Living in More Than One World

Many excellent business-related books were published in 2011; more than most people can either read (or write about) during the year. So we owe a debt of gratitude to the reviewers who help us make sense of what’s been published during that time. Matthew E. May, author of The Shibumi Strategy: A Powerful Way to Create Meaningful Change, has a really useful post on Open Forum, Best Business Books of 2011.  It’s got links to his original reviews of the top books, including one that is on many best-of lists this year, Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs. Matt’s reviews are concise, yet highly descriptive and informative.
Todd Sattersten weighs in with the 11 Best Business Books of 2011. His list includes three also charted by May: the Jobs biography, The Lean Startup by Eric Ries and Practically Radical by William C. Taylor. Todd wrote, with Jack Covert of 800-CEO-READ, the 100 Best Business Books of All Time, recently released in paperback. They have become perhaps the best-known commentators on business books in recent years. The 800-CEO-READ blog also has a running list of candidates for best business book of the year, in such categories as General Business, Leadership, Management and others.
Another helpful guide is the expert advice on offer in Marketplace radio’s best-of list. They polled a variety of people for their top choices, with brief explanations. Examples include author-professor Clay Shirky’s choice of Michael Nielsen’s Reinventing Discovery and Liaquat Ahamed, author of the award-winning Lords of Finance, with Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life.
James Pressley’s article Lehman Trader Goes Mad, Geithner Saves Citi: Top Business Books is Bloomberg.com’s best-of roundup. It starts with 10 books on the financial crisis, five on general business and five on economics. Number one on the latter list is Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman; I wrote about Kahneman and other leading psychologists in a recent post. 2012 will no doubt present us very soon with many candidates for next year’s best-of lists. I hope everyone has a happy and prosperous new year!

As the year winds down, some useful best-of-business-book posts have been published recently, particularly Todd Sattersten’s The Top 10 Business Books of 2010. I saw Todd do terrific presentations at the 2009 and 2010 BK authors marketing workshops, and last year he was the first person to review Living in More Than One World, when he was with 800ceoread. Todd and Jack Covert, the Founder and President of 800ceoread, are the co-authors of a great book, The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. Todd’s new post also includes links to podcast interviews he did with some of the authors on his 10 best list, including Daniel Pink, Seth Godin, Chip Heath and William Poundstone.  Another author on the list, Steven Johnson, was interviewed recently on the 800ceoread blog. In 2008, I interviewed Daniel Pink and reviewed his book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need, for USA TODAY. In 2003, I reviewed Poundstone’s How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft’s Cult of the Puzzle; How the World’s Smartest Company Selects the Most Creative Thinkers, for USAT. Miami Herald columnist Richard Pachter has Pachter’s Picks: The best business books of 2010. It includes three that also made Sattersten’s list: Pink’s Drive, Godin’s Linchpin and Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s Switch. Bloomberg.com’s best-of article is James Pressley’s Paulson Plays Chicken, Rich Get Richer in Best Business Books. Also on his list is Poundstone’s Priceless and Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, and such titles as Crash of the Titans, by my former USAT colleague Greg Farrell, now of the Financial Times. Finally, McCombs Today, the blog of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, has The Best Business Books of 2010, including The Big Short and, in agreement with Pachter, The Great Reset by Richard Florida; and in common with Bloomberg, Fault Lines by Raghuram G. Rajan and Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, by Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, n+1 and Keith Gessen. We will soon start seeing how the best business books of 2011 will unfold. Happy New Year!

Garr Reynolds, on his consistently useful Presentation Zen blog, has a handy and helpful recent post, 10 Tips on how to think like a designer. The ideas and insights he presents have applicability to a wide audience, which was his intention. Whether you are designing a presentation or anything else that people will have to look at and understand, you’re likely to discover things that will help you consider your project in new ways. One of the most provocative tips is the first: embrace constraints. The inclination for most of us is to complain about what we weren’t given to do something, rather than to focus on how to make the best of the situation. Reynolds suggests cold realism instead: “Your problem is what it is. How can you solve it given the resources and time that you have?” Reaching into Zen – Reynolds is based in Japan – tip #3 is to adopt the beginner’s mind. That way you are open and receptive to fresh new ideas and concepts because you are not jaded and shackled by your own experience. In a related manner, he suggests we sharpen our awareness and curiosity of the wonders all around us, all the time. “Good designers are skilled at noticing and observing,” he writes. “They are able to see both the big picture and the details of the world around them.” A running theme through some of the tips is to remember that what you are designing is about the audience — however that is defined — not you. Try to be empathetic and see things from their point of view. I enjoyed Reynolds’ 2008 book presentationzen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery. His next book, presentation zen Design: Basic design principles & techniques for the non-designer, will be published in November.

Guardian.co.uk continues to produce useful, thought-provoking content in easy-to-digest formats. The latest example I’ve discovered is How to Believe. So far, this series of blogs by expert commentators is mainly centered on philosophy, with some religion. Mark Vernon, a multi-talented author, journalist, teacher, broadcaster and former priest in the Church of England is doing a series of eight blogs on Plato; two so far with the next due tomorrow. His next book, Plato’s Podcasts: The Ancients’ Guide to Modern Living, will be published in the UK in October. He does a nice job of setting Plato in context in the two blogs so far, demonstrating his importance in the middle of the linked chain of philosophers between Socrates and Aristotle. In the August 3rd posting, Plato’s dialogues, part 1: Why Plato?, Vernon writes, “We live in an age of religious pluralism, secular innovation and ideological searching. Reading him encourages us to delve deep and refashion a way of life that can speak truth to our own times.” In the August 10th posting, Plato’s Dialogues, part 2: Who was Plato’s Socrates?, Vernon’s interpretations about how we can make uncertainty and the unknown work for us, as we navigate change in our lives, are inspirational. “It might be said that the genius of Plato’s Socrates,” Vernon writes, “was to embrace ordinary human uncertainty and doubt, and fashion it into a flourishing way of life.” This embrace of and desire to reach beyond the unknown can further our creativity, innovation, love and wisdom. The postings have drawn many passionate comments, showing that Vernon has hit a nerve, no matter what you think of his ideas. Kudos to guardian.co.uk for devoting so much thoughtful and impressive coverage to these important areas of life. And to follow more of Vernon’s work, see his own Philosophy and Life blog.

Although her posting ran nearly a month ago, check out Michelle Richmond’s I can’t bear to part with… on sfgate.com, the San Francisco Chronicle’s website. She explains that she is culling her bookshelves, but that some books not only couldn’t go, but “beg to be read again and again.” Some of the ten books on the list are new to me, such as The Palace of Dreams, by Ismail Kadare and The Death of a Beekeeper, by Lars Gustafsson. What initially drew me to her post was the inclusion of one of my all-time favorite books, Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges, as well as A Mathematician’s Apology, by G.H. Hardy. I discovered and read the latter in the past year, and possibly if I had read it in high school (which I theoretically could have, since it was published well before), I might have had a better attitude about studying math. Here is her description of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair: “This perfectly paced novel should be required reading for aspiring writers: a book about narrative, the arbitrariness of fate, and the writer’s subject – wrapped up in a riveting love story.” The whole list is informative, with beautifully written thumbnail descriptions of her keeper books. I then discovered that this shouldn’t be a surprise, as she is a best-selling novelist of such books as No One You Know and The Year of Fog, which is being made into a film. For more, see her website and her own blog, sans serif. She ends her sfgate.com post with the sensible advice that if her readers are cleaning her own shelves, they can donate books to the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. No matter where you live, your local library friends organization can serve the same function if you are doing similar book culling.

Another brief entry today, to note a follow-up to yesterday’s blog about my guest post on the Leader to Leader Institute blog. My new book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, is now featured as the recommended reading on Leader to Leader’s July online newsletter, Leading Today. The newsletter has lots of interesting material, including Susan Phillips Bari’s President’s Letter about the July 13th inaugural event of the Hesselbein Global Leadership Academy at the University of Pittsburgh. The Academy is named for Leader to Leader Institute Chairman and Founding President Frances Hesselbein, who wrote the foreword to my book. The keynote address was delivered by Jim Collins. The newsletter also has an account of a June conference in Seoul, South Korea (attended by Hesselbein, Bari and Leader to Leader Board Secretary Geneva Johnson) The Key to Responsible High-Performing Society, “the first of a series of events being held around the world to honor Peter Drucker’s life and work on the centennial of his birth.” My book was also the subject of a great July 23rd post by Stephen Abram, on his widely-followed Stephen’s Lighthouse blog.  Stephen is Vice President of Innovation for SirsiDynix. He references Drucker’s keynote address at the SLA annual conference in Los Angeles in 2002, and that “Drucker would have been 100 this year, just like SLA.”

A short post today to note that I’ve written more on the back story of my new book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, in a guest post, The Privilege of Writing a Book about Peter Drucker, on the Leader to Leader Institute blog. Frances Hesselbein, the Chairman and Founding President of Leader to Leader, wrote the foreword to my book. From 1990-2002, the organization was called the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, and Drucker played an active role. But well before those years, Hesselbein also worked with him when she was the CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, and he did considerable pro bono work for the organization. Besides the above guest post, I did another, Drucker’s Wisdom: Five Nuggets, for my publisher, Berrett-Koehler, in the July 23 edition of their lively and informative bi-weekly online newsletter, the BKCommuniqué. My book is also one of the spotlight features in the newsletter, which is free and well worth subscribing to. It continues to be an exciting time for me as I’m starting to hear early, encouraging feedback from people who have read the book. I would love to hear more, whether or not you’ve finished reading it!

As I noted in my previous post, the major reason I attended the American Library Association annual conference in Chicago from July 10-14 was to do the first signing for my new book Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life. Today I’ll briefly note some of the sessions I attended, with links to investigate further. Although I have been teaching since 1996, I still learned a lot from Preparing Yourself to Teach: Touching all the Bases, sponsored by LIRT (Library Instruction Round Table). The three presenters (Lisa Hinchliffe and Beth Woodard, both of the University of Illinois-Urbana; and Monika Antonelli, Minnesota State University) all had interesting perspectives on developing teaching skills. The increasing importance and intricacies of digital collections was examined in Collecting for Digital Repositories: New Ways to Disseminate and Share Information. The three speakers (Paul Royster; University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Sayeed Choudhury, Johns Hopkins University and Dianne McCutcheon, National Library of Medicine) made their subject seem doable, even with its inherent complexities. Michigan-based public librarians Holly Hibner and Mary Kelly led a lively session aimed at public library reference librarians, Thingamabobs and Doodads: Why Tech Support IS Reference. I enjoyed talking to both afterwards, and discovered that their blog, Awful Library Books, is developing a cult following. The Power of XML to Enhance Work Flow and Discovery explained and demystified a lot about the history and practical applications of XML in libraries. I had interesting conversations afterwards with both presenters, Patrick Yott of Brown University and David Ruddy of Cornell University. Finally, the Library History Round Table Edward G. Holley Lecture, Five Studies of Readers of Journalism, by David Paul Nord, a journalism and history professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, was a thought-provoking way for me to end the conference. I also enjoyed my brief talk with him after his lecture. Tomorrow, one final ALA-related post on my encounters with a few participants who are not librarians, and have no connection to my book.

My four days at the 100th annual conference of the Special Libraries Association/SLA, in Washington, D.C are over. As I mentioned in earlier posts, I met many new people, reconnected with old friends and colleagues – including a number I had worked with during my 21 years at USA TODAY – and saw many of my former students, including two from the first class I taught, in 1996.  Nearly 6,000 information professionals from around the world attended, a 16% increase over last year’s conference; quite an accomplishment in this economy. The information sessions I attended were very good, and the INFO-EXPO hall had many interesting vendors. It was a great way to learn not only about new products and services, but to find out about information products and services from a wide variety of large and small organizations through quick demos and talking with people working at the booths. A conference of this size would not be possible without vendors’ financial participation.  Check out more about the conference – either if you didn’t attend, or if you attended but want to find out what you missed, since there were so many things going on simultaneously – at these blogs: SLA blog, Infotoday blog (from the editors of Information Today) and Stephen’s Lighthouse, the regular blog of information world luminary Stephen Abram. There are handouts from the conference on the SLA site, which I found through Gary Price’s ever-helpful Resource Shelf.  Next year’s SLA Annual Conference will be held June 13-16, 2010 in New Orleans. I’ll resume blogging in a few days, so I can concentrate on a two-day Berrett-Koehler Authors Cooperative marketing workshop, starting Thursday and hosted by ASTD, the American Society of Training & Development, in Alexandria, Va.

Coverage of religion and spirituality has been downsized or eliminated by many newspapers in recent years. But there still is a lot of writing and reporting about these topics online, on radio and television and in magazines. Some newspapers have shifted more of their coverage away from print into blogs. Cathy Lynn Grossman, who covers this beat for USA TODAY both in the newspaper itself and in her Faith & Reason blog, presents four concise profiles of journalists who currently or have reported on religion, each of whom have personal books on the subject, in A window into the faith of religion reporters. The four, and their books are: Barbara Bradley Hagerty (National Public Radio; Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality); Peter Manseau (editor of Search: The Magazine of Science, Religion and Culture; Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead); Cathleen Falsani, (Chicago Sun-Times religion columnist and blogger; Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace) and William Lobdell (former Los Angeles Times religion reporter; Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace).  Cathy, who is a former colleague of mine at USA TODAY, does a nice job of weaving together material about the books with personal information on the authors and quotes from each. The different takes by each author on their state of belief (and now unbelief, in Lobdell’s case) hints at the immensity of the world of religion, and why it’s a subject that deserves to be explored and covered seriously by the media.