So yeah, blogs are dead… to kids who text. Wha?! You mean kids don’t want to read 800 words on a screen the size of half a post-it note?! You don’t say. These crazy kids and their Twittering, LiveJournaling, blogging, hip hop, punk, rock & roll, bee bop, swing jazz, dixieland, moving pictures… whatever.

Fine. I’ll buy that blogging is a dying medium when you bring me another medium that can allow 800 words published instantly, annotated perpetually, commented upon freely, spread virally, illustrated effusively, and seen publicly that costs less than free. You do that and I’ll start digging blogging’s grave. I’ll use a teaspoon.

The Obvious Choices

Linchpin by Seth Godin.

The Little BIG Things by Tom Peters

Switch by the Heath brothers.

Rather than review/gush all over these individually, I will just say that Seth and Tom have become institutions. Seth has finally written the book he was always hinting at in all his others (message: stop following my instructions and just figure it out! It’s a mystery, but it’s not impossible to figure out). Which may or may not be a killing of the golden goose for him (he could have spent his life pounding out books that walk you through marketing ideas until he was too senile to write them himself; he could have become the Dear Abby of the marketing world. Instead he threw the curtain back, revealed that you were your own wizard, so stop your bitching and get to work). Seth, I know you read this (I attended your seminar in Chicago), so let me say this: keep writing these big books! Stupid like pamphlets and workbooks are for the lesser minions to write. You need to to write bigimportantthoughtprovoking books! Pease!

Tom is coasting, but Tom coasting is like most of us sprinting for miles. He has lived at this level so long, it doesn’t even look revelatory anymore. I mean, can anyone ever top the simple idea that The Work Matters? Not going to happen. He reminds us that we are people and that they way we spend our time should not be about personal profit in the financial sense, but more about pride and love and passion, out of which financial success will come. The press release, the blog post, the web page, the memo, the spreadsheet, the project sheet, all these things we make can be more than just following the rules, it can be magic and love and excitement and interest. If the work really matters, then why the he’ll are you doing this crap?

The Heath brothers, who made a name for themselves with the “this is how a lay person should think like a marketer” book Stick, have switched to a new word: Switch. How to change. Yourself, your office, your coworkers, your relationships, your habits, the nature of how we make changes is that minor topic they cover. They cover it well, with a smattering of persuasion psychology, lizard-brain neurobiology, and rules of thumb. The remind us yet again that work like is part of life, not some separate thing that happens eight-ten hours a day we would like to forget after it’s done, but that it’s all connected, so take the lessons you learn outside work and use them inside it and vice versa.

Books I Loved This Year That I’m Too Lazy to Look at what Date They Were Published

How Did That Happen? By the guys who brought you the “set expectations and validate them” books Oz and Emerald City, comes a book with a lot less gimmick and a lot more real. No need and reread the first two, just skip to this one which summarizes the first two in about ten pages (re-confirming that most business books are 90% filler to part you from your money). The main idea is that we need to stop blaming and start working. Ironically, the person who suggested the books to me is probably most in need of adopting the lesson. Of course, who knows what some of you would say about my book suggestions.

Reread Art of Possibility and Three Laws of Performance. I think I’ll read these annually. I need to re-hear these messages constantly.

Tribal Leadership. The book Logan and team wrote before three laws of performance. More case studies, smaller ideas, but more “doable.”. It’s the book I would recommend to pele who weren’t ready for the big ideas in three laws.

Winning by Jack Welch. I agree with every nasty thing Tom peters has ever said about jack welch. He’s the devil’s project leader, as far as I can tell (sorry Jack Donaghy). But this is a peek inside his warped mind. The tools can and should be used for good, not evil. I expected to scan it, but instead read every word. Totally not the self-aggrandizing crap the first book was, this one is really a workbook on how to get the most of of teams, assuming you don’t care about them as people.

Rework. I suggested this to my boss and he seems to have missed the point. To paraphrase his response: if you’ve started a small business, this is all 100% obvious. Yes, but if you are a cubicle worker, and haven’t learned these lessons, they are invaluable.

First, you have a goal. A goal should be tangible and measurable. Hitting a sales target is a goal. Being the #1 whatever (based on market share) is a goal. To be the most dominant force in the XYZ industry is a goal. Starbucks goal is to be the dominant coffee seller in the world (with a sales number attached to it, I would expect). Apple’s goal is to be the dominant seller of high-end personal technology products (and a sales number). Notice that neither of those goals has anything to do with anything. There’s no discussion of product lines, branding, corporate structure, etc. It’s the star that the company sails towards.

Strategy is the way in which you are going to attack those strategies in the broadest of strokes. It’s a focus on an audience, market, demographic, or region. It’s a focus on a new line of products that focus on a new audience. There can be multiple strategies, especially if the company is big. Some of Starbucks’ strategies would be: Getting the consumer to spend more outside retail stores or getting each customer to spend more per visit. Some of Apple’s strategies would be: Fill the niche between smartphone and laptop, or become the number one music retailer online.

Tactics are the actions, projects, programs, product families that support the strategy. For Starbucks, if the goal is to have a customer spend more money at each visit, the tactics might involve new non-coffee products.

If it helps, here’s a breakdown in outline form:

1. Goal
   1. Strategy
      1. Tactic
      2. Tactic
   2. Strategy
      1. Tactic

Starbucks

1. Goal: Become the world largest coffee seller (and sales target)
   1. Strategy: Get the customer to spend money on Starbucks outside of the retail outlet.
      1. Tactic: VIA instant coffee
      2. Tactic: Sell bulk coffee at more retail outlets (grocery stores, et al)
   2. Get each customer to spend more per visit
      1. Tactic: Introduce new egg sandwiches
      2. Tactic: New flavors of coffee
      3. Tactic: More types of mugs and coffee makers

Apple

1. Goal: Become the largest seller of high-end personal technology products
   1. Strategy: Focus on the niche between iPhone and laptop
      1. Tactic: Apple Air
      2. Tactic: iPad
   2. Strategy: become the largest seller of music online
      1. Tactic: Get the Beatles’ catalog on iTunes
      2. Introduce Ping

If you look at these lists, any of these tactics could become a series of projects, each with their own goals, strategies and tactics. Also, these strategies can support other strategies. For example: To support the strategy of becoming the largest online music distributer, the tactic is to get the Beatles. But what you may not know is that Apple doesn’t make much money on selling songs. They sell songs because having access to the world’s largest library of legal music means that more people will choose iPods over Zunes (which is a tactic inside a strategy that’s probably called something like “focus on non-computer products” which is in itself a tactic of a strategy called “How to get people who won’t buy Apple computers because they are too expensive to get a taste of Apple technology”).

In a nutshell, as a rule of thumb, on the back of a napkin, at the end of the day, I would just say that strategies are obvious (meaning, that anyone outside the company can see them and that they don’t surprise anyone) but tactics are where the surprise is. Anyone could have seen a niche between phones and laptops (strategy), but the surprise was a product called iPad.

“We’ll do that based on our  five strategic directions.”

Someone should let this VP know that moving in five directions at once is the same as going nowhere.

Yeah, I know. It’s “semantics” but I am perpetually amazed by the looseness and vagueness of language at some places. And frankly, if being clear isn’t important to the VP, it won’t be important to their employees, who will make it very unclear for their customers.

This is the same place from whence “I don’t think there’s a difference between strategy and tactics” came.

We worry that the new place will cut our customer base in half because suddenly people have a choice that didn’t exist before.

deBono debunks it by saying that the second restaurant will make people think of your area as a restaurant district, bringing people to the area to make their decision about where to eat once they get here. You’ve increased the marketplace by bringing more people to your industry. Even if you market share drops, you total number of customer will increase.

Why? Because youa re shifting the position of the decision. If people came to your restaurant, they had to make the decision to eat there probably before they got in the car. If there’s 3 or more restuarants in the area, people will show up and decide in place.

What’s the difference? If you force people to decide before they get in the car, you are competing against every restaurant in town, even if you don’t see that competition. As a member of the restaurant district, the decision can be made closer to (your) home. Your localized marketing efforts will have more payoff once you get people close to your store. And localized marketing is cheaper than city-wide or region-wide marketing. It’s better targeted and will generate more returns.

Actually, they didn’t call it the Little Red Book, but when I read it, it reads like The Book of Five Rings, short koan-like statements that sound like one thing but mean another.

Of course, when I read it, I can’t help but think of Dwight Schrute’s speech to salespeople:

(I love the way this one is edited)