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:  Alignment Well Defined, Part II

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:  Myers-Briggs Redux

Instinct:  Tapping Your Entrepreneurial DNA to Achieve Your Business Goals, by Tom Harrison of Omnicom, is an ok book, although I wouldn’t rush out to buy it tomorrow.  The author talks about five broad aspects of our personalities that influence how we operate in a business setting:  Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.  These traits are remarkably similar to those in the popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator that so many executives have taken over the years.

It’s not just that you want to be high, high, high, high, and low in the Big 5.  Harrison asserts that successful entrepreneurs need a balance of openness and conscientiousness in order to be receptive to new ideas, but be able finish what you start; a balance of extroversion and agreeableness so that you have enough energy but also have the ability to work with others; and not too much neuroticism, as you have to be able to take risks.

The book not only talks about how to spot these factors, but how to work around them if you don’t have them (that part is particularly useful, but he doesn’t do it for all five factors).  He also talks about the entrepreneurial addiction to success, and creating the all-important Servant CEO culture, which I certainly agree with and wrote about early on in this blog in my “Who’s The Boss?” posting.

Harrison does have a great section on how “Nice Guys” can and should be winners; how being nice and having guts aren’t mutually exclusive, and he gives a well-written Twelve Rules for expressing the Nice Guy gene:

– Don’t walk on other people, but don’t let them walk on you

– Respect the big idea in everyone

– Own everything

– Never let ’em see you sweat Keep it simple

– Never think in terms of “So what have you done for me today?”

– More is less

– Live your word consistently

– Don’t lie:  fix what’s causing you to think you need to lie

– Never forget to thank, congratulate, or acknowledge people for their efforts

– Keep your door and your heart open

– Never stand in the way of balance

The most annoying part of the book is that Harrison keeps making references to a handful of genetic studies about twins to prove on and off that traits are inherited and that inherited traits can be expressed in different ways.  These references are mildly interesting, but they detract from the substance of the book.

Overall, the book has some interesting points in it, but it’s too much like Jim Collins’ Good to Great and Built to Last, only without the depth of business research and case studies.  Plus, Harrison does the one thing I find most irritating in business books — he is clearly an expert in one thing (business), but he unnecessarily pretends to be an expert in another thing (genetics) in order to make his point.

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.

Book Short:  The Little Engine that Could

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.

Book Short: A Marketing-Led Turnaround

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.

Book Short: Chip Off the Old Block

I have to admit, I was more than a little skeptical when Craig Spiezle handed me a copy of The Speed of Trust, by Stephen M. R. Covey, at the OTA summit last week. The author is the son of THE Stephen Covey, author of the world famous Seven Habits of Highly Effective People as well as The Eighth Habit (book, post). Would the book have substance and merit or be drafting off the dad’s good name?

I dog-ear pages of books as I read them, noting the pages that are most interesting if I ever want to go back and take a quick pass through the book to remind me about it (and yes, Ezra, I can do this on the Kindle as well via the bookmark feature). If dog-ear quantity is a mark of how impactful a book is, The Speed of Trust is towards the top of the list for me.

The book builds nicely on Seven Habits and The Eighth Habit and almost reads like the work of Stephen the father. The meat of the book is divided into two sections: one on developing what Covey calls “self trust,” a concept not unlike what I blogged about a few months ago, that if you make and keep commitments to yourself, you build a level of self-confidence and discipline that translates directly into better work and a better mental state. The other core section is one on building trust in relationships, where Covey lists out 13 behaviors that all lead to the development of trust.

In fact, we just had a medium-size trust breach a couple weeks ago with one of our key clients. Reading the book just as we are struggling to “right the wrong” was particularly impactful to me and gave me a number of good ideas for how to move past the issue without simply relying on self-flagellation and blunt apologies. This is a book full of practical applications.

It’s not a perfect book (no book is), and in particular its notion of societal trust through contribution is a bit weak relative to the rest of the book, but The Speed of Trust is an excellent read for anyone who wants to understand the fastest way to build — and destroy — a winning culture. It reads like a sequel of Covey senior’s books, but that’s a good thing.

5 Ways to Spot Trends That Will Make You (and Your Business) More Successful

I’ve recently started writing a column for The Magill Report, the new venture by Ken Magill, previously of Direct magazine and even more previously DMNews. Ken has been covering email for a long time and is one of the smartest journalists I know in this space. My column, which I share with my colleagues Jack Sinclair and George Bilbrey, covers how to approach the business of email marketing, thoughts on the future of email and other digital technologies, and more general articles on company-building in the online industry – all from the perspective of an entrepreneur. Below is a re-post of this week’s version, which I think my OnlyOnce readers will enjoy.

Last week I published my annual “Unpredictions” for 2011. This tradition grew out of the fact that I hate doing predictions and my marketing team loves them. So we compromise by predicting what won’t happen.

But the truth is that the annual prediction ritual – while trite – is really just trend-spotting. And trend-spotting is an important skill for entrepreneurs. Fortunately it’s a skill that can be acquired, at least it can with enough deliberate practice (another skill I talk about here).

Here are five habits you should consider cultivating if being a better trend spotter is in your career roadmap.

Read voraciously. I read about 50 books every year.  About half of them are business books, and I also mix in a bit of fiction, humor, American history, architecture and urban planning, and evolutionary biology.  I keep up with more than 50 blogs and I read all the trade publications that cover email.  I also read the Wall Street Journal and The Economist regularly.  What you read is a little less important than just reading a lot, and diversely.

Use social media (wisely). Julia Child once said that the key to success in life was having great parents. My advice to you is quite a bit simpler:  make friends with smart people. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others have given us a window into the world unlike any other. Status updates, tweets, and – maybe most important of all – links shared by your network of friends and colleagues gives you a sense of what people are talking about, thinking about and working on. And you can’t just lurk.  You actually have to be “in” to get something “out.”

Follow the money. Pay attention to where money gets invested and spent. This includes keeping an eye on venture capital, private equity, and the public markets, as well as where clients (mostly IT and marketing departments) are spending their dollars and what kinds of people they are hiring. Money flows toward ideas that people think will succeed. A pattern of investments in particular areas will give you clues to what might be the big ideas over the next five to 10 years.

Get out of the office: I think it’s hugely important for anyone in business, and especially entrepreneurs, to spend time in the world to get fresh perspectives. I’m not sure who coined the phrase, but our head of product management, Mike Mills, frequently refers to the NIHITO principle – Nothing Interesting Happens in the Office.  Now that’s not entirely true – running a company means needing to spend a huge amount of time with people and on people issues, but last year I traveled nearly 160,000 miles around the world meeting with prospect, clients, partners and industry luminaries. You don’t have to be a road warrior to get this one right – you can attend events in your local area, develop a local network of people you can meet with regularly – but you do have to get out there.

Take a break. While you need information to understand trends, you can quickly get overloaded with too much data.  Trend spotting is, in many ways, about pattern recognition. And that is often easier to do when your mind is relaxed.  Ever notice that you have moments of true epiphany in the shower or while running? Give yourself time every week to unplug and let your mind recharge. As Steven Covey says, “sharpen that saw”!

Startup CEO (OnlyOnce – the book!), Part III – Pre-Order Now

My book, Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, is now available for pre-order on Amazon in multiple formats (Print, Kindle), which is an exciting milestone in this project!  The book is due out right after Labor Day, but Brad Feld tells me that the more pre-orders I have, the better.  Please pardon the self-promotion, but click away if you’re interested!

Here are a few quick thoughts about the book, though I’ll post more about it and the process at some point:

• I’ll be using the hashtag #startupceo more now to encourage discussion of topics related to startup CEOs – please join me!
• The book has been described by a few CEOs who read it and commented early for me along the lines of “The Lean Startup movement is great, but this book starts where most of those books end and takes you through the ‘so you have a product that works in-market – now what?’ questions”
• The book is part of the Startup Revolution series that Brad has been working on for a couple years now, including Do More (Even) Faster, Venture Deals, Startup Communities, and Startup Life (with two more to come, Startup Boards and Startup Metrics)
• Writing a book is a LOT harder than I expected!

At this point, the best thing I can do to encourage you to read/buy is to share the full and final table of contents with you, sections/chapters/headings.  When I get closer in, I may publish some excerpts of new content here on Only Once.  Here’s the outline:

Part I: Storytelling

• Chapter 1: Dream the Possible Dream…Entrepreneurship and Creativity, “A Faster Horse,” Vetting Ideas
• Chapter 2: Defining and Testing the Story…Start Out By Admitting You’re Wrong, A Lean Business Plan Template, Problem, Solution, Key Metrics, Unique Value Proposition and Unfair Advantages, Channels, Customer Segments, Cost Structure and Revenue Streams
• Chapter 3: Telling the Story to Your Investors…The Business Plan is Dead. Long Live the Business Plan, The Investor Presentation, The Elevator Pitch, The Size of the Opportunity, Your Competitive Advantage, Current Status and Roadmap from Today, The Strength of Your Team, Summary Financials, Investor Presentations for Larger Startups
• Chapter 4: Telling the Story to Your Team…Defining Your Mission, Vision and Values, The Top-down Approach, The Bottom-Up Approach, The Hybrid Approach, Design a Lofty Mission Statement
• Chapter 5: Revising the Story…Workshopping, Knowing When It’s Time to Make a Change, Corporate Pivots: Telling the Story Differently, Consolidating, Diversifying, Focusing, Business Pivots: Telling a Different Story
• Chapter 6: Bringing the Story to Life…Building Your Company Purposefully, The Critical Elements of Company-Building, Articulating Purpose:  The Moral of the Story, You Can Be a Force for Helping Others—Even If Indirectly

Part II: Building the Company’s Human Capital

• Chapter 7: Fielding a Great Team…From Protozoa to Pancreas, The Best and the Brightest, What About HR?, What About Sales & Marketing?, Scaling Your Team Over Time
• Chapter 8: The CEO as Functional Supervisor…Rules for General Managers
• Chapter 9: Crafting Your Company’s Culture…, Introducing Fig Wasp #879, Six Legs and a Pair of Wings, Let People Be People, Build an Environment of Trust
• Chapter 10: The Hiring Challenge…Unique Challenges for Startups, Recruiting Outstanding Talent, Staying “In-Market”, Recruitment Tools, The Interview: Filtering Potential Candidates, Two Ears One Mouth, Who Should You Interview?, Onboarding: The First 90 Days
• Chapter 11: Every Day in Every Way, We Get a Little Better…The Feedback Matrix, 1:1 Check-ins, “Hallway” Feedback, Performance Reviews, The 360, Soliciting Feedback on Your Own Performance, Crafting and Meeting Development Plans      
• Chapter 12: Compensation…General Guidelines for Determining Compensation, The Three Elements of Startup Compensation, Base Pay, Incentive Pay, Equity              
• Chapter 13: Promoting                …Recruiting from Within, Applying the “Peter Principle” to Management, Scaling Horizontally, Promoting Responsibilities Rather than Swapping Titles               
• Chapter 14: Rewarding: “It’s the Little Things” That Matter…It Never Goes Without Saying, Building a Culture of Appreciation
• Chapter 15: Managing Remote Offices and Employees…Brick and Mortar Values in a Virtual World, Best Practices for Managing Remote Employees
• Chapter 16: Firing: When It’s Not Working…No One Should Ever Be Surprised to Be Fired, Termination and the Limits of Transparency, Layoffs

Part III: Execution

• Chapter 17: Creating a Company Operating System…Creating Company Rhythms, A Marathon? Or a Sprint?
• Chapter 18: Creating Your Operating Plan and Setting Goals…Turning Strategic Plans into Operating Plans, Financial Planning, Bringing Your Team into Alignment with Your Plans, Guidelines for Setting Goals
• Chapter 19: Making Sure There’s Enough Money in the Bank…Scaling Your Financial Instincts, Boiling the Frog, To Grow or to Profit? That Is the Question, First Perfect the Model, Choosing Growth, Choosing Profits, The Third Way
• Chapter 20: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Financing…Equity Investors, Venture Capitalists, Angel Investors, Strategic Investors, Debt, Convertible Debt, Venture Debt, Bank Loans, Personal Debt, Bootstrapping, Customer Financing, Your Own Cash Flow
• Chapter 21: When and How to Raise Money…When to Start Looking for VC Money, The Top 11 Takeaways for Financing Negotiations
• Chapter 22: Forecasting and Budgeting…Rigorous Financial Modeling, Of Course You’re Wrong—But Wrong How?, Budgeting in a Context of Uncertainty, Forecast, Early and Often
• Chapter 23: Collecting Data…External Data, Learning from Customers, Learning from (Un)Employees, Internal Data, Skip-Level Meetings, Subbing, Productive Eavesdropping
• Chapter 24: Managing in Tough Times…Managing in an Economic Downturn, Hope Is Not a Strategy—But It’s Not a Bad Tactic, Look for Nickels and Dimes under the Sofa, Never Waste a Good Crisis, Managing in a Difficult Business Situation
• Chapter 25: Meeting Routines…Lencioni’s Meeting Framework, Skip-Level Meetings, Running a Productive Offsite
• Chapter 26: Driving Alignment…Five Keys to Startup Alignment, Aligning Individual Incentives with Global Goals
• Chapter 27: Have You Learned Your Lesson?…The Value (and Limitations) of Benchmarking, The Art of the Post-Mortem
• Chapter 28: Going Global…Should Your Business Go Global?, How to Establish a Global Presence, Overcoming the Challenges of Going Global, Best Practices for Managing International Offices and Employees
• Chapter 29: The Role of M&A…Using Acquisitions as a Tool in Your Strategic Arsenal, The Mechanics of Financing and Closing Acquisitions, Stock, Cash, Earn Out, The Flipside of M&A: Divestiture, Odds and Ends, Integration (and Separation)
• Chapter 30: Competition…Playing Hardball, Playing Offense vs. Playing Defense, Good and Bad Competitors
• Chapter 31: Failure…Failure and the Startup Model, Failure Is Not an Orphan

Part IV: Building and Leading a Board of Directors

• Chapter 32: The Value of a Good Board…Why Have a Board?, Everybody Needs a Boss, The Board as Forcing Function, Pattern Matching, Forests, Trees, Honest Discussion and Debate
• Chapter 33: Building Your Board…What Makes a Great Board Member?, Recruiting a Board Member, Compensating Your Board, Boards as Teams, Structuring Your Board, Board Size, Board Committees, Chairing the Board, Running a Board Feedback Process, Building an Advisory Board
• Chapter 34: Board Meeting Materials…“The Board Book”, Sample Return Path Board Book, The Value of Preparing for Board Meetings
• Chapter 35: Running Effective Board Meetings…Scheduling Board Meetings, Building a Forward-Looking Agenda, In-Meeting Materials, Protocol, Attendance and Seating, Device-Free Meetings, Executive and Closed Sessions
• Chapter 36: Non-Board Meeting Time…Ad Hoc Meetings, Pre-Meetings, Social Outings
• Chapter 37: Decision-Making and the Board…The Buck Stops—Where?, Making Difficult Decisions in Concert, Managing Conflict with Your Board
• Chapter 38: Working with the Board on Your Compensation and Review…The CEO’s Performance Review, Your Compensation, Incentive Pay, Equity, Expenses
• Chapter 39: Serving on Other Boards…The Basics of Serving on Other Boards, Substance, or Style?

Part V: Managing Yourself So You Can Manage Others

• Chapter 40: Creating a Personal Operating System…Managing Your Agenda, Managing Your Calendar, Managing Your Time, Feedback Loops
• Chapter 41: Working with an Executive Assistant…Finding an Executive Assistant, What an Executive Assistant Does
• Chapter 42: Working with a Coach…The Value of Executive Coaches, Areas Where an Executive Coach Can Help
• Chapter 43: The Importance of Peer Groups…The Gang of Six, Problem-Solving in Tandem
• Chapter 44: Staying Fresh…Managing the Highs and Lows, Staying Mentally Fresh, At Your Company, Out and About, Staying Healthy, Me Time
• Chapter 45: Your Family…Making Room for Home Life, Involving Family in Work, Bringing Work Principles Home
• Chapter 46: Traveling…Sealing the Deal with a Handshake, Making the Most of Travel Time, Staying Disciplined on the Road
• Chapter 47: Taking Stock of the Year…Celebrating “Yes”; Addressing “No”, Are You Having Fun?, Are You Learning and Growing as a Professional?, Is It Financially Rewarding?, Are You Making an Impact?
• Chapter 48:  A Note on Exits…Five Rules of Thumb for Successfully Selling Your Company

 If you’re still with me and interested, again here are the links to pre-order (Print, Kindle).

Book Short:  Way, Way Beyond Books

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, by Brad Stone, was a great read.  Amazon is a fascinating, and phenomenally successful company, and Jeff is a legendary technology leader.  The Everything Store is a company and personal biography and totally delivers.

Forget about the fact that Amazon is now almost $100B in revenues and still growing like mad.  I find it even more amazing that a single company could be the largest ecommerce site on the planet while successfully pioneering both cloud computing services and e-readers.  The stories of all these things are in the book.

As a CEO, I enjoyed reading more of the vignettes behind the things that Amazon is reputationally known for in the tech world – doors as desks, their unique meeting formats, the toughness of the culture, the extensive risk taking of growth over profits, and what works and does not work about Bezos’ authoritative and domineering style.  And it’s always great to be reminded that even the biggest and best companies had to cheat death 10 times over before “arriving.”

This is good fun and learning for anyone in the business world.  It reminded me most of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs ,which I wrote about here, although it’s more of a company history and less of a biography than the Jobs book.

Book Short – Blink part III – Undo?

I just finished reading Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, and honestly, I wish I could hit Life’s Undo button and reclaim those hours.  I love Michael Lewis, and he’s one of those authors where if he writes it, I will read it.  But this one wasn’t really worth it for me.

Having said that, I think if you haven’t already read both Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (review, buy) and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (review, buy), then it might be worth it.  But having read those two books, The Undoing Project had too much overlap and not enough “underlap” (to quote my friend Tom Bartel) – that is, not enough new stuff of substance for me.  The book mostly went into the personal relationship between two academic thinkers, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.  It also touched on some of the highlights of their work, which, while coming out of the field of psychology, won them a Nobel prize in Economics for illuminating some of the underlying mechanics of how we make decisions.

The two most interesting pieces of their work to me, which are related in the book, are:

First, that human decision-making is incredibly nuanced and complex, and that at least 25% of the time, the transitive property doesn’t apply.  For example, I may prefer coffee to tea, and I may prefer tea to hot chocolate, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I prefer coffee to hot chocolate.

From the book, “When faced with complex multidimensional alternatives, such as job offers, gambles or [political] candidates, it is extremely difficult to utilize properly all the available information.” It wasn’t that people actually preferred A to B and B to C and then turned around and preferred C to A. It was that it was sometimes very hard to understand the differences. Amos didn’t think that the real world was as likely to fool people into contradicting themselves as were the experiments he had designed.  And the choice created its own context: Different features might assume greater prominence in the mind when the coffee was being compared to tea (caffeine) than when it was being compared to hot chocolate (sugar). And what was true of drinks might also be true of people, and ideas, and emotions. The idea was interesting: When people make decisions, they are also making judgments about similarity, between some object in the real world and what they ideally want. They make these judgments by, in effect, counting up the features they notice. And as the noticeability of features can be manipulated by the way they are highlighted, the sense of how similar two things are might also be manipulated.”

Second, what Kahneman and Tversky called Prospect Theory, which is basically that humans are more motivated by the fear of loss as opposed to the greed of gain.  I’ve written about the “Fear/Greed Continuum” of my former boss from many years ago before.  I’m not sure he knew about Kahneman and Tversky’s work when he came up with that construct, and I certainly didn’t know about it when I first blogged about it years ago.  Do this experiment – ask someone both of these questions:  Would you rather be handed $500 or have a 50% chance of winning $1,000 and a 50% of getting nothing?  Then, Would you rather hand me $500 or have a 50% chance of owing me $1,000 and a 50% chance of owing me nothing?  Most of the time, the answers are not the same.

For fun, I tried this out on my kids and re-proved Prospect Theory, just in case anyone was worried about it.

Anyway, bottom line on this book – read it if you haven’t ready those other two books, skip it if you have, maybe skim it if you’ve read one of them!