Book Short:  Calm in a Crisis, Explained

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales, is not a business book.  Even though the author says a few times “this can be applied to business, too,” the application is left 100% up to the reader.  But that’s my only criticism of the book, and it’s not a big one at that.  Deep Survival is an unexpected and somewhat odd way to think about how to lead an organization, but it’s very powerful, and incredibly well written.

The author essentially has made a career, or at least a hobby, of studying major accidents and delineating the qualities that separate those who survive from those who don’t. Most of his examples are from extreme sports — sailing across the Atlantic solo, doing highly technical rock and glacier climbs, and the like.  Certainly one easy takeaway from the book is that perhaps one can have a lot of fun and be challenged in life without putting oneself at risk in those ways!

But that’s not the author’s point.  And it’s not even that preparedness makes the difference, as you might expect (in fact, sometimes that hurts).  His point is that the correct combination of rational and emotional impulses makes the difference.  His specific 12 points are:

• Look, see, believe (keep those cognitive functions working)
• Stay calm, use humor and fear to focus
• Think/analyze/plan, get organized with manageable tasks
• Take correct, decisive action
• Celebrate successes
• Count your blessings
• Play…or do other things to occupy your mind’s idle moments
• See the beauty around you
• Believe that you will succeed
• Surrender – don’t let the fear of failure stand in your way
• Do whatever is necessary
• Never give up

But reading those points doesn’t really substitute for reading the book, especially since some seem contradictory!  Thanks to my friend Greg Sands for this great read.

Book Short: There is No Blueprint to $1B

Blueprint to a Billion: 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth, by David Thomson (book, Kindle) sounds more formulaic than it is. It’s not a bad book, but you have to dig a little bit for the non-obvious nuggets (yes, I get that growing your company to $1B in sales requires having a great value proposition in a high growth market!). The author looked for commonalities among the 387 American companies that have gone public since 1980 with less than $1B in revenues when they went public and had more than $1B in revenue (and were still in existence) at the time of the book’s writing in 2005.

Thompson classifies the blueprint into “7 Essentials,” which blueprint companies do well on across the board. The 7 Essentials are:

– Create and sustain a breakthrough value proposition

– Exploit a high growth market segment

– Marquee/lighthouse customers shape the revenue powerhouse

– Leverage big brother alliances for breaking into new markets

– Become the masters of exponential returns

– The management team: inside-outside leadership

– The Board: comprised of essentials experts

As I said above, there were some nuggets within this framework that made the entire read worthwhile. For example, crafting a Board that isn’t just management and investors but also includes industry experts like customers or alliance partners is critical. That matches our experience at Return Path over the years (not that we’re exactly closing in on $1B in revenues – yet) with having outside industry CEOs sit on our Board. Our Board has always been an extension of our management and strategy team, but we have specifically gotten some of our most valuable contributions and thought-provoking dialog from the non-management and non-investor directors.

Another critical item that I thought was interesting was this concept of not just marquee customers (yes, everyone wants big brand names as clients), but that they also need to be lighthouse customers. They need to help you attract other large customers to your solution – either actively by helping you evangelize your business, or at least passively by lending their name and case study to your cause.

The book is more of a retrospective analysis than a playbook, and some of its examples are a bit dated (marveling at Yahoo’s success seems a bit awkward today), and the author notes as well that many of the “blueprint” companies faltered after hitting the $1B mark. But it was a good read all-in. What I’d like to see next is a more microscopic view of the Milestones to $100 Million!

Book Short:  Internet Fiction

It’s been a long time since I read Tom Evslin’s Hackoff.com, which Tom called a “blook” since he released it serially as a blog, then when it was all done, as a bound book.  Mariquita and I read it together and loved every minute of it.  One post I wrote about it at the time was entitled Like Fingernails on a Chalkboard.

The essence of that post was “I liked it, but the truth of the parts of the Internet bubble that I lived through were painful to read,” applies to two “new” works of Internet fiction that I just plowed through this week, as well.

Uncommon Stock

Eliot Pepper’s brand new startup thriller, Uncommon Stock, was a breezy and quick read that I enjoyed tremendously. It’s got just the right mix of reality and fantasy in it. For anyone in the tech startup world, it’s a must read. But it would be equally fun and enjoyable for anyone who likes a good juicy thriller.

Like my memory of Hackoff, the book has all kinds of startup details in it, like co-founder struggles and a great presentation of the angel investor vs. VC dilemma. But it also has a great crime/murder intrigue that is interrupted with the book’s untimely ending.  I eagerly await the second installment, promised for early 2015.

The Circle

While not quite as new, The Circle  has been on my list since it came out a few months back and since Brad’s enticing review of it noted that:

The Circle  was brilliant. I went back and read a little of the tech criticism and all I could think was things like “wow – hubris” or “that person could benefit from a little reflection on the word irony”… We’ve taken Peter Drucker’s famous quote “‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” to an absurd extreme in the tech business. We believe we’ve mastered operant conditioning through the use of visible metrics associated with actions individual users take. We’ve somehow elevated social media metrics to the same level as money in the context of self-worth.

So here’s the scoop on this book.  Picture Google, Twitter, Facebook, and a few other companies all rolled up into a single company.  Then picture everything that could go wrong with that company in terms of how it measures things, dominates information flow, and promotes social transparency in the name of a new world order.  This is Internet dystopia at its best – and it’s not more than a couple steps removed from where we are.  So fiction…but hardly science fiction.

The Circle  is a lot longer than Uncommon Stock and quite different, but both are enticing reads if you’re up for some internet fiction.

In 2005, I wrote a post called Unfolding the Map in which I looked at these two seemingly opposing philosophies from successful entrepreneurs:

• If you don’t have a map, you can’t get lost
• If you don’t have a map, you can’t get where you’re going

and tried to combine them when thinking about product roadmapping. The same contradiction and combination could be applied to anything, including coaching and development.

That’s why I was excited to read my friend Matt Spielman’s new book, Inflection Points: How to Work and Live with Purpose. Matt worked at Return Path twice over the years — first as employee #3 (more on that in a minute) and then over a decade later as CMO. We live near each other and know each other’s families. I’ve been lucky enough to see his career unfold and develop into what it is today, a flourishing coaching business called Inflection Point Partners that helps clients tremendously…and that also feeds Matt’s soul.

When I first met Matt and he joined me and Jack to launch Return Path in 1999, he was fresh out of business school and focused on sales and marketing from his prior career in investment banking. Our idea was that he would do the same for us as we got our product in market. But as I started focusing more on what kind of company we wanted to build and how to get there, Matt became my leading thought partner on those topics. When we got to about 25 people, he and I created a new role for him — head of Human Capital and Organization Development. While a bit clunky, that title meant that Matt was the principal person helping me create at small scale what we later branded our People First philosophy. That philosophy and the practices we developed out of it led to 20 years of a strong track record of investing in people and helping over 1,300 colleagues grow their careers by being simple, actionable, and broad-based in the way we handled feedback and development planning. This started back in 2000.

Matt’s book puts the ethos that I saw percolating over 20 years ago into a tight framework around his coaching methodology of the GPS (Game Plan System). The book is short and sweet and walks through both the philosophy and the framework in accessible terms. And while it’s true that you have to be open to new ideas, open to serendipity, and go with flow sometimes…it’s also true that if you have specific goals in mind, you are unlikely to achieve them without a focused effort.

I’ve written a lot about coaching lately between The Impact of a Good Coach and another recent post about a strong coaching framework about intentionality in Russell Benaroya’s book. In that second post, I noted that “While I have become less and less of a life planner as I’ve gotten older under the headline of ‘man plans, God laughs,’ I am a huge believer in being intentional about everything. And that pretty much sums up Matt’s book: If you don’t have a map, you can’t get where you’re going.

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:  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:  Another 8 Habits

Besides having a fantastic title, Richard St. John’s Stupid, Ugly, Unlucky, and Rich is a fun and quick read.  It’s a completely different style than Stephen Covey’s “habits” books (The 7, The 8th).  It’s a little cartoony and list-oriented, and it’s a much quicker read — and also easier to put down and pick up without feeling like you’re losing your place.

The book’s foundation is interviews, mostly by the author, of successful people who span many different careers, from artists to actors and models to athletes to politicians to business leaders.  The organization is very solid, and the content is highly motivating.  It’s a good guide to success in any field, and in particular many of the examples are spot-on for entrepreneurship.

At a minimum, I’m buying it for my senior staff…and for every new entry-level employee as good career foundation reading material.

Book Short:  A Must Read

Every once in a while, I read a book and think, “This is an important book.”  Microtrends, by Mark Penn, was just that kind of read.  Penn is the CEO of one of our largest clients in the market research business as well as CEO of Burson Marstellar and, more notably, the Clintons’ pollster and strategy director for much of the last 16 years.  He’s a smart guy, and more important than that, he’s awash in primary research data.

The premise of Microtrends is that America is no longer a melting pot, where lots of different people come together to try to be the same, but rather that it’s a big tent, where lots of small groups are now large enough to express their individuality powerfully.  The book is also perfect for the ADD-afflicted among us, with 75 chapters each of about 4 pages in length describing one new “microtrend” or small faction of American identity.  Penn not only describes the trend in a data-rich way but then goes on to postulate about the impact that trend will have on society at large and/or on the business opportunities that could come from serving those in the trend.

Just to give you a sample of the trends he covers:  Sex-ratio singles (explaining why there really are more single women than men), Extreme commuters (we certainly have a couple of those at Return Path),
Pro-Semites vs. Christian Zionists (they sound the same but are completely different), Newly-released Ex-cons (hint – there are a ton of them), and the rise of Chinese artists.

Whether you’re interested in marketing, entrepreneurship (you’ll get loads of ideas here), investing (more loads of ideas), or just trends in American and global society, Microtrends is a must must must read.  All 75 chapters were interesting to me, but even if you don’t love some…they’re only 4 pages each!

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: 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:  a Corporate Team of Rivals

One of the many things I have come to love about the Christmas holiday every year is that I get to go running in Washington DC.  Running the Monuments is one of the best runs in America.  Today, at my mother-in-law’s suggestion, I stopped i8n at the Lincoln Memorial mid-run and read his second inaugural address again (along with the Gettysburg Address).  I had just last week finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals:  The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and while I wasn’t going to blog about it as it’s not a business book, it’s certainly a book about leadership from which any senior executive or CEO can derive lessons.

Derided by his political opponents as a “second-rate Illinois lawyer,” Lincoln, who arrived somewhat rapidly and unexpectedly on the national scene at a time of supreme crisis, obviously more than rose to the occasion and not only saved the nation and freed the slaves but also became one of the greatest political leaders of all time.  He clearly had his faults — probably at the top of the list not firing people soon enough like many of his incompetent Union Army generals — but the theme of the book is that he had as one of his greatest strengths the ability to co-opt most of his political rivals and get them to join his cabinet, effectively neutering them politically as well as showing a unity government to the people.

This stands in subtle but important contrast to George Washington, who filled his cabinet with men who were rivals to each other (Hamilton, Jefferson) but who never overtly challenged Washington himself.

Does that Team of Rivals concept — in either the Lincoln form or the Washington form — have a place in your business?  I’d say rarely in the Lincoln sense and more often in the Washington sense.

Lincoln, in order to be effective, didn’t have much of a choice.  Needing regional and philosophical representation on his cabinet at a time of national crisis, bringing Seward, Chase, and Bates on board was a smart move, however much a pain in the ass Chase ended up being.  There certainly could be times when corporate leadership calls for a representative executive team or even Board, for example in a massive merger with uncertain integration or in a scary turnaround.  But other than extreme circumstances like that, the Lincoln model is probably a recipe for weak, undermined leadership and heartache for the boss.

The Washington model is different and can be quite effective if managed closely.  One could argue that Washington didn’t manage the seething Hamilton and frothy Jefferson closely enough, but the reality is that the debates between the two of them in the founding days of our government, when well moderated by Washington, forged better national unity and just plain better results than had Washington had a cabinet made up of like-minded individuals.  As a CEO, I love hearing divergent opinion on my executive team.  That kind of discussion is challenging to manage — at least in our case we don’t have people at each other’s throats — but as long as you view your job as NOT to create compromises to appease all factions but instead to have the luxury of hearing multiple well articulated points of view as inputs to a decision you have to make, then you and your company end up with a far, far better result.