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 all well covered.

Chapter 8 also includes a great Cliff’s Notes guide to web 2.0 technologies — RSS, podcasting, wikis, tagging — which is useful if you still Feel Like a Luddite about those things.

I did contribute a couple interviews to the book, as did most of the other oft-cited CEO bloggers like Mark Cuban and Jonathan Schwartz in whose company I am somewhat embarrassed and humbled to be. But don’t let that deter you from picking up a copy if you are in the target audience!

Book Short – A Smattering of Good Ideas that further my Reboot path

Ram Charan’s The Attacker’s Advantage was not his best work, but it was worth the read.  It had a cohesive thesis and a smattering of good ideas in it, but it felt much more like the work of a management consultant than some of his better books like Know How (review, buy), Confronting Reality (review, buy), Execution (review, buy), What the CEO Wants You to Know ( buy), and my favorite of his that I refer people to all the time, The Leadership Pipeline (review, buy).

Charan’s framework for success in a crazy world full of digital and other disruption is this:

Perceptual acuity (I am still not 100% sure what this means)

1. A mindset to see opportunity in uncertainty
2. The ability to see a new path forward and commit to it
3. Adeptness in managing the transition to the new path
4. Skill in making the organization steerable and agile

The framework is basically about institutionalizing the ability to spot pending changes in the future landscape based on blips and early trends going on today and then about how to seize opportunity once you’ve spotted the future.  I like that theme.  It matches what I wrote about when I read Mark Penn’s Microtrends (review, buy) years ago.

Charan’s four points are important, but some of the suggestions for structuring an organization around them are very company-specific, and others are too generic (yes, you have to set clear priorities).  His conception of something he calls a Joint Practice Session is a lot like the practices involved in Agile that contemporary startups are more likely to just do in their sleep but which are probably helpful for larger companies.

I read the book over a year ago, and am finally getting around to blogging about it.  That time and distance were helpful in distilling my thinking about Charan’s words.  Probably my biggest series of takeaways from the book – and they fit into my Reboot theme this quarter/year, is to spend a little more time “flying at higher altitude,” as Charan puts it:  talking to people outside the company and asking them what they see and observe from the world around them; reading more and synthesizing takeaways and applicability to work more; expanding my information networks beyond industry and country; creating more routine mechanisms for my team to pool observations about the external landscape and potential impacts on the company; and developing a methodology for reviewing and improving predictions over time.

Bottom line:  like many business books, great to skim and pause for a deep dive at interesting sections, but not the author’s best work.

Book Short:  Shamu-rific

I re-read an old favorite last night in preparation for a management training course I’m co-teaching today at Return Path:  Ken Blanchard’s Whale Done! The Power of Positive Relationships.  I was reminded why it’s an old favorite.  It has a single concept which is simple but powerful.  And yes, it’s based loosely on killer whale  training tactics.

Accentuate the positive.

The best example in the book is actually a personal one more than a professional one.  The main character of the book has a “problem” in that he chronically works late, then comes home and gets beat up by his wife about coming home so late.  The result?  No behavior change — and probably even a reinforcement of the behavior because, after all, who wants to come home and get beat up?  The change as a result of the new philosophy?  The wife thanks her husband when he does come home at a more reasonable hour, makes him a nice dinner, etc. which makes the husband WANT to come home earlier.

That’s probably a poor paraphrasing of the story, and as I’m typing the story out here, boy does it sound a bit 1950s in terms of its portrayal of gender role stereotypes.  Nonetheless, I think it makes the point well.

Try it out sometime at work (or at home).  Pick a behavior you want to see more of out of a direct report, especially one that’s linked to another behavior you don’t like.  Accentuate the positive.  Make the person WANT to do more of it.  And watch the results!

Book Short:  Virtuous Cycle

Danny Meyer’s Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business is a fun read if you’re a New Yorker who eats out a lot; a good read for entrepreneurs around scaling leadership skills as the business grows; and a great read for anyone who runs a serious customer service-oriented organization.  I’ve eaten at all of his restaurants multiple times over the years except for the new ones at MOMA (perhaps a few too many times at the Shake Shack), and while I like some more than others (perhaps the Shake Shack a bit too much), they all do have great hospitality as a common theme.

While there are a lot of good lessons in the book, Meyer talks about something he calls the Virtuous Cycle of Enlightened Hospitality that matches the general hierarchy of constituents or stakeholders in a business that I refer to at Return Path:   employees, customers, community, suppliers, investors.  His general point is that if you have happy employees, they make for happy customers, and returns for investors will follow.  While the specifics may or not be true of all businesses, I bet the first and last item are — especially for service-oriented businesses in any industry.  I wish we had a better handle on the Community aspect at Return Path, but we at least do an OK job at it, especially given the geographic diversity within the company.

(Note this was one of Fred’s favorite parts of the book as well from his review — nice to see a professional investor in agreement!)

Thanks to my friend and long-time former Board member Jeff Epstein, I recently downed a new book, You’re in Charge – Now What?, by Thomas Neff and James Citrin.  I’m glad I read it.  But it was one of those business books that probably should have just been a Harvard Business Review article.  It’s best skimmed, with helpful short summaries at the end of every chapter that you could blow through quickly instead of hanging on every word. 

The authors’ 8-step plan is laid out as:

1. Prepare yourself during the countdown
2. Align expectations
3. Shape your management team
4. Craft your strategic agenda
5. Start transforming culture
6. Manage your board/boss
7. Communicate
8. Avoid common pitfalls

Ok fine, those make sense on the surface. Here are three things that really stood out for me from the book:

First, “working” before you’re officially working – the countdown period. I tried hard NOT to do this when I was between things, but I’m glad I did the things I did, and now, I wish I had done more. The most poignant phrase in the book is “scarce time available during your first hundred days.” That is an understatement. As my “to read” pile grows and grows and grows with no end in sight…I wish I had done more pre-work.

Second, remember that in every interaction, you are being evaluated as much as you are evaluating. And note that for many people, they will be thinking very critically, things like “do I want to work with this person…is he/she showing signs that he/she wants to work with me?” Yes, we all know as leaders, we live in a fishbowl. But I think that may be even more true during the first couple months on the job.

Finally, this phrase stood out for me: “Acknowledging and in some cases embracing your predecessor can sustain a sense of continuity within the organization and instill a sense of connectivity with employees’ shared past.” There is frequently a temptation to focus on things that need change, which invariably there are…and which invariably you will hear from people who are happy to find a willing new ear to listen to them. But this posture of acknowledge/embrace is especially true in my case, where my predecessor is the founder and 25-year CEO who continues on as our active chairman.

I know there are a ton of books like this on the market, and while I’ve only read this one, I’d say that if you’re starting a new CEO or executive-level job, this is a good one to at least skim to get some ideas.

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 to Moore’s strengths in analyzing leading companies and creating a powerful framework for innovation that transcends industry and stage of company. And even better, the book has a few very useful “how to” lists to help readers interpret the content and adapt it to their own environments.

So whether you’re a Geoffrey Moore fan or not — assuming you are a fan of innovation and kicking your competitors’ collective butts — this book’s for you.

By contrast, Seth Godin’s Small Is the New Big is old news if you are a Seth Godin fan. It is literally a repackaging of essays, articles, and blog postings he’s written over the years. He’s trended down lately in his writing, like Moore (and most authors who have a single theme or two, it should be said), but unlike Moore, this book isn’t his recovery. The book is a must-have if you (a) love Seth’s writing and want a hard copy archive of his soft-copy stuff, (b) you don’t read Seth’s blog and want to see what you’ve been missing, or (c) you have his other books and are compulsive enough that you can’t stand incomplete collections.

Otherwise, wait for his next book, which hopefully will have some more of the original thinking and writing and ideas that made books like Permission Marketing, Unleashing the Ideavirus, and Purple Cow such new business classics.  I have to say, the thing that disappointed me most here is that I felt like Seth totally sold out with this book — as a regular reader of his, I just felt duped by the Godin Marketing Machine, which is precisely the kind of thing he rants against.  There was definitely NO Free Prize Inside this one.

Startup CEO (OnlyOnce – the book!), Part III – Pre-Order Now

My book, Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, is now available for pre-order on Amazon in multiple formats (Print, Kindle), which is an exciting milestone in this project!  The book is due out right after Labor Day, but Brad Feld tells me that the more pre-orders I have, the better.  Please pardon the self-promotion, but click away if you’re interested!

Here are a few quick thoughts about the book, though I’ll post more about it and the process at some point:

• I’ll be using the hashtag #startupceo more now to encourage discussion of topics related to startup CEOs – please join me!
• The book has been described by a few CEOs who read it and commented early for me along the lines of “The Lean Startup movement is great, but this book starts where most of those books end and takes you through the ‘so you have a product that works in-market – now what?’ questions”
• The book is part of the Startup Revolution series that Brad has been working on for a couple years now, including Do More (Even) Faster, Venture Deals, Startup Communities, and Startup Life (with two more to come, Startup Boards and Startup Metrics)
• Writing a book is a LOT harder than I expected!

At this point, the best thing I can do to encourage you to read/buy is to share the full and final table of contents with you, sections/chapters/headings.  When I get closer in, I may publish some excerpts of new content here on Only Once.  Here’s the outline:

Part I: Storytelling

• Chapter 1: Dream the Possible Dream…Entrepreneurship and Creativity, “A Faster Horse,” Vetting Ideas
• Chapter 2: Defining and Testing the Story…Start Out By Admitting You’re Wrong, A Lean Business Plan Template, Problem, Solution, Key Metrics, Unique Value Proposition and Unfair Advantages, Channels, Customer Segments, Cost Structure and Revenue Streams
• Chapter 3: Telling the Story to Your Investors…The Business Plan is Dead. Long Live the Business Plan, The Investor Presentation, The Elevator Pitch, The Size of the Opportunity, Your Competitive Advantage, Current Status and Roadmap from Today, The Strength of Your Team, Summary Financials, Investor Presentations for Larger Startups
• Chapter 4: Telling the Story to Your Team…Defining Your Mission, Vision and Values, The Top-down Approach, The Bottom-Up Approach, The Hybrid Approach, Design a Lofty Mission Statement
• Chapter 5: Revising the Story…Workshopping, Knowing When It’s Time to Make a Change, Corporate Pivots: Telling the Story Differently, Consolidating, Diversifying, Focusing, Business Pivots: Telling a Different Story
• Chapter 6: Bringing the Story to Life…Building Your Company Purposefully, The Critical Elements of Company-Building, Articulating Purpose:  The Moral of the Story, You Can Be a Force for Helping Others—Even If Indirectly

Part II: Building the Company’s Human Capital

• Chapter 7: Fielding a Great Team…From Protozoa to Pancreas, The Best and the Brightest, What About HR?, What About Sales & Marketing?, Scaling Your Team Over Time
• Chapter 8: The CEO as Functional Supervisor…Rules for General Managers
• Chapter 9: Crafting Your Company’s Culture…, Introducing Fig Wasp #879, Six Legs and a Pair of Wings, Let People Be People, Build an Environment of Trust
• Chapter 10: The Hiring Challenge…Unique Challenges for Startups, Recruiting Outstanding Talent, Staying “In-Market”, Recruitment Tools, The Interview: Filtering Potential Candidates, Two Ears One Mouth, Who Should You Interview?, Onboarding: The First 90 Days
• Chapter 11: Every Day in Every Way, We Get a Little Better…The Feedback Matrix, 1:1 Check-ins, “Hallway” Feedback, Performance Reviews, The 360, Soliciting Feedback on Your Own Performance, Crafting and Meeting Development Plans      
• Chapter 12: Compensation…General Guidelines for Determining Compensation, The Three Elements of Startup Compensation, Base Pay, Incentive Pay, Equity              
• Chapter 13: Promoting                …Recruiting from Within, Applying the “Peter Principle” to Management, Scaling Horizontally, Promoting Responsibilities Rather than Swapping Titles               
• Chapter 14: Rewarding: “It’s the Little Things” That Matter…It Never Goes Without Saying, Building a Culture of Appreciation
• Chapter 15: Managing Remote Offices and Employees…Brick and Mortar Values in a Virtual World, Best Practices for Managing Remote Employees
• Chapter 16: Firing: When It’s Not Working…No One Should Ever Be Surprised to Be Fired, Termination and the Limits of Transparency, Layoffs

Part III: Execution

• Chapter 17: Creating a Company Operating System…Creating Company Rhythms, A Marathon? Or a Sprint?
• Chapter 18: Creating Your Operating Plan and Setting Goals…Turning Strategic Plans into Operating Plans, Financial Planning, Bringing Your Team into Alignment with Your Plans, Guidelines for Setting Goals
• Chapter 19: Making Sure There’s Enough Money in the Bank…Scaling Your Financial Instincts, Boiling the Frog, To Grow or to Profit? That Is the Question, First Perfect the Model, Choosing Growth, Choosing Profits, The Third Way
• Chapter 20: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Financing…Equity Investors, Venture Capitalists, Angel Investors, Strategic Investors, Debt, Convertible Debt, Venture Debt, Bank Loans, Personal Debt, Bootstrapping, Customer Financing, Your Own Cash Flow
• Chapter 21: When and How to Raise Money…When to Start Looking for VC Money, The Top 11 Takeaways for Financing Negotiations
• Chapter 22: Forecasting and Budgeting…Rigorous Financial Modeling, Of Course You’re Wrong—But Wrong How?, Budgeting in a Context of Uncertainty, Forecast, Early and Often
• Chapter 23: Collecting Data…External Data, Learning from Customers, Learning from (Un)Employees, Internal Data, Skip-Level Meetings, Subbing, Productive Eavesdropping
• Chapter 24: Managing in Tough Times…Managing in an Economic Downturn, Hope Is Not a Strategy—But It’s Not a Bad Tactic, Look for Nickels and Dimes under the Sofa, Never Waste a Good Crisis, Managing in a Difficult Business Situation
• Chapter 25: Meeting Routines…Lencioni’s Meeting Framework, Skip-Level Meetings, Running a Productive Offsite
• Chapter 26: Driving Alignment…Five Keys to Startup Alignment, Aligning Individual Incentives with Global Goals
• Chapter 27: Have You Learned Your Lesson?…The Value (and Limitations) of Benchmarking, The Art of the Post-Mortem
• Chapter 28: Going Global…Should Your Business Go Global?, How to Establish a Global Presence, Overcoming the Challenges of Going Global, Best Practices for Managing International Offices and Employees
• Chapter 29: The Role of M&A…Using Acquisitions as a Tool in Your Strategic Arsenal, The Mechanics of Financing and Closing Acquisitions, Stock, Cash, Earn Out, The Flipside of M&A: Divestiture, Odds and Ends, Integration (and Separation)
• Chapter 30: Competition…Playing Hardball, Playing Offense vs. Playing Defense, Good and Bad Competitors
• Chapter 31: Failure…Failure and the Startup Model, Failure Is Not an Orphan

Part IV: Building and Leading a Board of Directors

• Chapter 32: The Value of a Good Board…Why Have a Board?, Everybody Needs a Boss, The Board as Forcing Function, Pattern Matching, Forests, Trees, Honest Discussion and Debate
• Chapter 33: Building Your Board…What Makes a Great Board Member?, Recruiting a Board Member, Compensating Your Board, Boards as Teams, Structuring Your Board, Board Size, Board Committees, Chairing the Board, Running a Board Feedback Process, Building an Advisory Board
• Chapter 34: Board Meeting Materials…“The Board Book”, Sample Return Path Board Book, The Value of Preparing for Board Meetings
• Chapter 35: Running Effective Board Meetings…Scheduling Board Meetings, Building a Forward-Looking Agenda, In-Meeting Materials, Protocol, Attendance and Seating, Device-Free Meetings, Executive and Closed Sessions
• Chapter 36: Non-Board Meeting Time…Ad Hoc Meetings, Pre-Meetings, Social Outings
• Chapter 37: Decision-Making and the Board…The Buck Stops—Where?, Making Difficult Decisions in Concert, Managing Conflict with Your Board
• Chapter 38: Working with the Board on Your Compensation and Review…The CEO’s Performance Review, Your Compensation, Incentive Pay, Equity, Expenses
• Chapter 39: Serving on Other Boards…The Basics of Serving on Other Boards, Substance, or Style?

Part V: Managing Yourself So You Can Manage Others

• Chapter 40: Creating a Personal Operating System…Managing Your Agenda, Managing Your Calendar, Managing Your Time, Feedback Loops
• Chapter 41: Working with an Executive Assistant…Finding an Executive Assistant, What an Executive Assistant Does
• Chapter 42: Working with a Coach…The Value of Executive Coaches, Areas Where an Executive Coach Can Help
• Chapter 43: The Importance of Peer Groups…The Gang of Six, Problem-Solving in Tandem
• Chapter 44: Staying Fresh…Managing the Highs and Lows, Staying Mentally Fresh, At Your Company, Out and About, Staying Healthy, Me Time
• Chapter 45: Your Family…Making Room for Home Life, Involving Family in Work, Bringing Work Principles Home
• Chapter 46: Traveling…Sealing the Deal with a Handshake, Making the Most of Travel Time, Staying Disciplined on the Road
• Chapter 47: Taking Stock of the Year…Celebrating “Yes”; Addressing “No”, Are You Having Fun?, Are You Learning and Growing as a Professional?, Is It Financially Rewarding?, Are You Making an Impact?
• Chapter 48:  A Note on Exits…Five Rules of Thumb for Successfully Selling Your Company

 If you’re still with me and interested, again here are the links to pre-order (Print, Kindle).

Boards That Lead, by Ram Charan, Dennis Carey, and Michael Useem, was recommended to me by a CEO Coach in the Bolster network, Tim Porthouse, who said he’s been referring it to his clients alongside Startup Boards. I don’t exactly belong in the company of Ram Charan (Brad and Mahendra probably do!), so I was excited to read it. While it’s definitely the “big company” version to Startup Boards, there are some good lessons for startup CEOs and founder to take away from it.

The best part about the book as it relates to ALL boards is the framework of Partner, Take Charge, Stay out of the Way, and Monitor. You can probably lump all potential board activities into these four buckets. If you look at it that way…these are pretty logical:

• Monitor – what you’d expect any board to do
• Stay out of the Way – basic execution/operations
• Partner – strategy, goals, risk, budget, leadership talent development
• Take Charge – CEO hiring/firing, Exec compensation, Ethics, and Board Governance itself.

There was an interesting nugget in the book as well called the Central Idea that I hadn’t seen articulated quite this way before. It’s basically a statement of what the business is and how it’s going to win. It’s about a page long, 8-10 bullet points, and it includes things like mission, strategy, key goals, and key operating pillars that underlie the goals. It basically wraps up all of Lencioni’s key questions in one page with a little more meat on the bones. I like it and may adopt it. The authors put the creation of the Central Idea into the Take Charge bucket, but I’d put it squarely in the Partner bucket.

Other than that, the book is what you’d expect and does have a lot of overlap with the world of startups. Its criteria for director selection are very similar to what we use at Bolster, as is its director evaluation framework. The book has a ton of handy checklists as well, some of which are more applicable than others to startups, for example Dealing with Nonperforming Directors and Spotting a Failing CEO.

All in, a good read if you’re a student of Boards.

I enjoy reading books written by people I know. I can always picture the person narrating the book, or hear their voice saying the words, I can periodically see their personality showing through the words on the page, and books bring out so much more detail than I’d ever get from a conversation. Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products, by Martina Lauchengco, is one of those books. Martina is an operating partner at Costanoa Venture Capital, an investor in both Return Path and Bolster, and I’d known Martina for several years before she joined Costanoa through Greg Sands. She’s the best product marketer on the planet. She’s the also one of the nicest people around.

Product Marketing is a tricky discipline. A brand marketer on my leadership team years ago referred to it somewhat derisively as a “tweener” function, one of those things that’s not quite marketing and not quite product. We didn’t get the function right for many years at Return Path because we treated it that way, thinking “well, it’s neither fish nor fowl, so we’re not quite sure what to do with it.” Then we hired Scott Roth, who has gone on to have a storied career as a multi-time CEO. Scott’s background was in product marketing. He said to me in his interview process, “Product Marketing isn’t a tweener function with no home. It’s a glue function. It holds product and marketing together.” It’s amazing how that simple change in framing, combined with great leadership, led us to completely rethink the function and make it one of the most important functions in the company.

Martina brings that to live with Loved. Simply put, Loved is a handbook or a field guide to running the Product Marketing function. I can imagine it being a section of Startup CXO in that way — it’s incredibly practical, hands-on, how-to, and rich with examples from Martina’s amazing career at Microsoft, Netscape, Silicon Valley Product Group, and Costanoa. And she believes in Agile Marketing, which is always a plus in my book (and I find rare in marketers).

Martina has lots of great frameworks and stories in the book – key responsibilities of product marketing, key metrics, the release scale, the connection to Geoffrey Moore’s TALC, strategies for messaging, pricing and packaging, and more. I won’t spoil more than one here, but I will paraphrase one that I found particularly impactful, a bit of a checklist on the essence of great product marketing:

• Share data around shifting trends in buyer behavior
• Connect your product’s purpose with broader trends
• Rebrand to make your product seem bigger than it is (and save room for expansion down the road)
• Make it free, especially if you’re defining a new category
• Share the “why” and advance access with influencers

If the measure of a book’s impact is how many pages you dog ear or highlight, this says it all about Loved.

Book Short: Stick Figures That Matter

I have read a bunch of books lately to try to improve my presentation skills. The latest one, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, by Dan Roam, was good, and quite different from some of the others I’ve read recently like Presentation Zen and Beyond Bullet Points, both of which are much more focused on effective use of Powerpoint.

The Back of the Napkin takes a different approach. The focus is much more on creating compelling visuals. It’s not about Powerpoint so much as it is about teaching how to crystallize concepts into tight and compelling schematics. Roam creates two pretty good frameworks for thinking about this: one that breaks down the message of a given slide into its most simple element — are you describing a who (use a portrait), what (chart), when (timeline), where (map), why (plot), or how (flowchart)? And a second that takes that element and asks five questions about the best way to convey the information — simple vs. elaborate, quality vs. quantity, vision vs. execution, individual vs. comparison, or change state vs. as-is.

Both frameworks are good, and if you’re already doing really good presentations, this will help improve them. In short, I’d say The Back of the Napkin is a good read if you’re obsessed with creating compelling visuals, but it’s more of a deeper drill than the two books I noted above. I’d read and master the material from Presentation Zen for 101, then dive into this topic for the 201 course.

Book Short:  Fables and Morals

Courtesy of my colleague Stephanie Miller, I had a quick holiday read of Aesop & The CEO: Powerful Business Lessons from Aesop and America’s Best Leaders, by David Noonan, which I enjoyed.  The book was similar in some ways to Squirrel, Inc., which I recently posted about, in that it makes its points by allegory and example (and not that it’s relevant, but that it relies on animals to make its points).

Noonan takes a couple dozen of Aesop’s ancient Greek fables and groups them in to categories like Rewards & Incentives, Management & Leadership, Strategy, HR, Marketing, and Negotiations & Alliances – and for each one, he gives modern-day management examples of the lessons.

For example, in the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, the lesson clearly is to strike while the iron is hot, or that a good plan executed today is better than a perfect one that’s too late.  Noonan gives the example of Patton’s capture of Messina, Sicily during World War II.

And in The Hare & The Tortoise, where of course the moral is that slow & steady wins the race, Noonan gives the example of how New York Knicks coach Rick Pitino inspired Mark Jackson, who was chosen 18th in the NBA draft, to win the rookie of the year award in 1987 by helping him gain confidence by building on his strengths.

All in, a good read, even with that painful reminder that the Knicks used to have a decent basketball team.