Inbox = Zero = Satisfying (Quasi Book Short) I’m a big David Allen fan. Amazingly enough, I haven’t blogged about him and his books yet, probably for the most part because I read the books before I started blogging. But here they are. The first one, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, is probably a little better than the sequel, Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life, but both are worth reading. When I first read them, they didn’t revolutionize my thinking about productivity and workflow management (I was already at least decent at those things), but they did really sharpen my thinking around the edges and give me a great framework to plug all…
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Business
Do Business Books Suck for Entrepreneurs?
Do Business Books Suck for Entrepreneurs? Ben thinks they do. Some of his reasons are pretty good, but I’d challenge a few of them, or at least his finer points. My experience over the years is that while most business books are not geared toward entrepreneurs, a good entrepreneur will figure out how to milk them for what they’re worth quickly and apply key learnings to his or her company. The reality is that running a startup or high growth company is a multi-faceted and incredibly dynamic experience, and having a bunch of outside inputs in the form of business book examples and theories can be really helpful. Even bad ideas can spur good thinking.
Legal Aggression
Legal Aggression I will write more posts on this topic later in the year after a ridiculous lawsuit we’re in the middle of now winds up, but today’s news from Techdirt is that shoe retailer DSW is suing Zappos, who as regular readers know is one of my favorite companies and shopping experiences around. The lawsuit sounds silly to me, but I’m not in the middle of the details of it. But what absolutely amazes me is that DSW made no effort to contact Zappos prior to launching the lawsuit with a press release. How incredibly irresponsible and rude and wasteful. I hate it when lawyers run amok, or when overly aggressive business people think that a lawsuit is the…
Book Short: A SPIN Selling Companion
Book Short: A SPIN Selling Companion At Return Path, we’re big believers in the SPIN Selling methodology popularized by Neil Rackham. It just makes sense. Spend more time listening than talking on a sales call, uncover your prospect’s true needs and get him or her to articulate the need for YOUR product. Though it doesn’t reference SPIN Selling, Why People Don’t Buy Things, by Kim Wallace and Harry Washburn is a nice companion read. Rooted in psychology and cognitive science, Why People Don’t Buy Things presents a very practical sales methodology called Buying Path Selling. Understand how your prospect is making his or her buying decision and what kind of buyer he or she is, be more successful at uncovering…
Book Short: Presentation Zen
Book Short: Presentation Zen A few years ago, I blogged about Cliff Atkinson’s book Beyond Bullets. I don’t know whether it’s a better book, or whether the timing of reading it just made a deeper impression on me, but I just read and LOVED Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds. The concept is similar — a bad Powerpoint presentation kills your message as much as that horrendous high school physics teacher turned you off from the natural sciences. Reynolds’s examples are rich, and there are tons of “before and after” slides in the book for the visual learners among us. In addition, he articulates very clearly what I’ve always thought, since my consulting days, made for an excellent presentation: offline storyboarding….
Executive and Closed Sessions
Executive and Closed Sessions Brad has a good post up about what he calls “closed sessions” in Board meetings — time at the end of the meeting reserved for a conversation with Board members ONLY, no other observers or non-Board management. While we differ in terminology, I agree completely with the sentiment and with his logic. We call the part of the meeting that Brad describes the Executive Session. We’ve always done them. And the Board and I find it incredibly useful, and a good practice, even if there are no contentious or puzzling issues during a meeting. Not that our Board holds back much, but the Executive Session is a good time for us to connect 100% freely about…
Drawing the Line
Drawing the LineWe are having a bit of a debate at the moment internally around our Sender Score deliverability business about how to handle clients who are in businesses that are, shall we say, not exactly as pure as the driven snow. As a company that provides software and services to businesses without a vertical focus, we are often approached by all sorts of companies wanting our services where we don’t love what they do. Examples include: Gambling Tobacco Neutriceuticals Guns Adult content or products Our challenges are along three dimensions, each of which is a little different. But common threads run through all three dimensions. Dimension 1: Our deliverability technology platform. Our basic technology is used by mailers of…
Poor Systems Integration Just Makes It Worse
Poor Systems Integration Just Makes It Worse I attended a day of classes at Harvard Business School in 1992 as a college senior. I distinctly remember a case study on how poor systems integration was impacting companies’ ability to get a whole view of their customers and thus provide high service levels. In fact, the case study I remember was about American Airlines and how one system showed that a customer’s flights had been delayed or canceled, while another system showed a customer’s travel patterns and was able to tell when the customer had defected to another airline, and a third system sent out rewards and notices to customers. That was 16 years ago. I received an email from American…
What's the Response Rate on This Campaign?
What’s the Response Rate on This Campaign? This is a doosie. I will hide names to protect the guilty, but I just received my third form letter in the last five years from the CEO of one of the big public companies in the direct marketing space inviting me to sell Return Path to him. It was delivered via FedEx with some of the company’s marketing materials and public financial reporting. All I will note is the ironic list of ways that this letter does not conform to direct marketing best practices: It’s not personal It’s only theoretically relevant Behavioral targeting would catch that similar mailings in the past haven’t generated a response Treating solicitation of a CEO about M&A…
Book Short: Chock Full O Management & Leadership
Book Short: Chock Full O Management & Leadership I just finished The Better People Leader, by Charles Coonradt, which was a very short, good, rich read. It was a pretty expansive book on management & leadership topics — 100 short pages of material that are probably covered by 1,000 pages in other books. What separates this book from the pack is the rich examples from non-business life that Coonradt sprinkles throughout the book. They include the tale of a special ed kid who became a mainstream student within a year because his teacher had the courage to ask his fellow students to treat him normally, and the story of how Korean War POWs died in massive numbers not from physical…
Book Short: What’s For Dinner Tonight, Honey?
Book Short: What’s For Dinner Tonight, Honey? The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, by Barry Schwartz, presents an enlightening, if somewhat distressing perspective on the proliferation of options and choices facing the average American today. The central thesis of the book is that some choice is better than no choice (I’d rather be able to pick blue jeans or black jeans), but that limited choice may be better in the end than too much choice (how do I know that the jeans I really want are relaxed cut, tapered leg, button fly, etc.?). We have this somewhat astonishing, recurring conversation at home every night, with the two of us sitting around paralyzed about where to eat dinner. The author’s arguments and examples…