This isn’t a movie review, although I will talk about the movie “The Social Network” that came out last weekend.

Instead, in this short post I argue that everybody reading this post – and just about everybody who works in the interactive media and technology industries – ought to go out and see this movie in a hurry. “The Social Network” does for the internet biz what “Pretty Woman” did for prostitution.

It’s a terrific flick (take a date and save dinner for after so you can talk about it), but the other reason to see “The Social Network” is that this movie will define for the next decade how the rest of the world sees us, the people who make a living building and placing and optimizing websites and apps and display ads and emails and platforms of all sorts. The fact that the movie isn’t accurate doesn’t matter (there are abundant articles within easy reach of Google on this, so I won’t go into the details here): he who tells the best story wins, and this is a great story.

But it’s not a flattering portrait—more like the elementary school picture that still makes you cringe when you see it decades later.

Directed by the always-ominous David Fincher and with the trademark “Warning: You Must be a Mensa Candidate to Watch this Movie” rapid-fire dialog and crystalline structure of Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay, “The Social Network” paints Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as an arrogant and brilliant software engineer who effortlessly leads other geeks but can’t talk with a girl. The movie Zuckerberg doesn’t care about money yet steals the idea for Facebook from two rich jerks, improves it, lies about stealing it, builds Facebook with his best friend, later doesn’t hesitate to screw the best friend out of the company and gets sued by all the aggrieved parties. I saw the movie with my wife and she found the movie Zuckerberg somewhat sympathetic, whereas I had an easier time feeling good about Humbert Humbert, the unapologetic pedophile in Nabokov’s “Lolita.”

For those of us who has seen the real Mark Zuckerberg interviewed on stage or monitor (the hoodie, the discomfort) Jesse Eisenberg’s physical impression is spookily dead on. The movie Zuckerberg is not amoral or immoral—he just has a different moral code than most people, one that Nietzsche would have found cozy. This is the movie story about digital entrepreneurs that will define them for years. Justin Timberlake does a star turn as Napster-co-founder and Facebook Pied Piper Sean Parker, a vintage bizdev guy with a rolodex and no conscience. This too will stick.

The fortunes of the movie geek have improved over the decades. From Spaz in “Meatballs” to the entire cast of “Revenge of the Nerds” to Matthew Broderick in “War Games” and Val Kilmer in “Real Genius.” Up until now geeks have been socially awkward but moral, plagued by a compulsive curiosity that can lead them into bad decisions but willing to fix the problems they create. Not so with the movie Zuckerberg. This geek leaves bodies in his rear-view mirror and doesn’t slow down, but does so while building Facebook, the addictively engaging platform that many have open 24/7/365.

How the movie Zuckerberg defines a new kind of geek comes through most clearly in one of the films tag lines: “Punk, Genius, Billionaire.” When I saw that tag on a poster in the theater I thought, “Punk? Arthur Fonzarelli and Danny Zuko were punks. Sid Vicious was a punk. But… Mark Zuckerberg?” But if “punk” means somebody who lives outside the normal social order and pressures that order by being compelling and different, then maybe the label fits.

“Pretty Woman” came out in 1990. Five years later we saw “Leaving Las Vegas.” By this logic, we won’t see another movie about the internet biz this good until 2015, so go see “The Social Network.” And the next time you have to explain to civilians what you do for a living, remember that “The Social Network” is probably the ruler they’ll use to measure you.

[This blog is moving to www.bradberens.com in the coming weeks, so stay tuned and get ready to change your RSS feeds, if you have 'em.]

We’re now just over a month out from our San Francisco show and I’m excited about the changes we’re rolling out for our biggest show and the biggest show in the industry. In this post I’m going to do two things: 1) Tell you about how to save some money on the Conference and the Expo; 2) brag a little about the changes.

Save Money!

Register for a Full Conference Pass by the end of Friday, March 19, and you’ll save $200 over what you’ll pay later. If you’re just going to the Expo, register now and it’s FREE, but on the 20th it will be $50, and onsite it will be $100.

Kinda hard to argue with FREE, huh?

You can register here for ad:tech San Francisco.

So What’s New?

If you look over the Conference Agenda, you’ll see a lot of changes, including our new Marketing Masters series that do a two-hour dive into top of mind interactive channels and best practices.

Eight of the Marketing Masters series have a new component, which is a relationship with the Expo floor that includes a walking tour and also on-floor theater presentations from relevant exhibitors.

You’ll also see a lot of exciting new changes on the Expo Floor, including an “Innovation Alley,” and an “App Exchange” that will fight tooth and nail with the Conference for your attention.

And we’re throwing a party! This year ad:tech, SF/BIG and the SF AMA have joined forces to throw a party in Moscone Center immediately after the Tuesday closing keynote by Board Member Geoff Ramsey of eMarketer and Lori Schwartz of the IPG Emerging Media Lab—please join us!

Another significant change is that we have no panels at ad:tech. Instead, we have a series of single speaker presentations focusing on trends, statistics, case studies and best practices, with barstools on stage for people to sit on after they’ve presented.

We also have more sessions with a single speaker doing a deep dive on a relevant topic – Mediasmith’s David L. Smith on understanding digital metrics, for example – and when this happens we’ve programmed a “First Respondent” who will both introduce the speaker and run a 10-minute interview followed by audience Q&A after the speaker’s talk.

Our ad:tech Conference has always had fantastic speakers who have generously shared their time and insights. We’ve created these new structures to give our speakers better ways to shine and our attendees better opportunities to learn and to network.

See you there!

It takes moments to install and makes it easy to concentrate on the thing you’re reading by silencing the noise trying to block out the signal.

Here’s the best part: unlike many other plugins that seek to block online ads out of dislike for ads (and a short-sighted lack of understanding about how websites earn enough money to create content), Readability doesn’t wipe all ads from your experience– it just suppresses them when you’re highly engaged with the content.

While you’re navigating through a website, looking for something to read, letting your mind hummingbird around the monitor looking for a spot to alight, you’ll see all the ads. Only once you’ve decided to read the article do the distractions disappear.

Will advertisers still dislike it? Sure. Will some publishers? Yeah.

Tough. I love this plugin.

Take a look.

By the way: Arc90, the creators of Readability, just went high on my to-meet list.

Jerry spied my plea for help on Facebook and made it his personal mission to help me find it, and then David identified it immediately (I should have consulted David’s steel-trap memory first… next time I’ll know).

And the book? “The Marvelous Inventions of Alvin Fernald,” by Clifford B. Hicks, first of a series that you can learn more about at www.alvinfernald.com.

I’ll quote from David’s note:

Alvin is using the invention on the cover.  I quote from Chapter 7, “The One-Jerk Bed Maker”:

“Rummaging through the boxes on his inventing bench, he found a ball of strong cord and two small pulleys. He tied the pulleys to the head of the bed, one on each side of the pillow. He cut two long pieces of cord. One end of each cord he tied to one of the clothespins. The other ends he ran through the pulleys. He brought the cords down under the bed, leaving plenty of slack on the floor, then tied the two cords to the footboard. He squeezed open two clothespins and fastened one to the sheet and blanket on each side of the bed… He pulled slowly on the cords. The blanket and sheet slid neatly into place, as tough pulled by two invisible hands. Alvin Fernald, Great Inventor, had done it again.”

Of course, it’s possible you remember ANOTHER children’s book in which the protagonist invents an automatic bed maker. This is the one I recalled.

As I write, the local library is finding a copy and bringing it to the nearest branch.

Jerry, David– thanks!

Now that my eight year old girl has become a big reader, I find myself remembering the books that I read as a kid, and that’s the reason for today’s post: can you help me identify a book?

The book: I have a clear memory from the 1970s of reading a book about a boy inventor who — in an aside — created a simple machine to help him make his bed. It was a lever of some sort that attached to the top of the sheets and blankets, and when he got out of bed in the morning he would pull the lever and it would pull the bed into shape.

That’s all I remember, and it’s driving me crazy.

For a while I thought it was “Homer Price” by Robert McCloskey, but I then found that book in our local library, read it, and discovered I was wrong. Then I thought it was “Henry Reed, Inc.” by Keith Robertson (with illustrations by McCloskey), but I checked THAT one out of the library and so far, no dice.

The incredible book stumper archives at Loganberry Books didn’t help, and I submitted a query to the CBC’s “Lost Childhood Books” radio show (please, kind Canadians, help me!), but I thought that perhaps somebody reading this might recognize the book.

If you can help, please contact me via the form on this page or by commenting.

Does this post have a lot to do with media? Only in the sense that how we remember media — one of my strongest areas of intellectual interest — changes with time, and how we re-experience all culture as we get older can create an uncanny double sense of visiting our former selves along with the song, story, painting, book, TV show or movie in question. Today’s content-hungry internet and cable jumbles everything together into one big media haggis, and that can wreak havoc on our memories.

In her classic 1967 essay, “Movies on Television” (anthologized in “For Keeps,” 1994, among other places), Pauline Kael wrote about this:

People who see a movie for the first time on television don’t remember it the same way that people do who saw it in a theatre. Even without the specific visual loss that results from the transfer to another medium, it’s doubtful whether a movie could have as intense an impact as it had in its own time. Probably by definition, works that are not truly great cannot be as compelling out of their time. Sinclair Lewis’s and Hemingway’s novels were becoming archaic while their authors lived. Can On the Waterfront have the impact now that it had in 1954? Not quite. And revivals in move theatres don’t have the same kind of charge, either. There’s something a little stale in the air, there’s a different kind of audience. At a revival, we must allow for the period, or care because of the period. Television viewers seeing old movies for the first time can have very little sense of how and why new stars moved us when they appeared, of the excitement of new themes, of what these movies meant to us.

What would Kael have made of media today, I wonder.

Dear Jeff,

I’m a fan, a BIG fan, both of you and of Amazon.com. Want specifics? I got the very first Kindle and later the Kindle Dx. Love ‘em, and sometimes buy the same book in digital AND hardcover formats… both from Amazon. I’m a Prime member and think it’s the best $79.00 I spend each year. I prefer to buy mp3s via Amazon over iTunes, bought-and-downloaded the entire second season of Mad Men through your Unbox interface to watch on plane rides. I could go on, but I won’t, because I want to get to the point of this letter quickly.

Jeff, I’m begging you to create an Amazon Tip Jar that happy Amazon customers like me can use to reward the independent bookstores that Amazon is, quite simply and inarguably, killing dead dead dead. “Tip,” here means both the “ooooh, thanks for the recommendation” sort of tip and also the “here’s a few bucks for good service” tip. Your doing ths will be good for the Amazon brand, good for the world, the right thing to do, and technologically easy– combining your existing Associates program and Gift Card program.

Why should you do this? Here’s one story that, I hope, will make my point.

My guilty moment
About a year ago I was chatting with the proprietors at The Mystery Bookstore in Westwood, California (wonderful place: you ought to visit, here’s a map), where over the years I’ve happily spent a lot of money and, more importantly, received a ton of high-quality, personalized book recommendations that trump the “Frequently Bought Together” and “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” advice from your ecommerce algorithms.

On this fateful day, the nice lady at the register suggested Gregg Hurwitz’s terrific mystery “The Crime Writer” and made it sound fascinating (it is!).

I could have spend $14.00 plus tax right there in the store, but instead I covertly checked my Kindle, found it and later bought it on that platform for $9.99. Why? My Kindle was relatively new, and I wanted to see if I could fall into a mystery on that platform (yup, sure could).

But man, I felt guilty. Later, after I finished The Crime Writer, I wanted to give the folks at The Mystery Bookstore a reward, a bounty, if you will, for such a great recommendation. I wanted to hand them $5 — yes, the book is THAT good — but I didn’t, in part because I couldn’t face the perp walk of shame to the register to confess that I took their recommendation and bought it for the Kindle, and in part because I couldn’t imagine what they would DO with five bucks. There’s no “random money” entry in most cash registers, and many people would simply pocket the money rather than have to figure out what to do with it.

Jeff, help me assuage my guilt!
You can solve this problem: with an Amazon Tip Jar I could decide to reward The Mystery Bookstore later by sending them a thank you tip for the Hurwitz tip. All I’d need to do is click on the “Send a Tip!” link at Amazon.com, enter the email address or physical address of the tip-receiver, choose my dollar amount, and then go through the usual, expedient Amazon buying process.

This would be entirely voluntary for the customer — which means it might fail — but tipping at restaurants is voluntary and most of us do it.

If I browse a copy of Michael J. Mauboussin’s “Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition” (it’s on my Amazon wish list) at the local independent bookstore and later choose to save $10.18 by buying it through Amazon, I could send $1.99 — the cost of an episode of most TV shows at Amazon or iTunes — as a tip to the local shop… that means I still save $8.19, which is a lot.

Think of the positive brand exposure for Amazon! You could even make actual little glass jars that a store could have next to the register with signs that read, “Tip Jar: See something here that you’re gonna buy from Amazon? Tips appreciated!” and have the store’s email address on the jar. And it doesn’t need to be limited to bookstores (although that’s what started me down this chain of thought): if a blogger represents a book, I could say thank you. If a speaker at a conference mentions a book and I buy it, I could say thank you.

Nobody would respect a $1.99 gift certificate, but a tip? Who wouldn’t smile at that and think, “gosh, that’s nice… thanks!”

Amazon is the undisputed king of ecommerce, the cradle of the long tail, the enabler of authors to get their books in front of people in a hurry, but what Amazon doesn’t do well is have a real-time conversation… the one when how the customer’s eyes light up while she talks about one book sparks another title in the mind of the merchant. Independent bookstore owners do that very  well. You can help keep them around.

Please think about it.

Sincerely from a fan and loyal Amazon customer,

Brad Berens

My eyebrows lifted at this, as to me re-reading is a special pleasure and it had never occured to me that this was unusual or a family trait– H is also a big re-reader, as is Kathi, my wife).

I read a LOT and I re-read a lot: when I travel on busienss I often find myself visiting with old textual friends (“It’s homey,” as H says) like Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice,” the Vorkosigan adventures by Lois McMaster Bujold or — and this one I finished for perhaps the 40th time over my morning cup of coffee a few minutes ago — Heinlein’s majestic “Time Enough For Love.” Last week, I downloaded “Huckleberry Finn” onto the new Kindle Dx (a seven-league-boots leap forward for Amazon, by the way) for my next trip.

Speaking of Mark Twain, one of the best passages on re-reading I’ve encountered comes from the first chapter of Annie Dillard’s autobiography, “An American Childhood” where she talks about her father’s disasterous boating trip down the Mississippi River and what provoked it:

In 1955, when I was ten, my father’s reading went to his head.
My father’s reading during that time, and for many years before and after, consisted for the most part of Life on the Mississippi. He was a young executive in the old family firm, American Standard; sometimes he traveled alone on business. Traveling, he checked into a hotel, found a bookstore, and chose for the night’s reading, after what I fancy to have been long deliberation, yet another copy of Life on the Mississippe. He brought all these books home. There were dozens of copies of Life on the Mississippi on the living-room shelves. From time to time, I read one.

Re-reading lets me focus on the HOW of a piece of writing, not just the WHAT of its sense. If I’m just reading for plot (like, say, the J. D. Robb “In Death” mysteries that are a guilty pleasure like a pint container of Chunky Monkey in my lap while I sit on the couch watching The Mentalist) then there’s not a lot of point to re-reading, but the best books, even the best mysteries (Ellis Peters’ Cadfael books, for example) exceed the pleasures of plot and merit thinking about the how.  This is true of novels, essays, and particularly denser language like verse. The Russian Formalist critic Yuri Lotman famously once said that we don’t read poetry, we only re-read poetry.

There’s also a kinaesthetic old-jeans comfort about the physicality of a favorite book: my fingers know just where to hold the pages and the measuring pressure between the ball of my right thumb and the side of my right index finger hints at how far I’ve come in a reading session and how far I have to go.  The progress bar on the Kindle Dx doesn’t compare.

That cozy knowledge can also inhibit critical awareness, so it’s sometimes handy to read a new edition of an old friend — I did this regularly when I was a Shakespearean, flipping from edition to edition — or mildly tragic when a beloved copy of a book gets lost and the replacement just isn’t the same. I’m curious how reading Huck Finn on the Kindle will be different than reading the ancient, friendly, black-covered hardback edition I found in my grandmother’s front-hall cupboard when I was nine, or the green scholarly edition I read in grad school.

Which brings me to blogging and reading blogs.

The physical properties of books helps great writing stake out space in my head that vaguely corresponds to the space on my book shelves.  I can stumble across a book while looking for something else, pick it up, and in moments step into another place.  It’s particularly true of fiction but also works with the best nonfiction.

With digital media — whether a PDF or on a website or on the Kindle — the kinaesthetics drop out.  I rarely go back to re-read a great blog post because they’re hard to find without SEARCHING for them, and searching is different than stumbling.  And for all its merits the Kindle doesn’t let me organize my many digital books in any personalized way– just by author, title or date acquired.

To be fair, there’s not a lot of re-writing in blogs; by design blogs are the unedited firstlings of the writer’s heart (to paraphrase Macbeth), and for an information-acquisition mode nothing beats them.

But its hard to SAVOR a post, and this is why no matter how much I love the Kindle and digital media in general, I don’t think that books, physical books, will vanish any time soon.  We need at least some of our things to exceed the spatial constraints of a screen.

When I worked at EarthLink, for example, the explicit purpose of our magazine bLink was so that our customers’ experience of the company would extend beyond the PC and beyond sitting at the kitchen table with a checkbook once a month paying the bill.  In other words, we wanted our customers to think about EarthLink while sitting on the toilet because we thought that extra-computer engagement would bind them more closely to the brand.

These days, I travel with the Kindle, a magazine or two (for takeoff and landing) and at least one non-digital book.  Not everything can be constrained by a screen.

That’s the model of micropayments we should be working on.  Online publishers– help your readers to keep warm!

Where does this thought come from? Yesterday I listened to a robust conversation about micropayments on the July 8th “This Week in Media” podcast hosted by my friend Daisy Whitney in which Daisy and her guests chewed over how micropayments should and shouldn’t work, when fifty cents is too much and the like.

In contrast to Daisy’s guests who debated the right price point, I think most online publishing micropayment schemes miss the mark because they charge for the wrong thing: the article rather than the access.  Online publishers need to get out of the business of thinking about their product as a collection of articles and get into the business of thinking about their product as making my life easier by keeping me informed.

Here’s what I mean: If the New York Times goes back behind a pay wall, then when I click to get their take on, say, the latest on the Sotomayor confirmation hearings, I’d probably get an option to pay for an article… maybe even with a sneak preview of the first few sentences.

But what if I click and buy the WRONG article? I’ll feel bad about myself and angry with the publisher… neither of which are good.

Right now, as I’m writing this, the front door of www.nytimes.com has NINE pieces of content about Sotomayor– that’s eight chances to make a mistake. If I want the overview and I mistakenly click on the analysis, then I’m going to feel cheated.  Even if it only costs 10 cents it’s MY 10 cents and I’ll grimace about having made the wrong choice.

Remember: it’s hard to compete with free… and if the NYTimes makes me feel bad about my click-choice acumen I’ll probably go to a different source (there are plenty at Google News) that is free.

It should be impossible to make the wrong choice when I click on NYTimes.com.

What the Times should do instead is give me five minutes of total site access for 10 ten cents and keep track of how many times I click the “keep reading?” button and get charged another 10 cents so that if I reach the $1.50 newstand price for an entire paper I automatically get converted to a pass for a full day or more.  A “thank you for reading” pop-up would be nice, too.  (A full week of the paper delivered to my door costs just $5.85, so digital access should be much cheaper.)

If I pay 10 cents for five minutes of full site access then I have five minutes to find the page I want… and anybody should be able to do that.  Let’s say it takes me four minutes to get to the right article: I’ll be able to read it even if my time expires because the browser window will still be there.  I just won’t be able to click to read something new.

Suddenly, I’m engaged with the NYTimes and once I’m engaged I’ll keep clicking that spend-a-dime button because, hey, it’s just a dime and I already know that I’m getting what I want.  Heck, I’ll drop 99 cents for a song at iTunes that I’ll probably only listen to twice… 10 cents is a bargain.

(Side Note: NYT folks, remember that you get to KEEP the song on iTunes… so don’t go thinking that I somehow advocate a 99 cents-for-five-minutes-of-access charge.)

One major difference between this micropayment scheme and the per-article scheme is that I don’t measure my life in articles but I do measure it in minutes.  I know how much my time is worth (a lot) and letting a media brand I know and trust inform me is worth a dime or more.

And if the Times sells me saved time then I’ll be inclined to lean on them for more product offerings, for a full subscription that would include a TiVo like premium layer of information brought to me based on my previous reading.

Keep me warm.

P.S. Some of my thinking in this post is informed by Barry Schwartz’s wonderful book, “The Paradox of Choice.”

Today’s guest post comes from Don E. Schultz of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and Agora, Inc.

Universally acknowledged as the father of integrated marketing communications, here’s what Don has to say on this week’s topic:

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Sorry I’m late in responding but have been struggling to develop a clever and witty response. Unfortunately, my muse is out this week (she’s busy unloading my GM and Chrysler bonds in Iceland), so I will respond on my own.

I agree with you, Doug and John… that is, it may be a better use of time to read widely and in other areas than simply trying to find the nuggets in the published business books.

There are some very good reasons for the level of business books we have available.  Here’s my speculation o why they’re like they are.

As Doug has said, in order to generate sales, business strategy books have to be simple and have some sort of whiz-bang mnemonic, i.e., the infamous 4Ps or Positioning or Porter’s five forces.  If the book is too sophisticated, with some really good ideas, concepts and approaches, many will extensively quote passages from the text but few will (a) have read it, (b) know what it means or (c) have any idea on how to apply it in their own organization.

So, if the question is:  Do business strategy books really help improve business or organizations or even the reader? I suspect not.  I think that is particularly true for those toiling in the interactive vineyards.  We have to remember that almost all existing businesses have been built on three pillars.

1. A group of assembled functional silos that often don’t work together very well
2. A business model based on a supply chain: i.e., find a way to sell what the organization makes or does. Customers are of interest only in terms of what can be extracted from them
3. The primary goal is to provide short-term returns for investors; i.e., the 90 day financial model

Given these three elements, interactivity is a problem.  It doesn’t fit the executive’s background, training or current situation.  Therefore, most business strategy books are designed to create incremental change in the existing business model, not to provide transformational change to a new approach.  Interactivity and all the things that go with it are an anathema to current business leaders who simply want to keep the silos happy, manage the logistical chain and generate short term profits… then, head off into retirement, with a well feathered nest, to work on their golf game.

The one thing business strategy books do, however, is keep people employed in publishing, printing and distribution.  In today’s economic climate, that’s probably not all bad.

In reflecting back on the business strategy books I have read, scanned, perused, flipped through or whatever, over the years, I’ve found the following.

1. Most of the content is generally common sense. That’s what many of Peter Drucker’s concepts were; i.e, a company is built to generate and hold on to customers.  The only thing he did was put the concepts in a way that seemed relevant, important and quotable.  Most of Drucker’s musings are as — or perhaps more — important today than when he wrote them 50 years ago.  The problem is:  few managers have the gumption or capability to implement them because of the three factors noted above.  Thus, not as much has come from his work as should have… with the exceptions of selected quotes used as chapter headings in strategy books.
2. The basic ideas of most business books, including strategy, is in the first three chapters.  For the most part, after Chapter 3 the books become, not just turgid, but, in too many cases, appalling. The concepts may be fine but the implementation is simply not there.  Again, when you’re stuck with an outbound-only business model, it’s hard to think very creatively.  It’s like the well recognized industry titans who want to teach at the university but find they only have enough content for a couple of lectures.  There really isn’t any magic bullet in terms of describing a good business plan.  The challenge is in implementing it and making it work.  The problem is: the basic principles are no longer relevant.  Customers are now in control, the marketplace is dynamic, markets are not linear, they’re networked, and I can’t see the smokestacks of my competitors if they’re in India or China– so I don’t know what they’re doing.  In this type of situation, incremental change isn’t the answer and that’s what most business strategy books are about.
3. Most of the business strategy books that succeed are successful because we, as readers, agree with the views of the authors.  They have said what we’d like to say, but haven’t or didn’t.  So, we like their ideas because they fit with our own, and so we quote them and advocate for them.  Or, we write blurbs for the jacket covers because we like to see our names in print, too.  Just look at all the quotes at the end of every email. The problem? When we agree with the authors, we’re generally agreeing to incremental, not break-through thinking.
4. No revolutionary business strategy book will ever be published.  It can’t because the publishers don’t think it will sell.  Let’s face it, publishers are in business to sell books, not to provide for the common good.  Publishers won’t touch a book if it is radical in its views or unique in its approaches anymore than you can get an academic journal article published through the peer review journal process if it challenges the existing literature.  We’re comfortable with things we know and uncomfortable with things we don’t know or haven’t experienced.  That’s why you see many of the posts, blogs, comments, articles and reports on the interactive marketplace focused on how to use the new forms of communication to solve or resolve the same old outbound only problems, i.e., how to get people to pay attention to your email blast.    As a result, we keep plowing the same ground year after year, with new graphics and perhaps a few new cliches.

In all the books I have read in the past few years, the only one that really stands out is “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid” by CK Prahalad. It gave me a view of a world I’ve never really experienced.  And, for that, it was worthwhile.  The problem is, the topic represents about 80% of the world’s market, but I don’t see business people rushing to get into those markets. It doesn’t fit the business model they are committed to following.  If I were a business manager, could I implement some of Pralahad’s ideas?   A few have but for the most part, managers stick to established markets with known competitors, trying to sell to people just like themselves.

In looking back at this note, I realize I didn’t really answer your question.  Do all business strategy books suck?  If you’re committed to a traditional business model, they likely provide some incremental benefit.  If you think the world needs to be changed, i.e., interactivity and dynamic models, probably not.  But, in writing this response, I did answer some of my own questions.  That likely will be beneficial to me in the long run, but I’m not sure it will help anyone else.

In summary, thanks for the venting facility.  Hope this helps you and others.  It certainly helped clear my own mind.

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More to come on this, and please join the party! Weigh in at will with comments and additions both here and on Twitter.

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