Q&A with Todd Sattersten

Todd Sattersten founded BizBookLab, a company that identifies, develops, and launches business books around the world. He is the co-author of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time with Jack Covert and served as president of business bookseller 800-CEO-. His most recent project is Everything I Know About Business Books (So Far), a book that he continually updates with recommendations and observations about the genre (http://bit.ly/anKzkV).

Todd gave this exclusive interview to our special correspondent for economics and politics, Victor Fic, where he summarizes huge amounts of information about learning from the hero in various business books.

Todd, how did you come to realize that many business and strategy books are repetitive?

I have read hundreds of business books over the last several years and I notice the same topics coming up over and over again. It is no different than a musician noticing most songs use the same three chords repeatedly. The pattern became very apparent when we compiled the list for The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.

What is your major explanation for this?

We all fundamentally struggle with the same problems whether as individuals, work groups, or organizations. People have described these using different words, but they always point back to the same things. What allows thousands of books to be written is that there is no solution that everyone agrees on.

Share with our readers your fascinating solution about your area of study.

Ultimately, we found five persistent metathemes across our selection of the 100 best business books. Each meta-theme appears horizontally across traditional publishing categories, bridging such divisions as sales, management, narrative, and finance. Each meta-theme also scales in a vertical sense, applying to individuals, teams and organizations equally.

So profound are these meta-themes that the five universal insights act as the foundation for a leader dealing with any aspect of business, whether starting a new job or developing the next year’s corporate strategy. The five big themes are Clarity of Purpose, Wisdom in Decision Making, Bias for Action, Openness to Change, and Giving and Getting Feedback.

Let’s amplify these for our readers. One recurring challenge you identify is to wander aimlessly... What does this mean?

Purpose provides direction and brings clarity to all work. For the individual in pursuit of purpose, author Po Bronson asks the ultimate question in his book, What Should I Do with My Life? Organizations struggle with the same kind of question when they craft their mission statements and massage their marketing slogans. We need to know what our purpose in life is. Individually, this means understanding our strengths and pursuing endeavors that allow us to utilize those natural abilities. In groups, it means understanding the role of each member and how it relates to others on the team. For the organization that we work for or associate with, we need to clearly understand the direction they are headed in so we can best apply our efforts and be certain they align with our own sense of purpose.

How about circumstances and information baffling us?

The process of making decisions is often overtly deliberate or completely unconscious. In both cases, we base our decisions on past experience and judge our successes only on the outcomes. In Influence, Robert Cialdini alerts us to how we use unconscious routine to make even the smallest decision, while in The Power of Intuition, Gary Klein provides a map to some of that scripting and shows how we can improve our gut instinct.

Then you insist that fear trips us up...how so?

Tom Peters and Bob Waterman pointed out in In Search of Excellence that a quality [found in many] excellent companies was “the bias for action.” This assertion that action trumps all, most importantly fear, appears in many great books, so what keeps us from taking action? Author, David Allen, in Getting Things Done would say that a person’s focus is misplaced on time and priority, rather than action. Authors Jeffery Pfeffer and Bob Sutton in The Knowing Doing Gap would say organizations suffer from a gap between knowing and doing.

When given the chance to change, we freeze up...correct?

Understanding change is essential because change affects individuals and organizations constantly. Sales is about change and so is marketing and corporate strategy. Lou Gerstner says it was changing IBM’s entitlement culture that was his biggest challenge. In The First 90 Days, new job guru Michael Watkins describes the waves of change that new managers must create. In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore shows how products are adopted and what different constituents need to accept change.

And we use our mouths more than our ears, which you deem a huge error, yes?

I use different human senses to make this point. Imagine throwing a baseball in a dark room. You would miss seeing the trajectory or where it landed. Did it even come down where we wanted it to? Our success depends on feedback. Did we make the right choice? Did the action have the intended effect? Are things changing? Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence says that self-reflection is a form of feedback and an essential piece of emotional intelligence. Engineering professor Henry Petroski, author of To Engineer is Human, says failure is a critical part of learning. And in it, Zig Ziglar says that listening is the most important part of selling.

You cite the famous expert on myths, Joseph Campbell, and say the hero has a journey – can you explain this further?

Joseph Campbell was an anthropologist who studied hundreds of cultures and the stories that they told. Every one has some version of the hero’s journey. And when you connect the five themes together that I summarize above, then you see the same arc that Campbell did. Clarity of purpose provides wisdom in decision making, which informs action, which creates change, while feedback informs us and the process starts again.

You group together three famous figures from history that no else ever matched up: Hercules, Luke Skywalker and Jack Welch. What is the common element there?

They are all heroes and they all went through the same phases of the journey so are examples that show the arc in a real or fictional life. In the movie Star Wars, Luke rebuffs Old Ben to engage in the quest until his aunt and uncle die at the hands of the so called Empire. Luke finds clarity of purpose. As for Greek myth, Hera sends a crab to distract Hercules while he is battling the Hydra during his epic Labors. Hercules triumphs from his dogged bias for action. Welch made his famous declaration that every business will be ranked as number or two in their respective markets and vowed to fix, close, or sell any that didn’t comply. His threat creates a clear sense for the sorts of decisions that he is going to make and the kinds of decisions that his managers should be making.

Any business fable you have read such as The Goal by Goldratt, Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Lencioni, or Who Moved My Cheese by Johnson is based around the hero’s journey concept. We are often exposed to it, but we don’t even realize it.

You blame even major companies for not learning these lessons... cite specific examples.

How many employees can state in 10 words or less what the purpose of their firm is? This is a commonly used question and the power of it seems lost on executives. Look how often meetings are confused with both decision making and action.

Examine statistics of how often corporate efforts at change fail. Ask your cohorts the last time that they got meaningful feedback from their manager.

But Todd, if the giants struggle with these phobias, does that not indicate that liberation is very hard, if not impossible?

The five themes are very important because they remind us to focus on the big things and then much of the rest will work itself out.

If readers want to learn more, can you link your key points to books or deeper analysis?

We wrote a piece for Harvard Business Review in 2009 called Learning From Heroes (http://hbr.org/2009/03/learning-fromheroes/ar/1).

I would also encourage your readers to review what books they have been reading lately and see how these fit into the five themes. When we examine the books in The 100 Best, 93 of the 100 titles fit into one or more than one of the five themes. Chances are you are often reading in one of these areas already, but my reflections here make the insights more explicit and provide a wider context for understanding based on the heroic ideal.