Book Review: You Can’t Spell America Without Eric

There’s an old song you may know by Lovin’ Spoonful called “Summer in the City.” It starts like this: “Hot town/summer in the city/Back of my neck/getting dirty and gritty” and soon follows with “All around/people looking half dead/Walking on the sidewalk/hotter than a match head.” This song popped into my head while looking at the pictures from photographer Eric Payson’s trek across America titled You Can’t Spell America Without Eric. While it’s not an absolute, many of Payson’s subjects appear worn down, a bit sweaty, neither happy or unhappy—maybe the way most of us look when caught unaware, and maybe the way America looks day to day.

While the book’s title suggests a road trip, and a number of the photographs are actually taken looking through the front windshield of a car, this is mostly a book about people, which is always the most interesting photography subject. And, in reality, these people could be from anywhere in the U.S., which may be the point. From a bald, hairy guy smoking a cigarette in a swimming pool, to a vendor throwing peanuts, to little girls playing in some sort of public area (a museum?), the photographs evoke feelings more than a sense of place. The American flags that spring up throughout only heighten the feeling of this being Everywhere U.S.A.

Payson’s photos have a throwback quality, as if they could have been taken 30 years ago, although it’s hard to put your finger on what it is about them that evokes that thought. Is it the fact that they often have a slight haze, whether via smoke or rain or too bright sun? Or is it that he often chose people or locales that make it difficult to pinpoint a time? (For example, people look basically the same in swimsuits today as they have for the last 40 years.) Or is it the manner in which he brings out certain colors? I don’t know, but it’s definitely there.

One of the most jarring photographs in the book for me was a photograph of Sarah Hughes, the figure skating champion from the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics, riding in a car during a parade. (An interesting subject, famous yet obscure; I had to really think hard and do a little research to remember who she could be.) Many a photographer capturing images of America would make this type of shot—a smiling, waving, patriotic sweetheart—the norm. In You Can’t Spell America Without Eric, it stands out as the exception. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is in the eye of the beholder, and it will go a long way in determining your appreciation of this book.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Book Review: A Perfect Mess

Remember those old commercials for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups? The ones where you’d see a person on one side of a wall walking with a jar of peanut butter while the guy coming around the corner had a chocolate bar? They’d collide and one would say angrily, “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!”, then the other: “You got your peanut butter in my chocolate!” They’d quickly realize, however, that this messy interaction was a happy accident that had spawned a wonderful new candy sensation.

Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman, the authors of the new book A Perfect Mess, would probably approve of that commercial, because their book’s thesis is that a little mess can be a good thing, that too much orderliness can stifle inventiveness, waste time—even go against the laws of nature.

If you have a messy desk, the authors refute the claims of orderliness experts who say you’re losing hours every day hunting for things. In fact, they say that for most messy people, looks can be deceiving—there’s usually a method to the madness, even if that method is vague even to the person who’s learned to thrive within it. For example, your desk is a mess, but you might keep a small clear space immediately around you, with the most important things staying in your closer sphere and the less important being pushed to the far corners. What you need most stays close at hand, what you need only occasionally is further away, and you know that, at least subconsciously.

And, like the Reese’s Cup example above, that messy desk might bring together two disparate projects or papers that spark an idea of how they could be combined in a new, creative way. Or if you’re really messy, as in the case of Alexander Fleming, who came back from vacation one day to find that mold had invaded a petri dish left on his desk, it might lead to you discovering penicillin. Now that’d be cool. And it would never happen if everything was always lined up in color-coded file folders, now would it?

Of course neatniks might say that this book just throws around a few messy examples that prove the rule of order. Even a messy, disgusting squirrel finds a nut amid the clutter sometimes. And that’s a point you could argue, except A Perfect Mess doesn’t just look at messy people—it looks at how messiness, as in a lack of order, is often a stronger model for success.

There are countless examples of this. Look at war. From the guerilla-style American revolutionaries picking off the well-ordered redcoats to the decentralized cells of Al-Qaeda to the random insurgency that has often stonewalled the highly-trained and highly organized U.S. troops in Iraq, it’s clear that messiness has its advantages.

Look at business, especially today. More and more often we hear about businesses using open-source products and encouraging user participation in creating everything from Web sites to a company’s R&D. It’s messy, unpredictable, and requires giving up some control, but it’s also a way to generate new ideas that a business might never come up with in the traditional manner. (The authors also use Microsoft as an example of a messy company, getting their hands into everything, putting out products on the fly and refining them through successive iterations. This method may provoke criticism, but it’s hard to argue that it’s been unsuccessful.)

Even nature desires a certain messiness, and the book provides a number of examples. The one I found most interesting describes a species of turtle whose offspring’s sex is determined by the outside temperature. If the temperature didn’t fluctuate, all would be the same sex, effectively killing off the species.

These guys have dozens of other fun, messy stories you’ll enjoy, and overall the book is a winner. Know where it falters, though? When it attempts to categorize types of messiness, define the methods people use in dealing with mess, etc. Come on, guys, it’s a book about mess. Don’t mess it up by trying to neaten it.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Book Review: Know-How by Ram Charan

When a sports team is going bad, you’ll often hear the manager talk about going “back to the fundamentals.” In baseball, for example, that means see the ball, hit the ball, see the ball, catch the ball.  In football it might mean reminding a receiver that you can’t run with the ball until you’ve actually caught it. It’s not as if the players don’t know the fundamentals, it’s more that they get distracted, or try to do too much at once, or lose focus when the pressure is on.

So it is in business.  I can just imagine a manager at some level of a company being taken aside by his boss who says, “Things haven’t been going well lately. We need to get back to the fundamentals. Read this.”  And the manager receives a copy of Ram Charan’s latest book, Know-How.

Know-How is a book that does a nice job of boiling down success as a business leader into eight skills, things you must “know how” to do to be effective.  None of the skills Charan highlights is going to give you an “a-ha!” moment, but they give you an “oh yeah” moment, as in, “Oh, yeah, I knew I should have been doing that all along, but got so caught up with X and Y that I forgot Z.” In this way, it’s a good book to keep around to gauge how your leadership is progressing against these bedrock benchmarks.

Here’s what I mean by the fundamentals.  In a (long) sentence, Know-How teaches that in order to succeed, a leader must position a business or department correctly, must set priorities well in order to reach correct goals that are attainable, must manage people well in order to keep them motivated and “with the program”, and must be alert to outside factors that present both risks and opportunities.

I probably didn’t teach you anything you didn’t know there. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy, and that doesn’t mean you’re doing it. And if Charan left it at that, it would obviously be a short book. But, of course, he doesn’t.

While Charan can’t tell you exactly how these fundamentals apply in your unique situation,  he does offer a wealth of stories that illustrate how real-life leaders have successfully used them (along with a few stories of those who did not). Among the leaders Charan discusses in more detail: Blockbuster’s John Antioco, Steve Jobs of Apple, Verizon’s Ivan Seidenberg, GE’s Jeff Immelt, and others, including many anonymous leaders who did or did not make the necessary adjustments. (Charan also uses Home Depot’s newly ex-CEO Bob Nardelli as an example of an adept leader. Whether he would take that back considering more recent developments is unknown.)

As the last paragraph suggests, most of Charan’s examples center around larger organizations with multiple layers of management and large teams. He uses a few smaller company examples, but much of the book is devoted to big companies.  That doesn’t make the advice any less valid, and it makes sense in that smaller companies with a good product/service can often thrive in the short term even with poor or inexperienced leaders, while bigger, more diversified companies usually face more sophisticated challenges.

But, whether your business is big or small, whether you manage one person or 100, the fundamentals are still fundamental.  Having Know-How on your shelf to remind you to see the ball, catch the ball, run with the ball can help you stay focused on the key skills that will drive your business and your career.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Book Review: Future, Inc.

One of the biggest business lessons of the late 1990s and early 2000s came from teenagers using the Internet to trade music digitally, costing record companies millions of dollars. Caught off guard, the record companies ended up having 15-year-old kids arrested—not exactly the ideal way to interact with your target demographic.

In his new book Future, Inc., futurist Eric Garland says the record companies should have seen it coming, but they were too interested in working their traditional business model to notice a threat coming from a seemingly unrelated industry (computers). Similar (although less publicized) situations happen all the time in business, and the companies that avoid getting caught flat-footed are the ones who know enough to make educated guesses about the future. By doing so, they stay ahead of the curve, revamping their business models in advance to meet the changes head-on, or using the knowledge to launch new products or services that fill a coming need.

With Future, Inc., Garland gives you a double-dip toward predicting the future and getting out in front of it. First, he offers a wealth of ideas on how you can predict the future of your particular industry. Second, he offers his own take on today’s biggest trends and where those trends might be leading us.

How can you predict the future of your business? Garland offers a number of factors for you to analyze, and then suggests ways to put them together and make educated guesses. The issues that affect your business are not just about your current competitors. New technologies, government regulations, economic trends, environmental factors, politics, your company’s local community—any or all of these could affect what happens to your company.

As an example, Garland picks the chocolate industry. What if, thanks to the trends of increasing litigiousness and the epidemic of childhood obesity and diabetes, the chocolate industry found itself increasingly under attack, thus damaging sales while costing companies millions in legal fees? How would those companies react? What could they do to get ahead of that trend?

(Another example that comes to my mind would be the fact that some companies that had long enjoyed their treatment by the Republican majority in Congress should have been preparing for expected changes if the Democrats were to take control. )

While Garland suggests ways to predict the future, he also cautions companies not to get caught up in media hype. Carefully analyzing what is happening through the use of multiple, reliable sources can help you better assess the market of today and tomorrow.

To help you on your predictive path, Garland uses the second half of the book to point out current trends, where they may be headed, and what risks/opportunities each presents. Among the issues he raises:

• the effects of an aging population
• rising costs of health care
• ever-increasing computing power with ever-smaller chips
• biotechnology breakthroughs and the ethical questions they raise
• energy
• media
• the environment

You can probably easily cite some issues around these topics. The need for alternative energy sources, cloning controversies, people living longer and longer but the costs to keep them alive growing larger and larger—Garland discusses these and more, but offers thoughts on consequences you may not have considered.

Garland’s writing style is accessible and easily understood, not overly scholarly as books of this nature sometmes are. And, by combining his research on macro trends with a detailed plan for do-it-yourself futurism, Garland goes beyond telling you what’s coming—he makes the book a resource that you can return to repeatedly. Even when the trends he speaks of become dated, the methods used to make smart choices about the future will remain relevant.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Book Review: Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing

We can’t all be YouTube, rocketing from a garage startup to a billion-dollar buyout in less than two years on an unceasing wave of viral buzz. But, if your business is doing good things, it can probably generate a lot more buzz than it’s getting now. You might think that word of mouth buzz occurs only as a natural reaction to a “wow” product or service—you either have it or you don’t, it’s out of your control.

Ron McDaniel thinks otherwise, and his new book Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing shows you how a deliberate buzz strategy can lift your business, especially if your competitors aren’t employing one of their own.

The first thing McDaniel makes clear is that word of mouth can be generated by everyone in a company–in fact, it’s probably more meaningful when it comes from employees who aren’t executives or part of the sales staff. Hearing the buzz from the Queen Bee (or King Bee) is great, but it’s when the whole hive is buzzing that your customers and your industry really take notice. (McDaniel says his obsession with buzz really took hold when an employee told him that word of mouth is “not my job.”)

But what can an employee with other job responsibilities do to support a word of mouth effort? Especially if that employee does not have a marketing bone in his/her body?

The subtitle to Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing is “57 Word of Mouth Challenges For The Entire Workforce”. Don’t let the word “challenges” throw you, though. McDaniel offers 57 action steps to create buzz, and thankfully most are simple enough for anyone in a company to do in just a few minutes a day. (I think they’re called “challenges” in that you’re almost “challenging” people to follow through with them.) E-mail an old friend or business acquaintance and tell him or her in your own words about the good things your company is doing? That’s not hard. Send a congratulatory note to someone who’s had a noteworthy success? Sounds like a win-win. Forward a news clipping that a business contact might be interested in? That’s natural enough.

In fact, many of the word of mouth actions McDaniel describes are things you probably already do, but the idea is to do so more deliberately, with more of a conscious effort to be consistent about it. (I should note that some of the 57 ideas are a bit more ambitious, so those who want to take on bigger challenges can find plenty of ideas as well.)

An obvious question is how to motivate those whose interest in the company’s success is only as strong as their desire to get a regular paycheck. McDaniel suggests that the benefits to them in actively buzzing may need to be spelled out: the potential for greater rewards within the company, the potential to become an expert in a field, and of course the known benefits that come from active networking. In other words, talking up the company is in their interests just as much as it’s in the interests of the company.

By leaving plenty of space for you to document your attempts with each of the 57 action items, Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing is a workbook meant to be used on an ongoing basis instead of simply a book to be read once and put on the shelf. I plan to keep my copy within easy reach, picking it up at least once a day to be sure I’m consistently driving my business forward.

(P.S. If it hadn’t occurred to you, this review is one of the ways I’m creating buzz for me and my company.)

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Book Review: Wikinomics

As founder of Bessed, a human-powered search site that encourages visitors to shape search results, I was excited to get an advance copy of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. With me they’d just be preaching to the choir, but I was ready to hear the sermon.

The premise of Wikinomics is simple: the more your company lets outsiders in, or even turns the company over to the masses, the more new ideas are generated, the more new products are developed, and the more problems are solved. On the flip side, however, if your company wants to make money, you need to think long and hard about how open-sourcing fits with your business model, or figure out a business model that can take the fruits of mass collaboration and fashion saleable products and services around them. The potential is huge, and the risks may be fewer than you think.

The first thing that pops into your head when you hear Wikinomics is probably Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit (although don’t be surprised if your edits don’t last long). Wikipedia is the ultimate example of using the knowledge of thousands of diverse people to create something exceedingly useful—and something that even a large team of researchers couldn’t have created through decades of work.

Wikipedia is not a for-profit company, however. So, while it’s a great example of what can be accomplished, it’s not a great example of what can be accomplished at a profit. Luckily, Tapscott and Williams attack the question of “how can this make us money?” through the discussion of several business frameworks. These include:

• Peering (indirectly building business through participation in open-source projects)
• Ideagoras (marketplaces where businesses can post their R&D needs to the masses and reward the problem-solvers, or offer up their unused inventions that would otherwise lie dormant and in secret)
• Embracing the Prosumer (encouraging/supporting customers who “hack” your products, creating new features or uses that your company would have never thought of on its own)
• New Alexandrians (breaking down the proprietary walls in the sciences, namely in the fight against disease)
• Platforms for Participation (opening up your technology to allow others to create or even profit from its use, which may add to your bottom line and/or strengthen your brand)

Tapscott and Williams use many specific examples, from IBM’s contributions to building the free software Linux to Proctor & Gamble’s goal to outsource half its R&D, to Merck releasing thousands of human gene sequences to the public domain. What’s nice about the many examples the authors chose is that they aren’t all technology companies, proving that this isn’t just an IT phenomenon. (In fact, the book opens with a story about a very old-school industry, gold mining—Canadian company Goldcorp made its maps and research public, and outsiders very successfully pinpointed where more gold would be found.)

I was also glad to see the book acknowledge the huge issue associated with putting intellectual property in the hands of the masses. If your company spent money to create it, why and under what circumstances should some or all of it be freely shared? That’s the question any company who wants to profit from the wisdom of the masses (or that sees its business model threatened by it) needs to answer.

I had a few quibbles with the book. Neither its “Global Plant Floor” nor “Wiki Workplace” sections offered especially new ideas or insights—globalization isn’t new, collaborating and soliciting ideas in the workplace isn’t either, even if new technologies offer some slightly new spins on these phenomena. I also found myself daydreaming while reading the book. Sometimes this was because an idea or example made me start thinking about how to use it in my own business. Other times, unfortunately, I slipped off when the writing got overly jargony, saying little with a lot of words.

That aside, Wikinomics is an important book for any company or business person trying to understand how to thrive in an age where traditional top-down, command-and-control structures are being aggressively challenged. Mass collaboration may be a flash in the pan, but as some have already found out (i.e., the record industry), ignoring it could leave you burned.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Book Review: The Adventures of Captain Cur and Wonderflea

There’s nothing fun about being a stinky mutt with no family and no prospects in the love department. In fact, it can be downright painful to sit outside the dog park and watch the happy frolicking going on inside. And when finally given the chance to join the fun and meet the object of your affection, to be chased out by a toothy rottweiler… humiliating.

That’s the situation Dog finds himself in as the kids’ book The Adventures of Captain Cur and Wonderflea opens. His one shot at the perfect 10 poodle May destroyed, Dog finds himself on a bridge, staring down at the water, thinking the world would never miss a flea-ridden pooch like him when, lo and behold, he finds there is someone who would miss him. A flea, of course. But not just any flea—Wonderflea, who not only would miss feasting on Dog but also sees something in him that others don’t. Wonderflea dubs him Captain Cur and together they set out to make the world better for outcasts everywhere.

And they live happily together in their symbiotic relationship until the day Dog gets a chance to make the ultimate rescue, pulling his beloved May from the midst of traffic in the nick of time. Captain Cur’s hero status wins him a home with May, but an impending date with a flea bath. Who will he choose? His new love or his new flea friend?

The Adventures of Captain Cur and Wonderflea is a fun story for kids in the early grades, maybe kindergarten through 4th grade (Amazon.com shows an age range of 9-12; I think the higher end of that range is too high). I read it to my 5-year-old son, who loved it, although it was obvious that certain lines were over his head. My 3-year-old daughter wandered away; the illustrations kept her around for a few pages, then she was off to other pursuits.

The book is written by Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow, two of the writers of the movie Toy Story, so you could say it has a bit of a pedigree (I couldn’t resist), and the illustrations of Damian Ward are colorful, expressive and fun. A portion of the proceeds from book sales go to the non-profit Cygnet Foundation, which raises money for UNICEF as well as animal-related charities, so adding this to your home’s book collection is good for your kids and good for other kids (and animals), too.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Book Review: The Yellow House – Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles

About five years back, I saw the show “Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South” at The Art Institute of Chicago. While I enjoyed the art, it was the story of these two soon-to-be-famous painters living together in a little house while Van Gogh slowly succumbed to mental illness that fascinated me. Like most people, I knew Van Gogh as the crazy painter who cut his ear off—even if I liked some of his paintings, I hadn’t ever really thought of him as anything more than a caricature. That show filled in many of the gray areas, and it made me excited to read a new book that goes into much more detail on the time when these two artists spent a short, magical, bizarre time living and working just a few feet from one another.

The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles by Martin Gayford takes an in-depth look at who Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin were as people, how they saw themselves as artists, how their art fit into the historical context, how they influenced each other, and how their personalities ensured that their time together would be short-lived.

While it seems amazing that Van Gogh and Gauguin could have ever been roomies, looking at the situation it wasn’t strange at all. Both were struggling painters doing what at the time was considered experimental art, and Van Gogh’s younger brother Theo was an art dealer in position to sell their paintings. Especially Gauguin’s, who was just starting to get serious nibbles from art collectors. (Van Gogh was not selling anything and his brother was supporting him.) Each had little money, each ran in similar art circles, and each had Theo van Gogh in common. So, for roughly two months in the fall and winter of 1888, they lived together.

The idea had been Van Gogh’s. He admired Gauguin’s work and was hoping their time together might be the start of an artists colony of sorts in the French town of Arles. Gauguin was five years older than Vincent, and although Van Gogh’s work would eventually outshine Gauguin’s, at the time Gauguin was more successful and Van Gogh treated him like a wise big brother. Gauguin was the alpha male in the relationship, and Van Gogh was anxious to impress him.

Author Gayford does a nice job of setting the scene in many ways. He discusses how Van Gogh’s erratic behavior and dress turned off so many of the locals. (Until the more stable Gauguin showed up, Van Gogh could rarely get anyone to sit for him as subjects of his work; in many of the portraits done at this time, Van Gogh is painting the subject from the side because the person is facing Gauguin.) He discusses how Gauguin set up systems to keep their money straight. He discusses how closely the two must have sat as they painted, and how Van Gogh would often talk and pace and suddenly paint in a frenzy, which must have been distracting to the slower, methodical style of Gauguin. He offers multiple examples of how the artists were influenced by each other, and how they created many of their most famous works during this short period together.

Despite being the Post-Impressionist odd couple, Gauguin and Van Gogh got along well for much of their time together. (Gayford does make it clear that Gauguin seemed to tolerate the ravings of Van Gogh, who often got very worked up over topics both serious and inconsequential.) When the weather was warm enough they would take their easels and paint outdoors, then come back where Gauguin would cook before they capped off many an evening in the local brothel.

While Gayford chronicles Vincent’s increasingly strange behavior (including showing up at Gauguin’s bedside in the middle of the night and then wandering away and falling quickly asleep), it’s not clear that any one event caused Van Gogh to finally slip over the line. However, he was perceptive enough to worry that his behavior might drive Gauguin away, the thought of which only seemed to heighten his state of anxiety. Gaugain, probably rightly so, started to fear a little for his own safety within the tight confines of the Yellow House. When one night Van Gogh’s behavior was worrisome enough to make Gauguin spend the night in a hotel, a despondent Van Gogh, who was now sure Gauguin would soon leave, famously sliced off his ear. He would soon be confined to a mental institution, and would be in and out of such institutions for the few remaining years of his life, until finally committing suicide at age 37.

Gayford offers some interesting theories (which you’ll have to get the book to see) on why Van Gogh chose such a gruesome act as cutting off his own ear (and then delivering it in a box to a prostitute at the brothel) . He also offers theories as to Van Gogh’s form of mental illness in general. Gayford’s conclusion is that Van Gogh probably suffered from bipolar disorder, or manic depression—a conditon that would explain why Vincent could go from states of almost uncontrollable excitement and prolific creativeness down to states of dark depression in short periods of time. It might also explain why, even in his final years, Van Gogh could have “attacks” of madness which were then followed by extended periods of sanity. In fact, after cutting his ear, Van Gogh did return to the Yellow House for a short period (Gauguin was gone) before another attack sent him from Arles for good. And one of Vincent’s most famous works, The Starry Night, was produced during one of his stable periods after leaving Arles.

The thought of having two artists on the cusp of fame living together and producing their best works while one descends dramatically into mental illness would be too unbelievable of a plot if it weren’t all true. In The Yellow House, Martin Gayford does the job of making you a fly on the wall as this unlikely plot unfolds. If you are an art lover, you’ll find plenty here to enhance your understanding of these artists’ works (I wish I could see that Art Institute show all over again after having read the book). But even if you’re only passingly familiar with their work, the drama of their story makes this a book worth reading.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Book Review: Citizen Marketers by Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba

In 1983, the show “Cagney & Lacey” was canceled by CBS, only to be brought back after a huge letter-writing campaign by viewers. As a 13-year-old boy I had no use for this female cop show (although I liked the looks of that Sharon Gless), but the thought that it had been brought back to life by the will of determined viewers captured my imagination. Power to the people!

Fast forward twenty-some years and the people no longer have to resort to hopeful letter-writing campaigns. As the new book Citizen Marketers, by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, makes clear, everyday citizens now have the Internet at their disposal, and woe to companies that ignore their blogs, their discussion board posts, their YouTube videos. In today’s world, one happy or unhappy customer can make a big impact—fast. A blog post or consumer-created video gets posted today, goes viral tomorrow and is picked up by big media next week. All of a sudden, that disgruntled customer sitting alone in his apartment has turned a corporation’s world upside-down.

Of course, the active participation that is increasingly taking place by companies’ fans and/or detractors also presents an opportunity—if companies are wise enough to listen. Citizen Marketers (subtitled “When People Are the Message”) introduces us to people who voluntarily spend much of their free time writing and talking about consumer products, services, TV shows, movies, etc. Who are these people? Why do they do it? Are they the beginning of a sea change in the structure of society, or is this a passing fancy, with people temporarily taken with the novelty of how much easier it’s become to have one’s voice heard?

Citizen marketers come in many shapes and sizes. McConnell and Huba classify them loosely as Filters, Fanatics, Facilitators and Firecrackers. In short, this means they range from people creating one-off blog posts or videos that suddenly explode into the public consciousness, to people starting and running community Web sites built around their favorite companies or products, to Web site owners that function almost as extensions of the companies themselves, creating de facto hubs for news, information and rumors about the companies on which they focus.

Why do they do it? Sometimes out of love, sometimes out of hate, sometimes out of a desire to help others. Sometimes just to hear the sound of their own voices. The point is, they’re doing it. And how a company reacts to them can have big consequences.

Journalist-turned-blogger Jeff Jarvis wrote about being in “Dell Hell” when Dell couldn’t/wouldn’t fix his new computer in a timely manner. Soon enough, thousands of others chimed in with their own anti-Dell stories, which led to mainstream media latching on as well. It’s hard to quantify a public relations disaster such as this, but the subsequent 45% drop in Dell’s stock price over the following year couldn’t have been completely coincidental.

Citizen Marketers includes dozens of other stories about the positive, negative, and sometimes confused reactions of the companies that are targeted by the “1 Percenters” (as the book refers to citizen marketers, who make up such a small percentage of the whole). It’s clear that not every company “gets it”—perhaps they’re the ones who need this book the most.

As the founder of Bessed, a search site that encourages user participation, I was particularly interested in how McConnell and Huba see the “democratization” of the market playing out in terms of new business models. While it’s interesting to see a single person make enough noise to get noticed by Coca-Cola, that’s an example of new means of citizen participation affecting old ways of doing business. But are there companies being built specifically around this “democratization”, and, to quote the often-asked question of the Internet’s early years, how do you make money from it?

Active Internet users can quickly point to sites such as Digg and YouTube as examples of participatory models. But, other than the fact that YouTube’s founders got rich by selling out to Google and Digg’s founders may have a similar exit strategy, these types of sites have been more about building a user base than about turning a profit.

So I was particularly interested in McConnell and Huba’s focus on Threadless. On the surface it’s simply a site that sells T-shirts. But look under the hood and you see that Threadless has made democracy the core of its business. Membes of the Threadless community create T-shirt designs, which are then voted on by other community members, with the winning designs printed and sold by the company. The community has already told Threadless what they want to buy, so there’s never a clunker in the bunch. It’s on-demand production of sure winners. Threadless pays the designers a nominal amount (as well as some free T-shirts) for designs it already can bank on. Now that’s a business model!

That said, Citizen Marketers has as much to teach entrepreneurs as it has to teach lumbering corporations. When people are the message, treat them as such, and everybody wins.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.

Book Review: My Story, Illustrated Edition by Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe has been dead roughly 42 years, so give yourself a gold star if you already know that this autobiography is not exactly new. In fact, this is the third time it has gotten a major printing. The first was in 1974, then another in 2000. So, why do it again? Well, besides the fact that the others are out of print, this is the first time that the words of Marilyn Monroe have been put together with some of the greatest pictures taken of her, namely those by photographer and Monroe business partner Milton H. Greene.

Greene was more than a photographer of Monroe. The two became close friends, with Monroe actually living with Greene’s family for four years. And the friendship culminated in a partnership in Marilyn Monroe Productions, which produced the movies Bus Stop and Prince and the Showgirl. So Greene had extensive access to Monroe for a good number of her most famous years, and he took some of the most well-known photos of Monroe between 1953 and 1957.

This “Illustrated Edition” of My Story includes 46 of these photos, including shots from what Monroe fans might know as the “Black” series and the “Ballerina” series, and many others as well. The pictures look great, which is probably testament to the work of Joshua Greene, Milton’s son, who for the last decade or so has been digitally restoring many photos that were thought to be unsalvageable. Joshua Greene also provides the foreword to the book, where he helpfully identifies where and when most of the photos were taken.

The photos are the star here, but I suppose the story itself should be mentioned. My Story is published with Marilyn Monroe as the author but also with the words “with Ben Hecht” added on. Hecht was a screenwriter who collaborated with Monroe on the book, and some Monroe biographers believe he (and/or others) took the liberty of embellishing both the facts and Monroe’s version of them. (In one instance, Monroe says she is the kind of girl they find dead in a hallway with an empty bottle of pills. Were those really her words, or added later?) Nevertheles, the project had Monroe’s approval, and it undoubtedly captures a good deal of her life story.

The most notable sections of the book come early, when Monroe describes an upbringing in which she was shuttled from foster home to foster home, never knowing her father and being largely orphaned by her mother. When her mother was finally able to create a home for them, it didn’t last; she soon had to be institutionalized for schizophrenia and Norma Jean was orphaned again. Her escape from this life isn’t a fairy tale, either; she marries Jim Dougherty at only 15 in order to continue having a home. They divorced when she was 19. It’s a sad start to a life; in this case a life that was already half over.

The rest of the book takes the reader through Monroe’s struggles to gain acting roles (including her posing nude to get enough money to get her repossessed car back), her troubles with lecherous men and jealous women, her eventual success, and her feelings of always being a misfit in the movie business. The chapters are short and breezy, an enjoyable read if not particularly insightful. For example, the chapters on her relationship and marriage to Joe Dimaggio don’t make it particularly clear why she fell in love with him, other than that his reserved nature seemed to impress her. All in all, Monroe comes off as likable and smart, which was likely the book’s main goal when it was written.

My Story ends abruptly; it was never finished. Monroe is still married to Dimaggio in its pages (although one of the photos in the book is Monroe with her third husband, Arthur Miller). For fans of Marilyn Monroe, this may be a pleasant way to finish—dozens of Milton H. Greene’s photos of Marilyn coupled with a story that has a happy ending. Although if we didn’t know how it really turned out, the book might not be nearly as interesting.

e-mail me: adam@bessed.com

Adam Jusko is founder and CEO of Bessed, a Web site promising “search without spam”, thanks to human-edited search results and ongoing visitor feedback. Do a search, offer your comments, submit your site–help create the “bessed” search site in the world.