The Business Books That Have Most Influenced Me

Over the years, I probably have read most of the self-help books that have taken the business world by storm. Speechwriters were almost required to do this, if for nothing else than finding a topical quote to use in an executive’s speech. In Search of Excellence. Who Moved My Cheese? The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The One Minute Manager. Reengineering the Corporation. Crucial Conversations. The Tipping Point. On Management. First, Break All the Rules. Made to Stick.

Many of these books had interesting ideas. However, the impact on me was nil, or close to nil.

But I did read books that changed my day-to-day work, transformed my work life, and made me think about work in a completely different way.

Most of them weren’t actually business books, however, or what we think of as business books. Many were about communication, which is no surprise because that’s the field I’ve worked in for my entire career. Some were academic works. Others weren’t.

Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (first published in 1964) is the source of the famous, almost clichéd statement “the medium is the message.” What that means is that the medium is as important as the message; some media are better for some kinds of communications than others. In this contemporary culture of the mania for “message points,” no one remembers what McLuhan said about the media themselves.

Eloquence in the Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking by Kathleen Hall Jamieson (1988) came at the mid-point of my speechwriting career. Jamieson’s focus was politics, and how the television sound bite had transformed political speech (and by extension, corporate speech). She did not see this as a good thing. She was right. Look at Washignton, D.C., where discourse has become all but impossible.

Poet David Whyte published two books that approximate “business books” – The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Corporate Soul in America (1994) and Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity (2001) that had an enormous impact on how I thought about work, and what I understood work to be. (I also like his poetry.)

Walter Ong was a Jesuit priest who taught at St. Louis University. In 1982, he published Orality and Literacy, which in a sense continued the discussion started by McLuhan but broadened it to what was happening in human communication generally. I didn’t read the book until the mid-1990s, in the throes of just having started a (revolutionary-at-the-time) email newsletter and the company’s first web site. Ong helped me understand why I seemed to intuitively grasp electronic communication – it’s closer to an oral culture than a print culture (words encouraging to a speechwriter).

The late Neil Postman wrote two books that served as serious warnings in the rush to all things electronic: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1987) and Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1993). He wrote a number of other works as well (all of which I read) but these two provided the watch outs for embracing the internet and (later) social media.

More recently, and one closer to a traditional business book, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith published Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation and Earn Trust (2009). It shaped my entire approach at work to using social media. It still does.

Other books had an influence, but none like these eight. I still go back and read highlighted sections. And I remain surprised at how up-to-date they’ve remained.

Over at The High Calling, Jennifer Dukes-Lee is asking for what business books have influenced you the most. Check The High Calling to see what others are saying.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Ancient History Lesson

For a large part of my career, I was a corporate speechwriter. A word guy. I would often eat, drink, and sleep the printed word. People who knew me as a child weren’t surprised to learn that I end up making a living with words. I was the family reader. I loved books. There was never a time when I didn’t have too many books.

I was not quite 33 when I got my first desktop computer at work – an IBM 384. I was fascinated as the IT guy set it up, and he was so amused by my interest that he showed me (and no one else in our department) how to type in the command for it to play music that was programmed into it.

Email began arriving in the early 1990s, and by 1993 our company had hit critical mass with the number of people with access. I started an email newsletter on company news – simple text, no images or graphics. Within three weeks, the newsletter had gone viral, saturating the entire system and even being sent by sales people and researchers to customers and academic partners outside the company.

Form there, I graduated to programming a “magazine” on a disk and then to leading the project to create the company’s first web site.

This sound so, well, rather ancient and quaint today, but then it was exciting, cutting edge stuff. Even Microsoft took note of what we had done with the company’s web site.

What I didn’t understand was why this was all so appealing to me, the printed word guy, the book guy. I was grappling with the implications of where this digital stuff was taking me (and the company), but I was genuinely puzzled by my attraction to it. That is, until I read a rather academic book called Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word  by Walter Ong.

Ong was a Jesuit priest teaching at St. Louis University (he has since died). Essentially, his argument was that the digital revolution was actually harking back to the oral culture replaced by Gutenberg and his printing press in the 1400s. Image and feeling (emotion) was becoming more important, propelled first by television and then by the computer and the internet. In fact, the digital world was a kind of “secondary orality.”

It all clicked into place. I was a speechwriter – writing in one medium (the printed page) for communication in another medium (speech) for understanding via a third medium (the ear and then the mind). I was also largely working in an “oral” field when the digital revolution and its “secondary orality” arrived.

It all made sense. What also made sense was that digital technology – like any other communication medium – is not “neutral.” We think it’s all about content, and we are dead wrong. Content is important, but the form the content is packaged in is also a communication vehicle, with its; own assumptions, priorities and biases.

All of this was brought to mind this week as I was reading The Next Story: Life and Faith After the Digital Explosion by Tim Challies. I bought the book about the same time I started The Discipline of Grace by Jerry Bridges, which Challies is leading a discussion of at his blog, Informing the Reforming.

In The Next Story, Challies provides an concise history of communication technology (the revolution really started with the railroad and the telegraph) as he leads up to an extended discussion on how all this affects our faith. He says that television, for example, “has taken us from a culture that learned from print, was entertained by print, was persuaded by print, and trusted print to a culture that now relies on the image. It has changed our perception of ourselves and our understanding of the world around us. Television represents more than flickering images on a screen. It gives us a new identity. A new ideology. A new idolatry.”

I cannot remember a time of not having a television (the first one I recall was a square boxy-looking thing on four wooden legs). My children cannot remember a time of not having a computer in the house. My two-and-a-half-year-old grandson is already adept at using the iPad.

As Challies says, technology changes us. It’s no coincidence that the rise of television coincided with the rise of youth culture and the emphasis on youth. Television also emphasized the hear-and-now at the expense of history. We are very arrogant toward history these days, believing anything older than 15 minutes probably isn’t worth very much.

And why do people on Twitter say things they would never dream of saying in person? Because of the perception that Twitter and other social media are game changers, and can empower the so-called powerless. Social media can also be a form of tyranny.

I was going to review The Next Story and be done with it, but I may have two or three posts about it. What Challies has to say about the impact of technology on faith is important.

Related: A blog post I wrote in 2009 – Social Media and Me