Books

My Steve Jobs problem

November 15, 2011

In business, and in life, we’d like to believe that good behavior will be rewarded. Most books on management talk about treating people with respect, or being firm but not harsh, or being generous about sharing credit. What goes around comes around, right? Right.

So what are we to make of Steve Jobs?

Walter Isaacson

I’ve just read Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson’s riveting biography of the Apple founder and CEO. It’s a terrific book, but an unnerving one–because Jobs was successful despite some sneaky dealings, despite his utter lack of interest in corporate social responsibility, at least as it is conventionally defined, and despite treating people in ways that violate most everything that’s taught at business schools, or, for that matter, in kindergarten.

He could be cold, unpleasant, petulant, arrogant, abusive and self-absorbed. What’s more, this dark side of Jobs seems to be  intertwined with his brilliant and obsessive devotion to making great products at Apple. A “demented genius,” one reviewer called him. Having said that, Jobs could also be sweet, vulnerable, boyish, charming and endearing–when he chose to be.

It’s hard to overstate what Jobs accomplished in his 56 years. No, he didn’t cure cancer or alleviate global poverty but he remade a half dozen industries, all with panache: personal computers, music, animated movies (with Pixar), phones, tablet computing and digital publishing. My life is richer, more fun and more productive because of Jobs. I’m writing this on a MacBook, and I own an iPhone4s, an iPad, and a bunch of iPods. I’ve run hundreds of miles with my Nano, loaded with podcasts or music from iTunes, and  I’ve spent, conservatively, close to $10,000 on Apple products for myself, my wife and daughters. [click to continue…]

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Daniel Yergin: Why shale gas is like Walmart

November 8, 2011

The breakthrough energy innovation of the 21st century is not thin-film solar, sophisticated wind turbines, advanced biofuels or small-scale nukes.

It’s shale gas.

So says Daniel Yergin, the energy guru and author of The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World (Penguin, $35), who was interviewed today (Nov. 8) by Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Institute in Washington. Yergin, the best-selling author, consultant and all-around energy guru, is right: The ability to extract natural gas from shale, using a controversial technique known as fracking, is reshaping America’s energy landscape.

“So far this century, this is the biggest innovation in energy, in terms of scale and impact,” Yergin said. He likened its impact on the energy business to the arrival of a new Walmart in town, which shakes up competitors, big and small.

The impact of cheap, abundant natural gas on energy usage has enormous implications for the climate crisis.

Cleaner-burning gas could replace dirty coal as a fuel to generate electricity. Then again, Yergin said: “It’s does create a more challenging marketplace for wind and solar and everything else.” [click to continue…]

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How you can help end malaria

September 7, 2011

I’m a lover of books and I’m guessing you are, too.

So you know that books can lead you to think differently about life, perhaps improve your life, maybe even change your life.

Today, I’m writing about a book that will quite literally save lives. Indeed, that’s why it was created.

The book is called End Malaria: Bold Innovation, Limitless Generosity, and the Opportunity to Save a Life. It’s the brainchild of a writer and editor named Michael Bungay Stanier, and you can buy it here. End Malaria is published by The Domino Project, a Seth Godin book publishing venture with which I am loosely affiliated.*

End Malaria  is a collection of 62 essays–some inspirational, others practical–from a wide range of business thinkers and doers. They include personal-finance guru Dave Ramsey, productivity guru David Allen, Premal Shah of Kiva [See my blogpost, Kiva: pushing the envelope on green),  wine guy and social-media maven Gary Vaynerchuk, Wired magazine founder and author Kevin Kelly, pursuer of excellence Tom Peters, and authors Patrick Lencioni, Dan Pink and Tony Schwartz. An impressive group, to be sure.

Like most compilations, this one is a mixed bag. There's a bit too much breahtless inspiration for me, but I'm someone for whom a little inspiration goes a long way. Dream big dreams! Pursue your passion! Believe in yourself! Speak out! Just do it! (Some of the contributors might want to think about switching to decaf.) Having said that, even as someone who's not a bigtime reader of self-help writing or business advice, I found lots to value here--ideas that were worth well more than the $20 price tag of the Kindle edition or $25 cost of the paperback.

A few of my favorite nuggets:

To tackle something most productively, you must begin in clear space. Physically, you need all your tools in order, plus an open table for spreading your raw elements and assembling structures. Psychically, you meed an empty head, clear of distractions and unfinished business, holding your attention hostage. - David Allen, The Strategic Value of Clear Space

Researchers have found a surprising link between daydreaming and creativity--people who daydream more are also better at generating new ideas. - Jonah Lehrer, Don't Pay Attention

There are countless hours scheduled for operations, sales, reporting, finance, efficiency gains and human resources--yet very few people actually schedule time to think, create and invent. -- Josh Linkner, What's Your Idea Schedule?

There's a major cultural shift happening. Because people are more connected than ever on the Web, we're going back in time and living under small-town rules....This is a monumental shift--we're now in a marketplace where every whisper about your business gets heard. - Gary Vaynerchuk, The Best Marketing Strategy Ever

These are just my own favorites; you'll discover others. The real genius of this book is the generosity behind it, and a business model that delivers the overwhelming majority of the revenues--that's revenues, not profits-- to charity.

Michael Bungay Stanier

Michael Bungay Stanier, the editor, says $20 from every sale will go to Malaria No More. ** That’s 100% of the Kindle price, and 80% of the print copy. (The remaining $5 covers production costs.) All the writers wrote for free, to their credit. The Domino Project isn’t taking any money from sales, either. Michael isn’t taking any money, and Amazon is a supporter, too, which is one reason why End Malaria is only available through Amazon.

“It’s an amazing business model,” Michael said, on a call yesterday, one that couldn’t have been arranged with a conventional publisher. He took on the job without pay, he explained, in order to live up to the message of his last book, which was called Do More Great Work.

Michael has also raised about $100,000 from corporate sponsors, including Ashley Sleep and HubSpot, all of which goes directly to Malaria No More. Media sponsors ranging from Huffington Post to The Onion have agreed to promote the book. So have the authors.

Very cool.

 

 

 

* I don’t get paid to be park of what The Domino Project calls its “street team.” The publisher sends me a free book, and when I am so inclined, as I was here, I help spread the word about the books.

** Another member of The Domino Project “street team” checked out Malaria No More on www.givewell.org, a website that assesses charities, and they are not rated. I emailed them and they told me that 84.7% of the money they raise actually goes to fighting malaria. That satisfies me.

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Let’s do away with CSR

July 10, 2011

Maybe it’s time t0 do away with corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Not merely the words and the idea but the infrastructure: CSR departments, CSR reports, CSR conferences and CSR executives.

And, as long as we’re at it, let’s think about ditching the triple bottom line, the pursuit of shared value, corporate citizenship and especially, yuk, the idea that stakeholders deserve a say in how to run a business.

All of these are, at best, distractions and, at worst, ways of thinking about business that create a separation between a company’s core business and its impact on the world. Both ought to be life-enhancing. No more and no less.

I’ve been thinking about CSR and how to talk about it for years.  I wrote my first article on corporate responsibility for FORTUNE in 2003. It ran under an odd headline — Tree Huggers, Soy Lovers and Profits — because my editors knew that  words like corporate social responsibility turn off readers. I grappled with the meaning and terminology of CSR again in my 2004 book, Faith and Fortune, which explored connections between religion, faith, values, spirituality and business. The language of faith and values, I subsequently decided, wasn’t the best one to use when speaking to corporate executives about business and its impact. I’m now inclined to talk about sustainability. For all its vagueness, corporate sustainability is an idea that is both practical–no one wants to kill their company–and radical, because no company  is truly sustainable, at least as defined by the Bruntland Commission as promoting development in a way that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”

But the here goes beyond language. I was reminded of that when reading an excellent new book by Carol Sanford called The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Success (Jossey-Bass, 2011). No, I don’t love the title or even her terminology. (One chapter is  called, yikes, “Stakeholders as Systemic Collaborators.”) But Carol’s arguments and insights (and the title wasn’t her idea) are spot on. Carol argues that the most successful and profitable businesses, over time, will not be those that “practice CSR” but instead those that rethink their purpose, reorganize themselves to draw upon the creativity and passion of all, and integrate responsible behavior into the way they do everything they do.

As Carol writes:

Responsibility isn’t a set of metrics to be tracked or behaviors to be modified. It is central to both the purpose and prosperity of a business and must be pervasive in its practices.

This may sound obvious but it leads her (and her readers) to new ways of thinking about business. Businesses, she says, should strive not just to minimize the harm they do, but to do good, to become restorative, to “improve and evolve healthy systems.” She explains: [click to continue…]

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Self Reliance never goes out of style

May 25, 2011

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I haven’t read Ralph Waldo Emerson since college, but recently had the occasion to revisit Self Reliance.

It’s wonderful, readable, short (88 pages), very contemporary and, of course, quotable.

To wit:

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Or, famously:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

And

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

Relevant, no? And relevant, I think, to the theme of this blog, which is how all of us can harness the power of business to solve the world’s most important problems. [click to continue…]

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Reader faves: Best books about green business

May 15, 2011

Thanks for your emails and comments to my post last week, Best books in corporate sustainability? Not surprisingly, there was no consensus on what books are best–probably 200 books in were recommended–although many, many people suggested the writings of Paul Hawken and Bill McDonough. I don’t want to overwhelm you by listing all of the books that were recommended by email,  but here are some of my favorites as well as a few selections from last week’s comments, which can be found here.

From sustainability consultant Gil Friend, the ceo of Natural Logic:

My current picks:
> New: Climate Capitalism, Hunter Lovins & Boyd Cohen
> Venerable: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth – R. Buckminster Fuller
> Practical: The Truth About Green Business – Gil Friend
> Inspiring: Confessions of a Radical Industrialist – Ray Anderson

There are many more good ones, so here’s TriplePundit.com’s [year-old] list of the “must read” sustainability books:
http://www.triplepundit.com/2010/02/sustainable-mba-crash-course/

A classic suggestion came from Keli Rae McMillen of Winter Park, CO, who send me a PDF of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as this quote from Emerson’s History:

In old Rome the public roads beginning at the Forum proceeded north, south, east, west, to the centre of every province of the empire, making each market-town of Persia, Spain, and Britain pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so out of the human heart go, as it were, highways to the heart of every object in nature, to reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer to natures out of him, and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live without a world.
(Coincidentally, I’ll have some news about Emerson later this month but I can’t say more now.)

Steve Schein, a longtime business exec who now teaches sustainability at Southern Oregon University, sent a Top 20 list: [click to continue…]

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Best books on corporate sustainability?

May 9, 2011

Judging by the number of books about business and the environment piling up on my shelves, the corporate sustainability movement is alive and well.

One of the best is Business Lessons from a Radical Industrialist by Ray Anderson, the founder and chairman of the commercial carpet company Interface.

I’ve been provided with two signed copes of the paperback edition to give away. I’m expecting a signed copy of Howard Schultz’s book, which I’m also going to give to a blog reader. More on that, in a moment.

But first, a few thoughts about Ray and his book. Ray is a terrific guy who has had a great influence on business people across America, by tirelessly promoting the idea that a truly sustainable approach to business  is good for business. (See my 2009 interview, Ray Anderson, Radical Industrialist.) “Take nothing from the earth that cannot be replaced by the earth” is how he puts it. [click to continue…]

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Journalism: The Internet giveth, the Internet taketh away

April 20, 2011

Notwithstanding the terrible decline of newspapers, it is an exciting time to be a writer–and reader–of nonfiction.

I could spend half my time reading blogs, and the other half writing this one. (All too often, it feels like I do, alas.)

Now, thanks to  the Internet, which has hollowed out much of the traditional news media, here come a rush of new opportunities to publish and distribute high-quality journalism and good writing of all kinds. Read on, because most of the works that I’m about to describe are available free or at a very low cost:

Seth Godin’s Domino Project: This publishing venture, backed by Amazon, today released its second book, a 98-page manifesto called Do the Work by Steven Pressfield. It’s about getting things done, and overcoming a force that Pressfield  describes as Resistance. (Pressfield is probably best known as the author of The Legend of Bagger Vance, which became a movie starring Will Smith and Matt Damon.) Do the Work will help keep you focused on the project at hand, and while it’s applicable to any big undertaking–a book, a business venture, a philanthropic project, a new romance–it strikes me as particularly useful for those of us who write and are easily distracted by, say, spending half the day reading blogs.

You can read an excerpt from Do The Work in Fast Company. Better yet, you can download the Kindle edition of the ebook for free, thanks to an unusual sponsorship deal with GE. Lest you fear that you’ll be assaulted with ads….don’t worry.  GE offers a few harmless platitudes in the beginning of the book (“A remarkable thing happens when you bring together employees who are driven to make a difference: They do.”) and after scanning them you’ll be on your way. [click to continue…]

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Why we’re not as smart as we think we are

March 20, 2011

Whether it’s the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant, or last year’s BP oil spill, or the 2008 collapse of the housing market, or the difficulty the U.S. is having in Iraq and Afghanistan, the headlines on any given day should make us humble.

They don’t.

We humans make lots of mistakes, some terribly costly, and yet we continue to believe that we are smarter than we are.

We don’t even understand ourselves very well.

David Brooks, The New York Times columnist, has written a couple of excellent columns about overconfidence–see The Fatal Conceit from 2009 and, more recently, The Modesty Manifesto – and in his best-selling new book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement, he takes a broader and deeper look at how people and societies are shaped by “the unconscious realm of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, character traits, and social norms.” Much of this, by definition, is invisible to us.

I’m a Brooks fan, so I went to hear him speak last week at The Aspen Institute in Washington. (Here’s the video.) He was funnier in person than he is in print.  (“I know many people in the audience. I know you didn’t come here to hear me speak. You came to hear yourself speak. So I’ll try to be brief.) He told a few stories about politicians and how they have “phenomenal social skills,” yet they consistently underestimate the role of emotion, passion and irrationality when they make policy. [click to continue…]

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Seth Godin, book publishing and me

March 8, 2011

The Internet has not been kind to gatekeepers, middlemen, and those who depend on centralized power and control. Just ask the stockbrokers and travel agents who lived off their commissions (before eTrade and Expedia), the newspapers that monopolized classified ads (before Craigslist), the record companies who packaged CDs (before iTunes) and Hosni Mubarak who controlled communications in Egypt (before Facebook and Twitter).

Book publishers–who have historically been the only way for authors to get their words in front of readers–could be next.

Seth Godin

In my latest column for Cisco’s website about technology, news@cisco, I look at a new, disruptive book-publishing venture called The Domino Project, launched recently by the brilliant marketer and entrepreneur, Seth Godin.  Seth and his colleagues invited me to be part of a support group called the Domino Project Street Team, which is helping to spread the word about Domino and its new books.

Seth’s own book Poke the Box, an instant business bestseller, is the first one out of the Domino Project. Next month will bring be a manifesto by ex-Marine (and author of The Legend of Bagger Vance) Steven Pressfield called Do the Work. Domino plans to publish short, accessible, low-cost, easily-shared books in a variety of formats that will help people change their lives, and the world.

Quick aside: The most surprising thing I learned when reporting this story is that a 26-year-old blogger and novelist named Amanda Hocking has sold nearly 1 million books in less than a year–without the help of a publisher.

Whether all this is a good thing–for writers, for readers, for the rest of us–depends on how you feel about gatekeepers in general and book publishers in particular.

I love newspapers and magazines, the gatekeepers who have enabled me to earn a very good living since I left college many moons ago. I’m also a big-time consumers of newspapers and magazines.  If I had to choose between giving up The New York Times, and giving up all the blogs I read….I’d probably give up the blogs. Fortunately, that’s not a choice any of us have to make.

Book publishers are, in my view, more like travel agents or stockbrokers than they are like newspaper owners. They’re distributors and marketers who as a rule don’t add a lot of value. I’m interested in seeing a world where books can take on many more shapes and forms (shorter, longer, e-books, audio books, PDFs) and where more authors have a chance to connect directly to readers. That’s what Seth is trying to create with The Domino Project.

Here’s how the story begins:

Seth Godin’s first book failed because of Vanna White.

My last book was crushed by George Bush and John Kerry.

The book publishing industry is stuck in a rut. It desperately needs new ideas.

That’s why Seth and I are both excited about his new venture: The Domino Project, a publishing platform that uses the power of social media to help writers spread their ideas and connect to readers.

The Domino Project’s first book is an 85-page manifesto by Godin called Poke the Box, which was published March 1. It’s about starting things, making changes and learning in today’s fast-moving economy.

You can read the rest here.

Here’s Seth on video, talking about  about Poke the Box and the Domino Project.

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