Bring On The Books For Everybody How Literary Culture Becomes Popular Culture by Jim Collins

Bring On The Books For Everybody How Literary Culture Becomes Popular Culture by Jim Collins.

Jim Collins is a professor at the University of Notre Dame. This book is published by Duke University Press in 2010. Jim Collins is writing for a popular audience. The word choice is quite interesting and wonderful. He uses terms like lit-lit, bibliotherapy, adaptation film, and superstore. There is melding of the academic with the popular. Jim Collins easily moves between subjects like Ladies Home Journal and modernist literature. The juxtapositions are striking.



The writing is at times funny, ironic, and witty. The author is describing how literature is transformed into a popular medium and taken out of the academy. He describes adaptation films (films adapted from literary works,), the New York Times Book Review, Oprah's Book Club, and chick lit.



Jim Collins explains how literature is treated as both a form of self cultivation and self actualization. Many people read the classics to be better people. We get a of an Oprah Winfrey episode of television where Oprah encourages people to read Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, the classic Russian novel. It is at times appalling, fascinating, and poignant.

I espcially liked his sections on books to film. Two of the books which he spends quite a bit of time on are The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje and The Hours by Michael Cunningham both of which were turned into excellent films.



Jim Collins is describing the packaging of books into a complete line of products; books, films, furniture, and other products. Books become a brand unto themselves. This is an article that explains the phenomenon with the book, Eat Pray Love. http://www.mercurynews.com/fashion-style-headlines/ci_15797294?nclick_check=1



Classic literature becomes swept up in the process as well. Shakespeare becomes books like Shakespeare In Love and Jane Austen becomes The Jane Austen Book Club. This marketing is exploited by companies like Target, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other super shopping sites. Henry James and other writers become commodities.



I am not completely comfortable with this. I find some of it goes too far. For example, books like The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger are clear attempts at romantic consumerism; a mix of buying the right stuff, sex, and relationships.  Sex and the City for literature.



This is a very interesting book. It is quite topical for librarians, booksellers, and people interested in books. It even mentions Nancy Perl and her segment on books on National Public Radio. The book is well indexed and has an extensive bibliography. I highly recommend reading this book.

How The Mighty Fall And Why Some Companies Never Give In by Jim Collins

How The Mighty Fall And Why Some Companies Never Give In by Jim Collins

This book is about why very successful companies fail. It is not about complacency. It is about a process of self-inflicted mistakes; pursuing growth at all costs, taking on too much risk, excessive pride, making promises that are not doable, and finally succumbing to the inevitable. Jim Collins describes the death of Merrill Lynch, Merck, Motorola, Addressograph, and the decline and rebirth of IBM, Nucor, and Nordstrom's.

The books reminds us that returning to the core strengths of a company and putting the right people in place are more important than hiring outside managers and making grand plans. There are several charts comparing the right and wrong thing to do in a turnaround. The charts were to the point and easy to read.

The main text of this book was 157 pages. It could have been cut down to a 100 pages. The appendixes, notes, and index covered as much information as the main text. The ideas in this book were very clear. I think this book serves as a timely reminder that American companies need to get back to basics.

Good To Great By Jim Collins

Good To Great Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't By Jim Collins

This book is about how companies go from being good companies to companies that create long term sustained great performance. The book identifies eleven publicly traded companies from the Fortune 500 that went from barely beating the market to having continuous returns of at least twice the market for stockholders. I am not sure how this applies to libraries, but the book attempts to define a set of principles on making a company great.

The message in this book was easy to identify with. There are no complex strategies, flashy leadership secrets, or special financial techniques. This book is about how to inspire discipline, find a consistent simple purpose, create continuous incremental change, choose the right technologies, and bring very focused leadership on board.

One of the first things that Jim Collins writes is that it is impossible to implement any sustainable strategy without first bringing the right people on board. He also writes that it is as important to choose what not to do as what to do.

The book has a number of metaphors sprinkled throughout. One of them is the Stockdale Paradox: be brutally honest and at the same time know you will prevail. For discipline, there is the metaphor of rinsing your cottage to remove all the extra fat. This was done by a champion triathlete.

Most of the examples in this book are very concrete. Philip Morris introduced flip top boxes for cigarettes, Nucor introduced continuous slab casting, and Kroger was the first to experiment with scanners in supermarkets. These are all examples of introducing the right products and technology to gain market advantage.

My favorite metaphor in the book is the flywheel metaphor. Change happens not because of big fantasy initiatives, but because of continuous pressure. A flywheel speeds up because of continous sustained momentum. I like to think of the same idea with pushing an iceberg where it is very slow to move, but becomes very hard to stop once it is in motion.

The book contains no photographs. There are a few black and white charts that are easy to understand. Also, there is an index, bibliographic notes, and a detailed set of appendices explaining how the research on the companies being written about was done.

I read the companion monograph, Good to Great and the Social Sectors Why Business Thinking Is Not the Answer as well. The monograph is very short, 35 pages and distills the essence of the larger book focusing on nonprofits and government agencies. A few of the organizations covered are the New York Police Department, the Girl Scouts, and the Cleveland Orchestra. There are a number of metrics on how to measure greatness in social sector companies. This is worth reading before you read the larger book.

Daily Thoughts 4/29/09

Reading Lady. Kamisaka, Sekka -- Artist Woodcuts From:Momoyogusa = Flowers of a Hundred Generations. c1909

Daily Thoughts 4/29/09

Today is rather interesting. We had a morning meeting discussing the many things which are currently happening. We are doing a lot with getting the library collection more organized. I spent a considerable amount of time making sure the law collection was being covered properly today.

We have a reggae poet doing a workshop right now. I stopped in for a minute to check on things. He was talking about how to do free writing. He has a cd of his poetry which he is giving to participants. There is also a class visiting from the local baptist church who are working on a project on different countries around the world. The final thing which is happening is a city Green Committee which is meeting for the first time in the community room. We are making a concerted effort to increase community involvement in the library. The reggae poet did very well. He wants to come back again to do another workshop. He gave two of his spoken word cds to the library.

I started working on a bookmark for graphic novels. It has a nice short selection of what I think people might like to read. I might also do one for writing as well.

On the train home, I started reading Good To Great Why Some Companies Make The Leap... And Others Don't by Jim Collins. There is also an accompanying monograph called Good To Great And The Social Sectors Why Business Thinking Is Not The Answer by Jim Collins. The monograph is quite short, only 35 pages of text.