The Bard Press Essays
Week 4 – February 25, 2021
I just got done reading Adam Davidson’s book The Passion Economy. The book focuses on innovative businesses who are defying the odds and making their businesses more relevant than ever in a competitive, global economy. In the book, there are some incredible examples and he describes the kind of business owner I want to be. For me, there was inspiration throughout.
At the same time, I found the book frustrating, but not because it wasn’t good. I was frustrated because I don’t think the book reached its full potential. I fear recommending it because many readers will just think it was OK. Not true! The trouble is that all the pieces don’t fit together as well as they could.
What I am going to do is share The Passion Economy’s collection of elements that I call the product throughline. That arc starts on the cover with the title and subtitle. From there, the book description serves as the verbal book trailer and the chapters are revealed through the table of contents. The final segment of the throughline is the opening material from the book itself—the introduction and the first few chapters.
Davidson says in his introduction, it is hard to learn from abstraction. Stories can be more effective in making a point. The Passion Economy feels like a good case study, a book that we can x-ray to see its structure and examine how we might improve it.
Let’s walk through those elements for The Passion Economy and see what we find:
Title and Subtitle
The Passion Economy:
The New Rules for Thriving in the Twenty-First Century
Todd’s Take: ‘Passion’ is strong, emotive word. ‘Economy’ is broad and nebulous, but it does evoke a kind of movement through massive network of interlocking players. It’s interesting, but needs more definition.
And by reading the subtitle, you are told you are going to find out the rules, the things that really matter to make that happen in today’s world. The subtitle has a strong promise with high definition.
The Book Description
From the creator of NPR’s Planet Money, a brilliant analysis of our current economy that reveals the transformative hope it offers for millions of people to thrive as they never have before.
The popular economic refrain declares that the American middle class is dying and robots will soon take our jobs. These models of doom, though, fail to account for the hundreds of small businesses riding waves of change in their industries and harnessing these shifts to their advantage. How have the owners of these businesses accomplished this seemingly impossible feat? And what can they teach the rest of us?
Adam Davidson, an award-winning New Yorker writer, a small-business CEO, and one of our leading public voices on economic issues explores how the twenty-first-century paradigm offers new wars of making money. Fresh paths forward professional fulfillment, and unprecedented opportunities for curious, ambitious individuals to fold the things they love into their careers. These businesses look beyond traditional, broad ideas of commodities and cost and instead focus on the actual value created by personal, specialized relationships.
Drawing on the stories of average people doing exactly this—an accountant overturning his industry, a sweatshop owner’s daughter fighting for better working conditions, an Amish craftsman meeting the technological needs of Amish farmers—as well as the latest academic research, Davidson shows us how the twentieth-century economy of scale has given way in this century to an economy of passion. He makes clear, too, that though the adjustment has brought measures of dislocation, confusion, and even panic, these are most often the result of a lack of understanding.
The Passion Economy delineates the ground rules of the new economy, and armed with these, we begin to see how we can succeed in it according to its own terms—intimacy, insight, attention, automation, and, of course, passion. An indispensable road map and a refreshingly optimistic take on our economic future.
Todd’s Take: Book descriptions are often written by marketers and their job is to encapsulate everything the book and the author have to offer. It’s a tough job. This description has a few issues. First, the problem The Passion Economy is solving is described in one sentence: “The popular economic refrain declares that the American middle class is dying and robots will soon take our jobs.” How can the reader tell if they suffer from the problem the book tries to solve? The voice given to that problem is even dismissive as to whether it is a problem. We’ll return to this issue.
From there, the book description turns too fast to the solutions the book will deliver. This makes the description feel long. It uses lots of words that reach out beyond what could be a tight message around the premise for the book. This is where my worry started to appear.
The Table of Contents
- Preface
- Chapter 1: A Shoe Salesman’s Son at MIT
- Chapter 2: The Rules of The Passion Economy
- Chapter 3: Behold The Dairy Brush
- Chapter 4: Accounting For The Brave
- Chapter 5: In Vino Veritas
- Chapter 6: Know Your Story
- Chapter 7: The Amish Lesson
- Chapter 8: The North Carolina Factory That Let China Do The Cheap Stuff
- Chapter 9: Don’t Be A Commodity
- Chapter 10: The World in a Chocolate Bar
- Chapter 11: The Nudge
- Chapter 12: All It Takes Is A Quick Reminder
Todd’s Take: The Table of Contents in most books is purely functional, a light form of navigation to open the book. A book’s Table of Contents has the opportunity to be a great marketing tool for potential readers. From this TOC, you can’t tell much of anything about the book. The chapter titles are cryptic, in one case written in a foreign language. They are the kind of titles that make sense after you read the chapters, not before.
The Book’s Opening
In the opening of the book, you find the first four chapters are about:
- Davidson comparing the lives and perspectives of his grandfather, who worked as way up to being a plant manager of a ball bearings plant, and his father, a life-long actor who did work on Broadway and in regional theater around the country. We are given the promise of a new era that can combine livelihood with passion.
- Then we meet MIT professor Scott Stern and learn about his research on entrepreneurial strategies. Davidson contrasts that knowledge with Scott’s father Eitan and his struggle with entrepreneurship.
- Chapter Two takes a sharp turn with a very descriptive, chunky set of rules for The Passion Economy.
- And then we meet Braun Brush, a 145-year old company that completely reinvents itself and get a quick glimpse of Krischer Brush on the other side of the city that is slowly declining.
Todd’s Take: When readers get to the body of the text, they are now trying to line-up all the pieces they have seen of the product throughline. Whether they consciously know it, readers are looking for the answer to the question “What is this book about?”
When I am at this point, I search for a defining statement early in the book. I want the author to make a promise to me, the reader, about what I will get if I keep reading. If I don’t see that promise in the first twenty pages, I put the book down and walk away. I know that might sound extreme, but an author who doesn’t make a promise to the reader doesn’t have a North Star to write to. Books rarely recover.
In the Preface, Davidson starts the book by comparing the lives and perspectives of his grandfather, who worked as way up to being a plant manager of a ball bearings plant, and his father, a life-long actor who did work on Broadway and in regional theater around the country. He says the contrast is to compare the choice people feel they need to make between occupations that provide money and their passions that feed their soul.
And this takes us to the promise – “At the core of this book are stories of people who have figured this out and have been able to model an entirely new way of living, one that combines the financial goal of my grandfather’s work with the personal passion and joy of my dad’s.”
A few paragraphs later, it gets a little blurrier when he actually provides a definition for the book’s title:
“The same forces—technology and trade—that destroyed the widget economy have given birth to what I call the Passion Economy. The Internet allows people who want to sell a unique product or service to find customers all over the world. Automation makes it possible for people to manufacture their unique products without needing to build a factory first. Advances in trade mean that those unique products can be delivered to the people who most value them, where they happen to be…This book lays out the economics of how this change happened and how you can take advantage of it.”
Is that the same promise? The first was a promise to the answer for how to live a life filled with passion and profit. The second promise is the explanation of a new set of economics that let you sell your uniqueness to anyone in the world. So, maybe they are the same? You see that same trouble that we saw in the book description—the problem isn’t clear enough to build a lane for the solution.
The problem with the final segment of the product throughline is the opening arc of the book itself, starting with the story of his father and grandfather. His grandfather was in business, his father in the arts. We are not hearing about the story of two business people or two businesses trying to figure out how to survive and thrive in The Passion Economy. And frankly, the same mistake is made again in the next chapter with the story of an academic and his entrepreneurial father. In the following chapter, Davidson summarizes the rules, using a strong business book voice and utilitarian approach you don’t see in the book again. The whole take-off for The Passion Economy is too choppy, bumping around between different ideas and tones.
Potential Fixes to The Product Throughline
Let’s talk through what we could do with each element to help them fit better together.
Title/Subtitle
I would keep the title The Passion Economy. Every story in the book is about people doing things the love.
The subtitle is tougher. You need a promise that tells the readers what they are going to get from reading the book. Fans of Davidson are going to want the narratives. Business book readers are going to want lessons they can apply.
I would probably keep them both if I didn’t want to take on more editorial work…
The Passion Economy:
The New Rules for Thriving in the Twenty-First Century
Book Description
I think you can get a better sense of the book with a full paragraph about the problem and then describing what is different with the people you’ll read about. I spent about 15 minutes on this, largely using the copy in the current description. It is not perfect, but it works better.
The economy of the twenty-first century runs different than the last. New competition can come from a new company next door, another factory an ocean away, or from a firm in in a completely different industry you never thought could steal your customers. Everything seems to be commoditized widget that can be bought and sold through an online portal, where sales pivot around the lowest price. These new realities haunt business owners and the people who work for those companies.
Adam Davidson, an award-winning New Yorker writer and a small-business owner himself, believes there is a different story to tell. Fresh paths forward professional fulfillment, and unprecedented opportunities for curious, ambitious individuals to fold the things they love into their careers. These businesses look beyond traditional, broad ideas of commodities and cost and instead focus on the actual value created by personal, specialized relationships.
Drawing on the stories of average people doing exactly this—an accountant overturning his industry, an Amish craftsman meeting the technological needs of Amish farmers—as well as the latest academic research, Davidson shows us how the twentieth-century economy of scale has given way in this century to an economy of passion.
The Passion Economy delineates the ground rules of the new economy, and armed with these, we begin to see how we can succeed in it according to its own terms—intimacy, insight, attention, automation, and, of course, passion. An indispensable road map and a refreshingly optimistic take on our economic future.
Table of Contents
There is an easy fix for making the Table of Contents more helpful to prospects and readers. At the start of every chapter in The Passion Economy, there is a one sentence description that acts as a lead-in. There is nothing to create. Just add this copy to the TOC. Here is a partial example of what could be done:
- Preface
- Chapter 1: A Shoe Salesman’s Son at MIT
- The son of a brilliant failed entrepreneur learns that anybody who follows a few simple rules can thrive in our new economy.
- Chapter 2: The Rules of The Passion Economy
- Chapter 3: Behold The Dairy Brush
- How a long bristled brush explains the future of the American economy.
- Chapter 4: Accounting For The Brave
- By turning a traditional model upside down, a bored money cruncher learns that he can thrive by figuring out his true product and its true price.
- Chapter 5: In Vino Veritas
- How a bottle of wine and a farmer’s dirty hands explain the mechanics of pricing based on value.
- Chapter 6: Know Your Story
- No matter what it is you provide, the greatest value lies in the knowledge, passion, and skill with which you provide it.
(sidnote: I think the descriptions for chapters 5 and 6 are accidently reversed)
The Book’s Opening
The opening chapters of the book need to be in a different order. The material is all there, but there is a much better sequence.
Open the whole book with what is currently Chapter 3. And don’t call is a Preface or Introduction. Start with Chapter 1 and Lance Cheney, the current CEO of Braun Brush. Tell about the lunches he had with his father Max, about the disagreements over the future of the company. And then, take us across town to meet Israel Kirschner and his brush company Kirschner Brush, a company that isn’t going to survive, the path that Lance might have taken. Back at Braun, we’d hear about the brushes he made for Frito-Lay, NASA, and the nuclear power industry. You get to talk about passion, innovation, customer value and the power of pricing.
The wobbly promise is fixed and naturally falls out of that chapter—”In The Passion Economy, business owners are finding new paths that better serve their customers, developing businesses that are more financially sustainable, and all while engaging their deepest interests to create a purposeful life.“
The chapter on rules gets moved to the end of the book. This decision will make all readers happy. For readers who want stories, they flow uninterrupted now. For the business reader, they fully expect an ending chapter with the book’s lessons concentrated for easy consumption. If there was time to do more work editorially, it would be ideal to better illuminate the lessons from within the stories themselves. I think that is another reason the stories rattle around too much in the current book and inside the concept of The Passion Economy.
From there, you could tell the story of Scott Stern and his father and continue on with the rest of the chapters as they are presented.
Closing
My advice to authors is think through the whole arc of the the product throughline. Creating the throughline is an iterative process. Changes to one element nudge all of the other elements. Having an integrated team collaborating on editorial and marketing is really important to keep those elements aligned.
I hope it was helpful to look closer at the components of a product throughline that link together and move people from interested prospect to happy reader.
