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bookshelf DEFENDING YOUR BRAND AUTHOR: Tim Calkins PUBLISHER: Palgrave Macmillan, US$30 CALKINS DOESN'T pretend that he's written a pretty book. "If you're looking for a cheerful book about the power of innovation and strong brands—well, this isn't it," says the Northwestern professor. "Instead, this book is a practical guide to the dark arts of marketing and the shadowy world of defensive strategy." His premise is simple: Your company exists to be profitable. If a new competi- tor, even a small-scale one, enters the market, it can eat into your profits. So you have to stop it however you can. Perhaps you publicly indicate that you will cut prices in an effort to destroy the competitor's launch; perhaps you have your sales force buy up all of the newly introduced products so the other company can't gather reliable test-market data. He admits that some tactics are dodgy, maybe even illegal. "Is it okay to spy on your competitor? Is it right to damage someone else's product or brand by planting seeds of doubt?" Dark, yes—but utterly fascinating. INDISPENSABLE AUTHOR: Gautam Mukunda PUBLISHER: Harvard Business Review Press, US$28 HARVARD PROFESSOR Mukunda takes an unconventional approach to determining what makes a great leader. Most candidates for any leadership post, he argues, have been produced by the same system and thoroughly vetted. Thus, these "filtered" candidates tend to be so similar to each other that it scarcely matters which one is selected. By contrast, "unfiltered" candidates— who achieve high office by some shortcut of charisma, fame, or freak circum- stance—are likely to make dramatically dif- ferent choices than fil- tered ones, frequently leading to breathtak- ing success or utter failure. According to Mukunda, some of 58 November/December 2012 BizEd the best and worst U.S. presidents (from Lincoln to Harding) were unfiltered politicians; the middle- of-the-pack ones were all filtered. He follows the analogy into the realms of business and the military, and then poses the question: How can an organization decide when to choose a "Modal" leader, who's been through the filtration process, or an "Extreme," who hasn't? He decides, "Desperation, not discom- fort, should be the signal of the need to gamble on an Extreme." Don't Miss LESSONS FROM THE GREAT RECESSION is a handy advice book for small business owners. Edited by Fairleigh Dickinson's James Barrood and The Wall Street Journal's Brian Moran, the book offers guest essays on topics such as writing business plans, negotiating with creditors, and outsourcing. There are plenty of scary stories, but hopeful ones as well. For instance, Barrood and consultant Stephen Wunker sound an encouraging note about innovation: "During a recession, large companies often focus on cost-cutting and saving existing sales rather than pioneering new markets. This creates open space for innovators." (Insights Media, US$19.95) JUDGMENT ON THE FRONT LINE AUTHORS: Chris DeRose and Noel M. Tichy PUBLISHER: Portfolio/Penguin US$26.95 MANY COMPANIES claim that their people are their best resource, but few take advantage of the insights of their frontline employ- ees. DeRose and Tichy, both of the University of Michigan, pro- file companies such as the Ritz- Carlton, Amazon, and Zappos that are famous for engaging frontline employees to help improve the customer experience. The authors make it clear a frontline-focused strategy only works if top leaders develop a framework to enable it; they must create a culture that supports it and guidelines that spell out their expectations. They acknowledge that letting go of command-and- control management can be messy but add, "If leaders don't want employees who act as dumb ter- minals only capable of carrying out tasks they have been explicitly assigned, then they must have faith that giving employees power car- ries more reward than risk."