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Thanks to strategy+business for their annual review of the year’s business books. The forty-four page report is a great read itself. The editors point out that in May, 2009 year-to-date sales of professional books were down 6.8% in the U.S. The recession is the prime suspect for the decline and it is that event that fueled quite a few of the books on their list. It is not a ranking but rather a sorting of the cream within eight categories. True to the story of the year, the first category is The Meltdown. Seven books are suggested as worthy of reading with In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernake’s War on the Great Panic from David Wessel, The Wall Street Journal’s economics editor, as the top pick. It provides context, content and a compelling examination of the key players including Bernake, Geithner, and Paulson. The six other books include Fool’s Gold and House of Cards, both of which I have read, the latter being a must in my opinion.
From there we move to Leadership which can be argued was in short supply in 2009. The editors have chosen five books on this subject with The Puritan Gift: Reclaiming the American Dream amidst Global Financial Chaos the top pick. I find it a little too U.S. centric in review and that is acknowledged. The book laments the loss of entrepreneurial leaders who have been replaced by the imperial rule of professional CEOs. One of the others selected interests me far more than the top pick. Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor calls for leaders to create such a culture and who are “willing to rethink even their most basic assumptions through a process of constructive dissent”.
The next category is Strategy where the books are meant to demonstrate a virtue that reminds the reader of what it takes to achieve and sustain high performance. And the top pick here moves into marketing, The Invisible Edge: Taking Your Strategy to the Next Level Using Intellectual Property, is one I read upon its release. I did not experience the same impact as the editors but appreciated the content especially the two bits, “intellectual property represents small monopolies” and the notion that innovation without protection is corporate philanthropy. The one from this category that I will make sure to read is Dynamic Capabilities & strategic management. I feel redeemed reading the editor’s review of the book as it supports something I have been saying for years (on the record too) that Michael Porter’s Five Forces is actually constraining. Here they point out it neglects a company’s inner workings while my beef has been with the strict definition of industry.
Globalization continues to be a subject of debate and writing so it is the next category with the best book being The New Silk Road: How a Rising Arab World is Turning Away from the West and Rediscovering China. The premise is interesting and given past history and future implications – a must read. India figures prominently with two of the five suggested books covering that country of growing influence.
The broad subject of Management is the next category with four books suggested. The top pick is The Upside of the Downturn: Ten Management Strategies to Prevail in the Recession and Thrive in the Aftermath. It seems to be replete with real examples and cases of how to move ahead while others languish. They highlight John Deere where incentives are based on economic profit including capital costs and where bonuses are paid out over four years to encourage longer-term thinking. I must give a shout out to another pick here, namely Henry Mintzberg’s Managing. I have read almost all of his writing and though I do have a healthy skepticism of business professors who have never run an actual business, I enjoy his thinking because he spends so much time with actual leaders and managers. He truly believes that management is a profession comprised of science and art.
Marketing is a slim category this year but the three entries cover potent content. In addressing marketing, the editors point out that branding has become an open source endeavor. No longer do corporations control their brands – image is the hands of many. Major marketers and individual consumers use the same tools to produce and distribute messages. The best marketing book is reserved for Gerzema and Lebar’s The Brand Bubble: The Looming Crisis in Brand Value and How to Avoid It. The authors are with Young & Rubicam and have accessed the agency’s BrandAsset Valuator data. They conclude that the public’s faith in most brands has been eroded by decades of over-the-top ad claims and shelves that are overcrowded with undifferentiated products. I am definitely going to pick it up and see if takes into account the fact that brands and branding are extremely democratic allowing consumers the right to choose.
Technology is the next category and stealing the top pick is Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters. Stealing myspace and Remix are the other two picks in the category. All speak to democratization of content and channel and the impacts on business models and global economics.
John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand is the top pick in the last category which is Biography. The author concludes the Mill was the voice and conscience of the greatest era of progress and wealth creation in history. The two other towering personalities covered are The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilit and The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. I have not read any of them though Vanderbilt was on my list and Mill now intrigues.
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Visit www.strategy-business.com to download the report and review. And thanks again to strategy+business for this excellent annual effort.
Jeff Swystun, Chief Communications Officer, DDB Worldwide
This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on December 7, 2009 3:06 PM.
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Comments (13)
Jim
Could you elaborate on what "In Fed We Trust" is about? Thanks!
Posted by Jim | December 14, 2009 11:53 PM
Jeff Swystun
Hey Jim, this is one I have not read but is now on my personal list. I have included the Washington Post review to give you some more depth:
David Wessel's "In Fed We Trust" opens on Sept. 14, 2008, when Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, is badly sleep-deprived, living on trail mix and wrestling with the decision of a lifetime. For months, he has been trying to stamp out the spreading wildfire of the international financial crisis, yet he, along with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and New York Fed President Timothy Geithner, can't seem to get ahead of the flames. Bernanke had slashed interest rates, helped the Treasury Department and Wall Street bail out the investment bank Bear Stearns -- and still, Wessel writes, "every time officials at the Treasury or the Fed thought they finally had gotten ahead of the Great Panic, they turned out to be insufficiently pessimistic." And on Sept. 14 the problem is what to do about Lehman Brothers. A lifelong scholar of the Great Depression and its causes, Bernanke deeply believes that the global economic crisis of the 1930s, with all its baleful political consequences, could have been avoided if the Federal Reserve had more aggressively pumped liquidity into the economy. He has also been informed that the venerable Wall Street investment firm, with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of connections to the global financial sector, is running out of cash. A second Great Depression is in the offing -- the moment, in a sense, for which Bernanke has been preparing his whole life. Yet he does not know quite what to do. No private-sector buyer for Lehman can be found. The Fed stretched its legal authority to rescue Bear Stearns the previous March, and that doesn't appear possible in the Lehman case. Paulson, for his part, was spooked by the bad political reaction to the Bear bailout and doesn't want to repeat it if he doesn't have to. And so, Bernanke, believing that the markets might have had time to prepare their defenses against a Lehman collapse, concludes in consultation with Paulson and Geithner that there is no alternative to letting the firm fail. It was the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history, and it triggered a near-global financial meltdown. And from that moment on, Wessel argues, Bernanke was determined never to be accused of doing too little again. "Whatever it takes" became his depression-beating mantra, and under Bernanke the Fed either carried out or supported some of the most sweeping government interventions ever. Today, the Treasury owns most of General Motors and part of Citigroup and Bank of America, while the Fed funds mortgage-backed securities and the commercial paper markets to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. The Fed's balance sheet stands at about $2 trillion, double what it was two years ago. Did it work? Wessel, the economics editor at the Wall Street Journal, has clearly had access to all the key players; his reporter's judgment is that Bernanke does deserve credit for preventing what he aptly dubs the Great Panic from morphing into something even worse. The interventions Bernanke spearheaded cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars, much of which necessarily flowed into the coffers of Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs and AIG. But the relevant question is what Americans would have paid, now and in the future, if Bernanke and his colleagues had not done what they did. From that point of view, their actions look more cost-effective. Indeed, recent data suggest that the worst may be over. The U.S. economy's shrinkage decelerated to a rate of 1 percent between April and July. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is hovering near 9,200, up 2,700 points from its lowest point of the past 52 weeks. Even housing is finding a bottom. Unemployment is at 9.4 percent and will probably peak at around 10 percent -- bad, but far from 1930s levels. Last week, the central bank said it would allow a $300 billion program to buy Treasury bonds to lapse in October, a sign that it thinks the economy can stand on its own two feet. Still, as Wessel shows, the Fed in general and Bernanke in particular were hardly blameless in the buildup to the crisis. Under former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, the central bank probably kept interest rates too low for too long in the wake of the 2001 recession, fueling the housing boom whose bust in the second half of 2007 brought on the Great Panic. The Fed's policy under Greenspan reflected the intellectual influence of none other than Bernanke, Wessel writes, whose fear of a downward spiral made him "a strong ally of Greenspan's in making the case that the Fed should keep interest rates low and say so publicly." Bernanke on that occasion was not necessarily well served by his lifelong focus on depression economics: When you're a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. A final verdict on Bernanke's performance will have to wait until the Fed finishes the job he started. If the U.S. economy has stopped sinking, it is because of the flood of artificial liquidity, released by Bernanke, that has borne it up. The Fed's next job will be the perfectly timed withdrawal of all that extra money, so as to avoid either roaring inflation or a relapse of deflation. Bernanke's term ends in 2010, and it's clear he is itching for a chance to finish what he began, even though President Obama will be sorely tempted to replace him with a Democrat such as Larry Summers, the White House economic adviser (and Bernanke's longtime intellectual competitor). A second term for Bernanke would be a good call for Obama if he wants to preserve continuity at the Fed, and if he concludes that Bernanke's belated but creditable actions merit a reward. But in a sense, the Fed's job for the next half-decade has already been determined by the course Bernanke chose in the past 18 months. Whoever takes the helm will face the greatest liquidity mop-up in history. And only if the Fed pulls it off can there be a happy ending to the Great Panic, whose scary beginning David Wessel has so effectively narrated. lanec@washpost.com
Posted by Jeff Swystun | December 15, 2009 2:27 PM
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Adriane
Good night, Happy Fool's Day!
The upset and concerned housewife Rivkah sprang to the telephone when it rang and listened with relief to the kindly voice.
"Darling, How are you? This is Mummy."
"Oh Mummy," she said "I'm having a bad day."
Breaking into bitter tears, she continued, "The baby won't eat and the washing machine broke down. I haven't had a chance to go shopping and besides, I've just sprained my ankle and I have to hobble around. On top of that, the house is a mess and I'm supposed to have the Goldbergs and the Rosens for dinner tonight."
The voice on the other end said in sympathy, "Darling, let Mummy handle it."
She continued, "Sit down, relax, and close your eyes. I'll be over in half an hour. I'll do your shopping, clean up the house, and cook your dinner for you. I'll feed the baby and I'll call an engineer I know who'll be at your house to fix the washing machine in 30 minutes.
Now stop crying. I'll do everything. In fact, I'll even call your husband David at the office and tell him he ought to come home and help out for once."
"David?" said Rivkah. "Who's David?"
"Why, David 's your husband! Is this 0208 123 3749?"
"No, this is 0208 123 3747."
"Oh, I'm sorry. I guess I have the wrong number."
There was a short pause, then Rivkah said, "Does this mean you're not coming over?"
Happy April Fool's Day!
Posted by Adriane | April 2, 2010 4:29 AM
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