by Roger A. Smith, CPP, Payroll Management Consultant
Summer Reading
School’s out, the weather has warmed up, vacations are upon us, and the summer reading lists for business are out. If you’re a payroll or HR professional, you may be asking, “Why should I care?” Well, if you’re a leader, or would like to be some day, you’re going to spend a lot of your time talking to other leaders. You need to know the latest management theories, practices, and buzzwords, so it’s important to keeping up with the literature.
After reviewing several of these lists, I’ve reached the conclusion that business books don’t have to be dull. In fact, this year’s lists seem more interesting than ever. While I haven’t read all of these books, I thought I’d pass along this brief overview of the ones that sound the most interesting to me. All of these books are on at least one of the popular lists.
Why Popcorn Costs So Much at the Movies and Other Pricing Puzzles by Richard McKenzie (Copernicus Books, 2008). Professor McKenzie explores pricing puzzles such as popcorn at the movies, ink jet printer cartridges, and after-Christmas sales. Although not a pricing puzzle, he also discusses “The 9/11 Puzzle.” The September 11 terrorists, who are dead themselves now, killed more people since 9/11 than they did on that day. By driving the risks and price of air travel up and making it more inconvenient, the terrorists motivated people to drive their cars rather than take a plane, and the highways are deadlier than the airways.
Our Iceberg Is Melting by John Kotter, (Holger Rathgeber). Sort of a 21st Century Who Moved My Cheese?, this fable about Antarctic penguins facing change is the lead-in to a common sense process for successful change.
The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam (Portfolio Hardcover). According to the author Southwest Airlines really was started based on an idea drawn on the back of a cocktail napkin. He emphasizes that we are visual people, and that anyone with a pen and a scrap of paper can use visual thinking to work through complex business ideas.
The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman (Picador). No, the author doesn’t doubt Columbus. By “flat” he simply means “connected.” It is now possible to do business, or almost anything else, instantaneously with billions of other people across the planet. Globalization 3.0, as he calls it, is driven not by major corporations but by individuals: desktop freelancers and innovative startups all over the world that can compete, and win, in the global marketplace.
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcom Gladwell (Back Bay Books). Gladwell’s premise is simple: little changes can have big effects; when small numbers of people start behaving differently, that behavior can ripple outward until a critical mass or "tipping point" is reached, changing the world. It seems inevitable that "tipping point," like "future shock" or "chaos theory," will soon become one of those ideas that everybody knows--or at least knows the buzzword.
Creating Contagious Commitment: Applying the Tipping Point to Organizational Change by Andrea Shapiro (Strategy Perspective). See, I told you “Tipping Point” would become a business buzzword! In this book, the author explains why so many workplace "initiatives" seem doomed to failure almost before they have been launched and provides concrete examples of remedies to prevent these failures. She illustrates how “Tipping Point” theory is not only relevant, but directly applicable to the work place.
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose (Simon & Schuster). If you haven’t heard the story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition since childhood, you owe it to yourself to hear it as an adult. Undaunted Courage is the chronicle of that great adventure into the unknown wilderness, but it’s also the story of expedition leader Meriwether Lewis, who, haunted by what he saw as the expedition’s failure to accomplish many of its original objectives, died (possibly by his own hand) three years after returning to the East. With the perspective of 200 years, we can conclude that Lewis’s return home safely with all but one of his Corps of Discovery, was in itself a great victory over the odds and a triumph of personal leadership.
If you get a chance to read any of these books, let me know what you think. Or if you find a book you feel should be added to the list, tell me about it. I’ll provide an update in a future column.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, my email address is Roger.Smith@PayrollProf.com.
