publishing empire, Nikoli. I was intrigued to read that Nikoli was built on an open source basis; the people who buy its puzzles also refine them and design new ones. By the way, Kaji's US literary agent is none other than my own, superagent John Willig. Hmmm, wonder which one of us generates more commissions?

Speaking of puzzles, the pieces seem to be falling into place over at Portfolio, the massively-hyped new Conde Nast business magazine. According to a post over at Talking Biz News, the first issue, which will stand alone until the presses start running full time about four months from now, supposedly contains a bunch of 5,000 word articles, as well as a 25,000 word piece on hedge funds by New Journalism pioneer Tom Wolfe. For more on the ambitious new magazine, which hopes to expand the genre and broaden the audience, check out Paul Farhi's article in American Journalism Review.