Book Short:  Crazy Eights

In honor of Return Path being in the midst of its eighth year, I recently read a pair of books with 8 in the title (ok, I would have read them anyway, but that made for a convenient criterion when selecting out of my very large “to read” pile).

Ram Charan’s latest, Know-How:  The 8 Skills That Separate People People Who Perform From Those Who Don’t, was pretty good and classic Charan.  Quick, easy to skim and still get the main points.  The book lost a little credibility with me when Charan lionized Verizon (perhaps he uses a different carrier himself) and Bob Nardelli (the book was published before Nardelli’s high profile dismissal), but makes good points nonetheless.  Some of the 8 Skills he talks about are what you’d expect on the soft side of leadership — building the team, understanding the social system, judging people — but his best examples were particularly actionable around positioning, goal setting, and setting priorities.  The book reminded me much more of Execution and much less of Confronting Reality (which is a good thing).

For years I’ve felt like the last person around to still not have read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, so I thought I’d skip straight to the punchline and read Stephen Covey’s newer book, The 8th Habit:  From Effectiveness to Greatness.  Fortunately, as I’d hoped, the new book summarizes the prior book several times over, so if you haven’t read the first, you could certainly just start with this one.  The book also comes with a DVD of 16 short films, some of which are great — both inspirational and poignant.  Unlike most business books, the 8th Habit is NOT skimmable.  It almost has too much material in it and could probably be read multiple times or at least in smaller pieces.  The actual 8th habit Covey talks about is what he calls Find Your Voice and Help Others Find Their Voices and is a great encapsulation of what leading a knowledge worker business is all about.  But the book is much deeper and richer than that in its many models and frameworks and examples/tie-ins to business and goes beyond the “touchy feely” into hard-nosed topics around execution and strategy.

Now I’m looking for the DVD of the first season of Eight is Enough!

Book Short:  Tales of Two Cities

Return Path is basically dual-headquartered in New York City and Broomfield, Colorado, so two recently published books which provide history and insights into the tech industry in those two cities were both of interest to me.

Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City, by Brad Feld (book, kindle) came out a few months ago and is part of Brad’s Startup Revolution series which will also include my upcoming book Startup CEO, to be published this fall.  In the book, Brad uses the example of the Boulder/Denver area and a few different sectors to demonstrate a blueprint to creating an entrepreneurial ecosystem – the kind that are popping up all over the world of late.

Tech and the City: The Making of New York’s Startup Community, by Alessandro Piol (kindle only) hits on many of the same themes and topics as they relate to New York City, although the book is more of a history of the New York tech scene than a framework with examples.  The book draws heavily on quotes from Fred Wilson, like Brad, a long time friend and Board member.  One of the things the book left me thinking about was what the New York tech scene will look like in 30 years after the new Cornell-Technion campus is up and running.  That plus the current momentum of the tech industry in New York, plus the sheer commercial scale of the city, could really produce an interesting environment down the road that actually starts to rival Silicon Valley, though rival probably isn’t the right word.

All in, these two books do a good job of chronicling the industry I work in, in the two cities where I work, but they also abstract nicely to broader principles about public-private collaboration as well as sector development.

Pret a Manager

My friend James is the GM of the Pret a Manger (a chain of about 250 “everyday luxury” quick service restaurants in the UK and US) at 36th and 5th in Manhattan.  James recently won the President’s Award at Pret for doing an outstanding job opening up a new restaurant.  As part of my ongoing effort to learn and grow as a manager, I thought it would be interesting to spend a day shadowing James and seeing what his operation and management style looked like for a team of two dozen colleagues in a completely different environment than Return Path.  That day was today.  I’ll try to write up the day as combination of observations and learnings applied to our business.  This will be a much longer post than usual.  The title of this post is not a typo – James is “ready to manage.”

1. Team meeting.  The day started at 6:45 a.m. pre-opening with a “team brief” meeting.  The meeting only included half a dozen colleagues who were on hand for the opening, it was a mix of fun and serious, and it ended with three succinct points to remember for the day.  I haven’t done a daily huddle with my team in years, but we do daily stand-ups all across the company in different teams.  The interesting learning, though, is that James leaves the meeting and writes the three points on a whiteboard downstairs near the staff room.  All staff members who come in after the meeting are expected to read the board and internalize the three points (even though they missed the meeting) and are quizzed on them spontaneously during the day.  Key learning:  missing a meeting doesn’t have to mean missing the content of the meeting.

2. Individual 1:1 meeting.  I saw one of these, and it was a mix of a performance review and a development planning session.  It was a little more one-way in communication than ours are, but it did end up having a bunch of back-and-forth.  James’s approach to management is a lot of informal feedback “in the moment,” so this formal check-in contained no surprises for the employee.  The environment was a little challenging for the meeting, since it was in the restaurant (there’s no closed office, and all meetings are done on-site).  The centerpiece of the meeting was a “Start-Stop-Continue” form.  Key learning:  Start-Stop-Continue is a good succinct check-in format.

3. Importance of values.  There were two forms of this that I saw today.  One was a list of 13 key behaviors with an explanation next to each of specific good and bad examples of the behavior.  The behaviors were very clear and were “escalating,” meaning Team Members were expected to practice the first 5-6 of them, Team Leads the first 7-8, Managers the first 10, Head Office staff the first 12, Executives all 13 (roughly).  The second was this “Pret Recipe,” as posted on the public message board (see picture below).  Note – just like our values at Return Path, it all starts with the employee.  One interesting nugget I got from speaking to a relatively new employee who had just joined at the entry level after being recruited from a prominent fast food chain where he had been a store general manager was “Pret really believes this stuff — no lip service.”

I saw the values in action in two different ways.  The first was on the message board, where each element of the Pret Recipe was broken out with a list of supporting documents below it, per the below photo.  Very visual, very clear.

The second was that in James’s team meeting and in his 1:1 meeting, he consistently referenced the behaviors.  Key learning:  having values is great, making them come to life and be relevant for a team day-in, day-out is a lot harder but quite powerful when you get it right.

4. Managing by checklist.  I wrote about this topic a while ago here, but there is nothing like food service retail to demand this kind of attention to detail.  Wow.  They have checklists and standards for everything.  Adherence to standards is what keeps the place humming.  Key learning:  it feels like we have ~1% of the documentation of job processes that Pret does, and I’m thinking that as we get bigger and have people in more and more locations doing the same job, a little more documentation is probably in order to ensure consistency of delivery.

5. Extreme team-based and individual incentive compensation.  Team members start at $9/hour (22% above minimum wage that most competitors offer).  However, any week in which any individual store passes a Mystery Shopper test, the entire staff receives an incremental $2/hour for the whole week.  Any particular employee who is called out for outstanding service during a Mystery Shop receives a $100 bonus, or a $200 bonus if the store also passes the test.  The way the math works out, an entry level employee who gets the maximum bonus earns a 100% bonus for that week.  But the extra $2/hour per team member for a week seemed to be a powerful incentive across the board.  Key learning: team-based incentive comp is something we use here for executives, but maybe it’s worth considering for other teams as well.

6. Integrated systems.  Pret has basically one single software system that runs the whole business from inventory to labor scheduling to finances.  All data flows through it directly from point of sale or via manager single-entry.  All reports are available on demand.  The system is pretty slick.  There doesn’t seem to be much use of side systems and side spreadsheets, though I’m sure there are some.  Key learning: there’s a lot to be said for having a little more information standardized across the business, though the flip side is that this system is a single point of failure and also much less flexible than what we have.

7. Think time.  I’ve written a little about working “on the business, not in the business,” or what I call OTB time, once before, and I have another post queued up for later this summer about the same.  Brad Feld also very kindly wrote about it in reference to Return Path last week.  Working in retail means that time to work on IMPORTANT BUT NOT URGENT issues is extremely hard to come by and fragmented.  I suspect that it comes more at the end of the day for James, and it probably comes a lot more when he doesn’t have someone like me observing him and asking him questions.  But his “office” (below), exposed to the loud music and sounds and smells of the kitchen, certainly doesn’t lend itself to think time!  Key learning:  of course customers come first, but boy is it critical to make space to work OTB, not just ITB.  Oh, and James needs a new chair that’s more ergonomically compatible with his high countertop desk.

Years ago, I spent a few weekends working in my cousin Michael’s wine store in Hudson, NY, and I wrote up the experience in two different posts on this blog, the first one about the similarities between running a 2-person company and a 200-person company, and the second one about how in a small business, you have to wear one of every kind of hat there is.  My conclusion then was that there are more similarities than differences when it comes to running businesses of different types.  My conclusion from today is exactly the same, though the focus on management made for a very different experience.

Thanks to James, Gustavo, Orlanda, Shawona, and the rest of the team at the 36th & 5th Pret for putting up with the distraction of me for the bulk of the day today — I learned a lot (and particularly enjoyed the NYC Meatball Hot Wrap) and now have to figure out how to return the favor to you!

Book Short:  Like a Prequel to My Book

How to Start a Business, by Jason Nazar, CEO of our client Docstoc, is a great and quick (and free) eBook that feels a lot like a prequel to my book Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business (original outline here). My book is about scaling a business once you’ve started it.  Jason’s book is a really practical guide to starting it in the first place.

The thing that’s particularly good about this book is that it’s as much a resource guide as it is a book.  At the end of each of its 24 chapters (and within them as well), Jason adds a series of external links to other resources, from videos to checklists to templates.  The book answers a lot of really practical questions that are easy for product-focused entrepreneurs to gloss over or ignore, from corporate structures to insurance, from trademark registration to pitching VCs, from payroll to tax planning.

It’s great to see so much more being written for entrepreneurs these days.  Ash Maurya’s Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works (which I blogged about last week) is another related book that focuses on how to bring a new product to market.  But Jason’s eBook is a must read for anyone in TechStars or any accelerator program, or anyone contemplating starting a business.

Triple Book Short: For Parents

People who know me know that I am a voracious reader.  Among other things, I probably read about 25-30 books per year — and I wish I had time for more.  I probably read about 50% business books, which I blog about.  Most of my other reading is in a couple specific topical areas that interest me like American History and Evolutionary Biology.  Over the last few years, Mariquita and I have discovered and read a handful of books about parenting that have been foundational for us as we work deliberately at raising our three kids, and two of them have roots in some of the same philosophies, psychologies, and research as a lot of contemporary business literature.  So for parents everywhere, I thought I’d devote a book short to these three books.

The first one is Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, by Marc Weissbluth.  Having kids who sleep long and well has been the foundation for us to have a well functioning household.  Well rested kids are much easier than tired ones.  Well rested parents are more effective.  We have found that the principles in this book have consistently served us well on this front.  All three of our kids more or less slept through the night starting at 6-8 weeks and have been great sleepers since then.

Unconditional Parenting, by Alfie Kohn is basically, for those in the HR/OD field, “Action/Design” for parenting.  The principles in this book have applied to kids as young as 1 year old, and the examples in the book go through the teenage years.  Our main learnings from this book have been around moving away from more traditional forms of reward, punishment, and control and towards helping our kids make decisions as opposed to follow directions by understanding our kids perspective on things, working to help them articulate their own understanding of a situation, and helping them see the perspective of others.

Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child, by John Gottman, builds on a lot of the same underlying work that Daniel Goleman writes about in articles and business books around Emotional Intelligence (in fact, Goleman wrote the forward to this book as well).  The book lays out a process the author calls Emotional Coaching to help kids learn empathy and problem solving by showing kids empathy, teaching them to understand and label their own emotions, and working with them to craft solutions on their own, but doing the whole process in a very calm and 1:1 manner.  One of my favorite parts of the book, which is so unusual in business books and any kind of self-help book, is that the author has a whole section devoted to when NOT to use this process.

Parenting is a very personal thing, and there isn’t a right or wrong way to go about it.  I have a friend who is fond of saying that parenting is a little bit like the way comedian George Carlin used to describe “other drivers” on the highway.  People who are going slower than you are “a**holes” and people who are going faster than you are “crazy.”  Only you drive the “right way.”  So true, but if you’re a parent, there’s no more important thing to be deliberate about practicing than parenting, and these books have been a good practice guide for us.  We have found a full read of these three books to be very helpful to us in our work with our kids, and we have been very lucky that our main babysitter has been aligned with us on philosophy (and has been willing to read these books with us).

Boards That Lead, by Ram Charan, Dennis Carey, and Michael Useem, was recommended to me by a CEO Coach in the Bolster network, Tim Porthouse, who said he’s been referring it to his clients alongside Startup Boards. I don’t exactly belong in the company of Ram Charan (Brad and Mahendra probably do!), so I was excited to read it. While it’s definitely the “big company” version to Startup Boards, there are some good lessons for startup CEOs and founder to take away from it.

The best part about the book as it relates to ALL boards is the framework of Partner, Take Charge, Stay out of the Way, and Monitor. You can probably lump all potential board activities into these four buckets. If you look at it that way…these are pretty logical:

• Monitor – what you’d expect any board to do
• Stay out of the Way – basic execution/operations
• Partner – strategy, goals, risk, budget, leadership talent development
• Take Charge – CEO hiring/firing, Exec compensation, Ethics, and Board Governance itself.

There was an interesting nugget in the book as well called the Central Idea that I hadn’t seen articulated quite this way before. It’s basically a statement of what the business is and how it’s going to win. It’s about a page long, 8-10 bullet points, and it includes things like mission, strategy, key goals, and key operating pillars that underlie the goals. It basically wraps up all of Lencioni’s key questions in one page with a little more meat on the bones. I like it and may adopt it. The authors put the creation of the Central Idea into the Take Charge bucket, but I’d put it squarely in the Partner bucket.

Other than that, the book is what you’d expect and does have a lot of overlap with the world of startups. Its criteria for director selection are very similar to what we use at Bolster, as is its director evaluation framework. The book has a ton of handy checklists as well, some of which are more applicable than others to startups, for example Dealing with Nonperforming Directors and Spotting a Failing CEO.

All in, a good read if you’re a student of Boards.

Book Short: Wellness Redefined

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:

1. 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
2. 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
3. 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.

Note there is also a free whitepaper on the economics of well being that you can download here.  The white paper is ok…but not nearly as interesting as the book, and note that it does not substitute for the book.  Thanks to my colleague Cathy Hawley for this book!

5 Ways to Get Your Staff on the Same Page

[This post first appeared as an article in Entrepreneur Magazine as part of a new series I’m publishing there in conjunction with my book, Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business]

When a major issue arises, is everybody at your company serving the same interests? Or is one person serving the engineering team, another person serving the sales team, one board member serving the VC fund, another serving the early-stage “angels” and another serving the CEO? If that’s the case, then your team is misaligned. No individual department’s interests are as important as the company’s.

To align everyone behind your company’s interests, you must first define and communicate those goals and needs. This requires five steps:

1. Define the mission. Be clear to everyone about where you’re going and how you’re going to get there (in keeping with your values).
2. Set annual priorities, goals, and targets. Turn the broader mission into something more concrete with prioritized goals and unambiguous success metrics.
3. Encourage bottom-up planning. You and your executive team need to set the major strategic goals for the company, but team members should design their own path to contribution. Just be sure that you or their managers check in with them to assure that they remain in synch with the company’s goals.
4. Facilitate the transparent flow of information and rigorous debate. To help people calibrate the success, or insufficiency, of their efforts, be transparent about how the organization is doing along the way. Your organization will make better decisions when everyone has what they need to have frank conversations and then make well-informed decisions.
5. Ensure that compensation supports alignment (or at least doesn’t fight it). As selfless as you want your employees to be, they’ll always prioritize their interests over the company’s. If those interests are aligned – especially when it comes to compensation – this reality of human nature simply won’t be a problem.

Taken in sequence, these steps are the formula for alignment. But if I had to single out one as the most important, it would be number 5: aligning individual incentives with companywide goals.

It’s always great to hear people say that they’d do their jobs even if they weren’t paid to, but the reality of post-lottery-jackpot job retention rates suggests otherwise. You, and every member of your team, “work” for pay. Whatever the details of your compensation plan, it’s crucial that it aligns your entire team behind the company’s best interests.

Don’t reward marketers for hitting marketing milestones while rewarding engineers to hit product milestones and back office personnel to keep the infrastructure humming. Reward everybody when the company hits its milestones.

The results of this system can be extraordinary:

• Department goals are in alignment with overall company goals. “Hitting product goals” shouldn’t matter unless those goals serve the overall health of your company. When every member of your executive team – including your CTO – is rewarded for the latter, it’s much easier to set goals as a company. There are no competing priorities: the only priority is serving the annual goals.
• Individual success metrics are in alignment with overall company success metrics. The one place where all companies probably have alignment between corporate and departmental goals is in sales. The success metrics that your sales team uses can’t be that far off from your overall goals for the company. With a unified incentive plan, you can bring every department into the same degree of alignment. Imagine your general counsel asking for less extraneous legal review in order to cut costs
• Resource allocation serves the company, rather than individual silos. If a department with its own compensation plan hits its (unique) metrics early, members of that team have no incentive to pitch in elsewhere; their bonuses are secure. But if everyone’s incentive depends on the entire company’s performance, get ready to watch product leads offering to share developers, unprompted.

This approach can only be taken so far: I can’t imagine an incentive system that doesn’t reward salespeople for individual performance. And while everyone benefits when things go well, if your company misses its goals, nobody should have occasion to celebrate. Everybody gets dinged if the company doesn’t meet its goals, no matter how well they or their departments performed. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but it also important preventive medicine.

Book Short:  Continuing to make “sustainability” a mainstream business topic

The Big Pivot: Radically Practical Strategies for a Hotter, Scarcer, and More Open World, by my friend Andrew Winston, is a great book.  It just got awarded one of the Top 10 business books of 2014 by Strategy+Business, which is a great honor.

Andrew builds nicely on his first book, Green to Gold:  How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage (post, book link) (and second book, which I didn’t review, Green Recovery), as I said in my review of Green to Gold, to bring:

the theoretical and scientific to the practical and treat sustainability as the corporate world must treat it in order to adopt it as a mainstream practice — as a driver of capitalistic profit and competitive advantage.

Andrew’s central thesis, with plenty of proof points in the book for our planet of 7 Billion people, rapidly heading to 9-10 Billion, is this:

Whether you take a purely fiscal view of these challenges or look through a human-focused lens, one thing is clear: we’ve passed the economic tipping point. A weakening of the pillars of our planetary infrastructure— a stable climate, clean air and water, healthy biodiversity, and abundant resources— is costing business real money. It’s not some futuristic scenario and model to debate, but reality now, and it threatens our ability to sustain an expanding global economy… If this hotter, scarcer, more transparent, and unpredictable world is the new normal, then how must companies act to ensure a prosperous future for all, including themselves?

Andrew’s writing is accessible and colorful.  The book is full of useful analogies and metaphors like this one:

Climate can also seem easy to write off because the warming numbers don’t sound scary. A couple degrees warmer may sound pleasant, but we’re not really talking about going from 75 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit on a nice spring day. As many others have pointed out, the right metaphor is a fever. Take your core body temperature up one degree, and you don’t feel so great. Five degrees, and you’re sick as a dog. Ten degrees, and you’re dead.

The book also does a really nice job of looking at the externalities of climate change in a different way.  Not the usual “I can pollute, because there’s no cost to me to doing so,” but more along the lines of “If I had to pay for all the natural resources my business consumes, I would treat them differently.”

Some of Andrew’s points are good but general and maybe better made elsewhere (like the problems of short-termism on Wall Street), but overall, this book is a great think piece for all business leaders, especially in businesses that consume a lot of natural resources, around how to make the challenge of climate change work for your business, not against it.

Two things occurred to me during my read of The Big Pivot that I think are worth sharing for the people in my life who still don’t believe climate change is real or threatening.  The first is Y2K.  Remember the potentially cataclysmic circumstance where mission critical systems all around the world were going to go haywire at midnight at the turn of the millennium?  The conventional wisdom on why nothing major went wrong is that society did enough work ahead of time to prevent it, even though the outcomes weren’t clear and no one system problem alone would have been an issue.  I was thinking about this during the book…and then Andrew mentioned it explicitly towards the end.

The second is something I read several years ago in my personal news bible, The Economist.  I couldn’t find the exact quote online just now, but it was something to the effect of “Even if you don’t believe man created climate change, or that climate change is real and imperiling to humanity and can be fixed by man, the risks of climate change are so great, the potential consequences so dire, and the path to solve the problem so lengthy and complex and global…it’s worth investing in that solution now.”

Let’s all pivot towards that, shall we?  If you want to download the introduction to the book for free, you can find it on Andrew’s web site.  Or for a three-minute version of the story, you can watch this whiteboard animation on YouTube.

Book Short: Plain Talk

An HR rock star I met with recently told me that “You can say anything you want to your people, as long as it’s true,” which of course is great advice.  Plain Talk: Lessons from a Business Maverick (book, kindle), by Ken Iverson, the long-time CEO of Nucor, pretty much embodies that.  If you’re not familiar with Nucor, it’s a steel company – right, steel – and the most successful one of the last 50-75 years, at that.  You may think an industrial company like this offers no lessons for you.  If so, you are wrong.

The reason Nucor has been so successful, if you believe their long time leader, is that they run the people side of their business differently than most companies like them.  Reading this book from the perspective of a knowledge worker business CEO was particularly interesting, since I had to transform my frame of reference a bit (and do a little mental time travel as well) in order to understand just how revolutionary Nucor’s practices were at the time.

But then I realized – they’re still revolutionary today.  How many companies – even the most progressive ones – don’t have performance reviews because they don’t need them in order to create a high performing environment?  Companies that spend a good percentage of their time and energies thinking about how to get their employees to do their best work, as opposed to focusing only on the goals of the business, do better than those who don’t.  It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in.  As Patrick Lencioni would say, you can outbehave the competition.

Plain Talk is a really short book, and a good, authentic read if you’re a leader who cares about your people and wants to learn a few nuggets here and there from one of the 20^th century masters of that discipline.  Anyone that can link a high degree of delegation to authority has a story worth telling.

Book Short:  Which Runs Faster, You or Your Company?

Leading at the Speed of Growth, by Katherine Catlin at the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership is a must read for any entrepreneur or CEO of a growth company.  It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read targeted to that audience – its content is great, its format is a page-turner, and it’s concise and to the point.

The authors take you through three stages of a growth company’s lifestyle (Initial Growth, Rapid Growth, and Continuous Growth) and describe the “how to’s” of the transition into each stage:  how you know it’s coming, how to behave in the new stage, how to leave the old stage behind.

I didn’t realize it when I started reading the book, but Brad had one of the quotes on the back cover that says it all:  “There are business books about starting a company, but they tend to deal with the mechanics of business plans and financing.  Then there are books about ‘how to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.’  This is the first book I’ve seen that details the role of the CEO of a small but growing company.”  Thanks to my colleague George Bilbrey for pointing this one out to me.

UPDATE:  Brad corrects me and says that I should mention Jana Matthews, who co-wrote the book with Katherine Catlin and is actually the Kauffman Center person of the duo.