Coming in January and February

...are several business(y) books of note: The most-eagerly awaited (certainly by Random House) is former eBay CEO Meg Whitman's The Power of Many: Values for Success in Business and in Life (Crown). The would-be California Gov tells all about work-family balance, the purchase by eBay of of PayPal, and lessons she learned working at Procter & Gamble, Bain, Stride Rite, and, very interestingly, at FTD. Values, schmaluuus--the worth of this volume is in its stories, not its "rules" for business. Still, I came away persuaded that it would be cool to have a chat with Meg. (Pub date: Jan. 26)

Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (Broadway). So you liked Made to Stick, that Malcolm Gladwell-ish prescription for how successful products attract fans? Then, Switch may be for you: More tales about how our brains are constructed, with supporting evidence drawn from such sources as Save the Children and BP. (Pub date: Feb 16)

And speaking of brains, there's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by former Al Gore speechwriter and best-selling author Daniel Pink (Riverhead Books). You like to get paid--lots--for your work? Think about it: Pink surveys a variety of scientific experiments and corporate experiences that point to other factors as more significant in motivating workers. It's all about "autonomy, mastery, and purpose," he says--and makes us readers believe it. Put down your whips and your carrots, Mr. Bossman--what matters is getting your colleagues to apply a sense of play and imagination to their daily tasks. (Pub date: January 4).

The Great Game--in Publishing

It seems like a cross between secret agent and book agent: The literary scout. That's the little-known--and apparently grueling--job described by Emily Williams in a two-part series, posted on the Publishing Perspectives (an international online publishing newsletter) website at http://publishingperspectives.com/?p=9028

Think of it this way: Regular book agents are "employed" by authors and would-be authors. It's their job to place a book that they think is promising (often only on the basis of a book proposal) with a publishing house. But literary scouts work for such outfits as movie companies and foreign publishers. It's their job to ferret out the books that are being hotly contested by publishers, to anticipate what might make next year's big movie or a hot-selling book elsewhere. To that end, they stay in touch with editors at U.S. publishing houses, always looking for the latest proposal that's already the obscure object of desire...or maybe not so obscure. But the best target is a book that hasn't yet been bid on by publishers.

So why would editors share information with scouts about hot new projects? Williams quotes Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publisher Bruce Nichols:“It’s an information source for editors,” he explains. "It’s information you might not get elsewhere from someone whose self-interest is not so direct in any given project.”

Trading in information is an old profession--sort of like tinker, tailor, soldier...literary scout.

Brand-Name Authors Bid for Freedom

Today's New York Times reports that Stephen R. Covey, author of such megaselling business books as
The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, will sell e-book versions of his backlist via e-book publisher Rosetta Books. (link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/technology/companies/15amazon.html)
Sold via Amazon.com, the Rosetta move represents a small break for freedom away from Covey's longtime publisher, Simon & Schuster. And it also represents yet another example of the willingness of established writers to experiment with self-publishing: Both Stephen King and business author Jim Collins have, over the past years, tried similar gambits.

The battle over e-book rights has heated up in the past few days, with Random House asserting that it controlled e-book rights over such hoary backlist titles as William Styron's Darkness Visible. (link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/business/media/13ebooks.html?scp=2&sq=%22William%20Styron%22&st=cse) Problem is, the publishing contracts governing many such backlist titles were signed long before anyone anticipated the existence of e-books--so the language governing publishers' rights is broad and vague. What's more, many traditional publishers have been slow off the mark to create e-book versions of older backlist titles.

All The Monkeys Aren't In the Zoo...

…because many are now in the pages of business books.

Consider the following examples. In SuperFreakonomics (Morrow), Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner describe numerous lab experiments, including one conducted by Yale University economist Keith Chen. Chen wanted to see if lab monkeys could learn the concept of money, so he began by getting them to see that they could use the “coins” he gave them to buy food. They caught on quickly. Later, Chen saw one monkey giving some coins to another. Aha, the economist thought: They have an innate sense of altruism—just as many economists said existed in humans. (For a video interview with Levitt, go to: http://feedroom.businessweek.com/index.jsp?fr_story=074c8974ec3548c7444d59532b5726bf081f2aff)


Wrong. Shortly thereafter, Chen witnessed the same two monkeys having sex—and realized that they had on their own discovered the age-old institution of prostitution.

You see—monetary incentives really work, Levitt and Dubner conclude.

Primate protagonists also show up another new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Riverhead Books) by best-selling author Daniel H. Pink. This volume, too, surveys numerous laboratory experiments, including one conducted in 1940 by University of Wisconsin psychologist Harry F. Harlow. Only here, the evidence challenges the effectiveness of monetary incentives.

Pink describes how Harlow placed a simple mechanical puzzle in the cages of several rhesus monkeys. In short order, the monkeys figured out how the puzzles worked. Significantly, they required no incentives—food, affection, or otherwise—to arouse their interest in puzzle-solving. “The performance of the task,” Harlow concluded, “provided intrinsic reward.” The monkeys solved the puzzles because they enjoyed doing so. Moreover, the introduction of incentives seemed counterproductive—raisins as rewards proved distracting, causing the monkeys to make mistakes and solve the puzzles less frequently. (Pink's new book publishes on January 4. It's described at his website: http://www.danpink.com/about)


What’s it all mean? That monkey behavior is inconsistent? Perhaps even as inconsistent and irrational as that of human beings?

There’s an abundance of beasts in other business books as well. Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition by Legg Mason Capital Management chief strategy officer Michael J. Mauboussin (Harvard Business) relies on an account of honeybees’ swarming activity to describe decision-making within “complex adaptive systems.” Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw (Little, Brown) provides an account of pit-bull misbehavior and the animals’ subsequent banning in Canada.

It seems that authors have concluded that business readers find lessons rooted in animal behavior to be persuasive.

Little wonder: A veritable library of business fables modeled on the megaselling Who Moved My Cheese? and Our Iceberg is Melting has featured as leading characters mice, ducks, penguins, whales, fish and more. Monkeys were only the next stage of plot evolution.

(Photo by Muhammad Mahdi Karim, at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monkey_eating.jpg)

It's Time for "Best Books" Lists

Yes, 'tis the season to be reading, or so say many publications.

The Financial Times has an ambitious "best of" list for 2009 that includes works of fiction and nonfiction on politics, religion, science, history, food, travel, and art. That publication's business list, compiled by Stefan Stern, includes the likes of economists George Akerloff and Robert Shiller's Animal Spirits (an endorsement of behavioral economics) and Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance (on how central bankers fumbled during the Great Depression). To read the complete list, go to http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2fb47d30-dae5-11de-933d-00144feabdc0.html

BusinessWeek's list, compiled by me prior to my recent severance from the publication, features such volumes as New Yorker writer John Cassidy's Why Markets Fail (an attack on "market fundamentalism") and Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail (a blow-by-blow narrative of the recent market meltdown), along with such non-finance titles as Kenneth Roman's The King of Madison Avenue (a bio of legendary ad man David Ogilvy). To read that list, go to http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_50/b4159075731414.htm?campaign_id=rss_topStories


The Wall Street Journal has yet to post a list of "best" business books, but it has a feature on holiday-themed mysteries. You can find this at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704431804574538612376847996.html

R.I.P.--The Book

Books are dead--or so the smart-money boys say. It seems that everyone has a short attention span nowadays, they argue, sufficient only to absorb a Tweet or a sound bite.

But if that's so, why are book authors so in demand on television talk shows, from Oprah to John Stewart and Stephen Colbert to Charlie Rose?

Reason: Books remain our society's primary credentialing mechanism. If you don't have a book, there's no reason to pay attention to what you have to say.

Without a book, you just aren't a part of the national conversation. That's why Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, and Mitt Romney have all rushed to get their stories behind hardcovers, following the path twice trodden by President Barack Obama.

Consider an example from popular culture. The recent movie Julie & Julia concerns a young woman who, with time on her hands, decides to make every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. After each culinary effort, Julie writes a blog posting about the result.

Her mother complains: "Why are you doing this? No one is reading your blog." But in time, an article about Julie's experiment appears in The New York Times. Suddenly, she is inundated with offers from publishers to write a book, which she does. She is no longer a nobody, she announces to her husband. "I am a writer."

She has joined the national conversation.

Business executives are hardly immune to the lure of book publishing. Ever since Lee Iacocca's 1984 publication of his autobiography, Iacocca, CEOs have understood that they can help promote themselves and their company's brand by writing a book. and if they don't do it, a legion of business writers stands ready to help with such diverse efforts as David Magee's Turnaround (on Carlos Ghosn at Nissan) and William Holstein's Why GM Matters.

For all these reasons, it's important that there continue to be reporting on book publishing. But the review coverage in national publications continues to decline: Both The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post have recently discontinued their stand-alone books sections, while other publications have opted to have little books coverage at all.

Ironically, then, it will be bloggers and denizens of the Web who will play a big role in alerting readers to goings-on in the world of books. This blog will be one of those that takes up the torch.