Book Short: Not About Going With The…

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (book, Kindle), was a great read and a nice change from either strictly business books or my regular fiction/non-fiction reading. It’s basically about the process of achieving happiness through control over one’s inner life, but it’s far from a self-help book. It’s almost more of practical psychology deep dive into what brings about happiness and peak performance – a state the author calls Flow but others have called other things over time, like being “in the zone.”

The author talks about achieving this control as synonymous with the enviable ability to persevere despite obstacles and setbacks and transform hopeless situations into challenges to be overcome, just through the force of personality. This ability comes directly from ways to order consciousness so as to be in control of feelings and thoughts. The normal entropy/chaos of the mind is the enemy. There were a few key moments or takeaways in the book for me.

1. When one’s experience is most positive – when one is achieving Flow – people cite the following conditions in this order of importance:

– Confront tasks we have a chance of completing

– Able to concentrate

– Concentration is possible because the task has clear goals and…

– …provides immediate feedback

– Act with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life

– Exercise a sense of control over actions

– Concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the experience is over

2. Becoming more Autotelic – learning how to make experiences ends in and of themselves – coming from the Greek words for “self” and “goal,” this concept is savoring a given activity for its own sake, NOT for its consequences and is a key to achieving Flow. Whether you create a mental construct around beating a personal record, doing math or pattern matching in your head, or something else, being able to focus enough energy on the task at hand and not be distracted by the world around (present or future) is key. It’s a little like what I wrote a few months ago about how achieving mental discipline in the small areas of one’s life can lead to much greater things by building confidence and clearing mental clutter.

3. The concept of the “Flow channel” – as skill increases, challenges must also increase proportionally in order for us to continue learning, growing, and excelling – and achieving Flow.

4. Transformational coping is the ability to cheat chaos – transforming a hopeless situation into a new flow activity that can be controlled and enjoyed and emerge stronger from…

– Unselfconscious self-assurance – ego absent but confident, not at odds with environment but part of it

– Focusing attention on the world – looking outward, not inward

– The discovery of new solutions – being able to perceive unexpected opportunities as a result

5. How to develop the autotelic self

– Set clear goals

– Become immersed in the activity

– Pay attention to what’s happening

– Learn to enjoy immediate experience

The book reminded me of a couple other things I’ve read, in case any of these resonate with you. First, Tim Gallwey’s “Inner Game” books where he talks about “relaxed concentration,” basically the Flow state, and the inner conflict between focus on the event and focus on the consequences, between mental chaos and mental discipline, personified as Self 1 and Self 2. If you haven’t read these, any are good and give you the general idea, depending on which piques your interest the most: The Inner Game of Golf (book, Kindle), The Inner Game of Tennis (book only), and The Inner Game of Work (book, Kindle). Second, David Allen’s Getting Things Done theory about how a clear, uncluttered mind can do its best work. As Flow says, achieving an ordered mental condition is difficult – unless a person knows how to give order to his or her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment.

I’m not sure this book short does the book justice. It’s pretty complex and is rich with examples, but Flow (book, Kindle) is well worth a read if you’re into the theory of self control leading to better results and more happiness in life. Thanks to my friend Jonathan Shapiro for this book.

News Travels Fast

Fred’s post was Day 1 of the currently-seems-silly TSA ban on liquids on airplanes.  One day later, today, I had the pleasure of traveling from Idaho Falls to Boise and back (one metropolis to the next!), and I noticed almost no difference in security and passenger behavior at either airport.

Most people in line zinged out one bit of sarcastic resignation after the next about the silliness of banning all liquids.  My favorite was “next thing you know, we’re going to have to travel naked” — yikes — YIKES! — but as terrorists find new and exciting ways to terrorize us, and as our now-nationalized airport security staff doesn’t seem to understand the phrases “anticipation” or “long-term planning,” this seems like a not-so-silly comment.

Hopefully this hysteria will die down at some point.  I do remember for a few weeks after 9/11, security personnel were removing nail clippers and disposable razor blades from unsuspecting passengers, as if somehow we were going to shave the pilot to death.  Then again, the phrase “death by 1,000 cuts” must come from somewhere.

But the element of this whole thing that left the biggest impression on me was the difference between this and 9/11 — in the weeks after 9/11, passengers still showed up at the airport not knowing that Swiss army knives were contraband.  Within 48 hours of this incident, every single person I could hear at both small regional airports in Idaho were 100% informed and had not a single bottle of liquid on their person.  Perhaps one more reminder than in the Internet era, news travels super fast?

I read a ton of books.  I usually blog about business books, at least the good ones.  I almost never blog about fiction or non-business/non-fiction books, but I had a good “what did you read this summer” conversation the other night with my CEO Forum, so I thought I’d post super quick snippets about my summer reading list, none of which was business-related.

If you have kids, don’t read Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant’s Option B:  Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy unless you’re prepared to cry or at least be choked up.  A lot.  It is a tough story to read, even if you already know the story.  But it does have a number of VERY good themes and thoughts about what creates resilience (spoiler alert – my favorite key to resilience is having hope) that are wonderful for personal as well as professional lives.

Underground Airlines, by Ben Winters, is a member of a genre I love – alternative historical fiction.  This book is set in contemporary America – except that its version of America never had a Civil War and therefore still has four slave states.  It’s a solid caper in its own right, but it’s a chillingly realistic portrayal of what slavery and slave states would be like today and what America would be like with them.

Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance, is the story of Appalachia and white working class Americans as told by someone who “escaped” from there and became a marine, then a Yale-educated lawyer.  It explains a lot about the struggles of millions of Americans that are easy for so many of us to ignore or have a cartoonish view of.  It explains, indirectly, a lot about the 2016 presidential election.

Everybody Lies:  Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are, written by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, was like a cross between Nate Silver’s The Signal and The Noise and Levitt & Dubner’s Freakonomics.  It’s full of interesting factoids derived from internet data.  Probably the most interesting thing about it is how even the most basic data (common search terms) are proving to be great grist for the big data mill.

P.J. O’Rourke’s How the Hell Did This Happen? was a lot like the rest of P.J. O’Rourke’s books, but this time his crusty sarcasm is pointed at the last election in a compilation of articles written at various points during the campaign and after.  It didn’t feel to me as funny as his older books.  But that could also be because the subject was so depressing.  The final chapter was much less funny and much more insightful, not that it provides us with a roadmap out of the mess we’re in.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Noah Harari, is a bit of a rambling history of our species.  It was a good read and lots of interesting nuggets about biology, evolution, and history, though it had a tendency to meander a bit.  It reminded me a bit of various Richard Dawkins books (I blogged a list of them and one related business topic here), so if you’re into that genre, this wouldn’t be bad to pick up…although it’s probably higher level and less scientific than Dawkins if that’s what you’re used to.

Finally, I finished up the fourth book in the massive Robert Caro quadrilogy biography of Lyndon Johnson (full series here).  I have written a couple times over the years about my long-term reading project on American presidential biographies, probably now in its 12th or 13th year.  I’m working my way forward from George Washington, and I usually read a couple on each president, as well as occasional other related books along the way.  I’ve probably read well over 100 meaty tomes as part of this journey, but none as meaty as what must have been 3000+ pages on LBJ.  The good news:  What a fascinating read.  LBJ was probably (with the possible exception of Jefferson) the most complex character to ever hold the office.  Also, I’d say that both Volumes 3 and 4 stand alone as interesting books on their own – Volume 3 as a braoder history of the Senate and Civil Rights; Volume 4 as a slice of time around Kennedy’s assassination and Johnson’s assumption of power.  The bad news:  I got to the end of Vol 4 and realized that there’s a Vol 5 that isn’t even published yet.

That’s it for summer reading…now back to school!

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: 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:  I Wish This Existed 12 Years Ago

Brad Feld has been on my board for over a decade now, and when he and his partner Jason Mendelson told me about a new book they were writing a bunch of months ago called Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist, I took note.  I thought, “Hmmm.  I’d like to be smarter than my lawyer or venture capitalist.”

Then I read an advanced copy.  I loved it.  At first, I thought, I would really have benefited from this when I started Return Path way back when.  Then as I finished reading it, I realized it’s just a great reference book even now, all these years and financings later.  But as much as I enjoyed the early read, I felt like something was missing from the book, since its intended audience is entrepreneurs.

Brad and Jason took me up on my offer to participate in the book’s content a little bit, and they are including in the book a series of 50-75 sidebars called “The Entrepreneur’s Perspective” which I wrote and which they and others edited.  For almost every topic and sub-topic in the book, I chime in, either building on, or disagreeing, with Brad and Jason’s view on the subject.

The book is now out.  As Brad noted in his launch post, the book’s table of contents says a lot:

1. The Players
2. How to Raise Money
3. Overview of the Term Sheet
4. Economic Terms of the Term Sheet
5. Control Terms of the Term Sheet
6. Other Terms of the Term Sheet
7. The Capitalization Table
8. How Venture Capital Funds Work
9. Negotiation Tactics
10. Raising Money the Right Way
11. Issues at Different Financing States
12. Letters of Intent – The Other Term Sheet
13. Legal Things Every Entrepreneur Should Know

Fred has posted his review of the book as well.

Bottom line:  if you are an aspiring or actual entrepreneur, buy this book.  Even if you’ve done a couple of financings, this is fantastic reference material, and Brad and Jason’s points of view on things are incredibly insightful beyond the facts.  And I hope my small contributions to the book are useful for entrepreneurs as well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Half the Benefit is in the Preparation

This past week, we had what has become an annual tradition for us – a two-day Board meeting that’s Board and senior management (usually offsite, not this year to keep costs down) and geared to recapping the prior year and planning out 2009 together.  Since we are now two companies, we did two of them back-to-back, one for Authentic Response and the other for Return Path.

It’s a little exhausting to do these meetings, and it’s exhausting to attend them, but they’re well worth it.  The intensity of the sessions, discussion, and even social time in between meetings is great for everyone to get on the same page and remember what’s working, what’s not, and what the world around us looks like as we dive off the high dive for another year.

The most exhausting part is probably the preparation for the meetings.  We probably send out over 400 pages of material in advance – binders, tabs, the works.  It’s the only eco-unfriendly Board packet of the year.  It feels like the old days in management consulting.  It takes days of intense preparation — meetings, spreadsheets, powerpoints, occasionally even some soul searching — to get the books right.  And then, once those are out (the week before the meeting), we spend almost as much time getting the presentations down for the actual meeting, since presenting 400 pages of material that people have already read is completely useless.

By the end of the meetings, we’re in good shape for the next year.  But before the meetings have even started, we’ve gotten a huge percentage of the benefit out of the process.  Pulling materials together is one thing, but figuring out how to craft the overall story (then each piece of it in 10-15 minutes or less) for a semi-external audience is something entirely different.  That’s where the rubber meets the road and where good executives are able to step back; remember what the core drivers and critical success factors are; separate the laundry list of tactics from the kernel that includes strategy, development of competitive advantage, and value creation; and then articulate it quickly, crisply, and convincingly. 

I’m incredibly proud of how both management teams drove the process this year – and I’m charged up for a great 2009 (economy be damned!).

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.

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).