Summer Reading: Three Books to Help you Get Away from Twitter (While Maybe Helping You Get Better At It)
It’s summer again, time for lazy days at the beach, and of course, summer reading. Some of us will pick up the latest thriller or romance, but what if we want some measure of personal and professional edification? What should we read if we want to open our minds and gain a few insights that might help us back at the office?
Walk into your local Barnes and Noble, and you’ll find many new titles on everyone’s favorite subject, social media. In fact, typing in “social media” on amazon’s website yields no fewer than 33,000 book titles. This suggests what we know is true: Everybody in our industry and their aunt is reading about Facebook, Twitter, and the like.
We could do the expected and suggest another book on social media, but instead we’ll take inspiration from Youngme Moon’s new book Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd. Moon, a popular marketing professor at Harvard Business School, observes that business and marketing in particular are dangerously out of touch with the perspectives of everyday consumers. Companies are so obsessed with being different—with positioning themselves relative to competitors—that they paradoxically become part of the herd. Business today becomes a vast sea of sameness masquerading as difference.
Beautifully written and very personal, Moon’s book analyzes a number of outlying brands that actually are different—brands like Google, Ikea, and Swatch. The book ends not with a new paradigm or “takeaways” for appearing different in the eyes of consumers, but with a series of reflections that nudge you away from obsessively positioning yourself against others and toward crazy ideas that might not be so crazy after all. Those who want a quick recipe for success might come away frustrated, but it’s hard not to resonate with the humanity and wisdom of Moon’s perspective.
Different takes us a measure away from social media, but what if you want to get really far away from the world of 
tweets and “friends” yet still learn something valuable for your business? Kathleen Norris’ best-selling book Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer’s Life examines “the forgotten but utterly relevant concept of acedia, a term that has often been understood as spiritual sloth, signifying the serious malady of being unable to care.” Another deeply personal book, Acedia & Me weaves together reflections on monastic life, literature, and the author’s own marriage to focus on the phenomenon of “not caring.”
This is a vital topic for public relations professionals, since after all it is our job to encourage various constituencies precisely to care and become engaged. As Norris notes, acedia seems rife in today’s culture: “We grow inured to the horrendous violence engendered by suicide bombings and genocidal ‘little wars’ around the world, and sigh when we hear of road-rage fatalities at home….” This book again doesn’t provide ready-made answers (things like prayer help), but by examining the plague of boredom and carelessness, Norris helps us gain a keener sense of our cultural moment and a deeper understanding of what we might be up against when we try to address audiences.
We’ve covered business, religion…how about science? A new edition of Nassim Taleb’s bestselling 2007 book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is out. As the title suggests, the book explores those highly unlikely, outlier events that carry extreme consequences yet seem utterly comprehensible once they happen. “I stick my neck out,” Taleb writes, “and make a claim, against many of our habits of thought, that our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable…and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the known, and the repeated.” In other words, it’s our blindness that hurts us—what we don’t know, what we couldn’t conceive happening—something that’s painfully apparent after 9/11, and more recently, the oil spill in the Gulf. Taleb concludes with a new section offering “Ten Principles for A Black Swan Robust Society.” It’s helpful reading, especially for those of us whose clients must anticipate and deal with seemingly inconceivable crises.
So there you have it: Three (perhaps unexpected) book suggestions. No, you won’t learn a new technique to deploy on Facebook by reading these books. You won’t get “ten principles for better relationships and higher sales.” Yet you just might achieve a shift in perspective that could help you in your business. A freshness, a bigger sense of the world.
What else is summer vacation all about?
- In: Books
Great suggestions, Seth. Thanks for a post that is definitely not swimming in the “sea of sameness.” I look forward to reading the three books recommended and getting my own “bigger sense of the world.”