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Summer Reading

Here are a couple of books I'd like to suggest for your summer business reading. One I've devoured and the other, while it's long over due and I'm sure well worth the read, I probably won't bother. Perhaps you want to read it and offer a review here?

Strategy and the Fat Smoker

The latest from Managing the Professional Service Firm author David Maister, Strategy and the Fat Smoker; Doing What's Obvious But Not Easy, is an exploration of the gap between strategic planning and implementing on that strategy. Like most of Maister's books, this is largely re-packaged content that you will find on his website in various forms, but once again, he puts it all together to make some compelling arguments and lead the way on strategic issues facing professional service firms.

I found the first section on Strategy to be the most compelling. The sections that follow the first are devoted to Client Relationships, Managing and Implementing (Putting it All Together.) 

The chief argument he puts forward is that strategy without standards is useless. It's one thing to say that we will pursue the strategy of deep expertise within a vertical (as an example) but without behavioral stardards by which the principals of the firm are prepared to live, the strategy is bound to fail. If you'd like a free taste of the content of this book, read the transcript of a speech Maister gave a few years ago titled, The Problem of Standards. You'll find it on his website here. It's an article I pull out and re-read every few months.

To me this book offers a chance to be honest with yourself about your own strategy. First of all, do you really have one? And second, is it just a statement or is it backed up with a set of behaviors?

The truth is that in most firms the strategy is anything for anybody with a dollar.

This is mandatory reading for owners and managers of creative and all professional firms. Read it.

OBD: Obsessive Branding Disorder

When Adam Nisenson from Active Imagination sent me an email titled, The Best Branding Book Ever, I almost deleted without opening. I'm tired of reading about branding or hearing about the latest book on branding. But when I clicked on the link I saw that finally somone has written the book that outs 'branding' as an over-used, over-hyped and misapplied endeavor. Hallalejuah.

I think OBD: Obsessive Branding Disorder: The Illusion of Business and the Business of Illusion does this, but I will never know unless you read it and offer a review for me. :) I intend to go the rest of my life without reading another book on branding, even this one.

He's a quote I puled from Amazon, written by William Taylor, the founding editor of Fast Company Magazine. "There's nothing more powerful in business than a truly original idea or a new product that kicks butt--innovations that speak for themselves. But most companies have neither original ideas nor exciting products--which is why they rely on increasingly desperate marketing tactics to attract attention. Lucas Conley offers a stinging and hilarious take on a world in which brands have gotten out of hand. Business is simply too important for us to put up with the scourge of obsessive branding disorder. This book is the cure for what ails us." 

Read it, laugh about it, but also realize that the branding disorder of trying to position something that is unoriginal applies equally to the agency space, maybe even moreso.