Books and Resources

My favourite marketing books

September 18, 2009 By Dan Thornton

I probably don’t point it out as well as I could, but all the marketing and business books (and some others for inspiration) that I heartily recommend are all linked via the Amazon store link in the left-hand sidebar.

They’re all honest recommendations – the only one missing is Dave Cushman’s ‘The Power of the Network’ which is self-published on Lulu. (I’ll add the hyperlink when I get home – on-train wifi isn’t particularly reliable tonight).

There are a few notable books missing – Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, and the new Trust Agents by Chris Brogan for example – both are on my wish list for when I get time, money, or kind people buying me gifts…

And I aim to update the blog lists, including recommended books etc soon – this post is as much a reminder and prompt to act as anything…

Why you should read ‘The Blue Sweater’ by Jacqueline Novogratz

April 13, 2009 By Dan Thornton

If you’re involved or interested in charity, social good, business, management or leadership, then I highly recommend The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World having found it important enough to read it twice in the space of the few days I’ve had it!

And it’s not even about social media, web 2.0, or marketing. It’s far more important than that.

In all honesty, I wasn’t aware of Jacqueline Novogratz (here’s a Charlie Rose interview with Jacqueline) and her work, which includes founding the Acumen Fund, but I happened to see a post by Seth Godin which described it as important and essential – and then said Seth would buy a number of copies for bloggers to read and then pass on to their friends.

Which is how I ended up with an unexpected airmail package last week.

The book is a partly a personal account of how Novogratz was motivated to apply the knowledge and processes of business, learned during her time Chase Manhattan Bank and the Stanford Graduate School of Business, to begin micro-financing projects, having heard of the success of Professor Muhammed Yunus and the Grameem Bank, and starting by founding Duterimbere, a microfinance organisation in Rwanda.

Her account of her time in Africa, and the thought process behind the philosophy of combining charitable investment and entrepreneurship is enlightening, moving, at times harrowing, and importantly inspirational to produce actual results. The fact that Duterimbere spans both sides of the Rwandan Genocide, means that you’re presented with the humananity of women who worked to better the cause of poor women in the country, but were also caaught up in various ways in the genocide, whether as victim or as perpetrator.

It’s this honesty and moral ambiguity that had the greatest effect on me as I read the book – Jacqueline is brutally honest about her efforts to improve the situation of the poor, and especially where her well-intended efforts failed, particularly in her early attempts at building relationships with the women she needed to work with, or was trying to help – indeed she’s very honest about a number of mistakes made in her work with Duterimbere, and that’s probably why the organisation was able to celebrate it’s 20th anniversary in 2007, and survive the troubles which ripped Rwanda apart.

Suffice to say that the lessons of leadership and management contained in the book are applicable to any situation in which you’d like or need to be able to build successful working relationships with individuals or groups of people, regardless of their financial situation.

And it’s also the first book I’ve bought/received which my partner has voluntarily started reading – in this case before I’d even finished reading it!

And once I’ve done my duty in passing it on, I’ll be buying my own copy to refresh my memory on a regular basis:- The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World

Reading Gladwell’s Outliers and Cushman’s Networks

February 9, 2009 By Dan Thornton

I’ve been working my way through a backlog of books, and finally moved onto Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, which is a look at those people who stand out for their achievements, whether online or in the sporting world, for example.

He explores the possible reasons that contribute to such success – for example, the age cut-off for selection into sporting programmes – and shows that being born in a certain month gives you an advantage which is then amplified by being selected into more intensive training. Or the fact that in addition to the talents of Bill Gates, the fact that he was probably the only 13-year-old with access to an advanced computer (at the time), meant that his success was one of timing and opportunity in addition to his own skill.

I can understand why Gladwell comes in for criticism – his anecdotal style can hide the fact that Outliers certainly uses a reasonable amount of data to back up his observations. And as a parent, the insight into what can contribute to scholarly success certainly caught my attention.

Funnily enough, I actually observed something similar (I suspect it’s still languishing on my Blogger account amongst some posts which didn’t automatically transfer here) about the sudden appearance of Web 2.0 business successes under 30.

The reason they were all around a similar age (aside from possible fraudulence), was the situation they were in – old enough to be ambitious and educated at a time when Web 2.0 technology came available, in places where they were able to find equally interested developers, not tied down to mortgages and commitments etc, and generally in a University setting where they either had the free time to experiment, or could find it by missing classes!

The one thing that’s possibly missing is a message to absorb and use what you can learn from Outliers whilst still remembering that exceptions occur and not using it as an excuse.

The other book I’ve finally found time to sit down and digest is David Cushman’s The Power of the Network.

I’m probably not in a position to critically review his work (Dave is a former boss, colleague and friend of mine), but I can certainly see why Chris Thorpe wrote about the power of print after reading it.

It’s a collection of material and white papers Dave has already published on his blog, FasterFuture, and as such it’s material I’m fairly familiar with – but the fact that he frames it with discussion of Moore, Metcalfe and Reed’s Laws means that it benefits from a little bit of time and attention – which is too easy to avoid doing when skimming through RSS feeds during a busy day. Plus, as Chris points out, having the extracts collected means that certain themes become more apparent through the material Dave has picked out.

Plus at 98 pages it’s the right length to communicate the ideas without dragging on, and being self-published via Lulu, it’s also ‘cost-effective’ at £4.98 for print and £0.49 for a digital download.

Just to finish off, one of the books I’m currently keen to get hold of is What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis – which is available in print, but also as a video book if you’re in the U.S. You can watch a non-region specific excerpt below:

Some recommended reading

January 9, 2009 By Dan Thornton

Over Christmas I took the chance to beg, borrow, steal and buy various books I’d been meaning to read for a while, and having gone through the first three, I thought it was time to share

Why We Buy by Paco Underhill:

Paco Underhill is a ‘retail anthropologist’, and the founder of Envirosell, a company which spends thousands of hours collecting data by actually tracking individual shoppers as they move around shops and supermarkets. Unfortunately my borrowing policy meant I didn’t have the edition revised and updated for the rise of the internet, so the chapter about online retailing from 1999/2000 was pretty redundant, but there was still a lot of useful information and inspiration to be gained. Particularly around the perceptions business owners had, compared to what was actually happening. There’s also some important insight into how you can accidentally make things really difficult for shoppers if you don’t think about who they are and what their needs and limitations are. Key quote: ‘Amenability and profitability are totally and inextricably linked’. There’s also a secondary lesson in that I wanted to find out more about how things have changed since the book was published, but there’s not a lot of information on the Envirosell site, and the News section isn’t updated very much. So I’m left trawling a Google Search – bit of a fail to make things amenable!

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman:

If you wanted to give someone a textbook history of how the world has changed due to online connectivity, this would be the first choice. It’s a weighty book, but incredibly readable (He’s a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner), and covers the 10 important flattening elements in our time, from the fall of the Berlin Wall and release of Netscape to changes in outsourcing, Google and personal digital devices, which were all brought together by three forces of convergence. Not only that, but he also offers great examples, and insight into how countries (particularly the U.S.) should be adapting to meet the new challenges (which also applies to businesses). He’s also got a site/blog at www.thomaslfriedman.com Key quote: The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention argues that no two countries that are both part of the same global supply chain will ever fight a war as long as they are each part of that supply chain.

Moneyhunt: 27 rules for creating and growing a breakaway business by Miles Spencer and Cliff Ennico

I’ve missed the U.S Show, which is similar to Dragon’s Den in that it allows entreprenuers to gain publicity for their businesses – except that in this case, they get free help from a specialist in their field rather than direct cash. But the book is a great, no-nonsense guide to common-sense rules which are easy to overlook – with a handy real-life example of each rule in practice which helps to make it stick. And although the legalities are all based around U.S law, there’s enough there to be valuable advice for whichever country your business will be based in. Sadly the website is a bit pants: MoneyHunt. Key quote: If in running your business you reach a point where you truly believe that you know what you are doing, where you are going, and what’s going on around you, chances are you are overlooking something very important.