July 23, 2008
Rajesh Setty Interviews Mike Kanazawa
Beyond the Code author Rajesh Setty has posted an interview with Mike Kanazawa, author of Big Ideas to Big Results. The two met at our 2007 Author Pow-wow, and are both ChangeThis authors as well.
Here is an excerpt of that interview:
Rajesh Setty: I've heard you talk about doing "more on less." Can you explain more about that and how it relates to driving change and success?Mike Kanazawa: In many organizations there is little time for strategic thinking, prioritization of work or thinking through effective resource allocation. Every group is running fast against their own goals and often out of alignment with other divisions. Organizations end up in tactical overload. As resources get spread thin or cost cutting is done, leaders fall back on the old rallying cry, "we just need to do more with less!" In the end, these organizations get stuck in gridlock and progress comes to a grinding halt.
One of the big impediments to change is that people are so overloaded with firefighting on a daily basis that they can't get out in front of things to do fire prevention work or to create strategic change. Shifting your mindset to doing "more on less" can help you and your team to get your work under control and deliver results more quickly on the few initiatives with the greatest business impact.
Here is a direct link to the entire interview: http://blog.lifebeyondcode.com/2008/07/22/big-ideas-to-big-results-interview-with-mike-kanazawa/
For even more, you can find Mike's ChangeThis manifesto here. Rajesh has written two manifestos, which you can find here and here.
More From The Penguin Blog--The Hornby Edition--and Other Stuff I've Been Missing
I love Nick Hornby. His column, "Stuff I've Been Reading," is (or, sadly, was) the first thing I turn to every month when The Believer arrives in the mail. They're consistently the most unpretentious, enjoyable and downright funny reviews out there. If you're interested, McSweeney's has released two collections of those reviews--The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt. Joe Posnanski, author of a wonderful book himself, has called Hornby's Fever Pitch "one of the five best sports books ever written." Hornby is also author of High Fidelity and About a Boy--both made into terrific movies--and Fever Pitch was also made into, well, let's say a Jimmy Fallon movie. He has authored many, many, many other books as well.
But, none of that is why I'm writing of him today. I mention him today because he has his own blog, a fact I've somehow overlooked until I came across his post about eBooks, a hot topic here at 800-CEO-READ. The Penguin Blog picked up the post, which is where I found it. (And, what's the first thing I read on Nick Hornby's blog? That he's giving up his "Stuff I've Been Reading" column. Drats!)
Anyway... onto that ebook post. Hornby begins:
In branches of Borders, they are trying to flog us their e-book reader, the 'iLiad', for £399. Meanwhile in the London Evening Standard, David Sexton seems quite taken with Amazon's version, the Kindle. In my branch of Borders on Monday, the iLiad was piled high on the left, just as you walk in; on the right is their wall of bestselling paperbacks, many of which are being sold at half price. It was a quiet Monday morning, and there didn't seem to be too much interest in the four hundred quid e-book reader; what was striking, though, was that there didn't seem to be too much interest in the four quid books, either. Attempting to sell people something for four hundred pounds that merely enables them to read something that they won't buy at one hundredth of the price seems to me a thankless task. (A member of staff at Borders told me that he attempted to persuade a young and famous comedian to buy an iLiad last week. He seemed interested, until he was told the price, at which point he swore loudly and walked away. So at the moment, they are priced too high for millionaire showbusiness entertainers.)
If you're interested in the eBook debate, be sure to check out the discussion that followed its posting over at The Penguin Blog.
Paper Cuts has an interesting look at how the internet commerce has actually increased the price of certain books by discovering "a previously non-existent market for what you might call 'rare but not collectible' books."
And, finally, The Guardian has been having authors submit their top ten lists of books in their genre. Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist and The Logic of Life, chose the top 10 book undercover economics books in February. His choices were:
1. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
2. Micromotives and Macrobehavior by Thomas Schelling
3. The Poetry of Robert Frost, Complete and Unabridged by Robert Frost
4. Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton
5. The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod
6. The Winner's Curse by Richard Thaler
7. The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith
8. The Hare and the Tortoise by John Kay
9. How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff
10. Why Buildings Fall Down by Matthys Levy and Mario Salvadori
For Harford's explanations of these picks, go here.
For other author picks, go here. If you love independent bookstores as much as we do, start with Jeremy Mercer's top 10 bookshops of the world, and allow us to nominate here our beloved sister company, Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops.
July 22, 2008
Feel free to submit your Crowdsourcing questions
This afternoon I'm interviewing Jeff Howe, author of Crowdsourcing.* Back in 2006, Jeff coined the phrase of crowdsourcing in his article for Wired magazine. Crowdsourcing, a play on outsourcing, is the idea of using crowds to solve problems, invent and generally, get work done. Think, Wikipedia, Threadless, and iStockPhoto. The crowds are changing business as we know it.
And since I'm interviewing Jeff today, I thought it only right to ask you (the crowd) to submit questions you might have about Crowdsourcing.
If you have any questions, submit your questions by 1:30pm CST and I'll make a point to ask Jeff.
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* On bookshelves everywhere on in late August.
Plato and the Question of Beauty
I was browsing new book titles today and one just popped to my attention right away! It's called Plato and the Question of Beauty by Drew A. Hyland. The reason why I feel compelled to talk about this book goes back to my college days and my freshman year, second semester. I don't know if anyone has taken a right class at the wrong time like I did....the course was Communication in Civilization and I found out 3 weeks into it that even though it was a freshman course (# 171), juniors and seniors usually take it. (It was used, I like to think, to weed out those not ready for college). Most students had notes and past tests from alumni and I found out too late in the class to drop it. So, I muddled through.
Boy, was I glad I did! In the communication field, even though it can get a bit liberal as to what is taught, can feature very valuable information. The class I took brought Plato to my impressionable, freshman mind and I will never forget what I read. We only touched on the Symposium, the Republic and Pheadrus, and his lessons about life and skills in rhetoric are useful to us in 2008 just as they were to Plato those many years ago.
Hyland's book talks about those works as well as Plato's Hippias Major and is definitely right in step for today's business environment where people and companies move too fast, communicate too fast and tend to ignore details and the beauty around them. I'm not saying everyone that reads Plato will have this epiphany, but it may open minds to thinking of things in a different way. Plato may even help you when dealing in communication between co-workers, colleagues, etc.
If you do pick up a copy, enjoy it - and let me know what you think!
at 10:57 AM
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Categories: Book Reviews, Communication, New Releases
July 21, 2008
The Behavioral Economics of Penguin Classics and A Long Tail Discussion
The Penguin Blog has an excellent post on behavioral economics and why people buy more Penguin Classics than other publishers. Sales Managaer Fiona Buckland has obviously been following business literature, as she references not only the classic Why We Buy, but also recenty released Predictable Irrational and Nudge--the latter of which they've recently acquired the paperback rights to and will be releasing in January. (In her post, Buckland also links to a great review of Predictably Irrational from The Guardian)
Seth Godin had a very interesting post on the profitability of The Long Tail on Friday. Here's how he illustrated it :
To simplify his post, he describes the three "profit points" this way:
It's tempting to go for the bestseller list, to create a mass market hit. This is the box labeled 1 on the tail above. Everyone wants to be here. It's where ego meets profit. A home run. Pixar lives in box 1.
Incidentally, it turns out the odds of making the bestseller list (at least The New York Times') aren't so good.
The second pocket is labeled, conveniently, #2 (not because it's second best, merely because it's the second one I'm mentioning). This is the profitable, successful niche product. Roger Corman's horror movies, say, or Vandersteen's $3,000 stereo speakers. Not a product for everyone, certainly, but among those that care and are choosing to pay attention, a fantastic choice.The third pocket is to own the long tail, to make a small royalty on a huge range of products. That's CDbaby and iTunes and the Garrett Wade tool catalog.
If you're interested in the issue, I'd suggest you read the entire post, as it's much more nuanced and discusses The Dip of The Long Tail.
Kevin Kelly wrote an insightful follow up post on the issue, in which he writes:
There's a blatant switcheroo that Seth (and almost everyone else) makes when explaining the Long Tail. In pocket #1 [and # 2]of the curve, Seth talks in terms of a creator of a work. But then when he gets to the long tail, he switches away from a creator, to talk in terms of an aggregator of other creators' work. Why is that? What happens to the creator? The creator is dropped when we get to the long tail "pocket of profit" because the long tail is not profitable for the creator. It's profitable only for the audience and aggregators.[...]
... As one crosses the sections -- going from the short head to the long tail -- one should be consistent and view it from the aggregator's point of view or the creator's point of view. I think it is a mistake to conflate the two view points.
That is a very good distinction to make, and if you're an author (or creator of any other material) it's important to make it. But, to be fair, Seth's focus is not on that distinction, and although it's from a slightly different perspective, I think he ends up making essentially the same argument that Kelly makes. Seth writes that:
The most common misconception about Long Tail thinking is that if you don't succeed at pocket 1, don't worry, because the tail will take care of your product and you'll just end up in #2. That's not true. #2 isn't a consolation prize for mass market losers. Mass market losers are still losers.
If you're looking for the creator's view, Kevin Kelly is definitely right when he states that "The longer the tail, the worse for sales." And, Seth is right when looking at it from a company perspective, stressing the need to be the best at what you do in your category or market (Pixar, Vandersteen's and iTunes), whether what you distribute is your creation or not.
Looking at it from the publishing industry perspective, you obviously want those big hits on the bestseller lists, but you also want to have imprints in niche areas with a die-hard fan base that buys plenty of books, but probably not enough to make even a dent on the lists. And, it probably doesn't hurt to have those long tail distributors there to help sell titles here and there that, for whatever reason, fail to gain traction with a wider audience.
July 18, 2008
Joe Nocera's Best Business Books Ever
Joe Nocera is a columnist for The New York Times who writes about big business, and yesterday my inbox was filled with notes pointing me to his blog. His latest post recommends what he believes are the best business books ever. Here is Nocera's list with his commentary:
- "Liar's Poker," by Michael Lewis (even though I've since become convinced that the anecdote that gives the book its title never happened).
- "The Devil's Candy," by Julie Salamon. (Greatest dissection of the movie business ever written.)
- "The Box,", by Marc Levinson. (Hard to believe you can write a great book about the rise and importance of the shipping container, but he pulled it off.)
- "Indecent Exposure," by David McClintick. (Published in 1982, it single-handedly created the business narrative genre).
- "The Go-Go Years," by John Brooks. (The best book by the most elegant writer to ever make business his subject.)
- "The Kingdom and the Power," by Gay Talese. (Yes, the subject is The New York Times, but how can you leave it off any list of great business books?)
- "Titan," by Ron Chernow. (Chernow's magisterial biography of John D. Rockefeller.)
- "Do You Sincerely Want To Be Rich," by Godfrey Hodgson, Bruce Page and Charles Raw. (Hard to believe that this committee of authors could write a sensational narrative about the rise and fall of Bernard Cornfeld, but that they did.)
- "Disney Wars," by James Stewart. ("Best corporate psychoanalysis I've ever read," says John Huey.)
- "The Informant," by Kurt Eichenwald (Forget his Enron book, "Conspiracy of Fools." This book, about the strange saga of Mark Whitacre and Archer Daniels Midland, is his masterpiece.)
- "Father, Son and Co.: My Life at IBM and Beyond", by Thomas J. Watson and Peter Petre (The only great ghost-written C.E.O. autobiography ever written. No one else --not even Lee Iacocca or Jack Welch -- even comes close.)
- "When Genius Failed," by Roger Lowenstein. (Another one of those "how-did-he-do-it?" books: this account of the fall of Long Term Capital Management, which by all rights should be a tough slog, is crackling good read.)
- "Greed and Glory on Wall Street," by Ken Auletta. (This book, about the crack up of Lehman Brothers, has a great cast of characters, starting with Steve Schwartzman.) - [Out of Print]
- "The Smartest Guys in the Room," by Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean. (O.K., O.K., they are former colleagues of mine, and I was deeply involved in editing this book -- but I have to say, I think it turned out pretty well!)
Now as we have mentioned before, Jack and I will have a lot to say about The 100 Best Business Books of All-Time in February, but for now we'll say this. Nocera favored the story and tale over the tactics and theory. We think you need to read a wide range of books to get the mental nutrition you need for a well-balanced business diet. You'll be seeing some of these titles again.
PS Nocera has a new book out from Portfolio called Good Guys and Bad Guys: Behind the Scenes with the Saints and Scoundrels of American Business. This is compliation of profiles the writer has penned over the last several years.
Jack Covert Selects - Management Lessons From Mayo Clinic
Management Lessons From Mayo Clinic: Inside One of the World's Most Admired Service Organizations by Leonard L Berry and Kent D. Seltman, McGraw-Hill, 276 pages, $27.95, Hardcover, June 2008, ISBN 9780071590730
Over a century ago, a family of doctors in a small Minnesotan town formed an organization that has gone on to touch countless lives. These days, over 42,000 employees, students and volunteers go to work every day at Mayo Clinic's three U.S. campuses--one each in Minnesota, Florida and Arizona. But, talking to the clinic's patients, you'd never think the care they received came from such a large entity. Mayo Clinic has grown exponentially over the years, but has retained its human touch throughout. How has Mayo Clinic done it? Leonard Berry and Kent Seltman answer that question with this book.
In profiling this one very special organization, Berry and Seltman touch on almost every aspect of business--from the loftier issues of Vision, Values, and Purpose, to the everyday issues of customer service, management structure, hiring and branding. The authors tackle each issue methodically and know exactly when to step back and let those within the Clinic and their patients tell their own stories, keeping the book fresh and inspiring.
One such story is from Dr. Breanndan Moore. He was called in to work on a kidney transplant in the middle of the night, and noticed a technologist still in the lab. Being her supervisor and fearing the worst, he called her into his office the next day, asking why she had been in the lab at 2 a.m. It turned out that earlier that day she accidentally used the wrong solution on an antibody test and couldn't read it. She had come back just to do the test again. That was commendable, but Moore wondered why she didn't wait and redo the test the next day. She replied "Dr. Moore, I can't have the patients at Mayo Clinic waiting an extra day in the hospital just because I fouled up a lab test."
That technologist was behind the scenes, unknown to patients, and she wasn't expecting to be rewarded for her extra work--she didn't even expect anyone to know about it. It is employees like her that make Mayo Clinic what it is, and it is Mayo Clinic's culture that creates employees like her. Not every business has the high calling that Mayo Clinic has. Not every employee goes to work everyday clearly knowing that the work they do will benefit a life other than their own. But, the lessons and methods provided in this book can help any management team instill a culture and purpose to effectively manage an organization around.
The Mayo brothers established and built "one of the world's most admired service organizations" with solid values and a practicality in operations that is truly clinical. What else would you expect from a Midwestern family? The Mayo Clinic continues that work today, and you can expect those same qualities in this book.
July 17, 2008
The Bicycle Gang
I'm sure somewhere, there's a theory that, those who ride together, work well together. Or so holds true here.
We 8cr-ers have a bicycle gang. It's a group of us that rides together to and from company gatherings and homes and apartments. Dylan, Todd (our shipper) and I often traverse the Milwaukee streets in our pack of three on our ride home.
There's a list of reasons supporting why bicycling to work, well, works -- nice to the environment, heart-friendly, and easy on the budget. It's the beginning of taking up bicycling to work that can be a bit daunting. For various reasons.
If you're looking for advice on how to start, try Rory McMullan's Biking to Work guide. It's an 85-page introduction to the type of bicycle to choose, helpful accessories, and talking points for getting a bike rack at your office.
Good luck!
Edgelings and The Longer Tail
Silicon Valley's native son Mike Malone has been covering the tech industry better and for longer than anyone. We voted his latest book, Bill & Dave, the best of the year in the biography and memoir category in our first annual 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards. He has now teamed up with Robert Grove and Tom Hayes to create Edgelings.com, a technology news website, of which he is Editor-in-Chief. The press release states:
Edgelings.com is designed to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of high tech industry coverage in daily newspapers and mainstream magazine, and by the retreat of trade magazines from general readers to ever-more narrow niche audiences. In the process, Edgelings is also pioneering a new relationship with journalists that will give them a financial stake in the success of their stories measured by readership and traffic impact.[...]
"Ultimately, we intend to be the home of the most original technology and business writers in the world," says Mike Malone, Edgelings editor-in-chief. "We believe it is possible to have great reporting and great writing; and knowledgeable coverage of tech that is readable by the non-tech audience.
"To get that kind of quality, we intend to enter into partnership with the best writers and bloggers in tech, and enable them have a financial stake in Edgelings¡¦ success. That means helping drive traffic to their sites, rewarding them for readership, and paying them commensurate with the traffic they generate."
The site is partnering with Pajamas Media, so it should develop an audience quickly.
In book news, Chris Anderson's The Long Tail has been released in paperback and contains a new chapter on marketing and an epilogue on the reaction to the book. You can read his post on the paperback edition here.
Jack Covert Selects - Good Is Not Enough
Good Is Not Enough: And Other Unwritten Rules for Minority Professionals by Keith R. Wyche with Sonia Alleyne, Portfolio, 242 pages, $24.95, Hardcover, July 2008, ISBN 9781591842101
It's no secret that the leaders of America's largest corporations do not reflect the makeup of our country's population. Looking at the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, there are: four African Americans, four Latinos, five Asians and 13 women.
Why is this still true in corporate America and how can we change it? This is what Keith Wyche tries to resolve in Good Is Not Enough, written with Sonia Alleyne. First, he suggests that not only is there a managerial issue to be dealt with on the corporate level, but that employees themselves must do things differently to make it in today's business world.
If a company's culture is counterproductive, it can be hard regardless of what you do to stay, get promoted and bring about change. So, get out. Find some place better. Once finding a new organization, the authors discuss how to "fit in" and make the corporate culture work for you, explaining that this can be accomplished by changing perception (how one is seen), visibility (making oneself accessible), and knowing when to move over/get out, find a mentor, and be more prepared. Each focal point has its own chapter and contains several examples and explanations.
Chapter 6, in particular, deals with the skills that one must have to excel in the corporate world, and applies to everyone making their way up in business. If you cannot communicate, don't have some leadership skills, and can't be a team player, you won't get far in any organization. Wyche counsels employees not to look for Gold Stars at work. In the workforce, just doing great things isn’t enough. You often won't get noticed by just doing outstanding work. You need to meet with your superiors, show others what you've done and let them know that you're there if they need you.
Good Is Not Enough demonstrates how minorities in the workplace can, and have, overcome obstacles to thrive in previously uncharted territories of corporate America. But the lessons laid out here are useful to anyone in the workforce who is underappreciated or thinks they may not be reaching their full potential within their company. With any job, some aspects are easy to change: how you approach a job or present yourself. Others are impossible. This book is a guide to the pieces that one can change to help overcome the challenges that one can't change.
July 16, 2008
Jack Covert Selects - Predictably Irrational
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely, Harper, 280 pages, $25.95, Hardcover, February 2008, ISBN 9780061353239
We've all been there--the skin-to-strip adhesive is beginning to give, and it's clearly time to give the Band-Aid the ol' yank. That truism from mom--"fast and easy"--rings true, but does it really? According to Dan Ariely, maybe not...
As amusing as such human trivialities prove to be for light lunchtime reading, the increasingly grave results stemming from our seemingly simple everyday decisions (hybrid vs. hydrogen, fluorescent vs. incandescent, Starbucks vs. Dunkin' Donuts) beg a closer examination of Ariely's theory that we're not only all irrational, but Predictably Irrational. Pointing out inherent human foibles is no gesture of contrariness or devil's advocacy on the part of the author. Rather, as Ariely states, "these irrational behaviors of ours are neither random nor senseless. They are systematic, and since we repeat them again and again, predictable. So wouldn't it make sense to modify standard economics, to move it away from naive psychology?"
Hoping to expound on the growing field of behavioral economics, Ariely guides the reader through the backwaters of our own minds. Chapters chart the dangers of making decisions based on comparison (citing Crocodile Dundee nonetheless), the fallacy of supply and demand (Starbucks tricked us!), and the ridiculously high price of ownership (would you pay $2400 for a basketball ticket?). All the while Ariely keeps his tongue planted firmly in cheek. And, as for the Band Aide, it turns out that mom may have just been protecting herself from discomfort when she offered the quick-rip solution: Patients actually feel less pain if treatments are carried out with lower intensity and longer duration.
Ariely is currently the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT, holding a joint appointment between the school's Media Laboratory and the Sloan School of Management. What does such a lofty title mean, you might ask. Basically, that he understands human behavior as well as anyone on the planet, including the cognitive workings behind every one of our weird inclinations at work, in the store, in restaurants, and even at the bar. But throughout this book, the Professor's Friday afternoon tone never wavers--he's conversational, informal, and increasingly engaging despite the usually tedious nature of such a barrage of examples. Rarely is a book of empirical evidence at once so eye opening and fun.
New Excerpt - The Gridlock Economy
We've posted a new excerpt over on the blog that we post excerpts on--the excerpts blog. It is taken from Chapter 3 of The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Cost Lives by Michael A. Heller. In it, you'll read how current patent laws may actually be stifling innovation in drug development and holding up potentially live saving medicines. As Heller himself puts it:
This chapter brings you up to speed on drug patent gridlock. A decade ago Rebecca Eisenberg and I helped launch today's debate when we cautioned in Science that "privatization of biomedical research must be more carefully deployed to sustain both upstream research and downstream product development." Otherwise, we wrote, "more intellectual property rights may lead paradoxically to fewer lifesaving drugs."
Here is the direct link to the entire excerpt: http://800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/008311.html
July 15, 2008
Webinar with Dan Heath, author of Made to Stick
One of our favorite authors, Dan Heath, is leading a web seminar through The Center for Great Management.
Click here to learn more about the seminar and to sign up if you're interested.
Here's the description of the event:
Virtual Seminar Overview In this era of ever-tougher competition, your company's greatest asset is its managers. Why? They've got stellar ideas for new strategies that will leave rivals scrambling; for innovative products that will wow customers; and for fresh ways of doing business that will attract top talent, slash costs, and burnish your bottom line. But even the best idea won't make a difference if a manager can't "sell" it--can't get people to embrace it, remember it, and act on it. Let bestselling author and communication thought leader Dan Heath show your managers how to make their ideas "stick" for maximum business impact. Dan reveals the six principles that distinguish ideas that thrive from those that die:
- Simplicity-strip the idea to its core, without turning it into a silly sound bite
- Unexpectedness-capture and hold people's attention
- Concreteness-help people remember the idea
- Credibility-get people to believe your idea
- Emotion-persuade people to care about your idea
- Stories-get people to act on your idea new solutions
For each principle, Dan provides a wealth of examples of how real people have made great ideas sticky--in endeavors as diverse as business, entertainment, public health, and education.
Don't let your managers miss this opportunity to capture critical insights for crafting--and communicating--high-impact ideas.
Each participant receives a copy of the book Made to Stick, an executive summary of the book, and a comprehensive study guide.
at 8:47 AM
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Categories: General Management, Leadership
July 14, 2008
links for 2008-07-14
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In the end, the reader is left wishing that Mr. El-Erian were as clear about the causes of the global financial transformation, and the appropriate policy responses to it, as he is about how to realize its benefits.
June's Top 25 Books Available in Audio!
I bet you've been wondering to yourself, "Hrmmm, I wonder which 800-CEO-READ's top 25 books from June are available on compact disc?" Well, gentle reader, wonder no longer!! Here they are!
Now, you can set your mind at ease....until next month!!
July 11, 2008
What to Say to a Porcupine
This cute, recently published, little book came to my attention the other day when a company called in to place an order for books to give to their staff. I was taken aback by the title and wondered what kind of a book this was, until that is I pulled it up on our website and found out that the subtitle was: 20 Humorous Tales that Get to the Heart of Great Customer Service.
What to Say to a Porcupine is a book that contains twenty different tales all centering around customer service and it offers topics for group (or single) discussion at the end of each fable. Some chapters include: My Big Fat Greek Chorus, Chilly Willy, The Knight Shift, Going to the Dogs and Sloth is Not a Vice.
Richard S. Gallagher, the author of all these little vignettes, has created such a great way to emphasize the fact that customer service is so important to companies and great service makes everything run more smoothly, intelligently, etc. In fact, What to Say to a Porcupine ends with the Gallagher saying that customer service is more than just another fable.
This book is great for any company that needs a little kick-start or even a reminder of how customer service should be like. It's thought-provoking in a very interesting way! I hope when you get a copy - or even copies for your whole staff - you'll enjoy it!
Have a GREAT weekend!!
at 9:18 AM
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Categories: Book Reviews, Customer Service, New Releases
July 10, 2008
GLOBALITY Blog #3: You're Not Just Competing for Customers
It's the final day of blog hosting by the authors of GLOBALITY: Competing with Everyone From Everywhere for Everything. Jim Hemerling, co-author and senior partner of The Boston Consulting Group's San Francisco office, is our host today; he'll be checking in every now and then to take your questions.
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You're Not Just Competing for Customers
In the era of globality, we will all be competing with everyone from everywhere for everything. I want to talk about what everything means.
Customers, of course. The big multinationals from the West and Japan -- the "incumbents," as we call them -- suddenly find themselves competing with the "global challengers" (based in the rapidly developing economies) for customers in the challengers' home markets, in the incumbents' home markets, and in every other market around the world.
Commodities, too. I'm talking about bauxite and aluminum, palm oil, shipping containers, iron ore, natural gas, cotton -- every raw material that's needed to run a business could suddenly become scarce or pricey.
Talent is another big consideration. Human resources used to be mostly about recruiting (or poaching) the best people for the slots you needed to fill, then doing your best to keep them happy and motivated. Now it's different. There's a real scarcity of specialized talent. Some employees don’t want to live and work where companies need them. And, in many countries, there just aren't enough people with the right skills to run factories or manage services.
Everything also includes: capital, intellectual property, brand awareness, press coverage, real estate, equipment, partners and suppliers. You name it.
Almost everything is up for grabs. Almost nothing can be locked up.
With the cost of fuel skyrocketing, you may not even be able to book a flight from wherever you are to wherever you want to go!
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Thanks to Hal, Arindam, and Jim, authors of GLOBALITY for hosting our blog this week! If you're interested in learning more about the book and/or the authors, check out their website.