Book Short: Tales of Two Cities Return Path is basically dual-headquartered in New York City and Broomfield, Colorado, so two recently published books which provide history and insights into the tech industry in those two cities were both of interest to me. Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City, by Brad Feld (book, kindle) came out a few months ago and is part of Brad’s Startup Revolution series which will also include my upcoming book Startup CEO, to be published this fall. In the book, Brad uses the example of the Boulder/Denver area and a few different sectors to demonstrate a blueprint to creating an entrepreneurial ecosystem – the kind that are popping up all over the world…
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Books
Book Short: Deep Dive on Customer Development
Book Short: Deep Dive on Customer Development I continue to be on a tear reading books about startups as I finish and get ready for the publication of Startup CEO (now available for pre-ordering at Amazon). This week’s selection was The Startup Owners Manual: A Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company, by Steve Blank and Bon Dorf. This book is a significantly more detailed version of Blank’s first book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, which was a revolutionary book a few years ago that helped spawn the Lean Startup movement. And when I say significantly, I mean it! The Startup Owners Manual is 600 pages of really detailed how-to around the first two steps of Blank’s four steps,…
Book Short: Like a Prequel to My Book
Book Short: Like a Prequel to My Book How to Start a Business, by Jason Nazar, CEO of our client Docstoc, is a great and quick (and free) eBook that feels a lot like a prequel to my book Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business (original outline here). My book is about scaling a business once you’ve started it. Jason’s book is a really practical guide to starting it in the first place. The thing that’s particularly good about this book is that it’s as much a resource guide as it is a book. At the end of each of its 24 chapters (and within them as well), Jason adds a series of external links to…
Book Not-So-Short: Not Just for Women
Book Not-So-Short: Not Just for Women At the request of the women in our Professional Services team, I recently read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, and while it may seem like dancing the meringue in a minefield for a male CEO to blog about it, I think it’s an important enough topic to give it a shot. So here goes. First, given the minefield potential, let me issue a few caveats up front. These are deep, ages old, complex, societal issues and behaviors we’re talking about here. There is no quick answer to anything. There is no universal answer to anything. Men don’t have the same perspective as women and can come across as…
Book Short: Plain Talk
Book Short: Plain Talk An HR rock star I met with recently told me that “You can say anything you want to your people, as long as it’s true,” which of course is great advice. Plain Talk: Lessons from a Business Maverick (book, kindle), by Ken Iverson, the long-time CEO of Nucor, pretty much embodies that. If you’re not familiar with Nucor, it’s a steel company – right, steel – and the most successful one of the last 50-75 years, at that. You may think an industrial company like this offers no lessons for you. If so, you are wrong. The reason Nucor has been so successful, if you believe their long time leader, is that they run the people…
Book Short: Entrepreneurial Lessons
Book Short: Entrepreneurial Lessons The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from 42 Founders, by David Kidder, is the ultimate coffee table book for entrepreneurs and people who are interested in how they think about running their businesses. David is the author of the Intellectual Devotional series (here’s a link to one of the five or six books in the series), he’s a good friend of mine and a member of a CEO Forum that I’m in, and my major disclosure about this blog post is that I’m one of the 42 entrepreneurs David interviewed for and profiles in the book. The Startup Playbook is very different from my own book (in progress) on being a Startup CEO. Where…
Startup CEO (OnlyOnce- the book!), Part II – Crowdsourcing the Outline
Startup CEO (OnlyOnce- the book!), Part II – Crowdsourcing the Outline As I mentioned a few weeks ago here, I’m excited to be writing a book called Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Building and Running Your Company, to be published by Wiley & Sons next summer. Since many readers of OnlyOnce are my target audience for the book, I thought I’d post my current outline and ask for input and feedback on it. So here it is, still a bit of a work in progress. Please comment away and let me know what you think, what’s missing, what’s not interesting! 1 Part One: Vision and Strategy (Defining the Company) 1.1 Setting the Company’s Agenda 1.2 NIHITO! (or, “Nothing Interesting…
Book Short: Culture is King
Book Short: Culture is King Tony Hsieh’s story, Delivering Happiness (book, Kindle), is more than just the story of his life or the story of Zappos. It’s a great window into the soul of a very successful company and one that in many ways has become a model for great culture and a great customer service model. It’s a relatively quick and breezy read, and it contains a handful of legendary anecdotes from Zappos’ history to demonstrate those two things — culture and customer service — in action. As Hsieh himself says in the book, you can’t copy this stuff and believe it will work in your company’s environment as it does in Zappos’. You have to come up with…
Book Short: The Challenger Sale
Book Short: The Challenger Sale I’ve written a couple times in the past about how we sell at Return Path. I’ve written about our principle sales methodology for the past decade, SPIN Selling, by Neil Rackham (and Major Account Strategy, also by Rackham, which is basically SPIN Selling for Account Managers), which focuses on a specific technique for solution selling by using questioning to get the prospective client to identify his or her own needs, as well as Jeffrey Gitomer’s two short books, the Little Red Book of Selling and Little Red Book of Sales Answers, which are long on sales questioning techniques. And I also wrote this post about another book called Why People Don’t Buy Things, by Kim Wallace…
Book Short: the Garage Workbench of the Future
Book Short: the Garage Workbench of the Future Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, by Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail (review, buy) and Free (review, buy) is just as mind expanding as his prior two books were at the time they were published. I had the pleasure of talking with Chris for a few minutes after he finished his keynote address at DMA2012 in Las Vegas this week, and I was inspired to read the book, which I did on the flight home. The short of it is that Anderson paints a very vivid picture of the future world where the Long Tail not only applies to digital goods but to physical goods as well. The seeds…
Book Short: Alignment Well Defined
The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business is Patrick Lencioni’s newest book. Unlike most or all of his other books (see the end of this post for the listing), this one is not a fable, although his writing style remains very quick and accessible. I liked this book a lot. First, the beginning section is a bit of a recap of his Five Dysfunctions of a Team which I think was his best book. And the ending section is a recap of his Death by Meeting, another really good one. The middle sections of the book are just a great reminder of the basic building blocks of creating and communicating strategy and values – about driving alignment….