So, there are two kinds of business books.
The first kind contains a simple truth and then tries to persuade you to actually do something.
The second needs a big pad of paper and a pencil. This is the kind of book that covers the mechanics of a skill. Things like process control or cost accounting.
Josh comes through with a big ol list of the first type. Link: Josh Kaufman: Inside My Bald Head: The Josh Kaufman "Personal MBA" Program.
like me!
There’s no real purpose to this site, but I have to confess, on the twentieth anniversary of my first book being published, it did make me smile. It creates your name out of your book covers. Since I used to be a book packager, there’s a lot of unsold titles to choose from.
Link: amaztype. Thanks to Cory at Boing Boing for the link.
Thanks, Faisal, for the pointer.
Link: The Tao of Mac – blog/2005-03-12.
A lot too much inside baseball blog talk lately. Here’s a riff from the other side–if you’re blogging to help your career, maybe you should think twice.
Brandplay recommends its top 10 as part of my 30 books.
Link: Confessions of a Brand Evangelist: Top 10 Brand Books (Seth Godin’s MBA Program in Action).
Feel free to send links to your own lists. No promises, though.
Got some synergistic mail from Adam and Jeff.
Yes, it’s weird and cool and clever… and Purple. The best part is that is exactly what the team set out to do.
Link: BATMAN: NEW TIMES.
PS Art Asylum does some very very cool things with toys. They’re not actually Lego, but if you remember Lego, you’ll feel the Proustian thing happening.
My old college chum David Schatsky says that Jupiter is right and I am wrong about the cookie statistic (40% of American net users delete their cookies every month, with a significant percentage doing it every day). Hey, there are some states where people don’t even brush their teeth that often.
I will happily stand corrected if Jupiter is that sure of the data. What’s fascinating though is that among all the mail I got from my sophisticated reader base, not one person wrote in to tell me she deletes her cookies daily.
Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine … by Jeff Jarvis) thought it might be automated software that’s automatically doing the work. One writer (nameless) thinks it’s people covering their porn tracks. I think it might be survey design and people saying they do something they don’t really do.
means friend of a friend.
Link: Social networks: All around the Net, but underused by news sites.
This is such a loaded expression. It starts with "friend". Not a formal relationship, but a tenuous one. And a relationship that doesn’t belong to you! The friendship is between your friend and her friend.
The very idea of utilizing a FOAF network for your own gain is scary. Scarier still is allowing your FOAF network to be used by someone else to make a profit.
There are firms sprouting up every day promising big companies that they will do just that. That they’ll organize and exploit FOAF networks to product big profits for corporations. It might work for a little while, but not for long.
The reason is the tenuous nature of the friendships. The fourth person in the chain (marketer, you, your friend, your friend’s friend) is awfully low on the totem pole.
So what works? Two things:
1. Smooth, simplify and formalize the process of spreading the idea so if an idea is worth spreading, it’ll run into less friction. The white headphones on the iPod, for example, amplify the message of the player even when someone can’t see it.
2. Make stuff that people want to spread even if they don’t care about you. The Republicans definitely got this right during the last election cycle.
Rob Walker has a great piece in this weekend’s Times magazine
I’ve gotten more mail about my MBA post than any in weeks and weeks. And all the mail says the same thing:
"What are the 30 books?"
I’ve got three answers. Here’s the first one:
There aren’t 30 books. There is no tiny canon of the essential books, that once read, will transform you into Warren Buffet or Mark Cuban. There are 300 books, though, and choosing an appropriate variety from the 300 will work just fine.
The point of my post was that the knowledge required is pretty small. The will is hard to find, of course, but you don’t find will at business school.
Over the next week or two, I’ll try to give an answer that some of you may find more satisfying.
So, for 119 Harvard MBA students, the phone rings. "Buddy, you’re not going to be admitted to the MBA program because you decoded a poorly written website and found out your admissions status too soon." [This means, of course, that for the next two years, you don’t have to pay Harvard more than $150,000 in room and board and lost wages, and you can build your own business or join a non-profit or run for the Senate].
So what’s the bad news?
Plenty of handwringing about the ethics or lack thereof in this case (the media loves the turmoil) but I think a more interesting discussion is what a gift these 119 people got. An MBA has become a two-part time machine. First, the students are taught everything they need to know to manage a company from 1990, and second, they are taken out of the real world for two years while the rest of us race as fast as we possibly can.
I get away with this heresy since I, in fact, have my own fancy MBA from Stanford. The fact is, though, that unless you want to be a consultant or an i-banker (where a top MBA is nothing but a screen for admission) it’s hard for me to understand why this is a better use of time and money than actual experience combined with a dedicated reading of 30 or 40 books.
If this is an extension of a liberal arts education, with learning for learning’s sake, I’m all for it. If, on the other hand, it’s a cost-effective vocational program, I don’t get it.
Yes, I know what the Black Scholes equation is. No, I don’t understand it. And no, I don’t need it. Do you?
Link: PCWorld.com – Harvard Rejects Applicants Who Hacked Site.
