A few weeks ago I accused bookseller McNally Robinson of missing the plot twist following their entry into bankruptcy protection. What I said was (1) that they had expanded at the wrong time, in the wrong way and (2) that they didn’t have an effective strategy for competing with online book sales.

Well, last week McNally emerged from bankruptcy protection and Paul McNally made some public comment on what went wrong, as he saw it. The biggest single factor he cites was the failure of their Don Mills store to meet the sales targets for which they had hoped. He speculated that their strategy of community involvement maybe didn’t play as well in T-Dot, but it has also been noted that the Don Mills mall in which they were located has been a disappointment to many of its retail tenants.

Via TED’s Best of the Web Talks, I discovered J.K. Rowling‘s Harvard Commencement Address in June 2008 on The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination. The subject brings up an important concept — the fact that although we list only successes on our CVs, it is typically the failures that teach us more. Comparatively, success perhaps teaches us very little. When was the last time you judged someone as qualified because of the lessons learned in their last failure? Granted, this might not be the single best criteria, but someone who’s never failed may well be an underachiever stuck within the constraints of mediocre thinking.

J.K. Rowling:

Generally when you work on something that matters, you find yourself making a little extra effort to get everything just right. I may only be addressing the perfectionists in the crowd, but there are enough of us out there that it’s worth saying. Now, I don’t know if there’s an 80/20 rule for this, but there seems to be an 80/20 rule for everything else. So let’s suppose it takes 80% of your effort to get the last 20% “just so.” And it’s worth it, that striving for perfection. It’s what puts you above the competition, makes you stand out. It’s what keeps you from being singled out for having errors in your copy, for example. Shoot for perfect, right?

Ori Brafman has previously co-written The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations along with Rod Beckstrom. I’ve previously mentioned the book a couple of times, and was looking forward to delving into Ori’s new book, Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, written with his brother, Rom Brafman.  I was pleased when it arrived by FedEx, and I devoured it pretty quickly.

Comparing well with Blink and The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, Sway, like Starfish, is well-written and entertaining as the Brafmans explain how people’s judgment is swayed in various contexts.  Recognizing the types of context in which one’s judgment is likely to be swayed can help avert poor decision-making.  As the old saying goes, “forewarned is forearmed.”

“It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”

— Henry David Thoreau

I’ve previously mentioned David Seah’s Printable CEO Series, which I really like — it has all the hallmarks of a system that’s been designed by someone who has actually used it, and refined it over time. The real gem (imho) of the series is the Emergent Task Planner, which according to David’s blog

Leo at ZenHabits has taken a stab at simplifying the GTD system with Zen To Done (ZTD): The Ultimate Simple Productivity System. He says,

ZTD captures the essential spirit of the new system: that of simplicity, of a focus on doing, in the here and now, instead of on planning and on the system.

If you’ve been having trouble with GTD, as great as it is, ZTD might be just for you. It focuses on the habit changes necessary for GTD, in a more practical way, and it focuses on doing, on simplifying, and on adding a simple structure….

ZTD attempts to address five problems that many people have with GTD. I should note that GTD isn’t really flawed, and doesn’t really need modification, but everyone is different, and ZTD is a way to customize it to better fit different personality types.

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Earlier this week I was sitting with a colleague at the Prairie Ink Cafe. We were sipping a Lindemans chardonnay and, at one point, pontificating on the subject of business books. “They need to be not significantly more than 200 pages,” I said, with a touch of cynicism. It isn’t that a lengthier treatment of a worthwhile subject will inevitably run out of steam by page 200, it’s just that it may not sell all that well if it’s much longer. People don’t want to read, and I quipped wryly that your average CEO’s attention span was no longer than that.

If the truth doesn’t save us, what does that say about us?

A friend recently pointed out David Seah’s fine Printable CEO Series. The series is a set of printable tools he has produced for scheduling, planning, and estimating activities or projects. The set includes time-tracking tools to help keep on track with various tasks and record time for later billing. I think my favorite in the set is the Emergent Task Planner.