In my previous post, Google’s Innovative Rule, I stressed how innovation is an integral part of a companies DNA. Innovation drives companies forward; it’s the prized horse pulling your carriage. Innovation, in its simplest definition, is solving problems. In a holistic view, isn’t this what most companies, service or non-service, are attempting to accomplish? Does your company promote an innovative culture? Is it welcomed with open arms like the scene in movies where two lovers are running in slow motion to meet each other?

If not maybe you should hand out copies of Spark by John Winsor to employees. Spark is dedicated to finding that innovative “spark” within your team/company. We get to meet 16 leading businesspeople – from entrepreneurs, brand managers, CEO’s – who provide their insight and recommendations on getting innovation to work. The book is broken down into 4 sections: the “Team”, the “Customer”, the “Culture”, and the “Company”. In each chapter we get to meet, through interviews, those who are innovating at that level. At the end of each interview we are given ‘Tools’, or highlights of each persons interview, and ‘Resources’, which are web pages, books, magazine articles and any other types of media which support their message. The book does an excellent job of providing many insights. There is no way you can read this book and not take away ideas to implement into your own work/team/company. As the author suggests, tear out pages! Write in it! Draw in it! It’s the workbook for innovation.

Check out the Spark blog for more insights about the book and innovation.

Anyone who has attempted ‘networking’, whether it be through colleagues or friends, understands that it can be an unsuccessful experience. You enter the process with the goal to make a new business prospect, or possibly a contact for a new career move, but it ends far from where your expectations were. You handed your card with contact information out, but never heard back from the individual again. That’s what networking is, isn’t it? When it’s all said and done you tell yourself you will never network again. Don’t abandon your hope! Keith Ferrazzi is here to help. In what could be dubbed ‘networking for dummies’, the author has published Never Eat Alone, a relationship-building book that details the techniques that have made him one of the most successful connected individuals of our time.

He begins by walking us through the mind set one has to establish to build relationships. Don’t be that guy handing out his business card to anyone with a heartbeat. You have to work hard at making generosity being the fuel that drives your networking engine. Ask yourself: What can I provide the person I want to build the relationship with, and better yet, why do they need it? It may take a while to ‘build your brand’ as the author says, but once you’ve established your brand, or your mission, you can build relationships. With your new mind set understood, he provides us with the skills needed to capitalize on that mindset, and the practices needed to make irelationships long lasting. One practice worth mentioning is ‘following up’. Once the initial meeting or introduction has taken place you need to follow up the contact. This is the weak link in many attempts at networking. Without the follow up you can’t continue onto building worthwhile relationships.

When reading through the book, you’ll most likely think to yourself ‘Oh, that’s what I’m doing wrong!’ Ditch all previous notions of networking when reading Never Eat Alone. Mr.Ferrazzi will help you clear your mind of all previous networking experiences, and have you itching to put into practice what he teaches you.

Be sure to check out the Never Eat Alone blog. Keep up to date with Keith’s latest insights on relationship building.

Merry Christmas everyone! Hope your holidays are healthy and happy! See you early next week with new reviews!

For those of you not familiar with the Google enterprise structure, they have established a ‘golden rule’ for managing innovation. No, it’s not the 80/20 rule; it’s the 70/20/10 rule. 70 percent of your time on the core business, 20 percent on related projects, and 10 percent on unrelated new businesses. Let’s say for someone working 50 hours a week, 5 hours would be focused on new projects. This is how Google has established itself as an innovator, a leader in the search engine world, and more recently a leader in new technical areas. Google Earth(which is very cool), Local Google, and Google News are just some of the end products of this 10 percent allocation.

To me it would almost seem obvious that other companies would want to copy this rule, as it fosters innovation, which leads to more revenue and possible new business endeavors. You don’t limit yourself for new products or process enhancements coming from your R&D department. It levels the playing field within the company, and anyone who has produced something valuable for the company can bring it to management.

If I was running a company today I would introduce this ‘rule’. Think about it. Maybe those 4-5 hours a week your employee would be spent surfing the web, or chatting away, could be spent working on something they truly enjoyed. Maybe these projects would bring your company savings in cost, new revenue streams, or new business. It would shake things up within; maybe someone producing quality projects with his 10 percent time would be more productive and useful in a new position or department.

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, spoke of about innovation years ago:

“I was recently asked to speak at a conference about the role of innovation in enduring great companies. My first impulse was to decline, for a simple reason: great companies do not necessarily have innovation as a central part of their vision or strategy. They are just as likely to be followers as they are to be leaders with pioneering products and leading-edge services.”
-Inc. Magazine ‘97

This mentality doesn’t survive in the new economy. Companies that stay on top of innovating, whether it be in processes, products, or marketing are going to succeed greatness in today’s economy. Just read The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman to understand. You can count that Google isn’t going to lose its position anytime soon!

For those of you who’ve started your own business, and have taken up the title of an entrepreneur, you know why Barry Moltz wrote this book. The entrepreneur life is crazy! It revolves around daily heuristic learning, inevitable failures, and welcoming success. In You Need to Be a Little Crazy, the author chronicles the up and down roller coaster ride he experienced with starting three businesses. He lays it all on the table for us and candidly describes the problems he faced and the lessons he learned.

Although you can’t substitute real life experience, which is something he proclaims (read Chapter One’s section ‘Only Experience Teaches You’), Mr.Moltz’s book comes close to letting you ‘feel the pain’ of what entrepreneurs face when taking the plunge into the self-employed world. But the author isn’t the only one sharing advice and experiences; throughout each chapter we get the chance to meet 27 other successful entrepreneurs and their insights. My favorite entrepreneurial quote from the book, which also could be a whole discussion by itself, was from a featured entrepreneur Dean Rutter on making the entrepreneurial plunge:

“One of my big lessons in life is if you are going to fail, fail at something you don’t mind failing at.”

Doesn’t that quote resontate truth?

The author also deserves applause for his chapter on fitting (or at least attempting to) your family in with running your own business. This topic, which seems to be a taboo in the business world, was properly covered in 17 pages. If you’ve ever imagined starting your own business, and want a real life perspective from someone who has succeeded at it, You Need to Be a Little Crazy should be your next read.

Check out Barry Moltz’s site for his blog, articles, and information on speaking engagements.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Google’s Zeitgeist, it is a collection of the top keyword queries for their search engine. To take directly from the definition of Zeitgeist, it is the ‘general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era’. Google released their 2005 results today, and it is interesting to see the results. Imagine if they allowed businesses access to their databases for all keyword searches! It’s a data miner’s dream.

Everyday you are faced with situations where you need to use persuasion. Need extra time on your latest project at work? You’re going to need to win your boss’s approval. Trying to get that last sale to meet your monthly quota? You’re going to need to convince the customer that they need your product.

Dave Lakhani’s Persuasion: The Art of Getting What You Want lays out the blueprint for developing
your persuasion skills. Each chapter seamlessly describes the notions behind what moves people to be persuaded. The human desire for the sense of exclusivity, seeking familiarity with others, and our never ending curiosity are just some of the topics discussed. Throughout the book I found myself reflecting about situations I’ve been in which could have been aided with Dave’s advice. Although one may think that this book is catered towards sales professionals, it’s not. Dave has written this book for all audiences. From the high school student who is in debate club, to the CEO wanting to polish his negotiating skills, Persuasion: The Art of Getting What You Want is fit for all.

Be sure to check out Dave’s blog How to Persuade for the latest discussion on persuasion techniques and trends.

Made some tweaks…I’ll test it out for a few days to see if it sits well.

While I’m finishing up the review for Dave Lakhani’s Persuasion: the art of getting what you want. I thought I would pose this question to you:

Where do you use persuasion in your daily life?

This interesting article (quick sign up required, sorry!) at Knowledge@Wharton dives in the world of process management programs and their hindrance on innovation. They can become blinders to your company’s innovation when too much focus is placed on efficiency improvement:

Companies need to balance two types of activities: improving current operations to be competitive in the short term, and exploring for new knowledge for the future. Swinging back and forth between enthusiasm for process management or for new innovation, says Benner, doesn’t achieve the balance. Too much process management across all levels of an organization makes it easier to implement but can strangle bolder, breakthrough innovations. Conversely, it’s difficult to focus on systematic, continuous improvement in quality and cost if the entire organization is focused on big innovations for the future.
- Knowledge@Wharton

Do you like little spiral notepads? Do you like short, to the point advice? If you do then you’ll love Swanson’s UnWritten Rules of Management. “Why are the unwritten?,” you ask? Because for many years Bill Swanson, CEO of Raytheon kept them this way. Not by choice, but because he used these as speech points when speaking to fellow young engineers and scientists about management lessons he learned throughout his career. These thoughts created so much buzz, that he decided to make them ‘unwritten’ no more, and published them in a nice little spiral notebook. Each of the 33 “rules’ provides you with a piece of his management wisdom. There are some good rules contained in the notebook, such as #10, #12, #24 and #25. You can receive your FREE copy at Raytheon’s website. What are you waiting for?

Gary Harpst, the author, was the CEO of Solomon Software for 23 years. Over those 23 years he built a successful software company that achieved $60 million dollars in sales before being sold to Microsoft. With his experience in hand he set out to write a book that was focused towards small businesses.

He wanted to help small business not only achieve excellence, but to sustain it. In Six Disciplines, we are provided with six essential disciplines to help your business grow and succeed. The Six Disciplines are a systematic approach to running your business. Each discipline is explained in full detail and supplies you with the tools to implement them into the business. This book is a must read for any small business CEO or leader who wants to take his company to the next level. You must note though, that the methodologies aren’t a quick fix solution. These are changes that are going to need some extensive work to implement into your company. Especially if you have a business that has been around for a while and has picked up ‘bad’ habits along the way.

Check out the Six Disciplines website for more information about the corporation behind the book. Gary has created the Six Disciplines corporation to help the readers of the book implement these ideas, and to stay on the path of excellence.

Discuss Six Disciplines for Excellence in our business book discussion forum under Small Business & Entrepreneurship section.

John T. Reed’s site gives you an interesting critical view (short of calling him a fraud) towards the “best selling” author Robert Kiyosaki. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Rich Dad, Poor Dad, the book is a story about his two fathers. His real dad, the ‘poor dad’ lives a life similar to the typical American, which includes going to college, and getting a full time job with a company (for his father it was a teacher). His rich dad owns his own company and invests in real estate. The poor dad ‘works for his money’, while the rich dad had his ‘money work for him’. It’s basically a watered down informational book that leads to other products Mr.Kiyosaki offers. Kiyosaki is so popular that his book has been on the best sellers list for 250+ weeks, and is a featured writer on Yahoo! Finance. Definitely check out the link to see a different view of Mr. Kiyosaki. One thing I noticed is that a Google search for Robert Kiyosaki gives you Mr. Reed’s critical opinion as the first result! Ouch!

“This is just the kind of synergistic, customer-centric, upsell-driven, out-of-the-box, customizable, strategically tactical, best-of-breed thought leadership that will help our clients track to true north. Let’s fly this up the flagpole and see where the pushback is.”
– Fight the Bull

Does the paragraph above sound familiar? Could it be part of the daily dialogue that your company speaks in? Or (gasp!) how you converse? If so then today’s book can be a “How To” guide on escaping the bull. Why Business People Speak Like Idiots by Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway, and Jon Warshawsky, as evident in the title, explains why the business world is filled with hyped-up, overused, obscure jargon. It’s the same jargon that leaves its readers uninspired, bored, and aware that whatever is being said is bull.

The authors wrote this book, along with their software tool Bullfighter*, to fight the bull. They present us with the 4 bull traps and many suggestions on how to spare our audiences from its usage. Why Business People Speak like Idiots is filled with witty examples of the bull that we face daily, and the steps we can take to prevent us from adding to the bull! I thought it was an excellent read, and had me laughing at the all too familiar anecdotes. Go read it!

* The Bullfighter software, according to the site is, “the epoch-defining software that works with Microsoft Word and PowerPoint to help you find and eliminate jargon in your documents”. I suggest you try this software out with the latest announcement from your company. You’d be surprised (or maybe not!) at the amount of bull your company and co-workers are spewing out.

Discuss Why Business People Speak Like Idiots in our business book discussion forum!

I have decided that it’s time for some Q&A with the authors to get a better perspective about the books we review (also a chance to mine their brains on various business topics). This is an exciting opportunity to get some of your questions answered by the best authors in the business world!! Everytime you see the icon to the left, it’ll let you know that it’s a author Q&A feature.

I will notify readers in advance of the upcoming Q&A’s so that you’ll be able to email me some questions if you’d like me to ask them. Want to know more about the authors, their backgrounds, or their views on important business topics??? Then email your questions when it comes time!