links for 2006-07-02
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Great blog posting from Seth Godin on things the rest of us need to remember about how challenging it is to sell…and a couple pointers for the sales team about how to handle the rest of us!
links for 2006-06-26
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Slice of Lime, Inc. CEO Kevin Menzie, who I have known for years, writes a good summary of his thoughts on the early days of getting a startup off the ground and growing fast!
links for 2006-06-16
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Brad tipped me off to this article — it’s a good one and draws on a lot of the work and thinking done by Jim Collins in both Good to Great and Built to Last (links to both books on my blog in the books sidebar).
links for 2006-06-05
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Dallas Mavs owner and Internet entrepreneur Mark Cuban on Click Fraud, a notorious member of the Internet Axis of Evil
links for 2006-05-10
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Amazon, Microsoft, and Google on big marketing spend
links for 2006-04-13
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Really thorough posting (battle scars *may* be present based on the level of detail) about how to best position your company for sale.
links for 2006-03-30
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A great posting about Vendor Love from Seth Godin!
links for 2006-07-27
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Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence Founding Fathers, Patriots, Mr. T. Honored (From The Onion — hilarious)
links for 2006-03-28
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Brad has a good posting today about entrepreneur accountability — along the lines of my “Forecast Early and Often” theme. — /2005/11/notsocounter_cl.html
links for 2006-07-29
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It’s kind of a “Let Them Eat Cake!” response — which kind of makes sense, given our recent trip to India.
Book Short: Alignment Well Defined, Part II
Book Short:Â Alignment Well Defined, Part II
Getting the Right Things Done: A Leader’s Guide to Planning and Execution, by Pascal Dennis, is an excellent and extraordinarily practical book to read if you’re trying to create or reengineer your company’s planning, goal setting, and accountability processes. It’s very similar to the framework that we have generally adapted our planning and goals process off of at Return Path for the last few years, Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage (book, post/Part I of this series). My guess is that we will borrow from this and adapt our process even further for 2014.
The book’s history is in Toyota’s Lean Manufacturing system, and given the Lean meme floating around the land of tech startups these days, my guess is that its concepts will resonate with most of the readers of this blog. The book’s language — True North and Mother Strategies and A3s and Baby A3s — is a little funky, but the principles of simplicity, having a clear target, building a few major initiatives to drive to the target, linking all the plans, and measuring progress are universal. The “Plan-Do-Check-Adjust” cycle is smart and one of those things that is, to quote an old friend of mine, “common sense that turns out is not so common.”
One interesting thing that the book touches on a bit is the connection between planning/goals and performance management/reviews. This is something we’ve done fairly well but somewhat piecemeal over the years that we’re increasingly trying to link together more formally.
All in, this is a good read. It’s not a great fable like Lencioni’s books or Goldratt’s classic The Goal (reminiscent since its example is a manufacturing company). But it’s approachable, and it comes with a slew of sample processes and reports that make the theory come to life. If you’re in plan-to-plan mode, I’d recommend Getting the Right Things Done as well as The Advantage.