Tag: Jackie Huba

2013 Holiday Book List

Friday, December 13th, 2013

I’ve read dozens of business books this year, and reviewed at least one each month for OPEN. If you’re looking for a thoughtful gift for the business book-lover in your life, you simply cannot go wrong with any of these 15 picks!

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, by Daniel H. Pink. Bestselling author Pink argues that selling has changed more in the past 10 years than it did over the previous hundred. “We’re all in sales now,” Pink says. “One in nine Americans—some 15 million people—make a living trying to get others to make a purchase. But the other eight in nine work in sales, too—we’re persuading and influencing others to give up resources in exchange for something we have.”

Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin. Martin, one the world’s foremost authorities on strategy and former dean of the progressive Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, teams with one of the top CEOs of all time, Lafley, of Proctor & Gamble. Together they boil strategy down to two critical questions: Where to play? How to win?

Red Thread Thinking: Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovation, by Debra Kaye. Innovation demands looking at the world differently and finding connections between seemingly disconnected things. According to Kaye, the book’s theme is based on an Oriental legend, which she believes provides a powerful metaphor for the way in which the right connections can lead to brilliant insights and ultimately result in commercially viable innovations.

What’s the Future of Business? Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences, by Brian Solis. Solis argues that now is the time every business must go beyond price, performance or value. “The future of business is about creating experiences,” Solis writes. “Products, programs and processes that evoke splendor and rekindle meaningful and sincere interaction and growth. At the center of this evolution—or (r)evolution—is the experience.”

The Fearless Front Line: The Key to Liberating Leaders to Improve and Grow Their Business, by Ray Attiyah. Attiyah argues that all too often, the front line activities of a business are so unpredictable, unreliable and complicated that business owners and leaders can’t seem to pull themselves away from them. But if you’re spending most of your time on the day-to-day operations of your business, you’ve left a critical gap.

Monster Loyalty: How Lady Gaga Turns Followers Into Fanatics, by Jackie Huba. The author argues that Lady Gaga hasn’t just created a brand but cultivated a fanatical group of consumers—”Little Monsters”—that will follow her for the next two decades of her career and beyond. Huba distills seven key strategies from the Gaga approach.

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The bestselling Heath brothers expose what’s wrong with how decisions are made by our political and business leaders, and by us individually in our personal lives—from how much we save for retirement to choosing a job, spouse or college. By curating the latest psychological research, the authors first reveal why our brains are hardwired to make foolish decisions.

CTRL ALT Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It, by Mitch Joel. According to Joel, we are in business purgatory, but he believes there’s a way of navigating out of it: reboot. Hence the title, a retro reference to the original Windows keyboard combination you’d use when your computer was frozen. Rebooting never moved you forward, but it did allow you to regain stable footing and position you to move in whichever direction you wished.

Disrupt! Think Epic. Be Epic, by Bill Jensen. Using the real-life stories of not only well-known business figures and founders but also everyday innovators who’ve created everything from a Craigslist for people with disabilities to a Pakistani school for young boys who had been indoctrinated into the Taliban, Jensen’s interviews offer an inside look at the character of some of today’s greatest change makers.

The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets, by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits. The authors describe why our economy is primed for a new wave of entrepreneurship using new methods of disruptive innovation, then go on to provide real-world examples of how entrepreneurs are creating new markets and disrupting others. This books shows anyone interested in starting a new business or launching a new idea how to get started creating value.

Compelling People: The Hidden Qualities That Make Us Influential, by John Neffinger and Matthew Kohut. Everyone wants to know how to be more influential. But most of us don’t really think we can have the kind of magnetism or charisma that we associate with someone like Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey or Jon Stewart unless it comes naturally. According to the authors, however, it’s something we can learn, and they show us how in a book that’s already being taught at Harvard, Columbia and Georgetown.

Looptail: How One Company Changed the World by Reinventing Business, by Bruce Poon Tip. Looptail is Tip’s extraordinary first-person account of his entrepreneurial instincts to start and develop G Adventures, a highly successful international travel adventure company. Along the way, he reveals his unusual management secrets that not only keep his employees fully engaged but also keep his customers extremely happy.

The Myths of Creativity: The Truth About How Innovative Companies and People Generate Great Ideas, by David Burkus. Much has been written about creativity in business in an effort to understand just how great ideas are born, and much of it is just plain fiction, according to the author. Based on the latest research into how creative individuals and firms succeed, Burkus sets the record straight on 10 popular but mistaken beliefs.

Confidence: Overcoming Low Self-Esteem, Insecurity, and Self-Doubt, by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Ph.D. An internationally recognized personality expert exposes the dark side of confidence and offers a strong case for the upside of negativity and pessimism. Chamorro-Premuzic shatters much of the conventional thinking about confidence with compelling scientific research. The bottom line: Confidence is overrated.

Create Your Future The Peter Drucker Way, by Bruce Rosenstein. Rosenstein knows more about the most acclaimed management thinker of all time: the late Peter Drucker. He spent many hours with the man, and is both a student and scholar of “the Drucker way.” Drucker was always ahead of his time, but he wasn’t always easy to read, follow, or apply. That’s where this book come, because the author does just that.

NOTE: Republished in slightly different form from my OPEN column.

Monster Loyalty, ala Lady Gaga

Monday, April 29th, 2013

Lady Gaga is one of the most well-known pop artists in the world, which is no surprise given her vocal talents and often bizarre wardrobe. She’s sold 23 million albums, won five Grammy awards, and been named by Forbes as one of the world’s most powerful celebrities.

But behind the public persona lies a shrewd and calculating business professional, a marketing machine which has turned music lovers into a worldwide legion of diehard fans eager to buy her music, her concert tickets, and any and all products related to her. Is this simply a classic case of loyalty marketing and customer cultivation? Perhaps. Apple aside, few businesses can claim a base of zealots anywhere near the same scope and scale.

In Monster Loyalty: How Lady Gaga Turns Followers into Fanatics, author Jackie Huba argues that Lady Gaga has not only created a brand, but is cultivating a fanatical group of consumers that will follow her for the next two decades of her career and beyond.

In four short years, Lady Gaga has built an army of passionate fans that numbers in the tens of millions around the globe. According to Huba, Lady Gaga didn’t become the success she is today based solely on her talent. She did so through the message she inspires and the community she has built around that message.

The Loyalty Playbook

Huba distills seven key strategies from the Gaga approach, which, while individually effective, become a solid business blueprint when taken together:

  1. Focus on Your “One Percenters”: Gaga spends most of her effort on just one percent of her audience, the highly engaged super-fans who drive word of mouth.
  2. Lead with Values: Create an emotional connection with customers by showcasing what you believe in.
  3. Build Community: Connect your most loyal customers with each other to strengthen their bond with you.
  4. Give Fans a Name: Gaga calls her fans her “Little Monsters.” A name gives customers a way to self-identify as part of the group. In fact, Gaga now has her own social network, little monsters.com.
  5. Embrace Shared Symbols: Shared symbols help customers bond by creating a collective experience.
  6. Make Them Feel Like Rock Stars: Become a fan of your fans and find ways to make them feel special.
  7. Generate Something to Talk About: Make your business “word-of-mouth-worthy” by continually giving your fans reasons to talk about you.

5 Insights to Gaga

While these seven lessons seem sensible enough for a pop star, they beg a bit of insight and explanation in order for businesses to learn from them. Here, Huba answers a few questions:

Lady Gaga has such a specific brand and audience. What can the average businessperson really learn from her?

Gaga’s business of show business may be very different from the “average” business, but her focus on growing through devoted customer loyalty is a universal business objective. Most business people know that it’s far cheaper to keep a customer than to get new one. Gaga gets the math. It’s her overarching philosophy to focus on her core advocates, the super-fans, the “Little Monsters.” These advocates will ultimately be evangelists who bring in new customers on their own. This customer philosophy is one that businesses would do well to learn from Gaga.

How do more practical companies partake in her business philosophies without going over the top?

The best ideas sometimes come from the unlikeliest sources, and whether you love her or hate her, you can’t ignore what she has accomplished. I think it’s important to study what she does, how she does it and why, because there are ways to replicate her success in more traditional business settings. In every lesson from Gaga in the book, I highlight how traditional companies—from Whole Foods to MINI—are applying her methods to their customer bases, without having to wear any dresses made from meat.

You call her Little Monsters “One Percenters.” Can you explain this concept a bit more?

The idea of the One Percenters comes from our research during the early days of online community and social media. I looked at online communities and tracked what percentage of members in those communities created content—in other words, who was most engaged.

I found it amounted to just 1 percent of the total community members. This was surprising. The amount of super-engaged community members did not follow the usual 80/20 rule. We discovered that the volume of content creators was much smaller, at just 1 percent. That’s a very small part of the community, and yet it was creating most of the value for the entire community. Our thesis is that these One Percenters are a business’s most diehard customers—the ones who really love the company, buy new products as soon as they are released, give them as gifts and evangelize the company to everyone they know.

“Little Monsters” is a great fit for Lady Gaga, but can you give an example of how a business might “give fans a name”?

One of the best examples of a brand naming its fans is Maker’s Mark, the premium bourbon company out of Loretto, Kentucky. Bill Samuels, Jr., son of the founder, was looking for a way to better connect with the brand’s fanatical customers and created the Maker’s Mark Ambassador program.

Ambassadors are brand evangelists who volunteer to tell others about the product, and encourage bars that didn’t carry the brand at the time to do so. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of Makers Mark Ambassadors who receive custom business cards and fun holiday gifts from the brand, and gather for events at the distillery in Loretto each year.

What’s the most surprising thing you learned while studying Lady Gaga?

Lady Gaga’s business sense impresses me, but her passion for changing the world for the better through any means possible is what truly inspired me to study her. She is influencing an entire generation of young people to stand up for each other, to be more tolerant of differences and to be brave in the face of difficulty.

I have spent hours and hours reading fan comments about how she has changed lives for the better. I have cried watching YouTube videos of kids saying they thought about hurting themselves or ending their lives, but that her belief in them, a woman they don’t even know, kept them from doing it. They listen to her music, especially “Born This Way,” and they feel better about themselves. I believe that if there was ever a candidate to continue Oprah Winfrey’s legacy of inspiring people to live their best lives, it’s this five-foot-one, 26-year-old in a studded bikini.

Give Monster Loyalty a read, because there’s a lot to learn from Lady Gaga. It is trust that engenders loyalty, and there isn’t a business or individual on the planet that couldn’t improve their trust quotient.