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After just one week, Charlene Li's second book, Open Leadership, hit #5 on the New York Times Bestseller List. I will be surprised if it doesn't reach the #1 spot.
A week before Charlene's book was published, Toby Bloomberg launched her first book, a free ebook, Social Media Marketing.
What does one have to do with the other? They are two business books on social technology written by women. As a genre, the business book category is dominated by men.
If you check out the New York Times Hardcover Business Best Seller List for last week, you will not find one women author on the list. Suze Orman is on the paperback best seller list, but she's the only woman.
While vastly different in scope and approach -- Charlene's is a bestseller, Toby's is a free e-book -- the two books share a common message: Social technology/media is forcing companies to change the way they do business by thinking about relationships in a new way. If you read the two books, they will seem as if they are echoing each other.
Toby's book is actually a succession of 40 interviews conducted by Toby via Twitter. The interviewees include prominent marketers from Canada, England, India and the U.S. There are some names that are very familiar to BlogHer: Elisa Camahort, Susan Getgood, AV Flox and some BlogHer alums, Nancy White and Marianne Richmond.
Both books promise to provide practical, pragmatic, actionable information.
Toby says she created her book to be a resource for marketers, written by the community of social media marketeers. She calls it an experiment in "crowdsourcing" and says she wanted to create a body of knowledge that could serve as a roadmap for developing strategic social media.
Charlene says Open Leadership picks up where her first book, Groundswell, left off. She writes the purpose of this book is to show readers "just how they can use these new technologies [...] to improve efficiency, communication and decision making for both themselves and their organizations."
Both books look at the shift in the balance of power brought on by social technologies:
It's all about empowering the front line&ass.stakeholders; more power power vs. less control. Don't relinquish quality checks -- geoliving
Charlene says in her book, "Open Leadership is about how leaders must let go to succeed." She emphasizes that "being open requires more-not less-rigor and effort than being in control." Charlene defines open leadership as:
Having the confidence and humility to give up the need to be in control while inspiring commitment from people to accomplish goals.
Both books talk about the need to listen, the need for strategic planning, and the need to embrace failure. Both books talked to the social media strategists at Dell and Comcast.
The question is, did the two books succeed in what they set out to do? For the most part, they did.
Toby's is not a sit out on the deck, with a nice, cool glass of ice tea, kind of read. For me, it's more like Bartlett's Quotations -- a great go-to resource when I need a quick, easy way to find smart insights on social media. Like the quotations in Bartlett's, these tweets by industry experts serve as great conversation starters, thought jumpers and inspiration.
Charlene's book has been reviewed by many folks. Click here, here, and here. For the most part, winning rave reviews. While I do have 22 Kindle pages worth of notes, highlights and bookmarks, I did not find this book as powerful or as inspiring as Groundswell. I was clicking right along, doing lots of head nods and feeling at one with the subject, until I got to locations 1308-14 (25 percent through the book, this is Kindle talk). The subhead read: The Apple Factor. Charlene writes:
I would argue that, given Apple's strategic objectives, it doesn't have a driving, compelling need to be open -- at least, as long as it continues to develop world-class products.[...] When you come down to it, Apple doesn't need to be more open than it already is. And as long as it continues its success streak of delivering market-changing and leading products that delight customers, it likely won't need to change its ways.
While this is just a minor part of the book, it had a major impact on me, tainting the entire book. That may seem ridiculous, but it did. It really bothers me that, on the one hand, Charlene is saying businesses and
