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Business Plus is pleased to announce that we will be leaving our WordPress home for a new blog on Tumblr. Stay tuned for more details!
Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation #5 on Seth Godin’s list
Entrepreneur and marketing guru Seth Godin’s list of 12 Books Worth Spreading places Six Pixels of Separation, by author Mitch Joel, the “Rock Star of Digital Marketing,” at number 5. Seth’s compilation was prompted by TED, Technology, Entertainment, Design, a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading.
Six Pixels of Separation is the first book to integrate digital marketing, social media, personal branding, and entrepreneurship in a clear, entertaining, and instructive manner that everyone can understand and apply. The truth is, we no longer live in a world of six degrees of separation. In fact, we’re now down to only six pixels of separation, which changes everything we know about doing business.
Is it important to be connected? Well, consider this: If Facebook were a country, it would have the sixth largest population in the world.
Housing Starts Fall, Portugal On-The-Brink, Oil Over $105, Time to Party!
SALARY TUTOR Launch Party!
Come celebrate the launch of Jim Hopkinson’s first book, Salary Tutor! With the various disturbances throughout the world and the domestic job market being what it is, there’s been no better time for the publication of a guide that details a novel way to get the the raise you deserve.
Thursday, March 31 · 6:30pm – 10:00pm
Donate to Japan Earthquake relief efforts
All of us at Hachette Book Group and Business Plus urge you to support the Red Cross efforts to help those affected by the earthquake in Japan and the tsunami throughout the Pacific.
$4 per gallon gasoline! $16 left to go!
According to Christopher Steiner, author of $20 PER GALLON:
- People who live in suburbs will soon realize that there’s no longer any market for their houses (reason: nobody wants to live too far away because it’s too expensive to commute to work).
- Trains (not airplanes) will become the mode of national transportation as the price of air travel becomes prohibitive.
- Families will migrate southward as the cost of heating northern homes in the winter will become too pricey
- Cheap everyday items made from plastic will disappear because of the rising price to produce them (plastic is derived from oil).
Want to know what else we have in store?
View Christopher’s interactive timeline of the impacts of Oil’s appreciation.
Change Anything: What Will Your Change Story Be?
So often we want to make big changes in our lives, but lack the resolve to see them through. It seems we just can’t summon the necessary willpower to take on these huge challenges – challenges like saving money, changing bad work habits, quitting smoking, increasing productivity, or losing weight. But here’s the secret: willpower is not the answer. With a clearer understanding of the real forces that shape our actions, we can make better decisions, change our outlook, and replace bad habits with good.
From the authors of the national bestsellers, CRUCIAL CONVERSATIONS and INFLUENCER, comes a new book that gives you the tools to CHANGE ANYTHING.
In Memoriam: Author Gordon Murray
Gordon Murray, 1950-2011
Gordon Murray, co-author of THE INVESTMENT ANSWER and former Wall Street investment banker, died at his home on Saturday, January 15. He had been battling glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer, first diagnosed in 2008.
Murray spent more than 25 years working on Wall Street, primarily at Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and Credit Suisse First Boston, in a variety of institutional sales and management roles.
After a recurrence of the disease, Murray decided to cease all further treatment. Instead, he decided to write THE INVESTMENT ANSWER, a clear-cut primer on the basics of financial investing. Even in his final days, Murray was actively involved in the promotion of the book and working with Business Plus, which will be publishing the book in hardcover on January 25, 2011.
Murray co-authored THE INVESTMENT ANSWER with his friend and financial advisor Daniel Goldie, which was originally self-published in August 2010.
Rick Wolff, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Business Plus, said, “We are most saddened by Gordon’s passing, but we take heart in that his inspirational spirit and legacy will live on in his honest and forthright book.”
After his Wall Street career, Murray worked as a consultant with Dimensional Fund Advisors, an investment management firm known for bringing academic research to the practical world of investing. Murray has served as Vice-Chair of the U.C. Berkeley Parents’ Fund and Advisory Board where he received the Trustees Citation Award in 2009 and on the board of the Hillsborough Schools Foundation where he founded the Scholars’ Circle. Murray graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with an A.B. in Political Science, and received an M.B.A. from Columbia University.
Visit www.theinvestmentanswerbook.com for more information.
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A BUSINESS PLUS EXCLUSIVE: HANK PAULSON
With the tradepaper edition of the major bestseller ON THE BRINK set to come out in a few weeks, we asked Hank Paulson to give us his thoughts on what has happened since the financial crisis of 2008, and what still needs to be done. Here are his thoughts:
I don’t wake up mornings wishing that I were still Treasury secretary. For one thing, I am finally getting a good night’s sleep again. I hope as the economy recovers that that is also true for the millions of people in America—and throughout the world—who have been living through this long nightmare of home foreclosures, job losses, and financial uncertainty. Congress has passed vitally needed regulatory reforms, and the Group of 20 nations established by President Bush has made great progress in managing this global crisis and taking steps to minimize the next one. More than two years after the start of the current crisis it is more apparent than ever that the major actions we took to prevent the collapse of the financial system and the onset of another Great Depression have worked. Most of the TARP funds have been returned to the taxpayers and all, or almost all of the rest, will be returned.
But there is much left to do. It will take some time yet to work through the economic, psychological, and political consequences of this truly historic credit crisis. Yet, while the United States and the rest of the world wrestle with the aftermath of the calamitous near-collapse, we need to find ways to prevent another financial crisis of the magnitude and severity of the last one.
On the regulatory front, the Dodd-Frank Act must be implemented and turned into workable regulations. Policymakers here and abroad need to focus on the hard work of modernizing and strengthening the financial regulatory infrastructure—particularly that of the over-the-counter derivatives market and the secured lending, or so-called repo market. And, of course, the most difficult structural economic challenges must be addressed globally and in the United States. The Group of 20 nations must develop an effective global process to encourage major economies—including the US economy—to make progress in controlling dangerously large current account deficits, and surpluses. In the United States, our greatest structural challenge is, of course, our fiscal deficit. As a people and a nation we save too little and spend too much. Our increasing debt level threatens our status as a global economic power, and the economic security of our children and grandchildren. The good news is that we are a wealthy nation; dealing with this problem now will involve some sacrifice but will not drastically affect our standard of living. If we wait until more drastic changes are forced upon us by a crisis of confidence in the capital markets, the consequences will be much more severe and painful. Then our children and those who follow will bear the burden of diminished opportunity.
I’m very pleased that the Bowles-Simpson Commission recently presented a bipartisan proposal to deal with our deficit and that this has prompted a lively and wide-ranging debate, with the public now focused on the real options for addressing our long-term structural issues. In the past, attention has been focused on the need to curb the growth in entitlement spending for Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and rightfully so. What has received much less attention is the need to dramatically reform—rather than just tweak—our incredibly complex tax system. And I mean both individual and corporate taxes. I’m very glad that the Bowles-Simpson Commission has proposed doing just that. Taking away a lot of the complexities and inefficiencies in the tax code will allow us to lower the tax rate and broaden the base—a much better foundation to support sustained economic growth. Reforming our corporate tax system, lowering the rate and eliminating some of the biases while moving to an international system used by other nations, would allow US multinationals to become more competitive and create more jobs here at home.
And, of course, we have much work to do to reshape the government policies that helped to stimulate housing excessively, leading to overvalued home prices throughout the United States. A significant part of this effort should be directed to dramatically downsizing and restructuring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; we need to fix a flawed structure that was a major contributor to the crisis, while encouraging a healthy private-sector residential-mortgage market in the United States.
If we don’t lose our sense of urgency, and if the needed reforms are put in place domestically and internationally, markets will adapt and continue their positive trend of the past twenty-five years. Let’s not forget that these markets helped tear down the Iron Curtain, lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and brought great prosperity to our nation. Efficient, well-regulated capital markets can continue to provide economic progress around the world. That inevitably leads to more political freedom and greater individual liberty.
Henry M. Paulson, Jr. served under President George W. Bush as the 74th Secretary of the Treasury from June 2006 until January 2009. Before coming to Treasury, Paulson was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs since the firm’s initial public offering in 1999. He joined Goldman Sachs Chicago Office in 1974 and rose through the ranks holding several positions including, Managing Partner of the firm’s Chicago office, Co-head of the firm’s investment Banking Division, President and Chief Operating Officer, and Co-Senior partner.
Prior to joining Goldman Sachs, Paulson was a member of the White House Domestic Council, serving as Staff Assistant to the President from 1972 to 1973, and as Staff Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon from 1970 to 1972.
Paulson graduated from Dartmouth in 1968, where he majored in English, was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and an All Ivy, All East football player. He received an M.B.A. from Harvard in 1970. His book ON THE BRINK will be available in tradepaper on February 15, 2011.
THE TOP TEN MOST INFLUENTIAL INVENTIONS OF THE 20TH CENTURY
Today’s post comes to us from Harry Beckwith, bestselling author of the upcoming book, UNTHINKING (January 2011):
No one would nominate me among the several thousand people most qualified to assess the 20th century’s ten most influential inventions, but whichever invention wins the title will have to outscore television in the finals.
Television has shaped our attitudes, beliefs, values and behavior. It has glorified notoriety more than talent, and rewards spectacle and other extremes. It rhapsodizes over items that we simply must have. It’s also made us less communal; the days of early-evening chats with neighbors on their porches look almost medieval to us now, but they were part of American life just 60 years ago. Television, along with the air conditioner, sent us inside. We gather far less, and text far more.
But television also informs us about things we truly need, changes we can and should make, and insights that we can use to improve our lives.
At least as important, television makes real to us what otherwise would be abstract–and our brains much prefer the concrete. Imagine the difference between watching the Twin Towers collapse on your television screen versus reading about it the next day in your newspaper.
Consider television’s greater impact on your senses: hearing the screams, the emotion in the newscasters’ voices, the sound of the implosion. Television lets us see and hear what is happening, and seeing changes our feelings. Think how deeply we grieved the deaths of the people aboard the Challenger, and how stunning it was to watch and hear Neil Armstrong step onto the moon.
Is the internet a greater influence? Will it prove to be? Almost certainly, and definitely.
But television has certainly changed the world dramatically, too.
Beyond those two, I’d include:
the automobile, which made America wider, spreading us into suburbs and exurbs;
the atomic bomb, for its immediate effect in ending a war and its longer term effect of raising the stakes of international politics from worrisome to terrifying;
the computer of course–a too obvious choice;
air conditioning, which has made our entire country’s shift to the South and Southwest possible;
jet flight, which helped flatten America and changed how wars are fought and won;
and the contraceptive pill, which belongs near the top. It’s changed the role of women, promoted their liberation, and affected our belief about controlling our own bodies. If pills to prevent conception, why not pills to alter our minds? “You seem so much better!” “I’m taking these pills.”
That’s a phenomenal change.
These inventions seem uniquely influential. To fill out a ten-invention list, you can make strong arguments for chemotherapy, the Salk polio vaccine, the transistor, the silicon chip, the Interstate Highway System, the New Deal, the radio, and others I am overlooking. And I am among millions who, without consciously thinking about it, am very grateful for the invention of the electric guitar.
Harry Beckwith heads Beckwith Partners, a marketing firm that advises twenty-three Fortune 200 clients and dozens of venture-capitalized start-ups on branding and positioning. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford, Beckwith is an internationally acclaimed speaker. He is the bestselling author of five books, which, collectively, have been translated into twenty-three languages. His latest book, UNTHINKING: The Surprising Forces Behind What We Buy, will be available on January 26, 2011.
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