Book Short:  Underdog Victorious

The Underdog Advantage, by David Morey and Scott Miller, was a worthwhile read, though not a great book.  It was a little shallow, and although I enjoyed its case studies (who doesn’t love hearing about Ben & Jerry’s, Southwest, JetBlue, Starbucks?), I didn’t feel like the authors did enough to tie the details of the success of the case study companies back to the points they made in the book.

That said, the book had some great reminders in it for companies of all sizes and stages.  The main point was that successful companies always think of themselves as the underdog, the insurgent, and never get complacent.  They run themselves like a political campaign, needing to win an election every single day.  A lot of the tactics suggested are timeless and good to remember…things like never declare victory, always play offense, always respond to attacks, remember to communicate from the inside out, and remember to sell employees on a mision and purpose in order to make them your main ambassadors.  The laundry list of tactics is the book’s greatest strength.

• BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » They’re meltinggggg
  Jeff Jarvis on Why We’re Glad We’re New Media…good stats on all the troubles facing “old media” nowadays (box office, newspapers, music, radio, books)
  (tags: Technology Media)
• Our Customer Is The Entrepreneur | Union Square Ventures
  Fred Wilson on how VCs relate to entrepreneurs vs. their limited partners. They should think of entrepreneurs as their customers, and think of LPs as shareholders.
  (tags: VC Technology Entrepreneur)

Counter Cliche:  Head Lemming

Fred’s VC Cliche of the Week last week was that leadership is figuring out where everyone is going and then getting in front of them and saying “follow me.” While it’s certainly true that juming out in front of a well-organized, rapidly moving parade and becoming the grand marshal (or maybe the baton twirly person) is one path to successful leadership, CEOs do have to be careful about selecting the right parade to jump in front of for two reasons.

First, just because lots of people are going in a specific direction doesn’t mean it’s right.  There’s nothing good about ending up as the Head Lemming.  It just means you go over the cliff before the rest of the troops.  Lots of smart people thought home delivery of a stick of gum made sense and was worth investing in, but it certainly put a kink in George Shaheen’s career.

Second, even if the parade is a good one, the organization you run might not be best equipped to take advantage of it.  Again, you find yourself in the undesirable position of being the Head Lemming.  Gerry Levin and Steve Case fell in love with convergence story (one of the biggest parades of the last 10 years), but in the end, Time Warner and AOL just couldn’t cope with the merger.  Neither Gerry nor Steve survived the merger.

So if you’re going to follow the VC cliche and jump out in front of a crowd to lead it, make sure you select your crowd carefully.

A Typepad User, and Proud of It

SixApart showed huge corporate courage today when they emailed their entire blog user base, apologized (for the second or third time) for service interruptions the past month, then announced a cash remedy.

As a default, they’re giving everyone half a month of service for free.  This is obviously a huge hit to the company financially and probably more of a gesture than anyone expected.  But better than that, they allowed users to click through to their web site and automatically get a full month for free — or a month and a half for free — if they felt in good conscience that the service outages were more harmful to them.  They also quite intelligently allowed users to click through and decline the service credit if they weren’t inconvenienced by the outages.

This is everything that customer service is supposed to be.  Prompt.  Proactive.  Generous.  Allowing customers to be in the driver seat about remedies.  After a HORRENDOUS weekend of customer service gaffes by United Airlines (a story for another time), I couldn’t be more struck by the contrast.  And SixApart isn’t even an employee-owned company teetering on the edge bankruptcy.  Way to go, SixApart!

Hackoff – The Blook, Part II

A few weeks back, I posted about a new blook (book delivered in single episodes via blog) called Hackoff.com – An Historic Murder Mystery Set in the Internet Bubble and Rubble, by Tom Evslin.  A few weeks into it, and I’m hooked.  It’s:

– complete and total brain candy, or mental floss as Brad calls it

– a great 2 minute break in the middle of the day (episodes are delivered once a day during the week)

– a very entertaining reminder about some of the wacky things that went on back in the Internet heyday

– a good look into some of the processes that go on behind the scenes in taking a company public

If you haven’t started the blook yet and want to give it a try, you can catch up on all of the first episodes and subscribe to the new ones here.   You can also preorder a hardcover copy of the book here on Amazon.com.

Overload

Fred had a great posting last week called The Looming Attention Crisis.  He talks about how he’s at his limit of trying out new technology and consuming information/feeds.  He’s right — except I’d argue there’s nothing looming about the crisis.  Those of us who were early adopters of RSS (perhaps early adopters in general) are in full Overload mode at this point.

The negatives associated with this problem are pretty clear.  One of my very first postings, Present AND Accounted For, talked about the perils of multitasking on interpersonal relationships; that’s probably the biggest negative to the availability of all this information.  Attention, as Fred says, IS in fact a zero sum game. 

The great problem associated with all of this Web 2.0 stuff is that the web is now much more easily a read/write platform, as opposed to the primary read platform it was in the early days.  So now, everyone can have a printing press — but not everyone should.  And those who do, shouldn’t necessarily feel compelled to use those presses all day, every day.

We need some new tools and services to help reduce the Overload factor quickly.  Tips for better organizing information help (thanks, Whit), but they’re not enough.  We need better keywords and searching of the information that’s out there.  We need better tools to help understand which feeds to read and which to avoid — in other words, ways to figure out who shouldn’t have a printing press.  We need better tools to de-dupe information, or better yet to consolidate duplicate information with a clean list of sources.  We need better integration with mobile devices to scan the information during away-from-desk time.  Most of all, we need all of these tools to be integrated before average users can really adopt.

Maybe all of these tools are out there, and I just to find need more time (somehow) to find and implement them.  I’m sure some entrepreneurs far smarter than I am about Web 2.0 will come up with these things before long…and then of course we’ll hear about them 872 times until we implement their solutions.

Armistice Day

Back in May, writing about Decoration Day, I promised an exciting conclusion to the “forgotten past names of minor American holidays” series this week.  I’m on vacation the rest of the week, so I’ll post today about Friday’s holiday, what we now call Veterans Day but what Grandma Hazel still periodically calls Armistice Day.  Once again, Wikipedia to the rescue.

Armistice Day is the anniversary of the official end of World War I, November 11, 1918. It commemorates the armistice signed between the Allies and Germany at Compiègne, France, for the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front, which took effect at eleven o’clock in the morning — the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.”

Following World War II, the name of the holiday was changed (enacted June 1, 1954) to Veterans Day to honor those who served in all American wars. The day has since evolved to primarily be a time of honoring living veterans who have served in the military during wartime or peacetime, partially due to competition (competition?) with Memorial Day, which primarily honors the dead.

Many nations within the British Commonwealth observe a similar occasion on November 11, Remembrance Day.

Only Twice? or The Un-Big Sur Marathon

Well, it wasn’t pretty, but Brad and I finished the 36th running of the New York City Marathon yesterday.  Here we are shortly after the end.

This was my second marathon.  When I finished Big Sur in 1996 with my friend Karl Florida, I had a nagging feeling that I’d do another one someday and figured it should be New York given how long I’ve lived here and what a great race it is.  From where I sit today, it’s hard to imagine doing another one.  Finishing is a truly great feeling, but boy is it a lot of work to get ready for it (not to mention a fair amount of pain both getting ready for it and doing it!).  Brad’s nuts — I say this with the utmost admiration — he’s in the process of doing 50 marathons, 1 in each state, mostly over the next 10 years.

The whole thing was incredible.  37,000 runners is just a sea of people.  There was never a point on the course when the field really thinned out – all you could see as a runner, in either direction, was just miles of heads bobbing up and down.  The crowd was amazing.  The New York Roadrunners Club estimates that 2 million people turn out to watch the marathon somewhere along the course, and I believe it.

The race was truly the opposite of the Big Sur Marathon, though.  Big Sur was silent, serene, and picturesque, with about 3,000 runners and zero spectators until about mile 24.  Yesterday’s race was raucous, crowded, and while Central Park and 5th Avenue were nice, you’d be hard pressed to call some of the sections of Queens and The Bronx we ran through picturesque.

Anyway…back to limping around the office today!

A Good Laugh at Microsoft’s Expense

Anyone who has ever had a frustrating moment with any Microsoft product (um, that probably means everyone) must watch this 4 minute video.  Thanks to my colleague Carly Brantz for turning me on to this gem.

Update:  new link for this video as of June 18, 2006 here.

Book Short:  Allegory of Allegories

Squirrel, Inc., by Stephen Denning, is a good quick read for leaders who want a refreshing look at effective ways to motivate and communicate to their teams. The book focuses on storytelling as a method of communication, and Denning employs the storytelling method fairly successfully as a framework for the book.

The specific kinds of messages he focuses on, where he says storytelling can have the biggest impact, are:  communicating a complex idea and sparking action; communicating identity – who YOU as leader are; transmitting values; getting a group or team to work together more effectively; neutralizing gossip or taming the grapevine; knowledge-sharing; and painting a vision of the future that a team can hang onto.   The book even has a nice summary “how to” table at the end of it.

Thanks to email guru David Baker at Agency.com for giving me the book.

Book Short:  Reality Doesn’t have to Bite

I just read Confronting Reality (book; audio), the sequel to Execution, by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan.  Except I didn’t read it, I listened to it on Mariquita’s iPod Shuffle over the course of two or three long runs in the past week.  The book was good enough, but I also learned two valuable lessons.  Lesson 1:  Listening to audio books when running is difficult – it’s hard to focus enough, easy to lose one’s place, can’t refer back to anything or take notes.  Lesson 2:  If you sweat enough on your spouse’s Shuffle, you can end up owning a Shuffle of your own.

Anyway, I was able to focus on the book enough to know that it’s a good one.  It’s chock full of case studies from the last few years, including some “new economy” ones instead of just the industrial types covered in books like Built to Last and Good to Great.  Cisco, Sun, EMC, and Thomson are all among those covered.  The basic message is that you really have to dig into external market realities when crafting a strategic plan or business model and make sure they’re in alignment with your financial targets as well as people and processes.  But the devil’s in the details, and the case studies here are great.