Book Shorts: One Up, One Down I read new books by two of my favorite authors today: Geoffrey Moore and Seth Godin. Moore’s was his best book in years; Godin’s was his worst. Geoffrey Moore’s latest book, Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of their Evolution, is Moore’s best book in a while. While I loved Crossing the Chasm and thought Inside the Tornado was a close second, both The Gorilla Game and Living on the Fault Line didn’t do it for me — they both felt like a pile of Silicon Valley buzzwords as opposed to the insightful and groundbreaking market definition in his first two books. But Darwin is a gem. It goes back…
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Business
Book Short: And It’s Not Just Because I’m In It
Book Short: And It’s Not Just Because I’m In It Debbie Weil’s The Corporate Blogging Book is a good super quick read for any CEO or senior executive who is contemplating starting a blog — or even better, for those who have decided not to do so. Weil’s writing style is great and very informal (blog-like, in fact) – a representative snippet is where she tells readers that there are two types of information to worry about posting on a blog, in her words, “stuff you don’t to reveal and stuff you could get sued for.” And her range of topics is great and deals with issues head-on. Things like fear of losing control, time commitment, and ghost writing are…
Getting Good Inc.
Getting Good Inc. There’s an old saying in PR about “getting good ink,” referring to good press – a phrase that will probably replaced by something like “getting good bits” soon enough now, I’m sure. Anyway, Return Path was very fortunate to be ranked #167 in this year’s Inc. Magazine Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing private companies in America. See the list here and our press release here. We were also happy to see clients of ours like Constant Contact, Fishbowl, and Zappos on the list, as well as fellow email companies Exact Target, Vertical Response, and research panel Epocrates. That’s all the sign of a healthy industry! While we never rest on our laurels, it’s certainly nice…
People are People
People are People So after nearly seven years of running Return Path, I think it’s now fair to say that I’m a direct marketer. I’ve learned a lot about this business over the years, and there are a number of things about direct marketing that are phenomenal — the biggest one is that most of the business is incredibly clear, logical, and math-driven. But there’s always been one thing about the field that hasn’t quite made sense to me, and I think it’s because the Internet is once again changing the rules of the game. There are traditional companies in the space that focus on B2C direct marketing. There are others that focus on B2B. It’s been obvious to me…
Book Short: It Sounds Like it Should be About Monkeys, Doesn’t It?
Book Short: It Sounds Like it Should be About Monkeys, Doesn’t It? The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, is a must-read for anyone in the Internet publishing or marketing business. There’s been so much written about it in the blogosphere already that I feel a little lame and “me too” for adding my $0.02, but I finally had a chance to get to it last week, and it was fantastic. The premise is that the collapsing production, distribution, and marketing costs of the Internet for certain types of products — mostly media at this point — have extended the traditional curve of available products and purchased products almost indefinitely so that it has, in statistical terms, a really long tail….
Book Short: Choose Voice!
Book Short: Choose Voice! I took a couple days off last week and decided to re-read two old favorites. One –Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead — my fourth reading — will take me a little longer to process and figure out if there’s a good intersection with the blog. One would think so with entrepreneurship as the topic, but my head still hurts from all the objectivism. The second — Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, by Albert O. Hirschman — is today’s topic. I can’t remember when I first read Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. It was either in senior year of high school Economics or Government; or in freshman year of college Political Philosophy. Either way, it was a long time ago,…
Your Goal: Professional Nirvana
Your Goal: Professional Nirvana Brad wrote a delightful post the other day entitled "My Work is Play to Me." His theory about how to achieve it is worth reading. I, too believe that my work is play (under this definition), and that has been one of the things that’s kept me going as an entrepreneur for nearly seven years now. And you don’t have to be a VC, or a CEO, or be working remotely to achieve the state. This is reminiscent of the Fish books (here, here, and here), although in a more fundamental, philosophical, internally-generated way. Those are good, quick "airport" reads — at least get the first one, which is the story about the famous Pike Place…
Amazon: Icky Slippage Business Model
Amazon: Icky Slippage Business Model I never signed up for Amazon Prime, Amazon’s “pay a bunch up front then get free fast shipping all the time” deal, mostly because I usually buy more than $25 worth of books at a time, so shipping is free anyway. But today, they hit me on the checkout with a free three-month trial of Prime, so I clicked yes – what the heck? My bad for thinking they were just being nice to me as a VERY GOOD CUSTOMER. The confirmation email they sent had buried in the fine print that my subscription would auto-renew after three months for the usual $80 if I didn’t proactively opt-out on their web site. That’s a business…
Book Shorts: Sales, Sales, Sales, Sales, Sales
Book Shorts: Sales, Sales, Sales, Sales, Sales Jeffrey Gitomer’s Little Red Book of Selling and Little Red Book of Sales Answers were great refreshers in sales basics for you as CEO (and head of sales, and sales manager, and sales rep). The books were a bit “self-help” flavor for my taste as a reader, but they were excellent on content, and I have two long pages of notes of “back to basics” items I need to remind myself and my team about. Anyone at Return Path in sales/account-project management/marketing — your copy is on the way, hopefully by way of a barter I proposed with the author (sorry, Stephanie and Tami…), but in any case, we’ll buy them. Anyone else…
Counter Cliche: Sometimes You Need a Shortstop
Counter Cliche: Sometimes You Need a Shortstop Fred’s Chiche of the Week this week is about drafting the best available (corporate) athlete. I think he’s right lots of the time, especially in startup companies where people need to wear multiple hats. And it might also be a good rule of thumb in larger companies, when you want to have flexibility to move managers around from group to group and get them to easily take on new challenges or responsibilities. But sometimes, you just need a shortstop, and if you were the GM of a baseball team, your manager or owner would be pretty ticked off if you went out and hired a decathlete for the job. Companies who are in…
Naked Talking
Naked Talking Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing The Way Businesses Talk with Consumers, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, would have been mildly interesting had I never read, let alone written, a blog. So chances are if you’re reading this blog regularly, it’s not a great use of your time or money, but if you just ran across this post while trying to learn more about blogging – or really about any form of post-2002 Internet marketing – it’s probably worthwhile as a primer. But if you’re knee-deep in internet marketing or blogging, it may be a bit of a snoozer. I find it entertaining that leading bloggers like Scoble and Israel, who are part of the ultra-small group…