Last week, Forbes printed a short interview with Dick Foster, Senior Partner and Director at McKinsey & Company. Foster is most famous for his book, Creative Destruction. From the interview, it would appear that Foster is more than a little skeptical of business gurus who advise doing the same things you see high-performing companies doing: “There was no such company, and there never had been such a company!”

The Dick Foster interview is today’s Friday Inspiration. Here’s a short excerpt:

“Let me tell you how I got to the term “creative destruction.” In the 80’s, I was in a search for “the excellent company” – the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-wise company that made all the right moves in advance, and that made more money for its shareholders than any of its competitors. This was the permanent outperformer stock – the really good deal. I looked at 4,000 companies over 40 years, and what I found stunned me. There was no such company, and there never had been such a company!

“I thought something had to be wrong. Was I looking at the problem in the right way? No company had been able to outperform the market for any substantial length of time. (GE came as close as any, but didn’t do any better than the overall index). Somehow the market – managed by nobody – was performing better than all the brains on the planet. But why? Then I realized that the reason markets outperform companies was closely tied to what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” This was actually a phrase that came from the Hindu religion, dealing with the transformation of an individual throughout their life, from creation, onto death, and ultimately rebirth.

“That whole notion of creation, life, and destruction seemed a like a good model for what was going on in markets. When the time comes for a company to face its maker and file for bankruptcy, it does it – the markets don’t care. And when there is opportunity out there to create something new, hundreds will go after it. Most will fail, but one or two will succeed (and we’ll assign Apollo-like status to the latter, while quickly forgetting about the 500 others who failed). Markets are better at creation than any individual company, and they are much better at destruction. A company cannot perform better than the markets that are adapting more rapidly – it’s just a fact of life.”

Check out the rest of the interview at Forbes.com.

From time to time, I receive books from authors who are hoping I’ll like the book enough to write about it. This is one of those times.

I write (and read) a lot about brands, story, marketing, and strategy, so when I get a book on one of those topics, I’m generally inclined to read it.

Such is the case with Peter Guber’s upcoming book, Tell to Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story.

Mr. Guber has worked as a high-powered movie executive, political fundraiser, and a university professor, and he shares personal experiences from his life to show how stories sell ideas and move people to action.

The book isn’t about marketing (at least not outwardly). Or how companies can use stories to move the customers to action. But after reading it, the reader will have plenty of ideas that apply directly to telling any narrative, including brand stories.

Why do stories convey information more effectively than a recitation of facts, numbers, or other figures? Guber quotes Robert Rosen, the former dean of UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television:

“Stories put all the key facts into an emotional context. The information in a story doesn’t just sit there as it would in a logical proposition. Instead, it’s built to create suspense.”

Among the many stories Guber shares is one about how Lynda and Stewart Resnick (owners of Teleflora, FIJA Water, and POMWonderful) spent more than $200,000 for a string of imitation pearls worn by Jackie Kennedy. So why did they do it?

“…owning them gave Lynda the right and ability to analyze and copy them, right down to ‘the sterling silver clasp and the three little cubic zirconiums and the silk cord and the seventeen coats of lacquer.’ More than 130,000 of these exact replicas sold at $200 apiece, for a net profit of more than $26 million—all of it told and sold through story… ‘The promise of the story has got to deliver. If it doesn’t deliver, who would care?’”

Lynda tells Guber: “I don’t do companies that don’t have a story, because if they don’t have a story, they don’t have a business.”

Tell to Win is jammed with stories from and about Bill Clinton, Deepak Chopra, Steven Speilberg, Pat Riley and many others—all to illustrate how stories work to motivate, inspire, and sell. In fact, there are so many interesting stories in the book that sometimes it feels a little disjointed as you jump from one to the next. But all in all, it still makes a pretty good read.

One more quote from the book (from Steve Denning) that relates to telling stories in a marketing environment:

“The goal of story telling is to get the listener to take over your story. You want your story to become their story. Then they’re going to create a new story from your story. It’s going to to be adapted, changed, adjusted.”

Order Tell to Win at Amazon.
Click here for the Tell to Win website where you can find a free chapter of the book.

A short excerpt from Baked In by Alex Bogusky and John Winsor:

“Marketing people like to say that product is more than a physical object. As in a cup of coffee is more than a cup of coffee. A pair of sunglasses is more than a pair of sunglasses. A car is more than a car. There’s a story that the car represents. A promise. And that’s what we’re really selling. That’s what the brand is made of.

“Sometimes this story is true, and sometimes, unfortunately, it’s not. Sometimes a car really is just a car. So the process of marketing is to uncover, coax out, and tell a story that is buried inside the product. Most of the time a story can be found, but too often the story is only tenuously connected to the product, and in some cases the story is just wishful thinking on the part of all the marketers around the table. Perhaps the product was created without a clear narrative and audience in mind or is just another me-too product with nothing new to offer. What happens next is too often the sad state of affairs that passes for marketing. A battery of focus groups, ethnographies, brain scans, and more are arranged to go forth and uncover what the consumer wishes the product really was. Then the marketing budget is spent telling lies about the product.”

I think we can all agree, there’s a better way.

It’s a little pricey for its length, but it’s a quick, worth-while read. 
You can buy Baked In here.

In his excellent book, Predictably Irrational, author Dan Ariely writes about how people interact in two different ways, socially and commercially. Social exchanges are freely given, without an expectation of repayment—helping a neighbor move a sofa, helping a coworker jump start a dead battery, or opening a door for someone. These are the every day kindnesses that make life civil. On the other hand, Market exchanges depend on money changing hands in return for a product or service—commerce.

Trouble sets in when these behavioral norms collide, introducing market conditions into a social situation. Placing an economic price on a social exchange affects how each party behaves, often negatively. Ariely uses the example of a man offering a few hundred dollars to “even up” on his mother-in-law’s love. It simply isn’t possible, so the idea is almost offensive. He also offers the example of a day care center that introduced fees for picking up a child late, hoping to discourage this behavior, only to see late pick-ups increase. Ariely writes:

“So we live in two worlds: one characterized by social exchanges and the other characterized by market exchanges. And we apply different norms to these two kinds of relationships. Moreover, introducing market norms into social exchanges… violates the social norms and hurts the relationships. Once this type of mistake has been committed, recovering a social relationship is difficult.”

Consumers aren’t the only ones that make this mistake. Brands do it too.

Think of a brand with a market position that says, “We’re your friend” or “We’re on your side.” A few examples that come to mind:

Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
Zion’s Bank. We haven’t forgotten who keeps us in business.
Verizon. We never stop working for you.

This is great brand positioning: brand as friend, helper, or care giver.

Until the brand introduces a market exchange into the story.

If Zion’s Bank charges a overdraft fee, or eliminates free checking for students because it isn’t profitable, the market exchange collides with the social norm and consumers question whether they really do remember who keeps them in business.

If State Farm cancels a 20-year-old policy because the home owner makes her first claim, or refuses to pay a claim that the customer feels entitles to, the consumer might feel that State Farm wasn’t there.

If Verizon’s network drops calls or customer service is less than helpful, the niceties of the social exchange run headlong into the market exchange reality.

The result? The positive social norm goes away. As Ariely writes, “Once the bloom is off the rose—once a social norm is trumped by a market norm—it will rarely return.” Then your brand story is worthless.

If your brand depends a market position characterized by social exchanges, it is important to manage the brand experience to ensure market exchanges don’t interfere and destroy the social relationship.

Click here to buy and read Ariely’s book, Predictably Irrational and learn more about this phenomena.

I recently wrote an article for the Logoworks Newsletter that is posted at the Logoworks Biz Blog. It’s my list of seven books that every small business owner should read—plus three more books I think you’ll enjoy. In case you’re interested in my recommendations, click here to read the article (and add your favorite book in the comments).

Just got my copy of Dan Ariely’s The Upside of Irrationality from the guys at Inbubblewrap and CEO-READ. Looking forward to reading it just as soon as I can work through the stack of books next to my desk. Thanks guys!

Mitch Joel posted a short list of books about how to create a good story (on his blog, read it here). Most of them aren’t about branding, but rather, the art of story telling (with a good dose of writing thrown in). You’ll have to extrapolate. Worth checking out…

I have long been a fan of Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen, having read several of his books: The Innovator’s Dilemma, The Innovator’s Solution, and Seeing What’s Next as well as many of his personal essays on his website. A few days ago, Dan Pink tweeted a link to this an article from the Harvard Business Review by Dr. Christensen called, How Will You Measure Your Life?. It’s a reworking of a speech that Dr. Christensen has given in a religious setting. This particular version is directed at recent graduates from Harvard Business School. It’s excellent advice and worth reading. Here’s a sample from the article:

Allocate Your Resources

Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s strategy.

I have a bunch of “businesses” that compete for these resources: I’m trying to have a rewarding relationship with my wife, raise great kids, contribute to my community, succeed in my career, contribute to my church, and so on. And I have exactly the same problem that a corporation does. I have a limited amount of time and energy and talent. How much do I devote to each of these pursuits?

Allocation choices can make your life turn out to be very different from what you intended. Sometimes that’s good: Opportunities that you never planned for emerge. But if you misinvest your resources, the outcome can be bad. As I think about my former classmates who inadvertently invested for lives of hollow unhappiness, I can’t help believing that their troubles relate right back to a short-term perspective.

When people who have a high need for achievement—and that includes all Harvard Business School graduates—have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward. You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation, close a sale, teach a class, publish a paper, get paid, get promoted. In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.

If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that lens, you’ll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most.

The rest of the article is today’s Friday Inspiration. You can find it here.

No one reads books any more.

No, that’s not exactly true.

Almost no one reads books any more.

Which means one of two things.

Either reading is no longer useful or it’s a phenomenal opportunity for the few people who do it.

Those who think books aren’t useful would argue that there are new places to get the same information: Wikipedia, blogs, twitter, Google—you name it, they can find what they need somewhere else.

And maybe they’re right (in part).

But the people who read books know something that the first group doesn’t. Books aren’t just about finding information, they’re about something bigger.

Like exploring ideas in depth.

Finding answers to problems.

Discovering new ways of thinking.

No one gets the same depth or breadth of thinking from Wikipedia or an article at Inc.com or TED talk that they will get in a good book on the same subject.

We’re talking about the difference between an appetizer and seat at the banquet.

Most people prefer to starve.

In 2004, the National Endowment of the Arts issued a report called Reading at Risk. In it, the NEA reported that only 56.6% of American adults had read a book of any kind (fiction or non-fiction) in the past year.

And that statistic may be inflated—40% of people in a different survey admitted to lying about having read certain books (source).

Most book readers read fiction.

Which means there is a real opportunity for anyone who wants to stand out from the guy in the next cubicle who loves to talk about what happened last night on Two and a Half Men (the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV every day).

If you read one business book a month (just 5-10 pages a day) you expose yourself to new ideas and solutions to problems that your cubical buddy will simply not get from his sit down with Charlie Sheen and the rest of the prime-time line-up.

Harvest just one idea from each book and you’ll have 12 more ideas than Mr. TV. And if you can get more than one idea from a book, or you read more than one book a month, well, the math just gets better.

So where should you start?

Here are a few lists I’ve stumbled across recently. Lots of good choices here:

• One of my favorite lists each year is from Strategy+Business.
• Business Week Online just published a new recommended reading list, here. (It’s actually a list of lists—recommendations by 30 Business Professors around the country).
• Summer Reading from Wharton.
• Six Best Books to Read for Your Career (that’s the title of the article, not necessarily a recommendation from me).
• Books that Matter 2010 (from Tom Peters).
• Must Read Books for CEOs (again, a title, not necessarily a recommendation).

And, of course, there’s always The 100 Best Business Books of All Time (check out my review, here).

Have another book or recommendation list? Please add it in the comments.

Every once in a while, a book comes along with enough good ideas and marketing how-to’s that I recommend adding it to your marketing tool box.

But in the case of The Brandgym (by David Taylor and David Nichol), the book isn’t just a tool to be included, it is all of the tools in the box. Reading The Brandgym is a little like taking an in-depth seminar in brand management. With it as a guide, you probably don’t need to go anywhere else for ideas, principles, or to-do-lists to help you manage a brand. (You might choose to, but you won’t need to.)

The Brandgym covers eight “workouts” that will help you strengthen your brand’s foundation and focus your branding efforts on initiatives that will generate income. It’s also loaded with ideas and techniques for creating promotions that support the brand’s position and move customers to action.

Workout #4: Build Big Brand Ideas alone is worth getting the book. I found myself underlining and marking pages to come back to again later.

But what I love most about the approach taken in this book is the focus on a brand’s substance (remarkable products, growth, and the core business), not the so-called “exciting” part of branding (new design/advertising/launch).  It’s a resource for serious brand managers. In fact, it’s good enough to replace many of the marketing books currently used in business schools.

If you’re looking for ways to grow a stagnant brand, or new ideas for stretching a brand into new product categories, or ways to co-ordinate your marketing activities to maximize your spending, this book is a good place to turn. If you are in the process of launching a new brand, it is an essential resource to help you succeed.

I highly recommend The Brandgym.

Full-disclosure: I was given a copy of the book by David Taylor shortly after it was published. But that doesn’t change my recommendation, it’s well worth the read.

Other Brandgym Links:

You can’t purchase the book in the U.S. yet, but it is available here.
Check out David Taylor’s Brandgym Blog, here.
I’ve written about another of David’s books here.