Every year about this time, I reflect on the top 10 (or so) books that really stood out to me as someone interested in how companies succeed over the long run and how managers and frontline people alike can make the decisions necessary to achieve that success among the hyper-competitive, global markets we face today.

These are, as you might imagine, overwhelmingly of the non-fiction variety, but they are not, strictly speaking, always "business books". That's the case again for 2007, as many of the titles describe as much social phenomena and cognitive skills as they do business strategy.

So, this year, in recognition of the presence of more than one such non-business title on my top 10 list and the fact there are 27 of them, I decided to just call it my "My Favorite Books for Business 2007", in the list below, all having been released sometime in 2007 and are listed in the order in which I most enjoyed them. That said, my favorite book of 2007 was "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die" by Chip and Dan Heath and first runner-up "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Enjoy!

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The new George Tenet memoir that launches today was reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times yesterday in a piece called "An Ex-C.I.A. Chief on Iraq and the Slam Dunk That Wasn't".

Kakatuni called it both "withholding and aggrieved, earnest and disingenuous" and "is interesting less for any stunning new revelations than for fleshing out a portrait of the Bush White House already sketched by reporters and former administration members."

The book describes a White House entitled to its own set of facts as the former director of central intelligence lashes out at Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials, saying they pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a serious debate about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States.

Elsewhere in the book, Tenet defends his now infamous "slam dunk" comment about the case for going to war in Iraq. I found the Sunday TIME Magazine interview that runs down his side of the story plus a few other choice tidbits:

TIME: Slam Dunk? What were you thinking? (read more)

After reading Jacob Weisberg's Slate.com piece on Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden's plan to solve the healthcare crisis in the U.S., I've decided we should draft him to run for President... or at least, Vice President. And I'm a Republican. But as a critic of Hillary's last go-round with that issue, he'd make a better running mate for someone like Edwards or Obama (or better yet, teaming with McCain or Romney for a potent [though unlikely] mixed ticket). The excerpt below tells you why:

Wyden is a politically savvy wonk, who in drafting the bill he recently introduced has tried to learn from previous Democratic mistakes. He recently told me he had read The System, David Broder and Haynes Johnson's massive tome on the failure of the Clinton health-care reform plan, no less than five times. (Apparently, Starbucks now offers an intravenous drip.)

Wyden's bill is 166 pages against Hillary's 1364, and he thinks he can pare it further. When he was getting started, Wyden drew a grid of the major interest groups and made sure there were plusses as well as minuses for each in his bill. He has support from CEOs, labor leaders, and even one maverick health-insurance executive.(read more)

With the Grammy awards last night bouncing back in the ratings (though I still didn't watch it, they at least had the sense not to go up against American Idol like last year), the RIAA was in full effect and showing their rebel streak by blue-stating the Dixie Chicks with honors they'd never see at the Country Music Awards.

For the first time since Eric Clapton in 1993 bestowing upon the DCs FIVE awards, including album of the year, record of the year and song of the year. WHEW!

Even as mainstream pop waxed, rap records were waning as hip-hop got no love from the Recording Academy with zero nominations outside the rap category for the first time in years. Perhaps there is still hope for America's youth.

Why do I think the Dixie Chicks won for "Not Ready to Make Nice"?

Their co-author of course: Dan Wilson, Minneapolitan songwriter from Semisonic and Trip Shakespeare shared the honors.

What's interesting in all this music industry PR wasn't the reunion of The Police (though cool), but that it came even as Apple's extraordinary sense of timing has just finished forcing media companies of every ilk to bow before the iPod monopoly of consumers similarly locked into the iTunes digital distribution channel. (read more)

In looking through my notes from the Yahoo PM confab, I saw some intriguing bits and pieces gathered from all of the PM practitioners there I did not speak to in my original post.

It would seem that PM's, as with any new process that threatens the status quo and embedded processes, get the most push back and lack of acceptance from those in the middle tiers of an organization. The top-tier really like PM's because they get essentially unfiltered information, knowledge, analysis and opinions from the first-tier, and the first-tier likes them because they get a direct venue to those in the top-tier. The mid-tier (read middle management here) are the ones who are generally (but as in all generalizations not always)the ones most opposed to PM's, and are the most threatened (a perceived threat to be sure, but sometimes very real nonetheless) by them, for the very same reasons the others really like them.

This is true, again in general, within any organization trying to use or implement new processes and or changes. The new ways threaten the perceived role of the mid-tier professionals, who see as part of their roles the gathering of information and the feeding of knowledge, analysis and opinion up to the top tier (read senior management here). They see their role and influence (and yes, power) being reduced whenever they are put out of the loop. You can read any number of essays, books, papers, etc. about this, but it happens, and it happens in almost all organizations, public, private, government agencies, etc. In these same publications you can also read many tools and techniques to avoid this, or actually use management jujitsu to turn it around.

But what was striking in the confab was the absence of any awareness of these ideas. Perhaps they are aware of them and just did not have time to speak to them, or, perhaps not. As an example, I wonder what would happen if within the organizations that said they were having the most trouble with this real issue tried to enroll the mid-tier into using the PM as a key business tool, sponsoring the tool, and understanding what they had to gain by doing so? Anyone had any experience in doing this?