Consider the audience’s point of view: knowledge level, background, ability to keep up. Navigate for them. Deliver them to ‘point b’. What’s in it for your audience? Graphics: less is more. Useful structural models (chapter 6) and flowchart (p. 183).
Business management
3. MacCambridge, America’s Game (2005)
A magisterial study of how pro football surpassed college gridiron and then baseball to become America’s leading sport. Key to the league’s success was its collegial business administration. For example, TV revenues are pooled and shared, so that competitive merit is the distinguishing characteristic. In earlier postwar years, visiting teams received a share of the gate. The chronology includes closeup views of the Rams, Browns, Colts, Cowboys, Chiefs, and Raiders. Technology and savvy use of electronic media played a key role, as did the accidental commissioner Pete Rozelle. TV, including Monday Night Football, also was a key driver — the NFL supplanted boxing and mastered the medium long before baseball grasped the possibilities. Football gained from the shifting cultural mores of the 1960s, but did not escape labor problems of the 1980s and 90s. The draft remains a key source of talent and public interest, although the rival AFL used superabundance of talent (athletes) to its advantage. The NFL now is an economic and social phenomenon as much as it is a sporting contest.
14. Miller and Heiman, Conceptual Selling (2005)
People buy to solve their problems or address their goals. Pushing product therefore is inferior to a three-step sequence of getting info about the concept, connecting your product’s attributes to the concept, and getting incremental commitment that advances the sale. Key tactics include setting a single sales objective for each call; establishing minimum and best-possible expectations and getting commitment to next steps (or else walking away); defining a valid business reason for the call; and establishing credibility through experience, knowledge, presentation, or association. Getting info comprises confirmation questions to re-establish expectations, searching for new info to better define the concept, and questions to uncover the client’s attitude (the ‘win plus results’’ phase). When giving info, focus on differentiation, on tailoring strengths to the concept. Commitment questions, which are not closers, are to ensure interim steps. The call plan (chart p320) comprises identifying the concept, defining a valid reason, establishing action and commitments, establishing (test) credibility, getting info, giving info, getting commitment.
1. Wolf, Wired (14 Jan 2006)
Narrates the rise and fall of Louis Rosetto, visionary of digital technology as catalyst for cultural transformation. The first third sketches Rosetto’s nomadic existence before landing in San Francisco in time to exploit the first Internet boom. The book then hurtles through the tale of
- Wired
magazine as a microcosm of the dot-com phenomenon. Much of the tale centers on Rosetto’s obliviousness and Andrew Anker’s cynicism. It all ends rather abruptly when Conde Nast and Lycos purchase the magazine and web properties, respectively. Like
- Burn Rate
, there is ample personal connection.
13. Hagel and Brown, The Only Sustainable Edge (3 Oct 2006)
Rigorous specialization allied to making full use of partner capabilities creates ‘productive friction’, an emerging approach to business strategy. Products and practices developed at the ‘edge’, and specifically how a company handles exceptions, is a fertile source of improvement and innovation. Systemic adoption will create value in excess of cost and thus defeat margin pressures. This ‘Red Queen hypothesis’ is an approach to surmounting that primary nemesis of the core competency school of strategy, in which continually improved operations yield no lasting value. The antithesis has been the view that chaotic business environments defeat planning and therefore super operations are the best approach; the authors would seek to organize those line operations at a higher level. A company’s long-term direction should articulate its specialization and how it will collaborate with its ecosystem; operating initiatives should be measured by operating metrics that are leading indicators, not financial metrics that are lagging indicators. The thesis seems to apply to industries with strong reliance on IT. But a foray into public policy implications is unsatisfying and leads to disastrous views of educational policy by touting critical thinking over performance, thus empowering the relativists.
15. Reichheld, Ultimate Question (20 October 2006)
The most effective way to measure customer satisfaction and simultaneously prime a business for growth is to ask clients whether they would positively refer the company: on a scale of 0-10. The percent of scores of 5 and below is subtracted from the percentage of 9s and 10s. This determines the ‘net promoter score’, which indicates the likelihood of well-satisfied customers recruiting new customers. Revenues from customers who rate the business poorly are ‘bad profits’ because they come at the expense of the relationship (i.e., future revenues). Discusses ways of accurately measuring NPS (as at Enterprise Car Rental) and why satisfaction surveys are overloaded and opaque. More interesting is a six-sector grid (high-low profits, detractor-neutral-promoter) on p117. The business priorities are: 1) maintain the core (high promoters), 2) redress high detractors, 3) raise profits from low promoters, 4) move neutrals to promoters. The thesis jibes with one of Hagel’s trio of business types (i.e., network, product development, or customer service), but didn’t need to be a book.
1. Anderson, Long Tail (15 Jan 2007)
A book-length treatment of the now-famous thesis: digital technology reduces the imperatives of scarcity while introducing the capabilities of search and recommendations (micro tails). Although much thought may gave gone into the popularization of marginal economics, the book does not advance the concept.
2. Drucker, Effective Executive (30 Jan 2007)
Effectiveness cannot be taught but must be learned. It is a self-discipline. It is a modest goal but rare. The keys are 1) time: record where it goes, and consolidate useable blocs, 2) contribution: focus on results meaningful to the organization, not effort, 3) build on strengths: integrate the individual’s purpose and the organization’s required outcome. Do not try to build on weakness, 4) priorities: make the best use of time. Concentrate on results, and on leveraging opportunity (rather than problem solving), 5) decisions: identify the generic context and the most relevant principles. Get opinions first, to understand the relevance of facts. Self-development of executives is the only answer to both objective social needs for organizational performance and the individual’s need for achievement and fulfillment. A second reading.
8. Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing (2 Jun 2007)
An introspective look at outdoor clothing maker Patagonia by its founder. Really a series of essays, the first sequence describes the formative years of a small climbing supplies company whose management mainly wanted to pursue those recreational interests that formed the basis of the business. The book elucidates how those views and accommodations became product and operating principles. Key breakthroughs in creating removable chocks and synchilla, made of recycled pop bottles, are outlined alongside flexible work policies and the incorporation of left-wing activism. Also an avid flyfisher and surfer, Chouinard’s attention to simplicity, top quality, and focus on a clearly envisioned customer (the ‘dirt bag’) are precursors to Apple and Google. Past failure such as an early crop of rugby shirts are pointed out, though there is little mention of the 1990 fiscal crunch on the sale of Lost Arrow, the hardware maker. Also interesting is the sketch of marketing outlets — Internet, wholesale (channel), retail, and catalog — with emphasis on how the company aims to inspire and educate but not promote. Such propagandizing is the departure point for critique of the ‘capitalist’ economy. Chouinard questions the imperative of continuous growth and calls for ‘true cost’ accounting, meaning evaluation of natural resource consumption, especially oil used in transport. This leads to a call for local self-sufficiency and consumption of local productions, suggestive of Maoist autarky (and in contrast to Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage). By book’s end, through the flogging of the company’s donating one percent of gross sales to activist causes and related campaigns, the book becomes conventionally leftist and so uninteresting. Good for the brand, but disappointing in its failure to outstrip the paradigm. Perry Klebahn observes
- Surfing
may appeal to baby boomers but is not certain to attract younger generations, and that in over 40 years of business, not one employee has made an identifiable contribution.
9. Allen, Getting Things Done (15 Jun 2007)
The summary consists of three maxims: 1) get things out of your head and onto paper (an organizer), 2) decide actions and ideal outcomes when things first come onto the radar (‘natural planning’), and 3) regularly review and update ‘open loops’. The decision tree is thoughtful, as is the categorization of longer-term goals. But too much busy work inheres in the system.