Book Short: What’s Your Meeting Routine?
Patrick Lencioni’s Death by Meeting is, as Brad advertised, a great read, and much in line with his other books (running list at the end of the post). His books are just like candy. If only all business books were this short and easy to read.
This fable isn’t quite what I thought it was going to be at the outset – it’s not about too many meetings, which is what I’ve always called “death by meeting.” It’s about staff meetings that bore you to death. With a great story around them featuring characters named Casey and Will (my two oldest kids’ names, which had me chuckling the whole time), Lencioni describes a great framework for splitting up your staff meetings into four different types of meetings: the daily stand-up, the weekly tactical, the monthly strategic, and the quarterly offsite.
There’s definitely something to the framework. We have over the years done all four types of meetings, though we never had all four in our rotation at once as that felt like overkill. But I think at a minimum, any 2 get the job done much better than a single format recurring meeting. As long as you figure out how to separate status updates from more strategic conversations, you’re directionally in good shape. We have almost entirely eliminated or automated status update meetings at this point at my staff level.
The book has some other good stuff in it, though, about the role of conflict in staff meetings, which I’ll save for your own read of the book!
So far the series includes:
- The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (post, link)
- The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link
)
- The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link)
I have two more to go, which I’ll tackle in due course and am looking forward to.
Holiday Cards c. 2007
Every year, I get a daily flood of business holiday cards on my desk in the second half of December. Some are nice and have notes from people with whom we do business – clients, vendors, partners, and the like. Some are kind of random, and it takes me a while to even figure out who they are from. Occasionally some even come in with no mark identifying from whence they came other than an illegible signature.
And every year, I receive one or two email cards instead of print & post cards, some apologetic about the medium. Until this year.
I think I’ve received about 10-15 cards by email this month. None with an apology. All with the same quality of art/creative as printed cards. It’s great! A good use of the email channel…much less cost…easier overhead for distribution…and of course better for the environment.
I wonder what made 2007 the tipping year for this.
Startup CEO “Bibliography”
A couple people who read Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business asked me if I would publish a list of all the other business books I refer to over the course of the book. Here it is — I guess in some respects an all-time favorite list for me of business books.
And here’s the list of books in Brad Feld’s Startup Revolution series other than Startup CEO:
Book Short: 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!
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:
My name is Matt Blumberg. I am a technology entrepreneur and business builder based in New York City. I am CEO of Markup AI, the leading provider of Content Guardian Agents to companies of all sizes looking to scale their use of AI to generate content smartly and safely. We are defining a new category in the Generative AI space and crushing it.
Before that, I started a company called Bolster, which was an on-demand executive talent marketplace. We created a new way to scale executive teams and boards aimed at early and mid-stage tech companies. The business sort of worked and sort of didn’t work. We wound it down in 2025 and decided to focus on helping the portfolio companies we invested in via Bolster Ventures and help our friends with talent referrals on a more informal basis.
My longest career stint was Return Path, a company I started in 1999, which we sold in 2019. We created a business that was the global market leader in email intelligence, analyzing more data about email than anyone else in the world and producing applications that solve real business problems for end users, commercial senders, and mailbox providers. In the end, we served over 4,000 clients with about 450 employees and 12 offices in 7 countries. We also built a wonderful company with a signature People First Culture that won a number of awards over the years, including Fortune Magazine’s #2 best mid-sized place to work in 2012.
Early in my career, I ran marketing and online services for MovieFone/777-FILM (www.moviefone.com), now a division of AOL. Before that — I was in venture capital at General Atlantic Partners (www.gapartners.com), and before that, a consultant at Mercer Management Consulting (www.mercermc.com). And I went to Princeton before that.
Based on this blog, I wrote a book called Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, which was published by Wiley in 2013 and updated in 2020. I followed that by co-authoring a book with a number of my fellow executives from Retutrn Path and Bolster called Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company’s Critical Functions and Teams; as well as the second edition of Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors along with Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani. I hosted a podcast called The Daily Bolster, with over 200 micro-episodes (mostly 5-6 minutes long) where I interview other CEOs to share their stories and hacks.
I have been married for over 25 years to Mariquita, who is, as I tell her all the time, one of the all-time great wives. We have three great kids now in their late teens, Casey, Wilson, and Elyse.
I have lots of other hobbies and interests, like coaching my kids’ baseball and softball teams; traveling and seeing different corners of the world; reading all sorts of books, particularly about business, American Presidential history, art & architecture, natural sciences (for laymen!), and anything funny; cooking and wishing I lived in a place where I could grill and eat outdoors year-round; playing golf; lumbering my way through the very occasional marathon, eating cheap Mexican food; introducing my kids to classic movies; and playing around with new technology. I hosted a limited edition podcast series called Country Over Self which explored the topic of virtue in the Oval Office along with a dozen prominent presidential historians.
IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THIS BLOG IS ALL ABOUT, read my first two postings: You’re Only a First Time CEO Once, and Oh, and About That Picture, as well as my updated post when I relaunched the blog with its new name, StartupCEO.com.
Book (Not So) Short: Raise Your Hand If You’re Sure
I couldn’t get the catchy jingle from the 80’s commercial for Sure deodorant (you remember, the one with the Statue of Liberty at the end of it – thanks, YouTube) out of my head while I was reading the relatively new book, Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End. Written by HBS professor Rosabeth Moss Kantor, Confidence is one of the few business books I’ve read that’s both long and worth reading in full.
The book has scores of examples of both winning and losing streaks, from sports, business, politics, and other walks of life, and it does a great job of breaking down the core elements that go into creating a winning streak or turnaround (Accountability, Collaboration, Innovation). Kantor also puts a very fine point on the “doom loop” of losing streaks and just how hard it is to turn them around. The book also has a good crisp definition of why winning streaks end — arrogange, anyone? — and has consistent, but not preachy recipes for avoiding pitfalls and driving success. All in all, very inspirational, even if many of the roots of success lie in well-documented leadership qualities like those expressed in Jim Collins’ Built to Last and Good to Great. The book is good enough that Kantor can even be forgiven for lauding Verizon, probably the most consistently awful customer service company I’ve ever dealt with.
But even more of the roots of success and disappointment around streaks are psychological, and these examples really rang true for me as I reflected back on our acquisition of the troubled NetCreations in 2004. That company was in the midst of a serious slump, a losing streak dating back to 2000, at the peak of the original Internet boom. Year over year, the company had lost revenues, profits, customers, and key personnel. Its parent company saw poor results and set it into the doom loop of starving it for resources and alternating between ignoring it and micromanaging it, and when we acquired the business, we found great assets and some fantastic people (many of whom I’m proud to say are still with us today), but a dispirited, blame-oriented, passive culture that was poised to continue wallowing in decline.
I can hardly claim that we’ve turned the business around in full, or that I personally made happen whatever turnaround there has been, but I do think we did a few things right as far as Kantor and Confidence would see it. Her formula for a turnaround (Espouse the new message, Exemplify it with leadership actions, Establish programs to systematically drive it home throughout the organization) is right in line with our philosophy here at Return Path.
First, we accelerated the separation and autonomy of a fledgeling NetCreations spin-off unit, now our Authentic Response market research group, and let a culture of collaboration and innovation flourish under an exceptionally talented leader, Jeff Mattes.
But that was the easy part (for me anyway), because that part of the business was actually working well, and we just let it do its thing, with more support from HQ. The turnaround of the core list rental and lead generation business of NetCreations, the original Postmaster Direct, was much tougher and is still a work in progress. In the last six months, we’ve finally turned the corner, but it hasn’t been easy. Even though we knew lots of what had to be done early on, actually doing it is much harder than b-school platitudes or even the best-written books make it seem.
The one thing that Kantor probably gives short shrift to, although she does mention it in passing a couple times, is that frequently turnarounds require massive major amounts of purging of personnel (not just management) to take hold. As one of my former colleagues from Mercer Management Consulting used to say, “sometimes the only way to effect Change Management is to change management.” Sometimes even very talented people are just bogged down with baggage — the “ghost of quarters past” — and nothing you do or say can break that psychological barrier.
Boy, have we learned that lesson here at Return Path the hard way. I’m extremely grateful to our team at Return Path, from the old RP people who’ve seen it all happen, to the old NetCreations people who are thriving in the new environment, to the new blood we’ve brought in to help effect the turnaround, for playing such important roles in our own Confidence-building exercises here. And I’m super Confident that 2007 will be the year that we officially turn the old NetCreations/Postmaster losing streak into a big, multi-year winning streak.
Anyway, I realize this may redefine the “short” in book short, but Confidence is without question a good general management and leadership read.
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: Bringing it on Home
Silos, Politics and Turf Wars: A Leadership Fable About Destroying the Barriers That Turn Colleagues Into Competitors wasn’t Patrick Lencion’s best book, but it wasn’t bad, either. I think all six of his books are well worth a read (list at the bottom of the post). And in fact, they really belong in two categories.
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.
The full series roundup is:
Book Short: Vulnerability Applied to Leadership
Getting Naked: A Business Fable About Shedding The Three Fears That Sabotage Client Loyalty (book, Kindle), is Patrick Lencion’s latest fable-on-the-go book, and it’s as good a read as all of his books (see list of the ones I’ve read and reviewed at the end of the post).
The book talks about the power of vulnerability as a character trait for those who provide service to clients in that they are rewarded with levels of client loyalty and intimacy. Besides cringing as I remembered my own personal experience as an overpaid and underqualified 21 year old analyst at how ridiculous some aspects of the management consulting industry are…the book really made me think. The challenge to the conventional wisdom of “never letting ‘em see you sweat” (we *think* vulnerability will hurt success, we *confuse* competence with ego, etc.) is powerful. And although vulnerability is often uncomfortable, I believe Lencioni is 100% right – and more than he thinks.
First, the basic premise of the book is that consultants have three fears they need to overcome to achieve nirvana – those fears and the mitigation tactics are:
- Fear of losing the business: mitigate by always consulting instead of selling, giving away the business, telling the kind truth, and directly addressing elephants in the room
- Fear of being embarrassed: mitigate by asking dumb questions, making dumb suggestions, and celebrating your mistakes
- Fear of feeling inferior: mitigate by taking a bullet for the client, making everything about the client, honoring the client’s work, and doing your share of the dirty work
But to my point about Lencioni being more right than he thinks…I’d like to extend the premise around vulnerability as a key to success beyond the world of consulting and client service into the world of leadership. Think about some of the language above applied to leading an organization or a team:
- Telling the kind truth and directly addressing elephants in the room: If you’re not going to do this, who is? There is no place at the top of an organization or team for conflict avoidance
- Asking dumb questions: How else do you learn what’s going on in your organization? How else can you get people talking instead of listening?
- Making dumb suggestions: I’d refer to this more as “bringing an outside/higher level perspective to the dialog.” You never know when one of your seemingly dumb suggestions will connect the dots for your team in a way that they haven’t done yet on their own (e.g., the suggestions might not be so dumb after all)
- Celebrating your mistakes: We’re all human. And as a leader, some of your people may build you up in their mind beyond what’s real and reasonable. Set a good example by noting when you’re wrong, noting your learnings, and not making the same mistake twice
- Taking a bullet for your team, making everything about your team and honoring your team’s work: Management 101. Give credit out liberally. Take the blame for team failings.
- Doing your share of the dirty work: An underreported quality of good leaders. Change the big heavy bottle on the water cooler. Wipe down the coffee machine. Order the pizza or push the beer cart around yourself. Again, we’re all human, leaders aren’t above doing their share to keep the community of the organization safe, fun, clean, well fed, etc.
There’s a really powerful message here. I hope this review at least scratches the surface of it.
The full book series roundup as far as OnlyOnce has gotten so far is:
Book Short: Wither the Team
I keep expecting one of his books to be repetitive or boring, but Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team held my interest all the way through, as did his others. It builds nicely on the last one I read, Death by Meeting (post, link).
I’d say that over the 9 1/2 years we’ve been in business at Return Path, we’ve systematically improved the quality of our management team. Sometimes that’s because we’ve added or changed people, but mostly it’s because we’ve been deliberate about improving the way in which we work together. This particular book has a nice framework for spotting troubles on a team, and it both reassured me that we have done a nice job stamping out at least three of the dysfunctions in the model and fired me up that we still have some work to do to completely stamp out the final two (we’ve identified them and made progress, but we’re not quite there yet.
The dysfunctions make much more sense in context, but they are (in descending order of importance):
- Absence of trust
- Fear of conflict (everyone plays politically nice)
- Lack of commitment (decisions don’t stick)
- Avoidance of accountability
- Inattention to results (individual ego vs. team success)
For those who are wondering, the two we’re still working on at the exec team level here are conflict and commitment. And the two are related. If you don’t produce engaged discussion about an issue and allow everyone to air their opinions, they will invariably be less bought into a decision (especially one they don’t agree with). But we’re getting there and will continue to work aggressively on it until we’ve rooted it out.
There’s one other interesting takeaway from the book that’s not part of the framework directly, which is that an executive has to be first and foremost a member of his/her team of peers, not the head of his/her department. That’s how successful teams get built. AND (this is key) this must trickle down in the organization as well. Everyone who manages a team of group heads or managers needs to make those people function well as a team first, then as managers of their own groups second.
At any rate, another quick gem of a book. I’m kind of sorry there’s only one left in the series.
So far the series includes:
I have one or two more to go, which I’ll tackle in due course and am looking forward to.
