Book Short:  Not As Deep As You’d Like

Deep Change, by Robert Quinn, is a reasonably interesting collection of thoughts on management and leadership, but it doesn’t hang together very well as a single work with a unified theme.  The promise is interesting — that we must personally abandon our knowledge, competence, techniques and abilities and “walk naked into the land of uncertainty” to undergo great personal change that can then lead us to organizational change — but the book doesn’t quite deliver on it.

That said, I enjoyed the book as a quick read for a few of its more interesting concepts.  For example, Quinn has a great crystallization of many things I’ve observed over the years called “the tyrrany of competence” where organizations can get paralyzed by people who are technically strong at their jobs but who are either disruptive culturally or who have such a chokehold on their role that they hold back the organization as a whole from growing.  Another good concept is a chart and some related commentary about how a person transforms from an individual contributor, to a manager, to a leader — great for any growing company.  The last interesting one was a grid mapping out four different types of CEOs — Motivator, Vision Setter, Anazlyer, and Taskmaster.  Quinn goes into some detail about the characteristics of each and then circles back to the inevitable conclusion (like most Harvard Business Review articles) that the best CEOs exhibit all four characteristics at different times, in different circumstances.

So not my favorite book overall, but some good tidbits.  Probably worth a quick read if you’re a student of management and leadership.  Thanks to my former colleague Kendall Rawls for this book.

Book Short:  Allegory of Allegories

Squirrel, Inc., by Stephen Denning, is a good quick read for leaders who want a refreshing look at effective ways to motivate and communicate to their teams. The book focuses on storytelling as a method of communication, and Denning employs the storytelling method fairly successfully as a framework for the book.

The specific kinds of messages he focuses on, where he says storytelling can have the biggest impact, are:  communicating a complex idea and sparking action; communicating identity – who YOU as leader are; transmitting values; getting a group or team to work together more effectively; neutralizing gossip or taming the grapevine; knowledge-sharing; and painting a vision of the future that a team can hang onto.   The book even has a nice summary “how to” table at the end of it.

Thanks to email guru David Baker at Agency.com for giving me the book.

Book Short:  Underdog Victorious

The Underdog Advantage, by David Morey and Scott Miller, was a worthwhile read, though not a great book.  It was a little shallow, and although I enjoyed its case studies (who doesn’t love hearing about Ben & Jerry’s, Southwest, JetBlue, Starbucks?), I didn’t feel like the authors did enough to tie the details of the success of the case study companies back to the points they made in the book.

That said, the book had some great reminders in it for companies of all sizes and stages.  The main point was that successful companies always think of themselves as the underdog, the insurgent, and never get complacent.  They run themselves like a political campaign, needing to win an election every single day.  A lot of the tactics suggested are timeless and good to remember…things like never declare victory, always play offense, always respond to attacks, remember to communicate from the inside out, and remember to sell employees on a mision and purpose in order to make them your main ambassadors.  The laundry list of tactics is the book’s greatest strength.

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: 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:  Innovation and Discipline

The Puritan Gift, by Kenneth and William Hopper, is a bit of a mixed bag.  The authors have a wonderful point to make — that American businesses have thrived over the centuries due to a mix of innovation and discipline that descended from the country’s Puritan roots, and that when they lose their way, it’s because they diverge from those roots.  The book is also an interesting, if somewhat cursory, history of American industry.  And it playfully debunks some great myths of corporate American life over the last 50 years.  But the book has a few too many moments where assertions aren’t supported by data — where its theories overreach into explanations of other aspects of American life that may or may not be appropriate.

That said, it is a good read.  The main point is that there are five driving principles behind American business success over the years, the first four coming from the Puritans and the fifth from the French:

– the melding of the workplace with the search for a higher purpose in life
– an aptitude for the application of mechanical skills
– the subordination of the individual to the group
– the ability to assemble and galvanize forces to a single purpose on a massive scale
– a keen interest in and passion for technology

These things ring true as driving forces of successful businesses today.  The distillation (or abstraction) of these forces, though, is the most powerful lesson from the book as far as I’m concerned, which is that businesses, and organizations in general, succeed the most when they are led by people who really understand the substance of the business and not by professional managers or financial engineers, and when they practice integrated decision-making, which is to say that the same people make decisions, plan for execution, execute, and follow up.  You don’t have to look too far to see a lot of examples of how the absence of domain expertise and integrated decision-making has led to spectacular failures, from Enron to Wall Street’s meltdown to the Iraq War.

The Puritan Gift ends on a hopeful note about restoring America’s leadership in global industry by returning to our Puritan roots.  It’s way too early to assess whether or not this hypothesis will turn out to be correct, but the examples the authors give in the concluding chapter are certainly good food for thought for anyone who runs a business.  Thanks to my friend Marc Maltz of Triad Consulting for the book.

Book Short:  Presentation Zen

A few years ago, I blogged about Cliff Atkinson’s book Beyond Bullets.  I don’t know whether it’s a better book, or whether the timing of reading it just made a deeper impression on me, but I just read and LOVED Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds.

The concept is similar — a bad Powerpoint presentation kills your message as much as that horrendous high school physics teacher turned you off from the natural sciences.  Reynolds’s examples are rich, and there are tons of “before and after” slides in the book for the visual learners among us.  In addition, he articulates very clearly what I’ve always thought, since my consulting days, made for an excellent presentation:  offline storyboarding.

I’d recommend the book to anyone who does a lot of Powerpoint.  Relevant Return Pathers, don’t worry, your copies will come soon along with a new training course I’m developing using some of the concepts within.

Book Short:  On The Same Page

Being on the same page with your team, or your whole company for that matter, is a key to success in business.  The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, by Patrick Lencioni, espouses this notion and boils down the role of the CEO to four points:

1. Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team
2. Create organizational clarity
3. Overcommunicate organizational clarity
4. Reinforce organizational clarity through human systems

Those four points sound as boring as bread, but the book is anything but.  The book’s style is easy and breezy — business fiction.  One of the most poignant moments for me was when the book’s “other CEO” (the one that doesn’t “get it”) reflects that he “didn’t go into business to referee executive team meetings and delivery employee orientation…he loved strategy and competition.”  Being a CEO is a dynamic job that changes tremendously as the organization grows.  This book is a great handbook for anyone transitioning out of the startup phase, or for anyone managing a larger organization.

I haven’t read the author’s other books (this is one in a series), but I will soon!

Book Short: The Anti-Level-5 Leader

The Five Temptations of a CEO, another short leadership fable in a series by Patrick Lencioni, wasn’t as meaningful to me as the last one I read, The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link), but it wasn’t bad and was also a quick read.

The book to me was the 30 minute version of all the Level-5 Leadership stuff that Collins wrote about in Good to Great and Built to Last. All that said, it was a good quick read and a reminder of what not to do. The temptations are things that most CEOs I’ve ever known (present company very much included) have at least succumbed to at one point or another in their career. That said, you as a CEO should quit or be fired if you have them in earnest, so hopefully if you do have them, you recognize it and have them in diminishing quantities with experience, and hopefully not all at once:

– The temptation to be concerned about his or her image above company results

– The temptation to want to be popular with his or her direct reports above holding them accountable for results

– The temptation to ensure that decisions are correct, even if that means not making a decision on limited information when one is needed

– The temptation to find harmony on one’s staff rather than have productive conflict, discussion, and debate

– The temptation to avoid vulnerability and trust in one’s staff

I’m still going to read the others in Lencioni’s series as well. They may not be the best business books ever written, but they’re solid B/B+s, and they’re short and simple, which few business books are and all should be!

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?

I have two more to go, which I’ll tackle in due course and am looking forward to.