Fifty FOR FALL. - business book reviews - Review - book review

Industry Standard, The, August 21, 2000 by Luke Mitchell

If you want to learn next season's hottest fashions, preview the new line of business books.

As with the fashion world, fall is when the book world puts on its most lavish show. Not to be outdone by those black-clad editors at Conde Nast, we've selected 50 business titles slated for release between late August and January.

So what's hot? Consultants are hot. As HarperBusiness associate publishing director Lisa Berkowitz recently told Publisher's Weekly: "When there is volatility in the stock market and the rules are being changed every day, books by consultants do well. When there is stability in the market, books by CEOs do well. Right now, for the most part, it's a golden age for books by consultants."

Our own list of fall business books is testament to Berkowitz's law: Fifteen are written by consultants; two by CEOs, one of whom is now a consultant.

Dot-coms, on the other hand, have fallen out of favor with publishers and venture capitalists alike. Where the recent past saw everything from Customers.com to Strikeitrich.com, this year's list is dot-com free. That fetching "e-" prefix is hanging in there, though, with at least four titles: E-Leader, E-Loyalty, E-Service and E-Factor.

Asia, always a popular subject, also continues to turn heads, with four titles dedicated to the essential question: Will Asia eat our lunch? Three say yes; one says probably not.

Finally, a more subtle change is afoot. Kirsten Sandberg, a senior editor at Harvard Business School Press, says, "The trend in what we've been selling is not in the micro, it's in the macro."

Indeed the sort of microstrategy found in Customers.com is yielding to more expansive "big idea" books, like Gary Hamel's Leading the Revolution and George Gilder's Telecosm. This is a heartening trend, as it presumes readers also are taking a longer, or at least more abstract, view of the Internet Economy.

Of course, books are more than fashion plates. Some of them are actually worth reading. In that spirit, we've starred the titles that we think are especially interesting or important.

MANAGEMENT/STRATEGY

The 10-Second Internet Manager: Survive, Thrive and Drive Your Company In the Internet Age

By Mark Breier (Crown Business, September, $25). A play on The One-Minute Manager from the former CEO of Beyond.com, whom one would think has plenty of time on his hands right now.

* The Anatomy of Buzz: How to Create Word of Mouth Marketing

By Emanuel Rosen (Currency, October, $24.95). A former software marketing VP on how to get those gums flapping. Word is, Seth Godin's [see page 138] is the bigger of the two books on "viral marketing," but this one's deeper.

B2B: How to Build a Profitable E-Commerce Strategy

By Michael J. Cunningham (Perseus, October, $27). Fashions change, but businesses continue to do business with other businesses. Harvard Computing Group founder Cunningham shows how.

Building Brandwith: Closing the Sale Online

By Sergio Zyman and Scott Miller (HarperBusiness, October, $27). Zyman, the author of The End of Marketing as We Know It and the man behind New Coke (a promotion he claims was a rousing success), shifts paradigms with an assist from associate Miller.

E-Leader: Reinventing Leadership in a Connected Economy

By Robert Hargrove (Perseus, December, $26). Consultant Hargrove says "stewardship" is out, entrepreneurship is in.

E-Loyalty: How to Keep Customers Coming Back to Your Web Site

By Ellen Reid Smith (HarperBusiness, November, $26). A Texas-based marketing consultant draws from her work with clients such as Hewlett-Packard and Hasbro.

E-Service: 24 Ways to Keep Your Customers When the Competition Is just a Click Away

By Ron Zemke and Tom Connellan (Amacom, December, $27.95). The consulting team that brought you Knock Your Socks Off Service moves online.

Executive Instinct: Managing Stone-Age Minds in the Information Age

By Nigel Nicholson (Crown Business, November, $25). A professor at the London Business School brings the latest thinking from the field of evolutionary psychology to bear on managing the homo sapiens in your office.

* How Digital Is Your Business? Creating The Company of the Future

By Adrian Slywotzky and David Morrison (Crown Business, November, $25). Slywotzky and Morrison (who are also columnists for The Standard) are among the few consultants who have credibly crossed over from the old economy to the new. Should offer plenty of surprising case studies and insights.

The Interactive Marketplace: Prepare Your Company to Profit in The Interactive Revolution

By Keith Brown (McGraw Hill, September, $2495). The chairman of BuildNet, a construction-industry software company, preaches mass customization.

* It's Not the Big That Eat the Small ... It's the Fast That Eat the Slow: How to Use Speed as a Competitive Tool in Business

By Jason Jennings and Laurence Haughton (HarperBusiness, December, $25). From a pair of California-based consultants, the terrific title says it all and gets a star in the process.

Last Mile: Broadband and the Next Internet Revolution

By Jason Wolf and Natalie Zee (McGraw Hill, August, $24.95). A couple of consultants for MarchFirst on new strategies for the broadband world.