Games Make Us Better

One of the not-to-miss books for for the first half of 2011 is Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken. McGonigal is making a persuasive argument that games bring out the best in us and we should find more ways to incorporate the qualities of games into real life.

McGonigal was in Portland last night at the OMSI Science Pub. Here is a short clip from her talk where she talks about the four superpowers we acquire as we play more games.

Time Stamp Replaces Page Number

I had been wondering lately if we needed a different way to quantify the length of a book given the variability of the digital experience.

There is no way really to tell how long a book is going to be when you download it electronically. Weight and thickness have disappeared. The screens you read on are smartphone small to desktop big.

And it struck me: time is the standard for digital products.

I wrote a whole essay on the subject for Publishing Perspectives, which they posted today.

I hope you'll check it out.

Pricing Pictures

Today is the one year anniversary of Fixed to Flexible. There have been almost 17,000 reads of the ebook and I have been contacted by people all over the world who were helped.

I launch a new project today called Pricing Pictures. What I wanted to do was show in a very simple way that pricing has a multitude of dimensions and those dimensions create opportunities for new business models, continuing the message I started in Fixed to Flexible. And I do it all in ten pages.

Hope you enjoy Pricing Pictures and share it with others.

P.S. Happy Groundhog's Day!

Update (Feb 3 6:30AM PT): Pricing Pictures is being featured on the homepage of Slideshare as the Top Presentation of The Day. We just past 2600 views.

What I Read - January 2011

I spend an enormous amount of time reading. This is something that I already knew, but I decided to track my reading more closely as a sort of New Year's resolution. First, I want to better see the number and types of books that passed through my hands and secondly, I wanted to better assess the amount of time I was spending on this particular task.

I started using Daytum, the tool created by designer Nicholas Felton, well known for his elaborate yearly reports of his personal activities, and interactive designer Ryan Case. The service has a simple system of items and categories. With each item, you can create an entry with a quantity that gets time-stamped The service has an iPhone app that syncs with the web. You can input data using either method. And website lets you display your data in an insightful array of views.

Here is a sample of what I learned about my January reading habits:

• I read 1577 pages in 19 different books.
• I read on average 52.5 pages per day.
• My average time between reading was 1 day, 4 hours.
• The mix of the books based on release date was:
  
  • Backlist - 3
  • Current - 11
  • Upcoming - 5
• I read a greater quantity of pages at the beginning of the month, but was pretty consistent with the number of books I read through January.

The biggest learning for me was the realization of how much reading I am doing. I spend between one and two hours a day just taking inputs in the form of reading books. That's around 25% of my work day. That has also made me realize that I need to focus on spending the other parts of my day in creating outputs and telling others about what I have found.

As for books to recommend, I am still high on Practically Radical by Bill Taylor (my Idea Arena podcast is here). This is a book for everyone who wants to see how large organizations can change.

Start With Why by Simon Sinek was a book I came back to over a year after its release and really liked. His premise is simple but the material he used to support his thesis is rich. The pitch is directed toward leaders. I found good application for anyone who is trying to communicate a message.

The Price of Everything by Eduardo Porter was good, but the book didn't get past interesting for me. Business books need utility and I had a hard time finding it in this one.

It's All In The Frame

Both of these books appeared in my mailbox this week.

Both of these books are about solving similar problems--about completion and what keeps us from getting there. The promised solutions though are very different.

Piers Steel wants to recognize all of the things that have been stopping you from doing and deal with your delaying. Russell Bishop wants you to find a new way through your cluttered and complicated life.

Now let me ask two questions: which one would you pick up based on the cover? And, which one do you think will sell better in the long term?

The framing of the book is everything and the number of people who can identify with the problem as well as the solution will tell you a lot about how well a book will do. The frame is not the only thing, but it certainly determines the size of the prospect pool for the book.

The Very Best Business Books in 2010: A Compiled List

With 800-CEO-READ's announcement of Rework as their Business Book of The Year, we can officially close out the year that was 2010.

To try and make sense of all the year-end selections various sources made over the course of the last 60 days, I decided to put together a spreadsheet to see if there was any agreement about what shined brighter than the rest.

The methodology was simple: each selection at each source got one vote. Nineteen sources were used in the compilation (see sources below).

The top business book was The Big Short by Michael Lewis, garnering 12 votes of the 19 votes possible. Opinions diverged quickly with the Heath Brothers' Switch pulling in nine votes and Tony Hsieh's Delivering Happiness and Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From both getting seven votes.

Here a list of the top vote getters in the business books for 2010:

• The Big Short by Michael Lewis (12)
• Switch by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (9)
• Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh (7)
• Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson (7)
• Fault Lines by Raghyram Rajan (6 including FT/Goldman Sachs top honor)
• All The Devils Are Here by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera (5)
• Linchpin by Seth Godin (5)
• Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (5)
• Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely (5)
• Bury My Heart at Conference Room B by Stan Slap (4)
• Good Boss, Bad Boss by Bob Sutton (4)
• The Great Reset by Richard Florida (4)
• The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar (3)
• Diary of A Very Bad Year by by Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, N+1, and Keith Gessen (3)
• Drive by Dan Pink (3)
• The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick (3)
• The Mesh by Lisa Gansky (3)

A Google spreadsheet with all 147 books and the votes they received can be found here.

Sources: Todd Sattersten, 800-CEO-READ, Amazon's Customer Favorites, Amazon's Editor Picks, Bloomberg, CNBC, Economist, FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of The Year Short List, Fortune, Globe and Mail, Inc Magazine, The Leading Blog, Library Journal, Miami Herald, National Federation of Independent Businesses, NPR Marketplace, Tom Peters, Strategy+Business Magazine, University of Texas' McCombs School of Business.

Idea Arena Podcast - Practically Radical by William Taylor

In this interview, I talk with Bill Taylor, author of Practically Radical: Not So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, And Challenge Yourself.

Taylor is always on the lookout for individuals and organizations who are practicing a better form of business. He is searching for leaders who are taking a different path and finding success.Taylor did the same thing when he was at Harvard Business Review and when he founded Fast Company Magazine with Alan Webber. Practically Radical is full of stories about large organization who are finding ways to reinvent themselves, a kind of journalism that is rare and sorely needed.

I am sitting in cavernous ballroom at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee. A sense of anticipation fills the air. I am about to witness, along with six thousand other members of the audience, the world premiere if a production by theater icon Robert Brustein, former dean of the Yale Drama School and founding director of the Yale Repertory Theater and the American Repertory Theater. The Playbill offers few details about the story, but the cast is impressive: F. Murray Abraham, who won an Academy Award for his role as Salieri, Mozart's archrival, in Amadeus; Emmy winner Tony Shalhoub, best known for the long running, hit television series Monk; and Brooke Adams, who has appeared in countless stage productions and films such as Gas Food Lodging and TV shows such as Thirtysomething and Lace.

What makes the production so intriguingis that it's not some experimental performance at an arts festival or an out-of-town test of a Brodway show. Rather, it's the keynote presentation at the 20th Annual National Forum of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)--one of the most impressive professional gatherings I've seen, organized by one of the most unlikely forces for change the medical world has known.

Practically Radical Interview with Bill Taylor

Interview Length: 42 Minutes

Check out my other Idea Arena Podcasts.

How Authors Can Use Twitter To Help Others

Chris Brogan wrote this week about using Twitter as a real-time prospecting tool as an author. In his case, he was looking for people who were at Barnes & Noble and might be interested in his book Trust Agents. This is great example of how authors could be using Twitter. Is there a more opportune moment to talk to a reader then when they are standing in front of hundreds of books?

In his Database of Intentions, John Batelle describes sites like Twitter and Facebook as collectors for "What I'm Doing?" and "What's Happening?" For authors, these sites also capture the frustration of the moment; what someone is not doing or what is not happening. This gives authors another place to engage people whose problems they can help solve.

I have a saved search on Twitter for "business" and "books." This smaller view of tweet does two things. First, I can see people asking for help on what books they should be reading.

This was a tweet I saw from JoAnn Jordan this morning:

Here was my response:

The link directed her to my website for my best of 2010 blog post. In some cases, I directly people to the list from The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. In either case, that exposes them to me and how I can help if they run across the problem of figuring what what business book they should read next.

The second part is that by listening to what people are saying on Twitter it also shows me what others are sharing as their solutions. JoAnn in her tweet above provides both a solution and a query for more help. Being able to see reviews and lists of businesses books people are sharing lets me share those with others.

Let me also give you two caveats to think about. First, search results are noisy. Some people specifically target keywords to create spam. Sometimes, the context is completely out of place. But even with the noise, I can look through the results for the past day in a couple of minutes and respond or forward posts.

The second is timeliness. Much more than a day and the strength of the intention falls dramatically. I have to treat checking my search results like looking through your email first thing every morning. And email is a good analogy. On Twitter there are a set of people asking for your help. With a little monitoring , you can connect with more people and let's you help solve their problems.

Idea Arena Podcast - The Great Workplace Interview with Michael Burchell

In this audio interview, I talk with Michael Burchell, the co-author of The Great Workplace: How to Build It, How To Keep It, and Why It Matters.

[Robert Levering] identified the relationship between employees and their leaders, between employees and their jobs, and between employees and each other as the indicators of a great place to work. Relationships at work matter, and in particular, the centrality of these three relationships influenced by people's loyalty, commitment, and willingness to contribute to organizational priorities. If leaders implement practices and created programs and policies that contributed  to these three relationships, employes had a great workplace experience. It mattered less what the programs, policies, and practices were, and more that they were done in a way to strengthen relationships.

The Great Workplace comes from the folks who put together the Best Places To Work list with Fortune Magazine and it would be a mistake to think of this book as something only for human resources. What the book really addresses the environment that managers need to create to have successful organizations.

The interview last 23 minutes.

The Great Workplace Interview with Michael Burchell

Trends in Publishing for 2011

JWT has a interesting Slideshare presentation called 100 Things to Watch in 2011. There are a number of their points that could relate back to the world of business book publishing.

#14 - Breaking the Book: This is the most important publishing idea in the deck, and I am not sure we have even seen how this will play out. Ebooks are already change our value perception of how much we will play for the written word. Chapters are already being sold like tracks on an album. Expect more atomization to satisfy all the types of interest under the demand curve.

#18 - Children's E-books: This is interesting but I haven't seen the killer app here yet. I have young children, we have tried a number of these and it feels like we in publishing can do better than simply adding some touch activated animation.

#30 - E-book Sharing: I don't buy that this is something to be excited about. I don't even think you can call it sharing given the constraints of time and device.

#47 - Long-Form Content: 100% with this one. Longreads is my one of my favorite sites right now.

#62 - Objectifying Objects: Books, magazines, and newspapers still matter in many contexts.

#75 - Scanning Everything: I believe people want to stay in the media form they are consuming. When newspapers asking people to crossover to the web doesn't work well. I am wondering out loud if QR codes and smartphones are the right combo to make a better connection. Nick Bilton experimented with that in his book this year, but the extras weren't super great.

#83 - Social Objects: This plays to the idea that books should be more than just the words written. Where was the book read? Who has already owned this copy? What made them give it up? What did they think of it and what else was going on in their lives when it spent time with them? How often did they pick it up to read it? Notice these are all ideas beyond the data that the Kindle can capture from our reading pattern. These all have to do with the book as a physical object and the greater context for how it fit into our lives.

#93 - Transmedia Producers: This is another opportunity for business books authors. How do you make the book a point along a greater story arc?