Click (not the one you think) to success

In my experience, the most important factor for success in business is the ability to interact well with other people. Leadership skills, financial skills and technical skills all matter a lot, but they don’t amount to a hill of beans without solid people skills.

The reality is none of us can be successful completely on our own. We need the help of other people — be they peers, staff, managers, vendors or business partners — to successfully accomplish our tasks and goals.

Human relationships are more complicated than Wall Street financial schemes, but we often take interpersonal skills for granted. We rarely study them to the degree we study financial or technical skills. After all, we’ve been talking to people all our lives. We’re experienced. But I’ll argue there are subtleties that make all the difference, and they’re worth studying.

In my opinion, the best business book ever written is How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie — and it’s actually not even classified as a business book. I’ve never read a better guide to the basics of interacting effectively with people.

But I just finished a book that will take its place nicely alongside the Carnegie classic on my bookshelf.

Click: The Magic of Instant Connections by Ori and Rom Brafman (authors of Sway, one of my favorite books from last year) explores the factors or “accelerators” that exist when people “click” with each other. We’ve all had those instant connections with people in our lives, and those types of connections generally lead to powerful and productive relationships. While the Brafmans dig into both the personal and business nature of those connections, for purposes of this post I’ll focus on the business benefits of understanding and fostering such connections.

The book covers a wide range of connection accelerators, more than I could ever cover in this space, so I’ll just address a few that really stood out to me:

Proximity
Simple physical proximity can make a huge difference in our ability to connect with others. A study of a large number of military cadets found that 9 of 10 cadets formed close relationships with the cadets seated directly next to them in alphabetical seat assignments. Another study found that 40% of students living in randomly assigned dorms named their next-door neighbor as the person they most clicked with, but that percentage dropped in half when considering the student just two doors away. Maybe more startling, the students who lived in the middle of a hall were considerably more likely to be popular than those living at the end of a hall.

Why?

The authors explain that these connections are often driven by “spontaneous conversation…Over time, these seemingly casual interactions with people can have long-term consequences.”

I think many of us have instinctively understood the value of placing working teams in close proximity to each other. I’ve personally always attributed that value to the working conversations that are overheard and allow various member of the team to better understand and communicate issues about the work. But maybe that close proximity is also allowing people to better connect with each other. Maybe those connections allow us to better relate to each other and give each other the benefit of the doubt. Looking back at my career, I can think of many instances where office moves have coincided with strengthening or straining my working relationships with people.

Proximity is more important than I ever thought. We should carefully consider office layouts to foster the right types of connections. If close proximity is not possible for certain teams or people, we should understand the negative effects of separation and look for other ways to foster the connection.

Resonance
Resonance “results from an overwhelming sense of connection to our environment that deepens the quality of our interactions.” Huh? For example, the book reports that we’re 30 times more likely to laugh at a joke in the presence of others than if we hear it alone. My friend and colleague Jeff Dwoskin moonlights as a stand-up comedian, and he once explained to me that the difference between a good comedy club and a bad comedy club is the arrangement of audience seating. When tables are close together, people laugh more. When there are lots of booths that separate the audience into tiny groups, it’s much harder to get a laugh and keep the funny going.

Many companies swear by their open seating arrangements. Rich Sheridan, founder of Ann Arbor-based Menlo Innovations, seats his agile development teams on open tables together. No cubes. No walls. He says it’s a huge key to their success. Does that work for everyone working team in all situations? I doubt it. But certainly working environments have impact on working relationships and their resulting productivity, and resonance is a concept worth considering.

Similarity
“No matter what form it takes, similarity leads to greater likability…Once we accept people into our in-group, we start seeing them in a different light: we’re kinder to them, more generous.”

Kinder. More generous. Those sound like good bases for effective working relationships. It’s amazing how finding common ground can bring teams closer and help them work more effectively together. Sure, those of us working for the same company in the same industry all have industry and company in common, but it seems like the more personal similarities are more likely to bring people together. For that reason, we should encourage water cooler chats and other personal interactions in the work place. Everything in moderation, for sure, but a little personal time can actually end up improving productivity by reducing stress and misinterpretations that lead to unproductive miscommunications. The book reports that a “Finnish health survey conducted on thousands of employees between 2000 and 2003 revealed that those employees who had experienced a genuine sense of community at work were healthier psychologically.”

—————————————-

“Common bonds and that sense of community don’t just foster instant connections — they help to make happier individuals.” The Brofmans provide numerous examples of teams that performed significantly better than others primarily due to the interpersonal dynamics of their members. We simply cannot succeed in life without the support of other people. It’s worth taking the time to understand how to improve those relationships for the betterment of all parties. And pick up Click, it’s well worth the read.

What do you think? Is this all hogwash? Do you have stories of how personal relationships have led to success in your life?

11 Ways Humans Kill Good Analysis

In my last post, I talked about the immense value of FAME in analysis (Focused, Actionable, Manageable and Enlightening). Some of the comments on the post and many of the email conversations I had regarding the post sparked some great discussions about the difficulties in achieving FAME. Initially, the focus of those discussions centered on the roles executives, managers and other decisions makers play in the final quality of the analysis, and I was originally planning to dedicate this post to ideas decision makers can use to improve the quality of the analyses they get.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that many of the reasons we aren’t happy with the results of the analyses come down to fundamental disconnects in human relations between all parties involved.

Groups of people with disparate backgrounds, training and experiences gather in a room to “review the numbers.” We each bring our own sets of assumptions, biases and expectations, and we generally fail to establish common sets of understanding before digging in. It’s the type of Communication Illusion I’ve written about previously. And that failure to communicate tends to kill a lot of good analyses.

Establishing common understanding around a few key areas of focus can go a long way towards facilitating better communication around analyses and consequently developing better plans of action to address the findings.

Here’s a list of 11 key ways to stop killing good analyses:

1. Begin in the beginning. Hire analysts not reporters.
   This isn’t a slam on reporters, it’s just recognition that the mindset and skill set needed for gathering and reporting on data is different from the mindset and skill set required for analyzing that data and turning it into valuable business insight. To be sure, there are people who can do both. But it’s a mistake to assume these skill sets can always be found in the same person. Reporters need strong left-brain orientation and analysts need more of a balance between the “just the facts” left brain and the more creative right brain. Reporters ensure the data is complete and of high quality; analysts creatively examine loads of data to extract valuable insight. Finding someone with the right skill sets might cost more in payroll dollars, but my experience says they’re worth every penny in the value they bring to the organization.
2. Don’t turn analysts into reporters.
   This one happens all too often. We hire brilliant analysts and then ask them to spend all of their time pulling and formatting reports so that we can do our own analysis. Everyone’s time is misused at best and wasted at worst. I think this type of thing is a result of the miscommunication as much as a cause of it. When we get an analysis we’re unhappy with, we “solve” the problem by just doing it ourselves rather than use those moments as opportunities to get on the same page with each other. Web Analytics Demystified‘s Eric Peterson is always saying analytics is an art as much as it is a science, and that can mean there are multiple ways to get to findings. Talking about what’s effective and what’s not is critical to our ultimate success. Getting to great analysis is definitely an iterative process.
3. Don’t expect perfection; get comfortable with some ambiguity
   When we decide to be “data-driven,” we seem to assume that the data is going to provide perfect answers to our most difficult problems. But perfect data is about as common as perfect people. And the chances of getting perfect data decrease as the volume of data increases. We remember from our statistics classes that larger sample sizes mean more accurate statistics, but “more accurate” and “perfect” are not the same (and more about statistics later in this list). My friend Tim Wilson recently posted an excellent article on why data doesn’t match and why we shouldn’t be concerned. I highly recommend a quick read. The reality is we don’t need perfect data to produce highly valuable insight, but an expectation of perfection will quickly derail excellent analysis. To be clear, though, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try as hard as we can to use great tools, excellent methodologies and proper data cleansing to ensure we are working from high quality data sets. We just shouldn’t blow off an entire analysis because there is some ambiguity in the results. Unrealistic expectations are killers.
4. Be extremely clear about assumptions and objectives. Don’t leave things unspoken.
   Mismatched assumptions are at the heart of most miscommunications regarding just about anything, but they can be a killer in many analyses. Per item #3, we need to start with the assumption that the data won’t be perfect. But then we need to be really clear with all involved what we’re assuming we’re going to learn and what we’re trying to do with those learnings. It’s extremely important that the analysts are well aware of the business goals and objectives, and they need to be very clearly about why they’re being asked for the analysis and what’s going to be done with it. It’s also extremely important that the decision makers are aware of the capabilities of the tools and the quality of the data so they know if their expectations are realistic.
5. Resist numbers for number’s sake
   Man, we love our numbers in retail. If it’s trackable, we want to know about it. And on the web, just about everything is trackable. But I’ll argue that too much data is actually worse than no data at all. We can’t manage what we don’t measure, but we also can’t manage everything that is measurable. We need to determine which metrics are truly making a difference in our businesses (which is no small task) and then focus ourselves and our teams relentlessly on understanding and driving those metrics. Our analyses should always focus around those key measures of our businesses and not simply report hundreds (or thousands) of different numbers in the hopes that somehow they’ll all tie together into some sort of magic bullet.
6. Resist simplicity for simplicity’s sake
   Why do we seem to be on an endless quest to measure our businesses in the simplest possible manner? Don’t get me wrong. I understand the appeal of simplicity, especially when you have to communicate up the corporate ladder. While the allure of a simple metric is strong, I fear overly simplified metrics are not useful. Our businesses are complex. Our websites are complex. Our customers are complex. The combination of the three is incredibly complex. If we create a metric that’s easy to calculate but not reliable, we run the risk of endless amounts of analysis trying to manage to a metric that doesn’t actually have a cause-and-effect relationship with our financial success. Great metrics might require more complicated analyses, but accurate, actionable information is worth a bit of complexity. And quality metrics based on complex analyses can still be expressed simply.
7. Get comfortable with probabilities and ranges
   When we’re dealing with future uncertainties like forecasts or ROI calculations, we are kidding ourselves when we settle on specific numbers. Yet we do it all the time. One of my favorite books last year was called “Why Can’t You Just Give Me the Number?” The author, Patrick Leach, wrote the book specifically for executives who consistently ask that question. I highly recommend a read. Analysts and decision makers alike need to understand the of pros and cons of averages and using them in particular situations, particularly when stacking them on top of each other. Just the first chapter of the book Flaw of Averages does an excellent job explaining the general problems.
8. Be multilingual
   Decision makers should brush up on basic statistics. I don’t think it’s necessary to re-learn all the formulas, but it’s definitely important to remember all the nuances of statistics. As time has passed from our initial statistics classes, we tend to forget about properly selected samples, standard deviations and such, and we just remember that you can believe the numbers. But we can’t just believe any old number. All those intricacies matter. Numbers don’t lie, but people lie, misuse and misread numbers on a regular basis. A basic understanding of statistics can not only help mitigate those concerns, but on a more positive note it can also help decision makers and analysts get to the truth more quickly.

   Analysts should learn the language of the business and work hard to better understand the nuances of the businesses of the decision makers. It’s important to understand the daily pressures decision makers face to ensure the analysis is truly of value. It’s also important to understand the language of each decision maker to shortcut understanding of the analysis by presenting it in terms immediately identifiable to the audience. This sounds obvious, I suppose, but I’ve heard way too many analyses that are presented in “analyst-speak” and go right over the heard of the audience.

9. Faster is not necessarily better
   We have tons of data in real time, so the temptation is to start getting a read almost immediately on any new strategic implementation, promotion, etc. Resist the temptation! I wrote a post a while back comparing this type of real time analysis to some of the silliness that occurs on 24-hour news networks. Getting results back quickly is good, but not at the expense of accuracy. We have to strike the right balance to ensure we don’t spin our wheels in the wrong direction by reacting to very incomplete data.
10. Don’t ignore the gut
    Some people will probably vehemently disagree with me on this one, but when an experienced person says something in his or her gut says something is wrong with the data, we shouldn’t ignore it. As we stated in #3, the data we’re working from is not perfect so “gut checks” are not completely out of order. Our unconscious or hidden brains are more powerful and more correct than we often give them credit for. Many of our past learnings remain lurking in our brains and tend to surface as emotions and gut reactions. They’re not always right, for sure, but that doesn’t mean they should be ignored. If someone’s gut says something is wrong, we should at the very least take another honest look at the results. We might be very happy we did.
11. Presentation matters a lot.
    Last but certainly not least, how the analysis is presented can make or break its success. Everything from how slides are laid out to how we walk through the findings matter. It’s critically important to remember that analysts are WAY closer to the data than everyone else. The audience needs to be carefully walked through the analysis, and analysts should show their work (like math proofs in school). It’s all about persuading the audience and proving a case and every point prior to this one comes into play.

The wealth and complexity of data we have to run our businesses is often a luxury and sometimes a curse. In the end, the data doesn’t make our businesses decisions. People do. And we have to acknowledge and overcome some of our basic human interaction issues in order to fully leverage the value of our masses of data to make the right data-driven decisions for our businesses.

What do you think? Where do you differ? What else can we do?

2 important concepts for better usability

As I mentioned in my last post, I believe (and data I’ve seen at ForeSee Results supports this belief) poor usability is the #1 obstacle to better conversions on our sites.  Getting usability right is hard — very hard. It requires a mindset that is very difficult for most of us to develop naturally. In fact, I’d argue that our natural development tends to pull us further and further away from the mindset we need to design highly usable websites.

Two concepts we need to carefully consider — and strike the right balance between — are “knowledge in the head” and “knowledge in the world.”

Knowledge in the head and knowledge in the world are concepts introduced by noted psychologist, cognitive scientist and author Don Norman is his classic book, The Design of Everyday Things, which I just finished reading. The book was originally written in 1988, well before the web as we know it existed. But the principles he discusses about the design of doors, faucets, phones and other everyday things are extremely relevant to web design. To me, chief among those principles are the concepts of “knowledge in the head” and “knowledge in the world.”

Here’s how Norman explains the two concepts:

Human memory is essentially knowledge in the head, or internal knowledge. If we examine how people use their memories and how they retrieve information, we discover a number of categories. Three are important for us now: 1. Memory for arbitrary things. The items to be retained seem arbitrary, with no meaning and no particular relationship to one other or to things already known 2. Memory for meaningful relationships. The items to be retained form meaningful relationships with themselves or with other things already known. 3. Memory through explanation. The material does not have to be remembered, but rather can be derived from some explanatory mechanism.

Knowledge in the world acts as its own reminder. It can help us recover structures that we otherwise would forget. Knowledge in the head is efficient: no search and interpretation of the environment is required. In order to use knowledge in the head we have to get it there, which might require considerable amounts of learning. Knowledge in the world is easier to learn, but often more difficult to use. And it relies heavily upon the continued physical presence of the information; change the environment and the information is changed. Performance relies upon the physical presence of the task environment.

He goes on to note that “whenever information needed to do a task is readily available in the world, the need for us to learn it diminishes.”

It’s very interesting to look at our sites in the context of these concepts. Imagine a typical customer. What knowledge about how to use the site would she have in her head? How does that compare to the knowledge in our heads about how to use our sites? What’s her educational background, familiarity with web technology and familiarity with our sites versus our educational background, familiarity with web technology and, most of all, familiarity with our own sites?

The reality is, we are not like our customers.

It’s very difficult for those of us who work on sites day in and day out to see our customers’ perspectives. Elitism is the source of poor usability. We all too often consider ourselves to be proxies for our customers. It’s easy to do, and I’ve certainly been guilty of it myself. After all, we are customers of our own businesses, and we see things that work and don’t work for us as customers. We have to remember that we have a lot more knowledge in the head, particularly about our own businesses, than our customers do. And that knowledge in our heads prevents us from seeing our customers’ perspectives. We also easily miss lots of “tree stumps” on our sites that regularly get in our customers’ way.

So, should we just include step-by-step instructions for everything on our sites?

No, I don’t think that’s necessary or even prudent for everything. Norman explains lots of design principles that, if applied, should make many elements of our sites highly intuitive without instructions. But we probably should include a lot more help than we do. We really need to listen to what our customers are telling us and watch them use our sites. It’s the only way to get a better sense of the knowledge in their heads so we can know where we need to include some knowledge in the world.

For example, all too often username or password requirements are not mentioned at the point of entry and customers only find out about them when an error message occurs. Let’s be clear about those requirements upfront.

What type of terminology is being used in navigation? Are customers likely to equate “jackets” with “outerwear” or “stoves” with “cooktops?” One quick way to get a sense of terminology customers use is a review of search terms customers use.

Conventions can be our friends

There are certain conventions that are established enough to effectively be knowledge in the head for most of our customers. For example, navigation on the top of the page and on the left are common enough that we can reasonably expect the majority of our customers to find navigation in those places.If we veer from those types of conventions, though, we have to remember that we’re messing with that knowledge in the head.

But we have to be careful with conventions as there are many site practices that might be second nature to us and not to our customers. I once watched a usability session where on-screen instructions directed the customer (a 40ish or so middle class man) to select “the drop-down box.” He searched around the page looking for a box labeled “drop-down” and didn’t find one. That terminology wasn’t familiar to him. Some of our everyday language isn’t as common as we might assume.

————————————

While many of the concepts from Don Norman’s book have already seriously changed the way I look at the world (I think my wife may be getting annoyed at my now constant commentary on the design of every door we see), I most appreciate the relatively simple concepts of “knowledge in the head” and “knowledge in the world.” Forcing ourselves to identify what elements of our sites’ designs require which of those concepts will lead us to create significantly more usable sites for our customers. And more usable sites will absolutely lead to more sales. Woo hoo! Bonuses for all!

What do you think? Do you see your site differently in the context of these concepts? Do you have other concepts you like to use?

Social, mobile and other bright, shiny objects

It’s official. Social media and mobile commerce are this year’s bright, shiny objects. I recently attended a couple of industry conferences where those two topics dominated the agendas, and the trade mags and email newsletters are full of articles on everything social and mobile.

Heck, I’ve also written a white paper and blogged about social media.

Don’t get me wrong. I think social and mobile are important opportunities for us to improve our businesses. I just don’t think we should focus on them to the exclusion of some of the core aspects of our sites and businesses that still need a lot of work.

The level of our success with any of these new technologies is going to be limited by the effectiveness of our core site capabilities and constrained by any internal organizational challenges we might have.

Here are some topics I’d love to see get a little more press and conference content time:

• Usability
  From my vantage point at ForeSee Results, where I can see customer perceptions at many different retailers, it’s clear that our sites have not come close to solving all of our usability issues. In fact, I’ll go as far as saying improving usability is the #1 way to increase conversion. I’m currently reading a book called “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman. The book was written in the ’80s (I think) so there’s no mention of websites. Instead, he talks a lot about the design of doors, faucets and other everyday objects and, most interestingly, the psychology of we humans who interact with these things. The principles he discusses are absolutely relevant to web page design. Other books, such as “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug and anything by Jakob Nielsen are also great sources of knowledge. I’d sure love to see us cover these types of topics a little more in our conferences and trade mags. Also, how do different retailers approach find and solve usability issues? In the end, if the experiences we create aren’t usable our social and mobile strategies won’t reach their potential.
• Organizational structure
  How often do we come back from a conference with great new ideas about implementing some new strategies (say, a new social media or mobile commerce strategy) only to run into competing agendas, lack of resources or organizational bureaucracies? Discussing and writing about organizational structure doesn’t have the panache of social media or other exciting new frontiers, but there’s little doubt in my mind that the structure of our organizations can make or break the success of our businesses. When we were first setting up the organization for the new Borders.com, we spent a LOT of time studying the structures of other companies learning about the pros and the cons from those who lived through different schemes. It was hugely useful and more interesting than you might think. Mark Fodor, CEO of Cross View, just wrote an excellent piece for Online Strategies magazine that discussed the hurdles involved in going cross-channel and included a very good discussion about the need for mindset shifts. I’d love to see these topics further explored in interactive environments at industry conferences.
• Incentives
  Books like Freakonomics make strong cases for the fact that incentives drive our behaviors. I’d love to hear how other companies set up their internal incentive structures. And there are multiple types of incentives. Certainly, there are financial incentives that come in the form of bonuses. But there are also the sometimes more powerful social incentives. What gets talked about all the time? How do those topics of discussion influence people’s behaviors? How do all those incentives align with the needs generated by new strategies to maximize the power of social media or mobile commerce?
• Data/analytics storytelling
  We have so much data available to us, and we all talk about being data driven. But how do we get the most from that data? How do we use that data to form our strategies, support our strategies and communicate our strategies. John Lovett of Web Analytics Desmystified wrote an excellent piece on telling stories with data recently. There are also several great blogs on analytics like MineThatData, Occam’s Razor, and the aforementioned Web Analytics Demystified. I’d love to see more discussions in trade mags and conferences about how to get the most from our data, both in analyzing it and relating the findings to others.
• International expansion
  We used to talk a lot about international, but it doesn’t seem to be a big topic lately. Yet the opportunities to grow our businesses internationally are immense. So, too, are the challenges. Jim Okamura and Maris Daugherty at the JC Williams Group wrote an absolutely excellent white paper late last year on the prizes and perils of international expansion. Jim did have a breakout session at last year’s Shop.org Annual Summit, but I’d love to see more discussion from retailers who have gone or are going international to learn more. Or it would also be good to hear from those who simply ship internationally or those who have decided to stay domestic to learn more about their decision making processes.
• Leadership
  Leading lots of people and convincing big, disparate groups to do new things is hard. I just read the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Dan and Chip Heath. There are some amazing tips in that book about implementing change in organizations (and in other parts of life, for that matter). I would love to see more discussion of these types of leadership topics that help us all implement the changes we know we need to make to take advantage of new opportunities like social media and mobile commerce.

I know a lot of these topics are more business basics than retail or e-commerce specific. But the reality is we need to be our absolute best at these business basics in order to implement any of our new ideas and strategies. I personally always enjoy talking to other retailers about some of these basics, and I certainly never tire of reading books that expand my horizons. I’d love to see more about these topics in our conferences and trade mags.

But these are just my opinions. I’d really love to know what you think. As a member of the executive content committee for Shop.org, I’m actually in a position to influence some of the excellent content that my good friend Larry Joseloff regularly puts together. But I’d love to know if you agree or not before I start banging the drum. Would you mind dropping me a quick comment or an email letting me know if you agree or disagree. A simple “Right on” if you agree or a “You’re nuts” if you don’t is plenty sufficient; although, I certainly appreciate your expanded thoughts if you’d like to share them.

Please, let me know what you think of my little rant.

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?