Marty Neumeier: Zag
Picks up where Ries and Trout left off.
W. Chan Kim: Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
Almost brilliant. Their discussion of how to create new markets (kind of like differentiation on steroids) is fantastic. I would have liked to have seen just a wee bit more "how-to."
Darrell Mullis: The Accounting Game : Basic Accounting Fresh from the Lemonade Stand
If you want to really understand accounting (and you'd better), this book brings it home. Deceptively simple, it uses the lemonade stand throughout as its analogy. From balance sheets to cash flow, you'll finally start to see it.
Harry G. Frankfurt: On Bullshit
This one's fun because, well... it's about bullshit :)
Al Ries: The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR
Al is the grandad of modern marketing. In this book he is reborn and explains why traditional advertising doesn't work the way it used to. And tells you what works instead.
Harry Beckwith: Selling the Invisible : A Field Guide to Modern Marketing
This was the first business book that I ever really connected with. I reread it often. If you run a service business, read it. If you don't? Read it.
JACK STACK: The Great Game of Business
When I read this, it became so obvious: Give your people a stake in the game, good or bad, and they will learn to love it the way you do.
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This is a truly astonishing article. It chronicles the very limited, rogue trial by a tiny fraction of hospitals and doctors to not lie by default when they make a mistake.
Yep, they are, against most advice and some twisted conventional wisdom, going to try the option of apologizing for mistakes and doing their best to make things right.
The final nail is in the municipal WiFi coffin. It's fitting that it is also in its birthplace.
If only someone would have predicted this...
So I gave up TV about 3 years ago. And I get a lot of different responses when I tell people that. Some think I'm crazy. Some think I'm making a political statement. Most, I suspect, think that I am posturing myself as a bohemian hipster of some sort. A poet.
But it really didn't start as much. I moved into a building with no cable. And I wasn't going to live there long. So I silently protested the purchase of a $500 Satellite box, by having nothing at all.
It was uncomfortable at first. I was used to just...having it there. The familiar "bum-bum" of Law and Order keeping me company in the background. Casually perusing through the channels stumbling upon a Seinfeld rerun, or a Hitler documentary. Sometimes watching really excellent stuff too, like Battelestar, or Discovery. But in truth, I rarely sought out content, even with Tivo. I would just....have it on.
So when I moved into my new place, I figured I had gone a year without TV, and that I should get me some cable. But I had changed. I had found other things to do. I interact with the world differently. I just never watched it, and so I cut it off 3 months later.
I still watch shows sometimes. Either on AppleTV, or from Netflix. But there is something about the...deliberate... nature of my consumption now that reduces it by a factor of ten. I never have anything on in the background. TV does not keep me company.
I didn't fully understand the meaning of it all until I stumbled upon this article. The author makes a great point- a societal-changing point about the meaning TV has had in the world since it became popular. That is was our response to something we had never really had much of before the 20th century. Free time.
I don't know if it's true or not. But it sure is an interesting read.
For me? Much happier. Much more productive. A political, bohemian, crazy poet.
