Good Reading!

Book Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

Posted January 26, 2012

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Pricing and Profitability Management: A Practical Guide for Business Leaders by Julie M. Meehan, Michael G. Simonetto, Larry Montan, Jr. and Christopher Al. Goodin, 2011, John Wiley and Sons, Singapore. Any time I read a book written by a consulting company, I will admit that I am wary. This book, however, is well written and has good stories and a complete model. It does seemed more focused on B2C methods and analysis. The strategy discussion is a bit confused. There is an excellent discussion on the aspects of setting up a pricing system, process, and department and pricing software adoption. But it is lacking in some of the points on how to do the analysis they recommend – e.g. a competitive value plot. It is a good read, if you need information in the areas mentioned.
• The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation by Mathew Dixon and Brent Adamson, 2011, Portfolio/Penguin, New York, New York. This book moves beyond Spin Selling and investigates salespeople who have been very successful in the current environment of consensus buying and the rise of procurement. They have taken the skills of those "challenger" salespeople and developed a program to teach them to a broader sample of salespeople. Unfortunately, they don't move beyond simple rhetoric in value not do they see how internal systems often create the problem. For example, their strategy for dealing with procurement is to talk about value – not very effective. However, there are companies that have adopted this sales profile with good success. It is a well-written book, supported with clear examples.

Posted December 15, 2011

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business by Douglas W. Hubbard, Second Edition, 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey. This book was quite technical and complete. It had a good discussion on measuring risk and uncertainty, the use of Monte Carlo simulations, sampling, and the use of regression analysis to create estimates. If you're into this type of thing, a worthwhile read.
• The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow, 2011, Pantheon Books, New York, NY. This is a book mostly about the history of chance, the people who started writing about it hundreds of years ago, and interesting stories and insights into the field. A good read but a few too many statistics and analytics for a casual read.
• That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World it Invented and How We Can Come Back by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, 2011, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, New York. With an election year coming up shortly, this is terrific book to help us all understand the problems that we face as a country and the solutions. It serves as a primer for how we need to think about the work of our government and business leaders and our own actions to regain our former greatness. A terrific read

Posted November 17, 2011

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Impact Pricing: Your Blueprint for Driving Profits by Mark Stiving, Entrepreneur Press. This books is targeted for the small business owner, which is where Dr. Stiving specializes. Good stories for starting and growing businesses. Not so much a primer on pricing, but a good read for the small businesses and startups.
• Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell, 2009, The Penguin Press, New York, New York. I generally like writers with a chip on their shoulder, as they are well informed and feisty. I don't like that Ms. Ruppel holds up the wrong things as good. She looks at the evolution from vacuum tubes to modern electronics as bad – very narrow minded. And she often takes the position that most consumers are stupid. I like to believe otherwise. However, this is an extremely well-researched book, with many interesting tidbits in pricing and consumer retailing.
• Implementing Value Pricing: A Radical Business Model for Professional Firms by Ronald J. Baker, 2011, John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey. Ron Baker is the leading pricing specialist in pricing professional services. This book is "Classic Ron" – filled with high-level thoughts, models, and tactical details to help the professional services firm move to a value-based approach with their clients. Worth the read.
• Escaping the Price-Driven Sales: How World Class Sellers Create Extraordinary Profit by Tom Snyder and Kevin Kearns, 2008, McGraw-Hill Books. This book is intended for sales managers and training professionals and focuses at a systems level on improving sales process and skills. It is an extension of Spin Selling and still has some of the stories from the 1940's! I disagree with many of the premises in the book (e.g. Having salespeople be quote machines and humble!). Also, the book totally fails to deal with the most important issues salespeople face: procurement and the economic buyer.

Posted October 20, 2011

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Sales Eats First: How customer-motivated sales organizations out-think, out-offer and out-perform the competition by Noel Capon and Gary S. Tubridy, 2011, Wessex, Inc., Bronxville, New York. OMG, this is the sales management book for the 21st century and accomplishes for the sales manager what Good To Great did for the general manager. Simple, well written and loaded with terrific stories from the best sales organizations in the world. I loved this book!
• Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions by Guy Kawasaki, 2011, Portfolio/Penguin, New York, New York. I've been a long time follower and friend of Guy Kawasaki. He is a terrific writer, and his latest book is true to form – full of great ideas – allegedly for starting a business, but it is really about how to live a better life, too. Lots of thoughts on how to be exciting and get people excited about your business. Don't read this book if you work in a large bureaucratic company – you'll get depressed. OK, maybe you should, in spite of the consequences.
• Pricing Strategy: An Interdisciplinary Approach by Morris Engelson, 1995, Joint Management Strategy, Portland, Oregon. While 25-years old, this book still comes up once in a while, so I finally got around to reading it. It is certainly complete but quite superficial. It covers the basics of pricing analytics in a simple and mechanical world. A good starting primer but way behind Kent Monroe's Pricing, Making Profitable Decisions.

Posted August 12, 2011

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Killing Giants: 10 Strategies to Topple the Goliath in Your Industry by Stephen Denny, 2011, Penguin Group, New York, NY. This book has a wide range of topics on how to run a business better. Yes, the focus is on small companies beating extremely large companies. There are great lessons on pricing, marketing, selling, and more for all of us. A terrific book.
• CoDestiny: Overcome Your Growth Challenges by Helping Your Customers Overcome Theirs by Atlee Valentine Pope and George F. Brown, Jr., 2011, Greenleaf Book Group Press, Austin, Texas.  This book contains a good discussion of customer value chains – that is, how and where customers get value from their activities. Note, the value definitions are limited and high value. I found the book tedious and a bit too much selling.

Posted June 24, 2011

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• The Mirror Test: Is Your Business Really Breathing by Jeffrey W. Hayzlett with Jim Eber, 2010 Business Plus, Hachette Book Group, New York, NY. I enjoyed reading this book, as it was bottom line, no BS, and lots of good examples–most of them personal to the author.  This book is primarily focused on the small business owner, but there are a lot of worthwhile insights for most business managers. The discussion on value and pricing is to the point and good.
• Negotiation Genius: How to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Brilliant Results at the Bargaining Table and Beyond by Deepak Malhotra and Max H. Bazerman, 2007, Bantam Dell, New York, NY. While this book tends to generally deal with more complicated negotiations, such as selling a business, it does have a number of worthwhile insights. For example, the authors stress the importance of calculating "what's in it for them"–a useful requirement for prices and salespeople. If you calculate the customer's resulting value from your products and services, you have a better position in pricing and negotiations. It’s a worthwhile read.
• No B.S. Price Strategy: The Ultimate No Holds Barred Kick Butt Take No Prisoners Guide to Profits, Power and Prosperity by Dan S. Kennedy and Jason Marrs, 2011, Entrepreneur Press. OK, I admit that I bought this book because of the catchy title. It does have some good points, but it is primarily for small business owners. They do talk about BTB, but most of the examples are BTC. Also, it's more about selling and marketing than price. Skip this one.

Posted May 20, 2011

Review from Dr. Reed Holden

• The Delta Model: Reinventing Your Business Strategy by Arnoldo C. Hax, 2010, Spring Science +Business Media, New York, NY. This book has been around for a while, but recently a colleague suggested I take a look at it. I knew by chapter one that I was going to like it. Instead of refining the strategic process, Hax redefines it logically, simply, and well. He takes much of what we say in the pricing and value area to the next level: business strategy. There is a good focus on segmentation and customer value models, with plenty of deep stories. Consider me Hax'd. Thanks, Brian.

Posted April 22, 2011

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• The Lords of Strategy by Walter Kiechel, 2010, Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA.  If you are either a consultant or consumer of consulting services, this is a terrific book to read.  Oh yea, if you are a manager, it's a good read too.  Kiechel covers the complete history of strategy and strategy consulting.  He presents not only the development and evolution of the theories but how the professional services firms were the prime movers in applying them to their clients.  He also covers how most companies don't have strategies and appear in many cases not to need them--called the Honda Effect.  Thanks to Patrick for the recommendation.
• The Price of Everything: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do by Eduardo Porter, 2011, The Penguin Group, New York, New York.  This is a book about the imact of prices on social structure.  The truth is that money can buy happiness and we don't spend enough on gasoline in the US.  You'll enjoy his many examples and well researched thoughts on a wide range of topics

Posted March 25, 2011

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Why Popcorn Costs So Much at the Movies and Other Pricing Puzzles by Richard B. McKenzie, 2008, Springer Science + Business Media, New York, NY. This is a well thought out, well researched, and well presented discussion of a wide range of situations in pricing, ranging from popcorn (Of Course!) to colleges. As an economist, Dr. McKenzie presents all decisions as rational ones and misses on things like taste and emotions. Also, I was struck by the old phrase: "as a specialist, you learn more and more about less and less, until you know absolutely everything about nothing." A bit too much at times.
• Pricing Strategy: Setting Price Levels, Managing Price Discounts, & Establishing Price Structures by Tim J. Smith, 2012 Smith-Western, Mason, Ohio. This book is well written, well researched, and provides a modern view of pricing strategy and tactics. Tim Smith does a great job of capturing both the art and the science of modern pricing. He has taken much of what has been written in the past and reframed it in the broader context of pricing theory. While he often misses the nuances of B2B, he provides great discussions on bundling, the psychological factors of pricing, and yield management. There are lots of good current examples that are well researched and presented. This is a must read for every pricing professional.
• Handbook of Pricing Research in Marketing, Edited by Vithala R. Rao, 2010, Edward Elgar Publishing, Northampton, MA. This book is a summary of research and theories in various areas of pricing, exclusively focusing on B2C.  It is highly technical but quite insightful, as the writers of the individual sections have done an exhaustive search in the research literature to support their individual work.  I find it a good book to have on my shelf, if I have to investigate a detail or a specific area of pricing.

Posted February 17, 2011

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Islands of Profit in a Sea of Red Ink: Why 40% of Your Business is Unprofitable and How to Fix It by Jonathan L. S. Byrnes, 2010, Portfolio Penguin, New York, NY. This is not a pricing book, but it is a book which talks about many of the principles in Pricing with Confidence. The author spends a lot of time on what we call the "20/225 rule"—that is, how to focus on profitable customers and what to do with the ones that aren't (hint: fire them!). He also gets to a lot of the underlying operational requirements for developing a value-driven organization.  Well worth the read.
• Getting Past No: Negotiating in Difficult Situations, Revised Edition by William Ury, 2007  Bantam Books, New York, NY. This is a good book to help us all think about different approaches to dealing with tough negotiations with procurement.  It does assume a path—one that may not be there, but it provides a look of good insights and advice.
•  Value-Based Marketing: Marketing Strategies for Corporate Growth and Shareholder Value, Second Edition by Peter Doyle, 2008, John Wiley & Sons, West Sussex, England. This book came up on a top ten list for pricing managers, so I thought it would be worth the read. As the title says, it links marketing directly with shareholder value—an important exercise. The author tries to solve many problems with marketing by introducing a host of financial measures for marketing managers to include in their sights. He also introduces techniques like the balanced scorecard, with the same intent. I do wonder if it is a bit disconnected from the real marketing and a bit idealistic, but it is a good book.

Posted January 21, 2011

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Negotiating Rationally by Max H. Bazerman and Margaret A. Neale, 1992, The Free Press, New York, New York. This book has some interesting pointers on how to better approach negotiations. The authors talk about the winner's curse (one of my favorites), the need to take emotion out of the process, and some of the pitfalls that we all tend to fall into during a negotiation. The problem is that it fails to identify the tricks that most procurement people use against us. Having said that, it's still a worthwhile read.
• Getting Started with Conjoint Analysis: Strategies for Product Design and Pricing Research, Second Edition by Bryan K. Orme, 2010, Research Publishers, Madison, WI. This book is a good introduction to the use and application of conjoint analysis. It gets to what the technique is and does to how to design good conjoint studies. It also does a fair but somewhat limited job of pointing out the shortcomings, but I'll try to take care of that job

Posted December 17, 2010

Review from Dr. Reed Holden

• Hardball: Are You Playing to Pay or Playing to Win? By George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer, 2004, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. This is a "how to" strategy business book out of Boston Consulting Group. Their model is simple and supported with good, but in some cases, dated stories. It will help senior executives take a step back from their business and identify where they are doing well in key strategic areas and where they are doing poorly. If done well, it will also help identify competitors doing the same thing. A pretty good read.

Posted November 19, 2010

Review from Dr. Reed Holden

• Clutch: Why Some People Excel Under Pressure and Others Don't by Paul Sullivan. 2010, Penguin Group, New York, NY. I started reading this book, because of its look at sports but was pleasantly surprised by the number of stories it gave around business as well. There are simple criteria for excelling in tough situations and some great examples coming out of the financial crash. A worthwhile read.

Posted September 30, 2010

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People by G. Richard Shell, 2006, Penguin Books, New York, New York. This is a terrific book with lots of good ideas for how to prepare for and initiate better approaches to negotiations. There are many good stories, and the organization structure will help us all in this area. The only problem is that it doesn't cover what to do when you are negotiating with unreasonable people.
• Winning in Turbulence by Darrell Rigby, 2009, Harvard Business School Press. This is from the Bain "Memo to the CEO" series. As such, it is brief and to the point. Also, I give them credit, since they give a lot of good information for executives to think about when they are entering, in, and exiting turbulent periods–hey, isn't that always? They provide a good strategic model, good advice, and a brief recap of their Net Promoter Score, which is a good market research measure.
• Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions by Zachary Shore, 2008, Bloomsbury USA, New York, NY.  I was intrigued by this book. It certainly delivers on its premise and does a good job of presenting different "states" in our minds, which lead to bad decisions. Since the author is a Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, this does have a military leaning, but there are plenty of practical examples, as well as the war ones. Believe it or not, it has a lot of relevance in the area of pricing too–I ended up discussing it with a client senior executive, as it pertained to many of their pricing problems. A good read. Thanks to Jim Geisman of Market Share Inc. for recommending this book.

Posted August 20, 2010

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• A Sense of Urgency by John P. Kotter, 2008, Harvard Business School Press.  This is a book about urgency; more than that, it's a book about change. And it's a good one. It's a simple, fast read with some great advice, if you are concerned about your department's or your firm's sense of urgency. It's also good if you feel that your people aren't seeing the need to change and it's there. In our work, we see a lot of companies that suffer from a "terminal internal focus" or "death by Powerpoint." This book is the antidote.
• Practical Pricing: Translating Pricing Theory into Sustainable Profit Improvement by Michael Calogridis, 2009, Palgrave Macmillian. This books certainly gets the connection between new products, valued services, sales, and better pricing. It does miss important points on conjoint. Also, I can't understand why writers (and consulting firms) can't give credit to Mike Marn at McKinsey for developing waterfall analysis. There are interesting insights but some generalizations miss complexity in many areas. This is more of a check list than a how-to book. Also, it's thin in key areas, like strategy, and fails to deal with the frustrations of many pricing managers.
• Marketing as Strategy: Understanding the CEO's Agenda for Driving Growth and Innovation by Nirmalya Kumar, 2004 Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA. This is a good book for the senior level marketing executive. While I disagree with a few points (around what else–pricing), but it does have a good view of what strategic marketing is. There is a big focus on solution selling and how to put together solutions. I liked how he went beyond the techniques to discuss how to run a good business on relationships and trust. Bit of a BTC focus but good global stories.
• Guerrilla Marketing: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits From Your Small Business by Jay Conrad Levinson, 2007, Houghton Mifflin Corp., New York, NY. This really is a book intended for the small to medium business. But I found quite of few nuggets of value, even for large firms. It has a number of creative approaches and ideas for business to try for their marketing activities. Also, the author does a terrific job of providing bottom line advice that is often needed to make even large campaigns more effective. A decent read.

Posted July 23, 2010

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Prisoner's Dilemma by William Poundstone, Anchor Books, New York, New York, 1993. If you're a student of competitive strategy, you know about the Prisoner's Dilemma. If you want to learn more about how it was created and subsequently used with offshoots, this would be a pretty good book to read. It digs deep into the people like John von Neumann and how his and other competitive theories were put to use at the government think tank Rand Corp. A good historical book.
• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis, 2010, WW Norton & Co., New York, NY. Michael Lewis writes great stories, and this one is about the few guys who sifted through the complex financial instruments in 2006 & 2007 to make money on the decline in value of CDO's. But it's also about the guys who let it happen. This one could have also been called "ignorance and greed," but it's a good story anyway.
• The Boston Consulting Group on Strategy: Classic Concepts and New Perspectives, Carl W. Stern and Michael S. Deimler Editors, 2006, John Wiley, Hoboken, New Jersey. This is a collection of articles written by various people at BCG over the past 30+ years. While interesting, it does lack a unifying theory ("On strategy" just isn't enough, since it means many things) that pulls everything together. Rather than reading this book, you'd be better served going back to some of the more forward thinking people in the area of strategy.

Posted June 18, 2010

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Pricing for Profit: How to Command Higher Prices For Your Products and Services by Dale Furtwengler, 2010, American Management Association, New York, NY. I'll give credit to anyone who writes a book—it is hard work. But this book just didn't float my boat. There are a few interesting stories, but he tends to ramble, and I often wondered what the point was. It is BTC and more for small business owners—especially retail. I disagree on a number of points. For example, he doesn't believe you can teach salespeople to be value sellers—-it has to fit their personality profile. There is an extensive discussion and set of questions on bundling that was pretty good, if you're interested.
• Smart Pricing: How Google, Priceline and Leading Businesses Use Pricing Innovation for Profitability by Jagmohan Raju and Z. John Zhang, 2010,Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, NJ. I have to admit that I was initially turned off by this book. They used some of the structure (and one formula) from The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing. Also, this is not a strategic book—lots of tactical insights but no real or new structure or real strategic direction. If, however, you are working with real innovative, consumer-based products and looking to sell into China, it's a worthwhile read, as they had some terrific and deep stories. If you aren't, don't waste your time.
• The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul, Gawande, 2009 Metropolitan Books, New York, NY. I started reading this book and thinking: here's another non-business person (a surgeon, no less) trying to write about business. But the more I got into it, I recognized that he has great lessons for managers and, more specifically, Pricing Managers. He does focus a lot on the medical and, to a less extend, the flying business (where checklists originated). But if you think about his message, it makes me wonder if we rely too much on complex process and not enough on simple checklists—5 to 9 brief simple items that we should do when we price a product, for example. The focus is on a) learning from failures and b) teamwork and communication.  It is worthwhile to think about. A good read.

Posted May 26, 2010

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Predictably Irrational: Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely,2008, Harper Collins, New York, New York.  Dan Ariely has an interesting way of looking at how we make decisions, and this book covers a full range from how we make decisions in a variety of situations to how price impacts how we evaluate the drugs we take (the more you pay, the better you feel!). It's well written with good stories. For the BTB technicians, it isn’t a great read, but if you are a student of consumer pricing and specialize in that area, it's a must-have read.  Thanks to Jim Geisman of SoftwarePricingPartners, Inc. for the loan of this book.
• The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing: A Guide to Growing More Profitably, Fifth Edition by Thomas T. Nagle, John E. Hogan and Joseph Zale, 2011, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ. This is the fifth edition of one of the two "bibles of pricing" (the other is by Kent Monroe). The new edition goes into greater depth in important areas like value estimation and specifically connects that with ideas of segmentation. They also, for the first time, get into pricing organization structure and expand into more practical but technical analysis.
• Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Learn From Their Mistakes, by Sydney Finkelstein, 2003 Penguin Group, New York, NY.  This book comes from my continuing saga to understand why some businesses fail. This is a good book with a number of very useful insights. It's well written with a useful organization of things to watch for. Of course, it's loaded with stories about the business failures of the past 15 years. It is a good idea to keep your eyes open to learning from the mistakes of others. It's cheaper and easier.
• Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of it) by William Poundstone, 2010, Hill and Wang, New York, New York.  If you are a student of consumer pricing response, this is a terrific book. Poundstone starts with the history of the study of psychophysics, prospect theory, behavioral decision theory, and menu theory. Menu Theory? Yup, the rules for how you should show prices on menus. That one's going to drive me crazy in a few weeks. At any rate, if you get all wrapped up figuring out the "perfect" price for your consumers, read this book. It's a great narrative for the other considerations you should be thinking about, as well as those that have nothing to do with the price but everything to do with whether a customer will buy your product or not

Posted April 15, 2010

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• The 1% Windfall: How Successful Companies Use Price to Profit and Grow by Rafi Mohammed, 2010 Harper Collins, New York, NY. Rafi's latest book is a pretty good one. He has simple models of how to think about price and why that is important. The stories are current and make you think–always a good thing. There are parts that are a bit confusing, as he comes from two directions: as a pricer and a negotiator. Also, this is primarily a BTC book.

Posted March 18, 2010

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Competitive Intelligence: How To Minimize Risk, Avoid Surprises, and Grow Your Business in a Changing World by Seena Sharp, 2009, John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey.  This book was a surprise. I was expecting a book about how to research your competitors and discovered that Competitive Intelligence has progressed to a highly relevant business activity, one that is critical for successful businesses. It's a good look at how to get external insights to better drive both strategy and tactics of a firm. I liked Seena’s discussion of the shortcomings of traditional market research and why focusing on customers is more important than focusing on competitors. I absolutely loved the following quote: "Pricing is often identified as the brass ring, when the real issue is elsewhere." Right on Seena. A terrific book for all of us.
• Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play: Transforming the Buyer/Seller Relationship by Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig, 2008, Penguin Group, New York, New York. This is a terrific book for people selling professional services. I loved some of the analogies, and they had a good discussion on RFP's and how to handle pricing. The pricing focus was on eliciting and framing budget discussions–very worthwhile.
• The Ten Commandments for Business Failure by Donald R. Keough, 2008, Penguin Group, New York, NY. This is a quick read by the past CEO of Coca-Cola. It has simple messages that are backed by good stories and includes a fairly frank look at a company that he led for 12 years. There are 11 fairly simple lessons on how to guarantee business failure–a tongue-in-cheek way of saying how to do it right. A surprisingly pleasant read.
• Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness–How to Make Sales Forever by Jeffrey Gitomer, 2005 Bard Press, Austin, Texas. This is a good book for new salespeople or for new managers, for that matter. It is more of a self-help book, albeit a good one. There are a few too many stories about being a writer, but there is some good advice here, if you're trying to develop good selling skills.

Posted February 18,, 2010

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Super Freakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, 2009, Harper-Collins, New York, NY. As you would guess, this is a follow-up to the book Freakonomics. Like the original book, Freakonomics, this one has a number of great stories and very unique ways of looking at different situations in our lives today. A favorite story is the one about how the price quality effect and pricing work in prostitution. A good read–enjoy.
• The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam, 2008, Penguin Group, New York, NY. Most of you know that when it comes to presentations, I believe in fewer eye charts and more pictures. They're more interesting and better make the point. This is a good book to add more structure around that concept. For me, the first few chapters were enough, but if you want to get really good at using pictures to make your point, this is a worthwhile book.
• Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years by Paul B. Carroll and Chunka Mui, 2008, Penguin Group, New York, NY. Ever since I read the Deep Survival book reviewed in our January newsletter, I've been focusing part of my reading on companies that fail. Air travel has become safe, because pilots and operators spend a lot of time dissecting crashes and instituting improvements. Unfortunately, business could use the same focus. Whether it be through questionable acquisitions, bad pricing, bad decision making, whatever, businesses fail more than they succeed–lots more. This is a good book, especially for senior managers who need to see the many failures in decision-making and how some firms have begun to improve their safety record.
  
  There were two noteworthy discussions. The first was on how products perform relative to competition. While most executives rate their products as being better, only 4% of customers agree. The next one is on research. Successful firms have recognized that traditional market research often points them in the wrong direction and have begun to use offshoots of ethnographic/depth research to get better understandings of customers. Important! A good and valuable read.

Posted January 29, 2010

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• What the Dog Saw and other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell, 2009, Little, Brown and Company, New York, New York.  Malcolm Gladwell is a favorite author (The Tipping Point, Blink), but I had held off buying this book, since it is a collection of articles from his work at The New Yorker. Fortunately, a late night desperation buy at an airport bookstore solved that problem. It really is a terrific book, with lots of great insights into questions we normally might not ask but are pleased to get answered: Why is there one dominant brand of ketchup? Why are investments really a crapshoot even for the best? Why isn’t finding the blame always the best thing? That's just three out of many. It really was an enjoyable read.
• Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales, 2005, W. W. Norton and Company, New York, New York. I read this book in the general interest category but decided to write about it. The reason is simple—there is advice in this book which will keep businesses from failing—really. For example, the author talks about how survivors do a great job accepting and adjusting to their new reality, be it in the wilderness or a survival raft in the middle of the storm. They adjust so well that when the danger is over, they are actually quite comfortable there. As we've seen the number of spectacular business failures over the past several years, I was struck by how relevant this piece of advice was for their managers. Executives leading companies that survive don't deny their dire circumstances, they embrace them and figure out how to survive, then how to flourish. There are some other interesting insights here and certainly worth the read for personal reasons.
• Behind the Cloud by Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler, 2009, Josset-Bass, San Francisco, CA. This is the story behind the explosive growth of Salesforce.com told by it's CEO. It is written as 110 "plays" that helped them get to where they are. It is a bit antiseptic, but it has some good stories. Also, it has a good thread of how they evolved their offering to multiple levels to meet the needs of different segments, and how they had to evolve their pricing model to accommodate the offering, too. Thanks to good friend John Kador for this recommendation.

Posted December 16, 2009

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Pricing for Profitability: Activity-Base Pricing for Competitive Advantage by John L. Daly, 2002, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY. While this book is primarily for manufacturing professionals, it is a good introductory book for pricing theory. There are relevant stories that support the theory, and the Activity-Based Pricing concept is a good starting point for pricing in a manufacturing environment. There is a good discussion on pricing to enhance capacity utilization, too!

Posted September 25, 2009

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre & Every Business a Stage by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, 1999, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA.  This book has an interesting discussion about the difference and value of viewing a service businesses as a more theatrical "experience" business. It's a good read for all services business and has good insights for how BTB companies can better relate to its customers and intermediaries

Posted August 29, 2009

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Recession Storming: Thriving in Downturns through Superior Marketing, Pricing & Product Strategies by Rupert M. Hart, 1990-2009, Recessionstormingmedia, Amazon.com. So, I was surprised to find that this was a twenty-year-old book updated with recent stories. There is lots of simple, good advice. There is a thin, but worthwhile, discussion on things to think about in pricing, but some of the examples are quite dated. Yes, it might be late for this recession, but you never know when you might need it for the next one

Posted June 19, 2009

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Growing Firm, by Verne Harnish, 2002, SelectBooks, New York, NY.  Verne Harnish is a frequent writer for Fortune and focuses his consulting expertise on small businesses in the $10-200M range. This book is a terrific list of models and things to think about for business managers in all sizes of business. He writes about how to identify and focus on what's important and how to make sure everyone on your team does the same. It is a book for managers who want results. Don't we all?

Posted April 23, 2009

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• The Strategic Pricing of Pharmaceuticals by E. M. (Mick) Kolassa, Ph.D., 2009, The PondHouse Press. Mick is a colleague from the older days and is currently Managing Partner of Medical Marketing Economics. This is his second book on pharmaceutical pricing, and it is his best. I found it both insightful and informative. He unravels the complex issues of pharma pricing and integrates those issues to modern pricing theory. The book has clear examples, and I enjoyed his discussions on framing, drivers of use, and the impact of generics. This book has a wider application than just pharmaceuticals–anyone in the medical equipment or services field would find great insights.

• Effective Apology: Mending Fences, Building Bridges, and Restoring Trust by John Kador. When I first heard about this book, I thought it might be hard to write an interesting book on apology. Boy, John, I'm sorry–I was wrong. We all screw up, and too often, we ignore or gloss over an apology. Ineffective apology can undermine our power as a manager and it can weaken our friendships. Lack of apology does worse. John Kador does a terrific job providing a sound foundation of both when we should apologize and how we should do it effectively. He includes plenty of personal and public examples, so we can see how people have apologized poorly and how they have done it well.  The book comes complete with checklists and simple rules for us all. This is a terrific book–one that all of us should read.

Posted April 23, 2009

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• The Elegant Solution: Toyota's Formula for Mastering Innovation by Mathew E. May, 2007, Free Press, New York, NY.  This is a well-written book about how Toyota lets its people innovate like crazy. But it is really more than that, it's about how it respects and empowers its workforce to outperform competitors year after year. There are some great stories that emphasize key points, too. Here's the problem–the managers who really need to read it will dismiss it as rhetorical junk. That's too bad. 

• The Mission, The Men and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander by Peter Blaber, 2008, The Berkley Publishing Group, New York, NY. This book was recommended by my son in the military. I would not normally review it here but found myself in a board meeting recently using some of the principles to get other members focused on the mission of the organization. So, here it is: this book is about two things.  First, it is about what it was like being a mission commander on the ground in Afghanistan and how senior commanders in Washington screwed things up by not listening to the guys in the battlefield. Second, it contains a number of worthwhile principles for senior leaders of the firm to use when it comes to developing and executing strategy. The managers who don't follow these rules tend to make mistakes. The ones who follow don’t–that tells you how important those simple rules are

Posted March 19, 2009

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder, 2008, Bantam Books, New York, NY.  Boy, did this one take a long time to read. It is an exhaustive history of Warren Buffet from childhood to recent years. I found it interesting to read and full of insights on financial markets–especially in today's current financial meltdown.  Pricing? Not much. But there are lots of valuable insights into the CEO's of companies that continue to pay dividends to owners and employees alike.

• The Strategy Paradox: Why Committing to Success Leads to Failure (And What To Do About It) by Michael E. Raynor, 2007, Doubleday, New York, NY. This book is a bit scary as it gets to the issue of being lucky in the strategic process. It is about how to manage a large business in an uncertain environment and provides new insights into the complex world of corporate strategy. It is well researched, well written. Though a bit of a sales job about the need for scenario-based planning and strategic flexibility, it is worth the read

Posted January 16, 2009

Review from Dr. Reed Holden

• Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, 2998 Little, Brown and Company, New York, NY. As usual, Gladwell has some incredible insights into health, education and, yes, business. There is a great discussion on why airplanes crash that has relevance to decision making in business. It gives us good insights into why the old style of command and control gets aircraft and business into trouble and how new approaches may prevent some of the disasters we're seeing today. He does leave it up to the reader to tie his insights together into a tight package, but if you don't mind the work, it's worth the trip.

Posted December 18, 2008

Review from Dr. Reed Holden

• How Much Should I Charge: Pricing Basics for Making Money Doing What You Love by Ellen Rohr, 1999, Maxxrohr Press, Rogersville, MO.  How many times have people told you that they hate pricing their products and services--especially small business people?  Well, here is a simple, basic book on pricing you can recommend they read and get them to stop asking you questions.  No business degree required! 

Posted November 14, 2008

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Double-Digit Growth: How Great Companies Achieve it–No Matter What by Michael Treacy, 2003, Penguin Books, New York, NY.  This book is well written, contains no fancy graphics, and has a lot of very good stories. His model is simple and high level.  The problem with any book which focuses on a few companies for stories, as authors Peters and Waterman discovered, is that some stumble subsequent to publishing (Dell and WaMu). Also, he tends to make extreme statements which aren't always true and some stories contradict.  But a worthwhile read.

• Harvard Business Review on Pricing, 2008, Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA. This book contains a collection of prior articles from the Harvard Business Review on pricing, including pricing new products, fighting a price war, Six Sigma Pricing–generally a good collection from some of the top authors in the field. 

Posted August 21, 2008

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company by David A. Price, 2008, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, New York.  I'm not much of a historian, but I do love business history.  As we look at successful businesses today, the truth is that the path to getting there was ugly and littered with good, bad, and daring decisions.  If you are like that, then this will be a good and interesting read.  It's about the evolution of a business and a technology.  It’s also about the people who made the commitment and stuck to it despite advice and pressure from some very powerful people.

Posted July 25, 2008

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Exceeding Customer Expectations by Kirk Kazanjian, 2007 Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, New York, NY. This is not as much a book about pricing as it is about how to build and grow a world class company. This is a no BS, inside look at how Enterprise quietly and competently became the #1 car rental company in the U.S. We get to learn about how they price used cars ("no-haggle"), how they respond to customers (fast and well), and how they absolutely trounced their competitors by focusing on getting the job done. Finally, we learn about how they used simple market research to evaluate performance and how they used the results to become the best in the business. A good, quick read too!

• The Big Talk: How to Win Clients, Deliver Great Presentations and Solve Conflicts at Work by Debra Fine, 2008, Hyperion, New York, NY. There are some good points in this book, but it suffers from one big problem–the author jumps around too much. One minute she’s talking about dealing with the boss, the next, it's a problem employee. My sense is that she would have been better served with better organization. A bit of a disappointment.

Posted June 24, 2008

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Optimal Bundling: Marketing Strategies for Improving Economic Performance, Edited by Ralph Fuerderer, Andreas Herrmann and Georg Wuebker, 1999, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany. This book is a collection of working papers on the theory behind and the state of bundling and pricing of products and services. As such, it is a very technical work. But it does contain good and complete examples of work done by some of the leading scholars and practitioners in the field.

• The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything by Stephen M. R. Covey with Rebecca R. Merrill, 2006, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY. OK, maybe I'm biased by a few years of research on trust, but I did like this book. Trust is something that is often dismissed as not being relevant in business. The son of Stephen Covey, the Seven Habits guy, does a great job of not only showing why it is important, but he gives great advice on how to get there. Too many managers make little slips in this area and wonder why they don't have a culture of trust. If you're worried about that, read this and find out where the problems are.

• Our Iceberg is Melting by John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber, 2005 St. Marten's Press, New York, NY. John Kotter is one of the leading specialists in organizational change, and he has finally become "Blanchardized." You might be familiar with how Ken Blanchard and his cohorts develop memorable stories to go along with their models and books. This one is an entertaining and quick read about the eight steps that organizations need to think about in addressing change. Pretty good for the troops if you're going through a change process.

Posted May 30, 2008

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Value Creation: The Power of Brand Equity by William Neal and Ron Strauss, 2008, Cengage Learning, Mason, Ohio. I'm going to warn you right up front that the punch line of this book is using the author's predictive model for improving the effectiveness of branding efforts. Generally, you know I frown on consultants writing books where you have to use their services to get anything out of it. Fortunately, this isn't the case here. It is a well-written, well-researched effort which ties the brand identity to not only the CEO but other constituencies in the firm–workers, customers, and dealers. I like the way it connects brand results and satisfied customers with happy employees and draws well from the work of people like Fred Reiccheld along the way. This is both an introductory and a technical book, but for those who use branding research, there is an excellent discussion of different methods. I did find the few chapters that had a long story in them a bit distracting.

• Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher and William Ury. Second Edition, 1991, Penguin Books, New York, New York.  I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised by this oldie but goodie. Generally, books on negotiating lack the depth needed to deal with price-oriented customers in today's world. This book does not suffer from that malady. It is a well-written book that covers a wide range of negotiating topics in a manner that provides the reader with great insights on improving their skills. It doesn't really get to specifics on aggressive price negotiations, but with a little bit of thought, it's not hard to connect the dots there, too

Posted April 18, 2008

Reviews From Dr. Reed Holden

• The Price is Wrong: Understanding What Makes a Price Seem Fair and the True Cost of Unfair Pricing by Sarah Maxwell, PhD., 2008, John Wiley, Hoboken, NJ.  This is a book about the psychology of pricing in a consumer environment.  There are lots of good stories, insights and information for true students of pricing.  Also, a lot of good insights about what to watch for in unfair pricing.  There is a good discussion of pricing power and trust which is relevant in a BTB world.  I liked this book–well written and interesting

Posted March 20, 2008
Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disaster, Second Edition by Merrill R. Chapman.  I've always like to learn from other's mistakes rather than my own, it's cheaper and more fun.  This is a good book that pokes brutal fun at all of the high-tech blunders that occurred over the past twenty years.  Yes, it does get a bit too technical for me at times, but if you want to know why your favorite technology company imploded, you'll probably find it here.  Pricing?  Oh yeah, enough discussion of pricing blunders to make it worthwhile too.  Thanks to Jim Geisman of MarketShare (www.softwarepricing.com) for sending this book along.

• The Future of Management by Gary Hamel, 2007, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA.  This is a fairly good book about how several organizations have moved from top down, command and control management to individually empowered organic organizations.  Originally led by Meg Wheatley over twenty years ago, one of the leading strategic thinkers picks up the pace with a number of in-depth examples of how companies have moved into this better space.  The problem is that in most cases, it took a CEO willing to change and drive change to accomplish it.  What are the rest of us supposed to do?

Posted January 25, 2008

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Value Merchants: Demonstrating and Documenting Superior Value in Business Markets by James C. Anderson, Nirmalya Kumar and James A. Narus, 2007, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. For those of you who want an in-depth indoctrination to understanding and selling value in business markets, this is a terrific book. Though academics, the authors have presented a very pragmatic and usable model with lots of good stories to support it's application.

• Strictly Speaking: Reid Buckley's Indispensable Handbook on Public Speaking by Reid Buckley, 1999, McGraw Hill, New York, NY. I would have like this book if it was an article, but it does what it says—provides a terrific handbook on public speaking. What's the problem? It covers all of the situations—it seems like every last one of them. Fortunately, it is written quite well and has a lot of supporting anecdotes. He teaches the best speakers, and if you want to improve your public speaking skills, it's a worthwhile read. By the way, if you are a public speaker, you should want to improve your speaking skills.

• Pricing with Confidence: Ten Ways to Stop Leaving Money on the Table by Reed Holden and Mark Burton, 2008, Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ will be shipping at Amazon in February!

Posted December 13, 2007

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• The Circle Innovation: You Can't Shrink Your Way to Greatness by Tom Peters, 1997, Vintage Books, Random House, New York, NY. This book has been sitting on my shelf for quite a few months, a recommendation from a member of the Kitchen Cabinet. Tom Peters is his usual self in this one–lots of rants wrapped around mediocre theory. But you know what? I enjoyed this book. This is a book that motivates you to do new things, different things. That's always a good thing. It inspires. Sometimes with little things, sometimes with big things. Worth the read.

• Mind over Matter: Why Intellectual Capital is The Chief Source of Wealth by Ronald J. Baker, 2008, John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey. Ron Baker is the most prolific writer in the field of pricing, with several top sellers to his credit. In this new work, he moves to a broader discussion of the value of intellectual capital. He draws from a wide range of the world's greatest thinkers to spin an interesting web that does well to both support his point and draw the reader (me) in. Along the way, he takes on some of the flawed theories of pricing and business strategy. Another good read this month.

Posted November 16, 2007

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck, Ph. D., 2006, Random House, New York, NY. When I picked this book off my shelf to read on a trip, I was disappointed. It didn't look like a business book. Self help? Maybe. But certainly not a great business book. In fact, it turned out to be a good business book. This is a book about two very different types of people. It is also a book about how managers can create/support each kind. As such, it is a book about how to both select and develop more successful people. It has great business examples from the CEO clowns and kings. A good read.

• The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World by Alan Greenspan, 2007 Penguin Press, New York, NY. When I sat down on the airplane to read this book, the woman next to me commented that it must be very technical with lots of numbers. I told her it wasn't. But I had only finished the first half. In the second half, Greenspan gets into lots of detail of financial markets that were either over my head or out of my span of interest. Having said this, I really enjoyed the first half's discussion of his five terms as Chairman of the Federal Reserve – lots of insights into how he and the government struggled to figure out how to help the economy.

• Six Sigma Pricing: Improving Pricing Operations to Increase Profits by ManMohan S. Sodhi and Navdeep S. Sodhi, 2008 FT Press, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. These guys get into the nitty gritty detail of how pricing problems destroy profits. The book is loaded with tools and real-world examples and should be on every pricing manager's bookshelf. You'll be glad you bought it.

• The Self-Destructive Habits of Good Companies…And How to Break Them by Jagdish N. Sheth, 2007, Pearson Education Co., Upper Saddle River, NJ. This is a terrific book with good logic and even better stories. There is a good discussion on price value positioning. If you're unhappy with your senior management, read this book. But be forewarned that the guys who really need to read it won't – they don't think they have to. OK, buy them a copy and dump it on their desk. Just don't tell them who did it.

Posted October 19, 2007

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• How to Write & Give a Speech by Joan Detz, 1984, St. Martins Press, New York, NY. This fall, we're preparing to go on the road talking about our new book. As a result, I'll be reviewing a number of books on giving speeches and making presentation. My conclusion is that we all need to get better and more interesting in doing those darn things. This book is terrific. If you give speeches or presentations, it should be on your bookshelf. It is a complete how-to book on the subject and has a number of great examples.

• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2007, Random House Publishing, New York, NY. OK, this is an interesting book written by a very intelligent guy. The problem is that the somewhat obscure discussions make its value in a business environment questionable. His message is to prepare for the outliers. In business, it's not logical to do that. Yes, you have to be aware of the possibility of "outliers" like Hurricane Katrina so that when they happen, you don't ignore them but instead deal with them effectively. Hopefully, he'll do a book specific to business some day.

• Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots is Boldly Privatizing Space by Michael Belfiore, 2007, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY. I almost classified this as a "personal interest" book. But the more I thought about it, I recognized that it has a lot of relevance to firms that are trying to revolutionize their industry. We tend to try to do that by brute force and by ourselves. This is a story about how individuals and companies are using prize money to get business people to push technology to its limits for the benefit of an industry (and mankind for that matter). A good read.

Posted September 21, 2007

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, 2007, Random House Publishing, New York, NY. If you don't want to do better presentations, don't read this book. There has been a rumbling for quite a few years about the ineffectiveness of most PowerPoint presentations. We all know that but don't want to deal with it. Well, if you want to be more effective in making presentations, you should read this book. It has a simple (aka, sticky) framework of how to make better presentations. And, yes, I'm a reluctant convert. Starting to rework them this morning, in fact.

• >Kiss Theory Good Bye: Five Proven Ways to Get Extraordinary Results in Any Company by Bob Prosen, 2006, Gold Pen Publishing, Dallas, TX. This is an "I" book – I did this, I did that, and look how great it was. I don't get the title. A better one is: I have lots of advice but don't want to take the time to put it into a system which will make it easier to remember and present. The net result is rhetoric and redundancies with nothing new. He tried doing too much and ended up doing too little. Fahgedaboutit.

• Give Your Speech, Change the World: How to Move Your Audience to Action by Nick Morgan, 2003 Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. This is a terrific book if you want to do a better job making presentations, be they large or small. The author has lots of great examples to make his points, and like the title, you want to change the way you give presentations once you're done

Posted August 17, 2007

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Marketing That Works: How Entrepreneurial Marketing Can Add Sustainable Value to Any Sized Company by Leonard M. Lodish, Howard L. Morgan and Shellye Archambeau, 2007, Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. This is an insightful but bland effort. It has quite a few stories and is clearly positioned for a small to medium business that needs to get insights in marketing. Unfortunately, it pales in depth, insights, and pizzazz to Kotler's old standby. There is a good discussion on distribution and representative/salesperson strategy.

• The Halo Effect…and the Eight Other business Delusions That Deceive Managers by Phil Rosenzweig, 2007, The Free Press, New York, New York. This book is well researched, has some great stories and attempts to turn around how we think about some of the great business books. This guy does have a beef, and it's a reasonable one that some of the top business guru's are a little full of themselves and that their theories are based on insight, not solid research. But it takes him four chapters to get to the problem and another four to say what it is and why it is important. Then he has one chapter to pull it together and he fails. His punch line: it's a tough world out there to predict and to manage. No kidding. Didn't need a book to get there.

Posted July 20, 2007

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• The Marketing Mavens by Noel Capon, 2007, Crown Business, New York, NY. This is the best marketing book I've read in a long time. Capon delivers on his promise of who the big marketing mavens are and tells how they do it. He gives us five simple imperatives in marketing and in business and provides in-depth stories on how to achieve them. This is a well-documented, well-written book – a worthwhile read for all marketers.

Posted June 22, 2007

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Selling Blue Elephants: How to Make Great Products that People Want Before They Even Know they Want Them by Howard Moskowitz and Alex Gofman, 2007, Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, NJ. This book is about RDE--Rule Development Experimentation. Great theory but muddled in technology and lacking in simple logic of why it should be used. It is a way of taking consumer preferences and mapping and optimizing them. Simple? Not the way they present it. Also, it’s all BTC examples.

• The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth by Fred Reichheld, 2006, Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA. This is a book worthy of your bookshelf. It is well written, easy to read, and makes an excellent point. Leveraging his work on customer loyalty, Bain's Fred Reichheld shows how he measures sustainable competitive advantage by developing his Net Promoter Score – that is the percentage of customers who promote your business less the percentage of customers who detract from your business by complaining about it. This is going to be a scary read for some executives, but they're already in trouble. For those of you who care about your business and want to begin to develop simple metrics on how to improve it, this is a must read.

Posted April 20, 2007

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• The Manager's Book of Decencies by Steve Harrison, 2007, McGraw Hill, New York, NY. This is one of those books that is full of little insights into how you need to think about interacting with the people of your business. There are so many pearls of wisdom on how to run and attend meetings that they alone are worth the time to read it. They say that business success comes from attention to detail. If you are trying to motivate people, this book is loaded with insights on those details. A good read.

• Winning the Profit Game: Smarter Pricing, Smarter Branding by Robert G. Docters, Michael R. Reopel, Jeanne-May Sun and Stephen M. Tanny. This book is packed with good BTB and BTC stories and has some good advice. It also lacks good analytical insights. It should also be titled Smarter Finance, because it strays there a lot with a decent discussion on derivatives.

• Plain Talk: Lessons from a Business Maverick by Ken Iverson, 1998, John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey. This is a manifesto for managers who are tired of all the complexity that we add to business. It talks about how to best compensate and motivate people, how to have simple reporting structures. But most of all, it talks about Iverson's secrets to success as he took a business on the edge of bankruptcy in an industry that was in a massive downturn and made it into a global powerhouse. A book that should be on everyone's bookshelf.

• The Ultimate Question by Fred Reichheld, 2006 HBS Press. One of the pioneers of thinking on the value of loyal customers, Reichheld and his team seek to boil down all of their work to make it simpler and more applicable. By measuring the difference between customers that say that they would recommend your product and those that would not, the Net Promoter Score–Reichheld contends that companies can develop a roadmap to unparalleled growth. His points on how companies that live off bad profits generated by intentionally complicated pricing and onerous contract terms are particularly vulnerable are good ones. I have two issues with this book. First, most of his examples focus on business to consumer sales where the decision-making process is a simple and centralized means that many in business-to-business markets may find applying the Net Promoter Score concept a difficult proposition. Second, there is very little insight into what to actually do once you get the data. As a result, I can’t recommend this book. Do you think he is keeping score?

Posted May 18, 2007

Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Clued In: How To Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again by Lewis P. Carbone, 2004, Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, NJ. This book provides an in-depth look at how to manage for better customer experiences. Included are great stories on companies that have done it well and some that have done it poorly. Carbone explores the simple relationship between customer experience and business success. He considers customer experience to be a value proposition that links to loyalty and business results. He is right. But, he provides no real understanding of how to both prioritize and leverage those insights. Also, this is a solid BTC book–no BTB stories but some relevance.

• True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership by Bill George with Peter Sims, 2007, Jossey Bass, San Francisco, CA. This is a world-shattering book for anyone who chooses to take it seriously. If you feel like you've gotten too many bad breaks and have a lousy situation or a good situation and want to make it better, this book will help you. It not only provides a model for doing that, it provides a bunch of stories from industry leaders in what they had to go through and overcome in their journey of life.

Posted March 23, 2007
Reviews from Dr. Reed Holden

• Measure What Matters To Customers: Using Key Predictive Indicators by Ronald J. Baker. 2006, John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey. Ron Baker is an expert in services pricing, but he is also a philosopher, economist, and historian of sorts. His writing is never entirely about the title of the book. Yes, this book is about the importance of, but also, the need to move beyond Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) in the management of a business. For those of us in the services business, there is a terrific section on KPI's for knowledge workers. Since meeting him a decade ago at the University of Chicago, I have come to respect him for how he thinks, what he knows, and what I can learn from reading his books. This one does not disappoint.

• Work in Progress: Risking Failure, Surviving Success by Michael Eisner. This book came as a business gift, and it went to the bottom of the reading pile–the very bottom. I almost threw it out. After all, who wants to read the revisionist history of an ego-driven CEO? Well, the pile got low, and I found this to be an open, honest discussion of what it is like to be in the top spot. He admits his failures. He doesn't take all the credit. He understands his people. And, after all, he is responsible for making Disney the powerhouse it is today. Another good read.

• The Three Tensions: Winning the Struggle to Perform Without Compromise by Dominic Dod and Ken Favaro, 2007, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ. This book is a well-researched, high-level directional piece on how CEO's can manage the tensions between three important "tensions" in the firm: profitability vs. growth, short term vs. long term, and managing pieces or a whole part. While I found the third part a little rhetorical, there is good logic, great stories, and plenty of data to support the author's path. While it is a high-level piece, I was disappointed that they never dealt with pricing problems. Ah well, maybe next time.

Posted February 16, 2007

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• Marketing Champions: Practical Strategies for Improving Marketing's Power, Influence, and Business Impact by Roy A. Young, Allen M. Weiss, and David W. Steward, 2006, John Wiley, Hoboken, New Jersey. This book provides two out of three things its title promises. Unfortunately, it doesn't do the most important thing: how to make marketing more effective for the firm. It does talk about how to increase marketing's power by using more appropriate words for the different high-level functions of the firm. But it is weak on metrics and doesn't focus on external issues enough. The book features two chapters that ended with a list of questions to evaluate the CEO and CFO; it would have been more effective to have questions which evaluated marketing!

• Boeing versus Airbus: The Inside Story of the Greatest International Competition in Business by John Newhouse, 2007, Alfred Knopf, New York, New York. This book provides an in-depth look at the brutally competitive large aircraft business. Newhouse provides great depth in the cost, design, union, and customer demand factors that have caused a complete reversal of fortune in the battle between two giants. If you like the art of the deal, you'll like this book. If you're worried about complacency in your own firm, you might not like it, but you should read it.

Posted January 19, 2007

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• Lean Solutions: How Companies and Customers Can Create Value and Wealth Together by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones, 2005, Free Press, New York, NY. This book is all about making the process of customer engagement and the supply chain to achieve it more efficient. The primary focus is on BTC, but there were enough BTB examples in the service arena to make this a worthwhile read. There is a good discussion on the use of price to control demand. It's written in an easy prose with lots of examples.

Posted December 15, 2006

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• Total Integrated Marketing: Breaking the Bounds of the Function by James Mac Hulbert, Noel Capon, and Nigel F. Piercy, 2003, The Free Press, New York, NY. I always get a little nervous when I read a "practical" marketing book written by three business school professors, but this one was actually pretty good. It is all about marketing "in the new age" of fast moving customers and competitors. Their five tasks of strategic marketing form the manifesto for today's marketing executives. There are lots of relevant stories, and I loved the discussion on connecting with sales—one of Capon's strong points.

Posted November 16, 2006

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• Leading at the Speed of Growth by Katherine Catlin and Jana Mathews, 2001, Hungry Minds, Inc., New York, NY. Growing companies are evolving companies, and the job of the president and/or CEO is to change their style in a manner consistent with that evolution. This book identifies both the challenges and the trouble signs during that process. It is primarily for under $200M companies but is an easy read and has a number of good insights to be useful to many managers.

• Revenue Management and Pricing: Case Studies and Applications by Ian Yoeman and Una McMahon-Beattie, 2004, Thompson Learning, London, England. For both BTB and BTC services firms, this book provides some useful insights on problems other firms have had with yield management and the solutions to those problems. There are several great examples on bundling of services, and fortunately, the cases have answers.

• Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen, 1999, Viking Publishing, New York, NY. Do you hate to give feedback, especially hard feedback? Do you find yourself getting angry in simple conversations? Well, this book may help. It has simple rules, such as seek first to understand (Covey fans will remember this one), look for good intentions (rule #4 from Managing from the Heart), don't worry about blaming, worry about learning, understand how you really feel, and the importance of learning. Maybe it has too much depth, but the lessons are good ones.

Posted October 19, 2006

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• Mastering the Complex Sale: How to Compete and Win When the Stakes are High! by Jeff Thull, 2003, Wiley, Hoboken, New Jersey. Any book can provide some value and I suppose this does. The problem is that it is long on rhetoric and short on logical systems and processes to identify where a complex sales process is needed and how to do it. It presupposes too much and does things like calling disciplines criteria and mixing applications along the way. With regrets to whomever recommended it, this one didn't make the shelf.

• Marketing as Strategy: Understanding the CEO's Agenda for Driving Growth and Innovation by Nirmalya Kumar, 2004, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. This is a well researched, well thought-out book with many practical examples. His Three V's model is simple and seems to work. The shortcoming is that many of his examples are quite dated and haven't stood the test of time and there is nothing there to manage his process. Maybe he tries to do too much, and in doing so, misses points on metrics to prove value and basic connections with salespeople.

• The Cluetrain Manifesto by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger, 2000, Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, MA. Wow, this is a goofy book, but boy did it stick with me. It's all about how companies need to think about dialogues with people. It's not about talking to customers–which is how most companies think. It is a little technical and its stories focus on how some of the technical communities started dialogues with developers in the early days of the internet, but I did find it insightful and worth the read.

Posted September 22, 2006

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services by Anthony W. Ulwick, 2005, McGraw Hill, New York, NY. There are three types of books: ones that are a waste of time, ones that provide interesting insights, and ones that have solid tools to help you in your business. This one is certainly "interesting." I like the author's focus on "outcome-driven" innovation and the way he talks about different types of innovation. He also does a good job identifying problems with many innovative approaches we see in business today. Unfortunately, in his drive to keep it simple, he misses many opportunities for a deeper discussion in important areas. Nor does he provide useful tools or talk about how his approach would (should?) change in a push vs. a pull marketing and sales environment.

• The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, 2003, Penguin Group, London, England. The FAA has made flying in America safer than any other country. They do that by studying crashes. They learn what caused a crash and implement new procedures so it doesn't happen again. In business, we spend too much time studying the successes and when they crash, we ignore them. That's too bad, because we can learn a lot from crashes. Were there early warning signs of the crash at Enron? You betcha. Management ignored all of them. In fact, they encouraged practices that caused the crash. This is a very well written book. If you are in financial services, accounting, or senior management, it's a good read and chock full of insights on how not to run your business.

Posted August 17, 2006

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• Pricing and Revenue Optimization by Robert L. Phillips, 2005, Stanford Business Books, Stanford, California. This book is loaded with formulas and is about the best in-depth book for anyone who is thinking about using price optimization software. It is about pricing from an econometric perspective with good mathematical how-to's in demand shifting, segmentation, and supply and demand structure for intermediaries and markdown management. For those of you who aren't mathematically inclined, it still contains some good information about when optimization works.

• How to Sell At Margins Higher Than Your Competitors: Winning Every Sale at Full Price, Rate or Fee by Lawrence L. Steinmetz, PhD and William T. Brooks, 2006, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey. I've been a fan of Larry Steinmetz ever since I discovered another of his books last year. This book should be required reading for all sales managers, senior executives, and especially salespeople who deal with price. Pricing managers should read it too, so they can recommend it to the sales side. This is a tactical view of pricing execution in the trenches and what managers need to do to make it more successful. Plus, he has some great stories. This book has several additional chapters on signs of under and over pricing not included in his earlier book.

• Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renee Maugorgne, 2005, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. These guys get it--the Value Discipline^SM that is. If you are tired of beating your brains out competing with all of the firms in your industry, this book provides a useful structure to consider moving into new, higher-value positions. If you are a handwringer or generally have a negative bent, don't waste your time. But, if you truly want to elevate your thinking to a new, higher-value level, this is a winner.

• Key Account Management and Planning: The Comprehensive Handbook for Managing Your Firm's Most Important Strategic Asset by Noel Capon, 2001, The Free Press, New York, NY. This the complete textbook version for the manager's handbook by Prof. Capon we reviewed last November. As such, it provides a much more in-depth and quite valuable look. This is the "how to" book for major account management by the leading expert in the field. It includes the requisite underlying logic, practical support, tools, and plenty of real-world examples to support even the most ambitious program.

Posted July 21, 2006

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• The 50-Plus Market; Why the Future is Age Neutral When It Comes to Marketing & Branding Strategies by Dick Stroud, 2005, Kogan Page Limited, Sterling, VA. If you have anything to do with BTC marketing, this is a good book to read. It is well written and has lots of anecdotes and practical advice for the marketing practitioner in how to deal with the aging global population. It is written from the United Kingdom but has a very global perspective and does take the discussion to a number of valuable "so what's," especially with regard to technology.

• The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing, Fourth Edition by Thomas T. Nagle and John E. Hogan, 2006, Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, NJ. While I will admit to a bit of nostalgia while writing this, the fourth edition, of what is still the best book on strategic pricing, continues to move away from pricing in the trenches to a higher-level pricing strategy book. It is well written with a good balance of BTB and BTC examples in the early chapters. I liked the discussion on price banding analysis and value communications strategies but was disappointed that some of John Hogan's great work on new product pricing was missing. The inclusion of "negotiating with power buyers" was a great start, but it only refers to dealing with large retail buyers and moves further away from pricing support for the salesperson.

Posted June 16, 2006

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• Pricing and Revenue Optimization by Robert L. Phillips, 2005, Stanford Business Books, Stanford, California. This book is loaded with formulas and is about the best in-depth book for anyone who is thinking about using price optimization software. It is about pricing from an econometric perspective with good mathematical how to's in demand shifting, segmentation, supply and demand structure for intermediaries and markdown management. For those of you who aren't mathematically inclined, it still contains some good information about when optimization works.

• The 50-Plus Market; Why the Future is Age Neutral When It Comes to Marketing & Branding Strategies by Dick Stroud, 2005, Kogan Page Limited, Sterling, VA. If you have anything to do with BTC marketing, this is a good book to read. It is well written and has lots of anecdotes and practical advice for the marketing practitioner in how to deal with the aging global population. It is written from the United Kingdom but has a very global perspective and does take the discussion to a number of valuable "so what's," especially with regard to technology.

Posted May 19, 2006

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• Managing Global Accounts: Nine Critical Factors for a World-Class Program by Noel Capon, Dave Potter, and Fred Schindler, 2006, Thomson Higher Education, Mason, Ohio. Think of this as THE handbook for Global Account Management (GAM). It is a terrific book, chock-full of processes and steps for managers trying to catch up with the needs of their global accounts. Also included at no extra charge is some sage advice for the many firms that have stumbled in the process.

• Manage for Profit, Not for Market Share: A Guide to Greater Profits in Highly Contested Markets by Hermann Simon, Frank F. Bilstein & Frank Luby, 2006, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. The purpose of any book is to entertain, teach, or inspire the reader. This book doesn't do it. It has a long list of stories about how they have helped clients, but it fails to provide the detail, models, or theories needed. It is a "buy our consulting services" book. As such, it is not a recommended read.

Posted April 21, 2006

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• The Giants of Sales: What Dale Carnegie, John Patterson, Elmer Wheeler, and Joe Girard Can Teach You About Sales Success by Tom Sant, 2006, American Management Association, New York, NY. With this book, Tom Sant finally gives credit where credit is due to the original thought leaders in the development of modern selling. This book points beyond the rhetoric of the "one size fits all" sales program and puts all of the modern techniques into a simple and practical perspective that benefits all. By taking the discussion to the level of how to make the techniques work for you, Tom Sant has written an outstanding book that should be read by all in the field of sales.

• The New Solution Selling: The Revolutionary Sales Process That is Changing the Way People Sell by Keith M. Eades, 2004, McGraw Hill, New York, NY. This is a terrific book to introduce salespeople to a systematic process of selling that increases the likelihood of a successful piece of business. Included in the discussion is prospecting, how to engage in customer dialogue, when and how to compete and the use of vision re-engineering to take control of the sales process. I also like the chapter on how to gain access to people with power using gives-gets.

Reviews by Mark Burton

• Hardball – Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win? by George Stalk and Rob Lachnauer, Harvard Business School Press, 2004. While Hardball has a great deal of practical advice and examples on firms that have successfully made tough and aggressive strategic moves, the authors do a much better job in making some of their recommended approaches come to life than others. One of the areas where they do provide terrific depth of insight is in the connection between pricing strategy and competitive strategy – easily amongst the best material written on this subject. Given this and the fact that Hardball is a quick read, it is worth picking up.

• The Art of Pricing: How to Find the Hidden Profits to Grow Your Business by Rafi Mohammed, Crown Business Press, 2005. While I disagree with the premise that pricing is an “art” this book provides plenty of great examples of how to address some of the trickier elements of pricing including segmented and differential pricing. In these areas I agree with the author that a healthy dose of creativity and out-of-the box thinking can lead to opportunities to really improve pricing performance and profits. With a good mix of consumer and business-to-business examples, this is a good read for pricing professionals of all persuasions.

• Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes and How to Correct Them – Lessons From the New Science of Behavioral Economics by Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich, Simon and Schuster, 1999. This is really a book about factors that affect the way that people approach financial decisions and calculations, the predictable mental shortcuts they take, and the inherent biases in these shortcuts. For the hardcore pricing professional that wants to better understand the factors that affect customer perceptions of prices it is worth a read but I wouldn’t recommend it for other audiences.

Posted March 24, 2006

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• Life After the 30-Second Spot: Energize Your Brand with a Bold Mix of Alternatives to Traditional Advertising by Joseph Jaffe, 2005, Joseph Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey. Television advertising is not in the practical target for a small to mid-sized BTB CMO, but there are plenty of large companies that slide down the slippery slope of justification for what is increasingly becoming a low-return investment. This is a good primer on both the fallacy of TV advertising and the need to move into less "traditional" approaches – most of which are presented in this book.

• Competition Demystified: A Radically Simplified Approach to Business Strategy by Bruce Greenwald and Judd Kahn, 2005, Penguin Books, New York, New York. Developing corporate strategy is hard enough – any attempt to simplify it is indeed worthy. The problem is that in spite of all the data analysis, there are random problems that can crop up along the way. This book tries to take David Porter's Competitive Strategy Model and focus more on analysis of markets and make that process decision-tree-based.

• Passionate & Profitable: Why Customer Strategies Fail and 10 Steps to do Them Right by Lior Arussy, 2005, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey. Most companies give their customers a terrible experience. If you are one of those companies and you're comfortable with that, don't read this book. But you better hope your competitors don't read it either. While this book has as much rhetoric as passion, it does present a number of valuable tools on how to evaluate customer touch points and eventually improve the customer experience. It is primarily a BTC book and misses the complexity of the BTB relationship, but is a worthwhile read.

Reviews by Mark Burton

• Loyalty Myths – Hyped Strategies That Will Put You Out of Business – and Proven Tactics That Really Work, Timothy L. Keiningham, Terry G. Vavra, Lerzan Askoy, and Henri Wallard, 2005, John Wiley and Sons. I have to admit I usually get a little queasy when I hear about the emphasis that many companies put on customer loyalty and money spent on loyalty programs. After reading this book, I know why. Loyalty Myths puts the conventional wisdom regarding customer loyalty under a microscope. In the process, the authors challenge just about everything that you thought you knew about the economics, causes, and means to create more loyal customers. My one complaint is that while there is a sharp analysis to refute “truths” like loyal customers are more profitable, cheaper to serve, and pay higher prices, there is little in terms of actionable alternatives or case studies on companies that are handling customer loyalty the right way. (Maybe that’s a finding.) Having said that, this book is still a must read for executives that are thinking about or have implemented loyalty programs. It will provoke you to ask a lot of challenging questions and hopefully put expectations in the proper perspective.

Posted February 17, 2006

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• The Value Enterprise: Strategies for Building a Value-Based Organization by John Donovan, Richard Tully and Brent Wortman of Deloitte & Touche Consulting Group, 1998, McGraw Hill Ryerson, Ontario, Canada. This book does a good job of showing a high-level interaction with a firm's "value constituency"--its employees, its stockholders, and its customers. As such, it shows how firms that practice Value DisciplineSM can leverage the results throughout other elements of the firm for greater success. Unfortunately, it fails to get to the in-the-execution trenches of the value enterprise.

• Knockoff: The Deadly Trade in Counterfeit Goods by Tim Phillips, 2005, Kogan Page Ltd., London, UK. When I received this book, sent by the agent for the author, I thought that it would be a fairly light and uninspiring read. After all, doesn't everyone buy knockoffs and copy music? No big deal, right? Wrong. The knockoff business, whatever it involves, Gucci to Viagra, steals the intellectual property of others, and that is bad. In fact, in many cases, it is deadly. In 2001, 192,000 people in China alone died from using fake drugs. As I type this, I get chills thinking about that number because, as big as it is, it only represents China. This book is not only an indictment of the people who make the fakes, it is an indictment of the companies that don't do enough to protect themselves–and more importantly the public–from bad merchandise. If you think that fake Gucci bags are no big deal, recognize that tolerance here sets the standard for tolerance in other areas as well. This book is an important work if your firm has any problems with grey or black markets–whatever the product.

• Escaping the Black Hole: Minimizing the Damage from the Marketing-Sales Disconnect by Robert J. Schmonsees, 2005, Thompson Higher Education, Mason, Ohio. With the title and the focus on value, I had high hopes for this book, but in terms of definite action steps in a broad perspective, I came away disappointed. It does bring us a step closer in the strategic divide between sales and marketing and provides a very useful discussion of the current problems in that area–in fact that is 43% of the book! He does get to the importance of tracking systems and training, but he lost me when you had to license his "patented" value system that fails to go beyond a well organized but still rhetorical exercise.

• Magnetic Service: Secrets for Creating Passionately Devoted Customers by Chip R. Bell and Bilijack R. Bell, 2003, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, CA. If you think you have good customer service, read this book and discover a new standard and host of opportunities for improvement. There are no secrets or fancy processes here, just simple, from the heart advice that is terrific.

Posted January 20, 2006

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• Performance Without Compromise: How Emerson Consistently Achieves Winning Results by Charles F. Knight with Davis Dyer, 2005, Harvard Business School Press, Cambridge, MA. Emerson is one of those quiet little companies that has delivered a twenty year string of solid growth and profits under CEO Charles Knight. In this book, he tells about his secrets of success and the tricks on how to make them work. I especially liked his idea for a Corporate Profit Czar who helped manage divisional profit performance. Under Knight's leadership, Emerson managers learned how to evolve a business in a very beneficial direction--casting off some pieces with respect, buying others with resolve and the knowledge you can make it work. He also discusses how to keep the balance between profit and growth and supports that balance with effective compensations systems. Knight certainly embraced necessary change that caused other CEO's to circle the wagons. In doing so, he build an engine of growth, profit and pride. A pretty good read.

• Clients for Life: Evolving from an Expert for Hire to an Extraordinary Advisor by Jagdish Sheth and Andrew Sobel, 2000, Fireside Div. Simon and Schuster, New York, NY. Yes, the title of this book pretty much says it all. This is a good read both for the professional services person and the consumer of those professional services since it tells what to look for in buying world class advice. The authors graciously include thorough checklists in each area of recommendation.

• Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID by Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre, 2005, Nelson Currant, Nashville, TN. Every so often, someone recommends a book that comes from the other side. You know, the authors decided to take Only the Paranoid Survive to the next illogical step. Well, this is the book. It takes a swipe at the ethics of all marketers and tries to support that with data and specific reference to Hitler and 1984. If you can read it with an open mind, it does provide good insights into how small tracking chips can be used to provide consumer data in a wide range of areas of shopping habits. I would say this is a must read for BTC marketers but a no read for BTB.

Reviews by Mark Burton

• What Customers Want by Anthony W. Ulwick McGraw-Hill, 2005 With the opening line, “Listening to the ‘voice of the customer’ has been the marketing mantra for more than 20 years, but it is time for that voice to be silenced. The literal voice of the customer sidetracks the innovation process because customers are not qualified to know what solutions are best – that is the job of the organization…” this book got my attention. Ulwick provides an updated but straightforward approach to using an old tool, importance-performance analysis, to uncover opportunities to deliver products and services that deliver superior performance on key customer outcomes. This emphasis is important because it gets companies past reactive approaches that focus too literally on the features that customers say they want. There is lots of useful common sense in this one in how to apply this approach to segmenting, targeting, and messaging. My one wish is that the author had pushed beyond outcomes to the ultimate measure – economic value to the customer.

• The Heart of Change by John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen 2002, John Kotter and Deloitte Consulting. Effective and lasting change is rarely driven by overwhelmingly compelling logic and analysis. It happens when organizations and, more important, individuals feel the need to change and have a clear sense of where the change will lead. Kotter and Cohen make this truth come to life in a simple process with a lot of vivid, real-world examples, and practical advice. Are your efforts marked by “complex governance structures full of sponsors, cross-functional task forces, ownership teams or owners, and the like?” Does your organization suffer from a culture of over-analyzing before making change – or the opposite set out too quickly in pursuit of an ill-defined vision? If so, this book will be a critical beacon as you labor in the salt mines of creating meaningful, lasting change.

Posted November 29, 2005

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• Profit Brand: How to Increase the Profitability, Accountability and Sustainability of Brands by Nick Wreden, 2005, Kogan Page, Sterling, VA. I've got to admit that when I received the proof of this book, my first, second, and third reaction was "not another useless book on branding." Boy, was I wrong. This book is about more than branding – it is a hard-hitting manifesto for the proactive and strategic CMO. The problem is that it is going to scare the heck out of them first. Nick provides a good framework for the evolution of brand premises from the past and into the future. Accordingly, he helps prepare us for the coming future state. He has redefined the role of marketing for the sake of the firm and the customer. He looks at the difference between brand and customer equity and makes a strong case for ignoring the former. There is a great discussion and list of required metrics for building a customer-centric culture. This book has great examples of both BTC and BTB firms. It is on my top-ten "must read" list for 2005.

• All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World by Seth Godin, 2005, Penguin Books, London, England. Ok, I agree that positioning is everything and good stories make for great positioning. There is a good discussion of this, but unfortunately, it is mostly from a consumer perspective. I don't care for the positioning of this book, but the author's premise is that you've got to be willing to shock and alienate a large portion of the market to accomplish the appropriate position with the rest. It may work in BTC but in BTB you might as well close the door if you use this approach – this one didn't even make the bookshelf.

• Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change by William Bridges by William Bridges, 1991, Perseus Books, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY. Ok, so this is one of those books that sat on my bookshelf for over five years never read – pretty much a sin in my world. Well, a sin it was. This is a fast read for executives and managers who are trying to more effectively manage change. It not only debunks many popular approaches as useless but also characterizes change in three distinct phases and provides useful checklists on how to manage more effectively in each one.

Posted October 25, 2005

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• How to Sell at Prices Higher Than Your Competitors: The Complete Book on How to Make Prices Stick by Lawrence L. Steinmetz, Ph.D., 2003, High Yield Management, Boulder, CO. I'm writing this review with a heavy sigh---feeling a little bit too much like a "head-in-the-clouds" academic. This is a book I should have read ten years ago--it is a book you should read now. It is a real pricing book from a salesperson's perspective. As such it is also a great book for managers who have salespeople who can only sell on price. Also, it is written with an "I'm not going to take this anymore" perspective--quite refreshing. It contains simple business rules--getting into the faulted psychology of price selling and it is the first book that contains all of those nasty tricks purchasing agents use to get salespeople to lower the price. It may be dated--there are more price decisions now than ever before, and its costing discussions are limited in depth and overly complex in presentation. Having said that, it is a great discussion on what I call the "hurt me" strategy of price selling reps who use simple adjectives along with the price that undermine their value proposition faster than you can say "hurt me."

• Digital Phoenix: Why the Information Economy Collapsed and How It Will Rise Again by Bruce Abramson, 2005, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA. This book is titled wrong; it should be titled The Digital Hydra. Yes, the author does discuss why many of the high flying dotcoms failed in the 1990's. But the real story is how traditional companies are losing to smaller start-ups who do a better job ferreting out the real opportunity in the digital age. The book is well written and covers the legal, business and economic realities of knowledge and information businesses. It is the best book I've seen to explain and learn from the internet bubble and the details of the Microsoft court case.

Reviews by Mark Burton

• Clients for Life – Evolving From an Expert For Hire to an Extraordinary Advisor by Jagdish Sheth and Andrew Sobel, 2000, Fireside. Originally written for people in the professional services industry, the relevance of this book goes far beyond that. Having been in both “in-house” and consulting roles, we see this book as a manifesto for professional development for senior managers and professionals of all types. In short, it’s one of the best business books that we have read in a long time. The authors draw on copious examples from industry and history to make their points about what it takes to be a great professional. One of the themes that really resonated with us - start with mastery of one area, have the humility to realize its limitations and have the strength to use it as a launch pad to build into a well-rounded and thoughtful leader. They also spend a lot time bringing clarity to one of the most important and rare qualities in professionals – the ability to synthesize a number of ideas and perspectives into a useful whole that organizations can rally around. There is not much fluff here rather there are frameworks that provide a good blueprint for marketing.

• A Great Improvisation – Franklin, France, and the Birth of America by Stacy Schiff, 2005, Henry Holt and Company. While this is predominantly a wonderful biography and history of Franklin’s work in France during the American Revolution, we have included it in this month’s reading because the author does a terrific job in laying out the detail of the give and take of negotiations for aid from France. Understanding why Franklin’s approach of allowing the French to see him as they expected to worked, while others who came with a “give ‘em hell” posture didn’t, is an important insight for all leaders who want to improve their effectiveness in negotiations and in working in a global economy with partners from many different cultures.

Posted September 23, 2005

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• Market Busters: 40 Strategic Moves That Drive Exceptional Business Growth by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. MacMillan, 2005, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. I am in a bit of a dilemma on this book. It lacks a systematic approach to strategy, despite discussions to the contrary by the authors. On the other hand, it has an excellent discussion of metrics from both an operations and customer performance perspective. It also does a nice job of using "attitude mapping" to determine value positioning for customers. Finally, their "Kite" model of execution systems (or Transformation in our words) has some good insights.

• Managing Conflict and Consensus: Why Great Leaders Don't Take Yes for an Answer by Michael A. Roberto, 2005, Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, NJ. Despite a level of detail that most managers don't need, this is a good book for a number of reasons. First, it validates the importance of positive conflict as a value in organizations. It also does well at pointers for better listening and building consensus, especially in critical meetings and how to get better participation in the process. For those managers who are trying to bust "cycles of inaction", this is a must read.

• 25 Ways to Win with People by John c. Maxwell and Less Parrott, Ph. D., 2005, Thomas Nelson Publishing, Nashville, Tennessee. This is one of those quick read books that have 3 or 4 jewels of information for you. The trick to managing people is to figure out how to bring out the best in them. How to make them want to do the best job possible. This book has the little pieces of advice on how to do that.

• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell, 2005, Time Warner Book Group, New York, NY. This book, by the author of The Tipping Point, is about how some people can make very correct snap judgments in the "blink" of an eye. While not as directly relevant to actual business operations, this is still a good book. It provides the rationale and reasons why people can do this. It is an interesting book. For those of you thinking about joining one of these rotating five-minute meeting dating services, read the book, then go ahead. For those of you thinking about a five minute job interview, you might want to hold on for a bit.

Posted August 24, 2005

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• Solution Selling: Creating Buyers in Difficult Selling Markets by Michael T. Bosworth, 1995, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY. My frustration with all selling skills books is that they only cover pieces of what needs to be done yet they act like they cover all the steps of successful selling. The current issue is that sales people and their managers lack a systematic approach to selling. Having said that, this book is a good read and contains a number of excellent processes and points. It does discuss how a salesperson can move a buyer through three levels of "pain" and it has good coverage of building reference stories and phone scripts. It also has a great discussion on what they call false price negotiations--our “poker players”. It takes value selling to a good level but fails to provide some of the needed techniques.

• How Winners Sell: 21 Proven Strategies to Outsell Your Competition and Win the Big Sale by Dave Stein, 2002, Bard Press, Austin, TX. This must be the month for people to recommend selling books. This book is more of a personal self-help book for salespeople who want to learn to sell higher-up in client organizations. The author does provide quite a few valuable tools both for salespeople and sales managers. My favorite is the sales opportunity matrix which provides a way of thinking about how you enter the approval cycle and how high you are calling in the client organization---a good way to decide how and where to put your resources. Clearly, the winning approach is to get involved early and sell high. Yes, it is common sense but sometimes it's good to get hit over the head with it again.

• The Economics of Information Technology: An Introduction by Hal R. Varian, Joseph Farrell, and Carl Shapiro, 2004, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY. This book is a summary of lectures on the subject of pricing of internet technology given at the University of California, Berkeley, CA. As such, it is more for an advanced Pricing or Marketing Manager in the IT industry. Having said that, there are a number of great insights for any marketing or pricing manager selling any type of intellectual content or information offerings. It provides ways of looking at product versioning and approaches to gaining more of an industry footprint in a particular technology.

• Introduction to NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming): Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People by Joseph O'Connor & John Seymour, 2002, Element (Harper-Collins Publishing), London, England. I agree with the authors that just the title of this book is enough to scare you away. While the book did have small elements on selling, meeting management and negotiating, it is so far down the path for practicing psychologists, that I won't recommend it for a casual read. It is clearly a powerful technique of getting people to change but it clearly will take years of study and practice---I think I'll leave that to the real professionals.

• The Prime Solution by Jeff Thull, 2005, Dearborn Trade Publishing. A terrific summary of what marketing and sales leadership must do to uncover opportunities to move beyond pushing product to position and sell a set of services and solutions that deliver value over and above the competition. Building on his original work in The Complex Sale, Thull also provides good insight into something that most companies aren't even thinking about: ensuring that the value uncovered during the sales process is actually delivered - what a concept!

• The Rational Project Manager: A Thinking Team’s Guide to Getting Work Done by Andrew Longman and Jim Mullins, 2005, Wiley Publishing. One skill that we see lacking in almost every firm that we work with is project management. So when the folks at one of the premier project management consulting and training firms, Kepner-Tregoe, put out a new book on the subject we were eager to get our hands on it. Unfortunately we were somewhat disappointed. Perhaps our expectations were too high given our experience with some of Kepner-Tregoe's live seminars. The Rationale Project Manager is a nice overview of good project management processes and tools but fails to bring life to the burning platform of project management and performance that exists in many organizations. Our advice? Get them in to do a seminar.

Posted July 22, 2005

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, 1936, Simon and Schuster, New York, NY. When someone recommended this book, I was skeptical--after all, it's over 70 years old. Since it is a short read, I went ahead and found the advice perhaps more relevant today than it was when it was originally published. It contains apt advice on how to handle people in general and difficult people specifically. There are plenty of examples and Mr. Carnegie boils it all down to a simple list of actions.

• Turning Great Strategy into Great Performance by Michael C. Mankins and Richard Steel, Harvard Business Review, July-August, 2005. Every so often a great article comes along for those who want to learn more about the Value DisciplineSM. This article gives a number of simple principles on how to make sure that the competitive strategy side of things connects well with execution. It's the author's first rule is to keep it simple---Amen!

• Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, 1999, Harvard Business School Press, Cambridge, MA. This excellent should be read by anyone who is involved in product development, marketing or pricing of information and/or intellectual content. In fact, it should be their bible. The insights in this book will provide the guidance needed to make more profitable decisions and develop a larger competitive footprint in the global information business. The later chapters deal extensively with strategies for setting industry standards.

• The Last Word on Power: Executive Re-Invention for Leaders Who Must Make the Impossible Happen by Tracy Gross, 1996, Doubleday Publishing, New York, NY. This is a little bit of a "fake it till you make it" book for senior executives. While I do believe in the approach it is both squishy and a bit too self serving---in order to make this work you really need to have a lot of coaching and they say that up front---"after engaging with (us), he created a new context for himself". My basic belief is that a book should have the answer---if this one does, it is a bit too confounded with self promotion to be useful.

Posted June 24, 2005

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• Inside the Tornado: Marketing Strategies from Silicon Valley's Cutting Edge by Geoffrey A. Moore, 1995, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, NY. There are books that can be read and books that should be read – this is one that should be read by all marketers and product strategists. Moore's first book, Crossing the Chasm is a good introduction to product strategy. Think of this as the advanced text for those trying to introduce new products in various phases of the product life cycle. This book is essential for those introducing somewhat or radically new technology, thus starting a new life cycle. The common mistake is to a) go for too wide an audience and b) expect higher sales too quickly. In emerging technologies, the two watchwords are patience and focus.
  
  Focus on those intermediaries and customers who are most likely to adopt the new technology first, they will be the basis of your business case and success drivers. Have the patience to let the new adopters sniff around and trial the technology. Sage advice that is often ignored.

Posted May 20, 2005

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• Winning by Jack and Suzy Welch, 2005, Harper Collins, New York, NY. I will admit to being a Jack Welch fan. If you aren't, don't waste your time with this book. If you are, go back to any one of his earlier books and your read will be more insightful. While this isn't a bad book, it lacks the punchy drama that defined his earlier works. Yes, there are many good rules of engagement for handling people, jobs, strategy and the like. The problem is that most of these were in the earlier books and with more passion.

• The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman, 2005, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY. OK, I am a really big fan of this Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The New York Times. This book provides further proof that the competitive structure of most markets are a) becoming more global and b) thus becoming much more competitive. While there are lots of esoteric detail and arguably too much detail on technological and internet history, this is a must read for anyone specializing in services as well as software and technology companies.

Posted April 21, 2005

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• Platform Leadership: How Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco Drive Industry Innovation by Annabelle Gawar and Micahel A. Cusumano, 2002 Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. As markets get more complex and suppliers are forced to give up control of their offering to a mix of partners and intermediaries, they will increasingly have to rely on communities of collaborators to improve on and evolve that offering. With solid examples from a number of highly successful high technology companies, the authors provide the both the operating principles and the details of accomplishing those communities.

• Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting by H. Thomas Johnson and Robert S. Kaplan, 1987, Harvard Business School Press, Cambridge, MA. This seems to be "operational leverage" month with our clients as they discuss how best to deploy their costing systems for a value-based model. This book is the classic that marks the beginning of Activity Based Costing--a better way of allocating fixed costs in the firm. The problem to recognize is, that for the sake of pricing, incremental costs become the best internal measure of costs. When capacity constraints are seen, contribution dollars (not margin) need to be maximized to the point of the constraint (AKA Herbie for you Goldrat fans).

• The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization by Thomas L. Friedman, 2000, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, NY. While ordering Friedman's newest book The World is Flat, I realized that his earlier book hadn't been reviewed, yet it is one we discuss with clients on a weekly basis. If you are wondering why global competition is something that all managers should think about, this is the book to make that realization apparent. This Pulitzer Prize winning writer for the New York Times presents many practical examples of why the internet and global financial communities have changed the face of global competition forever. This book is on my top ten list and is likely to stay there for quite a while.

Posted March 24, 2005

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• Rethinking the Sales Force: Redefining Selling to Create and Capture Customer Value by Neil Rackham and John DeVincentis, 1999, McGraw Hill, New York, NY. In this extension of Rackham's original work on SPIN Selling, the authors present a good model for dealing with what we would call price, value and loyal customers. In their model they match each of these buying types with transactional, consultative and enterprise selling. The problem we see is that first, they don't do a good job defining the specifics of "value" in dealing with customer organizations. Also, they suggest that each approach would be a appropriate for a particular industry. We would disagree with that but do appreciate the depth they add to the sales approaches for the different types of customers.

• Managing Channels of Distribution: The Marketing Executive's Complete Guide by Kenneth Rolnicki, 1998, American Management Association, New York, NY. This is a terrific guide for developing new and evaluating existing distribution systems. While it still doesn't address the thorny issue of managing difficult distributors in depth it does provide an extensive number of checklists for how to review new and evaluate existing distributors. Readers are cautioned to review the recent supreme court decision that gives manufacturers considerably more latitude in setting end prices in a channel. They should also recognize that there are considerably more opportunities to balance existing power structures with creative and positive approaches. The authors provide an excellent review of the country by country laws which govern channel systems.

• The Manufacturer's Guide to Business Marketing: How small and midsize companies can increase profits with limited resources by Michael P. Collins, 1995, Michael P. Collins. To use the words of the author, this book focuses on "three fundamental strategies: 1) focus on improving profit performance not higher sales volume, 2) becoming customer-driven and 3) targeting specific markets and customers with tailored products and services." #3 certainly sounds like The Value Discipline. This book is a good gut-check for whether or not you are customer driven and provides numerous process check lists for conducting customer interviews, developing competitive intelligence capabilities and how to work with independent sales agents.

• The New Law of Demand and Supply: The Revolutionary New Demand Strategy for Faster Growth and Higher Profits, by Rick Kash, 2001, Doubleday, New York, NY. This book points to the tremendous and devastating loss of pricing power that firms have suffered over the last decade. While value is not well defined and the examples are mostly consumer, they do present an interesting framework for how to become more customer centric and use that centricity to drive innovation into the firm for sustainable competitive advantage. An interesting note is that most of the innovation he points to is services based.

• Strategic Supremacy: How Industry Leaders Create Growth, Wealth, and Power Through Spheres of Influence by Ricard A. D'Aveni, 2001, The Free Press, New York, NY. The author uses deep knowledge of history and competitive strategy to build his concept of spheres of influence which much be effectively managed in today's global markets. The problem is that, to a certain extent, he over complicates it. Also, he fails to address how non-leaders should evolve.

• Mail and Internet Surveys, Second Edition by Don A. Dillman, 2000, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY. If you do market research and think that response rates of 5-10% are good, you need to read this book. The focus is primarily on the elements needed to dramatically improve survey response rates to the 50-70% range. Prof. Dillman provides the elements of the "Tailored Response Method" which has been in use for over 20 years. A note: their coverage of Internet-based surveys is over 5 years old--an eon in that business.

• The Power of Impossible Thinking: Transform the Business of Your Life and the Life of Your Business, by Yoram Wind and Colin Crook, 2005, Pearson Education, Saddle River, NJ. Success in business is all about getting organizations and managers to change how they think about their business and it's problems. We often see managers make a major paradigm shift away from a price-focused to a value-focused business with incredible success. This book is all about challenging the mental models that hold us back from that transition.

Posted February 19, 2005

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• Root Cause Analysis: A Tool for Total Quality Management by Paul F. Wilson, Larry D. Dell and Gaylord F. Anderson, 1993, ASQC Quality Press, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Ok, so I skipped the textbook and went right to the workbook. Root Cause Analysis seeks answers to problems by looking at their root causes. It is a useful way of analyzing problems with sales, profits and pricing, especially pricing. Barrier analysis is "used to determine the real or actual cause of an event or unwanted condition". It looks at both "hard" and "soft" causes that lead to problems--treating those problems more as a symptom--which they are. This workbook provides useful case studies with step by step instructions on how to fill in the forms.

• The Best of Branding: Best Practices in Corporate Branding by James R. Gregory, 2004, McrGraw Hill, New York, NY. Ok, I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a big fan of corporate branding programs--having read this book, however, I've changed my mind. I'm not a fan of lousy corporate branding programs. This book is a terrific primer on how to do it right--even in a BTB environment. There are plenty of anecdotes and case studies that show both how to do it right and how to do it wrong. If you are spending money on "image" advertising--this is a must read.

• Beyond Selling Value: A Proven Process to Avoid the Vendor Trap by Mark Shonka and Dan Kosch, 2002, Dearborn Trade Books, Chicago, IL. Selling value is all about getting salespeople to move beyond the purchasing agent to the decision maker in their sales process. This is a book that provides some good "rules of the relationship" in how to get the decision maker, how to get the information and do your homework in preparation for a call.

Posted January 28, 2005

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• How to Grow When Markets Don't by Adrian Slywotzky and Richard Wise, 2003 Warner Business Books, New York, NY. The best way to avoid commoditization of anything is to look to your customers for peripheral product and services opportunities to redefine your business. This book provides both a good process and numerous examples of companies that have found this to be abetter way and driven superior results.

Posted December 17, 2004

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters to Get Things Right by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, 2004, Crown Business, New York, NY. In this follow-up book to their recent hit Execution, the authors once again exhort readers to get rid of the blinders and develop better understandings of what is going on both inside and outside of their companies. Success today is all about business savvy. Getting it takes an in-depth understanding of both the internal realities of the business and the external realities of markets and competitors. Ignore those realities, and managers will relegate their operations to the scrap heap of business also-rans.

• Competing in a Service Economy by Anders Gustafson and Michael D. Johnson, 2003, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. As more products and services become commoditized, high-value solutions that are co-created with customers are the key to competitive advantage. The problem is that services and solutions are fundamentally different than products. Companies must have far more frequent and meaningful dialog with their customers about what they value to get it right. The authors lay out a number of practical tools for attacking what can seem like a squishy, esoteric challenge. Companies that rise to this challenge will be the new value and market leaders. As the authors put it, "Competitive forces continue to push to provide customers with more than just product value. Increasingly it's service value, solutions, and experiences that differentiate competitors." We couldn't agree more.

Posted October 18, 2004

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• The Flight of the Buffalo--Soaring to Excellence, Learning to Let Employees Lead by James A. Belasco and Ralph C. Stayer, 1993, Warner Books, NY, NY. Leadership is all about making people more effective through systems, processes and behaviors. Unfortunately, most leaders do exactly the opposite things that need to be done to make that happen. This book is an effective primer for senior managers of both small and large organizations on how to first, become more effective leaders and second, to make their people more effective. There are not only big-picture lessons, but lots of little tricks that come from the author's many years of experience and learnings.

• The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers by C. K. Prahald & Venkat Ramaswamy, 2004, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. At most companies, "customer intimacy" is more rhetoric than fact. To turn the wish into a reality, managers need to adopt sophisticated approaches to both understand customers and implement programs which do a better job of meeting their needs. This text sets the standard for "customer centric organizations. It also identifies the opportunity and effect for adopting these types of programs in BTB organizations.

• The Firm of the Future: A Guide for Accountants, Lawyers, and Other Professional Services by Paul Dunn and Ron Baker, 2003, John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey. This book is all about how professional service firms can become more customer focused. It is a blend of deep history, theory and practice with numerous examples of how big and small professional services firms can improve their top and bottom line by following "Baker's Law": bad customers drive out good customers.

Posted Steptember 24, 2004

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• The Trusted Advisor by David H. Maister, Charles H. Green & Robert M. Galford, 2000, The Free Press--To build great relationships with customers requires trust. The things we do to create trust are sometimes the exact opposite of the things we need to do to close an order at the end of the month. This book provides excellent insight into how to develop better relationships with customers. A word of warning: not all customers want trusting relationships with suppliers.

• Sprout: Four Steps to Sales Success by Alan Vengel & Greg Wright, 2004, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, CA. Ok, a book that connects selling with gardening might leave us all skeptical but the fact is that Vengel and Wright offer some good tips that salespeople can use to improve their performance and how they feel about their jobs. You might call this book: successful selling: framing for success. How salespeople think about the things they do can lead to greater success. Cold calling is the process of seeding--and not all seeds sprout quickly. A quick read and a valuable one if you apply some of their simple lessons.

• The Delta Project: Discovering New Sources of Profitability in a Networked Economy by Arnoldo C. Hax & Dean L. Wilde II, 2001, Palgrave, NY, NY. I will be the first to agree that there are too many "strategy models" out there. This book does provide a great way to look at levels of customer integration in driving business strategy, how to benchmark, drive channels and a host of other structural issues that need to be considered. Where The Value Discipline suggests being able and capable of dealing with price, value and loyal customers, this books provides an in-depth model for the product focus required for price buyers, the total solution approach for dealing with value buyers and a system lock-in approach for dealing with relationship buyers.

• The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive by Patrick Lencioni, 2000, Jossey-Bass Publishing, San Francisco, CA. Good organizations begin with good leadership teams. Their focus should be on applying some of the basic principles in this book that lead to "healthy" organizations. To quote Lencioni "A Healthy organization is one that has less politics and confusion, higher morale and productivity, lower unwanted turnover and lower recruiting costs than an unhealthy one. Too many times, senior managers push their respective organizations in directions that are conflicting other parts of the firm. The results are often devastating. Lencioni presents four very simple rules of engagement for senior leadership teams to drive superior results.

Posted August 24, 2004

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• LaSalle, Diana & Terry A. Britton Priceless: Turning Ordinary Products in Extraordinary Experiences, 2003, Harvard Business School Press. While this book is primarily directed at B to C products it gives the B to B marketer a good way to conceptualize the customer experience. The framework presented provides a solid check list of possibilities to be a hero or a villan to customers.

• Lencioni, Patrick, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, 2002, Jossey-Bass. Senior managers who are not well connected and trusting of their peers unleash devastating politics and misdirection into organizations. In these environments, strategies are impossible and implementation is a hodge podge of silos and conflicting goals. Lencioni presents five simple principles to guide team goals and behaviors--it really should be this simple!

• Lencioni, Patrick Death by Meeting, 2004, Jossey-Bass. Meetings can be a waste of time for a number of reasons: no agenda, poor discipline, no follow-up, and no focus. This book presents five different meeting formats to follow and gives us a good understanding of when each is appropriate. A good read in Lencioni's typical "fable" format.

Posted July 23, 2004

Reviews by Dr. Reed Holden

• Hurd, Mark & Lars Nybers The Value Factor: How Global Leaders Use Information for Growth and Competitive Advantage, 2004, Bloomberg Press: In the words of the authors “the number one risk factor in any organization is lack of accurate information. This applies to assessing communications strategy customer costs and customer profitability. This book also contains an excellent list of value metrics for different parts of the organization.

• Davidson, Bill Breakthrough: How Great Companies Set Outrageous Objectives and Achieve Them, 2004, John Wiley & Sons. Bill Davidson presents an excellent vision of how senior teams can work together and develop breakthrough strategies and objectives for firms.

• Thaler, Richard H., The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life, 1992, The Free Press. This book is a must read for any firm that is getting involved in reverse auctions or aggressive bidding situations with customers. It outlines how many firms win the order but lose in the long run.

• Cross, Robert G., Revenue Management: Hard-Cord Tactics for Market Domination, 1997, Broadway Books. Bob Cross is the father of yield management. This books describes his early work with the airlines and how the tactic has evolved with use.

• Gladwell, Malcom, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, 2000, Oxford University Press. This book outlines the basics for making programs “sticky” in organizations, a great way to avoid the “program of the month” syndrome.

• Day, George S., The Market Driven Organization: Understanding, Attracting and Keeping Valuable Customers, 1999, The Free Press. George Day outlines the differences in “top down” vs. bottom-up strategic process and which is needed for various market conditions.

• Wheatley, Margaret J. Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, 1999, Brett Koehler Publishers. This excellent book reviews the basics of organic organizations and why they are needed in today’s fast-moving competitive markets. This is the second read for firms evolving to a bottoms-up strategic process.

• Schwartz, Peter, The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World, 1991, Doubleday. One of the best firms in long-term “contingency planning” is Shell Oil. This book provides an inside view on what Shell did to achieve such ground-breaking capabilities.