Innovation Must-Reads in Magazines

Reviewing Portfolio and Fast Company – our two favorite innovation/business intelligence-oriented magazines – this month, some novel reads:

• Boy Wonder: Chris Hughes’ first two acts – creating Facebook and launching Barack Obama online. The evolution of constructive social networking that actually creates value.
• Maximum Security – Best ways to protect your position and jobs to be in over the next decade, per exec-search firm Korn/Ferry.
• Lululemon’s Cult of Selling – An internal employee constitution, 900+ yoga-teacher evangelists, and a required office read in Oprah-endorsed book The Secret.
• The Steve Jobs Economy – Worth $5.7B individually, Mr. Jobs’ worth to Apple is estimated at a staggering $30.8B.
• What Should I Do with My Life, Now? – Po Bronson’s re-take on the soul/career-search, knocking down 7 fallacies in the 6 years since his original book was published.
• All Apologies – Kurt Cobain’s music isn’t finding the same licensing opportunities as one would expect. With only $50k from Guitar Hero (versus $5M to Aerosmith) and $50M to Courtney Love, time to review the math.

• Maximum Security – Gary Burnison, CEO of exec-search firm Korn/Ferry. The best jobs in the next decade: “Health care, education, sciences, some areas of technology, but not commodities.”
• Furlough Envy – With unpaid vacations becoming the latest interoffice spin on the sabbatical, a good read on employee furloughs: “I think it will be a mentally healthy thing, because you don’t have a choice. You’ve got to take off. I’d like to predict that this may permanently alter the American work force once people adjust to the lower income.”
• The Prime of Mr. Nouriel Roubini – Running seven offices in between teaching at NYU, this downturn doomsayer (aka “Dr. Doom”) is also a NYC party machine. Speaking at Davos, walking onto CNBC with disco music in the background, Roubini has built up a quick empire. “RGE’s site, called Roubini Global Monitor, combines aggregated and original content in a way that’s similar to the Huffington Post. [...] RGE has about 250 bloggers and analysts who contribute to the site. Some material is available by subscription only; clients include hedge funds, think tanks, and even the World Bank, RGE says. Subscription prices range from $10,000, for “reading rights,” to more than $100,000. “
• All Apologies – On Courtney Love’s licensing of Nirvana library, and it not finding many licensors given a $50M upfront to her: “When the makers of the video­game Guitar Hero struck a deal with Primary Wave, it was only for ‘Breed,’ one of Nirvana’s biggest hits, which probably brought in about $50,000, estimates one industry expert. By comparison, they wanted 24 of Aerosmith’s most popular tunes and paid $5 million for them.”
• The Steve Jobs Economy – With $2B in third-party accessories, $5B from AT&T for the iPhone, Jobs alone has an estimated “personal net worth [of] $5.7 billion. But he means much more than that to Apple, its partners, and its competition. On an annual basis, Jobs is the $30.8 billion man.” When one owns the majority of the IP ecosystem of Apple, as Jobs does, how does its economy scale in his short or long absence?

• Boy Wonder: How Chris Hughes Helped Launch Facebook and the Barack Obama Campaign – A determined 25-year-old, Hughes jumped from Facebook to Obama’s online campaign and “created more than 2 million profiles on the site, planned 200,000 offline events, formed 35,000 groups, posted 400,000 blogs, and raised $30 million on 70,000 personal fund-raising pages.” For his third act, he joined DC P.R. firm, GMMB Communications, per Gawker.
• Will NPR Save the News? – Given the recent downfall of news establishments,  NPR has pushed mixed media to users while growing its commuter stronghold via radio. “It was the first mainstream-media organization to enter podcasting and often has several programs in the iTunes top 10. An open platform introduced last year allows listeners to mix their own podcasts and otherwise play around with NPR content — one fan built an NPR iPhone app. [...] Traffic on NPR.org grew 78% from 2007 to 2008.”
• Oh My: Lululemon’s Cult of Selling – CEO Christine Day has commandeered an army of yoga-teachers, over 900, and created an internal constitutioning borrowing from The Secret. With “100 outlets and $340 million in annual revenue. ‘I have not been able to find any company that compares with what they do,’ says Suzanne Price, a retail analyst with ThinkEquity, who points to Lululemon stores ringing up $1,800 in sales per square foot, compared with only $600 for retailers such as J.Crew and Abercrombie & Fitch.”
• What Should I Do with My Life, Now? – Po Bronson wrote the book behind this article’s update, and breaks out seven fallacies about life decision-making: “There is no one-perfect-thing each of us is meant to do on this planet. Give me a break. Where’d that myth come from? If someone repeats it, throw a glass of water on them. For each of us, there are dozens, hundreds of careers, any one of which could provide you a sense of meaning and goodness.”