No, that's not Steven Colbert

It's Peter Tertzakian on The Daily Show. Peter was interviewed by Jon Stewart about the energy crisis. The reason: Peter stated that America had an addiction to cheap oil in his book, A Thousand Barrels a Second, then President Bush used the phrase in his State of the Union Address. 

Stewart's interview was interesting and thoughtful, as they generally are. The attention brought to Peter's book was impressive. It climbed the Amazon sales ranks noticeably in the next few weeks, reaching the top ten a few times. Luckily for Peter, the Daily Show episode got replayed a number of times because Stewart went on hiatus to prepare for the Oscars. 

Books are a printed medium, but as Oprah and Stewart demonstrate, there's nothing like a little PR from the TV. It's interesting that publishers have yet to find a really successful means of publicizing books in the digital age. Until they do, Oprah and Stewart are the publishing equivalent of winning the lottery. 

Road Warriors Getting Squeezed

I like to travel. But I hate traveling by plane. You know the complaints - the security, the second bag charge, the lack of space on the plane, the bogus delays and cancellations. My favorite video on overseas flights is the one that gives in-seat exercise tips for happy fliers. The smiling passenger bends over and touches her toes, then lifts her arms and does little swirly motions. As I watch, I'm so tightly squeezed into my seat I not only can't touch my toes, I'm forced to take shallow breaths. I'm not sure if the video is a cruel joke or a sociopsychology experiment. 

I don't know how you road warriors do it. Some of the authors we work with are on the road half the year. Our 50TopCoaches co-host, Marshall Goldsmith makes it sound easy. Go light on the clothes, only use carry-on bags, eat before you fly. But for most business travelers I think things are a bit more grim. 

Apparently, it's only going to get worse with the economic downturn and rise in energy prices. According to the NY Times, "scrutiny on travel has increased dramatically." Meaning fewer business class flights, fewer luxury hotels, more meetings squeezed into each trip, ad nauseam. 

New "travel management technology" is supposed to help alleviate some of the pressure. But somehow, I doubt it. Road warriors seem pretty efficient already. Instead, I think new communication technology will be the answer. Instead of traveling to conferences or meetings, we'll participate virtually. We're not going to see the end of all business travel, but I believe a serious curbing is on the horizon. CISCO Systems, for example, has a goal of reducing all business travel by 20 percent, and they're developing the communication technology to make that plausible. Not only will it alleviate the squeeze on road warriors but it will help reduce energy consumption, too. 

Peter Tertzakian talks about how energy prices are changing our work lives in his webinar on October 29. He's got compelling things to say about how we're going to get ourselves out of the squeeze we're in right now. It's been rough lately in corporate America. Analysts like Peter help explain what's going on and where we're headed. 

Unbound Roundup

In reviews this week.... it's mostly Buffet, and we're not talking Jimmy. (Despite all that talent, turns out they're not related.) 

At NYT, the new biography about Warren Buffet, The Snowball: Warren Buffet and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder, gets a positive review. Reading about Buffet visiting Wall Street and talking stock picks to celebrate his tenth birthday reminds me of this book. In hardcover non-fiction best-sellers, the only business book in the top ten, albeit numero uno, is Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How it Can Renew America. Topping the second tier is T. Boone Pickens' The First Billion is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future. Interesting that both these business books are focused on our energy problems. Well, so is Peter Tertzakian, coming up at the end of the month. 

WSJ's Buffet review gives some insights into how the book was written. First-time author, Alice Schroeder, who met Buffet in the early 90s as an analyst, got $7.2 million for the North American rights alone, an enormous amount of money for a book not penned by Clinton, Oprah, or the Pope. But Schroeder's biography was with Buffet's cooperation, and she carried around a personal note from him to open doors everywhere. Buffet, however, wanted the publishers to be clear on the fact that he was not a c0-author or stealth-author and would not engage in any promotion of the book. (The WSJ piece compares that to the tireless publicity work Jack Welch did on his Straight from the Gut.) Though Buffet claims it treats him "better than he deserves" and he wants to see it do well if he ever came out and disputed the facts that could really hurt sales. An odd arrangement and a big risk for the publisher Bantam. You can see Schroeder talking about the book here. 

In other WSJ reviews, Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn From the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years is a timely book on business mistakes, detailing bad moves by such companies as AOL Time Warner, Kodak, and Motorola. And in another timely book, and an apparent rebuttal to Mr. Friedman, it turns out The World is Curved and that's why we're experiencing upheaval in our financial markets.  

At The Economist, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business looks like an interesting IT update of Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds and tells us how open source and wikis are changing business. Finally, Goldman Sachs: The Culture of Success tells the history of the firm and shows it has faced adversity before.