Top Shelf Reading Picks:

I’m still talking about Nine Shift: Work, Life and Education in the 21st Centrury by William A. Draves and Julie Coates this week because it brings up some very important trends and concepts we need to consider as business owners.

As discussed in my last post, during the industrial age, we all left the farm and went to the cities. When we became successful, we moved to the suburbs and commuted to the cities. And, here is where the next chapter in American history begins.

According to the authors, by the year 2020 many of us will be working at home and this will bring about the demise of the company as we know it, and also suburbia. What happens when people work at home? The company intranet replaces the office. It also affects the traditional hierarchical pyramid structure because employees will now collaborate online via networks, making “what� you know almost as important as “who� you know.

We’re starting to see this with Gen Y hitting the workplace. They don’t defer to seniority in meetings; they come with “ubernetworks� where they can source information with a few clicks of a button; and they can’t comprehend why open-source software makes those of us with legal degrees cringe at the thought. Personally, I think most of these are good things as it leads to innovation and performance-based rewards.

While there was a lot of interesting discussion about this in the book, my favorite part was the list of 10 things people will say in a company when its pyramid is collapsing. Maybe that’s because I heard many of them at my last company (which shortly thereafter was sold to a competitor), including:

• I can’t make that decision.
• We’ve always done it that way.
• That’s not in my job description.
• They won’t give us the staff to do that.

So what does all this have to do with suburbia? It will likely be much improved. The authors point out that in suburbia today, everyone has their McMansions which are designed so that you never have to interact with neighbors. Gone are the front porches and sidewalks that were common in earlier decades. Also gone are the car ports and street parking. All of these were aspects of suburban life that allowed for interaction with neighbors. Now, many suburbanites simply go from their kitchen/mudroom to their attached 3-car garage to hop into their SUV and drive to the office.

What’s wrong with this picture? Perhaps it correlates with the fact that community involvement is down. When you don’t have to see your neighbors, then you don’t have to justify that you voted against affordable housing or school improvements. You also don’t feel obligated to clean up the local park or paint the library.

What’s next? As more people work at home, they’ll still seek out communities both locally and online to replace the one they had at the office. Just stop by any Starbucks or library and you can see that people still like to work besides other people. This (and the fact that most Boomer McMansions are well beyond the reach of the next generation) will lead to people seeking more dense communities. In correlation with the authors’ prediction that light rail will replace cars (because you can work on trains, and there’s no solution to traffic congestion), these dense communities will be centered around light rail train stations.

So what does this mean for entrepreneurs? It may be easier to find employees if you run a virtual company. Or, if you want to open that bagel/coffee shop, you might want to skip the office park or downtown location and locate in a neighborhood. From my own business standpoint, I enjoyed the authors’ predictions that associations and both in person and online communities will grow.

Moreover, I had to smile as my “exclusive� suburb is trying to adjust to the light rail that’s going to start running through town next month, as well as the new sidewalks and affordable housing that are being built (my town, along with the other surrounding suburbs had been fighting all of these things for decades – yet, I moved here last year precisely because these changes were coming).

The Bottom Line:  Per the theory of the book, our society is going to undergo more changes in the next decade than we have in 100 years. Are you and your business ready?

Other related reading:  Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam

Next post – The Year 2020, Part III – Good news for the girls and Gen Y, bad news for boys and Boomers.

Nine Shift: Work, Life and Education in the 21st Centrury by William A. Draves and Julie Coates highlights nine societal “shifts� that will complete our move from the Industrial Age into the Innovation Age by the year 2020. According to the authors, 75% of our lives will change between 2000 and 2020. A change that parallels what happened when we moved from an agrarian society to the Industrial Age between 1900 and 1920. Thanks to Topshelf reader Michael Arbow for recommending this book!

There’s so much in here that I’ve had to break this review up into three sections. But, first let’s list out the nine “shifts:�

1. Many more people will work at home
2. The intranet will replace physical offices
3. Networks will replace pyramid (hierarchical) structures
4. Trains will replace cars
5. Communities will become dense
6. New societal infrastructures will evolve
7. Cheating becomes collaboration
8. Half of all learning will be online
9. Education will be web-based

I’ll address those issues individually in later posts, but I want to note that the book was published in 2003, which means probably researched and written in 2001/2002. While some of the shifts listed above have already started happening, we should credit the authors with the fact that they weren’t at all prevalent five years ago.

I wanted to first focus on what I liked best about the book: their comparison to life at the last turn of the century and the analogy to the auto industry. Before discussing the nine shifts, the authors give you some background about how the world was in the period 1900-1920, using examples of rural farm life in Kansas and how the automobile came into existence and completely destroyed the world as they knew it.

Originally, the car was first thought to be a “play toy� for the rich and not a “necessity.� People even thought they were a “fad.� Flash forward a few decades, and the automobile can be directly tied to the creation of factories and even our entire way of suburban life. I’d seen the comparison of the auto industry to the internet before, but never in this much detail. Here’s a brief summary:

1. The auto completely destroyed agrarian life (they were built in new factories, tractors led to the demise of the family farms; displaced farmers went to the cities/factories)
2. When a family could afford a car, they could afford to move back out of the city, hence the creation of suburbs. Yet work, still remained downtown, requiring the need for more cars.
3. Since 1903, we’ve had over 2,200 car companies making cars, and now we’re down to a select few.

1. The internet is completely destroying our industrial life (technology has displaced factory workers, outsourcing and virtual work is becoming more and more of a reality).
2. As commutes from suburbs become longer, more people will consider working at home; as a result we will see a change in suburbs (more on that later).
3. Despite the dot com bubble bursting, there are some big survivors in the various categories of internet/technology.

Want more parallels?

Biggest issues facing the US 100 years ago:

1. 60+ hour workweeks
2. Poverty and the extreme inequitable distribution of wealth
3. Healthcare

Also, check out this post of mine from back in March sparked by a New York Times article paralleling current economic conditions with 1928. Yep, that’s right, we’re looking at the same economy our grandparents did one year before the Great Depression.

The Bottom Line: Before we attempt to predict the future, we should take some time to understand our past. This book does both.

**It also couldn’t hurt to read (or re-read) Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (the Nine Shift authors draw from it) and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

More thoughts on the Nine Shifts coming later this week … Part II – The demise of companies and suburbia as we know it; Part III – Good news (for women); bad news (for Boomers).

Sometimes good entrepreneurial advice comes in unexpected places. Lindsey Pollak’s Getting from College to Career: 90 Things to do before you join the real world is a guide for new graduates. But, here are some topics she covered that I thought were great for entrepreneurs of all ages:

• Minor in something majorly helpful (OK, too late for most of us to go back now, but somehow, my English major would’ve been helpd by a minor in economics or something, rather than history).
• Study China. If you haven’t figured this out, you might want to start.
• Be a winner. Chase down and get yourself nominated (or nominate yourself) for awards. Awards stay on your resume forever. And, everyone wants to work with a winner.
• Take every speaking/presentation opportunity that comes your way.
• Complete a physical challenge. Pollak notes that some of our country’s most successful people take their physical challenges just as seriously. I know I’m functioning at top capacity whenever I’m in the best physical shape.
• Perform five minutes of stand-up. It may be humbling but it’ll help with your speaking skills (and your sense of humor).
• Have a hobby. It’s a great way to meet people and also–all work and no play does make for a rather boring entrepreneur.

The Bottom Line: Good book to get for any college students in your life.

**Interesting stat from the book (which Pollak pulled from Entrepreneur magazine) = 71 percent of teenagers are interested in becoming entrepreneurs.

Having decided that I couldn’t read more than one to two business book per week, I’m asking fellow authors whom I spotlight to send me their picks. These two just came in from The Starfish and The Spider’s co-author Rod Beckstrom.

Just in case you’re wondering how I can actually read all these books that I do AND still have a day job, I’ll confess: (1) I read very, very quickly; (2) I’m no longer afraid to stop reading a book if it doesn’t grab me in the first few pages; (3) I usually have one book on CD in my car; and (4) some of these reviews are updated versions of my all time favorites from my former “books & stuff” blog for the Downtown Women’s Club.

Roadtrip Nation: A Guide to Discovering Your Path In Life by Nathan Gebhard, Mike Marriner, and Joanne Gordon is promoted as a guide for college graduates, but this book is truly an entrepreneurial bible for every age. It follows two young men who graduated from college and didn’t know what they wanted to do with their lives. So, they hopped in an RV and drove across the country interviewing people about their jobs. 

The interviewees range from Boston Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Benjamin Zander to a lobsterman. What’s most intriguing, however, is that rather than delivering stale status reports from founders of companies like Barnes & Noble, Starbucks and Dell, you’ll learn what drove these visionaries to buck the system, overcome objections, and follow their passions. In essence Marriner and Gebhard asked these extremely successful entrepreneurs “what the heck were you thinking way back then?â€?

And, that’s what I liked most. Because almost all of the entrepreneurs in the book were repeatedly discouraged by others from pursuing their business plans. So, whenever anyone would tell me things like, you can’t possibly start another women’s network in Boston, I would remember that someone once told Benjamin Zander, that he was so bad at composing, he should never be allowed to do so again. Good thing he listened to the music and not that one critic.

And, after launching Boston, I was then told that I couldn’t break into the NYC market.  That’s when I would remind myself that someone once told Howard Schultz that Italian style coffeehouses would never work in the US. Thank goodness he also ignored them or I would be blogging from Dunkin’ Donuts instead of Starbucks!

Looks like the book is out of publication, but you can still get a copy from other resellers through Amazon. However, the guys are still roadtripping. To check out what they’re up to now, visit www.roadtripnation.com.

The Bottom Line: This book is for anyone who has ever woken up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night and thought “what the heck am I doing with my life?” Keep this book by your bedside and your dreams at the forefront.

How to be a Billionaire: Proven Strategies from the Titans of Wealth by Martin Fridson is the perfect antidote for The Secret’s “get money for nothingâ€? philosophy. It’s a book about people who actually made their own money. Yes, that’s “madeâ€? as in “Donna Summer working hard for her money” made. And, we’re not just talking about a little bit of pocket change.

Initially, I struggled with the concept of How to be a Billionaire, because, despite my age, I tend to lean towards the gen y philosophy of making just enough to cover your preferred lifestyle over the entire course of your life. Add to this the fact that I’m an “accidental entrepreneur,� who would’ve gone on being a corporate “cog� for life (as my ToonTown-addicted son calls it), had I not discovered that being a single mom with a baby didn’t exactly endear me to corporate America. Yet, I realize that if my company is to succeed it needs to be extremely profitable, and to do so, who better to learn from than the men (yes, it’s all men) who have done this. 

Interestingly, my life philosophy wasn’t diametrically opposed to those of the self-made billionaire set. Almost all of the men profiled – Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Wayne Huizenga, and Sam Walton, to name a few – were not motivated by a desire to become wealthy; instead, they were motivated by the accumulation of wealth. Most, in fact, kept their modest lifestyles even after they passed the billion dollar mark. 

In short, they were fascinated and motivated by the process, not the result. You can call it a challenge, a game, a desire to beat others, a test of will; but while others play baseball, these guys play industry hardball. The book is not a step by step guide, so you have to draw out the lessons and apply them yourselves. And, it sounded (I listened to the audio) more like a series of magazine profiles than a cohesive book.  But, each profile ties back in varying degrees to the following nine strategies: 

1. Take monumental risks
2. Do business in new ways
3. Dominate your market
4. Consolidate an industry
5. Buy low
6. Thrive on deals
7. Out-manage the competition
8. Invest in political influence
9. Resist unions

And basic principles: 

1. Pursue the money in ideas
2. Rules are breakable
3. Copying pays better than innovating
4. Keep on growing
5. Hold on to your equity
6. Hard work is essential
7. Use financial leverage
8. Keep the back door open
9. Make mistakes, then learn from them
10. Frugality pays
11. Enjoy the pursuit
12. Develop a thick skin

Hmmmm. I noted that there was nothing on the lists about “asking the Universe to give you the goods.� Guess no one told these guys about The Secret. 

The Bottom Line: This book is clearly for entrepreneurs and not someone trying to make it to a billion on a salary. What I liked best about the book was that it’s a reality slap for “wanna be entrepreneurs.� Sure, I might not be able to emulate these self-made billionaires in every way, especially when right off the bat, the author says these guys all neglected their families in pursuit of their goals. (Doh! I’m an entrepreneur because I didn’t want to neglect my son.) But, as shown in the profile of Sam Walton, copying pays better than innovating. So, I will employ as many of their strategies and principles as I can, and console myself with the fact that they didn’t have all these great business books to learn from. 

I finally did it. I picked up The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. It was there in the library under new nonfiction and it kept beckoning to me, “You know you want to … C’mon, you want to know the big secret.� And I caved.  I picked it up, put it down, picked it up, put it down and, finally, I picked it up. My curiosity got the best of me.

And you know what the big secret is? That you can make lots of money by telling people in 184 repetitive and redundant pages that “like attracts like� and to “think good thoughts.�

More about my not so good thoughts on the quality of the book below, but I have to hand it to the author, it’s a brilliant way to make money:  telling people that all you have to do to get money (note, I didn’t use the term “make money�), lose weight, be happy, or fall in love is to buy this video or book. It’s a winning strategy in our “Money for Nothing� society. Sting and Dire Straits were spot on back in 1985, because today we live in a culture where everyone wants success without putting in the work.

Now, I’m not saying that I disagree with the book’s basic principle – that banishing negative thoughts will improve your life. Or even that some people can only get this message through reiteration of the same idea, page after page after page after page. But I can say that this is a book that does not add many “deep thoughts� to our society. Instead you get doozies like:

“You have two sets of feelings:  good feelings and bad feelings.  And you know the difference between the two because one makes you feel good, and the other makes you feel bad.�

Wow.  Now that’s insight.

“Begin right now to shout to the universe, ‘Life is so easy! Life is so good! All good things come to me!’�

I don’t know about you, but if I ran up and down my street shouting this, my neighbors would call the cops either out of concern … or spite … not sure which one. Then the authors recommend you place your order with the Universe (meaning whatever you want), just like you would “order from a catalog.�

Well, I hope that when I do this, that the person taking my order spent some time in customer service training at LL Bean. But, on a more serious note, is it just me, or is the analogy about shopping for material goods just so wrong in a book about the secret to a good life?

Hmmmm. I’ll have to think about that while I put in my order with the Universe. 

Dear Universe: 

Please send me angel seed money for my company, a new laptop which still runs on Windows XP, and an iPhone (preferably one that’s not a lemon).  And, while we’re at it, can you have it all delivered by a really hot UPS guy?

In the meantime, I’ll be here doing nothing but thinking good materialistic thoughts just like The Secret told me to.

Sincerely,

Diane

The Bottom Line: Optimism is always a good philosophy, especially for entrepreneurs; but in this case it made for a poor excuse of a book/video. However, it’s a brilliant example of what sells in our “Money for Nothing� society.

The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom is my top pick for this summer’s must read business book. (Of course I still have one more month to top it, but it’s going to be tough.) Generally, I like books that make me think; but I like books that make me think about my business plan even more.

The authors’ point is that some organizations (i.e., the Federal Government, major record companies) are like spiders where their command structure is centralized and if you chop off its head, the creature dies. Other companies are more like starfish, where if you chop off one of its arms, it grows another (CraigsList, AA). They make some great points about how difficult it is for centralized companies to fend off decentralized ones. So, what are you going to be? A spider or a starfish? Or perhaps a hybrid? They do allow for that.

Now decentralization is not for every organization. In fact, it’s somewhat mystifying for people unfamiliar with the concept. The authors tell a wonderful anecdote about Dave Garrison, who was the CEO of Netcom back in the early days of the Internet, once trying to explain the Internet to French investors completely unclear on the concept. They kept asking him “but who is the president of the Internet?� Finally, he broke down and said he was, just so that they could get on with the meeting.

I will confess this book sparked a big change in my business plan. In fact, there were so many similarities between the structure of AA and my business that I’m going to do a little more research on AA’s history. Unfortunately, I don’t think I want to come up with a 12-Step program for women who don’t like to network. (Nor do I want to make an analogy that “we’re a little bit like AA.�) But, I can be a catalyst who creates better ways to enable women to create their own “networking circles� around a shared ideology.  Next step … find a few champions, and then this starfish will launch!

The Bottom Line: Must read book for anyone in a Web 2.0 business or a traditional business being challenged by a new decentralized society.