If you are done shopping and are looking for some good stuff to read, here are seven stories I recommend for this weekend…

• 10 Things Julius Caesar could have taught us about business leadership: Oliver Blanchard goes back in time and finds that there is a lot to learn from the Roman emperor.
• Making Cents: As someone who celebrates the success of new connected companies like Spotify and Pandora, it is eye-opening to see the other side of the equation. Damon Krukowski of Galazie 500, a musician, shares his story.
• The man who hacked Hollywood: Since I am in Hollywood myself, why not share this story about Chris Chaney, who hacked the emails of some of the biggest names in Hollywood? Just plain common sense and some dedication from his Florida home.
• The divine Gary Cooper: And talking about scandals, even the old Hollywood had many of those. I wonder what bloggers would have done with Gary Cooper.
• Why it is good to be Michael Lewis: Well, there are many reasons, and they all start with his books. Great profile of Lewis and his rise to the top of the writing totem pole.
• Mexico: Risking life for truth: is a great story about reporters who ply their craft in Mexico at the risk of being beheaded. An eye-opening story about how journalism happens in one of the most dangerous places in the world.
• The Mandate of Hell: Tom Engelhardt laments the pervasiveness of the do-nothing culture, especially amongst the politician set. As an apolitical person, I found this piece resonating with me.

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Normally, industry analysts are a talkative, confident bunch, but generally speaking, they are like old fisherman, spinning yarns and telling tales that have become exaggerated through constant retelling.

Recent comments by leading Apple analyst Toni Sacconaghi, however, actually came out of discussions with a very good source: Tim Cook, Apple COO and acting head honcho at Cupertino during Steve Jobs’ medical leave. Not only that, but CFO Pete Oppenheimer and head of marketing Phil Schiller were there, too.

Which is why this time, when he says Apple is likely still working toward producing a netbook, I didn’t just roll my eyes and go about turning my Eee PC into a hackintosh. Not that Sacconaghi provided any firm details, just the tantalizing info that Cook “hinted” that Apple was still turning over “ideas” surrounding a netbook. Not a lot to build hope on, but better than the usual “predictions” based on “market trends.”

Other developments Sacconaghi foresees coming out of his all-star confab include pricing changes to the iPhone line-up, and new devices in the smartphone category. This, again, is speculation based on Cook’s own words, which are quoted by Sacconaghi as follows:

Tim Cook stated that since Steve Jobs announced his leave of absence, he was spending more time on new products, how Apple could take the iPhone into new markets and examining iPhone’s business model.

Cook has been hinting at new products for quite some time, so we’re bound to see some before Jobs’ scheduled return in June. Sacconaghi predicts those will be new iMacs, which might come as early as next month. It’s true the iMac is overdue for an update, and that predictions of possible new quad-core models have been surfacing lately. That said, this appears to be more Sacconaghi’s analysis and less anything said by Cook, so don’t go throwing your old iMac out the window just yet.

The unusual move on the part of Apple’s top brass to meet with an industry analyst (albeit the top rated analyst, according to Institutional Investor Magazine) is perhaps more newsworthy than the predictions themselves. They suggest a Cupertino that is willing to openly court some media speculation, even if they are still playing their hand very close to the chest. Maybe rumors of a growth slowdown are true, in which case Apple might be looking to fuel the speculative fire that represents so much of their publicity machine.

The good news for us as Apple users is that if Apple is inviting this kind of attention, they’re probably planning to deliver something soon that will benefit from it. In other words, they’re turning down the house lights and getting ready to raise the curtains. Let’s hope the show starts soon.

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Baseball has long been a game of stats, but Beane’s philosophy gave the tradition a twist: Instead of tracking a player’s batting average or runs batted in, Beane tracked a player’s on base percentage. The unorthodox approach helped Beane build the A’s into a remarkably efficient team that has reached the American League playoffs five times in eight years with a payroll that’s consistently near the bottom third of all 30 MLB teams ($78.5 million in 2007).

Plenty of corporate executives have tried to apply Beane’s tactics to their own operations. NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson did one better: In 2007 he invited Billy Beane to join NetSuite’s board of directors.

Nelson says tracking nonstandard performance stats has helped improve the efficiency of NetSuite’s sales process. Most CEOs track their marketing spend, lead generations and closed contracts independently; NetSuite tracks which marketing plans (players) turn into leads (walk ons) and which leads convert to sales (runs). If improving your company’s sales efficiency is the aim, then “walk ons” — or how you get to the sale — is the key stat, just as in baseball. Below Nelson offers a few tips from Beane’s play book to get you started “managing by the numbers.”

Management Rules from the School of Beane:

1. Just start measuring it. In the early stages of your business it may be difficult to know which stats will be the most important for evaluating your operation. (Operating expenses or burn rate? New sales or renewals?) Don’t get too hung up on selection, just start doing it. “It’s easier to measuring things now than later, when your business is much more complicated,” Nelson says.

2. Reduce the number of systems you use. Whether you’re using sophisticated SaaS applications, or a simple spreadsheet system, streamline. It’s best to unify data tracking into a single system so you can correlate the data. It’s fine to use multiple applications (one for finance, another for marketing), but keep in mind that when you fragment your data, it becomes harder to “connect the dots” and draw operationally useful conclusions.

3. No such thing as a wrong metric. It doesn’t matter if you discover you’ve been measuring a useless data point. Once you know, you can eliminate it and choose something more appropriate. There is such a thing as overkill. Nelson found that measuring the number of product demonstrations his sales representatives were doing wasn’t helpful; he could never correlate a single demo and a final sale. “Since there was no value in collecting that data point, we don’t track it anymore.”

4. Consistency is king. The one thing you can’t do is modify, in midstream, the specific terms you use to collect a data point. If you start out tracking contract renewals by geographic region, don’t change midstream to collect renewals by product line. Just start collecting a second data point. It’s more important to build up a body of historical data than to make changes in the heat of the moment.

5. Trust your data. Even when your intuition suggests otherwise. You have to have the courage and conviction to trust your data, and act on it, Nelson says. If your data says spending money on conferences like CES or Web 2.0 Summit does not convert to sales, don’t go — no matter how important you think it is to be seen at such events.

Photo credit: Geoffrey Ellis.

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