SEATTLE–Jeff Bezos, the co-founder and CEO of Amazon.com, has released a list of eight business books he recommends for reading this summer (and likely purchased you know where). This list originally appeared in Inc. Magazine, which also provided the opinion/analysis you will find below.
1. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't, by Jim Collins
In his first book, Built to Last, Collins proved that long-lasting companies have “successful DNA.” In this, his third book, Collins provides a recipe for companies that lack “successful DNA.” The publication of this book thus becomes a perfect example of the No. 1 rule of management consulting, which is that no business theory is complete until it’s been monetized.
Best Quote: "Our findings do not represent a quick fix, or the next fashion statement in a long string of management fads, or the next buzzword of the day, or a new 'program' to introduce. No! The only way to make any company visionary is through a long-term commitment to an eternal process of building the organization to preserve the core and stimulate progress."
2. Data Driven Marketing: The 15 Metrics Everyone in Marketing Should Know, by Mark Jeffery
Summary: This book announces itself as "a clear and convincing guide to using a more rigorous, data-driven strategic approach to deliver significant performance gains from your marketing."
For all you nonmarketing folk, here’s a translation: "We’re going to measure ourselves 15 different ways so that no matter what happens, at least one metric will justify an increase in the marketing budget."
Best Quote: "These statistics are symptomatic of why data-driven marketing and marketing measurement are so difficult for many organizations: the internal processes do not support a culture of measurement, and they also do not have an infrastructure to support data-driven marketing and marketing metrics. But beyond these high-level processes, my experience is that most marketers are overwhelmed with data and do not know where to start in terms of measuring the right things to drive real results."
3. Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones
Summary: This revolutionary manifesto contains the startlingly original observation that businesses can become more successful by cutting costs and increasing revenue. Curiously, the book’s prescription for success is the exact recipe the Innovator’s Dilemma (see below) says will put you out of business.
Best Quote: "Lean thinking therefore must start with a conscious attempt to precisely define value in terms of specific products with specific capabilities offered at specific prices through a dialogue with specific customers. The way to do this is to ignore existing assets and technologies and to rethink firms on a product-line basis with strong, dedicated product teams."
4. Memos From the Chairman by Alan Greenberg.
Summary: This collection of common sense wisdom -- expressed in the form of sometimes hilariously wry memos -- makes it seem as if it was truly fun to work at Bear Stearns before it became the scapegoat for the Giant Vampire Squid.
Best Quote: "Bear Stearns is moving forward at an accelerated rate and everybody is contributing. It is absolutely essential for us to be able to talk to our partners at all times. All of us are entitled to eat lunch, play golf, and go on vacation. But, you must leave word with your secretary or associates where you can be reached at all times. Decision have to be made and your input can be important. I conducted a study of the 200 firms that have disappeared from Wall Street over the last few years, and I discovered that 62.349 percent went out of business because the important people did not leave word where they went when they left their desk if even for 10 minutes. That idiocy will not occur here."
5. Sam Walton: Made in America by Sam Walton with John Huey
Summary: The memoir (as Amazon puts it) of a “genuine American folk hero cut from the homespun cloth of America’s heartland.” Read between the lines, though, and it’s pretty clear (at least to me) that the guy was kind of a self-absorbed horse’s rear-end. Just my opinion, of course.
Best Quote: "Here’s the thing: money never has meant that much to me, not even in the sense of keeping score. If we had enough groceries, and a nice place to live, plenty of room to keep and feed my bird dogs, a place to hunt, a place to play tennis, and the means to get the kids good educations -- that’s rich. No question about it. And we have it. We’re not crazy. We don’t live like paupers, the way some people depict us. We all love to fly, and we have nice airplanes, but I’ve owned about 18 airplanes over the years and I never bought one of them new."
6. The Black Swan
Subtitle: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Authors: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Summary: According to this book, a “black swan is an event, positive or negative, that is deemed improbable yet causes massive consequences.” In other words, the gist of the book is that unexpected things happen when we don’t expect them.
Best Quote: "Our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable (improbable according to our current knowledge) -- and all the while we spend out timer engaged in small talk, focusing on the known, and the repeated."
7. The Innovators Dilemma
Subtitle: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business
Author: Clayton M. Christensen
Summary: As Amazon blithely puts it, this book is “based on a truly radical idea -- that great companies can fail precisely because they do everything right.” If this is true, though, then the opposite must be true as well -- that crappy companies can succeed precisely because they do everything wrong. Hence, Microsoft. (Cue rim-shot!)
Best Quote: "Because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership."
8. The Mythical Man-Month
Author: Fredrick P. Brooks Jr.
Summary: The classic text on how to manage complex software projects and, by extension, any other large and complicated business effort.
The book’s essential revelation -- that adding people to a late project delays the project further -- is a timeless business truth invariably honored in the breach than in the observance.
Best Quote: "Systems program building is an entropy-decreasing process, hence inherently metastable. Program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence.”