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…
Category
Leadership
The Catcher Hypothesis
The Catcher Hypothesis Here’s an interesting nugget I just picked up from Harvard Business Review’s March issue in an article entitled “Making Mobility Matter,” by Richard Guzzo and Haig Nalbantian. Of the 30 teams in Major League baseball, 12 of the managers are former catchers. A normal distribution would be 2 or 3. Sounds like a case of a Gladwellian Outlier, doesn’t it? The authors explain their theory here…that catchers face their teammates, that they are closest to the competition, that they have to keep track of a lot of things at once, be psychiatrists to flailing pitchers, etc. Essentially that the kind of person who is a successful catcher has all the qualities of a successful manager. What’s the…
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…
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: 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…
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…
Please, Let There Be Another Explanation
Please, Let There Be Another Explanation One of the things I was most excited about with an Obama presidency was that it finally seemed as if we had a real leader in the hot seat. Someone who might actually be able to run an effective government instead of a bureaucracy paralyzed by partisanship. I still have this hope. But I also hope what we’re seeing around the stimulus bill is not what we’re in for the next four years. What I’m seeing is a complete absence of leadership around the problem. Seems to me, taking lessons from the corporate world, that Obama should have done two things that would have gotten the program passed in a bipartisan way much more…
Desperately Seeking an Owner for "Other"
Desperately Seeking an Owner for “Other” A couple weeks ago in Living with Less…For Good, I mentioned that we’re on a crusade against extraneous expenses at Return Path these days, as is pretty much the rest of the world. After a close review of our most recent month’s financials, we have a new target: “Other.” A relatively inconspicuous line on the income statement, this line, which different companies call different things such as “Other G&A” and “General Office,” is inherently problematic NOT because it inherently encompasses a huge amount of expenses, although it might, but rather because it inherently doesn’t have an owner and rarely has a budget. As we dug into the gory details of “Other” our accounting system…
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…
Symbolism in Action
Symbolism in Action A couple months ago, I wrote about how the idiots who run the Big 3 US automakers in Detroit don’t have a clue about symbolism — the art or the science of it. Yesterday, I wrote about how I think the non-headcount cuts to G&A that we’re making at Return Path during these challenging economic times will be positive for the company in the long run. The two topics are closely related. Obama announces on Day 1 that White House staffers who make more than $100k won’t be getting a pay raise this year. Presumably all of those people just started their jobs on January 20 and wouldn’t be eligible for a raise until 2010. Return Path…