The Phoenix Project: a novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford is a logical intellectual successor and regularly quotes Eli Goldratt’s seminal work The Goal and its good but less known sequel It’s Not Luck. The more business books I read, the more I appreciate the novel or fable format. Most business books are a bit boring and way too long to make a single point. The Phoenix Project is a novel, though unlike Goldratt’s books (and even Lencioni’s), it takes it easy on the cheesy and personal side stories. It just uses storytelling techniques to make its points and give color and examples for more memorable learning. If your…
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Technology
Democracy in Action
I went to our local high school gym last night to vote for a smallish ($12mm) school bond issue as well as another proposition I didn’t quite understand about paying for fire alarms in the schools. As is always the case in New York, I was somewhere between amused and appalled that the voting machines are pre-war vintage (possibly Civil, definitely WWI). But this election was a new experience for me. When I finished voting, I ran into a friend of ours who is on the school board, and he suggested I stick around because the polls were closing, and I’d get to hear the results. This picture is how the results were tabulated. A woman with a whiteboard yelled…
Book Short: Internet Fiction
Book Short: Internet Fiction It’s been a long time since I read Tom Evslin’s Hackoff.com, which Tom called a “blook” since he released it serially as a blog, then when it was all done, as a bound book. Mariquita and I read it together and loved every minute of it. One post I wrote about it at the time was entitled Like Fingernails on a Chalkboard. The essence of that post was “I liked it, but the truth of the parts of the Internet bubble that I lived through were painful to read,” applies to two “new” works of Internet fiction that I just plowed through this week, as well. Uncommon Stock Eliot Pepper’s brand new startup thriller, Uncommon Stock,…
Who Controls the Future of Technology?
Who Controls the Future of Technology? I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today, then got to my inbox to find both it and its opposite forwarded to me by Brad. The Journal says that the consumerization of technology wins out in the end, and that: In the past, CIOs and their staff had a reputation for being snarky, geeky guys who were always looking for ways to tell employees what they couldn’t do. Now, at the most progressive companies, the tech department’s main job isn’t to say no. Instead, it’s to find a way to let employees safely run any device or program they like. The thinking goes like this: Employees are most productive when they’re…
Luck Matters (and You Can Only Make Some of It)
Luck Matters ( and You Can Only Make Some of It) There was a great article recently in the Financial Times that’s worth reading here. (Warning – you might have to complete a free registration in order to read this article.) The premise is that most outliers, to use Malcolm Gladwell’s term, achieve their super status at least partly through luck. And once that status is achieved, the good things just pile on from there. This concept is as much Gladwell’s as that term is. I always say that “you can make your own luck.” And to some extent, that’s true. Hard work and persistence and creativity can eventually open up doors on their own, no question about it. While…
A New VC Ready to Go!
A New VC Ready to Go! One of the interesting things about being in business for 13 years (as of last week!) at Return Path is that we have been around longer than two of our Venture Capital funds. Fortunately for us, Fred led an investment in the company with his new fund, Union Square Ventures, even though his initial investment was via his first fund, Flatiron Partners. And even though Brad hasn’t invested out of his new fund, Foundry Group, he remains a really active member of our group as a Board Advisory through his Mobius Venture Capital investment. Although our third and largest VC shareholder, Sutter Hill Ventures, is very much still in business, our Board member Greg…
Book Short: Culture is King
Book Short: Culture is King Tony Hsieh’s story, Delivering Happiness (book, Kindle), is more than just the story of his life or the story of Zappos. It’s a great window into the soul of a very successful company and one that in many ways has become a model for great culture and a great customer service model. It’s a relatively quick and breezy read, and it contains a handful of legendary anecdotes from Zappos’ history to demonstrate those two things — culture and customer service — in action. As Hsieh himself says in the book, you can’t copy this stuff and believe it will work in your company’s environment as it does in Zappos’. You have to come up with…
Book Short: Internet True Crime
Book Short: Internet True Crime Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet, by Joseph Menn (book, kindle) was a bit of a disappointment. I was really hoping for more of an explanation of how the “business” of Internet crime works — what the economics are like, what the landscape/scope/sectors are like, who the players are. What I got was a bit of a true crime novel, the story of Barrett Lyon and Andy Crocker, who are respectively a geek and a cop, and their very specific stories of tracking down a handful of internet criminals around a handful of technical tactics (DDOS attacks and botnets). It wasn’t bad, the stories were…
Book Short: Steve Jobs and Lessons for CEOs and Founders
Book Short: Steve Jobs and Lessons for CEOs and Founders First, if you work in the internet, grew up during the rise of the PC, or are an avid consumer of Apple products, read the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs (book, kindle). It’s long but well worth it. I know much has been written about the subject and the book, so I won’t be long or formal, but here are the things that struck me from my perspective as a founder and CEO, many taken from specific passages from the book: In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important. Man is that ever true. I’ve come up with some…
Blogiversary, Part VII
Blogiversary, Part VII Today marks the seventh anniversary of OnlyOnce. I haven’t marked the date with a post in three years, but here was my last such post (with links to prior posts in it). In sum up until now, my reasons for blogging have been written up as: “Thinking” (writing short posts helps me crystallize my thinking) “Employees” (one of our senior people once called reading OnlyOnce “getting a peek inside Matt’s head) My book reviews help me crystallize my takeaways from books and serve as a bit of a personal reference library I like writing and don’t get to do it often After seven years, though, I’m going to add another important point of value for me for…
Guest Post: Staying Innovative as Your Business Grows (Part Two)
As I mentioned in a previous post, I write a column for The Magill Report, the new venture by Ken Magill, previously of Direct magazine and even more previously DMNews. I share the column with my colleagues Jack Sinclair and George Bilbrey and we cover how to approach the business of email marketing, thoughts on the future of email and other digital technologies, and more general articles on company-building in the online industry – all from the perspective of an entrepreneur. I recently posted George’s column on Staying Innovative as Your Business Grows (Part One). Below is a re-post of George’s second part of that column from this week, which I think my OnlyOnce readers will enjoy. Guest Post: Staying…