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Jack Covert Selects - Switch
Posted Feb. 12, 2010 12:29 p.m. by 800-ceo-read
Chip and Dan Heath, brothers and scholars, won the inaugural 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year Award with their first book, Made to Stick. That book, despite being a newborn, also made our list of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. When the publisher sent me the advance copy of Switch, I was concerned about the “sophomore slump” that happens in sports and music, whether due to a true drop in quality or critical backlash due to expectations. Still, I dropped everything and stretched out on my couch to read, and I can tell you that Switch might even be better than Made to Stick.
In Made to Stick, the Heaths offered a methodology for how to make your ideas memorable. And, of course, one of the things the Heath brothers excel in is creating their own sticky ideas. They use clever acronyms, catchy phrases, and unusual connections that we can easily remember and reference for future situations. In Made to Stick, it was SUCCESs, and the “curse of knowledge” among other memorable lessons. Switch is about making change happen, despite our tendency to fight it. Here the Heaths teach us about the Rider—or rational mind—and the Elephant—our emotional mind— and how change needs a partnership between the two in order to “shape the path” ahead. We also learn about TBU—true but useless—which, undiagnosed, can lead to decision paralysis.
To explain an antidote to decision paralysis, the Heaths tell of a small community in South Dakota that had been losing young people at an unsustainable rate. A group of high school students decided to do something. In the past, decision paralysis ruled efforts like this because the problem was so overwhelming and the potential answers so numerous. The students commissioned a survey and discovered that half the residents shopped outside they county. The first step was to ask the residents to support local businesses, which in turn became the first step in a successful revitalization program.
The Heath brothers are teachers at heart, and Switch features the same high level of research-driven data brought to life through world-class stories as Made to Stick, while also offering loads of practical, how-to advice on how to start and maintain your next change initiative, whether in your business or in your personal life. The ultimate takeaway is that by recognizing that oftentimes it is the situation that must change, not the person, we are able to take action and not fear the unknown.
Jack Covert Selects - Mojo
Posted Feb. 12, 2010 12:08 p.m. by 800-ceo-read
There are people on this planet who are scary smart, people who look at the world differently and help us see our own lives in a clearer light. Seth Godin is one. Marshall Goldsmith, a highly sought-after speaker and executive coach, is another. Goldsmith has written many books, but What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There from 2007 was a stand-out.
Mojo is Goldsmith’s latest work. While mojo is a ubiquitous word, here Goldsmith defines it as “that positive spirit towards what we are doing now that starts from the inside and radiates to the outside.” The way he refers to mojo reminds me a bit of Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Except “flow” is a strictly internal, “in the zone” state of being, while Goldsmith’s mojo moment is “the moment when we do something that’s purposeful, powerful, and positive and the rest of the world recognizes it.” Like Csikszentmihalyi. Goldsmith believes mojo is something that can be learned and continuously achieved once we have the right tools.
Goldsmith believes that your ability to get your mojo going is impacted by four factors: identity, who you think you are; achievement, what have you done; reputation, what others think of you; and acceptance, knowing what you can change (and letting go of the rest). I found Goldsmith’s approach to identity enlightening because many of the business books we sell focus on ways to change your behavior in order to change your circumstance. Goldsmith asserts that if you don’t first change how you think of yourself, any behavioral changes will feel false and fail to last. And his section on acceptance is a particularly hard, but imperative lesson. How many of us have given up on a friendship due to some small grievance instead of, as Goldsmith encourages, valuing what a friend gives us in total despite their sometimes-inconveniencing quirks?
Goldsmith is an interesting kind of storyteller. He doesn’t tell stories that are highly detailed with visual or emotional descriptions. But, at the same time, with casual language and a singular intuitiveness about people, Goldsmith’s stories about how people lose and gain their mojo keeps you turning pages like the best kind of novel.
Jack Covert Selects - Denial
Posted Feb. 12, 2010 11:59 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
Professor Richard Tedlow, author of two of my favorite books, Andy Grove and Giants of Industry, has written a book that tells memorable stories of business leaders who were in denial and whose businesses (think Sears, Coke) were subsequently affected by their inability to see the forest for the trees. This new book, Denial, begins entertainingly with the story of Henry Ford.
In the early 1920s, Henry Ford was crushing his competition: the Model T was a spectacular success. Tedlow tells us that “It took seven years for the company to sell its millionth Model T. Only a year and a half later, it sold its two-millionth. Four million were sold by 1920. The number of units sold doubled by 1923.” At the same time, the automotive industry was changing as the country went from a war economy to greater prosperity. Ford wouldn’t listen when his people warned him about Alfred Sloan, at General Motors, who believed that the consumer wanted something more than a black car. In fact, Ford fired an executive who wrote a memo about GM and called for Ford to change in order to compete. Henry Ford was in complete denial.
There are plenty of business books about the dangers of ignoring your competition—I’m thinking of Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma and Andy Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive, both of which warn of disruptive innovation and being able to predict moments of competitive crisis. Tedlow’s Denial looks at why so many companies get it wrong. He also offers common signs to watch out for so your organization avoids this trouble—or at the very least can find a way out of the forest.
