…Raghuram G. Rajan, for Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy.
Congratulations to Ragan on the prize. And many thanks to the FT and sponsor Goldman Sachs, for throwing quite a shindig. Even the vegetarian option was delicious.
GalleyCat: Raghuram G. Rajan Wins Business Book of the Year Award
This interview with Paul Maritz, president and CEO of VMware, discusses the four personality types a healthy organization needs to thrive (emphasis mine):
You need to have somebody who is a strategist or visionary, who sets the goals for where the organization needs to go.
You need to have somebody who is the classic manager — somebody who takes care of the organization, in terms of making sure that everybody knows what they need to do and making sure that tasks are broken up into manageable actions and how they’re going to be measured.
You need a champion for the customer, because you are trying to translate your product into something that customers are going to pay for. So it’s important to have somebody who empathizes and understands how customers will see it. I’ve seen many endeavors fail because people weren’t able to connect the strategy to the way the customers would see the issue.
Then, lastly, you need the enforcer. You need somebody who says: “We’ve stared at this issue long enough. We’re not going to stare at it anymore. We’re going to do something about it. We’re going to make a decision. We’re going to deal with whatever conflict we have.”
It isn’t a perfect overlap, but this breakdown is very much in line with the four personality “suits” in our upcoming book (cards included), Personality Poker by Stephen M. Shapiro.
Steve came into the office and totally nailed our department using his poker-based personality trait system—by the end of the demonstration we were all convinced he was onto something awesome. We still need to hire more “hearts” at Portfolio. Very cool book for managers.
New York Times: Does Your Team Have the Four Essential Types?
On this depressingly gloomy Monday morning, I found a column at The Economist bemoaning modern business’s “obsession with fun.”
Apparently, making sure your employees are having a ball at the office is all the rage with managers; one company even appointed a Chief Fun Officer.
The column blames this “cult of fun” on companies like Zappos, whose CEO Tony Hsieh has attributed the company’s success to its fun-centric corporate culture. (It can’t hurt that Zappos is located in Las Vegas.)
The article continues:
This cult of fun is driven by three of the most popular management fads of the moment: empowerment, engagement and creativity. Many companies pride themselves on devolving power to front-line workers. But surveys show that only 20% of workers are “fully engaged with their job”. Even fewer are creative. Managers hope that “fun” will magically make workers more engaged and creative. But the problem is that as soon as fun becomes part of a corporate strategy it ceases to be fun and becomes its opposite—at best an empty shell and at worst a tiresome imposition.
All true. In light of this, I feel I should step down as Portfolio’s Chief Fun Officer.
(Photo courtesy of boxercab.)
Lynne Rosenthal, a college English professor, was ejected from a Starbucks on Manhattan’s Upper West Side by police after getting into a dispute with a barista—she became enraged when asked whether she’d like butter or cream cheese on her bagel.
“I just wanted a multigrain bagel,” Rosenthal told the New York Post. “I refused to say ‘without butter or cheese.’ When you go to Burger King, you don’t have to list the six things you don’t want.”
She added: “Linguistically, it’s stupid, and I’m a stickler for correct English.”
Oh, are you, Lynne? I may not be a professor of English, but I am a professional book editor, and it’s in that capacity that I challenge Rosenthal’s assertion. Not only isn’t it linquistically stupid for a barista to ask whether you want butter or cream cheese on a bagel (which of Strunk and/or White’s rules of usage does that violate, exactly?), it’s regular stupid for someone who lives in New York City to order a multigrain bagel. Bagels don’t come in multigrain, no matter what Starbucks would have you believe, and this New Yorker should have known better.
New York Post: Grammar stickler: Starbucks booted me
(Thanks to ma_shimaro for the link.)
Here at Portfolio, we’re lucky to have without a doubt one of the best art directors in the industry. If you’re a fan of our books or just follow our “Current and Upcoming Books” updates, you probably have some sense of the incredibly consistent work he delivers for us and our authors, season after season. We rely on him to an uncomfortable degree. (Please never leave us, Joe!)
But even the best designers and art directors in publishing have to deal with an uncomfortable fact: more and more books are being bought online, where their beautiful designs, so eloquent at 6″ x 9″, can sometimes look diminished, even puny, at 300 pixels across.
We don’t create separate designs just for online stores yet, but that development seems almost inevitable in the near future. The question becomes: If you do design covers just for the rows of Amazon or BN.com search results, what do you do differently?
O’Reilly’s Tools of Change blog features intriguing answers to this question from a variety of enterprising publishers:
Tools of Change for Publishing: On Covers
What do you think? Would online-optimized cover designs make a difference in your buying decision? Or do you believe a cover should be a unified entity, consistent across retail channels and formats? Let us know in the comments.
Reason.tv interviews Mark Frauenfelder about the deep satisfaction of making things with your hands, and the value of making lots of mistakes, too:
YouTube: Boing Boing Founder Mark Frauenfelder on DIY, Mistakes, and Unschooling
