Tag: Mitch Joel

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.

CTRL ALT Delete

Friday, June 21st, 2013

Any book with “Delete” in the title is bound to catch my eye. Which is why I picked up Mitch Joel’s new book, CTRL ALT Delete. I’m glad I did, because I liked the book. (Disclosure: I’m a fan Mitch’s writing, and spoke to him at length last year on the subject of subtraction.)

According to Mitch, we are in business purgatory. “The transition of all industries into the fully-digital future leaves everybody caught in a middle ground,” he writes. “It’s not heaven, it’s not hell, and it’s very confusing. Businesses and employees are not sure where things are headed or what they must do to survive and thrive.”

Mitch believes he has a way of navigating out of this business purgatory: 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.

5 Key Movements Reshaping Business

The book is in two parts, Reboot: Business and Reboot: You, and describes the five movements underway that Mitch believes are changing business, and the reason a reboot is necessary.

1. Direct relationships. Consumers expect not just a direct relationship but, increasingly, an on-demand one. “It’s less about simply responding in a timely fashion to a customer service issue and much more about how to build a true and sustainable lifelong value with customers.”

2. Consumer utility. People don’t want your products and services. They want help solving a problem. They want the kind of practical value that simple utility brings.

3. Active media. One-way communication is a thing of the past. “We have moved well beyond the shiny, bright object of social media,” Joel writes, “and into a world where consumers not only are publishers of their own content, but engage with media in an active way.”

4. Beyond data. If you’re not converting data into insight and information, and actively addressing the paradox between oversharing, consumer privacy and the ability to deliver highly personalized marketing, you’re already behind.

5. One screen. “It’s not about three screens or four screens,” Mitch argues. “It’s not about the Web, mobile, touch, and what consumers are doing in their physical lives. It’s about the reality that the only screen that matters, going forward, is the one screen in front of the consumer’s face. This one-screen world is going to make the Web, social media, and e-commerce … look like a joke in terms of size, magnitude and business opportunity.”

7 Ways to Become Invaluable

“The five movements have happened and their unfolding is beginning to take place now,” Mitch writes. “To take advantage of them, you will have to change as well.”

According to Mitch, you need to embrace seven things to be an invaluable entrepreneur.

1. Digital first. Take a digital-first posture, which demands transparency, openness and kindness. As Mitch states, “If you’re not listening, monitoring and responding to people and their concerns (or accolades), your competitors will. Currently, the act of being kind to consumers is being forced on companies, and we should all look to change—not because our consumers are demanding it, but because it’s the right thing to do. Because it’s who we really are.”

2. Get squiggly. Forget the linear path to success: school, job, up the ladder. “The most successful and interesting entrepreneurs and businesspeople don’t have a very linear path,” writes Mitch. “In fact, it’s actually very squiggly. Always bear that in mind. Embrace the squiggle.”

3. Be entrepreneurial. Waiting for an opportunity won’t cut it. As Mitch defines it, “An entrepreneur is someone who has an uncanny desire to create the future.”

4. Market yourself. Rapid, consistent, compelling content and storytelling is the new advertising. “If you’re looking to create a true mark and to get people to remark about everything that you’re doing,” Joel urges, “you only have one major mission when it comes to marketing yourself and the business that you represent: Go out there and create some great stories. Please.”

5. Work anywhere. The modern workspace isn’t focused on square footage, but on flexibility and agility, to be “more actively in tune with the digital nomad that is the new employee and the ‘anywhere’ work space.” Think beyond “the office” and design your space to promote creative connection, collision and collaboration.

6. Think startup. You don’t have to run a startup to think and act like one. Mitch argues that, “What we’re seeing is a world where the next generation is not looking for (or even concerned with) job security and a pension, but rather governing their careers and guiding their future by the lessons learned from some of Silicon Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs and innovators. It makes you wonder if being a small startup (in your professional attitude and in how you run your day-to-day business) is the future of big business.”

7. Embrace what’s next. Mitch lists a handful of emerging trends to watch and capitalize on: the hacker culture, horizontal marketing, the rise of the indie brand, less-is-more marketing, controlling technology and virtual goods.

CTRL ALT Delete is chock full of practical takeaways in the form of multiple lessons, tips and techniques for each movement and trigger. And that’s what makes it an effective manual on rebooting your business and your life.

(Note: A version of this post appeared on my OPEN column.)