Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/72038
bookshelf SLEEPING WITH YOUR SMARTPHONE AUTHOR: Leslie A. Perlow PUBLISHER: Harvard Business Review Press, US$27 TODAY'S PROFESSIONALS are always working: One survey revealed that 26 percent sleep with their smartphones, while 48 percent check them over weekends and 51 percent during vacation. To figure out how to give professionals more control over their lives and improve job perfor- mance, Harvard professor Perlow and a colleague conducted an experiment at Boston Consult- ing Group, where hard-driving teams with demanding clients felt they were always on call. Teams coordinated their schedules and covered for each other to guarantee that everyone had one predictable night off every week. The group-oriented goal forced team members to collaborate more closely, develop tighter bonds, and practice big-picture thinking. The results? Participants in the experiment were far more likely than nonparticipants to be excited about work, satisfied by their work-life balance, and interested in staying at the firm for a long time. Over the next four years, 86 percent of BCC's staff engaged in similar experiments to find, as Perlow writes, that "indi- viduals, the team, and ultimately the organization all benefit." THE 4A'S OF MARKETING AUTHORS: Jagdish N. Sheth and Rajendra S. Sisodia PUBLISHER: Routledge, US$49.95 "AMONG ALL THE business disci- plines, marketing rou- tinely experiences and accepts the highest rate of failure," point out Sheth of Emory and Sisodia of Bent- ley. But they believe marketers can reverse that trend if, instead of primarily devising gimmicks designed to get customers to buy, they focus on acquiring and retaining customers. They contend that marketers need to build their strategies around four A's: a product's acceptability, affordability, accessibility, and awareness. These dovetail nicely with what the authors identify as the customer's four distinct roles as seeker, buyer, payer, and user. Thus, someone seeking informa- tion about a new product must have awareness of it; someone 60 July/August 2012 BizEd paying for it is more concerned with affordability. Sheth and Siso- dia offer dozens of case studies of companies that have succeeded because they understood the four A's or failed because they didn't. The framework, they write, "helps transform the marketing process from an unmeasurable 'blind push' effort … into a measurable and optimal effort that is driven from the customer's perspective." KILL THE COMPANY AUTHOR: Lisa Bodell PUBLISHER: Bibliomotion, US$27.95 BODELL DOESN'T think compa- nies have problems with innovation; they have problems with corporate cultures that stifle innovation. Her research group futurethink has devised exer- cises designed to get workers and their bosses excited about small changes that could have big impacts—and big changes that could have enormous con- sequences. In her "Kill the Com- pany" exercise, employees pretend they work for a competitor out to destroy their own firm, and they identify all their production and customer service weaknesses that the competitor could exploit. In "Kill the Stupid Rule," employees gleefully list their company's most hated procedural rules, and man- agers are invited to axe them on the spot. When employees see that management is willing to make small changes, Bodell says, their mindsets change, they begin think- ing more creatively, and the whole company grows more innovative. INGENIUS AUTHOR: Tina Seelig PUBLISHER: HarperOne, US$25.99 AS INNOVATION becomes the com- petitive advantage of the future, creativity becomes the most coveted job skill. But is creativity a skill that can be taught? Seelig, the executive director of Stanford's Technology