Book Short:  Getting to MVP

Usually, when we hear the term MVP, we think Most Valuable Player.  But in my line of work, that acronym has come to mean something entirely different:  Minimum Viable Product.  Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works, by Ash Maurya, is an incredibly useful, practical how-to guide for any entrepreneur with an idea from concept through to MVP, or the smallest bit of functionality that you can get customers to pay for. This is one of the best books I’ve read that encapsulates most of the contemporary thinking and writing about product development in the early stages of a startup’s life from thought leaders like Steven Gary Blank and Eric Ries.

I read the book recently, as I was writing Startup CEO (original outline here), and I quoted liberally from it, including using his Lean Canvas graphic:

The basic principle behind the Lean Canvas is that the old way of doing a business plan was a ton of up front planning work, assuming you’re right, then building to spec.  The new way of doing a business plan is a really short series of hypotheses on a single page, then the time is spent de-risking the plan by systematically testing each element of it out.  The book includes several lists of checklists that walk you through how to test each box on the Lean Canvas.  As I’ve written about before, checklists are a really powerful management tool.

This is an essential read for entrepreneurs just starting a business.  But it’s also an excellent read for anyone running a growth company.  We have adopted more and more agile/lean methodologies over time at Return Path, and all of our product teams use the Lean Canvas with any major new features and projects.

(Side note – I’m writing this post on Friday, May 10, which is the 9th anniversary of my publishing this blog – 760 posts and one draft book later, it’s still an integral part of my business life!)

Book (Not So) Short:  Raise Your Hand If You’re Sure

I couldn’t get the catchy jingle from the 80’s commercial for Sure deodorant (you remember, the one with the Statue of Liberty at the end of it – thanks, YouTube) out of my head while I was reading the relatively new book, Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End.  Written by HBS professor Rosabeth Moss Kantor, Confidence is one of the few business books I’ve read that’s both long and worth reading in full.

The book has scores of examples of both winning and losing streaks, from sports, business, politics, and other walks of life, and it does a great job of breaking down the core elements that go into creating a winning streak or turnaround (Accountability, Collaboration, Innovation).  Kantor also puts a very fine point on the “doom loop” of losing streaks and just how hard it is to turn them around.  The book also has a good crisp definition of why winning streaks end — arrogange, anyone? — and has consistent, but not preachy recipes for avoiding pitfalls and driving success.  All in all, very inspirational, even if many of the roots of success lie in well-documented leadership qualities like those expressed in Jim Collins’ Built to Last and Good to Great.  The book is good enough that Kantor can even be forgiven for lauding Verizon, probably the most consistently awful customer service company I’ve ever dealt with.

But even more of the roots of success and disappointment around streaks are psychological, and these examples really rang true for me as I reflected back on our acquisition of the troubled NetCreations in 2004.  That company was in the midst of a serious slump, a losing streak dating back to 2000, at the peak of the original Internet boom.  Year over year, the company had lost revenues, profits, customers, and key personnel.  Its parent company saw poor results and set it into the doom loop of starving it for resources and alternating between ignoring it and micromanaging it, and when we acquired the business, we found great assets and some fantastic people (many of whom I’m proud to say are still with us today), but a dispirited, blame-oriented, passive culture that was poised to continue wallowing in decline.

I can hardly claim that we’ve turned the business around in full, or that I personally made happen whatever turnaround there has been, but I do think we did a few things right as far as Kantor and Confidence would see it.  Her formula for a turnaround (Espouse the new message, Exemplify it with leadership actions, Establish programs to systematically drive it home throughout the organization) is right in line with our philosophy here at Return Path.

First, we accelerated the separation and autonomy of a fledgeling NetCreations spin-off unit, now our Authentic Response market research group, and let a culture of collaboration and innovation flourish under an exceptionally talented leader, Jeff Mattes.

But that was the easy part (for me anyway), because that part of the business was actually working well, and we just let it do its thing, with more support from HQ.  The turnaround of the core list rental and lead generation business of NetCreations, the original Postmaster Direct, was much tougher and is still a work in progress.  In the last six months, we’ve finally turned the corner, but it hasn’t been easy.  Even though we knew lots of what had to be done early on, actually doing it is much harder than b-school platitudes or even the best-written books make it seem.

The one thing that Kantor probably gives short shrift to, although she does mention it in passing a couple times, is that frequently turnarounds require massive major amounts of purging of personnel (not just management) to take hold.  As one of my former colleagues from Mercer Management Consulting used to say, “sometimes the only way to effect Change Management is to change management.”  Sometimes even very talented people are just bogged down with baggage — the “ghost of quarters past” — and nothing you do or say can break that psychological barrier.

Boy, have we learned that lesson here at Return Path the hard way.  I’m extremely grateful to our team at Return Path, from the old RP people who’ve seen it all happen, to the old NetCreations people who are thriving in the new environment, to the new blood we’ve brought in to help effect the turnaround, for playing such important roles in our own Confidence-building exercises here.  And I’m super Confident that 2007 will be the year that we officially turn the old NetCreations/Postmaster losing streak into a big, multi-year winning streak.

Anyway, I realize this may redefine the “short” in book short, but Confidence is without question a good general management and leadership read.

Good Meeting Behavior

I've been in meetings with large groups of people at big companies where they're all on laptops the whole meeting, no one makes any eye contact with the speaker/facilitator, and it's hard to get a pulse out of the group as a result.

I almost entirely stopped bringing laptops and smartphones into business meetings a few years back.  There's nothing I find more irritating than when other people are using them when it's my meeting.  Even if they're taking notes, I never know if they're really taking notes or sneaking a peek at email.  And in my experience, people who are on laptops and phones in meetings, whatever they're doing on those devices and however good they are at multi-tasking, aren't paying as close attention to the meeting as the other people in the room. 

What I do instead is take notes on paper and spend 2 minutes after the meeting handling whatever data entry I need to handle on my computer.

I was very excited to see Brad's post about how he is now going to take paper notes in Board meetings rather than use his smartphone and be tempted to check email (and otherwise be distracted).  Everyone should do this for every meeting.  Board meetings are important examples, but they're not alone.  It's just good meeting behavior.  If you have other things to do, step out of the meeting and do them.

Book Short:  Be Less Clever

In Search of the Obvious: The Antidote for Today’s Marketing Mess, by Jack Trout, is probably deserving of a read by most CEOs.  Trout at this point is a bit old school and curmudgeonly, the book has some sections which are a bit repetitive of other books he and his former partner Al Reis have written over the years, he does go off on some irrelevant rants, and his examples are a bit too focused on TV advertising, BUT his premise is great, and it’s universally applicable.  So much so that my colleagues Leah, Anita, and I had “book club” about it one night last week and had a very productive debate about our own positioning and marketing statements and how obvious they were (they need work!).

The premise in short is that, in advertising:

Logical, direct, obvious = relevant, and

Entertaining, emotional = irrelevant

And he’s got data to back it up, including a great case study from TiVo on which ads are skipped and not skipped – the ones that aren’t skipped are from companies like Bowflex, Hooters, and the Dominican Republic, where the presentation of the ad is very direct, explanatory of the product, and clear.  His reasons why advertising have drifted away from the obvious are probably right, ranging from the egos of marketing people, to CEOs being to disconnected from marketing, to the rise in importance of advertising awards, and his solution, of course is to refocus on your core positioning/competitive positioning.

It is true that when the only tool in your box is a hammer, everything starts to look a bit like a nail, but Trout is probably right in this case.  He does remind us in this book that “Marketing is not a battle of products. It is a battle of perceptions”– words to live by.

And some of his examples of great obvious advertising statements, either real or ones he thinks should have been used, are very revealing:

• Kerry should have turned charges that he was a flip-flopper in 2004 around on Bush with the simple line that Bush was “strong but wrong”
• New Zealand: “the world’s most beautiful two islands”
• The brilliance of the VW Beetle in a big-car era and “thinking small”
• Johnny Cochrane’s winning (over)simplification of the OJ case — “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit”
• BMW is still, 30 years later, The Ultimate Driving Machine
• “Every day, the Kremlin gets 12 copies of the Wall Street Journal. Maybe they know something you don’t know.”

If you are looking for a good marketing book to read as a refresher this year, this one could be it.  And if you’re not a very market-focused CEO, this kind of thinking is a must.

And for the record, the library of books by Trout and/or Reis (sometimes including Reis’ daughter Laura as well) that I’ve read, all of which are quite good, is:

• Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind – the original – a brilliant, short, classic
• The New Positioning (link, post) – good refresher on the original, gets into repositioning
• Marketing Warfare –
• The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR – excellent but pre-social media
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding –
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk! –
• Bottom-up Marketing –
• Differentiate or Die: Survival in Our Era of Killer Competition –
• In Search of the Obvious: The Antidote for Today’s Marketing Mess – the current book

Book Short:  Required Reading, Part II

Every once in a while, a business book nails it from all levels.  Well written, practical, broadly applicable to any size or type of organization, full of good examples, full of practical tables and checklists.   The Leadership Pipeline, which I wrote about here over six years ago, is one of those books — it lays out in great and clear detail a framework for understanding the transition from one level to another in an organization and how work behaviors must change in order for a person to succeed during and on the other side of that transition.  In an organization like Return Path‘s which is rapidly expanding and promoting people regularly, this is critical.  We liked the book so much that we have adopted a lot of its language and have built training courses around it.

The book’s sequel, The Performance Pipeline (book, Kindle), also by Stephen Drotter but without the co-authors of the original book, is now out — and it’s just as fantastic.  The book looks at the same six level types in an organization (Enterprise Manager, Group Manager, Business Manager, Functional Manager, Manager of Managers, Manager of Others, and Self Managers/Individual Contributors) and focuses on what competencies people at each level must have in order to do their jobs at maximum effectiveness — and more important, in order to enable the levels below them to operate in an optimal way.

This book is as close to a handbook as I’ve ever seen for “how to be a CEO” or “how to be a manager.”  Coupled with its prequel, it covers the transition into the role as well as the role itself, so “how to become a CEO and be a great one.”  As with the prequel, the author also takes good care to note how to apply the book to a smaller organization (from the below list, usually the top three levels are combined in the CEO, and often the next two are combined as well).  No synopsis can do justice to this book, but here’s a bit of a sense of what the book is about:

• Enterprise Manager:  role is to Perpetuate the Enterprise and develop an Enterprise-wide strategic framework – what should we look like in 15-20 years, and how will we get the resources we need to get there?
• Group Manager:  role is to manage a portfolio of businesses and develop people to run them
• Business Manager:  role is to optimize short- and long-term profit and develop business-specific strategies around creating customer and stakeholder value
• Functional Manager:  role is to drive competitive advantage and functional excellence
• Manager of Managers:  role is to drive productivity across a multi-year horizon, and focus
• Manager of Others:  role is to enable delivery through motivation, context setting, and talent acquisition
• Self Managers/Individual Contributors:  role is to deliver and to be a good corporate citizen

I could write more, but there’s too much good stuff in this book to make excerpts particularly useful.  The Performance Pipeline is another one of those rare – “run, don’t walk, to buy” books.  Enjoy.  For many of my colleagues at RP – look out – this one is coming!

Book Short (and great concept): Moments of Truth

TouchPoints:  Creating Powerdul Leadership Connections in the Smallest of Moments, by Douglas Conant, former CEO of Campbell’s Soup Corporation, and Mette Norgaard (book, kindle), is a very good nugget of an idea wrapped in lots of other good, though only loosely connected management advice around self awareness and communication — something I’m increasingly finding in business books these days.

It’s a very short book. I read it on the Kindle, so I don’t know how many pages it is or the size of the font, but it was only 2900 kindles (or whatever you call a unit on the device) and only took a few Metro North train rides to finish.  It’s probably worth a read just to get your head around the core concept a bit more, though it’s far from a great business book.

I won’t spend a lot of time on the book itself, but the concept echoes something I’ve been referring to a while here at Return Path as “Moments of Truth.”  Moments of Truth are very short interactions between you and an employee that are high impact and, once you get the hang of them, low effort.  At least, they’re low effort relative to long form meetings.

Here are a few thoughts about Moments of Truth:

• They are critical opportunities to get things both very right and very wrong with an employee
• They are more powerful than meets the eye – both for what they are and because they get amplified as employees mention them to other employees
• They can come to you (people popping into your office and the like), you can seek them out (management by walking around), and you can institutionalize them (for example, one of the things I do is call every employee on their Return Path anniversary to congratulate them on the milestone)
• They are no different than any other kind of interaction you have, just a lot shorter and therefore can be more intense (and numerous)
• Their use cases are as broad as any management interaction — coaching, positive or negative feedback, input, support, etc.

What can you as a manager or leader do to perfect your handling of Moments of Truth?

First, learn how to spot them when they come to you, and think about a typical employee’s day/week/month/year to think about when you can find opportunities to seek them out.  Their first day on the job.  When they get a promotion.  When they get a great performance review, or new stock options.  Maybe when they get a poor performance review or denied a promotion they were seeking.

Second, learn to appreciate them and leave space for them.  If you have zero free minutes in every single day, you not only won’t have time to create or seek out Moments of Truth, you’ll be rushed or blow them off when they come to you.

Finally, like everything else, you have to develop a formula for handling them and then practice that formula.  The book does talk about a formula of “head, heart, hand” (e.g., being logical, authentic, and competent) that’s not bad.  Although I’d never thought about it systematically before writing this post, I have a few different kinds of Moments of Truth, and each one has its own rhythm to it, and its own regular ending.

But regardless of how you handle them, once you think about your day through this lens, you’ll start seeing them all over the place.  Recognize their power, and dive in!

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.

Book Short: The Challenger Sale

I’ve written a couple times in the past about how we sell at Return Path.  I’ve written about our principle sales methodology for the past decade, SPIN Selling, by Neil Rackham (and Major Account Strategy, also by Rackham, which is basically SPIN Selling for Account Managers), which focuses on a specific technique for solution selling by using questioning to get the prospective client to identify his or her own needs, as well as Jeffrey Gitomer’s two short books, the Little Red Book of Selling and Little Red Book of Sales Answers, which are long on sales questioning techniques.  And I also wrote this post about another book called Why People Don’t Buy Things, by Kim Wallace and Harry Washburn.  The great thing about this book is that it dives into the need for variation in sales communication strategies based on BUYER personae, such as The Commander, The Thinker, and The Visualizer.

While both these principles are good – asking questions and tailoring communication styles based on the buyer – anyone who has ever tried to run a whole sales call by asking questions knows that it’s REALLY HARD and can sometimes just outright flop.  There’s a new movement that I’ve been reading articles about for a few months now called The Challenger Sale, and I finally finished the book about it this past week.

If you run a company or a sales team that has any kind of complex sale or a hybrid software/service model, then you should read The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson.  Whether you adopt the methodology or not, there are a few really great insights in the book that will help you recruit and manage a sales team.  Some of the insights include:

• Understanding the five types of sales reps and why/when they’re successful/not successful.  The labels are telling in and of themselves:  the Lone Wolf, the Hard Worker, the Relationship Building, the Reactive Problem Solver, and the Challenger
• Why sales reps can be trained as Challengers, and how important it is to rally an entire organization around this sales model, not just train sales reps on it (that’s probably a good reminder for any sales methodology)
• The ingredients of the Challenger sale – Commercial Teaching for Differentiation, Tailoring for Resonance, Taking Control of the Conversation.  I found the section on Commercial Teaching the most enlightening, particularly in our business, where we’re not selling an established category with established budget line items

The Challenger Sale feels like the beginning of a wave that will take over a lot of selling organizations in the next decade, either directly as written or as it inspires ancillary works and related techniques.  For that reason alone, it’s worth a read.

Please go put Decide and Conquer: 44 Decisions that will Make or Break All Leaders by David Siegel on your reading list, or buy it. David’s book is up there on my list with Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It’s a totally different kind of book than Startup CEO, and in some ways a much better one in that there’s a great through-line or storyline, as David shares his leadership framework in the context of his journey of getting hired to replace founder Scott Heiferman as Meetup’s CEO after its acquisition by WeWork, including some juicy interactions with Adam Neumann, through the trials and tribulations of WeWork as a parent company, through COVID and its impact on an in-person meeting facilitator like Meetup, through to the sale of Meetup OUT of WeWork.

It’s hard to do the book justice with a quick write up. It’s incredibly concise. It’s clear. It’s witty. Most of all, it’s very human, and David shares a very human, common sense approach to leadership. I particularly like a device he uses to reinforce his main points and principles by bolding the key phrases every time they show up in the book: be kind, be confident, be bold, expand your options, focus on the long-term picture, be pragmatic, be honest, be speedy, do what’s right for the business, work for your people and they’ll work for you, be surprised only about being surprised. These all resonate with me so much.

One of the interesting things about the book is that David is a CEO, but not a founder (although he was sort of a re-founder in this case). A lot of CEO books talk about how to run a company, or give stories from the trials and tribulations thereof, but few focus on the elements of interviewing for the CEO job, or taking over the reins of a company in the midst of a turbulent flight. So the book is about getting the job, starting the job, doing a turnaround, leading a company through growth, a buy-out, and managing a company inside of another company. And because Meetup is such an iconic brand and business, it’s easy to understand a lot of the backdrop to David’s story.

I just met David for the first time a few weeks ago. We knew a bunch of people in common from his DoubleClick days. We instantly hit it off and traded copies of our books, and then were reading them at the same time trading emails about the parts that clicked. I just can’t recommend the book enough to any CEO or founder. In my view, it joins a pretty elite canon.

Book Short:  Internet Fiction

It’s been a long time since I read Tom Evslin’s Hackoff.com, which Tom called a “blook” since he released it serially as a blog, then when it was all done, as a bound book.  Mariquita and I read it together and loved every minute of it.  One post I wrote about it at the time was entitled Like Fingernails on a Chalkboard.

The essence of that post was “I liked it, but the truth of the parts of the Internet bubble that I lived through were painful to read,” applies to two “new” works of Internet fiction that I just plowed through this week, as well.

Uncommon Stock

Eliot Pepper’s brand new startup thriller, Uncommon Stock, was a breezy and quick read that I enjoyed tremendously. It’s got just the right mix of reality and fantasy in it. For anyone in the tech startup world, it’s a must read. But it would be equally fun and enjoyable for anyone who likes a good juicy thriller.

Like my memory of Hackoff, the book has all kinds of startup details in it, like co-founder struggles and a great presentation of the angel investor vs. VC dilemma. But it also has a great crime/murder intrigue that is interrupted with the book’s untimely ending.  I eagerly await the second installment, promised for early 2015.

The Circle

While not quite as new, The Circle  has been on my list since it came out a few months back and since Brad’s enticing review of it noted that:

The Circle  was brilliant. I went back and read a little of the tech criticism and all I could think was things like “wow – hubris” or “that person could benefit from a little reflection on the word irony”… We’ve taken Peter Drucker’s famous quote “‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” to an absurd extreme in the tech business. We believe we’ve mastered operant conditioning through the use of visible metrics associated with actions individual users take. We’ve somehow elevated social media metrics to the same level as money in the context of self-worth.

So here’s the scoop on this book.  Picture Google, Twitter, Facebook, and a few other companies all rolled up into a single company.  Then picture everything that could go wrong with that company in terms of how it measures things, dominates information flow, and promotes social transparency in the name of a new world order.  This is Internet dystopia at its best – and it’s not more than a couple steps removed from where we are.  So fiction…but hardly science fiction.

The Circle  is a lot longer than Uncommon Stock and quite different, but both are enticing reads if you’re up for some internet fiction.

Book Short:  Long on Platitudes, Short on Value

I approached Success Built to Last:  Creating a Life That Matters, by Jerry Porras, Stewart Emery, and Mark Thompson, with great enthusiasm, as Porras was co-author, along with Jim Collins, of two of my favorite business books of all time, Built to Last and Good to Great. I was very disappointed in the end.  This wasn’t really a business book, despite its marketing and hype.  At best, it was a poor attempt at doing what Malcolm Gladwell just did in Outliers in attempting to zero in on the innate, learned, and environmental qualities that drive success.

The book had some reasonably good points to make and definitely some great quotes, but it was very rambly and hard to follow.  Its attempt at creating an overall framework like the one used in Built to Last and Good to Great just plain didn’t work, as two of the three legs of the stool were almost incomprehensible, or to put it more charitably, didn’t hang together well.

This isn’t a terrible book to have on your shelf, and it might be good to skim, but remember that “skim” is only one letter away from “skip.”