Top Shelf Reading Picks:

Seth Godin’s Small Is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas is a hodgepodge of his ideas and blog posts that seems disconnected, but there is a common theme through it all–treat customers and others with respect, and that is the secret to success. Sure, he talks about the advantages a small business might have: less bureaucracy, the ability to adapt quickly and be the new, new thing. Yet, it all comes back to what Aretha Franklin said: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T .Find out what it means to me.”

There are too many tidbits for me to recall and, since I listened to the audio in my car, I don’t have my trusty Post-its marking my favorite parts. However, I’ll point out a few that stood out. Note to readers: Seth read his own book, which I kind of liked as it felt like you were having a random conversation with him. In a similar vein, I previously enjoyed Sen. Barack Obama reading The Audacity of Hope and former president Bill Clinton reading My Life. Sometimes the voice can make or break an audio. I’ve listened to a few subpar chick lit books solely because I enjoyed the English accent of the reader. Or in the case of The Abstinence Teacher, I got a chill when Campbell Scott’s voice boomed out of my speakers. He was perfectly matched to the material.

Sure, I digress, although not really. A lot of what Seth talks about in Small is the New Big is the importance of the delivery of services and goods, whether it’s packaging, marketing or the actual product. As an example, note that I call him Seth. After listening to his monologue for the past two weeks in my car, I feel that we should be on a first-name basis. One example he uses of how the delivery of a message is almost as important as the message focuses on how JetBlue started selling a “safe journey.” The company simply redid its announcements in the airport. Rather than the garbled shouting, it trained gateway attendants to speak clearly and calmly, which can put otherwise cranky passengers in a much better frame of mind before boarding an aircraft with no food, no leg room and too many people putting oversized luggage into the overhead bin. (Thinking like Seth, I would say that airlines need to focus on the better delivery of checked baggage in order to increase their numbers of on-time flights. It’s the fear of waiting for, or losing, luggage that prompts too many people to take all their worldly possessions with them, slowing down boarding for everyone).

The JetBlue airline example hit home with me on one of my recent trips on USAir, which had the equivalent of an old-fashioned schoolmarm making the boarding announcements. She made clear when you would board, which side of the rope to walk on, and that you would be sent to the back of the line should you break the rules. Among the giggles of the business travelers who were undoubtedly having flashbacks to grammar school, we all marveled as the attendant ensured the quickest boarding of a flight I have ever experienced. Message from Seth: Setting the tone and people’s expectations can be done even if it’s with your tone of voice. This is what I remind myself as I start every customer service response with “Thank you for calling/writing.”

I also agree wholeheartedly with his statement that anonymity is the death of civilization. Anyone who regularly reads blogs has undoubtedly experienced the many irrelevant and useless comments of “anonymous.” There is a reason local newspapers only run letters to the editor if they are signed and verified–it helps maintain civility if you have to look your neighbors in the eye and stand behind your opinions. Unfortunately, we’ve created a world where people don’t need to know their neighbors anymore. This means less accountability and less civility. More on how our suburban sprawl has helped create a less accountable world in my review of Nine Shift.

Another interesting point was that Seth disagrees with Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week. Ferriss advises you to read only items and sections of items that are relevant to your work. Seth, on the other hand, proclaims that you should read something different and not relevant every week. Thanks Seth, I’ll feel better about keeping my subscription to US Weekly–I’m not sure you can get less relevant than that.

However, Seth agrees with Ferriss in his analysis of how Americans have confused working hard with working long. In other words, working hard is getting up at 4:30 a.m. and plowing the fields; working long is a lawyer sitting at a desk in an air-conditioned office for 20 hours a day living on take-out sushi. He touches on the idea that there is no glory in working long; it just means you’re working long.

I’ll end with a few comments about his section on “respectful marketing.” Since marketing and branding are my business loves, I found it amusing that “respectful marketing” often is seen as an oxymoron. Which brings us back to Aretha. Consumers are smart. They know when you don’t respect them. And, if your product needs to mislead consumers or “pull the wool over their eyes” to get them to buy, then you need to rethink your product. Seth’s test of a good product? Imagine an equal marketplace between you and your competitors. Would people still buy your product? If not, it’s time to rethink your business plan.

Top Shelf Bottom Line: While this was not my favorite Seth Godin book, he does put in some good tidbits–so worth listening to especially if you’re in a customer-service business. But then again, aren’t we all in the business of customer service? Each person will walk away with something different, and you can read it or listen to it in bits and starts. I’d love to hear in our comments below what captured your attention.

Last month I picked David Vinjamuri’s book, Accidental Branding: How Ordinary People Created Extraordinary Brands, as one of my must-reads for the year. So I asked him to return the favor and send us a few of his favorites. I haven’t read any of these yet, but if you’ve read any of them, please fee free to give your own review in our comments section.

1. A New Brand World: Eight Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the Twenty-First Century  by Scott Bedbury. This is a work by a guy who saw both Nike and Starbucks grow from the ground up. He has as complete an understanding of branding as anyone I’ve ever read, and he is a much better writer than most.
2. The Culting of Brands: Turn Your Customers into True Believers  by Douglas Atkin. Atkin asks a fascinating question: We talk casually about brands as cults, but are they really? Do they meet the sociological definition? Then he goes inside both real cults and cult brands to find out, as well as interviewing sociologists. He has some surprising conclusions.
3. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual  by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls and David Weinburger. This 7-year old book accurately predicted how blogs would emerge and how the conversation between brands and consumers would be forever changed by the internet. It has a strident tone (and really does read like a manifesto), but it’s an excellent read.
4. Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers  by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. This book directly answers the question: Should your business have a blog? It comes from two of the best-known bloggers online (Scoble worked for Microsoft) and is very easy to read.
5. Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People  by Marc Gobe. Marc is known as a guru on design, and he helps uncover how much of good branding is actually great design. This book not only changed the way I think about branding, it changed the way I invest in stocks.

Thanks, David. I’ve got a few of them on order at my local library.

Nina DiSesa’s Seducing the Boys Club: Uncensored Tactics from a Woman at the Top has surprisingly slipped onto my must-read list. I was a bit reluctant to read another “all guys suck” book. However, the title gave the impression that this was not going to be a “how I beat my head against the glass ceiling” book but more of a “how I beat the boys up the corporate ladder (while wearing high heels and dancing backward)” story. And DiSesa delivers.

Still, the reason this makes my must-read list probably was a matter of circumstance. I was on vacation and had a bunch of novels and magazines to read (My plan was not to tax my brainpower for a week). I read Seducing the Boys Club first because I liked the title. I was surprised to find that it reads a bit like chick lit, is at times humorous and actually delivers some fresh takes on how to deal with the old boys’ club. It was also a behind-the-scenes look at life in an ad agency (Think The Devil Wears Prada from the boss’s point of view, but with more of a plot and minus the annoying designer name-dropping). It was also interesting to read real-life stories about some memorable ad campaigns. Now that the writers are finished striking, the somewhat tepid Cashmere Mafia and Lipstick Jungle could benefit from of DiSesa’s obviously real, yet wacky, story lines.

DiSesa jumps right in and states matter-of-factly that the old boys’ club exists, so deal with it. No time is wasted on whining about how it hurt her career. When it comes to men, she says, “We have to seduce them without sex and manipulate them without malice. And we must like them.” She’s simply pointing out that if anyone (man or woman) knows you don’t like him or her, he or she is not going to like you.

This started the book off on a good note for me because, like DiSesa, I have always liked working with men. Despite my founding a company to help women in the workplace, I was guilty in an earlier career of firing an entirely female staff and hiring men because they were easier for me (and the rest of the old boys I worked with) to deal with. Ironically, my present company, the Downtown Women’s Club, was founded while I was working for a few of the oldest old boys in Boston, with their complete support and backing. I can’t recall getting anything but opposition from many of the senior women in town at the time (There were, of course, some amazing exceptions to this). DiSesa ends the intro by offering three lessons she’s learned:

1. Always “read” the room (You’re less likely to step in excrement);
2. Don’t wallow in anxiety (It makes you weak); and
3. Don’t confuse seduction with sex (One is a brilliant business tactic; the other isn’t).

The rest of the book follows her climb from entry level to the top at McCann, Erickson.

What I liked most is that she doesn’t pull punches (I’m sure more than one gentleman featured in the book probably has her face on his dartboard), and she doesn’t hide some of the bigger mistakes she made (even when it involved having a gusher of a nosebleed in the middle of a presentation–which she refused to leave despite making the clients queasy).

Through her adventures, misadventures and successes, we learn how to play office politics. I can see more than one female reader cringe at her recommendation to seduce (not sexually) and manipulate men. Yes, manipulation for the wrong reasons can be dreadful. But, as DiSesa points out, “Most people don’t mind being ‘handled’ as long as you don’t hurt them and (you) act magnanimously. They won’t resent you for manipulating them if you give them something in return.” One caveat here: She is in the advertising business, which manipulates consumers, so she’s gotta be a fan of manipulation.

Top Shelf Bottom Line: While Seducing the Boys Club focuses on a corporate environment, I think it’s relevant to entrepreneurs because she’s mostly in leadership roles throughout the book. And if you’re a female entrepreneur in a mostly male industry, you may be hiring good old boys or facing off with them across the negotiating table.

Of note in DiSesa’s conclusion are the five classic mistakes women make when we find ourselves leading the boys:

1. We get drunk with power;
2. We stop reading the room;
3. We become real witches;
4. We take the reins and don’t make rain; and
5. We forget that we have to be better than men.

This is a great book for all women to read or for anyone interested in what working in an ad agency is really like (or before you think about hiring an ad agency).