A while back I reviewed Trademark2.0 by R.Todd Stephens. The book is now available from Amazon.co.uk…
Tag: Business Books
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Trademark 2.0 Review
R.Todd Stephens is a very interesting man. I’ve met him and have sat through an incredibly interesting tutorial he gave back in 2006 in London on Enterprise Metadata. What interested me most about his presentation was how he was referring to tools and technologies that I was tinkering with to try and improve communication of key concepts and improve efficiencies in information management in my day job. Indeed, some of the tools were things I was playing with outside of work as a hobbyist blogger. It’s a pity I haven’t had a chance to implement too much of the vision that he triggered in my mind at that time for improvements in the day job … but who knows what might happen by the end of the year.
His website – www.rtodd.com – has been a regular touch point for me ever since.
He has recently published a book that sets out a recipe for establishing your personal brand (he uses the term trademark for a variety of reasons). Part of his thesis is that the collaborative tools of Web2.0 (the Read/Write Web as it is often called) have altered the rules for creating your personal brand and provide you with opportunities to raise your profile and, importantly, to measure how your profile is doing.
What sets this book apart in my eyes is that Todd adds value in interesting ways. Apart from just presenting bland statements about how ‘blogs are good’ and conferences are great ways to see new places and meet new people, he presents a set of tools to measure and score how well your ‘trademark’ is doing. He also sets out a reasoned argument as to why establishing a personal trademark for yourself may well be the career survival tool for the Read/Write Information Age.
He brings together a variety of references and marries them together in support of his argument – and above all he provides examples of how you can ‘speak with data’ to track how well you are meeting or exceeding your own expectations of what your ‘brand’ might be. From checking the site stats for your blog to your technorati rankings to having a ‘scorecard’ of the things you’ve done to promote your brand, Todd give some keen insights.
The fact that he is a world-class recognised authority on the management of meta-data is evidence of the success of his formula. The book at times reads somewhat autobiographically and it is clear that this is not a book based on a theoretical view of things or an attempt to leap on the airport business bookshelf bandwagon but rather an attempt to share a recipe that has worked.
I’ll certainly be taking stock of how I’m doing. This blog is a key part of my personal trademark but after reading Todd’s book I think that I might need to balance the scorecard a little bit more. The framework he presents gives me a road map to do this.
Trademark2.0 can be purchased from LULU.com. Just click on this link to be taken to the book’s page on Lulu. If you don’t want to buy from Lulu, the ISBN for the book is 978-0-6151-5688-0 and your local bookstore should be able to order it for you. Better yet you can buy Trademark 2.0: Defining Your Value in the Web 2.0 World
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A book review
Occasionally I find time to read a good book. Unfortunately I don’t often know it is a good book until I’ve started reading it, at which time I’ve invested the effort in opening the book and ignoring the phone that I plough on regardless.
Three books that I read recently that gave me more than I needed to put into them are The Long Tail and Freakonomics, and finally Malcom Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. I thought I’d do a quick review of both here (and see if anyone might buy them – click on the images to go to Amazon.co.uk).
The Long Tail
This is a really cool book. The basic premise is that you can make money in the margins through the wonderous world of the Interweb thing which has removed traditional economic barriers to sales success (location, inventory storage etc etc). Apart from the thinking involved, which is explained very clearly, one of the biggest boons to me was the links and pointers to useful on-line services that I can use to support a professional Association I’m involved with (the IAIDQ) which has a need to develop merchandising and other ‘products’ and have them shipped world wide while avoiding the cost and hassle of a product inventory in some volunteers garage in Boston while we need the T-shirts (or whatever) at a conference in London.
Amazon is an example of a good ‘Long tail’ success. Through its business model it derives a sizeable chunk of its sales and profits from the margins of its business – the niche interest books, cds and stuff. Amazon’s model has been to push that model into other markets other than books.
This book made me think about how I can make my web-presence work for me. It also made me think about how to develop a few ideas I have in an on-line context as well as providing me with immediately actionable ideas about how to use the long tail industries to help promote the IAIDQ.
Buy this book on Amazon by clicking on the picture above.
Freakonomics
Where the Long Tail examines the infinite applicability of Pareto efficiency (read the book and that will make sense) Freakonmics examines the way in which we often assign root cause to things with out a sound evidentiary base. From why crime rates didn’t explode in the US in the 1990s to why drug dealers live at home, this book is a thought provoking romp through the fallacies of “conventional wisdom”. I like it because it shows the value of speaking with data – having actual statistics to back up your arguments as well as the impacts of jumping to conclusions about the real causes of any effect.
Well written and thought provoking, Freaknomics is a definite must buy for those of us looking at information in our daily jobs and trying to make sense of it all.
The Tipping Point
All of life is an accumulation of little things and eventually one little thing causes a situation to change dramatically. Be it the sudden popularity of a brand of shoe or the jump from a minor outbreak to a disease epidemic, everything comes down to a single tipping point. Read in conjunction with Freakonomics and The Long Tail, this book gives rounds out the macro implications of micro things – be they the small unit sales of niche books on Amazon (which add up to big money volumes simply because Amazon never runs out of room) or the impacts of seemingly unrelated issues on a chain of events (such as Roe vs Wade and the crime wave that never happened in Freakonomics).
Well written and thought provoking it makes one consider how the minor things you do (or don’t do) can have a snowballing effect.
Summary
Each of these books on their own has strengths and weaknesses (see the reviews on Amazon for some of those). However combining them together a cohesive view can be formed. We are living in interesting times where the ability of ‘the little guy’ to have an impact either through blogs and social networking etc as they feed a snowball effect of lots of little events in The Long Tail that reach a tipping point.My advice – read all three.
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Another Book Review…
After my Dell rants of the last few posts I thought it appropriate to put up something that people might actually want to read. So I’ve plumped for another book review, particularly given the Quality Management focus of my tirades against the sheer ineptitude of Dell.
The books I’ve chosen to review this time out are The Deming Management Method by Mary Walton and Out of the Crisis by W.Edwards Deming. I’ve also included a nod to Deming’s other major book The New Economics These are three classics of Quality Management literature and are well worth picking up if you can as an understanding of Deming is a good foundation for improving quality of pretty much anything.
The Deming Management Method
This book is an excellent initial primer in the work of W. Edwards Deming. It covers off a biographical note on Deming, his 7 Diseases of Management, his 14 Points of Transformation and the infamous Red Beads experiment. It also contains case studies of a number of companies that applied the Deming methods.
It clearly and concisely runs through a number of the key principles of Deming’s management philosophy and provides some good case study examples.
One criticism is that it is showing its age somewhat (it was first published in the US in 1986) and some of the firms used in the case studies have not sustained the successes that they had achieved. This should not be taken as a criticism of Deming’s methodology however as it is clear from the history of Ford (for example) in recent years that they may not have maintained the constancy of purpose needed to truly embed quality practices in.
However, as a quick introduction to the life and work of W.Edwards Deming this 244 page book is worth a look.
Out of the Crisis
On the other hand, if you want a more in-depth study of Deming’s management philosophy then the classic work is Out of the Crisis, Deming’s seminal work on the subject of Quality Management.
This book is a detailed treatise on the 7 Deadly Diseases of Management (see page 36) and the 14 Points of Management which counter those diseases. One draw back of this book is that much of the content is has its focus on manufacturing quality and less on service industry or non-physical product manufacturing. These issues were addressed by Deming in later books (which I will review in time). However the fundamental principles are well laid out and this book is a constant reference for me in my personal library.
Overall – it is not possible to give a true assessment of Deming’s impact in just a few paragraphs. Those companies who have adopted and built on his 14 points have had great success. Dell might do well to order a few copies to see how they can constantly improve the quality of their products and services.
“The ideal companion to “Out of the Crisis” is Deming’s last book The New Economics. This is described by one reviewer on Amazon as Deming’s “spiritual legacy”. I can’t comment on that but what I will say is that this book represents a further maturing of the concepts in “Out of the Crisis”. However to fully grasp the concepts my personal feeling is that you need to read both books. Amongst other things, in The New Economics Deming changes “Plan Do Check Act” to a “Plan Do Study Act” cycle – for reasons he explains in The New Economics.
Put this on your wishlist!
