Best Business Books of the Year

With the holiday season upon us, I thought I would write about my favorite business books of the year to provide some gift giving ideas for you and your teams. Here, in no particular order, are my favorites among the books I read this year. (Note: These books were not all published this year, but since I read them this year I’m including them in my list.)

Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone.
by Mitch Joel

Six Pixels of Separation begins as a primer for any business leader with limited knowledge of the Internet’s capabilities and quickly turns into an indispensable set of guidelines and advice for any business person who plans to make use of the web (which should be any business person). Mitch Joel offers excellent insight and plenty of simple, direct, digestible advice. This is a must read.

The Flaw of Averages: Why We Underestimate Risk in the Face of Uncertainty
by Sam L. Savage

Every business person should read this book. We are so often looking for precise numbers when precise numbers are unrealistic. The reality is, we would actually be much more accurate to use probabilities and ranges when referencing uncertain number such as sales forecasts or project timelines. Savage takes us through the dangers of using averages to describe distributions and offers solid solutions that can be used to better manage our business.
Preview Flaw of Averages

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This book made me think more than any book in recent memory. That may be partly because it’s pretty dense and I had to read it more slowly than I normally read. However, I’ll give a lot more credit to the fact that Taleb’s makes some very interesting points about the amount of randomness in our lives and how that randomness is all too often mistaken for something more substantive.
Preview Fooled by Randomness

How We Decide
by Jonah Lehrer
I loved this book. Jonah Lehrer takes us through some fairly common behavior economics principles and experiments, but the very interesting twist he takes is to explain the brain mechanics that drive our thinking and decisions. He really uncovers why we’re “predictably irrational” and provides great insight into how we make decisions and how we can use that knowledge to improve our decision making.

The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
by Leonard Mlodinow

I’m on a randomness kick lately, and this is the book that got me started on it. Mlodinow does a nice job of illustrating some of the finer statistical points in a pretty accessible manner. While this book isn’t as deep at the book I’m currently reading, “Fooled by Randomness,” it’s definitely an easier read and does a nice job of covering the basics.
Preview The Drunkard’s Walk

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior
by Ori Brafman, Rom Brafman

Another one of the behavior economics books I so love. This one has some pretty interesting stories and anecdotes, and its insights benefit from one of the writers being a psychologist and the other a businessman.
Preview Sway

More Than a Motorcycle: The Leadership Journey at Harley-Davidson
By Rich Teerlink and Lee Ozley

This is a very interesting book about culture change at Harley-Davidson during the ’90s written by the CEO and lead consultant who initiated the change. It can be a bit dry at times, but the details behind the thinking and the execution are excellent. I learned a lot by reading it.
Preview More than a Motorcycle

And here are some great books that I re-read this year:

The OPEN Brand: When Push Comes to Pull in a Web-Made World
by Kelly Mooney, Nita Rollins
The world is changing rapidly, and those who fail to realize it will be left in the dust. However, those who open their brand and see the value of allowing their best customers to participate in the brand will not only reap the benefits of those customers ideas, but they will also benefit from those customers becoming the largest and more credible Marketing department a company could have. Kelly Mooney and Nita Rollins explore these themes in an extremely insightful book that comes with lots of examples that help the reader visualize how these ideas could apply to his or her own business. The writing style and formatting is fun and extremely easy to read. This is a great handbook for any marketer in the 21st century.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
by Michael Lewis

While this is ostensibly a baseball book about the success of Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane, I actually found this to be an excellent business book. Michael Lewis tells the story of Beane defying the conventional wisdom of longtime baseball scouts about what good baseball players look like. Rather than trust scouts who literally would determine a baseball player’s prospects by how he physically looked, Beane went to the data as a disciple of Bill James’ Sabermetrics theories. Lewis describes how James took a new look at traditional baseball statistics and created new statistics that were actually more causally related to winning games. By following the James’ approach, Beane was able to put together consistently winning teams while working with one of the lowest payrolls in the Major Leagues. How can the same principles of trusting data over tradition and “gut” play in the business world? That is a thought I constantly ponder thanks to reading this book.
Preview Moneyball

The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do
by Clotaire Rapaille

I picked this book up on a whim one day because the title was interesting. I was quickly engrossed by reading the story in the introduction of Clotaire Rapaille’s work with Chrysler on Jeep Wrangler. He describes the “code” word for Jeep in America is HORSE and advises executives to design round headlights instead of square headlights because horses have round eyes. They think he’s nuts, of course, but when it turns out round headlights are cheaper they go with them — and they’re a hit. They also then position the Wrangler as a “horse” in their ads and have great success. Rapaille goes on to describe what he means by “culture code” and details some of the hidden cultural patterns that affect most all of us. Some samples of other codes within the book are:
- The American Culture Code for love is FALSE EXPECTATION
- The female code for sex is VIOLENCE (Whoa! You’ve got to read the book to understand)
- The code for hospital in America is PROCESSING PLANT

There are tons more of these interesting observations embedded in short, easy-to-read chapters. Whether or not you buy into everything he says, it’s very interesting to see how he developed each code and certainly will expand your understanding of how and why people behave as they do under the powerful forces of culture
Preview The Culture Code

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
by Dan Ariely

This is the book that first turned me on to the fascinating world of behavioral economics. Ariely does an excellent job of explaining many of the core principles of behavioral economics with stories and experiments. Every retailer should read this book to better understand how people (customers) think and behave. It will absolutely open your eyes.

Those are some of my favorites. I’m always looking for a new read. What books fired you up this year?

The immense value of “slop time”

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about thinking. We spend such a large portion of our days reacting to issues flying at us from all directions that we can easily lose sight of where we’re headed and why we’re going there. We’re so busy that we don’t have time to think, and failing to allot time to think is ultimately counterproductive. Taking time (and even scheduling time) to reflect on past actions and consider future courses of action is more important than we often realize.

Consider this quote from former Intel exec Dov Frohman in his book Leadership the Hard Way and also discussed on this Practice of Leadership blog posting:

“Every leader should routinely keep a substantial portion of his or her time—I would say as much as 50 percent—unscheduled. Until you do so, you will never be able to develop the detachment required to identify long-term threats to the organization or the flexibility to move quickly to take advantage of random opportunities as they emerge. Only when you
have substantial ’slop’ in your schedule—unscheduled time—will you have the space to reflect on what  you are doing, learn from experience, and recover from your inevitable mistakes. Leaders without such  free time end up tackling issues only when there is an immediate or visible problem.”

Frohman makes some excellent points about the need to learn from experience and pull the value from the mistakes we make. Truly understanding the pros and cons of past decisions, ideally with the benefit that hindsight and new learning gives us, helps us better prepare for future decisions.

But there’s so much going on every day, and with staff cuts we have more work than ever. How can we possibly afford to time to think?
Well, Frohman has a ready answer:

“Managers’ typical response to my argument about free time is, ‘That’s all well and good, but there are  things I have to do.’ Yet we waste so much time in unproductive activity—it takes an enormous effort on  the part of the leader to keep free time for the truly important things.”

Of course, that’s easy to say and considerably harder to do. But it’s so important. Without taking the time to focus on the most important issues, tactics and strategies, we end up constantly fighting fires and ultimately working our way into a death spiral.

I find that if I give my think time enough priority, I can find a way to get it in. For me, actually scheduling time on my calendar makes all the difference. It also forces me to put some of the daily issues into perspective and postpone or even cancel meetings that don’t rate highly enough on the prioritization scale.

So, what do we do with this newly scheduled time to think?

Reflect on past decisions
I’ve recently started spending some time actively thinking through the decisions I made during the previous week or so. It’s amazing how hard it was at first to think of many decisions I made, particularly the numerous small decisions that happen every day. They came and went so fast that I didn’t really immediately retain them and their effects. Where they good decisions or bad decisions? It made me wonder if I could make better decisions in the future just by doing a better job of examining past decisions.

Open up to new ideas and learn something new
I am constantly hungry for new ideas. I love to read interesting new books, and I try to read as many blogs as I can. Of course, all of that reading takes time, so I look for my opportunities wherever I can. I try to read for at least a half hour every night, and I’m always looking for books that will expand my thinking.

I’m currently reading a very interesting book called How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. It’s essentially about behavioral economics (a fascinating field with all sorts of retail implications) but the twist is that he actually examines the inner mechanics of the brain to explain why we do what we do. He’s a good story teller and it doesn’t get to “scienc-y.” (Is that a word?)

Another book that has me thinking more than any book I’ve read in a very long time is Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. How much time have we mis-spent reacting to data that lacks statistical significance? Could some focused learning on the events that fool us time and again prevent us from making bad decisions in the future?

I use Google Reader to follow many thought provoking blogs, including those listed on the right column here. I also use the Newsstand application on my iPhone, which syncs with Google Reader and allows me to take in a blog or two at all sorts of random moments when I have a little bit of time on my hands. In fact, during my blog reading recently I even came upon a list of new an “out-of-the-box” ways to inject thinking in your business from Mitch Joel.

Anticipate the future
After analyzing past decisions and opening up my mind to new ideas, I try taking some time to start anticipating the future. Here, I think it’s definitely important to imagine large strategic shifts in the marketplace, but it’s also important to consider daily issues that come up with staff, marketing tactics, etc. as well. How are different types of decisions made in the organization, and who makes them? Is decision making authority matched with accountability? Are decision makers aware of their boundaries? Are the boundaries appropriate? Is the business strategy correct and clearly communicated? Are we working towards the right objectives? Should I consider a different approach when working with a particular person? Should I go with the ham or the turkey for lunch.

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You’re clearly reading at least one blog today, so it’s good that you’ve already made some time in your day. Good news! I hope you’ll be back, and I hope you’re also taking some time to read more of the really great content that’s available out there in both book and blog form. I hope you’ll come across something so mind-blowingly thought provoking that it changes the way you think about something. I hope you’ll be so open to new ideas that you won’t be afraid to change your mind about past decisions and direction. (Side note pet peeve of mine: Why do we criticize leaders and politicians who change their minds? Would you rather work with someone who can change his or her mind in the face of new information or someone who stubbornly sticks to convictions no matter what?)

And, if you haven’t already, I hope you’ll consider adding some “slop time” to your schedule to allow you to reflect on past decisions, open up to new ideas and new learning, and anticipate the future.

Now it’s your turn. I’d love to hear how you find time to think. What are your sources of expanded thinking? Will you share any great books or blogs that you’ve read? What’s changed your thinking recently?

True conversion – the on-base percentage of web analytics?

I just finished re-reading one of my all-time favorite business books, Moneyball by Michael Lewis. While on the surface Moneyball is a baseball book about the General Manager of the Oakland A’s, Billy Beane, I found it to be more about how defying conventional wisdom (a topic I’ll no doubt return to over and over in this space) can be an excellent competitive advantage. In retail, we can be just as prone to conventional wisdom and business as usual as the world of baseball Lewis encountered, and site conversion rate is an excellent example of how we’re already traversing that path in the relatively young world of e-commerce.

In Moneyball, Michael Lewis tells the story of Beane defying the conventional wisdom of longtime baseball scouts and  baseball industry veterans. Rather than trust scouts who would literally  determine a baseball player’s prospects by  how he physically looked, Beane went to the data as a disciple of Bill James’ Sabermetrics theories. By following the  James’ approach, Beane was able to put together consistently winning teams while working with one of the lowest payrolls in the Major Leagues.

Lewis describes how James took a new look at traditional baseball statistics and created new statistics that were  actually more causally related to winning games. Imagine that! For example, James found on-base percentage, which  includes walks when calculating how often a player gets on base, to be a much more reliable statistic than batting  average, which ignores walks (even though we’re always taught as Little Leaguers that a walk is as good as a hit). I won’t get into all the details, but suffice to say on-base percentage is more causally related to scoring runs than batting  average, and scoring runs is what wins games.

So why is batting average still so prevalent and what does this have to do with retail?

Basically, an English statistician named Henry Chadwick developed batting average as a statistic in the late 1800s and didn’t include walks because he thought they were caused by the pitcher and therefore the batter didn’t deserve credit for not swinging at bad pitches. Nevermind that teams with batters who got on base scored more runs and won more games. But batting average has been used so long that we just keep on using it, even when it’s been proven to not be very valuable.

OK, baseball boy, what about the retail?

As relatively young as the e-commerce space is, I believe we are already falling prey to  conventional wisdom in some of our metrics and causing ourselves unnecessary churn.  My favorite example is site conversion rate. Conversion is a metric that has been used in physical retail for a very long time, and it makes good sense in stores where the overwhelming purpose is to sell products to customers on their  current visit.

I’ll argue, though, that our sites have always been about more than the buy button, and they are becoming more and more all-purpose every day. They are marketing and merchandising vehicles, brand builders, customer research tools (customers researching products and us researching customers), and sales drivers, both in-store and online. Given the multitude of purposes of our sites, holding high a metric that covers only one purpose not only wrongly values our sites, but it also causes us to churn unnecessarily when implementing features or marketing programs that encourage higher traffic for valuable purposes to our overall businesses that don’t necessarily result in an online purchase on a particular day.

We still need to track the sales generating capabilities of our sites, but we want to find a causal metric that actually focuses on our ability or inability to convert the portion of our sites’ traffic that came to buy. We used our site for many purposes at Borders, so we found that changes in overall site conversion rate didn’t have much to do at all with changes in sales.

If we wanted to focus on a metric that tracked our selling success, we needed to focus on the type of traffic that likely came with an intent to buy (or at least eliminate the type of traffic that came for other reasons), and we knew through our ForeSee Results surveys that our customers who came with an intent to buy on that visit was only a percentage of our total visitors, while the rest came for other reasons like researching products, finding stores, checking store inventory, viewing video content, etc.

So, how could we isolate our sales conversion metrics to only the traffic that came with an intent to buy?
Our web analyst Steve Weinberg came up with something we called “true conversion” that measured adds to cart  divided by product page views multiplied by orders divided by checkout process starts. This true conversion metric was far more correlative to orders than anything else, so it was the place to initially focus as we tried to determine if we could turn the correlation into causation. We still needed to do more work matching the survey data to path analysis to further refine our metrics, but it was a heckuva lot better than overall site conversion, which was basically worthless to us.

Every site is different, so I don’t know that all sites could take the exact same formula described above and make it work. It will take some work from your web analyst to dig into the data to determine customer intent and the pages that drive your customers ability to consummate that intent. For more ideas, I highly recommend taking a look at Bryan Eisenberg’s excellent recent topic called How to Optimize Your Conversion Rates where he explores some of these topics in more detail.

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Whether or not you buy into everything written in Moneyball or all of Billy Beane’s methods, I believe the main lesson to be culled from the book is that it’s critically important that we constantly re-evaluate our thinking (particularly when conventional wisdom in assumed to be true) in order to get at deeper truths and clearer paths to success.

How is overall site conversion rate working for you? Do you have any better metrics? Where have you run into trouble with conventional wisdom?

Defending the status quo kills companies

“Defending the status quo is what kills companies.” That line comes from the excellent book More Than a Motorcycle: The Leadership Journey at Harley-Davidson written by former Harley CEO  Rich Teerlink and his organizational consultant partner Lee Ozley. The book chronicles Teerlink’s and Ozley’s process to change the culture at Harley-Davidson to ensure the company was ready for the challenges to come. What I found most remarkable, though, was that they didn’t initiate this massive change when the company was troubled — they initiated massive change when the company had just completed a successful financial turnaround and the press was actively singing their praises.

They changed when conventional wisdom would have said to keep doing what they were doing.

Bankruptcy courts are littered with companies who kept doing what they were doing and failed to adapt to changing marketplaces and changing customer needs and expectations.

I spent 20 years in the music industry with Tower Records, so I’ve see one of the best examples in recent years of an entire industry that desperately clung to the past rather than embrace the future. The music industry didn’t suffer because of Napster and illegal downloads; it suffered because it turned its back on its customers in favor of short term profits.

The music industry failed to recognize the opportunity that came with the advent of the Internet and digital music formats. Rather than see their industry from their customers’ perspective, the industry fell pray to the elitism I’ve discussed previously. So a computer company took their business from them. Apple’s iPod and iTunes took the music retailers’ business and substantially wrestled control away from the music labels.

The retailers could have created digital music stores if they weren’t so worried about protecting their current businesses. And there were other opportunities available. Seth Godin spoke to the industry last year and gave some excellent examples of opportunities to change the business model.

Now other traditional industries like newspapers, video stores and bookstores, among others, are also losing substantial market share to new, technology based upstarts. Others, like travel agencies, are mostly gone.

But some companies are embracing change even during the height of success.
A recent Forbes interview with Xerox’s retiring CEO Anne Mulcahy highlighted her strategy to focus Xerox on “paperless printing” even though the entire organization was basically built on paper-producing technology. Rather than focus on paper, Mulcahy instead said the company’s value was always about the creation, management and dispensing of information, “Democratization of information, however it happened.”

Threats to existing business models aren’t only coming in the form of digitization.
Look at the shoe business. In ten years, Zappos.com went from a germ of an idea to a $1 billion company. Their model? “In March of 2003, we made a decision to be about customer service,” say their CEO, Tony Hsieh, in a recent Fast  Company profile. “We view any expense that enhances the customer experience as a marketing cost because it generates more repeat customers through word of mouth.”

Customer experience as a marketing cost. It’s a whole new way of looking at the shoe business (or retail in general), and it’s a hit worth a cool billion in a short amount of time.

I can’t believe that billion dollars was incremental business to the overall market. That share came out of somebody’s  hide. And that means an existing shoe business could have done it first if the thought process and the courage to act  was there. If the Zappos model works, it can be applied to anything, and it appears that’s exactly what Zappos intends  to do.

And the radical ideas keep coming. Chris Anderson has a controversial new book, Free, that describes a future he believes will be centered largely around business models that give away 95% of their offerings and make money on the remaining 5%. Are Anderson’s ideas open for debate? Sure, but they and other seemingly nutty ideas should be regularly and honestlydiscussed. One of them may well be the next billion dollar idea.

It doesn’t take wholesale change in the marketplace to significantly disrupt a business model.
A drop in business of 10-15% can have massive impact, as many have clearly seen in the current economic downturn. But the economic downturn has not sunk all boats. Amazon.com reported a sales increase of 18% and a net income increase of 24% for their first quarter this year.

As e-commerce continues to be the growth vehicle in retail, and as Amazon continues to dominate e-commerce, I wonder how brick and mortar retail models will adapt. I believe there are many opportunities today to leverage both the growth and value of e-commerce and existing physical real estate.

Certainly, tying the web experience and the store experience together via cross-channel capabilities is a must. In the industry, we talk a lot today about capabilities like order online and pick up in store, and I think those are good.

But how can we take it further?
For example, I know from my experience with in-store kiosks at Borders that a lot more people than I expected still aren’t comfortable shopping online. They want someone to help them use the kiosks, and then they want to pay with cash at the register. Why not use our store POS systems to take cash payments for online orders? What if we took it a step further and took cash payments for other sites’ orders. What if the physical store essentially became an affiliate for a pure play e-commerce site and took the cash along with a commission? What type of opportunities might that open for both the pure play and the brick and mortar store? What other reasons should customers continue to shop physical stores well into the future as technology and delivery systems continue to improve?

What challenges does your business face in the coming years, or what businesses in general do you see most at risk? How could your business model change — maybe radically — to address those challenges? Or, do you think this is all hogwash? Let’s discuss.