Better late than...

I just posted my first entry in nine months, so to offer "I've been busy" as an excuse for abandoning this blog seems a stretch. But it's all I've got.

I blame Art Kleiner. In addition to my freelance work and ghostwriting, I joined strategy+business, Booz & Company's publishing unit, as a half-time editor of books last September at his invitation. This is as close as I've been to real job for 20-odd years, so it has required some adjustment in lifestyle. It has also been an amazing experience: editing other writers and working with the highly professional s+b staff has taught me a lot about the craft; exposure to expert Booz & Company consultants specializing in areas such as human capital, marketing, manufacturing, sourcing, and M&A has taught me a lot about business.

In short, it's been great and I've got tons to blog about. So, I'm gonna try to post more regularly...really.

In support of plain English

Who knew there was a National Plain English Day? There is, in the UK at least, and last December, the Local Government Association celebrated by publishing the LGA ‘non-word’ list, 100 words that all public sector bodies should avoid when talking to people about the work they do and the services they provide. Words on the list include: coterminosity, empowerment, multidisciplinary, place shaping, and sustainable communities. The LGA suggests that unless "local authorities talk to people in a language that they can understand then the work they do becomes inaccessible and reduces the chances of them getting involved in their local issues."

Chairman of the Local Government Association, Sir Simon Milton, said:“Plain English Day is a timely reminder for all of us that we can not, must not and should not hide behind impenetrable jargon and phrases...Why do we have to have ‘coterminous, stakeholder engagement’ when we could just ‘talk to people’ instead?“

The list is back in the news this month because a local council in England wanted to ban the word "brainstorming" to avoid offending epileptics and replace it with "thought showers."

It's a good lesson for business writers, consultants, and managers, too. Although I would hate to give up "stakeholder" which has always reminded me of killing vampires.

Atlas Shrugged at 50

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's great Objectivist novel, turns 50 this year. The NYT marked the event with a story by Harriet Rubin, who founded the Currency imprint at Doubleday and made it one of the leading business book publishers of the 1990s. (Read it here.)

Rubin dug up some notables in the business world who I hadn't realized were among Rand's devotees. One of them is Jack Stack, author of The Great Game of Business, whose turnaround of Springfield Remanufacturing Co. was a primary inspiration for the open-book management movement. He says,“Atlas helped me pursue this idiot dream that became SRC” and “It’s the best business book I ever read.”

Al Vogl at Conference Board Review wrote a feature on the book -- even yanked a couple of quotes from me. In it, he explores the continuing popularity and relevancy of the novel. I liked his opener: "By all rights, Ayn Rand should be the patron saint of American business." The article isn't online, but it's titled In Search of Atlas and it's in the magazine's Sept/Oct 2007 issue.

Envy as a genetic trait?

UC Davis economist Gregory Clark bills his new book A Farewell to Alms (Princeton) as "a brief economic history of the world." Its Darwinian thesis holds that the Industrial Revolution was sparked and caught on in England because its people descended from the upper classes, which over hundreds of years had survived at higher rates than the lower classes. As a result, upper class values also survived and became the basis for a culture that was conducive to an industrialized society. (See the NYT for more on this.)

Clark also cites evidence that shows that happiness is strongly correlated to wealth within a society. (There is little correlation between wealth and happiness between societies. In other words, rich societies are no more happy than poor societies.) Thus, he writes:

The key problem here is the ample evidence that our happiness depends not on our absolute level of well-being, but instead on how we are doing relative to our reference group. Each individual -- by acquiring more income, by buying a larger house in a nicer neighborhood, by driving a more elegant car -- can make him- or herself happier. But happier only at the expense of those with less income, meaner housing, and junkier cars. Money can buy happiness, but that happiness is transferred from someone else, not added to the common pool.

His startling conclusion:

Since we are for the most part the descendants of the strivers of the preindustrial world, those driven to achieve greater economic success than their peers, perhaps these findings reflect another cultural or biological heritage from the Malthusian era. The contented may well have lost out in the Darwinian struggle that defined the world before 1800. Those who were successful in the economy of the Malthusian era could well have been driven by a need to have more than their peers in order to be happy. Modern man might not be designed for contentment. The envious have inherited the earth.

On ethics and Howard Gardner

s+b published a great article on Howard Gardner, the Harvard prof and MacArthur genius grant winner, in its latest issue. The author, Lawrence Fisher, deftly weaves a profile of Gardner and his work into an article that is primarily focused on ethics. The "ethical mind" is one of the five sets of cognitive capabilities people need to succeed in the future that Gardner described in his most recent book. (My post on the book is here.) Unfortunately, according to the article, it's also the one mind that businesspeople seem least interested in developing.

Making sense of marketing chaos

I used to think that marketers, with their big budgets, lack of accountability, and scads of vendor goodies, had it made. But in recent years, three challenges -- the fragmentation of media, the rise of the customer, and the difficulties of figuring out whether the trillion or so dollars that companies spend on marketing actually produces a decent ROI, have made the job a lot harder. I've also been getting a growing stack of books from would-be gurus and other pros that attempt, with varying degrees of success, to address the challenges marketers are facing.

Watch This, Listen Up, Click Here (Wiley) is a story-driven survey of the state of marketing vehicles. Written by David Verklin, CEO of Carat Americas, the world's largest independent media buyer, and the late Bernice Kanner, a noted marketing journalist, it covers the meltdown in traditional media vehicles, such as TV and newspapers, and the emergence of a host of others, such as search, buzz, mobile, product placement, etc., etc. The book is a readable intro to the complexities that today's marketers face when trying to reach customers, but there isn't much prescriptive advice for how to handle them.

Jean-Marc Lehu's Branded Entertainment (Kogan Page) focuses more tightly on product and brand placement in films, music videos, novels, video games, etc. Packed with examples, the book contains both an overview of the development of this fast-expanding vehicle and a practical education for marketers who want to use it. One interesting conclusion: there is no proven and comprehensive way to measure the ROI of these marketing investments.

Richard Laermer and Mark Simmons, the authors of Punk Marketing: Get Off Your Ass and Join the Revolution (Collins), hone in the growing power of the customer in the "brandscape." They say that customers are running the show these days and that traditional marketing bores the hell out of them. The book is full of attitude and fun to read, and there's even an idea or two you might be able to put to work. (See the manifesto here.) But unless you're still marketing like it's 1969, I don't know that it's as earth-shaking as the authors seem to think.

In Your Gut Is Still Not Smarter Than Your Head (Wiley), Kevin Clancy and Peter Kreig, the leaders of Copernicus Marketing Consulting, take on the third challenge marketers face -- how to make marketing profitable. Toward that end, the authors offer a functional makeover that uses analysis and facts to make investment decisions, a basic business concept that marketers have been able to avoid by focusing on the creative side of the discipline. It's good book that imposes some systematic managerial order on the most critical and mysterious business function.

History of Kennedy Space Center

I've been to Kennedy Space Center a couple of times as a tourist and most recently, on a press pass for a shuttle launch that got scrubbed because of a hurricane. It's the most amazing travel depot on earth -- a spaceport, whose scale and mechanics are hard to grasp even when you are standing in the middle of it.

Happily, Kenneth Lipartito and Orville Butler help render what goes on there much more comprehensible with their new book, A History of the Kennedy Space Center, written under the auspices of NASA and published by University Press of Florida. It's a history, but the book is more about the business of KSC, the role it plays in the U.S. space program, and how it has been preparing, testing, and launching spacecraft over the past 45 years. It's a good read in it's own right, but a must if you're among the 1.5 million people that visit KSC each year.

Jim Camp's Top 10 Deal Killers

Publicist Cathy Lewis just sent out this neat short list of deal killers based on negotiation coach Jim Camp's excellent book, No: The Only Negotiating Strategy You Need for Work and Home:

1. DON'T show emotions, such as neediness, desperation, or excitement. Keep your body language and style of speaking emotionally neutral. Prepare your state of mind ahead of time. Repeat the mantra, "I don't need this, I don't need this," until you believe it.
2. DON'T offer a compromise or reveal your position at the start. Once you do this, you are signaling to your opponent that you are ready to give something up in order to get to an agreement, before you're even certain you have to!
3. DON'T give presentations or dominate the dialogue. A presentation is designed to tell the opponent what you think she wants to know. (You might be dead wrong!) While you are presenting, she is forming opinions, making judgments, and gaining valuable insight into you and your position. To maintain the advantage, you should do almost no talking, and ask question after question that gets your opponent to spill the beans instead.
4. DON'T waste your time dealing with "blockers." Blockers are people who will do anything to keep you from meeting with the real leader or decision maker face-to-face. (That may even be their job.) Be diplomatic when sidestepping blockers so you can speak with the person best able to deliver what you want.
5. DON'T think about closing. Despite everything you learned in business school, thinking about, hoping for, or planning for the outcome of this deal will kill you every time at the negotiating table. Your opponent will sense your neediness, perceive it as a weakness, and like spotting a lame animal in the herd, move in for the kill.
6. DON'T try to impress. Name-dropping, sucking up, dressing to the nines, and overstating your qualifications are common ways you might try to pump yourself up in front of an opponent. Such tactics have the opposite effect. Instead, make sure your opponent feels "more okay" than you, maybe even a bit superior. An opponent who does not feel threatened in any way is more likely to give up the goods.
7. DON'T try to be friends. The person sitting across the negotiating table from you is a respected opponent. Thinking about a long-term relationship or dwelling on whether or not she likes you is certain to cloud your decisions, disrupt your emotional neutrality, and keep you from being in the present moment, where you should be focusing, observing, and collecting information.
8. DON'T show up unprepared. Whether it's a phone call, an email exchange, or a face-to-face meeting, never communicate with your opponent without doing extensive research and preparation first. Find out everything there is to know about him, positions he's taken on similar deals, personal history, problems he and his company have and ways you might be able to solve them, and anything else, even if it seems irrelevant.
9. DON'T make assumptions. The quickest way to achieve failure is by forming opinions and making judgments and assumptions about your opponent. If there's anything about the way your opponent looks or behaves that makes you jump to a conclusion, that's a red flag. Banish the thought from your mind. The way to find out whom you are really dealing with is to ask lots of questions. Get her talking, revealing her biases, opinions, wants, needs, and weaknesses. Take copious notes while she talks.
10. DON'T focus on what you want. In any successful negotiation, set your mission and purpose in the adversary's world, not in your own. This is a sure-fire way to win the best result for your side. Focus on how you can help him or her realize that offering XYZ to you will be beneficial to him.

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.

Of widgets and whatchamacallits

Thanks to Al Vogl, head editor over at The Conference Board Review, I got a quick, paid education in the naming business a couple of months ago. The article that resulted is in the May/June issue and is available online, too:

George Eastman's dry-emulsion film simplified and popularized the art of photography. In 1888, he registered the trademark Kodak to identify his film and the cameras that used it, and began advertising their ease of use: "You press the button, we do the rest." By dint of his prodigious brand-building genius, the Eastman Co. soon laid claim to the leading position in a field of more than fifty competitors. Today, the film that created a corporate giant is tottering toward buggy-whip status, but the name Eastman chose still has legs. In 2006, even in the midst of the turmoil caused by the digital revolution, the Kodak brand ranked seventieth in the world in value, with an estimated worth of $4.4 billion, according to the annual Interbrand Corp./BusinessWeek brand survey. Not a bad return on a manufactured word...(read more)

The core curriculum of business, PGA style

Got a kick out of this press release from Perdue University titled "A Bit of Golf Should be Par for the Course for College Grads." Apparently, golf is important to your career, according Tom Templin, professor of health and kinesiology, who says, "Do your homework in advance, dress appropriately and ask for general guidelines about use of the course. Young people entering the work force may find a basic knowledge about the game helpful, especially as the sport's popularity increases and is a place for business."

Normally, I'd ignore this bit of fluff, but then, I read that Templin is the co-creator of the PGA's Golf: For Business and Life program that is taught at fifty universities. Nice work on the PGA's part to get golf on the business curriculum. (The hockey, foosball and curling leagues should take note.) Here's before and after photos of a student who took the course:

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.

A business historian to remember

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., who founded the field of business history, died on May 9 at the age of 88. His books included:

"Strategy and Structure" (1962) which examined four U.S. industrial giants -- General Motors, DuPont, Exxon, and Sears, Roebuck & Company -- from the 1900s to the 1940s and concluded that "strategy precedes structure.

"The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business" which won the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1977 and traced the rise of management as the "most powerful institution in the American economy."

"Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of American Capitalism" (1990) which compared the evolution of managerial capitalism and the largest companies in the United States, England, and Germany and found that "the first movers in capital-intensive industries kept their competitive advantage only if they made three key strategic investments: first, in large-scale, high-speed production; second, in distribution; and, third, in a management structure that could plan, coordinate, and monitor the company's vast operations."

Getting smart about cases

Not having an MBA, I've often wondered about the case method -- how it works and how it can be applied to solving real business problems. I guess I could go to B-school to figure it out, but it looks like Bill Ellet, the publisher of Training Media Review, saved me a couple of years and tens of thousands in tuition by writing The Case Study Handbook.

Ellet has been teaching students at Harvard Business School how to deal with cases for a dozen years and his practical, well organized book covers how to analyze, discuss, and write convincingly about them. So far, I've just dipped into the book, but I've seen enough to know that it's going into my tower o' reading. Seems like managers who have to deal with these things in the real world would want to read it, too.

Dell's memo says get your resume together

I thought I'd be getting an interesting new corporate communique for my collection when I heard that a memo from Michael Dell to Dell's 80,000 employees was making the rounds. Dell's had a tough year or two and as a result, a bunch of the company's senior leaders were "streamlined." Then, a couple of weeks ago, according to Michael's memo, the "complete Executive Leadership Team" met to discuss the company's future. And, what did they come up with? Well, here's the first thing:

Fix our Core Business to be competitive.

The Direct Model has been a revolution, but is not a religion. We will continue to improve our business model, and go beyond it, to give our customers what they need. We will simplify our organization to make it easier to hear customers and respond to them. We've already streamlined our executive leadership structure. We need to streamline our management structure to speed decisions and remove bureaucracy. We're making improvements in pricing, product development and fulfillment, and customer experience. We reorganized the product group to more effectively listen to our customers and develop end-to-end customer solutions. We are now revisiting our entire design process to improve our speed-to-market and focus on what customers truly value. Our new Global Operations organization, led by Mike Cannon, is working to take our supply chain and manufacturing to the next level of efficiency and quality. This group is also partnering with the regions and the product group to pursue new manufacturing and distribution models to address the unique needs of our customers in all markets. More broadly, we plan to eliminate overlaps in our organization and activities to enable us to deliver even more value to our customers. We also need to improve sales productivity. These won't be merely exercises in cost-cutting. We will re-invest those resources in the customer solutions that will build Dell for the future.

The NYT thinks this means that Dell is "rethinking direct sales," but it sounds more like double talk for major lay-offs to me. Of course, Dell repeatedly promises that "we're gonna do better in the future," but I don't see any hard details. If I was a Dell manager and I got this memo, I'd be looking for a better future somewhere else.

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!

Hunting cool online

Marketers, especially the online variety, and anyone else chasing what's cool, will want to read the new Amacom book Coolhunting by MIT Sloan's Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper. There's two interesting things here: their advice for coolfarmers and a software tool, developed by Gloor, that tracks and analyzes online networks.

Coolfarmers, according to the authors, are people who facilitate the emergence of new ideas by tapping swarm creativity thru COINs (Collaborative Innovation Networks). Ben Franklin and VC John Doerr and Linux's Linus Torvalds are examples. Their effectiveness is based on four principles:

• They gain power by giving it away.
• They seed community with new ideas.
• They create intrinsic motivation.
• They recruit trendsetters.

If you want to track coolfarmers, trendsetters, and emerging coolness online, the authors offer a software tool called TeCFlow (Temporal Communication Flow). This program, which you can download free for non-commercial use, enables you to visualize and analyze online COINs by mining their communication logs. So, if you're a marketer, for instance, you could use TeCFlow to identify the topics that most interest the online communities that use your products and services or you could target those people who are trendsetters or you could become a coolfarmer yourself and create your own next best thing. Cool stuff.

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.

Smart or stupid, rich is better

It turns out that rich people aren't any smarter than the rest of us, according to a study conducted by research scientist Jay Zagorsky of Ohio State’s Center for Human Resource Research. “People don’t become rich just because they are smart,” he concluded based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. “Your IQ has really no relationship to your wealth. And being very smart does not protect you from getting into financial difficulty.”

People with higher IQ scores do tend to get paid a little more than others. Like others before him, Zagorsky found that each point of increase in IQ scores is associated with $202 to $616 more annual income. That means that the average difference in income between a person with a normal IQ (100) and someone with an IQ in the top 2 percent (130) is somewhere between $6,000 to $18,500 a year. In terms of total wealth and the likelihood of financial difficulties, however, people with below average and average intelligence are no more or less likely to be wealthy than a genius.

But really, who cares? Smart or stupid, I'm still not feelthy rich.

Quit whining, start selling

I interviewed Martyn Lewis, the President and CEO of Market-Partners, a sales consultancy, the other day. Martyn's served as President and CEO for Drake International in North America, VP Marketing and Sales Services at DEC Canada, and in the major accounts division of ICL in the UK. We talked about what sales execs need to do to move up the ladder to the CEO's office.

Martyn also sent me a copy of his self-published book, Sales Wise -- a paperback of short, story-driven sales lessons. This one, in which he attends his first national sales conference, caught my eye. In it, the corporate VP of sales starts with the standard 'rally the troops' speech and then, abruptly changes gears, saying:

We know in that in some cases our products have a few holes. We know that our competitor's offerings are not that far behind us. We know that at times our customers see certain weaknesses in our overall offerings. We know that at times our competitors leapfrog us in some areas. And we don't need you to tell us--we pay other people to tell us this. Your job is to sell around the holes. If we always had the best products and our prospects and clients always viewed us the best solution provider, we wouldn't need a sales force. The only reason we have you is to sell around the holes.

The lesson, writes Martyn, "Don't waste your time complaining about the competition and other factors you can't control; focus on the strengths of your own offering and what you can control."