Every year about this time, I reflect on the top 10 (or so) books that really stood out to me as someone interested in how companies succeed over the long run and how managers and frontline people alike can make the decisions necessary to achieve that success among the hyper-competitive, global markets we face today.

These are, as you might imagine, overwhelmingly of the non-fiction variety, but they are not, strictly speaking, always "business books". That's the case again for 2007, as many of the titles describe as much social phenomena and cognitive skills as they do business strategy.

So, this year, in recognition of the presence of more than one such non-business title on my top 10 list and the fact there are 27 of them, I decided to just call it my "My Favorite Books for Business 2007", in the list below, all having been released sometime in 2007 and are listed in the order in which I most enjoyed them. That said, my favorite book of 2007 was "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die" by Chip and Dan Heath and first runner-up "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Enjoy!

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I was on Slate.com the other day and a review of the recent book "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb jumped out at me.

I'd first heard of the author from my friend Michael Sperger a year ago when he was chairing the SCIP conference in New York and was shortlisting keynotes, having read Taleb's earlier book, "Fooled by Randomness" (Michael chose Jim Surowiecki instead).

Now, I'm not much of a determinist myself but the central notion that highly improbable events through history are the ones that have shaped modern civilization and the inherent unpredictability of these events in the future makes the work of intelligence in business a good deal tougher. In fact, as pattern recognizers, we must help to manage the risk of threats emerging that look like threats we've seen before; but what happens when it's something entirely new and equally as devastating as, say, the 9/11 attacks were on the national psyche? (read more)

The new George Tenet memoir that launches today was reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times yesterday in a piece called "An Ex-C.I.A. Chief on Iraq and the Slam Dunk That Wasn't".

Kakatuni called it both "withholding and aggrieved, earnest and disingenuous" and "is interesting less for any stunning new revelations than for fleshing out a portrait of the Bush White House already sketched by reporters and former administration members."

The book describes a White House entitled to its own set of facts as the former director of central intelligence lashes out at Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials, saying they pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a serious debate about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States.

Elsewhere in the book, Tenet defends his now infamous "slam dunk" comment about the case for going to war in Iraq. I found the Sunday TIME Magazine interview that runs down his side of the story plus a few other choice tidbits:

TIME: Slam Dunk? What were you thinking? (read more)

Worldviews matter a lot - maybe more than anything else - when it comes to competitive strategy. This was highlighted last week as Viacom launched a copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube and Google claiming $1 billion in damages from the 150,000 clips of their content (in particular, the vast library of MTV programming) that has been collectively viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

Viacom claims that, although YouTube does remove such material if asked, the Google-owned company deliberately puts the burden on the copyright holder, and makes it unreasonably difficult for copyrighted works to be removed. This has led to the fantastic gains in traffic, trending momentum that amounted to a valuation in Google's acquisition of YouTube of $1.65 billion when the companies merged a few months ago despite YouTube's "immaterial" contribution to Google's revenue mix.(read more)

After reading Jacob Weisberg's Slate.com piece on Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden's plan to solve the healthcare crisis in the U.S., I've decided we should draft him to run for President... or at least, Vice President. And I'm a Republican. But as a critic of Hillary's last go-round with that issue, he'd make a better running mate for someone like Edwards or Obama (or better yet, teaming with McCain or Romney for a potent [though unlikely] mixed ticket). The excerpt below tells you why:

Wyden is a politically savvy wonk, who in drafting the bill he recently introduced has tried to learn from previous Democratic mistakes. He recently told me he had read The System, David Broder and Haynes Johnson's massive tome on the failure of the Clinton health-care reform plan, no less than five times. (Apparently, Starbucks now offers an intravenous drip.)

Wyden's bill is 166 pages against Hillary's 1364, and he thinks he can pare it further. When he was getting started, Wyden drew a grid of the major interest groups and made sure there were plusses as well as minuses for each in his bill. He has support from CEOs, labor leaders, and even one maverick health-insurance executive.(read more)

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L-R: Dr. Dieter Zetsche Chairman of the Board and Hartmut Schick Head of Global Communications for DaimlerChrysler, sit with Thomas LaSorda, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Chrysler Group, attend a press conference for DaimlerChrysler at their US headquarters in Auburn Hills, Michigan. DaimlerChrysler said it would axe 13,000 jobs at US unit Chrysler as part of a restructuring aimed at restoring its profitability by 2008.

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... but he still looked a lot more confident than Chrysler chief Tom LaSorda in this photo below.

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With the Grammy awards last night bouncing back in the ratings (though I still didn't watch it, they at least had the sense not to go up against American Idol like last year), the RIAA was in full effect and showing their rebel streak by blue-stating the Dixie Chicks with honors they'd never see at the Country Music Awards.

For the first time since Eric Clapton in 1993 bestowing upon the DCs FIVE awards, including album of the year, record of the year and song of the year. WHEW!

Even as mainstream pop waxed, rap records were waning as hip-hop got no love from the Recording Academy with zero nominations outside the rap category for the first time in years. Perhaps there is still hope for America's youth.

Why do I think the Dixie Chicks won for "Not Ready to Make Nice"?

Their co-author of course: Dan Wilson, Minneapolitan songwriter from Semisonic and Trip Shakespeare shared the honors.

What's interesting in all this music industry PR wasn't the reunion of The Police (though cool), but that it came even as Apple's extraordinary sense of timing has just finished forcing media companies of every ilk to bow before the iPod monopoly of consumers similarly locked into the iTunes digital distribution channel. (read more)

On Tuesday 30 January 2007, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates will spend his day in New York at what many have called the world's last OS launch. It means a lot to Gates who goes out to pasture in 2008, and even more to Microsoft.

For a peek at what Vista can do, check this out.

The nation's consumer electronics retailers will start selling at 12:01 AM to capture latent demand for eager upgraders, despite a dearth of Ultimate systems bearing the hefty $400 price tag. In fact, Ultimate has been postulated as a major hole in the strategy. But the company's competitors are scared enough to claim Vista violates the terms of anti-trust settlements it has agreed to.
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In looking through my notes from the Yahoo PM confab, I saw some intriguing bits and pieces gathered from all of the PM practitioners there I did not speak to in my original post.

It would seem that PM's, as with any new process that threatens the status quo and embedded processes, get the most push back and lack of acceptance from those in the middle tiers of an organization. The top-tier really like PM's because they get essentially unfiltered information, knowledge, analysis and opinions from the first-tier, and the first-tier likes them because they get a direct venue to those in the top-tier. The mid-tier (read middle management here) are the ones who are generally (but as in all generalizations not always)the ones most opposed to PM's, and are the most threatened (a perceived threat to be sure, but sometimes very real nonetheless) by them, for the very same reasons the others really like them.

This is true, again in general, within any organization trying to use or implement new processes and or changes. The new ways threaten the perceived role of the mid-tier professionals, who see as part of their roles the gathering of information and the feeding of knowledge, analysis and opinion up to the top tier (read senior management here). They see their role and influence (and yes, power) being reduced whenever they are put out of the loop. You can read any number of essays, books, papers, etc. about this, but it happens, and it happens in almost all organizations, public, private, government agencies, etc. In these same publications you can also read many tools and techniques to avoid this, or actually use management jujitsu to turn it around.

But what was striking in the confab was the absence of any awareness of these ideas. Perhaps they are aware of them and just did not have time to speak to them, or, perhaps not. As an example, I wonder what would happen if within the organizations that said they were having the most trouble with this real issue tried to enroll the mid-tier into using the PM as a key business tool, sponsoring the tool, and understanding what they had to gain by doing so? Anyone had any experience in doing this?

A couple of years ago, my wife Tina and I delighted in the first "The Apprentice" series hosted by Donald Trump, as a truly new reality show concept made this format fun for those of us with attention spans too short to wait for Clay to become the next Mariah and who don't enjoy wasting 99 cents on voting by SMS nearly as much as most of the core reality-programming demographic.

But we realistically agreed it was a one-season wonder at best... and frankly didn't really expect a franchise to emerge, regardless of the media whoring of certain unnamed winners of the first season contest.

And yet they soldiered on, death-spiraling through another FOUR of these disasters, despite declining share. Eventually, most of us stopped paying attention... as witnessed by the shark-jump moment and eventual cratering as even the Richard Branson and Mark Cuban adaptations of the genre shuttered before seasons-end.

Then finally, last year, a gasping breath of fresh air was injected into the franchise as Martha Stewart risked her newly-recovered, ex-con street cred on a JV with the Donald, that yielded some significant lessons-learned... also failing renewal, but it would seem, NBC didn't take those lessons to heart, as tonight, the LA-based debut of "The Apprentice" reality series hits the small screen for the sixth time.(read more)