In today’s NY Times Joe Nocera’s column attempts to eviscerate Jerry Yang for his efforts to maintain Yahoo! as Yahoo! instead of letting his creation become watered down so that it ultimately is nothing more than a deadened brand inside Microsoft or Google. Nocera claims throughout his column that the only responsiblity Yang has is toward Yahoo!’s shareholders, and that by turning down various Microsoft offers that would have benefitted Yahoo’s shareholders momentarily, Yang has somehow “shafted” those shareholders. And of course, that would be true if the only stakeholders in Yahoo! were a particular group of shareholders who wanted some immediate one-time gain at the cost of the entire enterprise. But this is not what a public company is all about. Read more…

Today’s Krugman opinion piece in the N.Y. Times finds the distinguished economist pondering the implications of the Kindle, Amazon’s book reader. Krugman suggests that the arrival of the Kindle means that book authors will need to follow the path blazed by the Grateful Dead: give away your core intellectual property (your music, your mind) and make money on T-shirts and other ancillary licensing. What a fabulous idea! Next will come lawyers doing their lawyering for free and making it up with a car wash and shoeshine. Doctors will of course follow, seeing the brilliance of the logic. Surgery: FREE!!! Post-op lollipops, $25,000. Makes sense to me.

Krugman has fallen into a value trap that says because reproduction costs are going down, the underlying intellectual property value also goes down. Part of that thinking leads to the idea that music or books all have the same value. Actually, the value of everything is determined not by what it costs to make or reproduce. Real value comes from how much someone (the prospective consumer)  wants something.

I’ll bet that there have already been a few times in your life when a book came along that changed your way of thinking, or even changed your life. What is that book worth to you? Two dollars? Or more likely, many thousands. What’s a book worth that changes the way you raise your child? What’s a book worth that guides you in starting or turning around your company? The right book at the right time for the right person can be close to priceless. Why then would we price books as if they are interchangeable commodities, as if all book are the same because they are called by the same name: books?

Whoever you are, and whatever you do, fight to the death to keep yourself or your work from being commoditized. It might make the economists happy to treat everything that is inherently unique and the result of special skills as if they were interchangeable, since it makes their models work better, but the reality is, most of what we value most highly is likely to be profoundly unique. Think about the members of our family, or our own greatest gifts, our favorite places, our most cherished art. For everything that counts, the value cannot be set by a commodity marketplace. Value comes from the buyer’s perception. We should price accordingly, or we’re giving it away.

Any announcement of a new publishing venture is always welcome, especially the one made by Robert Miller who is leaving Hyperion to form a new venture under the wing of HarperCollins, with its promise to shake up some of the dusty traditions of traditional “trade” publishing. But a couple of assertions in the business plan just don’t make any sense. We’ll get to them in a moment.

The good news is the notion that they are going to sell books to retail stores on the basis of, you ordered ‘em, now sell ‘em! What a radical idea. As you may or may not know, most books are ordered by bookstores on a returnable basis. When my first megahit …And Ladies of the Club showed up in my local Beverly Hills bookstore and filled all the windows, I asked the manager how many books he had taken in his first order. The number was staggering, 200. He then confided they made for a great display, and if they didn’t sell he could always return them for credit. Yikes! What kind of business is this? Read more…

Should Everyone Be a Thought Leader?

Twenty years ago when Thought Leaders Intl. started working full time helping business leaders get published successfully, the notion of thought leadership as a competitive advantage was just getting going. People who were identified as thought leaders, at that time, were considered to be the best and the brightest, and were recognized as people who actually were ahead of the game in whatever professional arena they called their own. Read more…

I am hard at work smithing my new book How to Think Like a Genius which will be published this coming Winter by New World Publishing. I’d like to share the eleven steps of the Endleofon with you here, and over time we’ll be discussing various aspects of each of these steps. Thinking like a genius means creating solutions or developing new thinking that is consistently brilliant, useful and moves the world forward in big healthy steps

The Endleofon:

1. Distinctions

2. Identity

3. Implications

4. Testing

5. Precedent

6. Need

7. Foundation

8. Completion

9. Connecting

10. Impact

11. Advocacy

These steps are the same for someone working by themselves, or for groups working together. The various steps of the Endleofon assure that the final work is the best possible thinking at the time, that it fits into the world and the needs of the prospective audience, that the solutions are practical, and carry with them the resources of persuasion that will help them through to adoption. We’ll discuss these over the next few months.

We have concluded our agreement with New World Library to publish How to Think Like a Genius, which will be on sale either December 2008 or Spring of 2009. The book will explore the Endleofon process, and is intended to be useful for everyone trying to find the best solutions to whatever their challenges, from business strategy and innovation, to personal creativity. We will be posting some of the concepts of the Endleofon process as the book progresses. We also are looking forward to readers of this site raising questions and making contributions to the development and refinement of Endleofon, so that by the time the book is ready it will have been tested.

In the one-on-one Obama Clinton debate in California, Ms. Clinton at one point quietly acknowledged that although “single-payer” was the preferred health system that most Americans wanted and that most professionals who focus on fixing the healthcare system also prefer, it was not practical to even go there at this time given the forces involved.

What are the implications of that thought? It means that in this democracy, what the people want cannot be done because certain forces, not of the “people” are too strong for democracy to actually work. What was the purpose of Gettysburg? “That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Apparently, it has.

It is a pleasure to welcome you here. This site is where I will be introducing my ideas and methodology about thinking creatively. At the time of this site’s creation, my process consists of eleven steps, and although I hope that that number will change in time as we exchange ideas, as I learn, and as our understanding of the thinking process evolves, we are eleven right now. I went looking for other words to express eleven, and in my Oxford Abridged I came across the Olde English world, “endleofon,” for eleven.

Over the coming weeks and months I will be presenting and discussing what each of these steps does, and how each one intereacts with others to quickly prototype solutions, test them, explore their consequences and implications, and test all that against who we are, what we stand for, and what we’re trying to achieve. My hope is that this site will become a magnet for those people who are passionate about thinking about a special kind of thinking, let’s call it endlefonic thinking at the moment, and that over time we will form a community of people who are passionate about developing important ideas and solving the challenges preventing their efficient diffusion.