Todd Sattersten started out his career as an engineer at General Electric. Now he’s president of 
800CEORead, a Milwaukee specialist in business books. Todd was recently in the Boston area for an event around the new book he and Jack Covert have authored, “The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.” I sat down with him in a Cambridge coffee shop for a few questions.
Big Think: Why did you decide you wanted to put together “The 100 Best Business Books of All Time”?
Todd: For us, the book is a stake in the ground: in the last 50 years – a couple are further back - what’s the stuff that really matters? This is for people who say, “I don’t have time for anything, but the 100 Best Books – I could spend the next five years with this book and figure out what works and what doesn’t.”
Big Think: Is there something you read and said, ‘we should be doing this?’
Todd: We found we have to celebrate failure a little bit more. Business books don’t tend to spend a lot of time on failure — there are probably 14 books in the 100 best whose primary message is about failure. I’m an engineer by training, and the book I think of is Henry Petroski’s “To Engineer is Human.” He talks about how engineering is not a science but an art, and how engineers learn the most from failure. In business, we tend to lose our jobs when we fail. For us, we want to try more stuff and celebrate failures as much as successes, and that’s really hard.
Big Think: Since you started writing this book the economy has completely fallen apart. Would that have changed some of the choices you made if you started today?
Todd: I think only a couple. For example, we put “Moneyball” by Michael Lewis in, but I think we would have looked harder at Liar’s Poker, and possibly his new book, Panic, which is an edited anthology. It’s a fascinating read, if you haven’t checked it out. We would’ve looked back at Nassim Nicholas Taleb and maybe put in “Fooled by Randomness” or “Black Swan.” He has some accessibility problems, from my perspective.
Big Think: What are you reading now?
I’m going back in time and reading a book called “Managing Transitions” by William Bridges. it was bestseller in the ’80s and he has a lot of things to say that are very applicable to today’s time about how organizations and people deal with change. It complements John Kotter’s stuff, but it’s a very simple model, and as we go through these times, there’s a process people go through to sort of deal with that. I think Bridges’ model is pretty interesting. I’m trying to think about how it applies to us, as well.
Big Think: What’s your next book?
Todd: The next book is us examining the best business ideas of all time. There’s lots of things that were bad books, but were good ideas. For example, we didn’t include Michael Porter. “Competitive Strategy,” for the average reader, at 432 pages — not really it. Not very accessible. The HBR article that was just updated on the five forces that shape competitive strategy, go read that. That’s what we recommend – that’s 26 pages.
Also, we’re amazed how often Maslow shows up, at how often Myers-Briggs and Social Style show up, and a lot of time authors don’t tend to acknowledge those, they tend to claim it as their own, and that’s problematic. We in business tend to want to keep renaming things over and over and we never get to a point of true learning. In the second book is find a set of ideas and have a good deep discussion about them and show all the places they show up.
