Book Short: The Joys of Slinging Hash
Book Short: The Joys of Slinging Hash
Patrick Lencioni’s The Three Signs of a Miserable Job is a good read, as were his last two books, The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link), and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link). They’re all super short, easy reads (four express train rides on Metro North got the job done), with a single simple message and great examples. This one is probably my second favorite so far.
This book, which has a downright dreary title, is great. It points to and proposes a solution to a problem I’ve thought about for a long time, which is how do you create meaning for people in their day to day work when they’re not doing something intrinsically meaningful like curing a disease or feeding the homeless. His recipe for success is simple:
– Get people to articulate the relevance in their jobs…the meaning they derive out of their work…an understanding of the people whose lives are made better, even in small ways, by what they do every day
– Get people to measure what they do (duh, management 101), IN RELATION TO THE RELEVANCE learnings from the last point (ahh, that’s an interesting twist)
– Get to know your people as people
All of these are things you’d generally read in good books on management, but this book ties them together artfully, simply, and in a good story about a roadside pizza restaurant. It also stands in stark contrast to the book I reviewed and panned a few days ago by Jerry Porras in that it is nothing but examples from non-celebrities, non-success stories — ordinary people doing ordinary jobs.
Brad has blogged glowingly about Death by Meeting, so I’ll probably make that my next Lencioni read next month, with two more to go after that.
Book Short: On The Same Page
Book Short:Â On The Same Page
Being on the same page with your team, or your whole company for that matter, is a key to success in business. The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, by Patrick Lencioni, espouses this notion and boils down the role of the CEO to four points:
- Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team
- Create organizational clarity
- Overcommunicate organizational clarity
- Reinforce organizational clarity through human systems
Those four points sound as boring as bread, but the book is anything but. The book’s style is easy and breezy — business fiction. One of the most poignant moments for me was when the book’s “other CEO” (the one that doesn’t “get it”) reflects that he “didn’t go into business to referee executive team meetings and delivery employee orientation…he loved strategy and competition.” Being a CEO is a dynamic job that changes tremendously as the organization grows. This book is a great handbook for anyone transitioning out of the startup phase, or for anyone managing a larger organization.
I haven’t read the author’s other books (this is one in a series), but I will soon!
Book Short: Continuing to make “sustainability” a mainstream business topic
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.
links for 2005-08-19
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Entrepreneur Bernard Moon does a great job of articulating “how to build the perfect team” for your new startup
links for 2005-09-22
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Great blog posting from Rob Walling on hiring like crazy
links for 2005-10-11
links for 2005-10-20
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Get your mind out of the gutter! These are very useful and oddly hard to find graphics for doing checklists in presentations (thanks to my colleague George Bilbrey for this link).
links for 2005-10-22
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From our client, Business & Legal Reports, a HILARIOUS read in the strange-but-true category. This is essential reading for any manager who has ever mediated an employee dispute. Tthanks to Tami Forman for citing this one!
links for 2005-10-23
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Return Path’s newly unveiled web site is now a blog, with an online resource center for email marketers and postings by its executive team
links for 2005-11-16
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Jeff Jarvis on Why We’re Glad We’re New Media…good stats on all the troubles facing “old media” nowadays (box office, newspapers, music, radio, books)
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Fred Wilson on how VCs relate to entrepreneurs vs. their limited partners. They should think of entrepreneurs as their customers, and think of LPs as shareholders.
links for 2005-11-26
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Charlie O’Donnell from Union Square Ventures has a great post about LinkedIn, its limitations, and some things it could do to be MUCH cooler and more useful.