Do Business Books Suck for Entrepreneurs?

Ben thinks they do.  Some of his reasons are pretty good, but I’d challenge a few of them, or at least his finer points.

My experience over the years is that while most business books are not geared toward entrepreneurs, a good entrepreneur will figure out how to milk them for what they’re worth quickly and apply key learnings to his or her company. 

The reality is that running a startup or high growth company is a multi-faceted and incredibly dynamic experience, and having a bunch of outside inputs in the form of business book examples and theories can be really helpful. 

Even bad ideas can spur good thinking.

The Facebook Fad

I’m sure someone will shoot me for saying this, but I don’t get Facebook.  I mean, I get it, but I don’t see what all the fuss is about.  I made similar comments before about Gmail (here, here), and people told me I was an idiot at the time.  Three years later, Gmail is certainly a popular webmail service, but it’s hardly changed the world. In fact, it’s a distant fourth behind Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL.  So I don’t feel so bad about not oohing and ahhing and slobbering all over the place about Facebook.

Facebook reminds me of AOL back in the day.  AOL was the most simple, elegant, general purpose entree for people who wanted to get online and weren’t sure how in the early days of online services, before the Internet came of age.  It was good at packaging up its content and putting everything “in a box.”  It was clean.  It was fun.  People bragged about being an AOL member and talked about their screen name like it was on their birth certificate or something.  And the company capitalized on all the goodwill by becoming a PR machine to perpetuate its membership growth.

Now Facebook — it’s the most simple, elegant, general purpose social networking site here in the early days of social networking.  It’s pretty good about packaging up its applications, and certainly opening up its APIs is a huge benefit that AOL didn’t figure out until it embraced the open web in 1999-2000.  It is pretty good about putting everything in a box for me as a member.  And like AOL, the company is turning into a PR juggernaut and hoping to use it to perpetuate its registration numbers.

But let’s look at the things that caused (IMO) AOL’s downfall (AOL as we knew it) and look at the parallels with Facebook.  AOL quickly became too cluttered.  It’s simple elegance was destroyed by too much stuff jammed into its clean interface.  It couldn’t keep up with best of breed content or even messaging systems inside its walled garden.  Spam crushed its email functionality.  It couldn’t maintain its “all things to all people” infrastructure on the back end.  Ultimately, the open web washed over it.  People who defected were simply having better experiences elsewhere.

The parallels aren’t exact, but there are certainly some strong ones.  Facebook is already too cluttered for me.  Why are people writing on my wall instead of emailing me — all that does is trigger an email from Facebook to me telling me to come generate another page view for them.  Why am I getting invitations to things on Facebook instead of through the much better eVite platform?  The various forms of messaging are disorganized and hard to find. 

Most important, for a social network, it turns out that I don’t actually want my entire universe of friends and contacts to be able to connect with each other through me.  Like George Costanza in Seinfeld, I apparently have a problem with my “worlds colliding.”  I already know of one couple who either hooked up or is heavily flirting by connecting through my Facebook profile, and it’s not one I’m proud to have spawned.  I think I let one of them “be my friend” by mistake in the first place.  And I am a compulsive social networker.  It’s hard to imagine that these principles scale unfettered to the whole universe.

The main thing Facebook has going for it in this comparison is that its open APIs will lead to best of breed development for the platform.  But who cares about Facebook as a platform?  Isn’t the open web (or Open Social) ultimately going to wash over it?  I get that there are cool apps being written for Facebook – but 100% of those applications will be on the open web as well.  It’s certainly possible that Facebook’s marrying of my “social network” with best of breed applications will make it stickier for longer than AOL…but let’s remember that AOL has clung to life as a proprietary service for quite a while on the stickiness of people’s email addresses.  And yet, it is a non-event now as a platform. 

It will be interesting to see how Facebook bobs and weaves over the coming years to avoid what I think of as its inevitable fate.  And yes, I know I’m not 18 and if I were, I’d like Facebook more and spend all day in it.  But that to me reinforces my point even more — this is the same crew who flocked to, and then quickly from, MySpace.  When will they get tired of Facebook, and what’s to prevent them moving onto the next fad?

Spam Filter and False Positive Reality Check

For a variety of reasons, we had to take our spam filter offline for a day or two here, so I am getting a good look at what raw, unfiltered email traffic looks like.  It’s not pretty.  I have two main observations:

– Spam filters are getting pretty good at eliminating false negatives (e.g., catching real spam).  There’s a virtual tidal wave in my inbox of crap that I never see.  I have multiple, very old, very public email addresses feeding the same inbox, so I am probably seeing more than most, but wow.  Spam is a far worse problem on networks than it is in actual inboxes

– Spam filters are still generating a decent amount of false positives (e.g., filtering out things that aren’t spam).  I have so much email — and so much filtered email — that I have stopped looking through my Spam Folder in good detail.  It just takes too long.  But what I am discovering in my unfiltered world today is a bunch of newsletters (both content and marketing) that are making it to my inbox for the first time in months, maybe years.  And I am having that reaction of "oh yeah, I did wonder what happened to that…"

Conclusion:  world of filtering still very much a work in progress.

Book Short:  Crazy Eights

In honor of Return Path being in the midst of its eighth year, I recently read a pair of books with 8 in the title (ok, I would have read them anyway, but that made for a convenient criterion when selecting out of my very large “to read” pile).

Ram Charan’s latest, Know-How:  The 8 Skills That Separate People People Who Perform From Those Who Don’t, was pretty good and classic Charan.  Quick, easy to skim and still get the main points.  The book lost a little credibility with me when Charan lionized Verizon (perhaps he uses a different carrier himself) and Bob Nardelli (the book was published before Nardelli’s high profile dismissal), but makes good points nonetheless.  Some of the 8 Skills he talks about are what you’d expect on the soft side of leadership — building the team, understanding the social system, judging people — but his best examples were particularly actionable around positioning, goal setting, and setting priorities.  The book reminded me much more of Execution and much less of Confronting Reality (which is a good thing).

For years I’ve felt like the last person around to still not have read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, so I thought I’d skip straight to the punchline and read Stephen Covey’s newer book, The 8th Habit:  From Effectiveness to Greatness.  Fortunately, as I’d hoped, the new book summarizes the prior book several times over, so if you haven’t read the first, you could certainly just start with this one.  The book also comes with a DVD of 16 short films, some of which are great — both inspirational and poignant.  Unlike most business books, the 8th Habit is NOT skimmable.  It almost has too much material in it and could probably be read multiple times or at least in smaller pieces.  The actual 8th habit Covey talks about is what he calls Find Your Voice and Help Others Find Their Voices and is a great encapsulation of what leading a knowledge worker business is all about.  But the book is much deeper and richer than that in its many models and frameworks and examples/tie-ins to business and goes beyond the “touchy feely” into hard-nosed topics around execution and strategy.

Now I’m looking for the DVD of the first season of Eight is Enough!

Humbled at TED

I’m at my first TED Conference this week, and while I’ve watched countless other bloggers around me pounding out post after post summarizing different presentations (which I won’t do — feel free to see the site for official stuff), I’ve been struggling to find something to write about.  Then it hit me today.  I kind of feel at this conference the way I did when I started college.  Totally humbled.

I was #2 in my class in high school.  Straight As, a few A+s thrown in for good measure.  Then I got to Princeton and felt like an idiot.  I was convinced I was bottom quartile at best.  Everyone around me was either like me or better, smarter, more intellectual, more well rounded, taller, thinner, better looking, better teeth, the works.

This conference so far has been the same, and I mean that in a good way.  The sessions have varied from fascinating to boring to Bill Clinton cool to Paul Simon and Jill Sobule entertaining to completely over my head.  My fellow TED attendees include royalty, billionaires, captains of industry, Oscar winners, and dignitaries.  Add it all up, and there is a giant aura of accomplishment and intellectualism in the room that makes me feel like bottom quartile at best, maybe more like bottom decile.  That’s a great thing, though.  It’s always good to have a reminder of the larger global issues, picture, and opportunities, and a window into the people thinking about solving them.

Executive and Closed Sessions

Brad has a good post up about what he calls “closed sessions” in Board meetings — time at the end of the meeting reserved for a conversation with Board members ONLY, no other observers or non-Board management.  While we differ in terminology, I agree completely with the sentiment and with his logic.

We call the part of the meeting that Brad describes the Executive Session.  We’ve always done them.  And the Board and I find it incredibly useful, and a good practice, even if there are no contentious or puzzling issues during a meeting.  Not that our Board holds back much, but the Executive Session is a good time for us to connect 100% freely about management issues as well as elements of business strategy and performance that might be better hashed out without others present.

We also have an additional part of the meeting at the very end which we call the Closed Session.  This part of the meeting has NO MANAGEMENT in it, even me, although I’m Chairman of the Board.  This time allows the other directors an even greater degree of freedom to discuss the business or my performance without worrying about saying something in front of me — and without hearing my opinion.

Both sessions are incredibly valuable parts of high functioning Boards.

Always On is Too Much On

Among other things last week travelling abroad for work, I learned another good CEO lesson — sometimes it’s ok, even good, to be a bit out of touch. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m Always On at the office, while travelling in the US, and usually at home and on weekends as well.  And as I’ve said before in various postings (here, here, here, and definitely here), it’s great to completely unplug at least once a year for a peaceful vacation with friends & family.

But last week was a nice lesson in the middle ground.  I had an international cell phone that people at work didn’t seem to want to call, so they could in an emergency, but no one did for routine things.  I was 5-8 hours off on time zones, so people didn’t think to reach out.  I did email once or twice a day when time permitted, so I stayed in good touch, but I wasn’t grinding out email responses on my Treo every time I took a deep breath.

And the company was fine.  As far as I could tell, sales were even up, so maybe I should semi-disappear more often!

Convergence Continues

So according to this article and this one, Acxiom is going to acquire Digital Impact in a much more friendly way (e.g., with more money) than InfoUSA was trying to last month.  This will probably be mixed news for DI employees, but it’s certainly good news for the email sector overall.

It builds on and extends the trend that really got going in the last 12 months for the big offline direct marketing companies to more fully embrace email as an integrated part of the DM mix for their clients.  InfoUSA has already gobbled up a few of the smaller players in the space, and Harte-Hanks bought PostFuture as well.

Why is it good?  Everyone wins.  Clients win because they will ultimately have fewer vendors and points of coordination/failure to deal with.  Players in the email space win because they see an exit.  The big offline players win by acquiring important new capabilities.  And in a small way, perhaps a bit indirectly, consumers even win, because companies will by definition do a better and more coordinated job of trying to reach them in a multi-channel way.

The biggest risks with convergence are, of course, around integration execution.  And I’m not talking specifically here about Acxiom and DI.  There’s the ever-present fear that the acquirors will screw up the companies they acquire (just ask the folks from Exactis about that one).  There’s also the risk that the acquirors will try to foist too much of the “we’re marketers – we can jam as much marketing at consumers as we want” mentality that’s antithetical to good digital marketing.

Keep an eye on this space.  There will be a lot more of this convergence over the next year or two.

Everyone’s a Marketer, Part II

In Part I of this posting, I talked about how everyone’s job function is increasingly touching customers and therefore, in our networked world, everyone needs to think like a marketer.  This posting has the same theme but a different spin.  From the perspective of the individual person (in a company, and in life), marketing is central to success, although the definition of your target market needs to change with the circumstances.

Interviewing for a job?  How good a job have you done building the brand of you (your list of accomplishments)?  How good is your collateral (resume)?

Want to get an increase in your department’s budget or buy a new piece of hardware?  Have you adequately defined the return on the incremental investment you’re proposing?

Need to get that project done?  What’s your universal selling proposition to get others to help you out (“here’s why it’s good for you to cooperate”)?  Are there any incentives involved (“I’ll buy dinner if you stay late and help with this”)?

Working hard to get a promotion?  Identify a new customer segment, or a new problem to solve for your customers, or a solution to that problem, and your marketing skills will get you there.

Want to go somewhere off the beaten path on vacation?  Better come up with some great selling points that resonate with specific members of your family (it’s beautiful, it’s inexpensive, the food is great, no one else has ever been there) to convince them all to go along with you!

I suppose this posting (and maybe the other one as well) could be entitled “Everyone’s in Sales,” and that would also be fitting.  Anyone who’s not in marketing or sales but who’s interested in learning a few of the basics should consider some outside reading.  I’d recommend Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, SPIN Selling, and Getting To Yes, but there are many, many other great books that would also do the job.

Reverse Engineering Venture Economics

What Convergence Really Means

Rebecca Lieb wrote a great column last week in ClickZ about Advertising Week and how disappointed she was in it.  The article is worth a read for many reasons, but there was one quote in particular that stuck out to me as I re-read it tonight.

Some people talk about convergence as the coming together of old media and new media.  Others talk about digial meeting analog.  Still others talk about the melding of cable, telco, Internet, and wireless.  A brave few even talk about direct marketing and brand advertising.

But Rebecca quoted the head of global advertising for American Express, who really nailed what convergence means in the world of media today — the convergence of advertising and publishing:

“No longer can we view our job as filling gaps between other peoples’ content,” said Scotti. “Soon, there won’t be gaps to fill because everything is content.”

Boy, isn’t that the truth?  And it’s not just the much-hyped world of user-generated content, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and blogs.

It’s as much about advertisers getting smarter and becoming content publishers themselves.  Think about any good email you get from a marketer.  What makes it good?  Sure, a nice discount, maybe free shipping, certainly a relevant offer based on your preferences and purchase behavior.  But the other thing that makes it good is the presence of content to surround and drive the marketing messages.  The applesauce around the pill, if you will.

It works.  We see it every day.  And we only see more of it happening in the future as consumers get smarter and more discerning about the brands with which they choose to interact.