Swedish suggestions
October 11, 2006Gerald No Comments »Business books are all too often based around the author guru’s latest recycling of common-sense logic. But Jonas Ridderstråle and Kjell Nordstrøm, the writers of ‘Funky Business: Talent Makes Capitalism Dance’ and ‘Karaoke Capitalism’, are worth anyone’s attention.
Example: “The time has come to stop re-engineering and start re-energizing our organizations. Competence is nothing without compassion. You may have a career, but do you have a calling? Future firms must become both co-creators of competence and providers of personality. Once it was money for mastery. Now, it must also be meaning for membership. Talent wants value and values. To thrive, organizations must learn how to combine skill and soul.
“The future, as always, does not lie in front of successful individuals, it must rest within them… Try to control the uncertainties of this world and you’ll go nuts. Perhaps, instead, the best thing that we can hope for is some stability and certainty inside ourselves. Forget about your weaknesses for a while. Find your strengths and use them. Be the person that you were meant to be. Reveal that best kept secret of yours to the rest of the world. Get real. Otherwise you are bound to get lost. And if that does not work for you, remember we always have Viagra and Prozac.”
Check out the books’ websites, www.funkybusiness.com and www.karaokecapitalism.com.
You can buy the book from Amazon, of course. Go to Karaoke Capitalism: Managing for Mankind (“Financial Times”)
The Swedish publishers, Bookhouse, also published ‘4D Branding’ by Thomas Gad (see the publisher’s blurb). The book “offers a revolutionary four-dimensional model for understanding brand strengths and weaknesses. It can be used to create a new brand or analyze the strategic options for established brands. The model enables companies to create their own unique ‘brand code’ or ‘mindspace’, the unique corporate DNA, which can be used to drive every aspect of a business from product innovation to recruitment. The 4-D model consists of:
- The functional dimension: describes the unique features of a product or service.
- The social dimension: speaks about the experience of the consumer as a user, as Starbucks did when it introduced European café culture into the US.
- The mental dimension: creates an individual experience through the brand, as Nike did with ‘Just do it’. Builds value in the minds of its users.
- The spiritual dimension: talks about what the brand stands for.”
Thought-provoking material – well worth the read…
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