I don't know if your parents are like this, but my mom always sends a bag of stuff home with me whenever I visit. Most of the time, it is magazines she has finished reading (when I was in college, she would fill out all of those offers where you send in three proofs of purchase to get some free t-shirt and put my dorm address as the send-to). In this week's bag was the Spring 2006 edition of BusinessWeek SmallBiz.

2010 was, for 800-CEO-READ, a year of stability, growth and redesign. Not everyone nor every company is so lucky as to say the same about the past year, but after the chaos, both internally and externally, of 2008-09, we count ourselves lucky that we close the year in a celebratory mood. Some highlights and happenings from 2010: January: We celebrated the winners of the annual 800-CEO-READ business book awards and other industry folks at a party in NYC.

If the book of the 80's was In Search of Excellence by Peters and Waterman, then book of the 90's was Reengineering the Corporation by Michael Hammer and Jim Champy. We were saddened to hear Michael Hammer died this week at age 60. The best way we can think of to acknowledge his impact is by announcing the inclusion of Reengineering The Corporation in our upcoming book.

In 1997, Sebastian Junger wrote a great book called The Perfect Storm. The phrase, “a perfect storm” is used when multiple things come together to create an extraordinary experience. That thought fleeted through my mind last night as I sat reading Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, because, including Freedom, I’m actually reading three brilliant books in three rather different genres.

In the book The First 90 Days, Michael Watkins talks about how the President of the United States gets 100 days to prove himself, but you are given 90 days in your new job. He states that the first three months can be a make or break time. Watching the inaugural yesterday led me back to this book.