Make It Happen

Some great news: The Indie Book Awards has named Personal Balance Sheet by Randall Craig a Gold Medal Winner in the Career category. It was also named one of the top Business books of the year.

The Next Generation Indie Book Awards is one of the most prestigious American book awards. All books are judged for their content; the judges include expert editors, writers and publishers in the book publishing industry.

I have to admit, when the actual gold medal arrived at my office, I thought it looked a bit silly, but then again, I'm thrilled to have received the honor, and it's not like I will be wearing it when I go out to meet clients.. I probably should mount it. I'm pretty excited about the gold stickers (I have both "winner" and "finalist" ones) though.

Hopefully the award will result in more exposure, and a more orders.

The book is available on Amazon, at Chapters/Indigo, and at www.PersonalBalanceSheet.com, or at your favorite book retailer.

A typical way to develop perspective is to consider issues from different vantage points. A less common - but perhaps more valuable - way to develop perspective is to expose yourself to different ideas.

One way to do this is to read books that are at the fringes of your "typical" interest area - and then apply those concepts in your area of expertise and in your dealings with others. Here are some recent books that I have read, along with the interesting lessons that they taught:

Working the Room (Nick Morgan): If it is important enough to get up in front of a group and say something, then it is important enough to rehearse.

The Trusted Advisor (David Maister): Personal credibility and relationships are what develop long-term relationships with clients - not price.

Chaos (James Gleick): The seminal book on the origins and uses of Chaos theory; The biggest advances in science are often discovered by those whose training started in a different field. Conventional wisdom sometimes prevents progress.

Freakonomics (Steven Levitt/Stephen Dubner): Personal motivation and incentive are often at the heart of behavior.

Growing an Engaged Church (Albert Winseman): The connection between personal engagement and the development of a community of interest.

Getting to Yes (Roger Fisher /William Ury): Wear the other person's shoes: helping others get what they want is the first step to getting what you want.

Linked (Albert-Laszlo Barabasi): It's not the "nodes", but the connections between them that make the network.

Carpe Diem: How to become a latin lover (Harry Mount): This book is a description and primer on Latin; it illustrates what can be learned from a culture from it's language. (And conversely, how hard it is to learn about a culture if you don't know its language.)

Death Sentences (Don Watson): This book rails against the use of weasel words and management-speak.

Godel Escher Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid (Douglas Hofstadter): The intimate, and sometimes surprising, connection between philosophy, art, and music.

Leaving the Mother Ship and Personal Balance Sheet: More so than reading, writing about a subject in depth forces you to think deeply about it.

What's on your list - and what did you learn?

I just finished reading another fascinating book: Freakonomics by Steven Levtitt and Stephen Dubner. This pair of authors (one an economics professor while the other an accomplished journalist) have probably done more to explain economics than any of the two-dozen-odd economics textbooks that I have in my library.

Levitt's area of interest is exploring difficult questions in human behavior by examining data related to incentives. Chapter titles include...

- What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?
(It seems that they both have cheated in very specific ways.)

- How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of Real Estate agents?
(How information provides market power.)

- What makes a perfect parent?
(What makes a child do better in school, and what doesn't)

... and several more.

Each of these chapters presents their case through (believe-it-or-not interesting) statistics, and anecdotes. For example, on real estate sales, Freakonomics has looked at the data and noted that real estate agents never take the first offer when they sell their own houses - they hold out for a higher one. Yet, when they sell on behalf of a client, the data indicates that they often will push to accept that first offer.

Why? One assumes that the interests of the agent and their customer is aligned - but this actually isn't so. If a house is receiving an offer of $300,000, then with a 3% commission, the agent will earn $9000. The agent then needs to weigh the possibility of a higher offer coming in later. If an offer were to come in at $310,000, then the extra $10,000 would be worth only $300 to the agent - but $9700 to the customer. Yet the delay in selling may cost the agent well over $300 in extra advertising, time spent running open houses, etc. So according to the data, they will (almost) always push to accept the early offer - even if they know the house will sell for more later. (And again, the only exception to this rule is when they sell their own houses.)

Fascinating!

Randall Craig
www.RandallCraig.com

I'm just about half way through a fascinating book, called "Linked", by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. In it, he explores how networks grow: whether they be social networks, biological networks, the internet, or web sites.

One of his most fascinating points is that the study of an individual node - whether it be a cancer cell, an atom, a web site, or a person - is less important than understanding the connections between them. No matter how perfect the microscope (or how big the search engine), it is the interrelationships between the individual items that often determine behavior.

From a business or career perspective, we know this intuitively: it is our relationships with others that determine our success. This is true whether we are dealing with clients or suppliers (a relationship of trust will often close the deal) or with a prospective employer (who is referred through our network.)

Recently, I have started to use a web-based social-networking site, called LinkedIn. Not sure exactly where the ultimate benefit will come from, but strengthening my own connections (and using nifty software like this) can't be all that bad an investment.

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