New Audio Read by Tom

Tom read The Little BIG Things for the audio version. We are posting one section at a time of audio files on our book page. Today's section is "Others," which follows "Self" in the text. In other words, first Tom gave ideas for working on yourself to improve your own business performance, and next he gave ideas for how to treat others to the same end. I think the titles of the entries in the "Others" section tell a great deal of the story, but you might want to listen to the audio items to get more of it.

#27. Kindness Is Free!
#28. Civil! Civil! Civil!
#29. Listen to Ann—and "Act Accordingly."
#30. "Being There." (Or: How I Learned First Principles from My Grandfather's Last Rites.)
#31. Appreciating the Great Battle: A Case for Consideration.
#32. Thoughtfulness Is Free (or Close Thereto).

Excellence: On Enterprise

In a new video from The Little Big Things Video Series, Tom defines the aspiration of organizations. After all, "organizations exist for one and only one reason, and that is to be of service."

Please watch the video. [Time: 2 minutes, 26 seconds]

[A PDF transcript of the video's content is also available: Excellence: On Enterprise.]

Cool Friend #147: Joy Panos Stauber

Erik Hansen, our Cool Friend interviewer (among the many other hats he wears), recently chatted with Joy Panos Stauber, the woman behind our beautiful banners. They covered design, being a designer, and of particular interest, the design of Tom's new book, The Little BIG Things, which Joy had a significant hand in. You can read the interview here and find out more about Joy here.

Cool Friend News

Our Cool Friends are always moving and shaking. Here are a few things they've been up to lately:

Sylvia Ann Hewlett just published a study through the Harvard Business Review called "The Globe: The Battle for Female Talent in Emerging Markets."

Lior Arussy has a new book, Customer Experience Strategy: The Complete Guide From Innovation to Execution. Sally Helgesen's new book, The Female Vision: Women's Real Power at Work, will be coming out in June.

Charles H. Green interviewed Chris Brogan and we think you'll enjoy reading it.

Brand You: Build Your Legacy

In the latest installment from The Little Big Things Video Series, Tom asks, "What will your legacy be from today?"

You can watch the video here, or click on the video window in the right column of this page. [Time: 2 minutes, 5 seconds]

[A PDF transcript of the video's content is also available: Brand You: Legacy.]

Been Hacked? There's Hope.

[Our guest blogger is John O'Leary. It seems Erik called him upon receiving spam from John's email address. The conversation led to this idea. The post is a re-blog from John's website.]

One nice thing about being repeatedly hacked in your email and social networking accounts is hearing back from old friends and business colleagues you haven't been in touch with for years! I'm sure you can relate. In my case I can't say that everyone on my spammed contact list has been entirely pleased to hear from me—or who they thought was me—but amazingly many of them have taken the bait. It appears that hundreds of folks are now wondering how I've been able to start so many multi-million-dollar home businesses this year AND successfully sell cheap meds on the side (while maintaining a consulting practice). Well, I've decided to exploit this opportunity and share my trade secrets in a new book I'm working on: How *YOU* Can Make Millions From Getting Hacked & Spammed in Your Spare Time. (The first step is: Don't give up that AOL account.) Subtitle: Business Lessons From Viagra.

Nice!

This really great review of The Little BIG Things showed up in our Google alerts yesterday. Ian Paul Marshall, who posted it on his personal development blog, gets our thanks!

Antidote to iPad Frenzy

iPads. iPhones. iPods. Blackberrys. SM. "60/60/24/7."

And Spring:

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

William Henry Davies
from The Nation's Favourite Poems*

(*The BBC had a contest to select Britain's favorite poems. The cynics assumed that the riffraff would choose mindless jingles. Instead the winners were thoughtful and powerful, Mr. Davies' verses among them.)

(The photo credit goes to me, he said immodestly. And Sony's dinky little camera!!)

I'm Not Making This Up!

Doubtless, despite the passage of 67 years, I'm still naïve. That's what I decided as I dove into Eamon Javers' Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage.

Of course I know about private security firms. Among other things, one of my Cornell classmates was Jules Kroll, founder of Kroll Associates. His shop, since sold, was perhaps the most powerful in a now enormous industry.

But on the second page of the prologue I found the following, which I literally read with my mouth agape:

"Day and his employees [at Diligence] had run a months-long covert undercover operation designed to penetrate the offices of KPMG, the global accounting giant. They'd done it on behalf of a Washington lobbying firm that was in turn working for a company controlled by one of Russia's most powerful oligarchs. And they'd gotten caught."

(A KPMG employee that Diligence "turned," after painstaking research, by appealing to his patriotism, regularly used the likes of dead drops and other accoutrements of the espionage trade. And there are all the bits about tag team efforts to follow someone, and of course follower v. follower, that equal Le Carré's world of Smiley.)

I've only advanced to page 16, thanks to that rarity among rarities, an on-time doctor's appointment. The book is a no-baloney "page turner," and I (VERY) highly recommend it for fun or to stoke your mind.

(Above: Cow. Vermont. I loved the pose so much that I risked life and limb to take the photo.)

XtremeAgony!

If I had a Worst Instructions & Controls award, it would have to be retired courtesy my hotel-room bedside clock radio, otherwise known as XtremeMac. The following was on the top of the clock in fine print, to guide one through the process of setting the alarm:

1. Press and hold the "Alarm 1" or "Alarm 2" button until "Alarm Time" appears on the display. Press the "Settings" knob and the alarm hour will blink.
2. Rotate the "Settings" knob to change the hour and press to set.
3. Rotate the "Settings" knob to change the minutes and press to set.
4. Rotate the "Settings" knob until "Source" appears on the display and press to select iPod, buzzer, FM or AM and press to set.
5. Rotate the "Settings" knob until "Exit" appears on the display and press to exit.

Of course it was virtually impossible to read all the gibberish that appeared on the clock's screen. Add the fact that while you were holding and pressing you could not simultaneously see what was on the screen. (At one point I was pushing and pressing and had the damn thing cradled in my lap so that I could at least partially see what I was doing.) The final indignity was that by the time you had twirled and pushed and pressed and then pressed and twirled and pushed, you had ... ZERO ... confidence that you had set the damn alarm correctly.

Excellence in design is on the tip of many a tongue.
That's great, and a monumental change in a decade.
We've come a long way.
We ain't there yet.

New Audio

Tom did the reading for The Little BIG Thingswhen the audio version was recorded, and we've been putting it on our book page a section at a time. Today you'll find new MP3 files of one Special Section and the sixth section of the book, titled "Self." You can use the links below, or find the first five sections of the book plus two special sections on our book page. It's always a treat to hear Tom telling his own story.

Special Section: The Recession 46—"Secrets" and "Strategies" for Dealing with the Downturn of 2007++

Self

#21. You Are Your Product—Develop It.
#22. Job One: Amuse Yourself!
#23. Fitness Power = Staying Power.
#24. Mental Gymnastics, Urgency Of.
#25. You Are Your Story! So Work on It!
#26. Develop Your R.POV8—ASAP!

Videos

When the book The Little BIG Things was in process, our friends at Enterprise Media caught Tom on camera reading an early draft. As a result, we have a collection of short takes of Tom laying out the beginnings of the 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence that became the finished product. We're putting these short video spots at YouTube, adding one a week. In this week's entry, Tom tells us about Roger Ailes's notion that a person has but seven seconds to make a first impression.

Take a look at this video, "Brand You: First Impressions" (2 minute, 28 seconds), or download a PDF transcript.

You might also want to watch some of the earlier videos in this series. There are some good topics, all presented by Tom in a casual setting. Like inviting him into your living room. Here's a selection of past titles:
Don't Fear Failure
Leadership: Listening
Milestones Matter
Servant Leadership
The Problem Isn't The Problem
Sacred Trust
On Thoughtfulness
First-line Supervisors
Out Read the Other Guy
Work on Your Writing

Link Roundup #15

Big news for Twitter: The Library of Congress is to archive almost all tweets since the beginning.

And in other Twitter news, less portentous but still cool, Tweets are used to predict box office hits.

More about the Internet: The FCC Lost to Comcast in a fight for net neutrality.

News about The Little BIG Things: Cool Friend Nick Morgan posted a review at PublicWords that we especially like.

And this review of the book uses no words at all!

Find Tom on Twitter and ChangeThis

Tom's been having a thought-provoking debate on Twitter this morning with Pawan Rajs (@pawanrajs) regarding the importance of design. Follow the conversation here (between 9 and 10:30 a.m.).

In case you missed it, we want to point to an excerpt from The Little BIG Things published on ChangeThis.com as a manifesto titled: Enterprise* (*At Its Best)—designed by Joy Stauber, it's beautiful as well as thought provoking.

Tom's in the Top Ten

We got an email from Jurgen Appelo, who recently assessed notable management blogs using statistics from Google PageRank, Bing, Alexa, Technorati, Twitter Grader, PostRank, and FeedBurner. We're happy to find Tom at #9 on his list of Top 150 Management & Leadership Blogs. Click on the link to get the full story of how he compiled the list. Thanks to Jurgen for the recognition.

New Video: Servant Leadership

In this latest addition to The Little BIG Things video series, Tom asks "What have you done in the past 24 hours to be of service to your organization?"

You can watch the video here. (Time: 2 minutes, 32 seconds.)

Or download a transcript of the video's content: Servant Leadership.

Tom Reads The Little BIG Things

When the audiobook version of The Little BIG Things was recorded, Tom himself did the reading. We were lucky enough to get copies of the MP3 files, and we've been posting them on our book page a section at a time. Today's offering is "Resilience":

#17: Swan Dive: A Guide to Getting On With Getting On.
#18: Lifetime Employment Is Dead. Your Career Is Not.
#19: "Failure"—Celebrate It!
#20: The World's Worst Advice (Please Ignore It).

We also added a Special Section called "Guru Gaffes." In the book it follows Item #8, and you'll find it there in the audio player. Or you can use this link: Guru Gaffes.

More Than a Review

Cool Friend John Moore from the Brand Autopsy blog went above and beyond in his review of Tom's new book, The Little BIG Things. John reviews a lot of books. He occasionally gets very creative as with the dramatic readings of Switch or Linchpin.

We found it quite remarkable that when he turned his attention to Tom's book, he decided to highlight particularly notable quotes by creating a slideshow in the exact style of the slides Tom uses in his presentations. John was so precise and accurate that two long time colleagues of Tom thought John had dug through Tom's slide presentations and pulled them out. Not the case. Check out the slideshow and see for yourself why we were fooled. More importantly, the slides are an excellent summary of the highlights of the book. Nice work, John!

No Message

Great Easter morning walk in VT. Passed this old truck. Came back and took pics. Kinda keeps you grounded.

Superb!

Tweeted this morning. Worthy of Blog post, too. Courtesy Steve Case, who pointed to this must-read posted by Clay Shirky: "The collapse of complex business models."

Never Look Back!
Never Look Back?

I will not tell you what got me thinking about this. And a lot of other data will be suppressed as well ...

It seems to me, as I look at my career over the last 40 years and reflect on a lifetime of biography reading, that a key to success—and maybe pretty high on the list—is an ability to more or less "never look back." While reflection is imperative, too much reflection is paralyzing. In my case I know that I err, by a sizeable margin, on the "too little" end of the spectrum.

The plus is a strong action bias—holiest of holies per me.

The negative is upon occasion making the same mistake twice (little reflection after the 1st cock-up); and a de facto willingness to tolerate collateral damage.

It is the latter that's bugging me at the moment—probably triggered by the agonies of a Richter 8.0 sinus infection, not amenable to the strongest of painkillers. That is, there is a lot of collateral damage along the way that at the moment feels pretty unacceptable.

If I had to do it all over again ...

If I had to do it all over again, I think I'd pay more attention—maybe even a lot more—to that collateral damage. The result thereof is totally unpredictable—that is, there are so so many parallel universes.

But the "If I had ..." is mostly a silly exercise. If I'd been a lot more reflective then I wouldn't be who I am, and I wouldn't be writing this post.

I simply conclude that it is probably true that success, which invariably requires bulldozing skills, requires the "ability" to more or less "never look back"—and the costs can run pretty damned high.

Comments?