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!
I took a couple days off last week and decided to re-read two old favorites. One –Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead — my fourth reading — will take me a little longer to process and figure out if there’s a good intersection with the blog. One would think so with entrepreneurship as the topic, but my head still hurts from all the objectivism. The second — Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, by Albert O. Hirschman — is today’s topic.
I can’t remember when I first read Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. It was either in senior year of high school Economics or Government; or in freshman year of college Political Philosophy. Either way, it was a long time ago, and for some reason, some of the core messages of this quirkly little 125 page political/economic philosophy book have stayed with me over the years. I remembered the book incorrectly as a book about political systems, and I think it was born consciously in the wake of Eugene McCarthy’s somewhat revolutionary challenge to a sitting President Johnson for the Democratic Party nomination in 1968. But the book is actually about business; it’s just about businesses and their customers, not corporations as social structures (the latter being more of an interest to me). Written by an academic economist (I think), the book has its share of gratuitous demonstrative graphs, 2×2 matrices, and SAT words. But its central premise is a gem for anyone who runs an organization of any size.
The central premise is that there are really two paths by which one can express dissatisfaction with a temporary, curable lapse in an organization: exit (bailing), or voice (trying to fix what’s wrong from within). The third key element, Loyalty, is less a path in and of itself but more an agent that “holds exit at bay and activates voice.”
You need to read the book and apply it to your own circumstances to really get into it, but for me, it’s all about breeding loyalty as a means of making voice the path of least resistance, even when exit is a freely available option (few of us run totalitarian states or monopolies, after all). That to me is the definition of a successful enterprise, both internally and externally.
With your customers: make your product so irresistible, and make your customer service so deep, that your customers feel an obligation to help you fix what they perceive to be wrong with your product first, rather than simply complain about price or flee to a competitor.
With your employees: make your company the best possible place you can think of to work so that even in as ridiculously fluid a job market as we live in, your employees will come to their manager, their department head, the head of HR, or you as leader to tell you when they’re unhappy instead of just leaving, or worse, sulking.
With your company (you as employee): make yourself indispensible to the organization and do such a great job that if things go wrong with your performance or with your role, your manager’s loyalty to you leads him or her to give you open feedback and coach you to success rather than unceremoniously show you the door.
Ok, this wasn’t such a short book short — probably the longest I’ve ever written in this blog, and certainly the highest ratio of short:actual book. But if you’re up for a serious academic framework (quasi-business but not exclusively) to apply to your management techniques, this short 1970 book is as valid today as when it was written. Thanks to David Ramert (I am pretty sure I read it in high school) for introducing it to me way back when!
Patrick Lencioni’s The Three Signs of a Miserable Job is a good read, as were his last two books, The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link), and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link). They’re all super short, easy reads (four express train rides on Metro North got the job done), with a single simple message and great examples. This one is probably my second favorite so far.
This book, which has a downright dreary title, is great. It points to and proposes a solution to a problem I’ve thought about for a long time, which is how do you create meaning for people in their day to day work when they’re not doing something intrinsically meaningful like curing a disease or feeding the homeless. His recipe for success is simple:
– Get people to articulate the relevance in their jobs…the meaning they derive out of their work…an understanding of the people whose lives are made better, even in small ways, by what they do every day
– Get people to measure what they do (duh, management 101), IN RELATION TO THE RELEVANCE learnings from the last point (ahh, that’s an interesting twist)
– Get to know your people as people
All of these are things you’d generally read in good books on management, but this book ties them together artfully, simply, and in a good story about a roadside pizza restaurant. It also stands in stark contrast to the book I reviewed and panned a few days ago by Jerry Porras in that it is nothing but examples from non-celebrities, non-success stories — ordinary people doing ordinary jobs.
One of the best things I can say about Remote: Office Not Required, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, is that it was short. That sounds a little harsh – part of what I mean is that business books are usually WAY TOO LONG to make their point, and this one was blessedly short. But the book was also a little bit of an angry rant against bad management wrapped inside some otherwise good points about remote management.
The book was a particularly interesting read juxtaposed against Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last which I just finished recently and blogged about here, which stressed the importance of face-to-face and in-person contact in order for leaders to most effectively do their jobs and stay in touch with the needs of their organizations.
The authors of Remote, who run a relatively small (and really good) engineering-oriented company, have a bit of an extreme point of view that has worked really well for their company but which, at best, needs to be adapted for companies of other sizes, other employee types, and other cultures. That said, the flip side of their views, which is the “everyone must be at their cubicle from 9 to 5 each day,” is even dumber for most businesses these days. As usual with these things, the right answer is probably somewhere in between the extremes, and I was reminded of the African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go farm go together” when I read it. Different target outcomes, different paths.
I totally agree with the authors around their comments about trusting employees and “the work is what matters.” And we have a ton of flexibility in our work at Return Path. With 400 people in the company, I personally spend six weeks over the summer working largely remote, and I value that time quite a bit. But I couldn’t do it all the time. We humans learn from each other better and treat each other better when we look at each other face to face. That’s why, with the amount of remote work we do, we strongly encourage the use of any form of video conferencing at all times. The importance of what the authors dismiss as “the last 1 or 2% of high fidelity” quality to the conversation is critical. Being in person is not just about firing and hiring and occasional sync up, it’s about managing performance and building relationships.
Remote might have been better if the authors had stressed the value that they get out of their approach more than ranting against the approaches of others. While there are serious benefits of remote work in terms of cost and individual productivity (particularly in maker roles), there are serious penalties to too much of it as well in terms of travel, communication burden, misunderstandings, and isolation. It’s not for everyone.
Thanks to my colleague Hoon Park for recommending this to me. When I asked Hoon what his main takeaway from the book was, he replied:
The importance of open communication that is archived (thus searchable), accessible (transparent and open to others) and asynchronous (doesn’t require people to be in the same place or even the same “timespace”). I love the asynchronous communication that the teams in Austin have tried: chatrooms, email lists (that anyone can subscribe to or read the archives of), SaaS project management tools. Others I would love to try or take more advantage of include internal blogs (specifically the P2 and upcoming O2 WordPress themes; http://ma.tt/2009/05/how-p2-changed-automattic/), GitHub pull requests (even for non-code) and a simple wiki.
These are great points, and good examples of the kinds of systems and processes you need to have in place to facilitate high quality, high volume remote work.
I’m going to get a lot of flak from people about what you just read. People might say that it’s too disorganized or not practical enough or that I require you to do too much work to actually accomplsh anything. That’s ok.
He’s kind of right. The book is a little breezy and meanders around, just like riffing with Seth. It’s not practical in the sense that if the entire world operated this way in the extreme, we’d have serious problems. But the fact that he requires you to do “too much work to actually accomplish anything” is part of the brilliance of his message.
This was Seth’s best book in years, mostly because it is fresh. It is not a rant about marketing; it is a wonderfully succinct look at how we as a society are rallying and organizing around causes, campaigns, companies, and collective beliefs. It’s not about the Internet, though its principles are easily implemented and amplified using online tools. It’s not a how-to guide to being a fancy corporate leader, but it’s one of the most pointed descriptions of the ethos of a certain type of leader (the upstart, or as Seth says, the heretic). It’s not about a particular revolution; it’s about how mini-revolutions are becoming the norm these days.
Tribes is short, inspirational, and pure Seth. Though quite different in its nature and mission, it really evoked for me Mark Penn’s Microtrends (post, link) — a study of larger tribes and heretics in contemporary America.
Well Being: The 5 Essential Elements, by Tom Rath and Jim Harter from the Gallup organization, is a solid read and incredibly short. It’s one of those books that’s really a long article stretched and bound. But it goes beyond the basics of what I expected, which was something like “having healthy employees cuts down on absenteeism” and has a couple great elements of food for thought for leaders looking to build cutting edge and uber-productive organizations. It comes out of the same general body of research as four other very strong books I’ve written about over time — First, Break all the Rules, Now, Discover Your Strengths, 12: The Great Elements of Managing (book, review), and Go Put Your Strengths to Work (book, review).
The authors define well being as having five separate components: career well being, social well being, physical well being, financial well being, and community well being. Ok, that makes sense, but the three most interesting points the book made from my perspective were:
Well being isn’t just about one of these five elements – it’s about all five, and how they interact together, and how the workplace can support all of them
Achieving long-term objectives around well being requires finding short-term incentives that drive the same behavior in more obvious and immediate ways, as most long-term well being drivers require short term sacrifice. So figure out how to make eating a salad better for you not just years from now but TODAY (you’ll have more energy after lunch than if you eat that cheeseburger), for example
Financial well being isn’t something a lot of companies focus on, and maybe it should be. Particularly in our industry we hire knowledge workers and assume therefore that they’re smart and educated about everything…but maybe there are ways that the company can support financial well being that aren’t necessarily obvious
The book is full of stats from the underlying research, most of which show that most people are shockingly unhappy, and that most workplaces dont do enough to support employee wellness. The book also notes, as is the case with most things, that promoting well being among employees requires more than just setting up programs. Doing it right requires constant vigilance, measurement, and follow up. At Return Path, we do a bunch of programs along the lines suggested by the book (but can and should do more!), but we’ve never been rigorous with follow up. Good food for thought.
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (book, Kindle), was a great read and a nice change from either strictly business books or my regular fiction/non-fiction reading.It’s basically about the process of achieving happiness through control over one’s inner life, but it’s far from a self-help book.It’s almost more of practical psychology deep dive into what brings about happiness and peak performance – a state the author calls Flow but others have called other things over time, like being “in the zone.”
The author talks about achieving this control as synonymous with the enviable ability to persevere despite obstacles and setbacks and transform hopeless situations into challenges to be overcome, just through the force of personality.This ability comes directly from ways to order consciousness so as to be in control of feelings and thoughts.The normal entropy/chaos of the mind is the enemy.There were a few key moments or takeaways in the book for me.
1. When one’s experience is most positive – when one is achieving Flow – people cite the following conditions in this order of importance:
– Confront tasks we have a chance of completing
– Able to concentrate
– Concentration is possible because the task has clear goals and…
– …provides immediate feedback
– Act with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life
– Exercise a sense of control over actions
– Concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the experience is over
2. Becoming more Autotelic – learning how to make experiences ends in and of themselves – coming from the Greek words for “self” and “goal,” this concept is savoring a given activity for its own sake, NOT for its consequences and is a key to achieving Flow.Whether you create a mental construct around beating a personal record, doing math or pattern matching in your head, or something else, being able to focus enough energy on the task at hand and not be distracted by the world around (present or future) is key.It’s a little like what I wrote a few months ago about how achieving mental discipline in the small areas of one’s life can lead to much greater things by building confidence and clearing mental clutter.
3. The concept of the “Flow channel” – as skill increases, challenges must also increase proportionally in order for us to continue learning, growing, and excelling – and achieving Flow.
4. Transformational coping is the ability to cheat chaos – transforming a hopeless situation into a new flow activity that can be controlled and enjoyed and emerge stronger from…
– Unselfconscious self-assurance – ego absent but confident, not at odds with environment but part of it
– Focusing attention on the world – looking outward, not inward
– The discovery of new solutions – being able to perceive unexpected opportunities as a result
5. How to develop the autotelic self
– Set clear goals
– Become immersed in the activity
– Pay attention to what’s happening
– Learn to enjoy immediate experience
The book reminded me of a couple other things I’ve read, in case any of these resonate with you.First, Tim Gallwey’s “Inner Game” books where he talks about “relaxed concentration,” basically the Flow state, and the inner conflict between focus on the event and focus on the consequences, between mental chaos and mental discipline, personified as Self 1 and Self 2.If you haven’t read these, any are good and give you the general idea, depending on which piques your interest the most:The Inner Game of Golf (book, Kindle), The Inner Game of Tennis (book only), and The Inner Game of Work (book, Kindle).Second, David Allen’s Getting Things Done theory about how a clear, uncluttered mind can do its best work.As Flow says, achieving an ordered mental condition is difficult – unless a person knows how to give order to his or her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment.
I’m not sure this book short does the book justice.It’s pretty complex and is rich with examples, but Flow (book, Kindle) is well worth a read if you’re into the theory of self control leading to better results and more happiness in life.Thanks to my friend Jonathan Shapiro for this book.
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.
Getting the Right Things Done: A Leader’s Guide to Planning and Execution, by Pascal Dennis, is an excellent and extraordinarily practical book to read if you’re trying to create or reengineer your company’s planning, goal setting, and accountability processes. It’s very similar to the framework that we have generally adapted our planning and goals process off of at Return Path for the last few years, Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage (book, post/Part I of this series). My guess is that we will borrow from this and adapt our process even further for 2014.
The book’s history is in Toyota’s Lean Manufacturing system, and given the Lean meme floating around the land of tech startups these days, my guess is that its concepts will resonate with most of the readers of this blog. The book’s language — True North and Mother Strategies and A3s and Baby A3s — is a little funky, but the principles of simplicity, having a clear target, building a few major initiatives to drive to the target, linking all the plans, and measuring progress are universal. The “Plan-Do-Check-Adjust” cycle is smart and one of those things that is, to quote an old friend of mine, “common sense that turns out is not so common.”
One interesting thing that the book touches on a bit is the connection between planning/goals and performance management/reviews. This is something we’ve done fairly well but somewhat piecemeal over the years that we’re increasingly trying to link together more formally.
All in, this is a good read. It’s not a great fable like Lencioni’s books or Goldratt’s classic The Goal (reminiscent since its example is a manufacturing company). But it’s approachable, and it comes with a slew of sample processes and reports that make the theory come to life. If you’re in plan-to-plan mode, I’d recommend Getting the Right Things Done as well as The Advantage.
Book Short: Steve Jobs and Lessons for CEOs and Founders
First, if you work in the internet, grew up during the rise of the PC, or are an avid consumer of Apple products, read the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs (book, kindle). It’s long but well worth it.
I know much has been written about the subject and the book, so I won’t be long or formal, but here are the things that struck me from my perspective as a founder and CEO, many taken from specific passages from the book:
In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important. Man is that ever true. I’ve come up with some ideas over the years at Return Path, but hardly a majority or even a plurality of them. But I think of myself as innovative because I’ve led the organization to execute them. I also think innovation has as much to do with how work gets done as it does what work gets done.
There were some upsides to Jobs’s demanding and wounding behavior. People who were not crushed ended up being stronger. They did better work, out of both fear and an eagerness to please. I guess that’s an upside. But only in a dysfunctional sort of way.
When one reporter asked him immediately afterward why the (NeXT) machine was going to be so late, Jobs replied, “It’s not late. It’s five years ahead of its time.” Amen to that. Sometimes product deadlines are artificial and silly. There’s another great related quote (I forget where it’s from) that goes something like “The future is here…it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” New releases can be about delivering the future for the first time…or about distributing it more broadly.
People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.” Amen. See Powerpointless.
The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind. This is critical. You can’t always be first in everything. But ultimately, if you’re a good company, you can figure out how to recover when you’re not first. Exhibit A: Microsoft.
In order to institutionalize the lessons that he and his team were learning, Jobs started an in-house center called Apple University. He hired Joel Podolny, who was dean of the Yale School of Management, to compile a series of case studies analyzing important decisions the company had made, including the switch to the Intel microprocessor and the decision to open the Apple Stores. Top executives spent time teaching the cases to new employees, so that the Apple style of decision making would be embedded in the culture. This is one of the most emotionally intelligent things Jobs did, if you just read his actions in the book and know nothing else. Love the style or hate it – teaching it to the company reinforces a strong and consistent culture.
Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page. There’s always a tension between listening TO customers and innovating FOR them. Great companies have to do both, and know when to do which.
What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. I didn’t invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how—because we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me. This is perhaps one of the best explanations I’ve ever heard of how creativity can be applied to non-creative (e.g., most business) jobs. I love this.
My board member Scott Weiss wrote a great post about the book as well and drew his own CEO lessons from it – also worth a read here.
Appropos of that, both Scott and I found out about Steve Jobs’ death at a Return Path Board dinner. Fred broke the news when he saw it on his phone, and we had a moment of silence. It was about as good a group as you can expect to be with upon hearing the news that an industry pioneer and icon has left us. Here’s to you, Steve. You may or may not have been a management role model, but your pursuit of perfection worked out well for your customers, and most important, you certainly had as much of an impact on society as just about anyone in business (or maybe all walks of life) that I can think of.
This post was inspired by Startup CXO and was originally published by Techstars on The Line.
If you’re new to the Chief Customer Officer role, we’d like to share some advice we wish we had learned earlier in our careers. There are a few common misconceptions about customers and the service organization. If you don’t realize these as misperceptions, you can spend a lot of time dealing with issues that are not real, but perceived. We have identified five of these common misperceptions, although we are sure there are more.
Misperception #1: The service organization fully controls churn (customer attrition)
In a lot of organizations you’ll see the service organization be measured solely on customer churn. If you really think about it, there are many elements that come into play that impact churn, including
How the customer is sold
The quality of the product
How easy it is to onboard the customer
How easy it is to use the product
How easy it is for the customer to understand what kind of value they’re getting out of the product
Of course, the service functions do have a critical role, but they’re not the only functions in a company that impact churn. The responsibility for churn also lies with sales, engineering, marketing, and other teams. One reason why you need a C-level senior person in charge of all service operations is because you need someone who understands the customer experience broadly and that person has to work cross-functionally to ensure customer retention.
Misperception #2: The service organization is just a cost center
In many businesses, if a function isn’t generating new revenue, it’s seen as “second class.” From our perspective revenue retained is revenue gained and the service organization has a big impact on retaining revenue. In addition, the account management portion of a service organization is often in charge of up-sale and cross-sale opportunities which can be huge areas of growth. CCOs should work within their company to alter that misperception of service as a cost center because the service organization can have a huge impact on revenues.
Misperception #3: Service teams should focus on responding to defections
I’ve recently found a situation where the customer success team is built to focus on the clients who have raised their hand and said, “I want to leave.” This reactive approach drives low job satisfaction and isn’t the “best and highest use” of a service team’s time. By the time a customer is frustrated enough, or isn’t seeing the value enough, that they want to leave — you’ve missed a window of opportunity. The right focus should be proactively helping customers reach their desired business objectives. If you can do that, most customers will stay. That’s the theory behind the rise of the customer success team and that’s what great companies are doing today.
Misperception #4: Service’s job is to “paper over” gaps in the product
There is a widespread practice of covering for product issues by throwing service at the problem. That certainly can work, but it’s not optimal. The superior approach is to focus the service team on becoming a trusted advisor for customers, helping those customers achieve their desired outcomes. To do that, the CCO will have to work cross-functionally with the product team, the marketing team, and the sales team to drive a more friction-free customer experience.
Misperception #5: Service is boring and tactical
There is a wide-spread misperception that working in the service organization is boring. It’s mundane, it’s tactical, it doesn’t appeal to people who think strategy is grander than tactics. I don’t agree with that at all. A great service organization starts with a strategy. It starts with an understanding of customer segmentation. It includes thinking about the different customer personas and how to define an appropriate and valuable customer experience. That core strategy actually takes a while to develop. Once the strategy takes hold, it is core to driving retention over time. And, while a lot of people perceive that the service organization jobs are boring, or just answering trouble tickets or reacting to client problems, that’s not the whole role. It is a strategic role as well.
The Chief Customer Officer has a big impact on the success of a company, especially startups and scaleups, and their function touches nearly every aspect of a company. To give your company the best chance of scaling, the Chief Customer Officer should understand, pinpoint, and manage misperceptions so that they can devote their time, energy, and resources to the real problems that help customers.
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