David is the author of the Intellectual Devotional series (here’s a link to one of the five or six books in the series), he’s a good friend of mine and a member of a CEO Forum that I’m in, and my major disclosure about this blog post is that I’m one of the 42 entrepreneurs David interviewed for and profiles in the book.
The Startup Playbook is very different from my own book (in progress) on being a Startup CEO. Where my book is going to go deep on different topics – think of it as a bit of a field guide – David’s book is extremely broad in its coverage of different entrepreneurs and their stories. Taken together, the book paints a great picture of how CEOs think about the most important parts of the job. It’s also a nice change of pace (for me, anyway) that David profiles some entrepreneurs who aren’t in the Internet/tech space.
It was an honor to be included in The Startup Playbook next to entrepreneurs like Reid Hoffman and Elon Musk.
And when I say significantly, I mean it! The Startup Owners Manual is 600 pages of really detailed how-to around the first two steps of Blank’s four steps, Customer Discovery and Customer Validation. It doesn’t get into the last two steps at all, Customer Creation and Company Building. It has a lot of overlap with Ash Maurya’s Running Lean (post, book), although it’s significantly more detailed. And essentially, especially around the topic of “Company Building,” my book starts where this one stops.
One of Blank’s great lines in the book is that a “A startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable, profitable business model.” That frames the whole Lean Startup movement really, really well. The whole concept of Customer Discovery and Validation, of testing hypotheses, is critical to getting product-marketing fit right in a capital-efficient manner. If I were starting Return Path today, we’d be using these methods from the get-go.
But Lean principles are wholly compatible with larger companies, as well, and in fact we use all of these principles in our product development organization today. We adapt them for our size and scale and the fact that often we are selling either new or enhanced versions of existing product into existing customers, but our product teams have all embraced the Lean principles and the vocabulary around them, and our goal is that we should never bring a product to market that isn’t already being bought.
“People talk about Andy,” writes Seth Godin in the foreward to Andy Sernovitz’s new book, Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking.  “He’s a living, breathing example of the power of word of mouth.” Andy’s the CEO of WOMMA, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, and a former colleague of mine.
Ever since reading The Tipping Point, I keep looking for the secret sauce around viral marketing. What is it that makes something cool enough to buzz about? My conclusion from reading Andy’s book is that secret sauce doesn’t exist. Like everything else, being buzzworthy comes from hard work, being inherently good, AND using the techniques and understanding in Andy’s book. Tables like “The Three Reasons People Talk About You” and “The Five T’s of Word of Mouth Marketing” are worth the price of the book in and of themselves, as they explain how to manage, handle, and drive viral marketing — once you have your own secret sauce down.
Andy’s wanted to write a book for a long time (in fact, he got us started on ours), and I’m glad he finally did it. If you’re interested in an easy-to-follow, practical, hands-on guide to viral, or word-of-mouth marketing, this is the book for you.
Trade Show and Event Marketing: Plan, Promote, and Profit, by our direct marketing colleague Ruth Stevens, is hardly a page-turner, but it is a great read and well worth the money for anyone in your B2B marketing department. That’s true as much for the event marketing specialist as the marketing generalist.
The author brings a very ROI-focused approach to planning and executing events – whether big trade shows or smaller corporate events, which are becoming increasingly popular in recent years for cost, focus, and control reasons. But beyond events, the book has a number of excellent checklists that are more general for marketers that I found quite useful both as a reminder of things we should be doing at Return Path as well as ways we should be thinking about the different elements of our B2B marketing mix.
Some of the best tables and charts include: strengths, weaknesses, and best applications of trade shows vs. corporate events; comparative analysis of marketing tools by channel (this was great – talks about best applications for all major tools from events to newsletters to search to inside sales); 12-month exhibitor timeline for trade shows; a great riff on bad booth signage vs. good booth signage (hint: don’t make the visitor do the work – be obvious!); business event strategic planning grid; pre-show campaign and post-show follow-up checklists; dos, don’ts and options for corporate events; a great section on qualifying and handling leads that extends well beyond trade shows; and several good case studies that are show-focused.
Thanks to Ruth herself for an autographed copy! Team Marketing and sales leaders at Return Path – your copies are on the way.
I haven’t done short book summaries in a LONG time, but I’ll try to start adding that back into the mix as I read interesting and relevant books. Here’s one to add to your list: One Life to Lead, by Russell Benaroya. I was recently connected to Russell by a mutual friend, TA McCann at Pioneer Square Labs. TA had a sense Russell and I would hit it off, and we did. Russell is a multi-time founder/CEO, a Coach, and an author, so we have a lot in common.
One Life to Lead is an excellent book. First, it is short and easy to get through. Unlike a lot of business books, it doesn’t go on too long or contain anything extraneous. It’s to the point!
Second, the book is a business book that’s not really about business. It’s about life and what Russell calls Life Design, which is a great framing of how to be intentional about leading your life. While I have become less and less of a life planner as I’ve gotten older under the headline of “man plans, God laughs,” I am a huge believer in being intentional about everything, which I talk about in Startup CEO quite a bit in the nuts and bolts context of building your business.
Finally, Russell’s framework is easy to understand and full of concrete exercises you can to. Here are his five steps, but you’ll have to read the book to get the details:
Ground stories with facts. This reminds me a lot of the principles we have taught team members over the years in our Action/Design (and related) trainings. First, start with absolute concrete facts that everyone will agree are facts.
Establish your principles. This is brilliant. Your company has documented values or operating principles. Why don’t you?
Harness energy from the environment. Figuring out what makes you tick, and what drains your energy, is so important.
Get in and stay in your genius zone. Shouldn’t we all focus our time on the things we do best and love the most?
Take action. How to put it together and make it all happen.
If you don’t get out in front of life, it will happen to you, and Russell’s framework is about how to make sure you are in the driver’s seat of your own life. Here’s to that.
I’m going to get a lot of flak from people about what you just read. People might say that it’s too disorganized or not practical enough or that I require you to do too much work to actually accomplsh anything. That’s ok.
He’s kind of right. The book is a little breezy and meanders around, just like riffing with Seth. It’s not practical in the sense that if the entire world operated this way in the extreme, we’d have serious problems. But the fact that he requires you to do “too much work to actually accomplish anything” is part of the brilliance of his message.
This was Seth’s best book in years, mostly because it is fresh. It is not a rant about marketing; it is a wonderfully succinct look at how we as a society are rallying and organizing around causes, campaigns, companies, and collective beliefs. It’s not about the Internet, though its principles are easily implemented and amplified using online tools. It’s not a how-to guide to being a fancy corporate leader, but it’s one of the most pointed descriptions of the ethos of a certain type of leader (the upstart, or as Seth says, the heretic). It’s not about a particular revolution; it’s about how mini-revolutions are becoming the norm these days.
Tribes is short, inspirational, and pure Seth. Though quite different in its nature and mission, it really evoked for me Mark Penn’s Microtrends (post, link) — a study of larger tribes and heretics in contemporary America.
I love me a good framework. And Geoffrey Moore is the kind of good product/marketing frameworks for technology companies. Moore’s Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption is a must-read for anyone managing a larger technology organization (start reading it when you get to 200-250 people – it’s never too early to worry about disruption). More important, it’s really a companion book or coda to Escape Velocity: Free Your Company’s Future from the Pull of the Past, so if you haven’t read that one, start there and read both sequentially. Zone to Win is quite short and punchy, and it doesn’t disappoint.
I can’t believe is that I never blogged about Escape Velocity before since it was a very influential book in how we managed a bunch of things at Return Path in the later years when we got larger and were more in “disrupt or be disrupted” mode. I’ll start with the essence of that book before I move onto Zone to Win.EscapeVelocity‘sprincipal framework is to divide the different product lines/lines of business you have into three planning horizons:
Horizon 1 (H1): Current businesses that should be profitable and sustainable
Horizon 3 (H3): Nascent R&D efforts with the potential to be disruptors or game changers
Horizon 2 (H2): The bridge between H1 and H3 where an R&D effort that is taking off is scaled and hopefully achieves the eponymous Escape Velocity
The essence of the book is to talk about how larger companies become completely slavish to H1 businesses, their cash cows, and struggle to escape from their pull, whether that’s internal resource allocation or customer-driven demands. Failure to innovate properly beyond H1 businesses is why companies die. But the rest of the book is a lot less memorable, and it doesn’t quite prompt you into action.
That’s where Zone to Win comes in, and it helps me understand where we really got a couple things really wrong at Return Path (as an aside, Moore once met my Return Path cofounder George at a conference, and when George described our business to him, he said “Ah, a blue collar business. Those can work, too.” I think I understand what he meant by that, although it doesn’t sound like a compliment!)
In Zone to Win, Moore shows you how to put the three Horizons into action by creating an overlay framework to managing your company to help optimize all three zones simultaneously. The four zones are:
The key takeaways for me from this framework as well as the notes of where we got things wrong at Return Path, even while acknowledging that we had to play across H1, H2, and H3 simultaneously, were:
Performance Zone: Managing your main H1 business in a way that drives growth and customer success for the long haul
Productivity Zone: Managing your main H1 business for optimal profitability and scalability
Incubation Zone: Starting new H3 businesses and hoping they work
Transformation Zone: Getting your H3 business through H2 and into H1 to the point where it’s at least 10% of your overall revenue
What we got right at Return Path was first recognizing that we needed to incubate new businesses as the growth in our core business started to slow down, as well as recognizing that we needed to step up our game in managing the core business for performance. So, Moore would say something like “congratulations, you drew up the correct strategy.” But we fell down on implementation for reasons in three of the four zones. Our problem with the Performance Zone is that we discovered the three horizon model too late — there were several years where we were running R&D experiments in the middle of the core business, which created chaos. By the time we got religion around it, we were constantly playing catch up redesigning our management processes — like the teenager still wearing his kid clothes looking awkward and misfit. In the Productivity Zone, we did invest in productivity, but we weren’t aggressive enough about insisting on End of Life for some programs or products, and and we were bogged down by a convoluted legacy implementation of our CRM system that we never wholesale fixed. But the biggest problem we ran into was in the Transformation Zone, where we tried to jam two new businesses through that zone at the same time instead of focusing all our energies on one. I bet we could have pulled off even more of a transformational success with our security business (the one further along) if we hadn’t also been trying to get our consumer insights business through H2 at the same time. At least Moore notes that’s the hardest zone to get right, so I don’t feel quite so dumb.
There were probably other exogenous factors that caused us to fall down on implementation, too, but I think this had a lot to do with it. And don’t get me wrong, Return Path was a success in the end. It just could have been more successful if we had caught this book and adhered rigorously sooner. It was even published in time — somehow we just missed it. We were lured by customer traction and market pull into thinking we could do both. And it’s certainly possible that we were advised against this by one or more of our board members and plowed ahead anyway.
Moore is a masterful writer. If you haven’t read Crossing the Chasm or Inside the Tornado,for example, if you’re a GenZ founder and you think “wow those books came out before I was born, they can’t be relevant,” you should start by reading them. They’re still 100% applicable today, and Moore’s subsequent editions have updated some of the case studies, even if not totally contemporary — and these are worth reading even as a raw startup (in fact, especially as a raw startup). But once you finish those and your business gets larger, go straight into Escape Velocity and be sure to add on Zone to Win.
I usually only blog about business books, but since I read Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert Putnam, because of its connection to the topic of Internet community and social media, I’ll record some thoughts about and from it here.
It’s an interesting read, although a little long. Putnam’s basic thesis is that America’s social capital — the things that have brought us physically and emotionally together as a country throughout much of the 20th century such as church, voting, and participation in civic organizations like the PTA or the Elks Club — are all severely on the decline. The reasons in Putnam’s view are television (you knew all those re-runs of The Brady Bunch would eventually catch up to you), suburban sprawl, two-career families, and “generational values,” which is Putnam’s way of saying things like people in their 60s all read newspapers more than people in their 50s, who all read newspapers more than people in their 40s, etc. He believes the decline is leading to things like worse schools, less safe neighborhoods, and poorer health.
The book does a good job laying out the decline in social capital with some really interesting and somewhat stunning numbers, but the book’s biggest shortcoming is that Putnam doesn’t do the work to determine causation. I buy that there’s a correlation between less voting and less safe neighborhoods, for example, but the book doesn’t convince me that A caused B as opposed to B causing A, or C causing both A and B. What I really wanted at the end of the book was for Putnam to go mano-a-mano with the Freakonomics guy for a couple hours. Preferably in those big fake sumo suits.
The book was published in 2000, so probably written from 1997-1999, and therefore its treatment of the Internet was a little dated — so I found myself wanting more on that topic since so much of the social media revolution on the Internet is post-2004. His basic view of the Internet is that it is in fact a bright spot in the decline of community, but that it’s changing the nature of communities. Now instead of chatting with whoever is bowling in the next lane over at the Tuesday night bowling league on Main Street, we are in an online discussion group with other people who own 1973 BMW 2002 series cars, preferably the turbo-charged ones. So the micro-communities of the Internet circa 2000 are more egalitarian (“on the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog”), but more narrow as well around interests and values.
What has social media done to Putnam’s theories in the last seven or eight years? How have things like blogging, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Photobucket changed our concept of community in America or in the world at large? I welcome your comments on this and will write more about it in the future.
My friend Andrew Winston, who is one of the nation’s gurus in corporate sustainability, just published his second book, this one from Harvard Business Press — Green Recovery: Get Lean, Get Smart, and Emerge from the Downturn on Top. It builds on the cases and successes he had with his first book, Green to Gold (post, link to book), which came out a couple years ago and has become the standard for how businesses embrace sustainability and use it to their financial and strategic competitive advantage rather than thinking of it as a burden or a cost center.
Green Recovery is a shorter read (my kind of business book), and it hits a few key themes:
Going green not only shouldn’t wait for better economic times, it’s a key way out of this mess
Businesses have relied on layoffs to cut costs for far too long — it’s time to get lean on stuff, not people
This is about survival for many businesses:Â Detroit died because it missed the green wave of environmental interest and rising energy prices
And the overarching theme…Green doesn’t raise costs, it lowers them – it’s a source of profit and innovation
The book reminds me a lot of my post Living With Less, For Good, which I wrote at the beginning of the financial market freefall last fall, talking about how we as a company were figuring out how to cut back without cutting people (something we’ve managed to do). Although I wasn’t talking about green initiatives specifically, the point of getting leaner on “stuff” really resonates with me.
At the end of the day, Andrew proves that steering your company to go green — no matter what industry you’re in — is a twofer: you can increase the strength of the business and simultaneously do your part to clean up the environment. That’s definitely the “change we can believe in” mentality applied quite pragmatically!
The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (post, link), The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link), and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link) are all related around the topic of management.
Death by Meeting (post, link), The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (post, link), and Silos, Politics and Turf Wars, on the other hand, are all related around the topic of leading a team and healthy team dynamics. This latest book, which is the last of his six books for me, rounds out this topic nicely, in a fun “novel” format as is the case with his other books.
The book hammers home the theme of an executive team needing to first be a team and then second be a collection of group heads as a means of breaking down barriers that exist inside organizations. It also lays out a framework for creating high-level alignment inside a team. The framework may or may not be perfect — we are using a different one at Return Path (the Balanced Scorecard) that accomplishes most of the same things — but for those companies who don’t have one, it’s as good as any.
The most compelling point in the book, though is the point that teams often make the most progress, change the most, and do their best work when their backs are up against a wall. And the point Lencioni makes here is — “why wait for a crisis?”
At any rate, another good, quick book, and absolutely worth reading along with the others, particularly along with the other two closely related ones. I’m definitely sorry to be done with the series. We may try the “field guide” companion to The Five Dysfunctions and see how the practical exercises work out.
In truth, Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, was a bit of a disappointment. I thought his first three books, Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, were fantastic, and I routinely refer to them in business. David and Goliath isn’t bad, it’s just a little light and hangs together a lot less than Gladwell’s other books.
I just read a scathing review of it in The New Republic, which I won’t bother linking to, mostly because the reviewer was on a total rant about Gladwell in general and was particularly insulting to people who read Gladwell (an interesting approach to a book review), essentially calling us self-help seekers who aren’t interested in reality or wisdom. Nice.
Two seminal quotes from the book that get at its essence are:
To play by David’s rules you have to be desperate. You have to be so bad that you have no choice.
and
He was an underdog and a misfit, and that gave him the freedom to try things no one else ever dreamt of.
I also liked the concept Gladwell talked about a few times in the book about being a big fish in a small pond, and how that can sometimes be a better place to be than a small fish in a big pond in terms of building self-confidence. That’s certainly been true for me in my life.
If you go back the premise of Gladwell’s books in general, as I heard him say on The Daily Show the other night — “to get people to look at the world a little differently” — then David and Goliath does that on some level. And for that alone, it’s probably worth a quick read.
