Reviews, the business edition
I ate way too much this weekend. But, I also read some books.
Is there such a thing as a good business book? Not one that tells a good story, but one that would actually help a businessperson run a business better? In preparation for my trademark class, I ordered a bunch of books about branding, and they run the gamut from stinkingly awful to merely unhelpful. Marketing Aesthetics: The Strategic Management of Brands, Identity and Image divides aesthetics into lots of categories, but I'm not sure what that helps you do. It's most interesting in contrast to The Power of Cult Branding: How 9 Magnetic Brands Turned Customers Into Loyal Followers (and Yours Can, Too!), as the former, written in 1997, repeatedly mentions Apple as a brand whose best design tricks still haven't saved it from becoming exhausted; the latter, from 2002, uses Apple as one of its nine exemplars of success. Brand Failures: The Truth about the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time has a bunch of interesting stories, including some that sound more like urban legends (in Taiwan, Pepsi's slogan "Come alive with the Pepsi generation" was translated as "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead"), but the advice generated manages to be both ridiculously obvious ("Act fast" and "Price is important") and contradictory ("Concentrate on the brand's perception" and "Quality is important"; "Be different" and "Don't go it alone").
BRANDChild has a website associated with it, promising to keep the book updated, which would be nicer if the book didn't suck like a megatwister. Message: tweens (preteens, but why use a perfectly good word when a cutesy one will do?) are important, fickle, loyal, constantly exposed to ads, and uncertain about the future, and if you do your marketing right, you can make their fears about peer approval, divorce, terrorism etc. into your profits! Except that's much more coherent than the book ever got; in the 24-hour, triple-time environment in which today's tween lives, topic sentences and other indicia of organization and thought are apparently irrelevant.
Brand Spirit: How Cause Related Marketing Builds Brands was probably the scariest book, simply because it's about how to manipulate consumers by making them think your company cares about some good, but noncontroversial, cause. Of course it's constantly emphasized that sincerety is important - if you're sincere, your employees will volunteer to help your chosen charity on their own free time, further increasing the beneficial PR and employee morale - at the same time as every anecdote ends with a balance sheet showing how sales and profits increased as a result of small investments in literacy programs or the like.
James B. Twitchell's Twenty Ads That Shook the World doesn't purport to be a business guide, and that makes it more interesting. Twitchell's prose is sometimes over the top, often when he's trying to link ads with Christian symbolism (the crossed BAYERs on a tab of Bayer aspirin, for example, becomes the Cross that will save us), but he's at least an entertaining writer, and his ad choices provide a concise history of advertising as it's moved from promising practical benefits to promising emotional and even metaphysical transformations.
As for business advice, I remain unenlightened. A MBA friend of ours lent me In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies, which he said was a classic but probably still wouldn't satisfy me in terms of providing generalizable, non-platitudinous advice.
Sort of continuing the theme, runpunkrun got me to read Mike Daisey's 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com, a fairly well-written account of entry-level shenanigans in the New Economy. I wouldn't want Daisey working for my company; just his office-supply theft alone, which he justifies with some of the poorest rationalizations I've ever read, is enough to make me dislike him as a person and distrust him as an employee, and that's without the stuff he does to the people who call him for customer support. I've long thought that every business fundamentally hates its customers, and Daisey's descriptions support that conclusion. Daisey got caught up in millionaire dreams like so many others, and the one good thing about him is that he figured out what an asshole he was.
Edward Tenner's Why Things Bite Back is an interesting account of why improvements in safety, efficiency, and other good things don't always bring the promised rewards. Tenner identifies "revenge effects" - seatbelts lead people to drive faster, making crashes worse; plants brought in from other ecologies to help agriculture end up choking it because conditions are different in the new environment; defeating acute disease leaves us with worsening chronic diseases. The book focuses on revenge effects in medicine, pests, computerization, and sports; if that last one seems weird to you, you're not alone. The theme of unintended consequences doesn't transfer across topics as well as Tenner thinks it does. There's a big difference between importing kudzu for agriculture and having it backfire and saving premature babies who then have lifelong disabilities instead of dying, actually a number of differences, and though Tenner has lots of interesting stories to tell, his prescriptions - basically, we need to pay more attention as we get more apparent control over the world so that increasingly complex systems don't become counterproductive - are much better suited to some revenge effects than others.
Our last book is about a slightly different business, the spy gig. Spy Dust: Two Masters of Disguise Reveal the Tools and Operations That Helped Win the Cold War, by Antonio and Jonna Mendez with Bruce Henderson, could win a prize for false advertising. What wasn't censored out of this book (and I have no idea how heavy the censorship was) isn't interesting. The authors aren't specific enough about their techniques to be informative, and nothing they say they did seems to have helped in any substantial way against the Soviets. The most gripping parts of the book are about spies who, while the Mendezes are working at the CIA, are exposed and killed as a result of double agents such as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, except that the Mendezes had nothing to do with that. At the end, 240 pages in, we do get a neat description of a dazzlingly coordinated operation to extract a high-placed Soviet informant involving three pairs of identity-switching couples, but what came before is deadly dull.
Is there such a thing as a good business book? Not one that tells a good story, but one that would actually help a businessperson run a business better? In preparation for my trademark class, I ordered a bunch of books about branding, and they run the gamut from stinkingly awful to merely unhelpful. Marketing Aesthetics: The Strategic Management of Brands, Identity and Image divides aesthetics into lots of categories, but I'm not sure what that helps you do. It's most interesting in contrast to The Power of Cult Branding: How 9 Magnetic Brands Turned Customers Into Loyal Followers (and Yours Can, Too!), as the former, written in 1997, repeatedly mentions Apple as a brand whose best design tricks still haven't saved it from becoming exhausted; the latter, from 2002, uses Apple as one of its nine exemplars of success. Brand Failures: The Truth about the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time has a bunch of interesting stories, including some that sound more like urban legends (in Taiwan, Pepsi's slogan "Come alive with the Pepsi generation" was translated as "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead"), but the advice generated manages to be both ridiculously obvious ("Act fast" and "Price is important") and contradictory ("Concentrate on the brand's perception" and "Quality is important"; "Be different" and "Don't go it alone").
BRANDChild has a website associated with it, promising to keep the book updated, which would be nicer if the book didn't suck like a megatwister. Message: tweens (preteens, but why use a perfectly good word when a cutesy one will do?) are important, fickle, loyal, constantly exposed to ads, and uncertain about the future, and if you do your marketing right, you can make their fears about peer approval, divorce, terrorism etc. into your profits! Except that's much more coherent than the book ever got; in the 24-hour, triple-time environment in which today's tween lives, topic sentences and other indicia of organization and thought are apparently irrelevant.
Brand Spirit: How Cause Related Marketing Builds Brands was probably the scariest book, simply because it's about how to manipulate consumers by making them think your company cares about some good, but noncontroversial, cause. Of course it's constantly emphasized that sincerety is important - if you're sincere, your employees will volunteer to help your chosen charity on their own free time, further increasing the beneficial PR and employee morale - at the same time as every anecdote ends with a balance sheet showing how sales and profits increased as a result of small investments in literacy programs or the like.
James B. Twitchell's Twenty Ads That Shook the World doesn't purport to be a business guide, and that makes it more interesting. Twitchell's prose is sometimes over the top, often when he's trying to link ads with Christian symbolism (the crossed BAYERs on a tab of Bayer aspirin, for example, becomes the Cross that will save us), but he's at least an entertaining writer, and his ad choices provide a concise history of advertising as it's moved from promising practical benefits to promising emotional and even metaphysical transformations.
As for business advice, I remain unenlightened. A MBA friend of ours lent me In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies, which he said was a classic but probably still wouldn't satisfy me in terms of providing generalizable, non-platitudinous advice.
Sort of continuing the theme, runpunkrun got me to read Mike Daisey's 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com, a fairly well-written account of entry-level shenanigans in the New Economy. I wouldn't want Daisey working for my company; just his office-supply theft alone, which he justifies with some of the poorest rationalizations I've ever read, is enough to make me dislike him as a person and distrust him as an employee, and that's without the stuff he does to the people who call him for customer support. I've long thought that every business fundamentally hates its customers, and Daisey's descriptions support that conclusion. Daisey got caught up in millionaire dreams like so many others, and the one good thing about him is that he figured out what an asshole he was.
Edward Tenner's Why Things Bite Back is an interesting account of why improvements in safety, efficiency, and other good things don't always bring the promised rewards. Tenner identifies "revenge effects" - seatbelts lead people to drive faster, making crashes worse; plants brought in from other ecologies to help agriculture end up choking it because conditions are different in the new environment; defeating acute disease leaves us with worsening chronic diseases. The book focuses on revenge effects in medicine, pests, computerization, and sports; if that last one seems weird to you, you're not alone. The theme of unintended consequences doesn't transfer across topics as well as Tenner thinks it does. There's a big difference between importing kudzu for agriculture and having it backfire and saving premature babies who then have lifelong disabilities instead of dying, actually a number of differences, and though Tenner has lots of interesting stories to tell, his prescriptions - basically, we need to pay more attention as we get more apparent control over the world so that increasingly complex systems don't become counterproductive - are much better suited to some revenge effects than others.
Our last book is about a slightly different business, the spy gig. Spy Dust: Two Masters of Disguise Reveal the Tools and Operations That Helped Win the Cold War, by Antonio and Jonna Mendez with Bruce Henderson, could win a prize for false advertising. What wasn't censored out of this book (and I have no idea how heavy the censorship was) isn't interesting. The authors aren't specific enough about their techniques to be informative, and nothing they say they did seems to have helped in any substantial way against the Soviets. The most gripping parts of the book are about spies who, while the Mendezes are working at the CIA, are exposed and killed as a result of double agents such as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, except that the Mendezes had nothing to do with that. At the end, 240 pages in, we do get a neat description of a dazzlingly coordinated operation to extract a high-placed Soviet informant involving three pairs of identity-switching couples, but what came before is deadly dull.