Powerpointless We tried an experiment last week at a Return Path Board meeting — and not just a regular Board meeting, but our once-a-year, full-day (~9 hour) annual planning session attended in person by all Board members, observers, and executives. First, a little background. We have been driving two important trends over the years at our Board meetings: 1. Focusing on the future, not the past. In the early years of the business, our Board meetings were probably 75% “looking backwards” and 25% “looking forwards.” They were reporting meetings — reports which were largely in the hands of Board members before the meetings anyway. They were dull as all get out. This past meeting was probably 10% “looking backwards” and…
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Books
Book Short: Sloppy Sequel
Book Short: Sloppy Sequel SuperFreakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, wasn’t a bad book, but it wasn’t nearly as good as the original Freakonomics, either. I always find the results of “naturally controlled experiments” and taking a data-driven view of the world to be very refreshing. And as much as I like the social scientist versions of these kinds of books like Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Blink (book; blog post), there’s usually something about reading something data driven written by a professional quant jock that’s more reassuring. That’s where SuperFreakonomics fell down a bit for me. Paul Krugman has described the book in a couple different places as “snarky and contrarian.” I typically enjoy books that carry…
Book Short: Chip Off the Old Block
Book Short: Chip Off the Old Block I have to admit, I was more than a little skeptical when Craig Spiezle handed me a copy of The Speed of Trust, by Stephen M. R. Covey, at the OTA summit last week. The author is the son of THE Stephen Covey, author of the world famous Seven Habits of Highly Effective People as well as The Eighth Habit (book, post). Would the book have substance and merit or be drafting off the dad’s good name? I dog-ear pages of books as I read them, noting the pages that are most interesting if I ever want to go back and take a quick pass through the book to remind me about it…
Book Short: Go Where They Ain’t
Book Short: Go Where They Ain’t Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant, by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne isn’t bad, but it could literally be summed up by the title of this post. I think it’s probably a better book for people who aren’t already entrepreneurs. That said, there are two chapters that I found pretty valuable. One is called “Reconstruct Market Boundaries,” which is a great way of thinking about either starting a new business or innovating an existing one. It’s a strategy that we’ve employed a few times over the years at both Return Path and Authentic Response. It’s hard to do, but it expands the available territory you have…
Book Short: Worth Buying Free
Book Short: Worth Buying Free The cynic in me wanted to start this book review of Free: The Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson, by complaining that I had to pay for the book. But it ended up being good enough that I won’t do that (plus, the author said there are free digital versions available — though the Kindle edition still costs money). At any rate, a bunch of reviews I read about the book panned it when compared to Anderson’s prior book, The Long Tail (post, link to book). I won’t get into the details of the book, though you’ll get an idea from the paragraph below, but Anderson has a few gems worth quoting: Any…
Book Short: A Twofer
Book Short: A Twofer My friend Andrew Winston, who is one of the nation’s gurus in corporate sustainability, just published his second book, this one from Harvard Business Press — Green Recovery: Get Lean, Get Smart, and Emerge from the Downturn on Top. It builds on the cases and successes he had with his first book, Green to Gold (post, link to book), which came out a couple years ago and has become the standard for how businesses embrace sustainability and use it to their financial and strategic competitive advantage rather than thinking of it as a burden or a cost center. Green Recovery is a shorter read (my kind of business book), and it hits a few key themes:…
Book Short: Bringing it on Home
Book Short: Bringing it on Home Silos, Politics and Turf Wars: A Leadership Fable About Destroying the Barriers That Turn Colleagues Into Competitors wasn’t Patrick Lencion’s best book, but it wasn’t bad, either. I think all six of his books are well worth a read (list at the bottom of the post). And in fact, they really belong in two categories. The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (post, link), The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link), and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link) are all related around the topic of management. Death by Meeting (post, link), The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (post, link), and Silos, Politics and Turf Wars, on the other hand, are…
Book Short: Entrepreneurs in Government
Book Short: Entrepreneurs in Government Leadership and Innovation: Entrepreneurs in Government, edited by a professor I had at Princeton, Jim Doig, is an interesting series of mini-biographies of second- and third-tier government officials, mostly from the 1930s through the 1970s. The book’s thesis is that some of the most interesting movers and shakers in the public arena (not elected officials) have a lot of the same core skills as private sector entrepreneurs. The thesis is borne out by the book, and the examples are interesting, if for no other reason than they are about a series of highly influential people you’ve probably never heard of. The guy who ran the Port Authority of New York for 30 years. The guy…
Book Short: Wither the Team
Book Short: Wither the Team I keep expecting one of his books to be repetitive or boring, but Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team held my interest all the way through, as did his others. It builds nicely on the last one I read, Death by Meeting (post, link). I’d say that over the 9 1/2 years we’ve been in business at Return Path, we’ve systematically improved the quality of our management team. Sometimes that’s because we’ve added or changed people, but mostly it’s because we’ve been deliberate about improving the way in which we work together. This particular book has a nice framework for spotting troubles on a team, and it both reassured me that we have done…
Book Short: Loving the Strengths Movement More Than the Book
Book Short: Loving the Strengths Movement More Than the Book I’m a big believer in the so-called Strengths Movement — that we would all be better served by playing to our strengths than agonizing over fixing our weaknesses. I think it’s true both in professional and personal settings. The books written by Marcus Buckingham that come out of Gallup’s extensive research into corporate America, First, Break All the Rules (about management) and Now, Discover Your Strengths (self-management) are both quite good. Another book written by someone else off the same research corpus, 12: The Elements of Great Managing is ok, but not as good, as I wrote about here. Buckingham’s newest, Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps…
Book Short: The Religion of Heresy
Book Short: The Religion of Heresy At the end of Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, Seth Godin’s new book, Seth says this: I’m going to get a lot of flak from people about what you just read. People might say that it’s too disorganized or not practical enough or that I require you to do too much work to actually accomplsh anything. That’s ok. He’s kind of right. The book is a little breezy and meanders around, just like riffing with Seth. It’s not practical in the sense that if the entire world operated this way in the extreme, we’d have serious problems. But the fact that he requires you to do “too much work to actually accomplish…