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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?

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?