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 framework for splitting up your staff meetings into four different types of meetings: the daily stand-up, the weekly tactical, the monthly strategic, and the quarterly offsite.
There’s definitely something to the framework. We have over the years done all four types of meetings, though we never had all four in our rotation at once as that felt like overkill. But I think at a minimum, any 2 get the job done much better than a single format recurring meeting. As long as you figure out how to separate status updates from more strategic conversations, you’re directionally in good shape. We have almost entirely eliminated or automated status update meetings at this point at my staff level.
The book has some other good stuff in it, though, about the role of conflict in staff meetings, which I’ll save for your own read of the book!
So far the series includes:
- The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (post, link)
- The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link
)
- The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link)
I have two more to go, which I’ll tackle in due course and am looking forward to.
Holiday Cards c. 2007
Every year, I get a daily flood of business holiday cards on my desk in the second half of December. Some are nice and have notes from people with whom we do business – clients, vendors, partners, and the like. Some are kind of random, and it takes me a while to even figure out who they are from. Occasionally some even come in with no mark identifying from whence they came other than an illegible signature.
And every year, I receive one or two email cards instead of print & post cards, some apologetic about the medium. Until this year.
I think I’ve received about 10-15 cards by email this month. None with an apology. All with the same quality of art/creative as printed cards. It’s great! A good use of the email channel…much less cost…easier overhead for distribution…and of course better for the environment.
I wonder what made 2007 the tipping year for this.
Startup CEO “Bibliography”
A couple people who read Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business asked me if I would publish a list of all the other business books I refer to over the course of the book. Here it is — I guess in some respects an all-time favorite list for me of business books.
And here’s the list of books in Brad Feld’s Startup Revolution series other than Startup CEO:
The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business is Patrick Lencioni’s newest book. Unlike most or all of his other books (see the end of this post for the listing), this one is not a fable, although his writing style remains very quick and accessible.
I liked this book a lot. First, the beginning section is a bit of a recap of his Five Dysfunctions of a Team which I think was his best book. And the ending section is a recap of his Death by Meeting, another really good one. The middle sections of the book are just a great reminder of the basic building blocks of creating and communicating strategy and values – about driving alignment.
But the premise, as the subtitle indicates, is that maintaining organizational health is the most important thing you can do as a leader. I tell our team at Return Path all the time that our culture is a competitive advantage in many ways, some quantifiable, and others a little less tangible.
A telling point in the book is when Lencioni is relaying a conversation he had with the CEO of a client company who does run a healthy organization – he asked, “Why in the world don’t your competitors do any of this?” And the client responded, “You know, I honestly believe they think it’s beneath them.” Lencioni goes on to say, “In spite of its undeniable power, so many leaders struggle to embrace organizational health because they quietly believe they are too sophisticated, too busy, or too analytical to bother with it.” And there you have it. More examples of why “the soft stuff” is mission critical.
Lencioni’s “Recipe for Organizational Health” (the outline of the book):
– Build a Cohesive Leadership Team
– Create Clarity
– Overcommunicate Clarity
– Reinforce Clarity
And his recipe for creating a tight set of “mission/vision/values” (the middle of the book):
1. Why do we exist?
2. How do we behave?
3. What do we do?
4. How will we succeed?
5. What is most important, right now?
6. Who must do what?
While there are lots of other good frameworks for doing all of this, Lencioni’s models and books are great, simple reminders of one of the CEO’s most important leadership functions. We’re recrafting our own mission and values statements at the moment at Return Path, and we’re doing it using this 6-Question framework instead of the classic “Mission/Vision/Values” framework popularized a few years back by Harvard Business Review.
The full book series roundup as far as OnlyOnce has gotten so far is:
Book Short: Bringing it on Home
Silos, Politics and Turf Wars: A Leadership Fable About Destroying the Barriers That Turn Colleagues Into Competitors wasn’t Patrick Lencion’s best book, but it wasn’t bad, either. I think all six of his books are well worth a read (list at the bottom of the post). And in fact, they really belong in two categories.
The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (post, link), The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link), and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link) are all related around the topic of management.
Death by Meeting (post, link), The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (post, link), and Silos, Politics and Turf Wars, on the other hand, are all related around the topic of leading a team and healthy team dynamics. This latest book, which is the last of his six books for me, rounds out this topic nicely, in a fun “novel” format as is the case with his other books.
The book hammers home the theme of an executive team needing to first be a team and then second be a collection of group heads as a means of breaking down barriers that exist inside organizations. It also lays out a framework for creating high-level alignment inside a team. The framework may or may not be perfect — we are using a different one at Return Path (the Balanced Scorecard) that accomplishes most of the same things — but for those companies who don’t have one, it’s as good as any.
The most compelling point in the book, though is the point that teams often make the most progress, change the most, and do their best work when their backs are up against a wall. And the point Lencioni makes here is — “why wait for a crisis?”
At any rate, another good, quick book, and absolutely worth reading along with the others, particularly along with the other two closely related ones. I’m definitely sorry to be done with the series. We may try the “field guide” companion to The Five Dysfunctions and see how the practical exercises work out.
The full series roundup is:
Book Short: Vulnerability Applied to Leadership
Getting Naked: A Business Fable About Shedding The Three Fears That Sabotage Client Loyalty (book, Kindle), is Patrick Lencion’s latest fable-on-the-go book, and it’s as good a read as all of his books (see list of the ones I’ve read and reviewed at the end of the post).
The book talks about the power of vulnerability as a character trait for those who provide service to clients in that they are rewarded with levels of client loyalty and intimacy. Besides cringing as I remembered my own personal experience as an overpaid and underqualified 21 year old analyst at how ridiculous some aspects of the management consulting industry are…the book really made me think. The challenge to the conventional wisdom of “never letting ‘em see you sweat” (we *think* vulnerability will hurt success, we *confuse* competence with ego, etc.) is powerful. And although vulnerability is often uncomfortable, I believe Lencioni is 100% right – and more than he thinks.
First, the basic premise of the book is that consultants have three fears they need to overcome to achieve nirvana – those fears and the mitigation tactics are:
- Fear of losing the business: mitigate by always consulting instead of selling, giving away the business, telling the kind truth, and directly addressing elephants in the room
- Fear of being embarrassed: mitigate by asking dumb questions, making dumb suggestions, and celebrating your mistakes
- Fear of feeling inferior: mitigate by taking a bullet for the client, making everything about the client, honoring the client’s work, and doing your share of the dirty work
But to my point about Lencioni being more right than he thinks…I’d like to extend the premise around vulnerability as a key to success beyond the world of consulting and client service into the world of leadership. Think about some of the language above applied to leading an organization or a team:
- Telling the kind truth and directly addressing elephants in the room: If you’re not going to do this, who is? There is no place at the top of an organization or team for conflict avoidance
- Asking dumb questions: How else do you learn what’s going on in your organization? How else can you get people talking instead of listening?
- Making dumb suggestions: I’d refer to this more as “bringing an outside/higher level perspective to the dialog.” You never know when one of your seemingly dumb suggestions will connect the dots for your team in a way that they haven’t done yet on their own (e.g., the suggestions might not be so dumb after all)
- Celebrating your mistakes: We’re all human. And as a leader, some of your people may build you up in their mind beyond what’s real and reasonable. Set a good example by noting when you’re wrong, noting your learnings, and not making the same mistake twice
- Taking a bullet for your team, making everything about your team and honoring your team’s work: Management 101. Give credit out liberally. Take the blame for team failings.
- Doing your share of the dirty work: An underreported quality of good leaders. Change the big heavy bottle on the water cooler. Wipe down the coffee machine. Order the pizza or push the beer cart around yourself. Again, we’re all human, leaders aren’t above doing their share to keep the community of the organization safe, fun, clean, well fed, etc.
There’s a really powerful message here. I hope this review at least scratches the surface of it.
The full book series roundup as far as OnlyOnce has gotten so far is:
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 a nice job stamping out at least three of the dysfunctions in the model and fired me up that we still have some work to do to completely stamp out the final two (we’ve identified them and made progress, but we’re not quite there yet.
The dysfunctions make much more sense in context, but they are (in descending order of importance):
- Absence of trust
- Fear of conflict (everyone plays politically nice)
- Lack of commitment (decisions don’t stick)
- Avoidance of accountability
- Inattention to results (individual ego vs. team success)
For those who are wondering, the two we’re still working on at the exec team level here are conflict and commitment. And the two are related. If you don’t produce engaged discussion about an issue and allow everyone to air their opinions, they will invariably be less bought into a decision (especially one they don’t agree with). But we’re getting there and will continue to work aggressively on it until we’ve rooted it out.
There’s one other interesting takeaway from the book that’s not part of the framework directly, which is that an executive has to be first and foremost a member of his/her team of peers, not the head of his/her department. That’s how successful teams get built. AND (this is key) this must trickle down in the organization as well. Everyone who manages a team of group heads or managers needs to make those people function well as a team first, then as managers of their own groups second.
At any rate, another quick gem of a book. I’m kind of sorry there’s only one left in the series.
So far the series includes:
I have one or two more to go, which I’ll tackle in due course and am looking forward to.
Book Not-So-Short: Not Just for Women
At the request of the women in our Professional Services team, I recently read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, and while it may seem like dancing the meringue in a minefield for a male CEO to blog about it, I think it’s an important enough topic to give it a shot. So here goes.
First, given the minefield potential, let me issue a few caveats up front. These are deep, ages old, complex, societal issues and behaviors we’re talking about here. There is no quick answer to anything. There is no universal answer to anything. Men don’t have the same perspective as women and can come across as observers (which in some respects, they are). Working moms don’t have the same perspective as stay-at-home moms, or as single women. We try to be good about all these issues at Return Path, but I’m sure we’ve only scratched the surface. </caveats>
Perhaps most important, my overall take on the book is that it’s a very good business book that everyone should read – not just women. I have a strong reaction to the reactions I’ve read and heard about the book – mostly from women dismissing the book because Sandberg has immense financial resources, so how could she possibly know the plight of the ordinary mom, and how could she understand what it is like to be a stay-at-home mom? That reaction is to dismiss the dismissals! I found the book to be very broadly applicable. Of course things about life with a two-working parent family are easier if you have more money. But that’s completely not the point of the book. And Sandberg doesn’t once criticize stay-at-home moms for that choice – in fact, she acknowledges feelings of guilt and inferiority around them and admiration for the work they do that benefits all families and kids, not just their own.
Here are a few of the biggest areas of thinking, AHA, or questioning, that the book gave me:
- One of Sandberg’s underlying points is that the world would be a better place with more women in leadership positions, so that’s an important goal. It’s interesting that few enough of our leaders are women, that it’s hard for me to draw that same conclusion, but it makes sense to me on the surface, and there’s some research about management teams and boards to back it up. As far as I can tell, the world has yet to see a brutal female dictator. Or a fair share of political or corporate scandals caused by women. There are definitely some horror stories of “tough boss” women, but probably no more than “tough boss” men. It’s interesting to note that in our society, leadership roles seem to be prized for their power and monetary reward, so even if the world wouldn’t be a better place with more female leaders, it would certainly be a more fair place along those two dimensions
- I felt that a bunch of Sandberg’s points about women were more generalizations about certain personality types which can be inherent in men and women. Maybe they’re more prevalent in women, even much more, but some are issues for some men as well. For example, her general point about women not speaking up even if they have something to say. I have seen this trait in women as well as more introverted men. As a leader, I work hard to draw comments out of people who look like they have something to say in a meeting but aren’t speaking up. This is something that leaders need to pay close attention to across the board so that they hear all the voices around their tables. Same goes for some of the fears she enumerates. Many male leaders I know, myself included at times, have the “fear of being found out as a fraud” thought. Same goes for the “desire to be liked by everyone” holding people back – that’s not gender specific, either. All that said, if these traits are much more prevalent in women, and they are traits that drive attainment of leadership roles, well, you get the point
- The fact that women earn 77 cents on the dollar in equivalent jobs for men is appalling. I’ve asked our People Team to do a study of this by level, factoring in experience and tenure, to make sure we don’t have that bias at Return Path. I know for sure we don’t at the leadership level. And I sure as heck hope we don’t anywhere in the organization. We are also about to launch an Unconscious Bias training program, which should be interesting
- Sandberg made a really interesting point that most of the women who don’t work are either on the low end or high end of the income spectrum. Her point about the low end really resonated with me – that women who don’t earn a lot stop working if their salaries only barely cover childcare costs. However, she argues that that’s a very short term view, and that staying in the workforce means your salary will escalate over time, while childcare costs stay relatively flat. This is compounded by the fact that women who lean back early in their careers simply because they are anticipating someday having children are earning less than they should be earning when they do finally have children.
- The other end of the income spectrum also made sense once I parsed through it – why do women whose husbands make a lot of money (most of whom make a lot of money as well) decide to off-ramp? Sandberg’s point about the “Leadership ambition gap” is interesting, and her example of running a marathon with the spectators screaming “you know you don’t have to do this” as opposed to “you’ve got this” is really vivid. See two bullets down for more on this one. But it might not be straight-up Leadership Ambition Gap so much as a recognition that some of the high-earning jobs out there are so demanding that having two of them in the household would be a nightmare (noting that Dave and Sheryl seem to have figured some of that out), or that moms don’t want to miss out on that much of their children’s lives. They want to be there…and they can afford to. Another related topic that I wish Sandberg had covered in more depth is the path of moms who off-ramp, then re-on-ramp once their youngest children are in school, whether into the career they left or a different one. That would be an interesting topic on many fronts
- Societal influences must matter. The facts that, in 2011 – Gymboree manufactured onesies that say “smart like Daddy” and “pretty like Mommy,” and that JC Penney teenage girl t-shirts say “I’m too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me” are more than a little troublesome on the surface (unless Gymboree also produces “handsome like Daddy” and “wicked smart like Mommy,” which somehow I doubt). The fact that women do worse on math and science tests when they have to identify their gender at the top of the test is surprising and shocking
- I am really fortunate that Mariquita only works part time, and it’s unclear to me how our lives would work if we both worked full time, especially given my extremely heavy travel schedule, though I am sure we’d figure it out. And there’s no way that I carry 50% of the burden of household responsibilities. Maybe 20-25% at best. But I was struck by Sandberg’s comments (I am sure true) that in two-working-parent families, women still carry the preponderance of household responsibilities on their shoulders. I totally don’t get this. If you both work, how can you not be equal partners at home? A quick mental survey of a couple of the two-working-parent families we know would indicate that the parents split household responsibilities somewhat evenly, though you can never know this from the outside. This should be a no brainer. Sandberg’s point that men need to “lean into their families” is spot on in these cases for sure
- On a related note, Sandberg’s comment that “as women must be more empowered at work, men must be more empowered at home…moms can be controlling and critical…if he’s forced to do things her way, pretty soon she’ll be doing them herself” made me smile. I have definitely seen this “learned helplessness” on the home front with dads quite a bit over the years
- One really good point Sandberg makes is that younger employees who don’t have kids should be allowed to have a life outside of work just as much as women who do have kids. And that she pays people for the quality and quantity of their output, not their hours. These are principles that match our values and philosophy at Return Path 100%
- Probably the most startling moment in the book for me – and I suspect many other men – was Sandberg’s vignette about the young woman at Facebook who was starting to “lean back” because she might someday have a family – before she was even dating anyone! This really gave me a lot of pause. If widespread (and I assume it is), there are clearly societal forces at work that we need to do more to help women early in their careers overcome, if they want to overcome them
- Sandberg’s point that a rich and fulfilling career “is a Jungle Gym, not a Ladder” is spot on, but this is true for men as well as women. It matches our philosophy of Scaling Horizontally perfectly
- Another very poignant moment in the book was when Sandberg talked about how she herself had shown bias against women in terms of who she called on in meetings or lectures during Q&A. Again, lots of pause for me. If female leaders have the same societal bias against women, that’s a sign that we all have real work in front of us to help level the playing field around giving women air time. Similarly, her example of the Heidi/Howard study was fascinating around how women with the same characteristics are perceived differently by both male and female co-workers gives me pause (for the record, I know the Heidi in question, and I like her!). Likewise, the fact that female leaders are often given unflattering nicknames like “The Iron Lady” – you’d never see something like that for a man in the same position. At least Thatcher wore the name as a badge of honor
I hope this post doesn’t end up as a no-win piece of writing where all I do is touch a few nerves and inspire no ongoing dialog. “Let’s start talking about it,” the ending theme of the book, is a great way to end this post as well. As with all tough issues, articulating the problem is the first step toward solving it. Women need to allow men (as long as the men are open-minded, of course!) to think what they think, say what they think in a safe space, and blunder through their own learnings without feeling threatened. And men need to be comfortable having conversations about topics like these if the paradigmatic relationship between women and leadership is going to continue to shift instead of avoiding the topic or just calling in HR.
Hopefully this blog post is one step towards that at my company. Return Path colleagues – feel free to comment on the blog or via email and share stories of how we’ve either helped you or held you back! But overall, I’m glad I read this book, and I’d encourage anyone and everyone to read it.
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 when they’re not doing something intrinsically meaningful like curing a disease or feeding the homeless. His recipe for success is simple:
– Get people to articulate the relevance in their jobs…the meaning they derive out of their work…an understanding of the people whose lives are made better, even in small ways, by what they do every day
– Get people to measure what they do (duh, management 101), IN RELATION TO THE RELEVANCE learnings from the last point (ahh, that’s an interesting twist)
– Get to know your people as people
All of these are things you’d generally read in good books on management, but this book ties them together artfully, simply, and in a good story about a roadside pizza restaurant. It also stands in stark contrast to the book I reviewed and panned a few days ago by Jerry Porras in that it is nothing but examples from non-celebrities, non-success stories — ordinary people doing ordinary jobs.
Brad has blogged glowingly about Death by Meeting, so I’ll probably make that my next Lencioni read next month, with two more to go after that.
Book Short: I Wish This Existed 12 Years Ago
Brad Feld has been on my board for over a decade now, and when he and his partner Jason Mendelson told me about a new book they were writing a bunch of months ago called Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist, I took note. I thought, “Hmmm. I’d like to be smarter than my lawyer or venture capitalist.”
Then I read an advanced copy. I loved it. At first, I thought, I would really have benefited from this when I started Return Path way back when. Then as I finished reading it, I realized it’s just a great reference book even now, all these years and financings later. But as much as I enjoyed the early read, I felt like something was missing from the book, since its intended audience is entrepreneurs.
Brad and Jason took me up on my offer to participate in the book’s content a little bit, and they are including in the book a series of 50-75 sidebars called “The Entrepreneur’s Perspective” which I wrote and which they and others edited. For almost every topic and sub-topic in the book, I chime in, either building on, or disagreeing, with Brad and Jason’s view on the subject.
The book is now out. As Brad noted in his launch post, the book’s table of contents says a lot:
- The Players
- How to Raise Money
- Overview of the Term Sheet
- Economic Terms of the Term Sheet
- Control Terms of the Term Sheet
- Other Terms of the Term Sheet
- The Capitalization Table
- How Venture Capital Funds Work
- Negotiation Tactics
- Raising Money the Right Way
- Issues at Different Financing States
- Letters of Intent – The Other Term Sheet
- Legal Things Every Entrepreneur Should Know
Fred has posted his review of the book as well.
Bottom line: if you are an aspiring or actual entrepreneur, buy this book. Even if you’ve done a couple of financings, this is fantastic reference material, and Brad and Jason’s points of view on things are incredibly insightful beyond the facts. And I hope my small contributions to the book are useful for entrepreneurs as well.
Book (Not So) Short: Raise Your Hand If You’re Sure
I couldn’t get the catchy jingle from the 80’s commercial for Sure deodorant (you remember, the one with the Statue of Liberty at the end of it – thanks, YouTube) out of my head while I was reading the relatively new book, Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End. Written by HBS professor Rosabeth Moss Kantor, Confidence is one of the few business books I’ve read that’s both long and worth reading in full.
The book has scores of examples of both winning and losing streaks, from sports, business, politics, and other walks of life, and it does a great job of breaking down the core elements that go into creating a winning streak or turnaround (Accountability, Collaboration, Innovation). Kantor also puts a very fine point on the “doom loop” of losing streaks and just how hard it is to turn them around. The book also has a good crisp definition of why winning streaks end — arrogange, anyone? — and has consistent, but not preachy recipes for avoiding pitfalls and driving success. All in all, very inspirational, even if many of the roots of success lie in well-documented leadership qualities like those expressed in Jim Collins’ Built to Last and Good to Great. The book is good enough that Kantor can even be forgiven for lauding Verizon, probably the most consistently awful customer service company I’ve ever dealt with.
But even more of the roots of success and disappointment around streaks are psychological, and these examples really rang true for me as I reflected back on our acquisition of the troubled NetCreations in 2004. That company was in the midst of a serious slump, a losing streak dating back to 2000, at the peak of the original Internet boom. Year over year, the company had lost revenues, profits, customers, and key personnel. Its parent company saw poor results and set it into the doom loop of starving it for resources and alternating between ignoring it and micromanaging it, and when we acquired the business, we found great assets and some fantastic people (many of whom I’m proud to say are still with us today), but a dispirited, blame-oriented, passive culture that was poised to continue wallowing in decline.
I can hardly claim that we’ve turned the business around in full, or that I personally made happen whatever turnaround there has been, but I do think we did a few things right as far as Kantor and Confidence would see it. Her formula for a turnaround (Espouse the new message, Exemplify it with leadership actions, Establish programs to systematically drive it home throughout the organization) is right in line with our philosophy here at Return Path.
First, we accelerated the separation and autonomy of a fledgeling NetCreations spin-off unit, now our Authentic Response market research group, and let a culture of collaboration and innovation flourish under an exceptionally talented leader, Jeff Mattes.
But that was the easy part (for me anyway), because that part of the business was actually working well, and we just let it do its thing, with more support from HQ. The turnaround of the core list rental and lead generation business of NetCreations, the original Postmaster Direct, was much tougher and is still a work in progress. In the last six months, we’ve finally turned the corner, but it hasn’t been easy. Even though we knew lots of what had to be done early on, actually doing it is much harder than b-school platitudes or even the best-written books make it seem.
The one thing that Kantor probably gives short shrift to, although she does mention it in passing a couple times, is that frequently turnarounds require massive major amounts of purging of personnel (not just management) to take hold. As one of my former colleagues from Mercer Management Consulting used to say, “sometimes the only way to effect Change Management is to change management.” Sometimes even very talented people are just bogged down with baggage — the “ghost of quarters past” — and nothing you do or say can break that psychological barrier.
Boy, have we learned that lesson here at Return Path the hard way. I’m extremely grateful to our team at Return Path, from the old RP people who’ve seen it all happen, to the old NetCreations people who are thriving in the new environment, to the new blood we’ve brought in to help effect the turnaround, for playing such important roles in our own Confidence-building exercises here. And I’m super Confident that 2007 will be the year that we officially turn the old NetCreations/Postmaster losing streak into a big, multi-year winning streak.
Anyway, I realize this may redefine the “short” in book short, but Confidence is without question a good general management and leadership read.
