Recommended Reading

Do You Matter, Robert Brunner

Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, Douglas Davis

Win Without Pitching Manifesto, Blair Enns

Thinking Strategically, Avinash K. Kixit

Managing Your Day-to-Day, 99U

Value-Based Fees, Alan Weiss

Tribes, Seth Godin

SPRINT, Jake Knapp

Run Studio Run; Eli Altman

Fanatical Prospecting, Jeb Blount

Expert Secrets, Russell Brunson

The Business of Design, Keith Granet

No B.S. Trust-Based Marketing, Dan S. Kennedy

FREE: The Future of a Radical Price, Chris Anderson

Stop Random Acts of Marketing, Karen Heyward

The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande

The Brain Audit, Sean D’Souza

Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter F. Drucker

Pricing Creativity, Blair Enns

Change the Management, Al Comeaux

The Design of Business, Roger L. Martin

No B.S. Direct Marketing, Dan S. Kennedy

Client Magnets, Stephen Mayall

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It, Chris Voss

Building a Story Brand, Donald Miller

Influencer: Building Your Personal Brand in the Age of Social Media, Brittany Hennessy

The PR Masterclass, Alex Singleton

Successful Employee Communications, Sue Dewhurst and Liam FitzPatrick

The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever, Michael Bungay Stanier (Box of Crayons Press, 2016.) Stanier delves into seven questions that can help you delve into the heart of the issue while keeping you from making assumptions and providing solutions to the “wrong” problem. These questions keep you from becoming overly “helpful.” That is helpful to the detriment of the asker, yourself, and/or the issue that really needs addressing. They allow you to focus on the deeper problem. Examine and identify what resources are required and, just as importantly, what resources and projects must be let go to achieve the desired result. (Recent Reads Post)

ADAPTIVE WEB DESIGN, Aaron Gustafson (New Riders, 2015)

DON’T MAKE ME THINK, Steve Krug

MASTERING TYPE, Denise Bosler (HOW Books, 2012)

THE ANATOMY OF TYPE, Stephen Coles

SHOW YOUR WORK!, Austin Kleon

BURN YOUR PORTFOLIO, Michael Janda

THE ANATOMY OF TYPE, Stephen Coles

COLOR INSPIRATION, Darius A Monsef (HOW Books, 2011)

 POSITIONING: THE BATTLE FOR YOUR MIND, Al Ries and Jack Trout (McGraw-Hill Trade, 2000). Positioning started as a brochure in the early 1970s, then grew into a book, and has been continuously updated without ever losing its salience. Ries and Trout pioneered the concept of positioning, the Big Bang of differentiation which soon they expanded into a dozen or more books, each viewing the subject from a different angle.

VALUE PROPOSITION DESIGN, Alex Osterwalder et al (Wiley, 2015). The authors simplify the process of finding and building out a value proposition—the key differentiator of a business—using a variety of charts, illustrations, and blanks to fill in. The strength of this book lies in its friendliness and thoroughness. You’ll still have to think, however.

BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne (Harvard Business School Press, 2005). A blue-ocean strategy is directly analogous to radical differentiation. It’s aimed at discovering wide-open
market space (blue ocean) instead of going head to head with entrenched competition (red ocean). The authors’ tool for mapping a brand’s “value curve” against those of competitors is especially useful for adding clarity and rigor to big-picture thinking.

THE INNOVATOR’S SOLUTION, Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor (Harvard Business School Press, 2003). The authors show how innovative companies can disrupt incumbents with products and services that seem “not good enough” compared with those of competitors, while setting the table for future success. They also show that large companies don’t have to sit by idly while scrappier upstarts reposition their business. A seminal work.

ZAG, Marty Neumeier (New Riders/AIGA, 2007). Whereas THE BRAND GAP outlined the five disciplines needed to build a charismatic brand, ZAG drills down into the first of the disciplines, radical differentiation. In an age of me-too products and instant communications, winning companies are those that can out-position, out-maneuver, and out-design the competition. The rule? When everybody zigs, zag.

UNSTUCK, Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro, Ph.D. (Portfolio, 2004). When all else fails, get UNSTUCK. This little book from a founder of Stone Yamashita Partners and a professor of organizational behavior is chock full of tips and tricks for improving collaboration. The authors couple a highly visual communication style with bite-size ideas (not unlike THE DESIGNFUL COMPANY), to create a fun, easy tool for jumpstarting your team. More inspirational than instructional, it allows the reader to participate in the process.

NO MORE TEAMS!, Michael Schrage (Currency/Doubleday, 1995). Teamwork has only been given lip service until now, argues Schrage, and for teams to be innovative they need “shared spaces” and collaborative tools. Well written and highly original, NO MORE TEAMS, will bring you closer to your ultimate goal, breakthrough concepts than can revolutionize a business or even an industry, and create a sustainable competitive advantage.

CREATING THE PERFECT DESIGN BRIEF, Peter L. Phillips (Alworth Press, 2004). Here’s a practical guide to getting all your collaborators on the same page—literally. Unless you can clearly delineate goals and roles, your project is doomed to mediocrity or even failure. Any design manager intent on building a creative metateam would do well to incorporate Phillips’s thinking into their manaement system.

THE TEN FACES OF INNOVATION, Tom Kelley (Doubleday, 2005). Kelley, from design mega-firm IDEO, maintains that the idea-killing power of the “devil’s advocate” is so strong that it takes up to ten innovation protagonists to subdue him. He offers the “anthropologist,” who goes into the field to see how customers really live; the “cross-pollinator,” who connects ideas, people, and technology in new ways; and the “hurdler,” who leaps tall obstacles that block innovation.

SIX THINKING HATS, Edward de Bono (Little, Brown and Company, 1985). When executives try to brainstorm the future of their organization, the discussion can quickly collapse into confusion. Edward de Bono, acknowledged master of thinking skills, shows how to get the groups best ideas by focusing on one kind thinking at a time. By organizing the session into a series of “hats”, i.e., red for emotions, black for devil’s advocate, green for creativity, ideas aren’t shot down before they’re proposed. I’ve used this system with my clients with amazing results.

 A SMILE IN THE MIND, Beryl McAlhone and David Stuart (Phaidon, 1996). If you were to buy only one book on graphic design, this should be it. Designer Stuart and writer McAlhone prove that wit is the soul of innovation, using clever and often profound examples from American and European designers, plus a modest few pieces from Stuart’s own firm, The Partners, in London.

SERIOUS PLAY, Michael Schrage (Harvard Business School Press, 1999). Schrage isn’t kidding—he seriously wants you to adopt a collaborative model. He says the secret is building quick-and-dirty prototypes, which serve as shared spaces for innovation. He brings the reader into the wild world of the right brain, where play equals seriousness, and serious players work on fun-loving teams.

THE ART OF INNOVATION, Tom Kelley et al (Currency/Doubleday, 2000). Kelley pulls back the curtain at IDEO to reveal the inner workings of today’s premier industrial design firm. He shows how the firm uses brainstorming and prototyping to design such innovative products as the Palm V, children’s “fat” toothbrushes, and wearable electronics. Cool stuff!

METASKILLS, Marty Neumeier (New Riders, 2012). His fourth book is not so much about branding as one of its major components: innovation mastery. Specifically, it’s about the untaught creative skills we need to harness the “Robot Curve,” an accelerating waterfall of obsolescence and opportunity. The five metaskills are feeling, seeing, dreaming, making, and learning. If you just want the takeaway lessons, read THE 46 RULES OF GENIUS.

THE 46 RULES OF GENIUS, Marty Neumeier (New Riders, 1014). There is no such thing as an accidental genius. Anyone who has reached that exalted state has arrived there by design. In this slim volume I’ve tried to compress the wisdom of the ages into the first “user manual” for genius—46 gems that will light your path to creative brilliance.

TRUTH, LIES, AND ADVERTISING, Jon Steel (John Wiley & Sons, 1998). Steel was an account planner at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, the agency famous for the “Got milk?” campaign and many others. Part researcher, part account executive, part agency creative, and part surrogate customer, he shows how to get inside customers’ minds to discover how they relate to products, brands, and categories.

THE DESIGN OF BUSINESS, Roger Martin (Harvard Business Review Press, 2000). This insightful book reminds us that even as we become enamored with Big Data, innovation is a product of design thinking more than analytical thinking. Martin shows how creativity accelerates the pace of business knowledge to deliver a powerful competitive advantage. A seminal work on design thinking.

DECODING THE NEW CONSUMER MIND, Kit Yarrow (Jossey-Bass, 2014). Marketing psychologist Kit Yarrow explains how technology has rewired our brains, making us more individualistic, isolated, emotional, and distrustful. This is not a pessimistic book—it’s a practical guide to addressing customers’ desires and insecurities in a time of deep cultural shifts. Not only has she done her homework, she presents the results with lightness and clarity.

THE INNOVATOR’S HYPOTHESIS, Michael Schrage (MIT Press, 2014). Schrage advocates for crafting business experiments that make top management sit up and take notice. He introduces a “5×5 framework”: diverse teams of five people have five days to come up with five business experiments costing no more than $5,000 each and taking no longer than five weeks to run. Successful 5x5s, Schrage shows, make people more effective innovators, and more effective innovators mean more effective innovations.

STATE OF THE ART MARKETING RESEARCH, George Breen, Alan Dutka, and A.B. Blankenship (McGraw-Hill, 1998). This is more than you’ll ever want to know about marketing research—unless you’re a professional researcher—including how to do mall interviews, focus groups, and mail studies. But if you need a good reference on the subject (or if you think mostly on the left side), this is your book.

LEADING THE REVOLUTION, Gary Hamel (Plume, 2000). Hamel issues a call to arms for would-be revolutionaries, saying it’s not enough to develop one or two innovative products—in the 21st century you need to create a state of perpetual innovation, not just with products but whole business models. Once an innovation becomes a best practice, he says, it’s potency is lost. “If it’s not different, it’s not strategic.” Highly recommended for provocateurs at every rung of the corporate ladder.

FUSION, Denise Yohn (Nicholas Brealey, 2018). Independently, brand and culture are powerful. Denise Yohn shows that when you fuse the two together, you create organizational power that isn’t possible by simply cultivating one or the other alone. Through detailed case studies from Amazon, Airbnb, Adobe, Nike, Salesforce, and others, she provides readers with a roadmap for increasing competitiveness, creating measurable value for customers and employees, and future-proofing their businesses.

BRAND LEADERSHIP, David A. Aaker and Erich Joachimsthaler (Free Press, 2000). To be successful, says Aaker, branding must be led from the top. This shift from a tactical approach to a strategic approach requires a equal shift in organizational structure, systems, and culture. The authors prove their point with hundreds of examples from Virgin to Swatch and from Marriot to McDonald’s.

THE METHOD METHOD, Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry (Portfolio/Penguin, 2011). As you might have guessed, the two founders of Method have a method. They’ve not only developed the world’s favorite cleaning brand, they’ve designed a set of principles that have turned the brand into a cultural movement. Read and learn from the best.

THE DESIGNFUL COMPANY, Marty Neumeier (New Riders, 2009). Forget total quality. Forget top-down strategy. In an era of fast-moving markets and leap-frogging innovation, we can no longer decide the way forward. We now have to design the way forward. This third book in my whiteboard series shows leaders and managers how to transform the organization into a powerhouse of brand innovation.

ZAG, Marty Neumeier (New Riders/AIGA, 2007). Whereas THE BRAND GAP outlined the five disciplines needed to build a charismatic brand, ZAG drills down into the first of the disciplines, radical differentiation. In an age of me-too products and instant communications, winning companies are those that can out-position, out-maneuver, and out-design the competition. The rule? When everybody zigs, zag.

SCRAMBLE, Marty Neumeier (Level C Media, 2019). A “business thriller” about a CEO facing a stark choice: he and his team must reimagine their company in five weeks or lose everything they’ve been working for. David Stone and his staff learn they can’t win the game playing by the old rules. They have to master “agile strategy” to overcome the headwinds buffeting their industry. Can they do it in time? Who do they want to be? What will they do? How will it matter? (Recent Reads Post)

BUILT TO LAST, James C Collins and Jerry I. Porras (Harper Business Essentials, 1994). The key to longevity, say Collins and Porras, is to preserve the core and stimulate progress. What’s the core of your business? Your value set? Your promise? This is the place where brand strategy starts, whether your company is a house of brands or a branded house. The authors spent six years on research, which gives the book a certain gravitas.

TRIBES, Seth Godin (Portfolio, 2008). More manifesto than business book, TRIBES puts out a passionate call for leaders in the age of easy group-forming. “The Web can do many things,” says Godin, “but it can’t provide leadership.” Tribes emerge when people are connected to each other, to a leader, and to an idea that matters. To the extent that brands are movements, they need great leaders.

THE MISSION STATEMENT BOOK, Jeffrey Abrahams (Ten Speed Press, 1999). This is a handy reference tool, since it contains 301 corporate mission statements from some of America’s best known companies, including Johnson & Johnson, Kelly Services, and TRW, and John Deere. The only time you’ll need it is when you’re working on a mission statement, at which point it will seem indispensable.

THE BRAND FLIP, Marty Neumeier (New Riders/AIGA, 2016). THE BRAND FLIP is a sequel to THE BRAND GAP. The rise of branding, now fueled by social media, has placed the future of companies firmly in the hands of customers. It’s a pan-industry judo throw that’s taking down some companies and raising others to the status of superstars. Each of the 18 chapters describes a specific flip—an accepted business “truth” upended by technological change—and how to profit from it.

WHO DO YOU WANT YOUR CUSTOMERS TO BECOME?, Michael Schrage (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). It’s a startling question, especially to companies that focus on their own success instead of the success of their customers. But if you’re out to build a lasting brand, it’s the right question to ask. Schrage shows why the goal of innovation should not be to invent a great product but to create a great customer.

DECODING THE NEW CONSUMER MIND, Kit Yarrow (Jossey-Bass, 2014). Marketing psychologist Kit Yarrow explains how technology has rewired our brains, making us more individualistic, isolated, emotional, and distrustful. This is not a pessimistic book—it’s a practical guide to addressing customers’ desires and insecurities in a time of deep cultural shifts. Not only has she done her homework, she presents the results with lightness and clarity.

VALUE PROPOSITION DESIGN, Alex Osterwalder et al (Wiley, 2015). The authors simplify the process of finding and building out a value proposition—the key differentiator of a business—using a variety of charts, illustrations, and blanks to fill in. The strength of this book lies in its friendliness and thoroughness. You’ll still have to think, of course.

THE INNOVATOR’S SOLUTION, Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor (Harvard Business School Press, 2003). The authors show how innovative companies can disrupt incumbents with products and services that seem “not good enough” compared with those of competitors, while setting the table for future success. They also show that large companies don’t have to sit by idly while scrappier upstarts reposition their business. A seminal work.

BUILDING STRONG BRANDS, David A. Aaker (Free Press, 1995). In this followup to MANAGING BRAND EQUITY, Aaker acknowledges that many companies’ brands are part of a larger system of intertwined and overlapping brands and subbrands. He shows how to manage the “brand system” to achieve maximum clarity and synergy, how to adapt to a changing environment, and how to extend brand assets into new markets and products.

POSITIONING: THE BATTLE FOR YOUR MIND, Al Ries and Jack Trout (McGraw-Hill Trade, 2000). POSITIONING started as a brochure in the early 1970s, then grew into a book, and has been continuously updated without ever losing its salience. Ries and Trout pioneered the concept of positioning, the Big Bang of differentiation which soon they expanded into a dozen or more books, each viewing the subject from a different angle.

BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne (Harvard Business School Press, 2005). A blue-ocean strategy is directly analogous to radical differentiation. It’s aimed at discovering wide-open market space (blue ocean) instead of going head to head with entrenched competition (red ocean). The authors’ tool for mapping a brand’s “value curve” against those of competitors is especially useful for adding clarity and rigor to big-picture thinking.

PURPLE COW, Seth Godin (Portfolio, 2003). The author likens a differentiated brand to a purple cow. When driving through the countryside, the first brown cow gets your attention. After ten or twelve brown cows, not so much. Godin proves his point with innumerable examples from today’s brandscape, and shows how any company can stand out from the herd. He also takes aim at advertising as usual, proclaiming the death of the TV-industrial complex. It’s time to mooove on, folks.

FASTER, James Gleick (Vintage, 2000). This book is chock full of facts that support something most of us understand intuitively—that the pace of life is speeding up. Gleick maintains that our era of “instant coffee, instant intimacy, instant replay, an instant gratification” is causing what doctors and sociologists call “hurry sickness.” In ZAG, I didn’t use copious illustrations to support my point about the “big speedup”, since Gleick has already done it here. Also, my readers are in too much of a hurry.

THE PARADOX OF CHOICE, Barry Schwartz (HarperCollins, 2004). Conventional wisdom says that more choice is better. Only up to a point, says Schwartz, after which more becomes less. Choice overload can cause us to second-guess ourselves, adopt unrealistic expectations, and blame ourselves for any and every failure. Instead of empowering us, excessive choice can undermine us, leading in some cases to clinical depression. A good book to read if your goal is to reduce customer choice—marketplace clutter—instead of adding to it.

THE POWER OF SIMPLICITY, Jack Trout and Steve Rivkin (McGraw-Hill, 2000). Simplicity is always a hard sell, which is why it’s so powerful in the commercial world. It goes far to explain the success of In-and-Out Burger, Google search, the iPod, and Post-It Notes. It may also explain why the simplest advertising works best, and why ideas that take more that a few words to describe often fail in the marketplace. According to Trout, reducing complexity is the number one way to streamline a business and maximize its profits. Simple, really.

THE DESIGNFUL COMPANY, Marty Neumeier (New Riders, 2009). Forget total quality. Forget top-down strategy. In an era of fast-moving markets and leap-frogging innovation, we can no longer decide the way forward. We have to design the way forward. This third book in my whiteboard series shows leaders and managers how to transform the organization into a powerhouse of brand innovation.

LEADING THE REVOLUTION, Gary Hamel (Plume, 2000). Hamel issues a call to arms for would-be revolutionaries, saying it’s not enough to develop one or two innovative products—in the 21st century you need to create a state of perpetual innovation, not just with products but whole business models. Once an innovation becomes a best practice, he says, its potency is lost. “If it’s not different, it’s not strategic.” Highly recommended for provocateurs at every rung of the corporate ladder.

UNSTUCK, Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro, Ph.D. (Portfolio, 2004). When all else fails, get UNSTUCK. This little book from a founder of Stone Yamashita Partners and a professor of organizational behavior is chock full of tips and tricks for improving collaboration. The authors couple a highly visual communication style with bite-size ideas, to create a fun, easy tool for jump-starting your team. More inspirational than instructional, it allows the reader to participate in the process.

SERIOUS PLAY, Michael Schrage (Harvard Business School Press, 1999). Schrage isn’t kidding—he seriously wants you to adopt a collaborative model. He says the secret is building quick-and-dirty prototypes, which serve as shared spaces for innovation. He brings the reader into the wild world of the right brain, where play equals seriousness, and serious players work on fun-loving teams.

THE DESIGN OF BUSINESS, Roger Martin (Harvard Business Review Press, 2000). This insightful book reminds us that even as we become enamored with Big Data, innovation is a product of design thinking more than analytical thinking. Martin shows how creativity accelerates the pace of business knowledge to deliver a powerful competitive advantage. A seminal work on design thinking.

FUSION, Denise Yohn (Nicholas Brealey, 2018). Independently, brand and culture are powerful. Denise Yohn shows that when you fuse the two together, you create organizational power that isn’t possible by simply cultivating one or the other alone. Through detailed case studies from Amazon, Airbnb, Adobe, Nike, Salesforce, and others, she provides readers with a roadmap for increasing competitiveness, creating measurable value for customers and employees, and future-proofing their businesses.

BRAND AGAINST THE MACHINE, John Michael Morgan (Wiley, 2011)

DIFFERENCE, Bernadette Jiwa (The Story Of Telling Press, 2014)

THE LITTLE BRAND BOOK, Kalika Yap (Harper Design, 2020)

HOW TO LAUNCH A BRAND, Gabian Geyrhalter (Brandtro, 2016)