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?
The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate The Three Essential Virtues(hardcover,kindle is Patrick Lencioni’s latest and greatest. It’s not my favorite of his, which is still The Advantage (post,buy ), but it’s pretty good and well worth a read. It builds on his model for accountability in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (post,buy)and brings it back to “how can you spot or develop and a good team player?”
The central thesis of the book is that great team players have three attributes – hungry, humble, and people-smart. While I can’t disagree with those three things, as with all consultants’ frameworks, I sound two cautionary notes: (1) they aren’t the absolute truth, just a truth, and (2) different organizations and different cultures sometimes thrive with different recipes. That said, certainly for my company, this framework rings true, if not the only truth.
Some great nuggets from the book:
-The basketball coach who says he loves kids who want to come to practice and work as hard as they can at practice to avoid losing
-The concept of Addition by Addition and Addition by Subtraction in the same book – both are real and true. The notion that three people can get more done than four if the fourth is a problem is VERY REAL
-When you’re desperate for people, you do stupid things – you bring people on who can get the job done but shouldn’t be in your environment. I don’t know a single CEO who hasn’t made this mistake, even knowing sometimes that they’re in the process of making it
The framing of the “edge” people – people who have two of the three virtues, but not the third, is quite good:
-Hungry and Humble but not People-Smart – The Accidental Mess Maker -Humble and People-Smart, but not Hungry – The Lovable Slacker -Hungry and People-Smart, but not Humble – The Skillful Politician
In my experience, and Lencioni may say this in the book, too (I can’t remember and can’t find it), none of these is great…but the last one is by far the most problematic for a culture that values teamwork and collaboration.
Anyway, I realize this is a long summary for a short book, but it’s worth buying and reading and having on your (real or virtual) shelf. In addition to the story, there are some REALLY GOOD interview guides/questions and team surveys in the back of the book.
I usually only blog about business books, but since I read Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert Putnam, because of its connection to the topic of Internet community and social media, I’ll record some thoughts about and from it here.
It’s an interesting read, although a little long. Putnam’s basic thesis is that America’s social capital — the things that have brought us physically and emotionally together as a country throughout much of the 20th century such as church, voting, and participation in civic organizations like the PTA or the Elks Club — are all severely on the decline. The reasons in Putnam’s view are television (you knew all those re-runs of The Brady Bunch would eventually catch up to you), suburban sprawl, two-career families, and “generational values,” which is Putnam’s way of saying things like people in their 60s all read newspapers more than people in their 50s, who all read newspapers more than people in their 40s, etc. He believes the decline is leading to things like worse schools, less safe neighborhoods, and poorer health.
The book does a good job laying out the decline in social capital with some really interesting and somewhat stunning numbers, but the book’s biggest shortcoming is that Putnam doesn’t do the work to determine causation. I buy that there’s a correlation between less voting and less safe neighborhoods, for example, but the book doesn’t convince me that A caused B as opposed to B causing A, or C causing both A and B. What I really wanted at the end of the book was for Putnam to go mano-a-mano with the Freakonomics guy for a couple hours. Preferably in those big fake sumo suits.
The book was published in 2000, so probably written from 1997-1999, and therefore its treatment of the Internet was a little dated — so I found myself wanting more on that topic since so much of the social media revolution on the Internet is post-2004. His basic view of the Internet is that it is in fact a bright spot in the decline of community, but that it’s changing the nature of communities. Now instead of chatting with whoever is bowling in the next lane over at the Tuesday night bowling league on Main Street, we are in an online discussion group with other people who own 1973 BMW 2002 series cars, preferably the turbo-charged ones. So the micro-communities of the Internet circa 2000 are more egalitarian (“on the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog”), but more narrow as well around interests and values.
What has social media done to Putnam’s theories in the last seven or eight years? How have things like blogging, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Photobucket changed our concept of community in America or in the world at large? I welcome your comments on this and will write more about it in the future.
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.
Generally, I love books by practitioners even more than those by academics. That’s why Steve McKee’s first (I assume) book, When Growth Stalls: How it Happens, Why You’re Stuck, and What to do About It (book, Kindle edition) appealed to me right out of the gate. The author is CEO of a mid-size agency and a prior Inc. 500 winner who has experienced the problem firsthand – then went out, researched it, and wrote about it. As a two-time Inc. 500 winner ourselves, Return Path has also struggled with keeping the growth flames burning over the years, so I was eager to dig into the research. The title also grabbed my attention, as there are few if any business books really geared at growth stage companies.
I’d say the book was “solid” in the end, not spectacular. Overall, it felt very consistent with a lot of other business books I’ve read over the years, from Trout & Reis to Lencioni to Collins, which is good. The first half of the book, describing the reasons why growth stalls, was quite good and very multi-faceted. His labeling description of “market tectonics” is vivid and well done. He gets into management and leadership failings around both focus and consensus, all true. Perhaps his most poignant cause of stalls in growth is what he calls “loss of nerve,” which is a brilliant way of capturing the tendence of weak leadership when times get tough to play defense instead of offense.
The problem with the book in the end is that the second section, which is the “how to reverse the stall” section, is way too focused on marketing. That can be the problem with a specialty practitioner writing a general business book. What’s in the books makes a lot of sense about going back to ground zero on positioning, market and target customer definition and understanding, and the like. But reversing the stall of company can and usually must involve lots of the other same facets that are documented in the first half of the book — and some other things as well, like aggressive change management and internal communication, systems and process changes, financial work, etc.
At any rate, if you are in a company where growth is stalling, it’s certainly a good read and worth your time, as what’s in it is good (it’s what’s missing that tempers my enthusiasm for it). In this same category, I’d also strongly recommend Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End, by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, as well.
I’m sure author Robert Cialdini would blanch if he read this comparison, but then again, I can’t be the first person to make it, either. His book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, is an outstanding read for any marketing or sales professional, but boy does it remind me of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Blink (book; blog post). Of course, Cialdini’s book came out a decade before Gladwell’s! Anyway, Influence is a great social science look at the psychology that makes sales and marketing work.
Cialdini talks about sales and marketing professionals as “compliance practitioners,” which is a great way to think about them, quite frankly. He boils down the things that make sales and marketing work to six core factors: consistency, reciprocation, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity.
Reciprocation – we hate being in a state of being beholden so much that we might even be willing to do a larger favor than the one done for us in order to remove the state. Think about “free gifts” in merchandising as an example of this, or being in a negotiation where someone trying to make a cold sale on you offers a fallback, smaller sale. For example, you don’t want to buy anything from the boy scout, but after you say no to the $5 raffle ticket and he asks about the $1 candy bar, you feel more obligated to buy the $1 candy bar because the boy scout has “given” on his initial request.
Consistency – once we have made a choice, personal and interpersonal pressures force us to back it up and justify our earlier decision – even more so when in writing or when declared to others. This is why marketers love getting testimonials from customers; the testimonial locks the customer in emotionally, as well as encouraging others to buy the product.
Social proof – if others think it’s correct, it must be correct, especially if those other people are like us. There are some scary examples in the book here, such as Reverand Jim Jones and The People’s Temple mass suicides. Gripping, but creepy.
Liking – we listen to people we like, and we like people to whom we’re similar or who are physically attractive. This section was especially reminiscent of Blink, but with different and more marketer-focused examples.
Authority – we have an extreme willingness to listen to authority, even when the authority isn’t quite relevant. This is why celebrity endorsements work so well.
Scarcity – we have a extreme motivation of fear of loss, either or something, or of the opportunity to have something. Who doesn’t like to keep doors open as long as possible?
The one place the book falls down a little bit is in the sections at the end of each chapter talking about how to resist that particular technique through jujitsu – the art of “turning the enemy’s strength to your advantage.” While nice in theory, Cialdini’s examples aren’t super helpful beyond saying “when you think you’re getting suckered, stop — and then say no.”
Overally, though, the book is well written and choc full of examples. Thanks to marketer Mallory Kates for sending me this great book!
The cynic in me wanted to start this book review of Free: The Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson, by complaining that I had to pay for the book. But it ended up being good enough that I won’t do that (plus, the author said there are free digital versions available — though the Kindle edition still costs money). At any rate, a bunch of reviews I read about the book panned it when compared to Anderson’s prior book, The Long Tail (post, link to book).
I won’t get into the details of the book, though you’ll get an idea from the paragraph below, but Anderson has a few gems worth quoting:
Any topic that can divide critics into two opposite camps — “totally wrong” and “so obvious” — has got to be a good one
Free makes Paid more profitable
Younger players have more time than money…older players have more money than time
Doing things we like without pay often makes us happier than the work we do for a salary
It’s true that each generation takes for granted some things their parents valued, but that doesn’t mean that generation values everything less
While Free is s probably not quite as good as The Long Tail, it does a good job of organizing and classifying and explaining the power of different economic models that involve a free component, and I found it very thought provoking about our own business at Return Path.
We already do a couple forms of Free — we practice the “third party” model, by giving things away to ISPs but selling them to mailers; and we practice Freemium by providing Senderscore.org and Feedback Loops for free in order to attract paying customers to our testing and monitoring application and whitelist. But could we do others? Maybe. They may not be revolutionary, but they’re smart marketing.
As some of the reviewers write, the book isn’t the be-all-end-all of marketing, it overreaches at times, and it is more applicable to some businesses than others, but Free was definitely worth paying for.
Authors Steven Woods and Alex Shootman would make Watty Piper proud. Instead of bringing toys to the children on the other side of the mountain, though, this engine brings revenue into your company. If you run a SaaS business, or really if you run any B2B business, Revenue Engine: Why Revenue Performance Management is the Next Frontier of Competitive Advantage, will change the way you think about Sales and Marketing. The authors, who were CTO and CRO of Eloqua (the largest SaaS player in the demand management software space that recently got acquired by Oracle), are thought leaders in the field, and the wisdom of the book reflects that.
The book chronicles the contemporary corporate buying process and shows that it has become increasingly like the consumer buying process in recent years. The Consumer Decision Journey, first published by McKinsey in 2009, chronicles this process and talks about how the traditional funnel has been transformed by the availability of information and social media on the Internet. Revenue Engine moves this concept to a B2B setting and examines how Marketing and Sales are no longer two separate departments, but stewards of a combined process that requires holistic analysis, investment decisions, and management attention.
In particular, the book does a good job of highlighting new stages in the buying process and the imperatives and metrics associated with getting this “new funnel” right. One that resonated particularly strongly with me was the importance of consistent and clean data, which is hard but critical! As my colleague Matt Spielman pointed out when we were discussing the book, the one area of the consumer journey that Revenue Engine leaves is out is Advocacy, which is essential for influencing the purchase process in a B2B environment as well.
One thing I didn’t love about the book is that it’s a little more theoretical than practical. There aren’t nearly enough detailed examples. In fact, the book itself says it’s “a framework, not an answer.” So you’ll be left wanting a bit more and needing to do a bit more work on your own to translate the wisdom to your reality, but you’ll have a great jumping off point.
I enjoy reading books written by people I know. I can always picture the person narrating the book, or hear their voice saying the words, I can periodically see their personality showing through the words on the page, and books bring out so much more detail than I’d ever get from a conversation. Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products, by Martina Lauchengco, is one of those books. Martina is an operating partner at Costanoa Venture Capital, an investor in both Return Path and Bolster, and I’d known Martina for several years before she joined Costanoa through Greg Sands. She’s the best product marketer on the planet. She’s the also one of the nicest people around.
Product Marketing is a tricky discipline. A brand marketer on my leadership team years ago referred to it somewhat derisively as a “tweener” function, one of those things that’s not quite marketing and not quite product. We didn’t get the function right for many years at Return Path because we treated it that way, thinking “well, it’s neither fish nor fowl, so we’re not quite sure what to do with it.” Then we hired Scott Roth, who has gone on to have a storied career as a multi-time CEO. Scott’s background was in product marketing. He said to me in his interview process, “Product Marketing isn’t a tweener function with no home. It’s a glue function. It holds product and marketing together.” It’s amazing how that simple change in framing, combined with great leadership, led us to completely rethink the function and make it one of the most important functions in the company.
Martina brings that to live with Loved. Simply put, Loved is a handbook or a field guide to running the Product Marketing function. I can imagine it being a section of Startup CXO in that way — it’s incredibly practical, hands-on, how-to, and rich with examples from Martina’s amazing career at Microsoft, Netscape, Silicon Valley Product Group, and Costanoa. And she believes in Agile Marketing, which is always a plus in my book (and I find rare in marketers).
Martina has lots of great frameworks and stories in the book – key responsibilities of product marketing, key metrics, the release scale, the connection to Geoffrey Moore’s TALC, strategies for messaging, pricing and packaging, and more. I won’t spoil more than one here, but I will paraphrase one that I found particularly impactful, a bit of a checklist on the essence of great product marketing:
Share data around shifting trends in buyer behavior
Connect your product’s purpose with broader trends
Rebrand to make your product seem bigger than it is (and save room for expansion down the road)
Make it free, especially if you’re defining a new category
Share the “why” and advance access with influencers
If the measure of a book’s impact is how many pages you dog ear or highlight, this says it all about Loved.
And when I say significantly, I mean it! The Startup Owners Manual is 600 pages of really detailed how-to around the first two steps of Blank’s four steps, Customer Discovery and Customer Validation. It doesn’t get into the last two steps at all, Customer Creation and Company Building. It has a lot of overlap with Ash Maurya’s Running Lean (post, book), although it’s significantly more detailed. And essentially, especially around the topic of “Company Building,” my book starts where this one stops.
One of Blank’s great lines in the book is that a “A startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable, profitable business model.” That frames the whole Lean Startup movement really, really well. The whole concept of Customer Discovery and Validation, of testing hypotheses, is critical to getting product-marketing fit right in a capital-efficient manner. If I were starting Return Path today, we’d be using these methods from the get-go.
But Lean principles are wholly compatible with larger companies, as well, and in fact we use all of these principles in our product development organization today. We adapt them for our size and scale and the fact that often we are selling either new or enhanced versions of existing product into existing customers, but our product teams have all embraced the Lean principles and the vocabulary around them, and our goal is that we should never bring a product to market that isn’t already being bought.
“People talk about Andy,” writes Seth Godin in the foreward to Andy Sernovitz’s new book, Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking.  “He’s a living, breathing example of the power of word of mouth.” Andy’s the CEO of WOMMA, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, and a former colleague of mine.
Ever since reading The Tipping Point, I keep looking for the secret sauce around viral marketing. What is it that makes something cool enough to buzz about? My conclusion from reading Andy’s book is that secret sauce doesn’t exist. Like everything else, being buzzworthy comes from hard work, being inherently good, AND using the techniques and understanding in Andy’s book. Tables like “The Three Reasons People Talk About You” and “The Five T’s of Word of Mouth Marketing” are worth the price of the book in and of themselves, as they explain how to manage, handle, and drive viral marketing — once you have your own secret sauce down.
Andy’s wanted to write a book for a long time (in fact, he got us started on ours), and I’m glad he finally did it. If you’re interested in an easy-to-follow, practical, hands-on guide to viral, or word-of-mouth marketing, this is the book for you.
