5 Great Business Books, 1 Timeless Essay
Posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009
The absolute last word on social media, economics and freeconomics. As they say, “if you read nothing else this year,” please do make it one of these tomes. And if shyness about writing is holding you back from SM, we’ve thrown in an essay recommendation that will help.
#1. Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Think the perfectly-coiffed guy with the country manor and stable of classic vehicles is a financial wizard? More likely he’s just lucky — and maybe only for awhile. Taleb’s highly original work reveals how we confuse luck with skills, randomness with determinism, belief with knowledge, and forecast with prophecy. Still think markets are rational and predictable? Think again. After you read Taleb on “Monte Carlo engines,” programs that spit out millions of equally likely probabilities, you’ll understand how every event has limitless possible outcomes and our hopes ride on a best guess. More accessible than his best-selling The Black Swan, Fooled is a good introduction to Taleb’s revelatory ideas. This book will open your eyes. Loved Fooled so much that I read it twice, then bought The Black Swan and did the same.
#2. Free: The Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson. Everything you ever wanted to know about the art of making money from “Free.” Granted, we all know the oft-told tale of Google’s business model: providing core services free of charge to cull fine-grained customer data for advertisers. And the “mainstream” companies — an airline, a retailer, and an automaker — celebrated here for their “free” approach to business are, for the most part, unproven start-ups. Trust me: United, Wal*Mart and Ford ain’t doin’ it fer free – not yet. Yet they and other giants struggled in this year’s economy. Is it possible the big fellas could lose out, ultimately, to companies that follow a “free” business model? Anderson makes a compelling case for a wild twist on free market economics dominated by zero-cost goods and services. Welcome to the “new” New Economy.
#3. Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust, by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. Arguably the best new strategic book on social media. Trust Agents is or should be a wake-up call to any enterprise that still drapes its corporate logo over tweets and relentlessly hard-sells its wares in every blog post. Among Brogan’s and Smith’s most powerful messages: To win trust, be a person not a professional. Empty suits with multi-page resumes, take heed: On the Web you may not be “one of us.”
#4. Six Pixels of Separation, by Mitch Joel. The entrepreneur’s guide to social media. Practical advice and step-by-step tactical execution, presented by the greatest one-man social media band in the business (strictly my opinion, but I mean it). Beyond urging everyone to lay her or his hands on a copy as quickly as possible, there’s nothing more to say. Joel himself says it best and there’s simply no way to condense his innovative thinking in a paragraph. A genuinely useful reference, well-organized and entertaining, to boot. (Disclosure: The idea for blogging about my favorite business books? — straight out of Six Pixels.)
#5. In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic, by David Wessel. When the market collapsed after 911 and again with Lehman’s bankruptcy, a financial adviser congratulated my “genius” for conservatively investing in Treasury bills. Actually I’m just a big chicken who doesn’t trust banks or understand why corporate paper has any value. After reading Wessel’s account of the Federal Reserve’s fly-by-the-seat-your-pants approach to the Great Panic of 2008-09, I now feel a little queasy about government paper, too. A candid appraisal of Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson and Tim Geithner, the book gives credit where due but also raises uncomfortable questions: Why didn’t the world’s great financial minds see this mess coming, why were they so slow to respond — and in the aftermath, why isn’t more being done to prevent a recurrence of the financial meltdown?
#6. “Politics and the English Language,” by George Orwell. If I hear one more marketing exec say he can’t execute on a great blog idea “because I can’t write,” I’ll tear up his American Marketing Association membership card and eat it piece by piece. Read this essay and learn how to match noun with verb minus superfluous (oops) adjective or pompous Latinism. Writing is like a muscle. Work it and you’ll get stronger. Orwell’s great essay offers simple pointers on constructing the well-built sentence, with hilarious examples of bad writing that made it to print. If nothing else, chuckling over others’ public prose goofs may make you feel better about your own. Works for me, anyway.
