thinks

Business owners, managers and writers often invoke sports metaphors to illustrate business situations. Just as often, those metaphors fall flat, either because the audience has little connection to the sport or the metaphor has little connection to reality. So a business book that builds its case around the actions of a low-budget sports franchise risks alienating sports fans and business managers alike. Yet, traveling these well-worn basepaths, Michael Lewis has written one of the classic business books of its era in “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game”.

The book, ostensibly about the Oakland A’s and their demanding general manager Billy Beane, provides a catalog of techniques - and more important - attitudes necessary to compete with the big boys. Its fundamental question, “how does a low-budget operation manage to win consistently against the best-funded teams in sports,” illustrates how a small business owner or manager can develop a winning game plan by focusing on the right information and exploiting market inefficiencies the big guys overlook. Plus it reads as an engaging David vs. Goliath story, introducing colorful characters and situations familiar to sports fans and business veterans alike.

Among the business wisdom sprinkled throughout its pages, “Moneyball” states “the goal of the Oakland front office was simply to minimize the risk. Their solution wasn’t perfect, it was just better than the hoary alternative, rendering decisions by gut feeling.” It also quotes the wonderfully-named amateur (later pro) statistician Voros McCracken, “It didn’t make any sense to me that the way to approach the problem was to give up.” You don’t have to be a fan of baseball - or any sport - to see how that applies to every business.

Oakland general manager Beane, according to Lewis, is fond of Warren Buffett’s statement, “The hardest thing to find is a good investment.” Buy this book. That’s at least one good investment you can take to bank.

Typically, I spend this time each week (or so) reviewing what I’ve just finished reading. But, I haven’t actually finished reading anything for the last couple weeks. Here’s what’s on my night stand right now:

• Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working from GigaOM’s Web Worker Daily - Anne Truitt Zelenka and Judi Sohn discuss the transition from knowledge worker to web worker and what that means for business and their employees. Anne and I have debated this point from time to time, though she makes a compelling case in the book. Check back in a couple of weeks and I’ll let you know if she’s convinced me.
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable - Nassim Nicholas Taleb takes what ought to be a dry topic and makes it interesting, engaging - and sometimes funny. Not funny enough to read it quicker (this one’s been on my nightstand for a while), but worthwhile all the same.
• Influencer: The Power to Change Anything - I feel like I walked in late on a conversation on this one. The authors (Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, and Ron McMillan) detail the steps others have taken to affect change in key performance drivers. But, they seem to ignore how one goes about identifying those key drivers in a particular enterprise in the first place. Maybe I should read their earlier books?

So, that’s what I’m reading right now. Here are my questions for you: What are you reading? What should we all be reading? Drop a comment and let us all know.

Tim Ash subtitled his new book, “Landing Page Optimization”, “The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions”. That’s a bold claim, but one he defends well. Ash, president of SiteTuners.com, knows his subject inside and out and does a solid job of walking web marketers through both the theory and practice of optimizing your web pages to drive increased sales, even when presenting more complex math behind analyzing results (yes, math. Don’t worry, fellow marketer, he keeps it brief). The information in chapters 7 and 8 alone should cover the costs of the book for your entire team. Ash does a great job of discussing important topics in data collection such as data aging. The only place Ash may fall short is in discussing data collection for offline conversions, though, to be fair, that’s likely a topic worthy of a book (or two) of its own. Don’t let that keep you from checking it out. If your job revolves around selling on the web, you need this book.

Increasingly, being a marketer means being a geek marketer, one as comfortable with data analysis as designing a campaign. Folks like Tim Ash and books like “Landing Page Optimization” will ease that transition. Grab a copy today..

In the spirit of Mike Moran’s “Do It Wrong Quickly” this is a brief review. E-marketing is only as hard as you make it, and “Do It Wrong Quickly” makes it easy. Moran breaks down a complex topic into simple, easy to understand pieces, suitable for folks who know nothing about how to generate business via the Web. And he writes with enough humor and style that even experienced folks will be entertained as well as gaining a little knowledge. Some folks say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Learn from “Do It Wrong Quickly” and the only folks in danger will be your competition.

You’ve gotta love Seth Godin. Even if you hate him. He’s made a mini-empire out of writing little books that distill big topics into bite-sized chunks for busy business owners, marketers and executives. Take his latest,“Meatball Sundae”. Please.

It’s a great little book. Seth covers fourteen trends, many of them book subjects on their own, that represent a change “…in the environment we live in.” These range from “no insulation” between customers and companies, through outsourcing, the rise of Google and the birth of the Long Tail (itself one of my 12 Crucial Reads of the last 10 years). What Seth has done is break down the barriers between these trends and provide a field guide for marketers interested in using them to engage with customers and sell more effectively.

When I channeled Henny Youngman earlier, I wasn’t just making a bad joke. I was actually asking you. Please buy “Meatball Sundae”. It won’t take you much longer to read than this review. And it will do so much more for you.

Josh Bernoff, Charlene Li and other fine folks at Forrester have a report on what they call “The POST Method” for social strategy. It’s an excellent report, well worth the read for many folks at larger companies interested in the best way to set social strategy for their firm. Charlene and Josh both have excellent insights into the right way to do social strategy.

For instance, the way that Josh got folks to review this report (and their forthcoming book) illustrates excellent social strategy implementation.

I learned about this report from a link on Josh and Charlene’s blog, encouraging bloggers to tweet Josh if they were interested in a review copy of the report. (Tweets are messages sent via Twitter, for those new to both). He offered the report to the first 100 TWITs. (TWITs are what many folks call the folks using Twitter. Ah, how we love our irony). What impressed me about this method is that Josh sized up his audience first, connected bloggers using social platforms such as blogs, RSS and Twitter. Who better to review a report about social strategy than the folks using social technologies. But, key to both the report and the approach is Josh didn’t start by saying, “I’ll use Twitter.” He started be knowing what mattered to his customers, then using tools that worked for those folks. It might sound obvious, but that’s precisely Josh’s point. Too many companies start with “Let’s use some cool new technology” without thinking first about what value it has to their customers. Your business can use Twitter in a number of ways. But that doesn’t mean you should in all cases. Josh just happened to demonstrate one of them. His colleague Peter Kim listed other uses for Twitter in a recent post, too. But without the right objectives and strategies in place, you won’t see the value you should.

So, should you buy the report? The answer depends on your budget. For many large companies, the cost is low relative to similar reports. For small companies though, I’d recommend waiting for Charlene and Josh’s book. I suspect it will cover everything in the book, plus some and for a much more reasonable price.