Book Short:  Awesome Title, So-So Book

Strategy and the Fat Smoker (book, Kindle), by David Maister, was a book that had me completely riveted in the first few chapters, then completely lost me for the rest.  That was a shame.  It might be worth reading it just for the beginning, though I’m not sure I can wholeheartedly recommend the purchase just for that.

The concept (as well as the title) is fantastic.  As the author says in the first words of the introduction:

We often (or even usually) know what we should be doing in both personal and professional life.  We also know why we should be doing it and (often) how to do it.  Figuring all that out is not too difficult.  What is very hard is actually doing what you know to be good for you in the long-run, in spite of short-run temptations.  The same is true for organizations.

The diagnosis is clear, which is as true for organizations as it is for fat people, smokers, fat smokers, etc.  The hard work (pain) is near-term, and the rewards (gain) are off in the future, without an obvious or visible correlation.  As someone who has had major up and down swings in weight for decades, I totally relate to this.

But the concept that

the necessary outcome of strategic planning is not analytical insight but resolve,

while accurate, is the equivalent of an entire book dedicated to the principle of “oh just shut up and do it already.”  The closest the author comes to answering the critical question of how to get “it” done is when he says

A large part of really bringing about strategic change is designing some new action or new system that visibly, inescapably, and irreversibly commits top management to the strategy.

Right.  That’s the same thing as saying that in order to lose weight, not only do you need to go on a diet and weigh yourself once in a while, but you need to make some major public declaration and have other people help hold you accountable, if by no other means than causing you to be embarrassed if you fail in your quest.

So all that is true, but unfortunately, the last 80% of the book, while peppered with moderately useful insights on management and leadership, felt largely divorced from the topic.  It all just left me wanting inspirational stories of organizations doing the equivalent of losing weight and quitting smoking before their heart attacks, frameworks of how to get there, and the like.  But those were almost nonexistent.  Maybe Strategy and the Fat Smoker works really well for consulting firms – that’s where a lot of the examples came from.  I find frequently that books written by consultants are fitting for that industry but harder to extrapolate from there to any business.

Book Short:  Multiplying Your Team’s Productivity

No matter how frustrated a kids’ soccer coach gets, he never, ever runs onto the field in the middle of a game to step in and play.  It’s not just against the rules, it isn’t his or her role.

Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown (book, Kindle) takes this concept and drives it home.  The book was a great read, one of the better business books I’ve read in a long time.  I read a preview of it via an article in a recent Harvard Business Review (walled garden alert – you can only get the first page of the article without buying it), then my colleague George Bilbrey got the book and suggested I read it.  George also has a good post up on his blog about it.

One of the things I love about the book is that unlike a lot of business books, it applies to big companies and small companies with equal relevance.  The book echoes a lot of other contemporary literature on leadership (Collins, Charan, Welch) but pulls it into a more accessible framework based on a more direct form of impact:  not long-term shareholder value, but staff productivity and intelligence.  The book’s thesis is that the best managers get more than 2x out of their people than the average – some of that comes from having people more motivated and stretching, but some comes from literally making people more intelligent by challenging them, investing in them, and leaving them room to grow and learn.

The thesis has similar roots to many successful sales philosophies – that asking value-based questions is more effective than presenting features and benefits (that’s probably a good subject for a whole other post sometime).  The method of selling we use at Return Path which I’ve written about before, SPIN Selling, based on the book by Neil Rackham, gets into that in good detail.  One colorful quote in the book around this came from someone who met two famous 19th century British Prime Ministers and noted that when he came back from a meeting with Gladstone, he was convinced that Gladstone was the smartest person in the world, but when he came back from a meeting with Disraeli, he was convinced that he (not Disraeli) was the smartest person in the world.

Anyway, the book creates archetypal good and bad leaders, called Multipliers and Diminishers, and discusses five traits of both:

• Talent Magnet vs. Empire Builder (find people’s native genius and amplify it)
• Liberator vs. Tyrant (create space, demand the best work, delineate your “hard opinions” from your “soft opinions”)
• Challenger vs. Know-It-All (lay down challenges, ask hard questions)
• Debate Maker vs. Decision Maker (ask for data, ask each person, limit your own participation in debates)
• Investor vs. Micromanager (delegate, teach and coach, practice public accountability)

This was a great read.  Any manager who is trying to get more done with less (and who isn’t these days) can benefit from figuring out how to multiply the performance of his or her team by more than 2x.

Book short:  Life Isn’t Just a Wiki

One of the best things I can say about Remote: Office Not Required,  by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, is that it was short.  That sounds a little harsh – part of what I mean is that business books are usually WAY TOO LONG to make their point, and this one was blessedly short.  But the book was also a little bit of an angry rant against bad management wrapped inside some otherwise good points about remote management.

The book was a particularly interesting read juxtaposed against Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last which I just finished recently and blogged about here, which stressed the importance of face-to-face and in-person contact in order for leaders to most effectively do their jobs and stay in touch with the needs of their organizations.

The authors of Remote, who run a relatively small (and really good) engineering-oriented company, have a bit of an extreme point of view that has worked really well for their company but which, at best, needs to be adapted for companies of other sizes, other employee types, and other cultures.  That said, the flip side of their views, which is the “everyone must be at their cubicle from 9 to 5 each day,” is even dumber for most businesses these days.  As usual with these things, the right answer is probably somewhere in between the extremes, and I was reminded of the African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go farm go together” when I read it.  Different target outcomes, different paths.

I totally agree with the authors around their comments about trusting employees and “the work is what matters.”  And we have a ton of flexibility in our work at Return Path.  With 400 people in the company, I personally spend six weeks over the summer working largely remote, and I value that time quite a bit.  But I couldn’t do it all the time.  We humans learn from each other better and treat each other better when we look at each other face to face.  That’s why, with the amount of remote work we do, we strongly encourage the use of any form of video conferencing at all times.  The importance of what the authors dismiss as “the last 1 or 2% of high fidelity” quality to the conversation is critical.  Being in person is not just about firing and hiring and occasional sync up, it’s about managing performance and building relationships.

Remote might have been better if the authors had stressed the value that they get out of their approach more than ranting against the approaches of others.  While there are serious benefits of remote work in terms of cost and individual productivity (particularly in maker roles), there are serious penalties to too much of it as well in terms of travel, communication burden, misunderstandings, and isolation.  It’s not for everyone.

Thanks to my colleague Hoon Park for recommending this to me.  When I asked Hoon what his main takeaway from the book was, he replied:

The importance of open communication that is archived (thus searchable), accessible (transparent and open to others) and asynchronous (doesn’t require people to be in the same place or even the same “timespace”).  I love the asynchronous communication that the teams in Austin have tried: chatrooms, email lists (that anyone can subscribe to or read the archives of), SaaS project management tools. Others I would love to try or take more advantage of include internal blogs (specifically the P2 and upcoming O2 WordPress themes; http://ma.tt/2009/05/how-p2-changed-automattic/), GitHub pull requests (even for non-code) and a simple wiki.

These are great points, and good examples of the kinds of systems and processes you need to have in place to facilitate high quality, high volume remote work.

The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business is Patrick Lencioni’s newest book.  Unlike most or all of his other books (see the end of this post for the listing), this one is not a fable, although his writing style remains very quick and accessible.

I liked this book a lot.  First, the beginning section is a bit of a recap of his Five Dysfunctions of a Team which I think was his best book.  And the ending section is a recap of his Death by Meeting, another really good one.  The middle sections of the book are just a great reminder of the basic building blocks of creating and communicating strategy and values – about driving alignment.

But the premise, as the subtitle indicates, is that maintaining organizational health is the most important thing you can do as a leader.  I tell our team at Return Path  all the time that our culture is a competitive advantage in many ways, some quantifiable, and others a little less tangible.

A telling point in the book is when Lencioni is relaying a conversation he had with the CEO of a client company who does run a healthy organization – he asked, “Why in the world don’t your competitors do any of this?” And the client responded, “You know, I honestly believe they think it’s beneath them.” Lencioni goes on to say, “In spite of its undeniable power, so many leaders struggle to embrace organizational health because they quietly believe they are too sophisticated, too busy, or too analytical to bother with it.”  And there you have it.  More examples of why “the soft stuff” is mission critical.

Lencioni’s “Recipe for Organizational Health” (the outline of the book):

–          Build a Cohesive Leadership Team

–          Create Clarity

–          Overcommunicate Clarity

–          Reinforce Clarity

And his recipe for creating a tight set of “mission/vision/values” (the middle of the book):

1. Why do we exist?

2. How do we behave?

3. What do we do?

4. How will we succeed?

5. What is most important, right now?

6. Who must do what?

While there are lots of other good frameworks for doing all of this, Lencioni’s models and books are great, simple reminders of one of the CEO’s most important leadership functions.  We’re recrafting our own mission and values statements at the moment at Return Path, and we’re doing it using this 6-Question framework instead of the classic “Mission/Vision/Values” framework popularized a few years back by Harvard Business Review.

The full book series roundup as far as OnlyOnce has gotten so far is:

• The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (post, book)
• The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, book)
• The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, book)
• Death by Meeting (post, book)
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (post, book, Field Guide)
• Silos, Politics and Turf Wars (post, book)
• Getting Naked (post, book)
• The Advantage (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:  Unsung Heroes

If you like “entrepreneurship by analogy” books, you’ll like The Innovators:  The Engineering Pioneers Who Made America Modern, by David Billington.  I have to admit some bias here — Professor Billington was my favorite teacher and senior thesis advisor at Princeton (I almost majored in civil engineering because of him), and this book is one of a number he’s written that are outgrowths of his most popular courses at Princeton.  And while there’s no substitute for the length or energy of his lectures, the book works.

The book is basically a person-focused engineering history of America from 1776-1883.  Billington talks about four classes of engineering product:  public structures (mostly bridges), machines that produced power, networks like the railroads and telegraphs, and processes like steel manufacturing.

His approach is to acknowledge that the Americans innovators couldn’t do much without the right context:  learnings from their counterparts in Britain, a supportive government here at home, and abundant raw materials and capital.  But with that backdrop in place, Billington tells the tale of a number of the inventions that built our modern society with a focus on the engineers who got things right.  While some of them are familiar names (Morse, Edison), many are not (Thomas Telford, J. Edgar Thomson, Joseph Henry).

Sound familiar?  It feels at many point in the book that you could insert some different names and dates and be reading a history of the Internet or information age.  And as with the Industrial Revolution, while many of the innovators in our world today are known (Bezos, Yang, Brin/Page), there are probably an equal number who are unsung heroes — either software engineers or even buisness model pioneers who haven’t sought or won’t end up in the spotlight even though their contributions to society or to their companies are giant.  I know there are a number of unsung heroes in our own engineering department at Return Path — people who aren’t market facing and who never get quoted in press releases, but who really make a difference in how the company works and how competitive we are.  This book celebrates those people as much as it does the entrepreneurs you’ve heard of.

Warning, there are lots of pages which are full of mathematical formulas, which may or may not be interesting to you, but the book still holds together 100% if you skip over them.

Book Short:  Like Reading a Good Speech

Leaders Eat Last, by Simon Sinek, is a self-described “polemic” that reads like some of the author’s famous TED talks and other speeches in that it’s punchy, full of interesting stories, has some attempted basis in scientific fact like Gladwell, and wanders around a bit.  That said, I enjoyed the book, and it hit on a number of themes in which I am a big believer – and it extended and shaped my view on a couple of them.

Sinek’s central concept in the book is the Circle of Safety, which is his way of saying that when people feel safe, they are at their best and healthiest.  Applied to workplaces, this isn’t far off from Lencioni’s concept of the trust foundational layer in his outstanding book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team.  His stories and examples about the kinds of things that create a Circle of Safety at work (and the kinds of things that destroy them) were very poignant.  Some of his points about how leaders set the tone and “eat last,” both literally and figuratively, are solid.  But his most interesting vignettes are the ones about how spending time face-to-face in person with people as opposed to virtually are incredibly important aspects of creating trust and bringing humanity to leadership.

My favorite one-liner from the book, which builds on the above point and extends it to a corporate philosophy of people first, customer second, shareholders third (which I have espoused at Return Path for almost 15 years now) is

Customers will never love a company unless employees love it first.

A couple of Sinek’s speeches that are worth watching are the one based on this book, also called Leaders Eat Last, and a much shorter one called How Great Leaders Inspire Action.

Bottom line:  this is a rambly book, but the nuggets of wisdom in it are probably worth the exercise of having to find them and figure out how to connect them (or not connect them).

Thanks to my fellow NYC CEO Seth Besmertnik for giving me this book as well as the links to Sinek’s speeches.

Book Short:  Best Book Ever

The Hard Thing About Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz, is the best business book I’ve ever read.  Or at least the best book on management and leadership that I’ve ever read.  Period.

It’s certainly the best CEO book on the market.  It’s about 1000 times better than my book although my book is intended to be different in several ways.  I suppose they’re complementary, but if you only had time left on this planet for one book, read Ben’s first.

I’m not even going to get into specifics on it, other than that Ben does a great job of telling the LoudCloud/Opsware story in a way that shows the grit, psychology, and pain of being an entrepreneur in a way that, for me, has previously only existed in my head.

Just go buy and read the book.

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.

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!

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!