Newsletter February '09
Targeted at time-poor executives, Bookbuzz™ facilitated learning programmes stimulate fresh and innovative thinking in the boardroom and beyond. Participants read passages of a selected book, as a prelude to joining a facilitated session where the book serves as the launch-pad for lively, open-ended round-table conversation and debate.
BOOKBUZZ TV
Robert Greene’s The 33 Strategies of War is the book under discussion in the pilot Bookbuzz TV programme, in which Yanky Fachler facilitates Frank Harrigan (founder of YouGetItBack.com) and Frans de Groot (founder of BiTS Communication). The trio travelled to Amsterdam to shoot the 20-minute pilot, which is now available for viewing by clicking here
FRANK 
FRANS 
YANKY
INVITATION TO NEXT DUBLIN TASTER
THURSDAY 19 FEBRUARY 2009, 3PM-5PM, at Pembroke Hall, 38-39 Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin 2.
You are invited to a facilitated Bookbuzz™ taster session where you will debate and discuss Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell (which was featured in the previous newsletter.) In this follow-up to Blink and Tipping Point, Gladwell explores why some people succeed in living remarkably productive lives, while others never reach their potential. He challenges our belief of the "self-made man," and claims that superstars do not arise out of nowhere, propelled only by genius and talent. Gladwell looks at the complex ways that privilege manifests in our culture, and asks what we can do to help more kids fulfill their remarkable potential.
To book your place, please contact Daniel Begley on +353 (0)86 8187118 / daniel@bookbuzz.biz. Places are strictly limited – please book early. Prior to attending this taster session, please try and read chapter 7, The Ethnicity of Plane Crashes, pp 177-223.
The book is about the insights that Yanky gained from reading the 110 books featured in the book. It is not a reference book, there are no executive summaries, it is more like a journey through the books. The book is divided into several thematic chapters:
INTRODUCTION: HOW HIGH IS YOUR STACK OF UNREAD BUSINESS BOOKS?
1 BACK TO BASICS
2 LEADERSHIP AND MOTIVATION
3 THE ETHICS OF BUSINESS
4 ME JANE, YOU TARZAN
5 THINGS AREN’T WHAT THEY SEEM
6 IDEAS AND INNOVATION
7 BUSINESS AS STRATEGY
8 SALES AND MARKETING
9 STORYTELLING: FABLES, PARABLES AND CASE STUDIES
10 MAVERICS, HERETICS AND OTHER PRACTIONERS OF AUDACIOUS CHUTZPAH
11 WHERE ARE WE GOING?
Excerpts from the Introduction:
Have you ever tried handing a busy executive a business book, accompanied by some helpful suggestion like: You really should read this?
You know what happens next. The recipient smiles, thanks you, and literally or figuratively adds the book to their stack of unread business books. It’s a fact. Executives aren’t reading. Not because they can’t read, but because they don’t have time to read.
Yet by not reading, these same executives are cut off from new ideas that are the very lifeblood of any company’s survival. Without a steady stream of fresh thinking, businesses will be ill-equipped to boost their competitive metabolism. Companies that fail to cultivate a climate of thought leadership, run the risk of squandering the qualitative edge of their top people. Senior executives who are not exposed to fresh ideas will find it hard to explore innovative thinking.
……
The scarce commodity that we call time can be the biggest barrier to fresh thinking. We no longer believe the myth that the world of work would become more streamlined and more time-efficient. As competition grows, executives rising through the corporate ranks are seeing their workload become heavier – and that’s even before we factor in the effects of the recession.
The Harvard Business Journal coined the term “extreme employees” to describe people who regularly work 70-120 hours a week, people who do not even take their full allowance of annual leave. There is constant pressure on executives to achieve unrealistic productivity, which they do by working intolerable hours. There is little or no time to focus on non-work-related issues, so reading business books becomes a luxury they simply don’t have time for. If we learned that our personal physician is too busy to keep up with his or her professional reading, we would be shocked. Yet when it comes to ourselves, we meekly accept that time constraints prevent us from keeping up with the world of new business thinking.
…..
We see training as something that is experienced passively, while learning is less structured, and occurs in as many ways and at as many places as there are learners. Training is a stop/start process that relies on external drivers, while learning is an active and internally driven process. Learning is about asking questions, not about supplying answers. Learning is about developing a healthy scepticism, not accepting something just because someone said it. Learning is pull, training is push. Learning is about the learner and what the learner does with new knowledge. Learning is something that the learner wants, values and seeks to apply.
Participants in Bookbuzz facilitated learning programmes get to read selected excerpts from books as a prelude to discussion sessions in various Bookbuzz forums. The take-away from the books and from the discussions are the insights that can be implemented in the workplace. The books are a vehicle for peer-to-peer learning, and the discussions help participants sharpen their comprehension and open their minds to new ideas. We know from client feedback that the dynamics of the discussion sessions spill over into interactions beyond the boardroom.
……
“What leads to high performance?” This, according to Phil Rosenzweig in The Halo Effect, is the main raison d’être of many business books. This question assumes that we can identify the drivers of company performance, and that companies can achieve success by following timeless principles. Basically, we can choose to be successful. ….This is not only wrong, it is dangerous, says Rosenzweig, because it leaves no room for luck or other market conditions that influence business performance. There is no single, simple magic formula.
Rosenzweig could be acting as a spokesperson for Bookbuzz when he urges managers to read business books a bit more critically and with a bit more realism.
…..
I invite you to join me in a stroll through over 100 books I read in 2008. Some of the books were hot off the press, some were written before the Gutenburg moment, and others were written somewhere in between. Where a book featured in a Bookbuzz discussion, I have quoted comments and insights that emerged from the debate.
This book is not a collection of executive summaries. It is a personal odyssey. Others would have chosen a totally different selection of books, and that’s how it should be. I would love this volume to provoke a healthy debate about the role and value of business books in corporate learning.
We invite you to do the following:
* Download here the pdf.
* Email any comments about the book, the insights, or anything else to yanky@bookbuzz.biz – let’s get a conversation going.
* Spread the word – feel free to send this to people you know, and invite them to contact Yanky with their comments.
* Indicate whether you would be interested in buying a hard copy of the book, or in making bulk orders.
LONDON TASTER SESSION
Bookbuzz held its first taster session in London at the School of Life on January 13. The book under discussion was Robert Greene’s The 33 Strategies of War, in which the author claims that our culture suffers from too much conflict avoidance, and that war is an inevitable fact of life. “Being steeped in the art of war does not make you aggressive - it makes you better able to intelligently handle life’s inevitable struggles.” Drawing on Machiavelli, Sun-Tsu, Napoleon, Bismark and dozens of other historical figures, Greene uses military combat as a metaphor for beating the competition.
The lively debate around the book was revealing because for the first time in a Bookbuzz session devoted to this particular book (and we have done dozens!), some participants questioned whether war is indeed a suitable metaphor for business. The success of the London taster can be gauged from an email received by one of the participants, a senior consultant with an international leadership development consultancy: Thanks again for the excellent session yesterday - it was stimulating and a real pleasure to have an interesting and real conversation with you and the others. I also think it’s got great business potential.
Bookbuzz has held follow-up meetings with several of the participants, and we are actively planning our next London taster for March. For further information, please contact Daniel on +353 (0)86 8187118 / daniel@boobkuzz.biz.
ROUNDUP OF BOOKS IN BIZPLUS MAGAZINE
The February issue of BusinessPlus magazine contains a year-end round-up of Yanky’s favourite biz books. These are the 10 books that made an impact in 2008.
We are all in “Commodity Hell,” faced with the inevitability of perpetual imitation. Thanks to the increasing irrelevance of time and distance, the rise of glasshouse transparency, the customer as superpower, cost-crushing technology, mobs of competitors, and a zeitgeist of irreverence, everything is eventually commoditised. This is the theme of Oren Harari’s Break From the Pack: How to Compete in a Copycat Economy,. which proved to be the book that most engaged Bookbuzz participants in 2008. According to Harari, the biggest challenge facing a business that wishes to innovate and to sustain its competitive advantage, is clear differentiation from others. To break from the pack, we must be curious, cool and crazy, we must run smarter, run a different path, and cultivated a culture of disciplined lunacy.
Warren Buffett is known as the Oracle of Omaha. When the world's economies entered freefall in the summer of 2008, Buffett’s distrust of financial instruments he didn’t understand suddenly made so much more sense. Alice Schroeder’s The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life gives a fascinating glimpse of the man, and shows how his guiding principles have remained constant since he filed his first income tax return in 1943 at the age of 13. Buffett is the antithesis of the stereotypical greedy, predatory or incompetent business leader. Worth every one of the 800+ pages.
The irrepressible Nassim Nicholas Taleb predicted that the global financial system would one day need to be bailed out with tax-payers' money. In The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Taleb urges us to avoid risks we don't properly understand. Most people who make convincing claims about probabilities don’t actually understand probability theory, says Taleb. The book examines the influence of highly improbable, unpredictable and high-impact events such as 9/11, and explores why we tend to place too much weight on the odds that past events will repeat. Although consequential events in history come from the unexpected, we persist in convincing ourselves that these events are explainable in hindsight.
“Say to your mind, are you one of the herd?” This plea for individuality, together with thoughts such as “Discard most of the junk that clutters your mind and clear space for yourself,” sounds like something we would find in any modern motivational book. In fact, they were written 1,800 years ago by the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, who jotted down his thoughts in The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Many of the themes that the author tackled continue to bedevil us to this day. “Frightened of change? But what can exist without it? What’s closer to nature’s heart? Can any vital process take place without something being changed?”
My fascination with the way we communicate attracted me to The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us about the Mind by Alison M Gopnick, Andrew N Meltzoff and Patricia K Kuhl. Evolution designed us with a lifelong drive to learn: “We humans are born to learn.” Language formation starts earlier than was previously thought, and babies' representations of the world are surprisingly complex. Infants are like little scientists, obsessively interested in making sense of the people, the objects, and the language around them. Language is not just used to label physical objects, but also to label significant cognitive thoughts—such as children's beliefs about the invisible, their intentions, and their desires about their own actions and those of others.
When Unilever launched a new shampoo in Asia, an impish designer included “Contains the X9 factor” on the label. When Unilever discovered the prank, it dropped the offending reference for the next production batch. Thousands of customers complained that their hair had lost its lustre because Unilever had dropped the illusive x9 factor. This story appears in Martin Lindstrom’s buyology: How everything we believe about why we buy is wrong. Lindstrom uses the fusion of science and marketing to explore the advertising assault that plays on our hidden preferences, unconscious desires and irrational dreams. Asking consumers why they buy a product only taps into a minute part of brain activity associated with purchase decisions. The real reasons lie in unconscious factors that only brain imaging can identify.
If I allow myself to fantasise about my ideal corporate position, heading up the Executive Communications division of GE, and being Jack Welch’s speechwriter, would come pretty close. Bill Lane did exactly that for 20 years, and describes his experiences in Jacked Up: The Inside Story of How Jack Welch Talked GE into Becoming the Worlds Greatest Company. My concerns that this would be little more than a kiss-and-tell book about Welch proved groundless. The book is stuffed with entertaining anecdotes, and there are also useful tips on speechwriting, use of words, and marketing communications.
Behind many corporate ideas or practices now wearing the mantle of “conventional wisdom,” lies a heretic who fought for that idea when it seemed outlandish, improbable and impossible. The Age of Heretics, by Art Kleiner, traces the history of the corporate heretics who have made such an indelible impact on management thinking. I loved Saul Alinsky’s definition of a heretic as someone willing “to dance on the edge of tolerance.” Kleiner examines the human cost of being a heretical hero or heroine in a world bounded by immense institutions. Many ideas that now regarded as core management principles, were originally labeled as utopian, Pollyannaish, deluded, unrealistic and silly.
The business world now accepts Daniel Goleman’s argument that emotional intelligence (EQ) is a key factor for the modern business leader. But how does this help business leaders looking for the answer to the “What do I do now?” question. Emotional capitalists: The New Leaders, by consulting psychologist Martyn Newman, picks up where Goleman’s ideas leave off, and identifies several EQ principles that set exceptional leaders apart. Newman tells us how to build emotional capital in the workplace and how to turn emotional intelligence into value.
I admit it. I am a fan of Malcolm Gladwell. I admire his ability to startle as he weaves peculiar facts and figures into thought-provoking unconventional theories He did it in Blink, where he introduced the concept of thin slicing. He did it in Tipping Point, where he introduced the concept of sticky ideas. And he does it again in Outliers: The Story of Success. I suspect that anyone reading about Avianca flight 052 in a chapter entitled “The ethnicity of plane crashes”, will never look at flying in quite the same light. I was particularly enlightened by the discussion on mitigated speech, and how it can lead to disastrous misunderstandings.
Every so often, an author comes along who with a word or a phrase encapsulates an idea that may not be new but which suddenly achieves new impact. Such authors have a habit of writing books that challenge the status quo and turn conventional thinking on its head. Malcolm Gladwell did it with Blink and Tipping Point, Seth Godin did it with Purple Cow, and now he does it again with Tribes - We Need You To Lead Us. A tribe, by Godin’s definition, is any large or small group where like-minded people are connected to one another, to a leader, and to an idea. Thanks to the Internet, the old barriers of geography, cost and time have been eliminated, and anyone who wants to make a difference in their business, in their community or in the world, now has the tools at their fingertips. Tribes can generate lasting and substantive change, and the reason there are not more tribe leaders is fear of criticism and fear of being wrong.
Godin claims that a leader increases effectiveness for the tribe by transforming the shared interest into a passionate goal and desire for change, by providing tools to allow members to tighten their communications, and by leveraging the tribe to allow it to grow and gain new members.
It is fascinating to look at the recent US elections through the prism of Godin’s tribes metaphor. One of the most resounding recent successes of how to get the tribe excited by a new message is of course the Obama campaign’s use of the grassroots. Obama is an example of unconventional leadership - taking a cause or idea and gathering support without a firm institutional foundation.
While everyone points to Obama’s campaign as an example of how to relentlessly build and cultivate an email list, we should remember that Obama’s people did not invent this. Karl Rove was well known for cultivating the Republican base – shorthand for the tribe. George W. Bush was able to get elected twice by embracing the base, by connecting them, by being one of them. McCain tried to embrace the same base, one which he had previously scorned, by choosing Sarah Palin, in the hope that he could also attract Hillary Clinton's tribe, which was now leaderless. McCain’s gamble failed. Voters looked at the tribe represented by Ms Palin – and said no.
Obama knew that the traditional base for Democratic candidates had failed John Kerry, so he set out to weave a new tribe, a tribe that included progressives, the centre, younger religious voters, weary veterans, internationalists, Nobel prize winners, black voters and others. Voters looked at his tribe, and said yes. The tribe that Obama built identified with him. Attacking him was like attacking them. They took it personally, and their outrage led to more donations and bigger turnout. We see the same phenomenon with Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary. Attack him, and you attack the Ryanair tribe. Every time he is attacked in the media, his tribe responds by increasing their bookings.
Several critics have accused Godin of turning a one-trick article into a book. I don’t agree. Yes, the book is short, and yes, the book does not give a roadmap for creating a tribe. But by explaining the difference between a crowd and a tribe (“a crowd is a tribe without a leader, with communication”), and by introducing us to the concept of tribe and leaders in this new age of rapid communication, I think that Godin has made an important contribution.
TOP 10 BUSINESS BOOKS LISTS
The end of the year is a good excuse for various publications to publish their Top 10 Business Books list. Here is the Business Week list:
1. Charles R. Morris' The Trillion Dollar Meltdown (PublicAffairs)
2. Alice Schroeder's The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (Bantam)
3. The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs (The Penguin Press) by strategy consultant Charles D. Ellis.
4. Hell's Cartel: I.G. Farben and the Making of Hitler's War Machine (Metropolitan Books) by Diarmuid Jeffreys.
5. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (HarperCollins) by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Dan Ariely.
6. The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives (Basic Books).
7. The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation (Crown Business) by P&G CEO A.G. Lafley and management consultant Ram Charan
8. Thomas L. Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
9. Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (Spiegel & Grau) by former Wall Street Journal writer Leslie T. Chang.
10. Outliers: The Story of Success by New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown).
… and here is the Business Pundit list:
1. The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life By Alice Schroeder
2. The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google By Nicholas Carr
3. A Sense of Urgency By John Kotter
4. The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures By Dan Roam
5. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions By Dan Ariely
6. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness By Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
7. Outliers: The Story of Success By Malcolm Gladwell
8. The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation By A. G. Lafley and Ram Charan
9. Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of business By Jeff Howe
10. The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash By Charles R. Morris
BOOKBUZZ TV
Robert Greene’s The 33 Strategies of War is the book under discussion in the pilot Bookbuzz TV programme, in which Yanky Fachler facilitates Frank Harrigan (founder of YouGetItBack.com) and Frans de Groot (founder of BiTS Communication). The trio travelled to Amsterdam to shoot the 20-minute pilot, which is now available for viewing by clicking here
INVITATION TO NEXT DUBLIN TASTER
THURSDAY 19 FEBRUARY 2009, 3PM-5PM, at Pembroke Hall, 38-39 Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin 2.
To book your place, please contact Daniel Begley on +353 (0)86 8187118 / daniel@bookbuzz.biz. Places are strictly limited – please book early. Prior to attending this taster session, please try and read chapter 7, The Ethnicity of Plane Crashes, pp 177-223.
PREVIEW THE MANUSCRIPT OF A UNIQUE NEW BOOK:
Bookbuzz co-founder Yanky Fachler, author of Fire in the Belly: Exploring the entrepreneurial mindset, and Chutzpah: Unlocking the maverick mindset for success, has just completed his latest book – and you have an exclusive opportunity to preview the draft manuscript! Eventually, we intend to print hard copies of this book, but in the meantime, we are releasing the manuscript to the Bookbuzz community in order to kick-start a dialogue.The book is about the insights that Yanky gained from reading the 110 books featured in the book. It is not a reference book, there are no executive summaries, it is more like a journey through the books. The book is divided into several thematic chapters:
INTRODUCTION: HOW HIGH IS YOUR STACK OF UNREAD BUSINESS BOOKS?
1 BACK TO BASICS
2 LEADERSHIP AND MOTIVATION
3 THE ETHICS OF BUSINESS
4 ME JANE, YOU TARZAN
5 THINGS AREN’T WHAT THEY SEEM
6 IDEAS AND INNOVATION
7 BUSINESS AS STRATEGY
8 SALES AND MARKETING
9 STORYTELLING: FABLES, PARABLES AND CASE STUDIES
10 MAVERICS, HERETICS AND OTHER PRACTIONERS OF AUDACIOUS CHUTZPAH
11 WHERE ARE WE GOING?
Excerpts from the Introduction:
Have you ever tried handing a busy executive a business book, accompanied by some helpful suggestion like: You really should read this?
You know what happens next. The recipient smiles, thanks you, and literally or figuratively adds the book to their stack of unread business books. It’s a fact. Executives aren’t reading. Not because they can’t read, but because they don’t have time to read.
Yet by not reading, these same executives are cut off from new ideas that are the very lifeblood of any company’s survival. Without a steady stream of fresh thinking, businesses will be ill-equipped to boost their competitive metabolism. Companies that fail to cultivate a climate of thought leadership, run the risk of squandering the qualitative edge of their top people. Senior executives who are not exposed to fresh ideas will find it hard to explore innovative thinking.
……
The scarce commodity that we call time can be the biggest barrier to fresh thinking. We no longer believe the myth that the world of work would become more streamlined and more time-efficient. As competition grows, executives rising through the corporate ranks are seeing their workload become heavier – and that’s even before we factor in the effects of the recession.
The Harvard Business Journal coined the term “extreme employees” to describe people who regularly work 70-120 hours a week, people who do not even take their full allowance of annual leave. There is constant pressure on executives to achieve unrealistic productivity, which they do by working intolerable hours. There is little or no time to focus on non-work-related issues, so reading business books becomes a luxury they simply don’t have time for. If we learned that our personal physician is too busy to keep up with his or her professional reading, we would be shocked. Yet when it comes to ourselves, we meekly accept that time constraints prevent us from keeping up with the world of new business thinking.
…..
We see training as something that is experienced passively, while learning is less structured, and occurs in as many ways and at as many places as there are learners. Training is a stop/start process that relies on external drivers, while learning is an active and internally driven process. Learning is about asking questions, not about supplying answers. Learning is about developing a healthy scepticism, not accepting something just because someone said it. Learning is pull, training is push. Learning is about the learner and what the learner does with new knowledge. Learning is something that the learner wants, values and seeks to apply.
Participants in Bookbuzz facilitated learning programmes get to read selected excerpts from books as a prelude to discussion sessions in various Bookbuzz forums. The take-away from the books and from the discussions are the insights that can be implemented in the workplace. The books are a vehicle for peer-to-peer learning, and the discussions help participants sharpen their comprehension and open their minds to new ideas. We know from client feedback that the dynamics of the discussion sessions spill over into interactions beyond the boardroom.
……
“What leads to high performance?” This, according to Phil Rosenzweig in The Halo Effect, is the main raison d’être of many business books. This question assumes that we can identify the drivers of company performance, and that companies can achieve success by following timeless principles. Basically, we can choose to be successful. ….This is not only wrong, it is dangerous, says Rosenzweig, because it leaves no room for luck or other market conditions that influence business performance. There is no single, simple magic formula.
Rosenzweig could be acting as a spokesperson for Bookbuzz when he urges managers to read business books a bit more critically and with a bit more realism.
…..
I invite you to join me in a stroll through over 100 books I read in 2008. Some of the books were hot off the press, some were written before the Gutenburg moment, and others were written somewhere in between. Where a book featured in a Bookbuzz discussion, I have quoted comments and insights that emerged from the debate.
This book is not a collection of executive summaries. It is a personal odyssey. Others would have chosen a totally different selection of books, and that’s how it should be. I would love this volume to provoke a healthy debate about the role and value of business books in corporate learning.
We invite you to do the following:
* Download here the pdf.
* Email any comments about the book, the insights, or anything else to yanky@bookbuzz.biz – let’s get a conversation going.
* Spread the word – feel free to send this to people you know, and invite them to contact Yanky with their comments.
* Indicate whether you would be interested in buying a hard copy of the book, or in making bulk orders.
LONDON TASTER SESSION
Bookbuzz held its first taster session in London at the School of Life on January 13. The book under discussion was Robert Greene’s The 33 Strategies of War, in which the author claims that our culture suffers from too much conflict avoidance, and that war is an inevitable fact of life. “Being steeped in the art of war does not make you aggressive - it makes you better able to intelligently handle life’s inevitable struggles.” Drawing on Machiavelli, Sun-Tsu, Napoleon, Bismark and dozens of other historical figures, Greene uses military combat as a metaphor for beating the competition.
The lively debate around the book was revealing because for the first time in a Bookbuzz session devoted to this particular book (and we have done dozens!), some participants questioned whether war is indeed a suitable metaphor for business. The success of the London taster can be gauged from an email received by one of the participants, a senior consultant with an international leadership development consultancy: Thanks again for the excellent session yesterday - it was stimulating and a real pleasure to have an interesting and real conversation with you and the others. I also think it’s got great business potential.
Bookbuzz has held follow-up meetings with several of the participants, and we are actively planning our next London taster for March. For further information, please contact Daniel on +353 (0)86 8187118 / daniel@boobkuzz.biz.
ROUNDUP OF BOOKS IN BIZPLUS MAGAZINE
The February issue of BusinessPlus magazine contains a year-end round-up of Yanky’s favourite biz books. These are the 10 books that made an impact in 2008.
BOOK OF THE MONTH: TRIBES BY SETH GODIN
reviewed by Yanky FachlerEvery so often, an author comes along who with a word or a phrase encapsulates an idea that may not be new but which suddenly achieves new impact. Such authors have a habit of writing books that challenge the status quo and turn conventional thinking on its head. Malcolm Gladwell did it with Blink and Tipping Point, Seth Godin did it with Purple Cow, and now he does it again with Tribes - We Need You To Lead Us. A tribe, by Godin’s definition, is any large or small group where like-minded people are connected to one another, to a leader, and to an idea. Thanks to the Internet, the old barriers of geography, cost and time have been eliminated, and anyone who wants to make a difference in their business, in their community or in the world, now has the tools at their fingertips. Tribes can generate lasting and substantive change, and the reason there are not more tribe leaders is fear of criticism and fear of being wrong.
Godin claims that a leader increases effectiveness for the tribe by transforming the shared interest into a passionate goal and desire for change, by providing tools to allow members to tighten their communications, and by leveraging the tribe to allow it to grow and gain new members.
It is fascinating to look at the recent US elections through the prism of Godin’s tribes metaphor. One of the most resounding recent successes of how to get the tribe excited by a new message is of course the Obama campaign’s use of the grassroots. Obama is an example of unconventional leadership - taking a cause or idea and gathering support without a firm institutional foundation.
While everyone points to Obama’s campaign as an example of how to relentlessly build and cultivate an email list, we should remember that Obama’s people did not invent this. Karl Rove was well known for cultivating the Republican base – shorthand for the tribe. George W. Bush was able to get elected twice by embracing the base, by connecting them, by being one of them. McCain tried to embrace the same base, one which he had previously scorned, by choosing Sarah Palin, in the hope that he could also attract Hillary Clinton's tribe, which was now leaderless. McCain’s gamble failed. Voters looked at the tribe represented by Ms Palin – and said no.
Obama knew that the traditional base for Democratic candidates had failed John Kerry, so he set out to weave a new tribe, a tribe that included progressives, the centre, younger religious voters, weary veterans, internationalists, Nobel prize winners, black voters and others. Voters looked at his tribe, and said yes. The tribe that Obama built identified with him. Attacking him was like attacking them. They took it personally, and their outrage led to more donations and bigger turnout. We see the same phenomenon with Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary. Attack him, and you attack the Ryanair tribe. Every time he is attacked in the media, his tribe responds by increasing their bookings.
Several critics have accused Godin of turning a one-trick article into a book. I don’t agree. Yes, the book is short, and yes, the book does not give a roadmap for creating a tribe. But by explaining the difference between a crowd and a tribe (“a crowd is a tribe without a leader, with communication”), and by introducing us to the concept of tribe and leaders in this new age of rapid communication, I think that Godin has made an important contribution.
TOP 10 BUSINESS BOOKS LISTS
The end of the year is a good excuse for various publications to publish their Top 10 Business Books list. Here is the Business Week list:
1. Charles R. Morris' The Trillion Dollar Meltdown (PublicAffairs)
2. Alice Schroeder's The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (Bantam)
3. The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs (The Penguin Press) by strategy consultant Charles D. Ellis.
4. Hell's Cartel: I.G. Farben and the Making of Hitler's War Machine (Metropolitan Books) by Diarmuid Jeffreys.
5. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (HarperCollins) by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Dan Ariely.
6. The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives (Basic Books).
7. The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation (Crown Business) by P&G CEO A.G. Lafley and management consultant Ram Charan
8. Thomas L. Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
9. Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (Spiegel & Grau) by former Wall Street Journal writer Leslie T. Chang.
10. Outliers: The Story of Success by New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown).
… and here is the Business Pundit list:
1. The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life By Alice Schroeder
2. The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google By Nicholas Carr
3. A Sense of Urgency By John Kotter
4. The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures By Dan Roam
5. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions By Dan Ariely
6. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness By Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
7. Outliers: The Story of Success By Malcolm Gladwell
8. The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation By A. G. Lafley and Ram Charan
9. Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of business By Jeff Howe
10. The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash By Charles R. Morris
