Book Report: Born Standing Up

In the late 1970s, Steve Martin was the biggest thing stand up comedy ever saw. Routinely playing before audiences of over 20,000 people, a regular on The Tonight Show, and the originator of catch phrases that were cemented in American popular culture at the time, he was a huge success.

Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life is mostly a story about how huge a failure he was that enabled that success and a worthy study for career advancement. By far my favorite quote in the book explains one of the two overriding themes of his story:

"Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent."

He tried hard, very hard. From his beginnings as a sales clerk at the now defunct magic shops at Disneyland where he would demonstrate tricks to his time as a stock performer at Knott's Berry Farm, he ultimately perfected the art of stage performing because he did it thousands upon thousands of times.

The second theme has to do with connections. As I'm finding in my own career, it is amazing how one thing can lead to another if you keep up your personal network. For Steve Martin, an ex-girlfriend who was a professional dancer helped get him off the stages of amusement parks and into the writing rooms of the Smothers Brothers Show.

The writers he met there included Rob Reiner and a host of others that went on to work the wildly popular mid 70s daytime talk show circuit where Martin made use of his newfound contacts to get exposure for what was becoming his solo magic, banjo, comedy act. That eventually got him on the highly coveted Tonight Show, which spilled into several hosting stints on the early Saturday Night Live episodes.

When he realized that there was nowhere to go but down and he became weary of the travel required of a solo live performer, he was able to branch into films with The Jerk, which was directed by the legendary Carl Reiner, Rob's father who he met during their time together doing variety show writing. With his stand up career having nowhere to go but down, he walked away despite still being hugely popular. His focus since has been his movie career and he's written a few novels along the way as well.

Practice and connections. Both took many years and a lot of hard work to build up, but both were crucial in cementing his early career and gave him a chance to get noticed.

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Book Report: Good to Great

What's the secret to running a great company?

To find out, former Stanford Graduate School of Business faculty member Jim Collins turned his impressive researchers loose on mountains of public data. They examined the 1,435 companies that appeared in the Fortune 500 from 1965 to 1995 looking for a pattern: more than 15 years of sustained growth.

While that sounds simple, that 15 year period was selected on purpose so that the growth was related to the management excellence at a particular company as opposed to their specific industry getting hot or the market in general. From that huge list of companies, only 11 made the cut. Collins' team then studied those top companies closely, interviewing as many of their top executives as would talk to them and did the same for one of their competitors to find out what it was that made one company good, but the other great. That's the premise of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't.

The conclusions that Collins' team reached are separated into three main sections for what each company did in preparation for their leap, steps taken to spark their leap, and how they sustained the leap. The entire book is a worthy read, but the first section on laying the groundwork was the most interesting me and I think the most applicable to anybody at any part of an organization.

This section, entitled "Disciplined People" is covered in two chapters and deals with the issues of effective leadership and hiring.

Level 5 Leadership

The most striking aspect of the CEO's of the 11 Good to Great companies was that I had never heard of any of them. In fact, I had to reread the chapter to come up with their names again: George Cain, Alan Wurtzel, David Maxwell, Colman Mockler, Darwin Smith, Jim Herring, Lyle Everingham, Joe Cullman, Fred Allen, Cork Walgreen, Carl Reichardt. Upon viewing the list yourself, I bet you can only identify the company associated with one of these people who led their companies to an average growth almost 7 times the general market over a 15 year period.

It turns out, that's not a mistake or a coincidence.

What Collins team found is that these leaders had an unusual combination of an unwavering will to succeed but combined with a fundamental humility. They took the blame for problems and pointed out the contributions of others for successes. As the book states, "more plow horse than show horse." Collins goes into what he calls the different levels of leadership, with this kind of leader at the top of the 5 bands.

Contrast that to the "rock star" CEO who has a huge personality and is a certified genius. The study found plenty of those companies and it was not unusual for them to be wildly successful. But, the pattern that repeated itself over and over again is that when these highly intelligent, highly charismatic people left their companies, results dipped substantially in the wake of no capable successors. When the genius gets bored, he or she leaves and the drive goes with him or her. This type of leader tends to have helpers around, but not people who challenge their massive intelligence, so when they do leave there's nobody to take their place.

First Who . . . Then What

Once these modest leaders were in place, it's not surprising that they put a premium on finding top talent instead of "yes" men in strategy level positions. What was surprising, the study found, was that often it was more useful to find the right people first before figuring out what direction to take the company. Typically we think about making the plans first and then hiring the people to execute those plans, but for these companies that achieved this long term growth, the opposite was true.

Essentially, these humble but driven leaders got as many smart people as they could find and locked them in a room together until they came up with the plan to move forward with. The concept went as far as it being better to hire nobody than to hire the wrong person. That part has stuck with me, as I've often been forced to put someone in a position of influence that I knew wasn't as capable as they could be but did so for the sake of timing. Never has that worked out and I now see how the flip side of that mistake manifests itself much better.

Conclusions

While later sections of the book are more useful to someone who has strategic decision making ability within a company, it really struck me how much these two chapters could influence just about anybody. Even if you aren't in a leadership position yet, the behaviors outlined above can help your immediate work group function more effectively. Be humble. Pass around credit. Conduct that extra interview to find just the right person. Enforcing these types of things can aid in your own career ladder climb.

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Book Report: The Search

As a co-founding editor of Wired, John Battelle qualifies in my book for a nerd crush article. His book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture is a look at the past, present (circa 2005), and potential future of the search industry. Although he got unprecedented access to Google insiders when researching the book, it does a great job of recording the achievements of early search pioneers as well.

It starts by explaining what Battelle calls The Database of Intentions, which is a conceptual model for everything people have collectively looked for in the past when used to predict what we'd like to do next. He explains how close he thought Google was to having just that in 2001:

"Given the millions upon millions of queries streaming into its servers each hour, it seemed to me that the company was sitting on a gold mine of information. entire publishing businesses could be created from the traces of intent in such a database; in fact, Google already started its first: a beta project called Google News. Could it not also start a research and marketing company capable of telling clients exactly what people were buying, looking to buy, or avoiding?"

Before getting to his predictions, Battelle gives some definitions of what search really is and gives a great pre-Google history of the industry. In a way, this is the most interesting chapter because it paints a very accurate picture of what the world thought of search before Google came along: it was a problem already solved. Alta Vista and Yahoo seemed to have met everybody's needs and you were a fool for wanting to compete with them. It is a great reminder that any industry can succumb to a disruptive technology that completely changes the game for everybody. That's exactly what happened here.

The middle part of the book traces Google's history, starting in a curious place: Larry Page's childhood admiration of Nikola Tesla. "The twelve-year-old Page was struck by this fact: regardless of how brilliant and world-changing Tesla's work had been, the inventory received little long-term fame or fortune for his efforts." This path would not be repeated by Google's co-founder.

The breakthrough, of course, came from the great weight given in the Google search algorithm to the number of links that point to a particular site. The engineering required to crunch the massive amount of data to make this happen is explored in detail to satisfy your inner nerd, but done in a way that just about anybody can understand. Ultimately, when that approach proved better than what more established competitors were doing and combined with pay per click advertising, the company we all know today emerged.

Battelle's predictions for what that world might look like given The Database of Intentions are saved for the end of the book and some of them have started to materialize since the books' first publishing in 2005. My favorite unrealized futurist scenario involves buying wine at a local grocery store. You take your PDA and enter into a search site (presumably Google) what you are having for your dinner party that night. The results tell you what wine is best served, but when you find it on a shelf in the wine section, you suspect it is over priced. So, you scan the UPC with your PDA, which, after some grinding, tells you about 3 other stores in a 5 mile radius of your current GPS verified location. The application lets you reserve a bottle, which you can pick up after you get the dessert.

Not coincidentally, this isn't too different from the iPhone "Calamari" commercial, but takes things to a slightly higher level than technology currently offers. But, what The Search does is gets us to think about what we might do with The Database of Intentions when combined with things like RFID's, GPS, UPC's, Google Maps, and electronic stocking information. To spark these kinds of ideas is reason enough to read it.

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Book Report: Send - The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home

I think that David Shipley and Will Schwalbe may have been looking over my shoulder the past 14 years, because every mistake I've ever made using electronic communication (and its solution) is cataloged in Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home. Email has become a bigger and bigger part of our lives over the years, but nobody ever gets a course on how to do it properly. That's exactly what this book is: the "how to email" class you never took.

I'm always a believer that if you understand a bit about how something works, you understand how to use it better. Send starts with a discussion of where email came from, what the different parts of a message are, and how it gets split into packets, each of which are sent on its merry way out on the Internet before being reassembled at its destination (this is actually an interview question I like to ask software engineering candidates). In the section entitled "When should we email?" Shipley and Schwalbe lay out some good guidelines for when it is and is not appropriate to send email versus other forms in of communication. In the process, they echo some of my own feelings about how tone needs careful consideration in email, :

"Try an experiment. Call a friend and say, 'I'm mad at you' in a tone that conveys that you aren't - the tone you would use if the next sentence was something like, "You didn't tell me about your promotion." Then ask your friend if she thought you were truly angry. The answer will probably be no. Now imagine what would have happened if you sent that pal an email that read, 'I'm mad at you.'"

The real meat of Send can be found in Chapter 4: Six Essential Types of Email. There, they explain the most common types of email that are sent and enforce best practices for each:

1. The Ask: A Guide to Requesting
2. The Answer: A Guide to Responding
3. The Facts: A (Snort) Guide to Informing
4. Gratitude: A Guide to Thanking
5. Groveling: A Guide to Apologies
6. Social Glue: A Guide to Connecting

The electronic world would be a better place if everybody (including me) would follow Shipley and Schwalbe's suggestions in this chapter alone. I highly recommend it to everybody and think it should be a part of any corporate introductory training program.

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Book Report: Getting Things Done

I have been assimilated.

Lots and lots of people have recommended David Allen's productivity bible, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity to me over the years, but I kept thinking, "I'm already pretty productive, I don't need that." I couldn't have been more wrong. Over the past several months, Allen's techniques have made a noticeable impact on my day to day life that I didn't think was possible. Instead of doing a traditional review of his material, I thought I'd walk through what I've done with it over the past few months that has changed the way I approach my job.

I ended up adopting Allen's processes in two waves (with another one still to go) and reaped huge benefits from both. Almost all of my work life comes to me in email. Prior to reading GTD, I'd let my Outlook inbox run to several thousand items and clean it out once a quarter or so. The list would be cluttered with things I just had to know about, things that I had to remember to do at a later date, things that could be deleted, and things that were reminders to do something. I found I was able to keep track of the really important things in my head and was pretty good about responding to people within 24 hours on various topics, but it was an organizational mess.

For Wave 1, all I did was follow some GTD basic rules about inbox processing. I read each item immediately as it came in and did one of 3 things with it:

1. Filed it in the set of topic-oriented reference folders I already had in Outlook if it was something I just had to know was happening.

2. Deleted it if it was something I didn't care about.

3. Left it in my inbox if it was something I had to do or was a reminder that I was waiting for someone else to respond.

Just that slight change in process made a huge difference for me. An inbox list that previously had a tendency to grow out of control until my quarterly cleanup activity never got larger than one screen full of messages. It stayed that way for 6 weeks before I proceeded on to Wave 2, but just this step let me see my whole world worth of worries in one screen, which made a big difference in my peace of mind and in my productivity. Everything I had to be concerned with was on one page, not hiding in cracks on multiple scroll downs.

Wave 2 led me to adopting the GTD system more strictly. In addition to the "reference" folder I already had, I added "actions", "waiting", and "some day" folders.



What that allowed me to do was take that 1 page full of inbox items and further sort them into actionable categories. Now, when I get a new message it gets read immediately and either replied to, deleted, or filed into one of those 4 places. My favorite message to see staring at me several times a day is "there are no items to show in this view".

Now, different aspects of my work life are easy to display. I have 15 minutes between meetings, is there something I can get done in that amount of time? Check the "actions" folder. Who owes me a response on that new data center move? Check the "waiting" folder. What was that thing I was talking to Sam about that we might do next year when we get funding? Check the "some day" folder.

I end up spending a lot less time figuring out what to do next and a lot more time actually doing it. That has been the productivity leap I've been able to make with the suggestions of this book. The one aspect I haven't adopted yet has to do with breaking apart projects into different actionable tasks, but I'm giddy over what the book has already given me.

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Book Report: Empire Building

I've often written in this space that it's a good practice to study successful people in other fields. Even if what they do is completely unrelated to your own career, you can still find a nugget or two to bring to your own life. Who better to study for an engineer, than the creator of the ultimate in nerd subculture?

Empire Building: The Remarkable, Real-Life Story of Star Wars is a really good biography of George Lucas by Garry Jenkins. It starts with his simple but some times rebellious childhood in Northern California and the revised edition ends during production of the unfortunate Jar Jar Binks career vehicle known as Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace. In between, though, there are lots of interesting tid bits:

• In film school, Lucas makes a widely praised version of THX 1138 (that's where the name of the sound certification comes from), which depicts one man's stand against a severely Orwellian future government.


• Fresh out of school, he teams with Francis Ford Copalla (fresh off of the success of The Godfather) and together they the make a widely panned version of THX 1138 which I happen to own on DVD and have never watched in its entirety because it puts me to sleep.


• Lucas realizes that everybody knows the world is a cruel, dark place and doesn't exactly want to be reminded of that in a movie. He learns from this mistake and makes the 60s nostalgia feel good movie, American Graffiti, launching a variety of careers (Ron Howard as an adult, Richard Dreyfus, Mackenzie Phillips, Cindy Williams, Harrison Ford, and even Wolfman Jack) and ultimately contributing to the new millennium term "Jump the Shark".


• With some money and newfound leverage, he sells his idea for a "space opera" to 20th Century Fox, cleverly and famously writing into the contract that he owned both sequel and merchandising rights.


• After a difficult shoot and editing process given the cutting edge special effects work by the newly formed Industrial Light and Magic as well as constant pestering from the movie studio, Star Wars goes on to become a cultural phenomenon.


• Lucas then rolls over his profits from Star Wars so that he can produce (but not direct) The Empire Strikes Back without interference from any Hollywood movie studio. He enlists former USC Film School professor Irwin Kershner to direct. Fox signs on for distribution and then makes up the difference when the budget goes over what Lucas set aside to finance himself.


• Rolling over profits a third time, Return of the Jedi is entirely financed by Lucas. He has a heated dispute with the Director's Guild over the order the credits are presented in Empire and is forced to find someone a little more obscure to direct the end of the original trilogy.


• The success of Jedi is bittersweet when his wife leaves him for another man.

Lessons in control, financing, and work-life balance abound in a setting that just about everybody can find interesting.

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Book Report: Every Business is a Growth Business

On its face, Every Business is a Growth Business: How Your Company Can Prosper Year After Year, by Ram Charan and Noel M. Tichy looks like a market analysis book. In a broader sense, though, it is about taking something and trying to look at it a different way. In doing so, you find more creative uses for what you already have or realize there is something else you might go about building instead that's a lot better. Such things aren't exclusively directed at the marketers of the world, but can help everybody.

The best example of this is the book's opening anecdote. Prior to rereading it for this review, I hadn't picked up this book in 5 years but this story stuck with me, lending some credibility to the idea that being memorable through anecdotes is a key presentation skill. The incident described involves long time Coca-Cola CEO Roberto Goizueta and how he thought differently about the business his company was really in.

In the early 1980's, soft drinks were considered a "mature market" where the players and consumer trends were well known. Rival Pepsi gained market share at Coke's expense through a series of image advertising campaigns (think, Michael Jackson's hair on fire) and Coke found itself defending every percentage point of traditionally measured market share for soft drink consumption. Charan and Tichy's take the story the rest of the way:

"Goizueta had an insight - a simple but stunningly powerful one that he shared with his senior executives in the 1980s. What, he asked almost casually, was the average per-capita daily consumption of fluids by the worlds 4.4 billion people? The answer was: 64 ounces. And what, he asked, is the daily per-capita consumption of Coca-Cola? Answer: Less than 2 ounces.

Finally, he asked: What's our market share of the stomach? Not Coca-Cola's share of the U.S. cola market or the world soft-drink market, but of all the fluids everyone in the world drinks on a given day. Coca-Cola's share was scarcely measurable.

Coca-Cola's people had invested a lot in the idea of PepsiCo as their enemy. But Goizueta led them to see that the enemy was coffee, milk, tea. The enemy was water."

The transformation this had for Coca-Cola was pretty dramatic. They began pushing their products in places they hadn't thought of before simply because they now chose to look at themselves in a different way. While you can argue that the proliferation of Coke machines in places like bus stations and elementary schools has been a huge factor in the U.S. obesity epidemic, it was a big financial windfall for the Coca-Cola company.

Most of the book focuses on 3 kinds of growth opportunities that businesses tend to miss:

• Expanding your pond - Coke's example. Think of a broader context for what you already have to offer to find more customers.


• Re-segmenting your markets - The best book example here deals with Nike's basketball shoe business in the early 1990's. Instead of just "basketball shoes" and their star endorser Michael Jordan, Nike re-segmented the idea of their basketball market to really be made up of several sub-markets that identified with particular playing styles. "Force, for the aggressive style exemplified by Charles Barkley; and Flight, for the quick, high-flying style of Scottie Pippen." It's akin to filling a jar with rocks and thinking it's full when really, you can still get a lot of sand in it too. Finding a set of smaller niches in what you previously thought was exclusively a broad topic.
  


• Moving into adjacent segments - Moving up or down the price/quality curve from where you are now can open opportunities while taking advantage of current skills and resources. Charan and Tichy cite car makers Toyta, Nissan, and Honda as examples of this when they introduced Lexus, Infiniti, and Acura (respectively) in an attempt to compete in a higher market with BMW and Mercedes.
  

All these ideas fall into the more general approach of trying to look at an existing product line with a fresh and different perspective to find opportunities. This isn't just true of entire products, though. Engineers design subsystems that get plugged into products all the time and using this approach to analyze them may lead you to new levels of reuse or change opportunities you might not have otherwise considered.

The rest of the book goes into a long list of examples, tips on how you can structure your organization for growth, and presents a set of exercises and templates aimed at helping groups find new ideas. The big takeaway, though, is this concept of finding different ways to examine your pre-existing ideas to discover new uses for them. Reuse and get a bigger bang out of that buck you've already spent money on.

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Book Report: The Virtual Handshake

Whenever someone starts to talk about networking, the computer geek in me assumes they mean something having to do with TCP/IP. To most people, though, that means tracking and growing the relationships you have with different people. For most of my professional career, I've equated this practice with going to bars in groups of people you hardly know that only talk to you long enough until they can figure out way to exploit your skills to do their bidding. Obviously, I've had a bad attitude about it and much to my detriment.

What changed my way of thinking was reading David Teten and Scott Allen's excellent book The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors And Closing Deals Online. Since then, I've broadened my network far beyond what I had before and did so from the comfort of my desk (and one trip to a Chipotle in Austin, TX). While I'm not exactly ready to leave HP over this epiphany, I'm involved in a lot of things I wasn't before that have opened side opportunities that weren't possible with my previous mindset.

The book opens with a discussion of what your personal network really is and comprised of. David and Scott break this down into 7 key pieces (I paraphrase their work below):

1. Character - Your integrity, clarity of motives, consistency of behavior, openness, discretion, and trustworthiness.


2. Competence - Your ability to walk your talk; your demonstrated capability.


3. Relevance - The Acquaintance's value to you, defied as their ability to contribute to your goals.


4. Information - Data that you have about the Acquaintance.


5. Strength - The closeness of the relationship, broadly grouped as strong or weak.


6. Number -How many people you have in your list of ties (family, close friends, people you've worked with a long time) and weak ones (everybody else).


7. Diversity - Heterogeneity of your network by geography, profession, industry, and hierarchical position.

This is all covered in the first two chapters of the book, but I spend a lot of time on it here because it not only provides a framework for the other chapters, but when I applied this analysis on my own career it had a pretty profound effect on me. What I realized was that I had a bigger network than I thought I did, despite never actively "networking" per se. However, I had pretty pitiful diversity outside my employer of the last 14 years. These two chapters did what every good book should do: made me want to read the rest of it.

The remainder of the book explains different ways to expand improve your network using virtual tools (hence the title). There's a section on social software that covers things like email lists, social networking sites, virtual communities, and blogs. My favorite of these, and a focus of Scott's now with his website LinkedIntelligence.com, pointed me to LinkedIn. I had a LinkedIn profile for awhile, but I wasn't really doing anything with it. Using advice from the book I found old college friends, people who had left HP and started their own thriving businesses, and even people inside HP I simply hadn't thought about in a long, long time.

The my other favorite part entitled "You Are the Virtual You"gives great advice on how to present yourself online to maximize effectiveness. Specifically, the discussion of signatures was enlightening for me. I had been signing posts in discussion groups or comments on others blogs with:

---Pete

I then graduated to:

---Pete http://nerdguru.net

Before finally realizing that this was much better:

Pete Johnson
HP.com Chief Architect
Personal Blog: http://nerdguru.net

The first signature says nothing and, accordingly, did nothing for me. The second one gave me some base blog traffic when I wrote something decent on blog comments and discussion groups. On one techie site in particular, I saw a 10-fold increase in traffic to my blog when I changed from the second version to the third based on the credibility my job title gives me that I wasn't exposing before.

Those are the biggest things I took away from The Virtual Handshake, but there's plenty of other suggestions in there that anybody can use to their advantage. We live in an increasingly virtual world and being able to navigate it effectively to maximize opportunities in your real world existence is something everyone can use.

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Book Report: Accidental Empires

Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date should be required reading for anybody even remotely involved in the computer industry. Robert X. Cringely covers the birth of what he calls the 4th largest industry in the world (after cars, energy production, and illegal drugs) from its infancy in the world of semi-conductors until just before the explosion of the Internet. This book is the basis for the mid 1990s PBS multi-hour documentary “Triumph of the Nerds” (not to be confused with the TNT original movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley” which dramatizes a subset of the same material) which is pretty epic in its own right (although, according to Amazon reviews the DVD version has been shortened considerably compared to what originally aired).

While even the 1996 revised version is somewhat dated (it contains the quote, “Many experts are excited about a new Internet programming language from Sun Microsystems called Java.”), the lessons to be learned from the repeating patterns (both good and bad) in the industry make this worth the purchase price. The best parts of this book include:

• Much of the contemporary computing universe was created by the folks at Xerox PARC and completely ignored by it parent company. Cirngely goes into why this probably happened, but he offers insights into the culture and organizational structure of this fascinating place that invented everything from laser printers to the multi-windowed user interface we all use today to even the foundation of computer networks that connects the modern world.


• IBM creating a PC offering that was so easily cloneable by unforeseen competitors in order to overcome its own limiting business processes and the foresight Bill Gates had in licensing an operating system he didn’t even own. Early decisions made in IBM’s foray into the PC business, after Apple showed it could be profitable, continue to shape the industry today and expose lots of things to learn from.


• While Steve Jobs is still fond of contrasting Apple and Microsoft by quoting Picasso with, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal,” there’s a lot to be said about leading the cutting edge with technology (typically Apple’s strategy, although they hardly invented things like MP3 players and graphical user interfaces) as opposed to dragging them along slowly while preserving your customer base with backward compatibility (which is what made Microsoft the company that it is, for good and bad).


• The culture and organization of Microsoft, borrowing heavily from ideas fostered at Xerox PARC, allowed Gates to control product directions and create a replenish-able army of young software engineers willing to do his bidding at the cost of free beverages.

There’s a very interesting segment in the revised edition involving Apple founder Steve Wozniak and his circa 1996 thoughts on Moore’s Law. Woz looks forward to its demise despite the fact that it has fueled much of the growth that the computer industry has enjoyed over the last 30+ years, “because that’s when software tools can finally start to mature.”

There’s a theory of creativity that states that the more constraints you have when solving a problem, the more creative your solution has to become. Woz has a point here. You don’t have to have hyper-efficient software when the processing power of the hardware doubles every 18 months, as Moore’s Law states and has generally held true. Once the limit of the hardware is reached, the next gains need to come from better software because that’s the only place where there’s room left for creative improvement.

Put it all together, and this is a great read that has many lessons you can take back to your own engineering career.

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Book Report: Barack Obama's autobiography

I am generally not a very political person and I did not start reading this book for political reasons. As such, I start this review in an unusual fashion.

In 2004 as Jessica Simpson was getting ready to marry Nick Lachey, she came out with a book entitled "Jessica Simpson I Do: Achieving Your Dream Wedding". In fairness, I never read this book. I did, however, see her interviewed on a few different talk shows when she was promoting it so I got the gist of what her advice was:

1. Get yourself a million dollars
2. Spend it on a really nice wedding

While that may have worked for her, it wasn't advice that was terribly practical for the general public.

I know, you're asking yourself, "What could this possibly have to do with Barack Obama?" Well, a time tested formula for having a best-selling book is:

1. Become famous
2. Write a best-selling book

This strategy has worked for the likes of Jenny McCarthy (getting naked for Playboy clearly makes you an expert on pregnancy), Clay Aiken (he seems like a nice guy with an incredible story, but if he'd never been on American Idol nobody would give him a book deal for his biography), and our good friend/wedding planning expert Jessica Simpson.

Among the fascinating aspects of: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance is that it was written BEFORE anybody ever heard of him. He was given the chance to write his biography based on being the first African-American to be president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. As amazing as that feat is in itself, I honestly can't think of another celebrity, politician, or sports figure that penned his life story prior to gaining regular attention from the mainstream media and the ripple effect it has had on his Presidential candidacy 15 years later is significant.

Why? Because in this text, Obama is extremely candid and honest about his own fears, mistakes, and shortcomings in a way that no political candidate ever would be if they wrote their life story after already being elected to high office, as is normally the case. Instead, any and all skeletons that Obama might have (including admission of cocaine and other drug use) are all out in the open and written before he had any incentive to cover them up. The result reads as a compelling and genuine self-portrait.

As I've written in this space before, one way to spark your own success is to study generally acknowledged successful people or organizations (whether it be Eddie Murphy, Disneyland, or the 1994 San Fransisco 49ers). That, not politics, is what drew me to this book initially. When you examine success in this way, you can usually find something to take away and use in your own life or career in some fashion.

From Barack Obama, I got inspired.

A lot.

Just about anybody should be inspired by the accomplishments he has achieved despite the odds that have faced him. As he said himself in his famous 2004 DNC speech, "Tonight is a particular honor for me because - let's face it - my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely." Born in Hawaii to a Kenyan exchange student father and a mother transplanted from Kansas, he spent much of his childhood in Indonesia before starting his undergraduate education at Occidental College in Southern California. He then transfered to Columbia University where he earned a degree in Political Science. This was one of many points in this book where I stopped and thought to myself, "He did THAT. What did YOU do today?"

I grew up in suburban, middle-class Los Angeles, never struggling to come to grips with my mixed race as he did or my absent father since my parents remain married to this day. Despite my advantages, did I earn an Ivy League education? Nope.

Obama takes that degree and, instead of finding an high-powered job with it, goes to inner city Chicago to become a community organizer where he leads people from Altgeld Gardens in a variety of neighborhood and economic improvement programs. Some are successful and others are not, but along the way he sees a side of low income families that most eventual national politicians never see. Again I thought to myself,"He did THAT. What did YOU do today?" Prior to his tenure at Harvard Law, the book concludes with a section chronicling an extensive trip to Kenya to visit his father's side of his family for the first time in his life. There, he does a lot of soul searching and ultimately finds peace with his complicated heritage upon learning the full family history, including the facets of both his father's and grandfather's lives that influenced the decisions they made that continue to have an impact on him.

Fast forward to present times and there are probably only 3 or 4 people who have as good or better a chance as he does at becoming the 44th President of the United States, and by extension, the most powerful person in the world. To read about his struggles and inner conflicts in a forum where he had no incentive to obscure his honesty for professional gain was extremely moving. Even if he never wins another election, we can all be inspired by his journey and have it motivate change in ours.

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Book Report: The Tipping Point

If you mix up a little dash of sociology, a pinch of marketing, and a few tablespoons of analytical thinking and you get:

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Malcolm Gladwell is a long time staff writer of The New Yorker who became interested in scientifically studying how "word of mouth" works. Gladwell refers to the phenomenon throughout the book as an "epidemic", but defines the term far beyond its more typical medical use. With this book, he created what many consider to be a key reference point in the study of viral marketing, which has become a huge topic in the Internet Age.

Loaded with a with a wide variety of interesting example studies ranging from the sales of Hush Puppies shoes to syphilis and AIDS outbreaks to New York City crime rates and even stylistic changes in children's programming, Gladwell theorizes that three main rules that can cause an an epidemic.

• The Law of the Few - People with wide social networks (Connectors), extreme expertise in a particular area (Mavens), and charismatic types who can easily influence others (Salesman) play key roles in starting epidemics. Not all are necessarily required to tip a situation to spreading over the greater population, but typically at least one is, which makes finding such people keys when attempting to start positive epidemics (a sales trend) or stopping negative ones (the spread of crime or disease).
• Stickiness - In order for something to spread, it needs to "stick". In most cases, that means the message itself has to be memorable in some way and the way that message is delivered can help it stick. Gladwell gives the example of Sesame Street making it easy for children to remember character names by making it obvious (the big yellow bird is named Big Bird), stating them over and over again, and being careful about the length of each sub section of each show to account for the typical attention span of a preschooler. In combination, that helps the characters stick with the intended audience.
  
• The Power of Context - The context in which someone encounters something has a great effect on how they perceive it. Finding the right context for whatever message it is you are trying to deliver goes a long way in determining its success. Among the more notable observations in this section has to do with the bystander effect.

Collectively, these ideas all study human behavior in a different and fascinating way. For selling products or gaining popularity for ideas, I like to think of the tenants of The Tipping Point as tools to use when trying to move up The Long Tail.

Regardless, the book is at the very least an interesting look at how groups of people react to different things and interact with each other in various situations that is worth just about any body's time.

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Book Report: The Dilbert Principle

There are only two books I've read more than twice. Michael Chrighton's Sphere (awesome science fiction that's much better than the movie with a miscast Sharon Stone playing an unattractive scientist who is self conscious about her inability to attract men) and The Dilbert Principle. Nobody in the past 15 years has accurately captured office existence, and nerd sub-culture in particular, than Scott Adams. Dilbert personifies all that it means to be an engineer with everything to his clothing, love of problem solving, and lack of social skills. In 1996, Adams expanded on an article he wrote for the Wall Street Journal into a book:

The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions

While The Dilbert Principle does rely heavily on previously published comics material, Adams seamlessly weaves his prior work into longer examinations on office phenomena such as Great Lies of Management, Pretending to Work, and How to Get Your Way. Most of these topics are very tongue-in-cheek and you might get fired for taking some of his suggestions. Still, all of them ring true for the various jobs I've had over the years and reader emails he integrates into the text suggests that I'm not alone.

Most of this book is about stress relief, really. It depicts ridiculous office situations we've all had to sit through while justifiably pointing a mocking finger. This is why I've read it 3 times. When I get frustrated at some new policy or irritated at somebody to the point where my head feels like it will explode, I pick a random chapter and find myself laughing at the absurdity of it all.

The last section, though, surprisingly offers very useful productivity suggestions for how Adams would run a company were he the CEO. Some things, like letting employees dress any way they want and keeping managers out of peoples way you can't implement on your own. Others, you can, including (from page 332-3 of the first edition):

• Do creative work in the morning and do routine, brainless work in the afternoon.
• Keep meetings short. Get the the point and get on.
• Blow off low-priority activities and make it clear why.
• Respectfully interrupt people who talk too long without getting to the point.
• Be efficient in the little things.

These are the kinds of things I try to cover here that lead to greater output and better performance reviews. You can't always do all of them, I know I don't no matter how hard I try, but if you do things like these most of the time you'll find yourself better off in the long term.

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Book Report: The Long Tail

You have to understand a little bit about marketing in order to function well with the MBA's in your life that come up with ideas for products. It's a necessary evil of engineering. That's not to say that you have to go out and buy MBAs for Dummies or something similar, though. Instead, there are lots of more interesting materials out there.

OK, I admit a bias on this one. As someone who makes their living creating web sites, I may bring a prejudice to the topic of using the Internet in a variety of ways. Still, it's not like the Internet doesn't touch everyone's lives, though. It just happens to touch mine not only as a user of its content, but as one of the millions of creators of it as well.

With that, I bring you a (perhaps the) defining marketing book of the Internet Age:

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More

Chris Anderson is way cooler than me just based on his day job as the editor in chief of Wired magazine. The purpose of his book is best summed up by a selection from the introduction:

"TV shows were more popular in the seventies than they are now not because they were better, but because we had fewer alternatives to compete for our screen attention. What we though was the rising tide of common culture actually turned out to be less about the triumph of Hollywood talent and more to do with the sheepherding effect of broadcast distribution.

The great thing about broadcast is that it can bring one show to millions of people with unmatchable efficiency. But it can't do the opposite - bring a million shows to one person each. Yet that is exactly what the Internet does so well. The economics of the broadcast era required hit shows - big buckets - to catch huge audiences. The economics of the broadband era are reversed."

That's essentially what The Long Tail is. Instead of selling one big hit to people via some broadcast medium, sell a million niche pieces of content to one person each. The name of the book comes from the graph you'd see if you ranked items by popularity.

The above image comes from the Wikipedia article on The Long Tail phenomenon and is what, say, iTunes sales might look like. On the far left (in green), there are the hits that sell a lot. Justin Timberlake lives in that part of the curve. As you move to the right (in yellow), the number of sales drop off pretty quickly, but that tail goes on seemingly forever. This is where your struggling garage band might be found. The tail goes on so far, that many online Long Tail retailers (NetFlix, iTunes, Amazon, etc) sell every item they put into their massive catalogs at least once.

Think about that. Everything in the catalog sells at least once (actually 98% of what is in the catalog sells once, give or take). If that were true, there's a lot of money to be made just by having a great big catalog, isn't there? That's what Jeff Bezos said.

In an example from the book, your local Borders carries about 100,000 book titles. Amazon carries nearly 4,000,000. Borders can only afford to shelve books that are hits because it has to pay for the the building the store operates in, scores of employees, utilities, etc. In order to offer a new book, they ultimately have to create space for it by no longer carrying an older one. Amazon, though,can carry as many books as they want to given their vast where house system. Each new title is almost free for them to stock because of the economies of scale. Yet, for each book they carry, SOMEBODY will buy it and they will make a profit off of that one sale due to the extremely low overhead. Amazon will sell at least one copy of almost all 4,000,000 of those titles, 3,900,000 of which your local Borders or Barnes & Noble can't get for you with out a special order. In fact, Amazon gets 25% of its sales from items you can't find at any brick and mortar bookstore.

There are lots of anecdotes in this book, including a reasonable claim that the Sears catalog was an early Long Tail for rural Midwestern farmers. Pieces of functionality that need to be in place for a successful Long Tail are analyzed as is our emerging niche culture and future possibilities of the phenomena. This is a fun read, in part because you have probably used a lot of the websites mentioned inn it and can relate better to the Long Tail shopping experience. Impress your marketers by quoting this one and even make suggestions to your product lines based on its concepts. That sort of thing will improve your relationships with those folks and help build your reputation in the process. Having endorsements from people in a variety of job types can be beneficial when it is time for that performance evaluation.

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Book Report: Naked Economics

I was an econ minor in college, where I learned about supply and demand curves, what a mutual fund is, and how to calculate a mortgage amortization with an abacus. It always disappointed me that I didn’t learn a whole lot about the actual economy. How does the Fed manipulate interest rates and why? What is the importance of the unemployment rate as it relates to the housing market? Why should I care about the GNP? Besides in the interest of being re-elected, why do politicians tweak the tax code?

These questions and more are answered by Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science

Charles Wheelan, former correspondent for The Economist, does an excellent job of explaining what economics is really about (my take is that it’s about studying human behavior), what the role of the government really should be (primarily to level the playing field for everybody), and how well we really have it in United States compared to others (the process involved in starting a business in South America is staggering, as are the differences in health care between the US and India).

My favorite concept introduced by Wheelan, though, is human capital. Covered in the chapter entitled “Productivity and Human Capital: Why is Bill Gates so much richer than you?”, human capital is defined as “the sum total of the skills embodied within an individual: education, intelligence, charisma, creativity, work experience, entrepreneurial vigor, even the ability to throw a baseball fast. It is what you would be left with if someone stripped away all your assets – your job, your money, your home, your possessions – and left you on a street corner with only the clothes on your back.” Wheelan then theorizes how quickly the Microsoft founder would find employment in that situation to demonstrate the concept. As you might imagine, there are lots of correlations between having a high amount of human capital and economic security. Not just for individuals, but for countries as well:

“There is a striking correlation between a country’s level of human capital and its economic-well being. At the same time, there is a striking lack of correlation between natural resources and standard of living. Countries like Japan and Switzerland are among the richest countries in the world despite having relative poor endowments of natural resources. Countries like Nigeria are just the opposite; enormous oil wealth has done relatively little for the nation’s standard of living. In some cases, the mineral wealth of Africa has financed bloody civil wars that would have otherwise died out. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has most of the oil while, Israel, with no natural resources to speak of, has the highest per capita income.”

Wheelan then goes on to explain how productivity and human capital go hand in hand. He further explains how it affects the wage gap in the US, which is why it is my favorite topic and is important to this space. Ultimately, engineers with skills (both technical and soft) get ahead and, as I’ve argued here before, the soft ones tend to be the more important of the two. Overall, Naked Economics has a thing or two to teach you about the structures and processes involved in the global economy. This can help you understand the ultimate big picture, see trends that affect technology and job markets, and assist your overall career growth.

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