by Esther Wojcicki, journalism teacher and newspaper adviser at Palo Alto High School

Reading the newspaper these days makes me sad about journalism. “The American Press on Suicide Watch” was the headline of Frank Rich’s New York Times column this past Sunday. “Legendary brands from the Los Angeles Times to the Philadelphia Inquirer are teetering,” Rich said, adding that the New York Times Co. (NYT) might shutter the Boston Globe. Maureen Dowd riffed too about “The Future of Journalism” — which was the title of last week’s Congressional hearing chaired by Senator John Kerry. Journalists, Kerry said, are “an endangered species.”

The crisis isn’t simply that consumers are no longer willing to pay real money to support real journalism. Consumers truly don’t care enough about the product. A Pew Research Center survey in March found that 42% of readers said they wouldn’t miss their city paper.  Most of these readers, as you might guess, were under 40 years old.

I care a lot because I teach journalism at Palo Alto High School, in California. I’ve been teaching high school journalism for 25 years. Starting with 19 students, I’ve built our journalism program into the largest high school journalism program in the country, with six publications, four journalism teachers, and about 400 students. In the advanced journalism class, I teach 70 juniors and seniors. I also teach freshman English.

I decided to poll my journalism students: “How do you prefer to get your news, online or in print format?”

The popular answer may surprise you. About 70% of the students said they prefer “print format” — a hard copy of the paper. They said it’s easier to read this way — especially if a story is long. Long stories online give you headaches and eyestrain, they told me.

When I asked how many get breaking news online, almost everyone raised their hands. They prefer online for breaking news and sports news as well. But they prefer the hard-copy newspaper for features, opinion pieces, and columns, as well as long news stories.

“Who prefers to read magazines online?” When I asked that question, no one raised their hand. Makes sense to me. I can’t imagine reading magazines online.

My students say that they read a greater variety of stories in print. Online they tend to seek specific stories or subscribe to RSS feeds that they know they’re interested in. This is why I urge them strongly to read the hard-copy newspaper. How can you expand your world and your knowledge base if you read only what you’re already interested in?

Yes, it’s ironic, these kids who live in the heart of Silicon Valley recognize the value of traditional print journalism. In February, I took 50 of my students to New York City to visit several publications. The New York Times was one of them. The editors there posed this question: “How many of you read the New York Times in print?” The majority of hands went up. The editors were very surprised.

As one of my students said, “Who wants to have breakfast reading your computer if you can avoid it?”

So here’s the reality: It’s not necessarily that people enjoy getting their news online. It’s just that it’s faster and more efficient — and free.

This is the rub: Readers aren’t willing to pay for news online. They expect it to be free. The standard was set back in the 90’s, and it’s now part of the culture of the Internet. Ads, they said…the ads should pay for it. So far, that strategy has had mixed results. And now we see Amazon.com (AMZN), with the Kindle, and other e-book innovators asking consumers to pay subscription fees for newspapers delivered wirelessly.

How will this story evolve? I’m not sure whether there is a solution to help pay for real journalism. I told one of my sources close to the industry about the results of my poll. “We are in a transition period,” he said. “Wait until the netbooks become ubiquitous. Then kids won’t mind taking their netbooks everywhere and accessing all their news online. It is just a matter of time.”

I wonder if it really is a matter of time. Not for me. Nothing can replace reading the New York Times on Sunday morning. I’ll pay for that pleasure, even though news about the future of journalism is bad.

Esther Wojcicki is a journalism teacher and newspaper adviser at Palo Alto High School in Palo Alto, California. In 2002, she was named California Teacher of the Year by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.  Starting in 1984, she built one of the largest high school journalism programs in the nation — about 400 students currently. One of her students a decade ago: my Postcards colleague Jessica Shambora. And we featured two of her daughters – Susan, VP of Product Management at Google (GOOG), and Anne, co-founder of genetic analysis startup 23andMe, in “The New Valley Girls,” a feature about Silicon Valley’s rising-star women in Fortune’s Most Powerful Women issue last October. Wojcicki’s other daughter, Janet, is Professor of Pediatrics at University of California Medical Center.

“Woj,” as Wojcicki is known to her friends and students, this year was named Board Chair of Creative Commons, a group dedicated to providing free licenses and other legal tools to facilitate sharing, remixing and using of creative works of all kinds.

Photo courtesy of frog design

by Doreen Lorenzo, President of frog design

The firm where I work, frog design, helps Fortune 500 clients like General Electric (GE), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and Microsoft (MSFT) stay innovative. Innovating is never easy, but it’s really challenging when times are tough. Former Starbucks (SBUX) CEO Jim Donald makes a good suggestion in his recent guest post about managing through a crisis: Turn to your best people for ideas.

At frog, that’s exactly what we do. In the spirit of reaching out to our best people, I asked some of our top clients to share their ideas for innovating in difficult times:

Collaborate. “In a downturn, innovation is an imperative, not an option,” says David Christopher, AT&T’s (T) chief marketing officer. AT&T convenes teams of diverse people — engineers, marketers, sales reps, financial analysts — to stretch high-potential talent beyond their usual scope.

HP similarly pushes collaboration.“We have a rotation program where individuals in our labs and our strategy and marketing functions can work on special projects outside their areas,” says HP CMO Michael Mendenhall. And at Cisco (CSCO), a program called Idea Zone Wiki, or iZone, brings together people across the company to discuss new-product opportunities. iZone has evolved into an innovation breeding ground. Members post new-product ideas and business cases to a community forum; the forum decides which ideas are viable. “In one year, we had hundreds of product ideas submitted, “ says Sheila Jordan, Cisco’s VP of communications and collaboration IT. “Several have resulted in the development of actual products.”

Fish for ideas. LittleMissMatched is a quirky fashion brand for girls. Co-founder and CEO Jonah Staw began with socks and now sells a variety of products, from books to bedding to furniture. He and his team at the New York-based company offer employees lots of opportunities to contribute ideas. There are weekly open discussion forums and thrice weekly snack times and an Idea Jar in the lobby. Anyone walking by can drop an idea into the Idea Jar. The ideas are reviewed at a monthly Innovation Meeting.

Somebody on LittleMissMatched’s customer service team suggested the Socktop hair band. “She was always cutting the tops off of our sample socks and making hair bands out of them,” explains Staw. “So she put the idea in the jar. Now we offer the product. Innovation comes from everyone in the company and we do everything we can to harness it.”

Reward ingenuity. “Rewarding people solely for return on investment won’t encourage them to develop long-term projects,” says Mike Linton, former CMO at Best Buy and eBay. You have to create an environment that rewards employees for trying something new. So, Linton advises: “Don’t put an ROI demand on Ben Franklin’s kite — or you won’t discover electricity.” The best innovators, he adds, give employees a chance to put their idea into the market or test it in some other way. “Then they can have a real idea of its impact,” he says.

Give your people a stage to act. At frog, one of our most recent and most successful efforts is our own media channel, called design mind. Employees write blogs and articles, speak at events, create videos, and come up with concepts related to technology, design and innovation.

One example of design mind at work: Ashley Menger, a designer in our Austin studio, wanted to live without a garbage can for two weeks to see exactly how much trash she produced. We encouraged her to chronicle her experiences, so she wrote a blog called Trash Talk. Inspired by Ashley, frogs from our studios around the world decided to take on the challenge, two weeks at a time. Witnessing this grassroots enthusiasm for greener thinking, we established a broader initiative called frogware. We dedicated $1 million in otherwise billable time to design teams across our global studios, and they produced several high profile concepts. One is the frog LED light bulb, which got media coverage and has helped us recruit clients who might not be aware of our “green” expertise.

So listen to your own people. Sometimes the best ideas are right in front of you — and maybe priceless.

Doreen Lorenzo is president of frog design, a 40-year-old global innovation firm based in San Francisco. She operates out of Austin, Texas.

Photo courtesy of Marcena Peterson

By John Wood, Founder & Executive Chairman of Room to Read

Here’s a quick history quiz. If someone mentions Andrew Carnegie, what image immediately comes to mind? Greedy capitalist union-busting robber baron? Benefactor of thousands of community libraries? Or both? No matter what people think of old Andy’s business ethics, historians agree that Carnegie’s focus on creating community libraries is one of the greatest philanthropic legacies of all time.

When Carnegie grew up in 19th Century Scotland, books were considered to be a luxury item, accessible only to the rich. The poor, who made up the majority of the population, could not hope to better themselves through reading. Carnegie thought this was blatantly unfair, and late in his life he decided to do something about it. The result: more than 2,500 libraries across North America that have paid dividends for tens of millions of people, for several generations.

Fast forward by a century, to 1999. I am a burned out Microsoft (MSFT) executive who plans the ultimate escape: an 18-day, 200-mile trek in the Himalayas. No cell phone, no email, nothing to stand in the way of breathing the mountain air and trekking for hours a day to an awe-inspiring 18,000-foot pass along the Nepal/Tibet border.

On the first day of the trek, fate had me cross paths with an “education resource officer” who invited me to join on his inspection route of the local schools. He introduced me to some children–more than 400–sitting on the dirt floor of the school’s library. In addition to no desks, the library also had no chairs, no shelves, and most importantly, no books.

Not wanting to be obnoxious, I said to the headmaster: “This is a beautiful library. Thank you for showing it to me. Just one question: Where exactly do you keep the books hidden?” He pointed to a cabinet in the back of the room with a prominent padlock. The school had so few books, he said, that they were treated as precious treasures. Unlocking the door, he showed me the meager supply: 20 books.

Even more depressing than the quantity was the quality. The few books the school owned had been left behind by well-meaning backpackers who wanted to help. But when you trek the Himalayas, you generally don’t have extra room in your backpack for a copy of Cat in the Hat or Clifford the Big Red Dog. Consequently, the piece-meal library consisted of a Danielle Steel romance novel (complete with the bodice-ripping cover), James Joyce and Umberto Eco.

The headmaster noticed my concern, and explained: “We are too poor to afford education. But until we have education, we will always be poor.”

That’s when it hit me. This was just like Andrew Carnegie’s youth. Over 100 years later, nobody had acted to solve the exact same problem. My mind traveled to all the places I’d visited where kids had asked me for something as simple as a book or a pencil. Post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. The Mekong Delta of Vietnam. Post-apartheid South Africa. I already knew the statistics: over 800 million people across the developing world lacked basic literacy.  That is one out of every seven human beings, and 98% of them are in the poorest countries. But it took this little school in the mountain town of Bahundanda, Nepal to take these dry statistics and make them into a reality I could visualize.

A spark was lit, and the spark soon became a bonfire.

After acting on the headmaster’s request and traveling back to the school a year later with 3,000 books on the back of six rented donkeys, I was overwhelmed by the wide eyes and bright smiles of the students. They were so excited to see, for the first time in their lives, brightly-colored children’s books. Within two months, I had quit Microsoft to devote my life to what people told me was a crazy idea: I would try to become the Andrew Carnegie of the developing world by equalizing access to books and educational resources.

Less than a decade later, the organization I founded, Room to Read, has opened more than 7,000 libraries and 765 schools. We have placed more than five million books into the hands of eager young readers in Cambodia, Laos, India, Nepal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Zambia. Over three million children have access to this network.

Yet this is only the tip of the iceberg. Today, over a billion kids lack access to a proper library. This seems a moral failure of our world. Books are the ultimate way to help people to help themselves, to offer them a hand up rather than a hand out. All of us who are well off almost inevitably have our education to thank, and it seems logical to pay this gift forward by reaching out to kids who can take control of their own lives if they gain an education via the gift of literacy.

At Microsoft, we used to say “Go Big, or Go Home!” With so many kids in the developing world craving education as the ultimate ticket out of poverty, it seems an opportune time to think big about helping them. If a generation of business and philanthropic leaders were to do for the developing world what Carnegie did for the U.S., it would be one hell of a legacy to leave. For over a century, the world has avoided emulating one of the most successful charitable investments of all time. Rather than trying to re-invent the wheel, why not instead aim for a successful version 2.0?

So I am going to propose a challenge to another billionaire entrepreneur – do you want to join forces, and become the Andrew Carnegie of the developing world? Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com (AMZN), Larry Ellison at Oracle (ORCL), George Soros , Sergey Brin and Larry Page at Google (GOOG)– can we talk?

John Wood is Founder & Executive Chairman of Room to Read, a San Francisco-based NGO dedicated to changing the world through education. With the help of corporate donors like Credit Suisse Group, Goldman Sachs (GS), Qualcomm (QCOM), Scholastic (SCHL) and Microsoft, his team has spearheaded the construction of over 750 schools and 7,000 libraries with five million books serving three million children across the developing world. He is the author of Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, which was chosen by Amazon.com as one of the Top Ten Business Narratives of 2006.

I’m an optimist. Always have been. So take with a grain of salt–or sugar, perhaps–these signs of hope across the board:

1. Maybe print isn’t dead. My new Kindle 2 makes me think that even though we may not be reading magazines and newspapers on paper a decade or two from now, long-form stories and beautiful page design can endure. (My Monday Postcard, “Amazon: Thinking beyond the Kindle,” stirred debate about whether Amazon’s (AMZN) e-reader is worth the $359 price. I say: Yes. I’m saving a lot already on newspapers and books. My cost for Book 1 of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series: $6.04.)

2. E-books could help educate the world. On Tuesday, Marie-Josee Kravis, buyout king Henry’s wife, stopped by with Dr. Sakena Yacoobi, who heads the Afghan Institute of Learning. Dr. Yacoobi has built dozens of education and health centers across Afghanistan and won this year’s Kravis Prize for non-profit leadership. As we sat in my Fortune office, I downloaded a book in less than 60 seconds (”Buy The Lords of Finance,” Kravis suggested. So I did). “That’s amazing!” said a wide-eyed Dr. Yacoobi. And we sat there contemplating how one Kindle per school might help educate poor children the world over. Once, that is, Amazon gets Kindle functioning internationally.

3. Spring is here! It’s gloomy in Manhattan today, but my Postcards colleague, Jessica Shambora, told me this morning that she saw yellow flowers sprouting in Central Park.

4. The fittest survive. Walking down Broadway to work today, I noticed the bright lights of Zara at 66th and Broadway. The hot Spain-based apparel retailer is replacing Circuit City–shuttered and bankrupt–which replaced Tower Records, another dinosaur. Retail evolution continues apace.

5. The bull is back. Who knows? But let’s enjoy the biggest four-week rise in the Dow in more than 70 years.

6. There’s life after being fired. Jim Donald, ousted early last year from his CEO perch at Starbucks (SBUX), is keeping plenty busy speaking, teaching, consulting, and more. His Guest Post, published Wednesday, has attracted more traffic than any other Guest Post we’ve run–except for Walter Stoiber’s “The Great Depression, as I remember.” My 91-year-old Uncle Walt’s inspiring piece is Postcards‘ best-read Guest Post ever.

7. Jobs are out there. Read Jessica’s “Here’s where to find a job,” posted yesterday.

8. Rock stars do good. Last night I spent a bit of time with the board of Bono’s Product RED: Bobby Shriver, former Viacom (VIAB) CEO Tom Freston, Kleiner Perkins partner Juliet Flint, RED CEO Susan Smith Ellis, and the U2 frontman himself. Can I just tell you that Bono, beyond working hard to eradicate global poverty, is a genuinely nice guy? That nice-guy professionalism helps him attract VIP supporters–Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, to name two–and it also helps his rock-star longevity. Freston (who built MTV and is now working with Oprah as well as Bono) pointed out last night that the Beatles were together for less than a decade. U2 is 33 years old and as strong as ever.

9. New York baseball lives on. Tonight the Mets play their first game, against the Red Sox, at brand new Citi Field–naming rights acquired by Citigroup (C) before the big bank collapse. Tonight’s even more historic first game: the Yankees vs. the Chicago Cubs to christen the new Yankee Stadium.

10. The weekend is finally here. Enjoy the games, get rest, and recover!

Photo courtesy of Starbucks

by Jim Donald, former CEO of Starbucks and Pathmark

“Good morning, general store managers, assistant store managers, VPs and all 26,000 employees…Jim here…

Photo courtesy of Joyce Ravid

by Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of Acumen Fund and author of The Blue Sweater

As a 25-year old banker, I decided to leave my career and change the world. This sounds like a move that a 25-year-old banker might make today–to escape the chaos.

But this was 1986. I thought I might start my new life in Africa. I discovered soon enough, though, that most Africans didn’t want saving, thank you very much. Certainly not by me–a young, unmarried American woman whose French was pathetic and whose understanding of the continent was limited to reading a few books.

I could have given up my dream. But I had a calling, so to speak. One sun-drenched day, I was jogging up and down the hilly streets of Kigali, Rwanda. Out of nowhere, a young boy, wearing a blue sweater, walked toward me. He was about 10 years old, skinny, with a shaved head and huge eyes, and not more than four feet tall. The sweater hung so low that it hid his shorts, covering toothpick legs and knobby knees.

My Uncle Ed had given me a blue sweater when I was in middle school. A soft blue wool sweater, with stripes on the sleeves and an African motif on the front–two zebras walking in front of a snow-capped mountain. This day in Rwanda, I ran over to the boy, who was obviously terrified. I grabbed his shoulders and turned down his collar. Sure enough, it was my name, Jacqueline Novogratz, on the tag.

My sweater had traveled thousands of miles for more than a decade.

Over the past two-plus decades, I’ve committed my life to understanding global connectedness and issues of poverty. In 2001, after working for more than seven years for the Rockefeller Foundation, I founded Acumen Fund, a nonprofit venture capital fund that invests in the poor. We don’t believe in traditional aid. We hold the recipients of our loans and equity stakes accountable to clear goals.

We’ve funded A To Z, a company in Tanzania that today produces more than 20 million anti-malarial bed nets annually and employs over 7,000 people, mostly women. We’ve invested in Mumbai’s first emergency ambulance service that serves rich and poor alike (and whose yellow ambulances were ubiquitous in the news coverage of last November’s attacks in that city). We’ve supported the development and distribution of drip irrigation systems that allow hundreds of thousands of poor farmers in India and Pakistan to double or even triple their crop yields and income. We’ve invested more than $40 million in enterprises that have brought safe water, affordable health care, housing, and alternative energy to low-income people in South Asia and East Africa.

In writing my new book The Blue Sweater, I’ve thought a lot about what my adventures, experiences and the people I’ve met have taught me. I learned that it’s all too easy to veer toward the charitable–to have low or no expectations of low-income people. This does nothing but confirm prejudices on all sides. “Philanthropists should focus on supporting others to do what they already do well,” one of my mentors, the late John Gardner, told me back when I was in business school at Stanford. “Individuals don’t want to be taken care of. They need to be given a chance to fulfill their own potential.” (Gardner, who served in the Johnson Administration, founded Common Cause and headed the Carnegie Foundation before I knew him.)

I’ve also learned this: “I am part of all that I have met.” This is from Tennyson’s Ulysses. It’s one of my favorite lines in literature. I try to live it every day.

Jacqueline Novogratz is the founder and CEO of Acumen Fund, a non-profit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of global poverty. Her new memoir, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World, tells the inspiring story of a woman who left a career in international banking to spend her life on a quest to understand global poverty and find powerful new ways of tackling it. Acumen Fund’s corporate supporters include Goldman Sachs (GS), Google (GOOG), Cisco (CSCO), Nike (NKE), Coca-Cola (KO), Exxon Mobil (XOM), Citigroup (C), Dow Chemical (DOW), Credit Suisse (CS), as well as the Skoll Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Photo courtesy of Elena Seibert

by Ben Sherwood

What does it take to survive the shock of losing a job or a home?

I’ve spent the last few years interviewing some of the world’s best survivors – those who got slammed by life and overcame almost every imaginable adversity. They were left for dead after brutal beatings, ravaged by cancer or broken by collisions with 20-ton trucks. Yet, each managed to recover, rebuild and grow even stronger.

What’s the secret of these most effective survivors? They draw upon strengths from a common psychological toolkit. What follows are four essential ways to outlast a crisis:

Flip the switch from inaction to action. Disaster, experts say, brings out three types of people: 10% of us are leaders, 80% are followers, and the other 10% are troublemakers who engage in self-destructive behavior. Are you in that 80%—bewildered amidst all the uncertainty, waiting for authority figures to tell you what to do? You are if you’re one of those people who, despite the warning signs, don’t start searching for a new job until your company practically goes under. This is like continuing to watch the on-board movie after you see the wing of your plane on fire. Psychologists call this “behavioral inaction.” The key to saving yourself is to extinguish the alarm bells in your head, make a plan and a backup plan, and take action.

Adapt (or else). Across every species, survival depends on adapting to new realities. Today, there’s no value in clinging to the way life used to be. A $60,000-a-year manager who gets laid off has to accept the notion that a $12-an-hour janitorial job may be best for a while. If you’re a seven-figure-salary banker, get real: A “survival job” is better than no job at all. Use it to get back on your feet. Rigidity will only keep you down.

Exercise your resilience. Thirty-two percent of us are born with a Resilience Gene: the 5-HTT serotonin transporter gene. These folks bounce back faster after life’s inevitable knocks. For the rest of us who aren’t genetically “inoculated” against stress, experts say to build your resilience like a muscle. Work it every day by practicing realistic optimism. Face facts but remain hopeful; build a support network; find a greater purpose. And stay healthy because physical reserve carries you a long way in a crisis.

Know thyself. One thing I know for sure: We’re stronger than we realize. All of us possess some of the tools required to overcome adversity. One key is to identify your survivor personality and take advantage of your strengths. Check out TheSurvivorsClub.org, where you can learn more about your survivor personality. It’s a helpful first step toward making it through ‘til tomorrow.

Ben Sherwood is the author of The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life, a New York Times bestseller. He is executive director of TheSurvivorsClub.org, an online resource center and support network for people facing every kind of adversity. An award-winning journalist, he is a former executive producer of ABC’s Good Morning America and senior broadcast producer of NBC Nightly News.

Photo courtesy of Stuart Cahill

by Clayton M. Christensen and Jason Hwang

It’s strange to think that not long ago, the ability of ordinary people to access a blog like this from a PC, laptop or cell phone was the stuff of science fiction. But the advent of the microprocessor, which simplified computer design and assembly, brought computing out of corporate mainframe centers and into our homes.

The microprocessor was what we call a “technological enabler” of disruptive innovation. Translation: It revolutionized the computer industry by making products cheaper and more convenient.

We’ve studied these innovations in another industry, health care, over the last 10 years. Many technological enablers — in the form of molecular diagnostics, imaging technologies, and myriad drugs and devices — exist in health care. Yet, lower cost and convenience haven’t come.

With our new President now focusing on health care, it’s time to look at why the system seems so broken, and to ask why health care isn’t following the pattern of the computing industry.

Actually, disruption is occurring, but often it’s outside of hospitals and physicians’ practices. These niches can show us how health care might become more affordable and convenient.

First, retail. As we describe in our new book, The Innovator’s Prescription, CVS Caremark’s (CVS) MinuteClinic provides basic care at kiosks in retail pharmacies. These clinics are staffed by nurse practitioners who can administer rules-based diagnostics and predictably-effective treatments like immunizations, strep throat exams and diabetes screenings.

Second, digital data. President Obama’s new budget puts big money behind digitizing medical records — a step toward making health data more accessible to both providers and patients. But in the private sector and apart from hospitals, Google (GOOG) Health and Microsoft (MSFT) HealthVault are already helping patients manage their clinical data by making user-generated health records portable.

Companies are also building online resources to allow patients to review health care providers. Zagat, known for its user-generated restaurant reviews, is partnering with WellPoint (WLP) to build a website that rates physicians.

There is also the giant challenge of disrupting the fee-for-service payment model, which general hospitals and private practices were built on. They profit from patients needing more services, more care, more time in the hospital, and more visits back to the doctor. In other words, they profit only when people are sick. What’s the incentive to provide the excellent, low-cost care that technological enablers make possible?

Here disruption comes from innovative providers like Kaiser Permanente. These providers want to give the best care at the lowest cost because they employ their own doctors and operate their own insurance companies. Their patients pay fixed fees for full services over a given time frame. These providers win by keeping their members healthy and satisfied with their care.

So, get ready, doctors and patients. Disruption is coming soon. And it’s a prescription we all need.

Clayton M. Christensen is the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and co-founder of Innosight and Innosight Institute. Jason Hwang, M.D., is Senior Strategist for the Healthcare Practice at Innosight and Executive Director of Healthcare at Innosight Institute. They are coauthors, with the late Jerome Grossman, M.D., of The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care.

Photo courtesy of Kathrine Berger

by Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten

As authors of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, published in February by Portfolio, we found ourselves stumbling across the most important business insights of the last 30 years. We learned plenty about leading, managing, innovating and saving your company and yourself when disaster lurks around the corner. In case you don’t have time to read all the stuff that we did–or you’re so busy that you can’t even to read our new book!—here are 10 pointers that we picked up from those 100 Best books:

Better to be first than better. In the 1980 classic Positioning, Al Ries and Jack Trout show that being No. 1 in the mind of the customer offers enormous market advantage. Today, Apple’s (AAPL) iPod and McDonald’s (MCD), two companies holding strong in the recession, exemplify the concept, dominating their respective categories. Can’t be first? Take a step sideways and create a new segment where you can be.

Manage actions, not time. Productivity guru David Allen says that we make the futile mistake of trying to manage all the wrong things–time, information, priorities–when none of these can be controlled. In his 2001 book, Getting Things Done, he advises: Build your next steps around actions. Use to-do lists. Tip sheets and software modules are just a Google (GOOG) search away.

Find faults faster. Silicon Valley design firm IDEO has helped create groundbreaking products ranging from the original Apple mouse to the Palm V (PALM) handheld organizer. In 2001, IDEO general manager Tom Kelly wrote The Art of Innovation, explaining how the firm succeeds. By building prototypes early, IDEO makes mistakes happen faster and speeds products to market. Making something beats imagining what it might be.

Drive pushes; passion pulls. Randy Komisar’s 2000 pseudo-memoir The Monk and the Riddle is about success. Not the kind of success that can be quantified by dollar signs. “It is about the purpose of work and the integration of what one does with what one believes. The Monk is not about how, but why,” writes Komisar. “Purpose” and “passion” are contemplated in many books we chose for the 100 Best. Komisar shows us that work and life, ideally, are one and the same.

Be remarkable. In his 2003 book, Purple Cow, Seth Godin encourages risk-taking. Create something exceptiona that will get people talking, he says. Word-of-mouth marketing is more powerful today than ever. The person or organization whose ideas spread the furthest wins. L.L. Bean’s no-questions-asked return policy and OXO’s (HELE) ergonomically, easily grippable kitchen gadgets are just two examples of what fans eagerly tell their friends about.

Any industry is ripe for reinvention. Billy Beane turned Major League Baseball upside down by using unusual metrics to evaluate talent when his team couldn’t compete with money. Michael Lewis’ Moneyball (2003) proves that all businesses are in danger of disruption. So you might as well do some of your own reinventing.

Find a parade and get in front of it. In Zag (2006), branding expert Marty Neumeier advocates a kind of radical differentiation he calls “zagging.” Look for the white spaces and start marching–because follow the leader is a game for kids.

The President gets 100 days, you get 90. In The First 90 Days, author Michael Watkins says that managers used to get 100 days to prove themselves in a new job. Newcomers now get 90. Certainly, since 2003, when this guidebook was published, the honeymoon has contracted even more. But whatever the number and whatever the job, Watkins details why you must get out of the gate quickly–and gives good advice about how to do it effectively.

Be unreasonable. The cliché is that change is the only thing predictable in an unpredictable world. Charles Handy would disagree with this. He says that we’re living in The Age of Unreason (1990). Change is unpredictable. The best way to combat change? Become a changeling yourself.

Read anything Drucker. – The late management sage delivers insights through powerful Socratic questioning. When Jack Welch took over General Electric (GE) in 1981, Drucker challenged the new CEO with a single question about his conglomerate: “If you didn’t own any of these businesses now and had a chance to buy them, would you?” Drucker formed many of his early beliefs while consulting for General Motors (GM) in 1940s. What advice would he give the auto giant today?

Jack Covert is the founder of 800-CEO-READ, a Milwaukee-based specialty business book retailer. Todd Sattersten is the company’s president. They are the co-authors of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, available now from Portfolio. Both read countless business books every year and review many of them on their Web site and blog at www.800ceoread.com.

Photo courtesy of Dave Mead

When the ashes clear from this economic Armageddon, the leaders and organizations left standing will be the ones that stand for something. That have a clear purpose.

I’m sure of this because I worked with two CEO-founders who indeed stood for something: Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines (LUV) and Sam Walton of Wal-Mart (WMT). I worked with these iconic entrepreneurs on their companies’ advertising, marketing and internal culture. They taught me that performance is driven by the core purpose of an organization. This is true particularly when crisis is all around.

So what is purpose anyway? Purpose is the definitive difference you make in the marketplace and the world.

During more than 30 years, when I worked up close and personal with Herb Kelleher, he preached and practiced the purpose of Southwest Airlines every day. Herb’s purpose? To democratize the skies. Herb was in the Freedom business. He used to always say, “Keep costs low and spirits high and the people of Southwest Airlines will keep LUV in the air.”

By making a difference, Herb’s company made money and made history. In 1971, only 15% of the American people had flown because air travel was reserved for the elite. Southwest Airlines helped to change that. Today, over 85% of the American people have flown.

The legendary Sam Walton called me “Ol’ Roy,” after his dog and also after Wal-Mart brand Ol’ Roy dog food. In fact, I was the person who got Sam Walton and Herb Kelleher together for the first time. It was a dinner in 1990 that any CEO would have given anything to be a part of.

And it was a few years before that I heard Mr. Sam, as he was called by so many of his friends and associates, first articulate the purpose of Wal-Mart. “At Wal-Mart, we are in business to save people money so they can live better,” he said. And now “Save money. Live better,” a powerful purpose statement that we helped rediscover, is the company’s tag line and is embedded in its culture worldwide.

Today, 88% of Americans agree that “what a company stands for is more important than what it sells.” And according to a recent Cone Inc. study of Millennials, 79% want to work for a company that cares about how it impacts or contributes to society.

Purpose isn’t everything. But more than ever, purpose trumps everything.

Roy Spence is co-founder and CEO of GSD&M Idea City, a marketing and communications firm whose clients include Southwest Airlines, MasterCard (MA), John Deere (DE) and BMW (BMWF). Also founder of the Purpose Institute, he co-authored It’s Not What You Sell, It’s What You Stand For: Why Every Extraordinary Business is Driven by Purpose, just published by Portfolio.

For more on Wal-Mart, read Suzanne Kapner’s piece on the changing of the guard at Wal-Mart as Lee Scott hands the reins to new CEO Mike Duke.