Business Insight Zone

And how much should they?

My friend Dave Livingston (you may remember him) made a simple statement in an e-mail exchange that stopped me in my tracks:

“Most businesses don’t have the habit of thinking about themselves.”

I think it’s true, and that it’s true of must individuals as well, in the sense that we seldom think through how we do things and how we might do them better. (Deliberate practicers, by contrast, do this sort of thinking all the time.)

What do you think?

Today we’re happy to celebrate one of our own for his extra-curricular endeavors: it’s the official release date for The Day-Glo Brothers, the first published book by long-time Hooverite Chris Barton.

The book chronicles the invention of day-glo colors by Joe and Bob Switzer, brothers who collaborated in the 1930s and 1940s to make the daylight-fluorescent pigments that we take for granted today when we see things like safety cones and highlighters. Chris actually stumbled across their story while doing his job here:

The project started at Hoover’s, actually. In August 1997, when I was in [the] Editorial [department], I read Bob Switzer’s obituary in the New York Times. I started writing for kids about three years later, and the Switzers’ story had stuck with me all that time. I started researching it in mid-2001.

Chris is wry about the very long time it can take to bring an illustrated book like this to fruition, pointing out that it’s taken eight years to produce a 48-page book. But he’s also highly methodical in his pursuit of writing projects outside his duties as a senior business analyst in the Hoover’s IT department:

I get up at 5 a.m. six days a week — seven days a week, when I’m on deadline. Most lunch hours, I spend writing or researching. If I have any free time in the evenings, I’m probably working on something related to my writing.

Besides his own patient efforts to build his audience through his blog, Chris benefits from the outstanding job that Charlesbridge did in publishing the book. Tony Persiani’s cheerful illustrations include swathes of the day-glo colors Fire Orange, Signal Green, and Saturn Yellow.

Charlesbridge also set up a page with animations that explain the difference between regular light, regular fluorescence, and day-glo fluorescence. Even better, Wired ran a blurb on the book last week. And if you’re in Austin, you can join Chris and many of his friends and fans for a book party on July 11 at BookPeople.

This isn’t the last you’ll hear from Chris, either: he already has several other books for children under contract, including a picture book “a lot sillier” than The Day-Glo Brothers that should be out from Little, Brown in early 2010.

Congratulations, Chris!

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Bonus Coverage at the “Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast” blog, including an interview with Barton and Persiani and a generous peek at sample pages from the book. Check it out!

BONUS Bonus: The Day-Glo Brothers just earned a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly!

UPDATE — Wednesday afternoon: WOW! The Day-Glo Brothers lands a review in BoingBoing!

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This morning I made the early drive from Austin to Waco to speak at the Waco Social Media Breakfast. It was a great, friendly crowd, and we enjoyed excellent food at the Cafe Cappuccino.

My friend Bryan Person, who brought the Social Media Breakfast concept with him last year when he moved from Boston to Austin, wrangled the technical details to live-stream the session. Here’s the video (52 minutes’ worth!) of my talk:

If 52 minutes is too much of a commitment, you might prefer the five-minute audio I did with Bryan after the session for his daily podcast series. Here it is:

I hope I’m starting to get the hang of this — this is my third time to speak at an SMB. If you like, you can read writeups of my Austin and San Antonio talks in the archives.

Life is so much easier when smart people say what you’ve been wanting to say. In this case, the smart person is David B. Thomas of SAS, who takes up the defense of “Social Media Manager” as a job title.

Why I am right and Chris Brogan is wrong.
(At least about this one thing.)

. . .

Right now my title might sound odd to people on the cutting edge, but it sounds pretty forward-looking to the people I most need to influence. By the time it starts sounding odd to them, I’ll probably be out of business cards anyway. Plus, I’ve been saying since before I got the job that if I do it right, I will eventually make my current position irrelevant.

A few weeks ago — after returning from Chris Brogan’s Inbound Marketing Summit, as it happens — I took the picture at the top of this post. Chris and I are friends, and I certainly understand and respect his take on “Social Media Manager,” so I thought it was funny that I wore that badge at his conference.

Anyway, I considered putting the photo to use in a post of my own on the subject, but let the idea slide once other things intervened. Now I’m glad that Dave (who, by the way, has a delightfully scorching dry wit in person) has laid out the case so clearly.

I’m doing a fair bit of traveling over the next couple of weeks, which means:

1. Any comments that land in the moderating queue (typically because you’ve never commented here before) may take longer than usual to process.
2. I probably won’t be replying to your comments as quickly as usual.

Please let this not deter you from rampant, trenchant commenting!

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Photo by Robert S. Donovan, used under a Creative Commons license.

Debated with myself whether to write about this, but then my friend Gini Dietrich said it better than I could have — and from the perspective of a P.R. pro:

Should Apple Have Disclosed Jobs’s Liver Transplant?

. . . I disagree that Apple and its board think Jobs’s health is a private matter. He has made himself a public figure synonymous with the brand; he is the face of the company. Many believe his health is instrumental in the stock performance of the company. While the U.S. has strict medical privacy laws, Jobs’s role as the company’s visionary trumps his right to privacy.

What she said — Apple could have done this much better.

Related story on this topic:

• USA Today: Jobs’ liver transplant shows money can make a difference

And three more posts from the archives:

• Steve Jobs’s health: a brief note. (28 July 2008)
• Banking on the founder’s mojo.
• Steve Jobs, rock star.

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We talked about it earlier this week, and sure enough the dominoes have started falling in the IPO market. Early returns:

• Chemspec International Limited: Ehh.
• Duoyuan Global Water Inc.: Offered at $16/share, opened at $22.65, closed its first day of trading at $21.87. Nice work when you can get it.
• Medidata Solutions, Inc.: Offered at $14, opened at $18, but tapered off into the mid-$16 range. Not bad.

Meanwhile, some in the IPO business are predicting better times ahead. Case in point:

IPO Comeback Starting Now, Cleantech Investors Say

Mind you, in this case “ahead” means “in the next 12 months” rather than “really soon.” My hunch is that the next 12 months is a good range of time to be talking about for a real, steady, sustained flow of IPOs. I think there’s still too much volatility and uncertainty in the markets to expect a real surge within the next few months. We’ll see.

John Wilshire, writing at Feeding the Puppy, offers an excellent overview of the marketing appeal of social media:

Dell and Twitter; thousands not millions

I encourage you to read the whole piece, not least for its engaging graphics. The upshot of it is that marketers used to target millions of potential customers/consumers to reach the thousands who would actually be interested and consider buying. But social media channels allow a radically different approach:

. . . the cost of communication, sharing, and conversation is now so low that companies (and their agencies) have available to them the approach that they arguably would have wanted in the first place. Just talk to the thousands.

Wilshire focuses on the example of Dell’s @delloutlet account on Twitter, which I discussed at length last week. He’s particularly acute in discussing (1) the low cost of time and effort to make @delloutlet a success, and (2) the longer timeframe you have to give to social media as you build up a genuine audience.

The whole piece is well worth a read.

A while back I got into a discussion with Tom Peters over Carly Fiorina’s role in reshaping Hewlett-Packard. He held that Mark Hurd’s success in improving HP’s operations would have been impossible without the groundwork that Fiorina laid to remake the company’s culture — and to give HP enough scale, through its acquisition of Compaq, to go toe-to-toe with both Dell and IBM.

Peters liked my eventual formulation of Fiorina as “Leader A,” the one who starts the revolution, and Hurd as “Leader B,” the one who implements the needed changes that build out and sustain that revolution.

Now I’m wondering if something similar has happened at Ford. Consider this excerpt from a comment Wally Bock left the other day:

[Mulally] benefitted from being hired by Bill Ford after Ford had done the CEO job for a while. Both parts of that are important. Bill Ford, as a Ford and key stockholder, had a leverage that no “hired hand” could ever have, inside the company, inside the family, and inside the board room. But it’s also significant that he had tried on the CEO job and had an idea of both how tough it was and what was needed. A year earlier, I’m not sure he’d have made as good a decision.

What do you think? What other examples of this phenomenon come to mind?

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Related:

• Ford’s Sustainability Focus.
• Would you give up scale for quality?
• Mark Hurd’s 3-minute management clinic.

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Image source.