Barbarians at the Gate. B. Burrough, J. Heylar.

Perhaps one of the best, if not the best, business books ever written! Instead of being a collection of arguments to back up a point of view, this actually is a story that bundles together an uber-charismatic and ambitious CEO, several well-known investment banks, elite investors, junk-bond financiers, a difficult-to-manage board and multiple other characters, all mixed up in a story of one of the biggest LBO’s in CPG: RJR Nabisco  – company, which present day descendants include Kraft and Japan Tobacco International. The authors are two World Street Journal journalists: consequently the book actually is very well written, which makes this a novel and a business title in one book!

 

Contemporary Strategy Analysis. R. Grant

There is one common thing about nearly all books written on strategy – frankly, they frequently come as quite boring. This one probably is not an exception, but it makes it up by giving a highly condensed and to the point summary of main frameworks, tools and instruments. I came across this book as a part of the core strategy course in London Business School and still revert to that from time to time. All the strategy “buzz-words” like competitive advantage, five forces, synergies, vertical integration and so on and so forth are all nicely packed, illustrated with case studies and put in context of various industries. Great structure and small paragraphs help dealing with aforementioned boredom as well. So If it has to be one book on strategy, perhaps it’s this one.

Freakonomics. S. Levitt, S. Dubner.

These days economists are not the ones you’d expect to come up with credible insights about how things work in real life. And yet this book is a testament of what happens when any topic is approached with inquisitive mind and good hand in data-analysis. Apart from being uber-interesting and combining topics of drug-dealers, fashion for children names and cheating school teachers in one plot, for me it actually is a great example of a what data analysis is all about when done properly.

I was always amazed by what could be uncovered about what is happening in the field, in retail by just spending a little bit more with the retail audit data and asking some “why” questions along the way. As it seems, consumer insights, that are so much in need these days, sometimes are already there in data already available. One just need to look!

Levitt&Dubner seem to be able to uncover the underscoring reasons for just about anything and the way they put questions going deeper into data make this approach a textbook! In short, it’s a rare gem and an exceptionally interesting read. By the way, part II is equally great!

 

Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. R. Pirsig

Strictly speaking this is not a business book at all, but there are two things that could have a great importance for modern day managers and executives. One – is a concept of “quality”.  How many times you see, read or hear something – a book, a music album, an internet site, an advertising campaign or a powerpoint presentation – and you immediately understand that it’s really good? Perhaps that happens more frequently that we admit. We frequently just know it’s good and then comes all the justifications, arguments and voice of reason. At academia we’re all taught about relativity of standards and judgements, which most certainly is right, but it would have been much more difficult to do something first-class without this sense of quality. Second is an approach to analyzing just about anything. In the book, as it says in its title, the subject naturally is a motorcycle. But this could as well apply to anything  – excel market model, corporate strategy or a market research report. To know more you’ll have to read the book! Putting all this into a context of philosophical concepts of Plato, Nietzsche and Laozi comes as a bonus.

 

Bulding strong brands. D. Aaker.

In many ways this is a marketing textbook by a marketing classic, who’s also known as a founder of one of the best brand consultancy companies, Prophet. So it’s a textbook – not much to add to that. One thing I particularly like is the brand equity concept, – very well known now, – introduced and coined by Aaker: brand as a person, brand as an organization symbol etc. In my view it’s a great way to have a holistic understanding of brand, be it a big brand with a huge footprint, when at some point it’s already super-difficult to decide what’s “on-brand” and what is off, or for a new brand when everything’s possible and every steps leads into unknown.

 

Black Swan. N. Taleb.

This is one of those books, which if you haven’t read it, run, quickly, read it now! It’s a great text illustrating that many processes from a stock-market to history itself develop not as an incremental, gradual flow but rather are driven by high-impact, highly-improbable events (black swans). Coming from a former trader, this book gives great insights about how we tend to simplify and explain events in retrospect, what drives progress and limits of human knowledge. What’s the practical implication of all that? Not to lose track of a big picture and shooting for the stars, in the first place!

 

Marketing as Strategy. N. Kumar.

Perhaps the least known and decorated of all books in this list, “Marketing as a Strategy” is a great way to put marketing in a wider context. It’s an excellent case-based illustration that choices made in developing and implementing successful marketing strategies frequently go beyond marketing field and function.  The companies that serve as sources of data and cases range from P&G and Unilever to EasyJet and Vodafone. I’ve seen many very senior people in organizations focusing on one element of a strategy (“with this aggressive pricing we’ll move them out of business”, “we need this new brand platform and it will solve problems of this declining brand” etc.). Perhaps the most important message in this book for me was that it’s never about one element. To embrace complexity one needs to make not just one but a series of inter-dependent choices. It’s also refreshing for a marketing book instead of talking of intangibles (like love, reputation, brand equity etc) to focus on profitability and growth. So there is hope, focus on marketing can still be a growth-engine for a corporation!

 

Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand

Another fictional, non-business book in the list, Atlas Shrugged and its Objectivism theory had a wide-ranging and sometimes controversial influences since it was first published in 1957. Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman mocked some of the US government officials for getting ideas about monetary policy from this book and said that “there are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged”. Reportedly it’s also a favorite of the Tea Party Movement and how things evolve in US politics is not the best way to recommend a book. And yet, despite that it might be naïve and utopian, it makes a point that’s hard to overemphasize in a corporation: importance of people who can make things done. Those people might be not the most pleasant to deal with as superiors or subordinates, but those are the engine of growth. There is obviously more to that in the book and it’s 700+ pages make getting through those a feat of Atlas as well!

 

Tipping Point. Malcolm Gladwell

Extremely interesting read on how small numbers could make a huge difference. While it centers to a large extent on social and behavioral changes, there is a lot of food for thought when it comes to innovation process in a corporation or when a company tries to establish a new category. Most of the time testing new products or concepts companies focus on trial, conversion rates i.e. something one way or the other related to usage. What Gladwell shows is that one of the key roles in making an idea reaching the tipping point belong to those who might as well not be that interested in using the product themselves! Connectors just know lots of people and if they think there is something cool or interesting they pass it on. Many of us have a friend who gives or recommends us something s/he thinks just thinks or heard is cool. That’s tipical Connectors’ behaviour. These people might never be the users of those new products, so measuring conversion on them might be useless. However, introducing some kind of Net Promoter Score for a new product or a concept for these kind of people and communicating this in a way to make it easy for them to share, might be something for marketers to take out from this book to reach their tipping points!

 

No Logo. Naomi Klein

This book is probably known even to those who haven’t read it. It became one of the most influential books about the anti-globalization movement and is all about, well…, how global corporations and brand manipulate public. Among many brands, somehow Nike seemed to receive a bigger portion of criticism. While for anyone working in marketing of a big brand many things in the book might seem one-sided, it’s also important to acknowledge that this might be the way people see us. And corporates tried hard to provide reasons for criticism in NoLogo: from advertising at schools and aggressive corporate sponsorships to temp workers and exploiting cheap labor in developing countries. If this is what consumers think, are they more likely to buy your products? Well, probably not.

 

There is a great three-page document written by Neil McElroy, then a P&G employee, as a note suggesting an introduction of brand management. Perhaps the key reason being the ownership of what a brand is and will be. In my view one of the reasons why public is so critical about big corporations is their shift in approach from ownership to outplacement driven by ever-lasting public companies search for efficiencies. The letter led to reorganization of P&G and introduction of the brand management.

 

85 years after it was written, P&G-ers internally frequently use words “specially trained people” – there is a department of dedicated resource for just about any activity one can think of, a kind of internal outsourcing in action. Specially trained people, summoned just about every time something actually has to be done, might be very good at what they do, but coordinating those becomes challenging and time consuming to say the least. As a result, managers don’t have a full understanding of what’s going on and on a bigger scale a company becomes so process-driven that simple, common sense questions, cease to be asked. As usual the optimum is perhaps somewhere in between and books like NoLogo are those that help to find this common ground.