2021 Castlin Manifesto: Strategy in Polemy
by JP Castlin
JP Castlin is a strategic thinker and consultant based in Sweden. Major themes in his Manifesto are complexity and emergent strategy. In the chapter on marketing, he is not shy about challenging prominent figures. The paper is 71 pages including an impressive 9-page bibliography with academic papers, articles, and books cited throughout the text.
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Schottenfreude: German Words for the Human Condition
by Ben Schott
Schottenfreude is a collection of 120 German compound words (Komposita) made up by an Englishman. It’s an amusing coffee table book – essentially a parody of German rather than words a native speaker would ever use.
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Small Business Finance and Valuation
by Rick Nason and Dan Nordqvist
A finance professor and a CPA have teamed up to explain finance and risk management concepts specifically for small business, defined as assets under $5 million. They acknowledge that the objectives of small business owners often differ from those of a Fortune 500 CFO, whose focus is typically maximizing shareholder value. Freedom, peace of mind, and other quality of life issues may be more important to a small business owner.
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How to Build a Better Business Plan: A Hands-On Action Guide for Business Owners
by Alastair Thomson
One of the primary benefits of a business plan is “finding a business model that works.” Alastair Thomson, an accountant and experienced C-level executive, guides you to think from a lender’s or investor’s perspective, whether or not you are seeking outside financing. From their side of the table, would you find your business compelling?
The completed plan becomes your “roadmap” for execution. “With the right business plan, you do your thinking up-front. You know how to take advantage when new opportunities come your way and you know exactly what problem needs solving if performance veers off-course.” Thomson encourages planning for three scenarios: best-case, worst-case, and likely outcome. “The biggest danger for a pessimist is under-resourcing their business.”
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Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture
by W. Patrick McCray
This book picks up where C.P. Snow left off in his 1959 book The Two Cultures. Snow was a British chemist turned novelist who had scientist friends and literary friends, but he observed that these groups were two separate cultures who rarely communicated with each other. Patrick McCray is a history professor at UC Santa Barbara. In Making Art Work, he studies several endeavors to bridge this divide, primarily in the 1960s, but also more recently. Specifically the book is about collaborations between artists and engineers.
Continue reading “Making Art Work”An interview with Mark C. Crowley
author of Lead from the Heart:
Transformational Leadership for the 21st Century
December 16, 2020 — 63 minutes — Book Review — Amazon
Transcript
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Risk: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn’t—and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger
by Dan Gardner
“One of the most consistent findings of risk perception research is that we overestimate the likelihood of being killed by the things that make the evening news and underestimate those that don’t. What makes the evening news? The rare, vivid, and catastrophic killers. Murder, terrorism, fire, and flood. What doesn’t make the news is the routine cause of death that kills one person at a time and doesn’t lend itself to strong emotions and pictures. Diabetes, asthma, heart disease.”
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2030 B2B Trends: Contrarian Ideas for The Next Decade
by Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo, The B2B Institute
The B2B Institute published a 43-page PDF on what they foresee as the three major trends in business-to-business marketing: (1) a greater emphasis on building long-term brand equity; (2) greater consistency in creative execution; and (3) a shift from hyper-targeting to broader reach within categories. Some of the ideas presented in this paper will sound familiar to anyone who has read the work of Ehrenberg-Bass Institute or the work of Les Binet and Peter Field.
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Lead from the Heart: Transformational Leadership for the 21st Century
by Mark C. Crowley (interview)
Prevailing management practices have become “a destructive influence, both to workers and to organizational effectiveness.”
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Always Look on the Bright Side of Life: A Sortabiography
by Eric Idle
This is an autobiography of a very funny writer and performer. The book includes many stories of how Monty Python projects came to be. But it is also the story of friendships and the healing power of comedy.
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The Key Point 