Business Insight Zone

For years I’ve been enjoying Dan Pink’s journalism, not to mention his other appearances around the Internet. But now he’s outdone himself with his pithy, witty new book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need. It packs a remarkable amount of career wisdom into a slim package, and best of all — it’s a manga!

In case you don’t share a house with comics-obsessed children like I do, let me explain that manga are a Japanese genre of comic-book-style books. In Japan — and increasingly here — manga address many topics far beyond the superheroes found in the productions of Marvel and DC. In this case, the art of Rob Ten Pas conveys Pink’s story with a visual style that evokes classic tropes of manga as well as Mike Judge’s cult-classic movie Office Space.

Johnny Bunko centers around six core lessons that a sort of fairy stepsister named Diana teaches to our eponymous hero:

1. There is no plan.
2. Think strengths, not weaknesses
3. It’s not about you.
4. Persistence trumps talent.
5. Make excellent mistakes
6. Leave an imprint.

The author packs a lot of good thinking into a small space, bringing up some pretty big ideas and giving the nod to thinkers like Marcus Buckingham and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (Lesson #4, “Persistence trumps talent,” is a major theme of Carol Dweck’s Mindset, which I reviewed a few days ago.)

Pink has also done a great job of promoting his book. In fact, I got my signed copy of Johnny Bunko by entering a contest on Andy Sernovitz’s blog. In that same post, Andy praised Pink for “perfect word of mouth execution” around the book– high praise coming from the man who literally wrote the book on word-of-mouth marketing. The promotion must be working, since Pink’s book has spent months on the BusinessWeek bestseller list.

The fun isn’t over yet. Besides reading the book for yourself and giving out copies to any young career-ladder-climbers you know, you can enter a contest to join Pink on an all-expenses-paid trip to the TED Global 2009 conference in England. All you have to do: Come up with a seventh lesson to go with the six in the book.

Any suggestions?