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…
Category
Business
Book Short: A Marketing-Led Turnaround
Book Short: A Marketing-Led Turnaround Generally, I love books by practitioners even more than those by academics. That’s why Steve McKee’s first (I assume) book, When Growth Stalls: How it Happens, Why You’re Stuck, and What to do About It (book, Kindle edition) appealed to me right out of the gate. The author is CEO of a mid-size agency and a prior Inc. 500 winner who has experienced the problem firsthand – then went out, researched it, and wrote about it. As a two-time Inc. 500 winner ourselves, Return Path has also struggled with keeping the growth flames burning over the years, so I was eager to dig into the research. The title also grabbed my attention, as there are…
Book Short: Be Less Clever
Book Short: Be Less Clever In Search of the Obvious: The Antidote for Today’s Marketing Mess, by Jack Trout, is probably deserving of a read by most CEOs. Trout at this point is a bit old school and curmudgeonly, the book has some sections which are a bit repetitive of other books he and his former partner Al Reis have written over the years, he does go off on some irrelevant rants, and his examples are a bit too focused on TV advertising, BUT his premise is great, and it’s universally applicable. So much so that my colleagues Leah, Anita, and I had “book club” about it one night last week and had a very productive debate about our own…
Book Short: What’s Your Meeting Routine?
Book Short: What’s Your Meeting Routine? Patrick Lencioni’s Death by Meeting is, as Brad advertised, a great read, and much in line with his other books (running list at the end of the post). His books are just like candy. If only all business books were this short and easy to read. This fable isn’t quite what I thought it was going to be at the outset – it’s not about too many meetings, which is what I’ve always called “death by meeting.” It’s about staff meetings that bore you to death. With a great story around them featuring characters named Casey and Will (my two oldest kids’ names, which had me chuckling the whole time), Lencioni describes a great…
Why Are We Financing Fortune 500 Companies?
Why Are We Financing Fortune 500 Companies? And here’s another problem of the economic meltdown — companies are stretching out their payables like mad. Our average payable has increased 50% in the last 120 days. That translates into millions of dollars of cash shortfall versus our plan. We believe it’s all still collectible, but we just can’t seem to speed up payment. We are going to launch some new and more meaningful efforts to collect, but it just shouldn’t be that hard. And you hate to be heavy handed with customers in this environment. Is it a good idea to threaten to suspend service? When do you cut someone off? Is it appropriate for the CEO to make a collections…
Education and Entrepreneurship
Education and Entrepreneurship Fred posted his thoughts the other day that you don’t need a college degree to be a successful entrepreneur. He is clearly right in that one CAN be successful without it. Gates, Zuckerberg, Dell have proven that. I’ve always said that I didn’t think an MBA was a prerequisite for a successful business career. That’s easy for me to say, as I don’t have one despite many years of applying, deferring, cancelling, reapplying and general hand-wringing over whether or not to go in the mid-90s. An MBA is probably a positive on a resume for the most part (hard to argue it’s a negative), but it’s not a prerequisite. Every time I see “MBA preferred”…
The Evils of Patent Litigation
The Evils of Patent Litigation There have been a lot of posts over the years on the blogs I read about patents and how they are problematic. I know Brad has done a bunch, including this one. I wrote one once about a dumb patent issued in the email space, which is here. And of course no listing of great patent posts would be complete without a nod to my colleague Whitney McNamara, who I believe coined the term "ass patent" starting with this post. In fact, Whit has a whole category of posts on his blog about ass patents. But one of the most thoughtful, accurate, and proscriptive ones I've read is what Fred wrote a couple days ago….
Book Short: Hire Great
Book Short: Hire Great It’s certainly not hiring season for most of America The World The Universe, but we are still making some limited hires here at Return Path, and I thought – what better time to retool our interviewing and hiring process than in a relatively slow period? So I just read Who: The A Method for Hiring, by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. It’s a bit of a sequel, or I guess more of a successor book, to the best book I’ve ever read about hiring and interviewing, Topgrading, by Geoff Smart and his father Brad (post, link to buy). This one wasn’t bad, and it was much shorter and crisper. I’m not sure I believe the oft-quoted…
Book Short: The Joys of Slinging Hash
Book Short: The Joys of Slinging Hash Patrick Lencioni’s The Three Signs of a Miserable Job is a good read, as were his last two books, The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link), and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link). They’re all super short, easy reads (four express train rides on Metro North got the job done), with a single simple message and great examples. This one is probably my second favorite so far. This book, which has a downright dreary title, is great. It points to and proposes a solution to a problem I’ve thought about for a long time, which is how do you create meaning for people in their day to day work…
Book Short: Long on Platitudes, Short on Value
Book Short: Long on Platitudes, Short on Value I approached Success Built to Last: Creating a Life That Matters, by Jerry Porras, Stewart Emery, and Mark Thompson, with great enthusiasm, as Porras was co-author, along with Jim Collins, of two of my favorite business books of all time, Built to Last and Good to Great. I was very disappointed in the end. This wasn’t really a business book, despite its marketing and hype. At best, it was a poor attempt at doing what Malcolm Gladwell just did in Outliers in attempting to zero in on the innate, learned, and environmental qualities that drive success. The book had some reasonably good points to make and definitely some great quotes, but it…
Book Short: Two New Ones from Veteran Writers
Book Short: Two New Ones from Veteran Writers I’m feeling very New York this week. I just read both Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell, and Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – and How It Can Renew America, by Tom Friedman. Both are great, and if you like the respective authors’ prior works, are must reads. In Outliers, Gladwell’s simple premise is that talents are both carefully cultivated and subject to accidents of fate as much as they are genetic. I guess that’s not such a brilliant premise when you look at it like that. But as with his other two books, The Tipping Point (about how trends and social movements start and…