Filed under: Books in General, Innovation, Internet, Leadership, Strategic Management, Technology | Tags: books, Business, business book, business books, Innovation, Leadership, Strategic Management, Technology
Receiving an inside look at one of the most powerful companies on the planet is something for which business book readers clamor. What if the deal were sweetened and the book were to be authored not by a third-party observer or a mid-level manager but instead by one of the top executives for the company?
In a matter of months, we’ll get the opportunity described above! This post from a blog on CNET confirms rumors that we’ve heard for some time. Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft’s Windows Division, is collaborating with the Harvard Business School to craft a book on creating and implementing innovative strategies. As the article indicates, Sinofsky has been contributing posts to Microsoft’s Engineering Windows 7 blog, many of which offer insights into the inner workings of the intensely private software giant.
I for one was intrigued by the suggestion that Sinofsky’s book will delve into the strategic changes made by Microsoft after its Windows Vista release. I’m curious to know the level of detail to which he will discuss this subject. As fascinating as the creation of a new product will be to readers, it may be more helpful to executives to gain insight on how to recover when a product that took millions of dollars and an equal amount of man hours to produce is underwhelming upon its release. It takes a certain amount of bravery on the part of any executive to publicly acknowledge and address a product that has received its fair share of criticism.
Part of what makes Microsoft an object of admiration to many observers is its ability to stay ahead of fluctuations in its industry. Innovation is at the heart of what has separated Microsoft from its competitors. Sinofsky’s revelations could prove to be quite useful, particularly when combined with co-author Marco Iansiti’s research at Harvard. A collaboration between Microsoft and Harvard sounds like a winner. I’ll keep you posted when we get a sneak peek at the book as it nears publication.
Filed under: Books in General, Conference/Event, Innovation, Politics, health care | Tags: books, Business, business book, business books, Conference/Event, health care, Innovation, Soundview Live
If we’re able to push aside the celebrity-related news for two seconds, what remains on the front page is an intense focus on the health care system here in the United States. Opposing sides are dissecting and scrutinizing every aspect of this hot-button issue. Today, with great interest, I checked out the story of Wal-Mart weighing in on the issue.
As the summer rolls on, this issue may generate the most heat of all. This is partly pleasing to me since we opted to select The Innovator’s Prescription as one of the 30 best books of 2009. I have to tell you, this was a book that generated some considerable debate amongst our selection committee. It had nothing to do with the quality of the content. We knew it was great material. We were somewhat concerned that our existing subscribers may feel the book didn’t have direct application to their own business. How times change, eh? With the prospect of major shake-ups in health care, there’s never been a better time to arm oneself with much-needed info about the health care industry and possible ways to improve it. This summary gives an in-depth look at a top-to-bottom overhaul of the health care industry via disruptive innovation.
And for you subscribers out there, you’ll be able to sign up for FREE for our Soundview Live event featuring Dr. Clayton M. Christensen, co-author of The Innovator’s Prescription. This live audio broadcast on the Web will give you the chance to send your questions in to Dr. Christensen. Who knows? By the end of the month, we could be looking at a whole new landscape in health care. I, for one, can’t wait to hear what Dr. Christensen has to say about it!
Filed under: Books in General, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Leadership, Personal Development, Strategic Management, Success, iPhone app | Tags: books, Business, business book, business books, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, iPhone app, Leadership, management, Survival Skills, Technology
I confess that I occasionally drag my feet when it comes to adopting new technology. Between GPS systems, Web 2.0, and my cell phone, I’m wired and traceable to the point where even I wonder if Big Brother is bored with me. Still, it’s hard to deny the overwhelming appeal of certain devices.
There are a large number of people who would put their iPhones at the top of the list of devices they can’t live without. Hopefully, we’ve just added three more reasons to keep it at the top of your list.
I mentioned earlier this week about our Entrepreneurship application. If one application is good, how does a total of three new apps sound?
In addition to the Entrepreneurship app, Soundview is also debuting Survival Skills Vol. I, as well as Innovation Vol. I. Each app features three crucial titles that will help you with the app’s specific subject.
These three apps are the latest in a growing collection of Soundview iPhone apps. Click here to see the complete list!
The convenience of having these apps at my fingertips is something that I underestimated. It makes me glad that I got on board with this technology more quickly than my usual pace. Now if only I could force myself to upgrade my DVD player to a “ray” of a certain shade (For trademark reasons, I’ll let you figure out the obvious).
Filed under: Books in General, Economics, Entrepreneurship, Hands-On Management, Innovation, Technology | Tags: books, Business, business books, career skills, Economics, Innovation, Internet, iPhone app, Leadership, management
There’s so much concern anymore about the state of the average company that executives can’t help but wonder if they’ll be in their current jobs by the end of the quarter. However, there is some good to come out of an era of turbulence.
Let’s face it, people like to take notice of problems at their companies. You probably have a small list yourself. Who hasn’t said to him- or herself, “If I was the president of this outfit, I’d make this change”? Fortunately, times of economic hardship are often the moments when people decide to strike out on their own. This can be the result of a dismissal from their current position or the desire to leave the firing range before the crosshairs fall on them. Either way, I have a sneaking suspicion that a couple of the next great success stories will get their start during this era of difficulty.
With that in mind, we’ve got something special for you iPhone fans. We’ve got a new application that includes three stellar summaries about the business of being in business for oneself. Soundview’s Entrepreneurship Vol. I app includes three excellent titles:
NEVER BET THE FARM by Anthony L. Iaquinto and Stephen Spinelli Jr. This book celebrates entrepreneurship in its entirety, presenting a framework that can help entrepreneurs reduce risks and simplify decision-making. It is at once both encouraging and cautionary, but neither a textbook how-to nor an inspirational tome lacking substance. “We’re living in a world with unimaginable adversity and invisible threats,” writes Iaquinto. “Why should entrepreneurs be any different from a sailor who stows a well-stocked emergency pack or a mill worker who puts a little bit aside each month for a rainy day or a Boy Scout following his motto, ‘Be prepared?’”
THE ART OF THE START by Guy Kawasaki. In The Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki writes that his goal is to help you use your knowledge, love and determination to create something great without getting bogged down in theory and unnecessary details. At Apple in the 1980s, Kawasaki turned ordinary consumers into evangelists. As founder and CEO of Garage Technology Ventures, he has field-tested his ideas with dozens of newly hatched companies. In The Art of the Start, Kawasaki takes you through every phase of creating a business, from the very basics of raising money and designing a business model through the many stages that will eventually lead your company to doing the right thing and giving back to society.
HOOVER’S VISION by Gary Hoover. Gary Hoover, the founder of BOOKSTOP, Inc. and Hoover’s Inc., lays out a plan that can turn an enterprise into a success by showing entrepreneurs how to address inputs with an open mind, and see more than what others envision. Demonstrating how leaders can recognize the importance of history and trends, Hoover drives business owners to create and feed a clear and consistent vision, and helps them find the essential qualities of entrepreneurial leadership.
Take at peek at these three titles and let your iPhone help you open your mind to the idea that you can be the next big entrepreneur. We believe! So should you.
Filed under: Books in General, Economics, Financial/Accounting, From the Editor, General Business, Green, Innovation | Tags: books, Business, business book, business books, Earth Day, Environment, Green, Leadership, Publishing, Recycle, Reuse, Strategic Management, Sustainability, The Business of Green
If you printed out this installement of the Soundview Editor’s Blog, shame, shame! After all, today is Earth Day, and in the ever-expanding global consciousness of all things green, we shouldn’t forget that it’s the small things that make a difference. The notion of environmental awareness is much-discussed, but where does it actually lead? If we’re operating under the age-old adage of actions speaking louder than words, Earth Day is as good a day as any to take a long look in the mirror.
Just like so many areas of our lives, be it eating right, getting regular, strenuous exercise or going for routine medical check-ups, being green is a great idea that’s often difficult to put into practice. Who hasn’t had their feet burned on the infamous path paved with their good intentions? Making the correct decisions for the Earth can be time-consuming. It takes an effort to do simple actions like separating one’s trash or replacing every light bulb, not to mention remembering reusable grocery bags every time we set out for the store. These actions are just the basics.
It’s far more likely that people are more concerned with money than with time. The media is starting to pick up on this notion, and it’s no surprise that when put to a vote, the real “green initiative” is conserving the paper in our wallets. Fortunately, there are many companies who are working very diligently to benefit consumers and the environment at the same time. The more effort companies put into making environmentally-friendly practices a benefit to consumers, the better everyone will be in the long run. Now that’s an Earth Day wish we could all make together.
Lest you think I’m looking to cast stones from my glass-lined editorial pulpit, we’re trying to do our part as well. Check out our new collection, The Business of Green, and help your company take affordable, proactive steps to making smart choices for your business, your customers and the environment. We’re featuring 11 key summaries of top business titles with an environmental edge. What’s more, this collection is only available electronically. Like I said, it’s the small things that make a difference.
Filed under: Innovation, Leadership, Personal Development | Tags: Business, business books, Innovation, Leadership
There are some days when I think we all want to avoid reading the newspaper or glancing at CNN on the TV during breakfast. We keep saying, “How bad is this recession going to get? It can’t get any worse, right?” And then it does. This is a scary time, but we have to remember that it is not the first recession this country has seen.
While trying to track down an article I had spied about different sectors and how “recession-proof” they are, I came across an interview of Ram Charan, conducted by by Christina Bielaszka-DuVernay—a HarvardBusiness.org editor.
I suggest taking a look at what Charan has to say about what leaders need to focus on right now during the recession (it’s the first question tackled in the interview). But I think his answer to Bielaska-DuVernay’s final question, “What will the best companies do during this recession?” is even more important for leaders to consider. Charan answers, “They’ll get ahead the curve and conserve their cash. They’ll take out frills and focus on the core. And then they’ll think of how the market will have changed in two or three years and what innovation they will need to have done to compete successfully, and they’ll do that innovation now.”
Also notable is that Charan, the ever-prolific writer, published Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty: The New Rules for Getting the Right Things Done in Difficult Times with McGraw-Hill in late December 2008.
One reviewer on Amazon.com, identified as M. McDonald, hits the nail right on the head with the comment that Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty is “a playbook for senior executives to get back to the basics in these tough economic times. Charan is the first author to take a serious look at what running a company will be like under the assumption that the economy will not recover in the short run, but rather what you will need to be effective over the next two to three years.”
But if that’s not enough, consider Soundview’s Personal Survival Skills Collection. Definitely something worth considering if you want to make yourself more valuable to your company.
Filed under: Innovation, Leadership, Technology | Tags: Business, Innovation, Leadership, Technology
Back in June of 2008, investment banker Piper Jaffray predicted that Apple’s App Store could become a $1.2B business in 2009. He based his prediction on careful calculations around the number of iPhone and iTouch users, those that are actively using their device, and the average cost of an app. His conservative number came in at $416M, while his aggressive calculation came in at just over $1.2B.
Although one might think that the changes in the economy would slow this app train down, it will have more effect on new purchases of iPhones than on the sale of apps that average just $10 each (not including free apps). There’s still quite a healthy market for apps, and development doesn’t seem to be slowing any. There are now over 15,000 apps available and the average iPhone user has downloaded at least 15 applications in the past 6 months.
In fact, at 10pm on Jan. 19th, a new app came out just in time to be downloaded by iPhone users to see streaming coverage (Ustream) of the events around Barack Obama’s inauguration. This kind of development is a regular event at the app store with entrepreneurs putting everything they can think of onto the iPhone, riding its tsunami of popularity.
Here are just a few of the great business apps I found while surfing the iTunes app store:
- Credit Card Terminal – you can actually handle a credit card transaction through Authorize.net. $49.99
- Hey Taxi – finds the closest taxi services so you can make the call. Also rates them on response time. $0.99
- Rental Cars – finds the closest rental car office and provides a map. $0.99
- TraveLog – keeps track of your billable vehicles miles. $1.99
- Smart Dial – allows you to search for a number by typing the name right on the phone-dial keypad. $0.99
And not to be left out, Soundview has just entered the iPhone app market with three mini-collections of leadership book summaries, designed perfectly for the iPhone in text and audio formats. $9.99 each
- Soundview Leadership Vol. I – Know-How, Get There Early and Leadership Gold.
- Soundview Leadership Vol. II – The 360 Degree Leader, Crisis Leadership Now and True North.
- Soundview Leadership Vol. III – Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes for an Answer, A Leader’s Legacy and The Leader of the Future II.
Let us know about some of your favorite apps!
Most likely, you learned it in history class – how Henry Ford launched the automobile industry. But Hayagreeva Rao has a different explanation. It was actually automobile enthusiasts that drove the popularity of the automobile and provided a market for Ford once he developed his mass-production techniques.
These automobile buffs helped the cause by staging reliability races to counter the public’s concerns about safety, and lobbied for licensing and road-use laws to deal with the issue of cars and horses on the same roads.
This is just one example of activists that can make or break innovation, as described in Rao’s book Market Rebels. Other examples include the micro-brewing movement and the integration of French cooking into modern cuisine. Rao contends that two forces are needed to make innovation successful, a “hot cause” and “cool mobilization.”
A hot cause is an issue that can build emotion around it, like the auto enthusiasts that were excited about driving. Cool mobilization is when a larger audience is engaged and mobilized around the issue, as happened when car clubs were able to gain wide acceptance of the safety and potential of owning an automobile. By the time Ford began mass-producing the Model T, the public was excited and ready for a reasonably priced car. His innovations were successful because the market was primed.
So the question for the rest of us in the business world is how can we ignite and mobilize a market around our innovations. There is much potential for this activism in social media, although Rao doesn’t mention the Web as a potential source of mobilization. There is also much emotion around environmental issues, which can be mobilized around strong products. Wanted: Market Rebels!
Filed under: Innovation
With the recession hanging over our heads in the U.S., everywhere people are looking for ways to make money. On the individual level, folks are trying to figure out how they can turn their skill sets, talents, and even hobbies into money. On the larger, organizational level, companies are busy looking for new, cost-effective products to create to fill the current and future demand for consumers. Sure, if the application you developed for the iPhone fails to sell well on iTunes it’s a bummer, but there’s a good chance that on the individual level it will not break anyone financially. However, on the organizational scale, a product design miss can prove fatal to the bottom line. And in this recession, no organization can afford a miss.
Enter to the scene Phil Baker, who has been involved in product development for the consumer tech market for his entire career. Baker is certainly a smart guy, hailing a B.S. in physics from Worchester Polytechnic Institute, an M.S. in engineering from Yale, and an M.B.A from Northeastern University. And did I mention he holds more than 30 patents?
Baker is also the author of From Concept to Consumer: How to Turn Ideas Into Money, published by FT Press. In the preface, Baker writes, “One thing I’ve learned is that creating a successful product is much more than coming up with the idea; in fact, that’s usually the easiest part. It’s much more about what happens after. It involves a wide range of activities that bring together all sorts of disciplines, everything from engineering to product management to distribution to marketing. Each of these activities is much like a link in a chain. When one link fails, the entire endeavor can fail. … This book covers the new rules that have resulted from how quickly products are developed, their shorter life cycles, the use of outsourcing, and the Internet. All these factors have changed how things are now done.”
This is a truly exciting book to share with you; look for it in our upcoming selection.
