S+B’s Best Business Books of 2009

Booz & Co’s Strategy + Business ezine is one of my favourites, and one I always make time to read. Last week’s edition looked at the best business books of 2009, selected by their top team, and helpfully categorised.

If you want to read their reasoning, and some excellent background comments, start here. All I am going to do is list the books (and make it easy for you to buy them – choose from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk or Kalahari.net – for South Africa):

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Oprah and Supply Chains

We all know about Oprah’s ability to significantly impact sales. In both directions. She loves it, we love it and we buy it. She hates it, we hate it and don’t ever buy it. It’s one of the reason’s, I suppose, that her business is as large as it is? Started as a simple talk show, added a ‘home shopping network’ component, and now she moves markets (and I’m sure a whole lot more)

I enjoyed this article from CIO because it moves from sales and profits and focusses on supply chains and logistics. I suppose it’s an obvious curiosity, but it does create an interesting question around logistics and supply planning for a product being Oprah-tised.

There’s a great case study exercise around Amazon.com and their Kindle being Oprah-tised. Even the highly efficient Amazon didn’t seem to cope with the added demand apparently created by Oprah.

“The day of the endorsement, visits to Amazon’s website were up 6 percent over the previous Friday, according to Experian PLC’s Hitwise. Web traffic going from Oprah.com to Amazon.com increased more than 15,000 percent.”