Book Short: A Brand Extension That Works
Usually, brand or line extensions don’t work out well in the end. They dilute and confuse the brand. Companies with them tend to see their total market share shrink, while focused competitors flourish. As the authors of the seminal work from years ago, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Jack Trout and Al Reis would be the first people to tell you this.
That said, The New Positioning, which I guess you could call a line extension by Jack Trout (without Reis), was a fantastic read. Not quite as good as the original, but well worth it. It’s actually not a new new book – I think it’s 12 years old as opposed to the original, which is now something like 25 years old, but I just read it and think it’s incredibly relevant to today’s world.
Building on the original work, Trout focuses more this time on Repositioning and Brand Extensions — two things critical to most businesses today. How to do the impossible, to change people’s minds about your brand or product mid-stream, whether in response to new competitive activity or general changes in the world around you. And how to think about brand extensions (hint: don’t do them, create a new brand like Levi’s did with Dockers).
The book also has a very valuable section on the importance of sound and words to branding and positioning, relative to imagery. Trout has a short but very colorful metaphor about women named Gertrude here that’s reminiscent of the research Malcolm Gladwell cited in Blink.
If you haven’t read the original Positioning, that should be on your wish list for the holidays. If you have, then maybe Santa can deliver The New Positioning!
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.
Book Short: It Sounds Like it Should be About Monkeys, Doesn’t It?
The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, is a must-read for anyone in the Internet publishing or marketing business. There’s been so much written about it in the blogosphere already that I feel a little lame and “me too” for adding my $0.02, but I finally had a chance to get to it last week, and it was fantastic.
The premise is that the collapsing production, distribution, and marketing costs of the Internet for certain types of products — mostly media at this point — have extended the traditional curve of available products and purchased products almost indefinitely so that it has, in statistical terms, a really long tail.
So, for example, where Wal-Mart might only be able to carry (I’m making these numbers up, don’t have the book in front of me) 1,000 different CDs at any given moment in time on the shelf, iTunes or Rhapsody can carry 1,000,000 different CDs online. And even though the numbers of units purchased are still greatest for the most popular items (the hits, the ones Wal-Mart stocks on shelf), the number of units purchased way down “in the tail of the curve,” say at the 750,000th most popular unit, are still meaningful — and when you add up all of the units purchased beyond the top 1,000 that Wal-Mart can carry, the revenue growth and diversity of consumer choice become *really* meaningful.
The book is chock full o’ interesting examples and stats and is reasonably short and easy to read, as Anderson is a journalist and writes in a very accessible style. You may or may not think it’s revolutionary based on how deep you are in Internet media, but it will at a minimum help you crystallize your thinking about it.
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 Short: Beyond 10,000 Hours
In Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell (post, buy), we are taught, among other things, that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something, as well as a dash of luck and timing, as opposed to huge amounts of innate and unique talent. In Talent is Overrated, by Geoff Colvin, this theory comes to life, with a very clear differentiating point – it’s not just logging the 10,000 hours, it’s HOW the hours are spent.
Colvin’s main point is that the hours need to be spent in what he calls “deliberate practice.” The elements of deliberate practice are best explained with his example of Jerry Rice, although you can apply these to any discipline:
- He spent very little time playing football (e.g., most of his practice was building specific skills, not playing the game)
- He designed his practice to work on specific needs
- While supported by others, he did much of the work on his own (e.g., it can be repeated a lot, and there are built-in feedback loops)
- It wasn’t fun
- He defied the conventional limits of age
If you’re the kind of person who cares deeply about your own performance, let alone the performance of people around you, it doesn’t take long to be completely riveted by Colvin’s points. They ring true, and his examples are great and cross a lot of disciplines (though not a ton about business in particular). I wasn’t 50% done with the book before I had made my list of three key things that I need to Deliberately Practice.
There are some other great aspects to the book as well — including a section on Making Organizations Innovative, from creating a culture of innovation to allowing people the freedom to think, to a section on where passion and drive come from, but hopefully this post conveys the gist of it all. Want to be a better CEO? Or a better anything? This is a good place to start the process.
Thanks to Greg Sands for sending me this excellent book. I’m going to work it into my rotation for Return Path anniversary presents.
Book Short: Go Where They Ain’t
Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant, by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne isn’t bad, but it could literally be summed up by the title of this post. I think it’s probably a better book for people who aren’t already entrepreneurs.
That said, there are two chapters that I found pretty valuable. One is called “Reconstruct Market Boundaries,” which is a great way of thinking about either starting a new business or innovating an existing one. It’s a strategy that we’ve employed a few times over the years at both Return Path and Authentic Response. It’s hard to do, but it expands the available territory you have to cover. The classic Jack Welch/GE “we don’t just sell jet engines, we sell AND SERVICE jet engines” which expanded their addressable market 9x.
The other useful chapter was “Get the Strategic Sequence Right.” The sequence of questions to answer, according to the authors, is:
- Will buyers get enough utility out of it?
- What’s the right price?
- Can you cost it low enough to make good margin?
- Are you dealing with adoption hurdles?
The reason I found this sequence so interesting is that I think many entrepreneurs mix the order up once they get past the first one. It’s easy to start with market need and then quickly jump to adoption hurdles, cost things out, and go with a cost-plus pricing strategy. The book documents nicely why this order is more productive. In particular, pricing first, then costing second, is both more market-focused (what will people pay?) and more innovative (how can I think creatively to work within the constraint of that price point?).
The common theme that’s most interesting out of the book is that new frameworks for thought produce killer innovation. That’s clearly something most entrepreneurs and innovators can hang their hat on.
Book Short: Why Not Both?
Craig Hickman’s Mind of a Manager, Soul of a Leader talks about how tapping the natural tension between managers and leaders allows an organization to achieve its best. It covers dozens of topical areas and for each compares how a prototypical manager handles the area (practical, reasonable, decisive) vs. how a prototypical leader handles it (visionary, empathetic, and flexible). Of course, the book describes the ideal organization as “balanced an integrated” between the two extremes.
My take for startups, a topic not addressed in the book, is that the job of the entrepreneur CEO is to be both manager and leader, and try to do both roles effectively without driving the team nuts. The book says that “managers wield authority, leaders apply influence.” Entrepreneurs have to be comfortable with both styles. Thanks to my colleague Stephanie Miller for giving me a copy of this one.
Book Short: The Most Rapacious Guys in the Room
I just finished The Smartest Guys in the Room, by journalists Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. This is the story of Enron, and what a tale it is! The book is a good quick business novel read. It reminded me a lot of Barbarians at the Gate, except that it made me far angrier. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m at a different place in my career now than I was 10 years ago and therefore have a different appreciation for what goes on in companies, or if the Enron guys were just far worse than anyone surrounding RJR Nabisco. But in any case, as my Grandpa Bill would have said, this one certainly raised my hackles.
Anyway, I can’t even get into the details without working myself into a frenzy about these crooks, but suffice to say there are lots of “what not to do” lessons in this book, starting with CEO Ken Lay’s wuss-like, disconnected approach to leading the company and ending with CFO Andy Fastow’s insane rationalizations for using the company as his own piggy bank. Anyway, I thought it would just be easier to just list out a few simple things to look for in your own company if you’re concerned you might be having some financial scandals within. You know you have a problem if…
– Your company has 3,000 off-balance sheet special purpose entities, including 800 in the Caymans
– Your CEO has waived your company code of ethics twice so that the CFO could negotiate deals for his own profit against the company
– Your President combatively calls an analyst an asshole on an earnings call when asked why the company couldn’t produce a balance sheet and cash flow statement with its income statement and earnings release
– Your staffers meet someone from your auditor and say “oh, you’re the guy that won’t let us do something”
– Your accounting department becomes viewed as a major profit center because of its treatment of revenue
It’s truly astonishing what these bozos thought they could get away with. Thank God they’re going to jail. Thanks to my colleague Patty Mah (a friend of the author) for this 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.
Book Short: Are You Topgraded?
I read a decent volume of business books (some of my favorites and more recent ones are listed in the left hand column of the blog). I have two main pet peeves with business books as a rule: the first is is that most business books have one central idea and a few good case examples and take way too many pages to get where they’re going; the other is that far too many of them are geared towards middle and upper management of 5,000+ person companies and are either not applicable or need to be adapted for startups.
Anyway, I thought I’d occasionally post quick synopses of some good ones I’ve read recently. Topgrading, by Brad Smart was so good that this post will be longer than most. It’s a must read for anyone who’s doing a lot of hiring (fellow entrepreneur blogger Terry Gold is a fan, as well).
The book is all about how to build an organization of A players and only A players, and it presents a great interviewing methodology. It’s very long for a business book, but also very valuable. Buy a copy for anyone in your company who’s doing a lot of hiring, not just for yourself or for your HR person. I think the book falls down a little bit on startup adaptation, but it’s still worth a read.
There’s been much talk lately about “the importance of B players” in Harvard Business Review and other places. I share the Topgrading perspective, which is a little different (although more semantically different than philosophically different).
The Topgrading perspective is that you should always hire A players — the definition of which is “one of the top 10% of the available people in the talent pool, for the job you have defined today, at the comp range you have specified.” I absolutely buy into this. Don’t like what you’re seeing while screening candidates? Change one of the three variables (job definition, comp, or geography) and you’ll get there.
The corrolary to the A-player-only theory is that there are three types of A players — the author calls them A1, A2, and A3. A1’s are capable of and interested in rapidly rising to be leaders of the organization. A2s are promotable over time. A3s are not capable of or interested in promotion.
I think what the HBR article on B players is talking about is really what Topgrading calls A3 players. A3 players are absolutely essential to an organization, especially as it grows over time and develops more operational jobs that leverage the powerhouse A1s and A2s that make up such a big percentage of successful startups. You just have to recognize (perhaps with them) that A3 players may not be interested in career growth and promotion and not try to push them into more advanced roles that they may not be interested in or capable of doing well.
I’m a huge believer in having a healthy balance of A1s, A2s, and A3s, but I will always want to hire A players per the above definition. Why would you ever settle for less?
Book Short: Tech Founder? Varsity Basketball Captain? Both! At the Same Time!
Ben Casnocha’s My Startup Life has some of the same appeal as The Mousedriver Chronicles (which I reviewed years go here) in its tale of a startup, its successes, failures, and lessons learned. If you like that kind of book or are starting a company and are looking for kindred spirits, it’s a good book for you.
Ben’s story is more remarkable in some ways because he started his eGovernment software (SaaS of course) company Comcate at the age of 13. That’s right, 13. When I was learning how to shave, having a bar mitzvah, and dealing with acne and a voice dropping at terminal velocity. Starting a business was the furthest thing from my mind. Though to be fair, teenage entrepreneurs are a featured new demographic in Mark Penn’s Microtrends (also worth a read). Perhaps if I were Ben’s age today, I would be a startup junkie, too.
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Ben a couple times via Brad — I think Brad MUST have been a lot like him 20ish years ago. The advice in the book is good and relevant and incredibly mature for a 20-year old, and Ben, I mean that in an impressed way, not a patronizing one. It’s not necessarily revolutionary, but it’s a very quick and light read if you like the genre/premise.
