books

The book:  Absolute Value: What Really Influences Customers in the Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information – a provocative read about the new context of marketing today

The brains:  Emanuel Rosen (author of The Anatomy of Buzz) and Itamar Simonson (a marketing professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business) – a strong combination of a marketing practitioner and a academic researcher

Do you know what Amazement is?

A couple months ago, Shep Hyken sent me his latest book, Amaze Every Customer Every Time: 52 Tools for Delivering the Most Amazing Customer Service on the Planet. I'm making my way through some great books on my bookshelf, and today I'll share some amazing tools and learnings from Shep's book.

Do you know what great brands do? 

I first met Denise Lee Yohn in person when she spoke at the inaugural CXPA SoCal Local Networking Event in the fall of 2012. She spoke about good brands and great brands, and likened the difference between the two to the difference between failure and success. Great brands reap so many benefits, including: increased sales, higher profit margins, lower costs, greater customer loyalty, and higher market valuation.

“Design Thinking” has gone beyond fashionable in the design industry, but now quickly getting into management circles and even boardrooms. B-schools are tapping into this new trend and but many are yet to understand what it means and its applications. The idea of management that we teach in B-schools was originally designed for a set of very different kind of needs - managing repetitive tasks, improving economic efficiency and labor productivity and maximizing scale. 

Want to make your next book a best-seller?

The tablet revolution, by making it possible to place advertisements within digital e-books, is about to change the publishing world forever. Imagine commuting to work while reading The Great Gatsby on your Kindle for free, thanks to the generous sponsorship of a financial services company like Chase. Or, imagine being curled up in your pajamas reading Doctor Zhivago at night, while tiny contextual ads for 1-800-Flowers pop up on your Kindle anytime there's a romantic scene between Yuri and Lara. 

If ideas are the currency of the future, then books are still the best way to trade these ideas with others. To celebrate the 600th blog post of Endless Innovation, I've put together a summer reading list of ten books for innovators. These books feature some of the big ideas that are winning in the marketplace of ideas. While not all of them deal directly with technological innovation, all of them approach innovation from a unique perspective - whether it's neuroscience or science fiction or Darwinian evolution.

I value what Don Peppers and Martha Rogers write and as such I am making my way through their latest book (Extreme Trust) and using it to write a series of posts on matters that are touched upon by Don and Martha. In the first post I set out the bigger picture – why trust matters, what the challenge is and how transparency will force companies to become “trustable”.

I enjoy reading what Don Peppers and Martha Rogers write. In fact their point of view spoke to me in such a way that it called me to join up and become a part of The Peppers & Rogers Group, for a while, back in 2000. Don and Martha have published a new book Extreme Trust. In this series of posts on trust I am going to share with you, comment upon and explore topics that are addressed by Don and Martha in their book.

I was presently surprised to find out that Chip Kidd presented at TED.

Chip is one of my favorite book cover designers. I especially like the cover he did for a book (which I own) on Concept Artwork for the Batman Animated series. So I really enjoyed this talk, and his super quirky sense of humor, at TED called “Designing books is no laughing matter. OK, it is.” It is fascinating to see how his personality merges with his design philosophy.