Friday Links

If you'd like to get a taste of Bob Sutton's upcoming book, Good Boss, Bad Boss (due out with Business Plus in September), he posted a small gem that didn't make it in the book, the leadership philosophy of John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla:

Life is a lot better when I think about my job as one of helping everyone ...

He expands upon this some more in the post, and I think I can safely say that if that's what's been culled, then what made it in the book is going to be very worth picking up and absorbing.

"Would you go to a dinner party and just repeat what the person to the right of you is saying all night long? Would that be interesting to anybody?" The obvious answer is... well, yes. It would by annoying, but hilarious. But, Rework author Jason Fried wasn't really thinking in absurdist hypotheticals in that sentence, he was answering the question "Why Is Business Writing So Awful?" and providing some positive examples as remedies, to boot.

Also on the Rework front, we hosted our seventh PechaKucha night here in Milwaukee on Tuesday, which included a presentation from the book's illustrator, Mike Rohde, about sketchnotes. We also had local artists dwellephant and Kristopher Pollard on hand to document the event with portraits—both of the attendees and the presentations themselves. (We'll have more on that next week.)

Devin Stewart, Program Director and Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, wrote a very good review of The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War between States and Corporations? over at The Huffington Post. The book isn't about the tired arguments between New-Deal Democracy and Reagan Republicanism in America, but about how the tools of state-run capitalism (in places like China and Russia) threaten free-markets around the world. In the book, Bremmer poses hypotheticals, including:

[G]iven the mutually assured economic destruction (or interdependence) between the United States and China, what happens if China closes the door?

The book describes a competition between two separate visions of capitalism that increasingly looks like a economic Cold War.

The folks over at strategy+business know their business books, as is evidenced by them having Tony Hseih, CEO of Zappos and author of the forthcoming Delivering Happiness (we're very excited about), introduce an excerpt from Switch by Chip and Dan Heath.

If you are a human being with a beating heart, you might want to check out War of Art author Steven Pressfield's interview with Jonathan Fields, author of Career Renegade.

You guys can keep you fancy Kindles and iPads, I'm sticking with my Electronic Book from Radio Shack, circa 1986. It's affordable.

Turnover can be a good thing.