Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten know business books. They run 800-CEO READ, a retail (and online) bookstore catering specifically to businesses. Who better, then, to compile The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You? The books are organized by category to facilitate easy reading, and also making it a handy go to guide if you’re looking for help in a specific area. What I think I enjoyed most about The 100 Best Business Books is how Jack and Todd were able to extract the key ideas and each of the books featured in a concise manner, pulling in first-hand stories of their experiences running 800-CEO-READ to add some narrative and grounding to the ideas the authors presented. We had the chance to ask Todd and Jack some questions about the book, as well as the business of books.

Chris Taggart: How can people who are not necessarily interested in business benefit from reading “business” books?

Todd Sattersten: First of all, everyone is involved in business. Buy a car. Shop at a grocery store. You are participating in commerce on a daily basis.  Having an understanding of business is personally beneficial no matter what field you are in. Business books are a great route to that better understanding.  Take a book like Oil on the Brain.  There is no better description of the oil industry.

Secondly, most “business” books have lessons that can be applied to other parts of your life.  Getting Things Done helps productivity in all parts of your life.  The Leadership Challenge applies to your work as president of the Rotary or president of the PTA.  Emotional Intelligence helps you work with colleagues or children.

Having reading so many business books, how have you personally benefited from doing so?
TS: Each book brings something different. From Getting Things Done, I now keep my email inbox empty and have a tickler file for things to remember in the future.  Those sound simple, but they add a little bit of sanity to my life by clear space in my head for other things. Now, Discover Your Strengths showed me what my strengths are and what I can do to improve them. Made To Stick showed me how to construct and package my ideas so they last longer and have greater influence. I could go on and on.

What was the 101st book that almost made the cut…but didn’t?
TS: There are 295 books that we recommend in the book beyond The 100 Best.  Any of those could have been a candidate.

Jack Covert: John at Brand Autopsy (Monday’s stop on the tour) makes a great case for The Discipline of Market Leaders and he even goes as far as producing the review how it may have appeared in the book.

TS: I could make a great case for our 2008 800-CEO-READ Business Book of The Year Tribes by Seth Godin (we include the 2007 winner Made To Stick).

JC: It is also amazing to see the power that StrengthsFinder 2.0 is finding in the marketplace.

TS: We could go on (and yes we are not going to give you a direct answer :)

Do you see a lot of customers purchasing books for corporate libraries, or are they more often given to managers or employees?

JC: I built the business on selling to corporate librarians.  They were a huge resource for managers and as time went on, they were eliminated and people were left to do their own research.  The tools that became available with the internet made that all possible.

Where we see business books most used is as change tools with managers giving them to employees. They work great for sending messages that people can later digest at their own pace and get a better understanding of.

Why do you think it is that people don’t read more business books?

TS: Time is the issue. And it is not a lack of time to read.  I think it is a lack of time to search and be certain they are going to find a book worthy of their time.  There is nothing worse that an hour lost and $25 spent on a bum book.  What we are doing with The 100 Best Business Books of All Time is giving people a pile of both they could read.  There is enough there to keep people busy for three or four years.

We noticed The Cluetrain Manifesto wasn’t included in the book… was our copy missing some pages? ;)

JC: That was the 101st book.  That was the one that almost made it. Thank you for reminding us.

Where do you see the future of business books going? Are E-books and readers like the Kindle poised to take over, or do you think we’ll still be passing around dead trees  for several years yet?

TS: We are about one year into a five year disruption of book publishing. Books read on devices other than paper is going to become dominant.  Screens beat paper for flexibility of use and immediacy of delivery. I still think paper is  a better way to read books, but we will accept a lower grade experience as we have with mp3 files and YouTube videos.  Reading a paper book will be like going to the movie.  You will do it less often but will still periodically for a superior experience. And business people are always earlier adopters so they will be among the first to make this digital move.  This is something we are watching really closely.

Thanks guys!

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A big thanks goes out to Todd Sattersten and Jack Covert for making the time to answer our questions, and high-fives all around to Paul Williams at Idea Sandbox for including us in the first Virtual Book Tour of 2009.

Additional Resources

• 100 Best Biz – The official website of the 100 Best Business Books of All-Time
• All the books included – A complete listing of the 100 Best Business Books of All-Time
• 8CR YouTube channel – for author interviews & talks

Other Stops on the Tour

• March 2nd – John Moore at Brand Autopsy
• March 3rd – Phil Gerbyshak at Slacker Manager
• March 5th -  Eric Taylor
• March 6th – Krishna De at Biz Growth News

As a special treat to CrowdSpark readers, Jack and Todd are offering a choice of one of three books free if you buy The 100 Best Business Books of All Time from 800-CEO-READ this week using one of the following coupon codes.

Leadership Moment by Michael Useem – Code: clash
Six Thinking Hats by Edward De Bono – Code: csq9t
Growing A Business by Paul Hawken – Code: xtjpt

Just put the book in your cart and then apply the code.  A copy of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time must also be in your cart for the offer to be valid.

The offer expires March 7, 2009 at the conclusion of the tour.

You see Bad Oldeslo is home to GlaxoSmithKline Deutchland who manufactures Volmax. Volmax is one of the four ingredients that make up long-acting beta2 agonists, the most common form of Asthma treatment that most of us would call a puffer or inhaler. With the Canadian Medical Association Journal’s release that up to 30% of Canadians living with asthma have been misdiagnosed, I can’t help but visualize the German GSK acting out like a Stride Gum commercial this morning.

Report author Shawn Aaron and the crew that put this report together, have possibly uncovered one of the greatest medical oversight’s in modern medicine. In simpleton terms, this means that in a room of ten asthma sufferers, THREE OF THEM  SHOULD NOT EVEN BE IN THE ROOM. This is either, an incredible black mark on public health care that highlights what happens when you overwork an industry to a point where detail regarding the healthy lifestyles of our communities is passed over for productivity and benchmarking, or this story is the perfect plot line for the next James Bond film!

I started looking at this story through cbcnews.ca, and I think this quote got me rilled up the most.

Physicians are under a lot of pressure to manage a lot of patients quickly,” Aaron said. “For a patient who comes in complaining of shortness of breath and wheeze, it’s much more easy and it takes much less time to say, ‘I think you have asthma, take this puffer.

What’s worse is I don’t know who the fault ultimately falls on for this collective gaffe? Do we blame the overworked and underfunded health care system that needs to implement quantity over quality to meet demand? Or maybe there is some real world Ernst Stavro Blofeld character running around plotting human demise with the use of inhalers and Ritalin (don’t get me started on ADHD). Or is it possible that we ultimately need to point the finger at the concept of public health care at its root?

For any readers from Bad Oldesloe, take a deep breath I am sure you will all be fine.

Fundamentally, great marketing is about great storytelling. We’ve all had the experience of being enthralled by the power of a good storyteller, their ability to bring their subject to life and create an experience.

Conversely, we’ve all also had the unfortunate experience of having to endure some really bad storytelling. The kind that a lot of the times begins with “So have you heard the one about…..”. More often than not, we are the victims of boredom inducing, daydream inspiring stories during which we retreat to our mental play-garden.

That’s why we pay good money to hear and see good storytellers. We pay to hear them in the form of speakers and we pay to see them in the form actors. Companies pay for them in the form of good marketeers.

In a way, marketing is something that we all do because we all tell stories. So yes, in a sense everyone is a storyteller, the problem is, most people are only good at telling stories about themselves an not telling stories in general.

There is nothing a company wants more than to cultivate a love affair with customers. Now what’s wrong with that sentence? Well nothing really, besides the fact that its usually a LIE, and a pretty brazen one at that.

Sadly, most corporations only preach this without actually practicing it. They prefer to behave like detached creatures that loathe closeness and recoil at the slightest twinge of customer affection. They prefer “customer adoption” and “customer retention” to customer affection. They shrink back from the warm embrace of their most ardent fans.

Case in point, whenever customers become so enamored with some product or service that they are willing to contribute to its well being and development by devoting copious amounts of their own free time to improving upon it, they get sued. Think Scrabulous here. Two brothers who are fans of the classic Scrabble board game create a Facebook application based on it. It becomes popular, really popular. So popular in fact that Hasbro & Mattel, the owners of the rights to the game decided to take legal action against brothers who are now pulling in about $25 000 a month on something they did on a whim based on their enjoyment of the game. What they intuitively recognized as fans of the game of Scrabble is that playing the game is a social act. It is best enjoyed when playing against family and friends and even better when you have a wide variety of opponents to challenge. What better place to connect to friends and family and huge number of possible opponents than a social network? Furthermore, they realized that it is not necessarily possible to finish a game of Scrabble in one sitting so they designed it in such a way that games could be played over long periods of time at the leisure of the players.

This really illustrates the heightened insight of the most devout customers. I mean who is really in better position to understand the customer psyche? Is it the guys sitting in the “Ivory Tower Boardroom” trying to figure out what makes people buy or the customers themselves, the people actually acting out the consumption behaviors; the individuals who feel the itch created by an unfulfilled need and spend countless hours seeking out a solution.

Connecting with customers is hard, I get that; but companies should not fool themselves either by thinking that going the easy way of dealing with “market segments”, “psycho-graphic profiles”, targeting customers, and “cardboard cutouts” is equivalent to engaging and connecting with customers . The consequence of this is that consumption becomes abstracted from real human experience, then categorized and finally objectified. The customer becomes a mere data-point in a maze of interconnected databases.

All this misses the fundamental idea that the best customers are also the best innovators because they are the most acutely attuned to the needs that are fulfilled by the various products and services they buy. So why don’t companies make it easy on themselves and simply let the customers tell them what they want? When I say this I don’t mean focus groups either.

I mean co-creation, genuine partnerships between those who consume and those work to produce such that when consumers come up with innovations they are embraced instead of slapped down with cease-and desist letters. They are given the tools, access to resources and the ability to be a part of the process that creates the things that make our lives easier, better and more enjoyable. Think of what might have happened for instance, if RIAA had worked with Napster to create a digital distribution platform for the music industry. Would there still have been an Itunes?

Once you objectify your customers, you’ve completely lost touch and it’s only a matter of time before they find someone who makes them feel like they matter. It’s high time companies learned to embrace their customers and profit from Customer Affection.

“Gallup polls indicate that 300 billion is lost in productivity as 25% of a typical organization is disengaged, 50% is ambivalent, and only 25% are agents of change. This lack of engagement results in the fact that 66-90% of strategies that are developed don’t get executed.”

An interesting stat in and of itself, but what happens if we think of this not in terms of productivity within an organization, but rather, from the perspective of a company and its customers:

“…$300 billion is lost in revenue as 25% of a typical organization’s customers are disengaged (buy the product service, but are not satisfied with the level of service or quality), 50% are ambivalent, and only 25% are agents of change (excited about your company/product, and tell their friends). This lack of customer engagement results in the fact that 66-90% of customer service efforts targeted at your customers, don’t succeed.”

Now the numbers in my scenario are completely made up, but if that were the reality – and certainly, it could be in a crowdsourced model where your customers are your employees; what would you need to do differently in your customer service strategy?

…And the best thing about getting engaged with your customers, is that it doesn’t cost you 3 months salary!

(photo credit: rmrayner)

Creativity; what is it and where does it come from? It is creativity that gives rise to
Ideas.

The question is, can it be brought about by some systematic means, some sort of process? Creativity is production, is making things, it is to manufacture and the result is Ideas.

Manufacturing requires raw material. What is the raw material for the manufacture of Ideas?

The answer is…

Experience

But not just passive experience, in the sense of simply being a witness to things happening. I mean active experience, the sort of experience in which one is present, is aware and is “in the moment.” This is not the experience of driving home on the same road at about the same time everyday at approximately the same speed.

This is the experience of going skydiving for the first time or seeing the ocean for the first time.

Creativity is thinking outside the box; but what is the “box”?

The box is Monday morning meetings
The box is brainstorming sessions
The box is “creativity exercises.”
The box is the ordinary, the routine and the commonsensical.

Creativity is extraordinary, creativity is unusual and heterodox.

Creativity arises by taking a collection of experiences and jumbling them together to create new patterns of thought and avenues of exploration.

Creativity is Newton under the apple tree.

Creativity is Chaos.

Therefore creativity is fundamentally at odds with process.

Creativity is the synthesis of the known into the unknown.
So how do you foster creativity? Do things that take you outside your comfort zone, things that force you to acquire new skills and knowledge and things that that create new
Experiences.

Then almost like magic, as if I were playing a real life version of Where’s Waldo, I started to see the parkas everywhere! In the streets, on the bus in the subway. The logo had become distinct and unmistakable and I could spot it from a mile away. Which brought me to my next thought, that if this wasn’t a private company then I would buy the stock because with so many people wearing these parkas, the company must be doing really well!

At that point I stopped to reexamine my thought process and realized something was wrong with my my logic (gasp!). In reality there aren’t any more or less people wearing Canada Goose parkas, the only difference is that I went from not noticing people wearing them to noticing just about anyone wearing one. Therefore, it would appear to me as if there’s been a huge increase in the number of people wearing the parkas but in reality there is a certain number of people wearing parkas that have been wearing them and continue to wear them regardless of my ability to spot them or not.

So what’s the moral of the story? Well the whole experience got me thinking about trend spotting and how difficult it is to actually find real trends. The first evidence of a trend is always anecdotal and based on a single observation or piece of information. As a result of this, one goes from being completely ignorant to suddenly aware of some phenomenon and begins to look for it systematically. The only problem is that the human eye is so fond of finding patterns that it becomes difficult to discern real trends from what one merely thinks are trends. In other words, am I seeing a lot parkas because people are buying a lot of parkas or am I seeing a lot of parkas because I’m looking for them? Once a pattern seems to manifest itself the temptation is always overestimate the significance of one’s subsequent observations. One begins to subconsciously look for information to support what they already believe to be true and in doing so, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

Just like in the Waldo books, if you look carefully you can find Waldo and the same is true with trends too. Just be careful when trend hunting not to confuse what is happening for what you think is happening. Always be hesitant to draw conclusions based on examining a potential trend from just one perspective. Observation tells us about where a trend might be, it offers an avenue of investigation and a potential opportunity but it should not be taken as a firm conclusion. The reality is that most so called trends end up in fact being just blips on the radar. A good trend hunter must realize this and consistently re-frame their perspective in order to discern the difference between what they think is happening and what is actually happening.

It was the proposed firmware upgrade for the iPhone and iPod Touch which adds the Mail, Maps, Stocks, Notes and Weather applications. While the upgrade is free for iPhone users, “lucky” iPod Touch users get to pay $20 for the same privilege. You would think that Apple would have learned its lesson with the backlash they experienced when they debuted the iPhone and then lowered the price just 67 days later, that it’s generally a bad idea to leave early adopters of your product feeling like they’ve been suckered.

Companies need early adopters to get their products off the ground. There has to be a group of people who are willing to go out there, buy your product at full price and take the risk that it won’t function exactly as advertised. These are your product ambassadors, the people actively promoting and showcasing your product to the rest of the consumer world. Without these people your product doesn’t move into the consumer consciousness because it can’t be seen in use and there are no experiences being shared which involve it. I would liken it to hosting a party. You always need a few people to show up early to start the party otherwise everyone who arrives will soon leave because they assume the party isn’t going to be very well attended and therefore not any good.

Given how important these people are, you would think that a company might want to take good care of them. This logic seems lost on Apple because it consistently sends the message that if you’re an early adopter of Mac products then you’re likely to get suckered. Either the price for that shiny new gadget you just bought will plummet, making you look stupid instead of cool or you’ll have to pay extra for new features on what you “thought” was the latest and greatest. Is this really any way to treat your most loyal fans? Apple should be wary because it might soon find that the so called early adopters won’t be so eager to adopt and won’t show up early either.

If you’re actually interested in the other announcements from the Macworld keynote but don’t feel like watching the whole thing try the condensed version. Its 90 minutes of keynote condensed into 60 seconds. Now how’s that for convenience?