Book Short: Not As Deep As You’d Like
Deep Change, by Robert Quinn, is a reasonably interesting collection of thoughts on management and leadership, but it doesn’t hang together very well as a single work with a unified theme. The promise is interesting — that we must personally abandon our knowledge, competence, techniques and abilities and “walk naked into the land of uncertainty” to undergo great personal change that can then lead us to organizational change — but the book doesn’t quite deliver on it.
That said, I enjoyed the book as a quick read for a few of its more interesting concepts. For example, Quinn has a great crystallization of many things I’ve observed over the years called “the tyrrany of competence” where organizations can get paralyzed by people who are technically strong at their jobs but who are either disruptive culturally or who have such a chokehold on their role that they hold back the organization as a whole from growing. Another good concept is a chart and some related commentary about how a person transforms from an individual contributor, to a manager, to a leader — great for any growing company. The last interesting one was a grid mapping out four different types of CEOs — Motivator, Vision Setter, Anazlyer, and Taskmaster. Quinn goes into some detail about the characteristics of each and then circles back to the inevitable conclusion (like most Harvard Business Review articles) that the best CEOs exhibit all four characteristics at different times, in different circumstances.
So not my favorite book overall, but some good tidbits. Probably worth a quick read if you’re a student of management and leadership. Thanks to my former colleague Kendall Rawls for this book.
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!
Book Short: Calm in a Crisis, Explained
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, by Laurence Gonzales, is not a business book. Even though the author says a few times “this can be applied to business, too,” the application is left 100% up to the reader. But that’s my only criticism of the book, and it’s not a big one at that. Deep Survival is an unexpected and somewhat odd way to think about how to lead an organization, but it’s very powerful, and incredibly well written.
The author essentially has made a career, or at least a hobby, of studying major accidents and delineating the qualities that separate those who survive from those who don’t. Most of his examples are from extreme sports — sailing across the Atlantic solo, doing highly technical rock and glacier climbs, and the like. Certainly one easy takeaway from the book is that perhaps one can have a lot of fun and be challenged in life without putting oneself at risk in those ways!
But that’s not the author’s point. And it’s not even that preparedness makes the difference, as you might expect (in fact, sometimes that hurts). His point is that the correct combination of rational and emotional impulses makes the difference. His specific 12 points are:
- Look, see, believe (keep those cognitive functions working)
- Stay calm, use humor and fear to focus
- Think/analyze/plan, get organized with manageable tasks
- Take correct, decisive action
- Celebrate successes
- Count your blessings
- Play…or do other things to occupy your mind’s idle moments
- See the beauty around you
- Believe that you will succeed
- Surrender – don’t let the fear of failure stand in your way
- Do whatever is necessary
- Never give up
But reading those points doesn’t really substitute for reading the book, especially since some seem contradictory! Thanks to my friend Greg Sands for this great read.
In 2005, I wrote a post called Unfolding the Map in which I looked at these two seemingly opposing philosophies from successful entrepreneurs:
- If you don’t have a map, you can’t get lost
- If you don’t have a map, you can’t get where you’re going
and tried to combine them when thinking about product roadmapping. The same contradiction and combination could be applied to anything, including coaching and development.
That’s why I was excited to read my friend Matt Spielman’s new book, Inflection Points: How to Work and Live with Purpose. Matt worked at Return Path twice over the years — first as employee #3 (more on that in a minute) and then over a decade later as CMO. We live near each other and know each other’s families. I’ve been lucky enough to see his career unfold and develop into what it is today, a flourishing coaching business called Inflection Point Partners that helps clients tremendously…and that also feeds Matt’s soul.
When I first met Matt and he joined me and Jack to launch Return Path in 1999, he was fresh out of business school and focused on sales and marketing from his prior career in investment banking. Our idea was that he would do the same for us as we got our product in market. But as I started focusing more on what kind of company we wanted to build and how to get there, Matt became my leading thought partner on those topics. When we got to about 25 people, he and I created a new role for him — head of Human Capital and Organization Development. While a bit clunky, that title meant that Matt was the principal person helping me create at small scale what we later branded our People First philosophy. That philosophy and the practices we developed out of it led to 20 years of a strong track record of investing in people and helping over 1,300 colleagues grow their careers by being simple, actionable, and broad-based in the way we handled feedback and development planning. This started back in 2000.
Matt’s book puts the ethos that I saw percolating over 20 years ago into a tight framework around his coaching methodology of the GPS (Game Plan System). The book is short and sweet and walks through both the philosophy and the framework in accessible terms. And while it’s true that you have to be open to new ideas, open to serendipity, and go with flow sometimes…it’s also true that if you have specific goals in mind, you are unlikely to achieve them without a focused effort.
I’ve written a lot about coaching lately between The Impact of a Good Coach and another recent post about a strong coaching framework about intentionality in Russell Benaroya’s book. In that second post, I noted that “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. And that pretty much sums up Matt’s book: If you don’t have a map, you can’t get where you’re going.
Book Short: Internet Fiction
It’s been a long time since I read Tom Evslin’s Hackoff.com, which Tom called a “blook” since he released it serially as a blog, then when it was all done, as a bound book. Mariquita and I read it together and loved every minute of it. One post I wrote about it at the time was entitled Like Fingernails on a Chalkboard.
The essence of that post was “I liked it, but the truth of the parts of the Internet bubble that I lived through were painful to read,” applies to two “new” works of Internet fiction that I just plowed through this week, as well.
Uncommon Stock
Eliot Pepper’s brand new startup thriller, Uncommon Stock, was a breezy and quick read that I enjoyed tremendously. It’s got just the right mix of reality and fantasy in it. For anyone in the tech startup world, it’s a must read. But it would be equally fun and enjoyable for anyone who likes a good juicy thriller.
Like my memory of Hackoff, the book has all kinds of startup details in it, like co-founder struggles and a great presentation of the angel investor vs. VC dilemma. But it also has a great crime/murder intrigue that is interrupted with the book’s untimely ending. I eagerly await the second installment, promised for early 2015.
The Circle
While not quite as new, The Circle has been on my list since it came out a few months back and since Brad’s enticing review of it noted that:
The Circle was brilliant. I went back and read a little of the tech criticism and all I could think was things like “wow – hubris” or “that person could benefit from a little reflection on the word irony”… We’ve taken Peter Drucker’s famous quote “‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” to an absurd extreme in the tech business. We believe we’ve mastered operant conditioning through the use of visible metrics associated with actions individual users take. We’ve somehow elevated social media metrics to the same level as money in the context of self-worth.
So here’s the scoop on this book. Picture Google, Twitter, Facebook, and a few other companies all rolled up into a single company. Then picture everything that could go wrong with that company in terms of how it measures things, dominates information flow, and promotes social transparency in the name of a new world order. This is Internet dystopia at its best – and it’s not more than a couple steps removed from where we are. So fiction…but hardly science fiction.
The Circle is a lot longer than Uncommon Stock and quite different, but both are enticing reads if you’re up for some internet fiction.
Book Short: The Anti-Level-5 Leader
The Five Temptations of a CEO, another short leadership fable in a series by Patrick Lencioni, wasn’t as meaningful to me as the last one I read, The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link), but it wasn’t bad and was also a quick read.
The book to me was the 30 minute version of all the Level-5 Leadership stuff that Collins wrote about in Good to Great and Built to Last. All that said, it was a good quick read and a reminder of what not to do. The temptations are things that most CEOs I’ve ever known (present company very much included) have at least succumbed to at one point or another in their career. That said, you as a CEO should quit or be fired if you have them in earnest, so hopefully if you do have them, you recognize it and have them in diminishing quantities with experience, and hopefully not all at once:
– The temptation to be concerned about his or her image above company results
– The temptation to want to be popular with his or her direct reports above holding them accountable for results
– The temptation to ensure that decisions are correct, even if that means not making a decision on limited information when one is needed
– The temptation to find harmony on one’s staff rather than have productive conflict, discussion, and debate
– The temptation to avoid vulnerability and trust in one’s staff
I’m still going to read the others in Lencioni’s series as well. They may not be the best business books ever written, but they’re solid B/B+s, and they’re short and simple, which few business books are and all should be!
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.
Book Short: A Brand Extension That Works
Usually, brand or line extensions don’t work out well in the end. They dilute and confuse the brand. Companies with them tend to see their total market share shrink, while focused competitors flourish. As the authors of the seminal work from years ago, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Jack Trout and Al Reis would be the first people to tell you this.
That said, The New Positioning, which I guess you could call a line extension by Jack Trout (without Reis), was a fantastic read. Not quite as good as the original, but well worth it. It’s actually not a new new book – I think it’s 12 years old as opposed to the original, which is now something like 25 years old, but I just read it and think it’s incredibly relevant to today’s world.
Building on the original work, Trout focuses more this time on Repositioning and Brand Extensions — two things critical to most businesses today. How to do the impossible, to change people’s minds about your brand or product mid-stream, whether in response to new competitive activity or general changes in the world around you. And how to think about brand extensions (hint: don’t do them, create a new brand like Levi’s did with Dockers).
The book also has a very valuable section on the importance of sound and words to branding and positioning, relative to imagery. Trout has a short but very colorful metaphor about women named Gertrude here that’s reminiscent of the research Malcolm Gladwell cited in Blink.
If you haven’t read the original Positioning, that should be on your wish list for the holidays. If you have, then maybe Santa can deliver The New Positioning!
Book Short: It Sounds Like it Should be About Monkeys, Doesn’t It?
The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, is a must-read for anyone in the Internet publishing or marketing business. There’s been so much written about it in the blogosphere already that I feel a little lame and “me too” for adding my $0.02, but I finally had a chance to get to it last week, and it was fantastic.
The premise is that the collapsing production, distribution, and marketing costs of the Internet for certain types of products — mostly media at this point — have extended the traditional curve of available products and purchased products almost indefinitely so that it has, in statistical terms, a really long tail.
So, for example, where Wal-Mart might only be able to carry (I’m making these numbers up, don’t have the book in front of me) 1,000 different CDs at any given moment in time on the shelf, iTunes or Rhapsody can carry 1,000,000 different CDs online. And even though the numbers of units purchased are still greatest for the most popular items (the hits, the ones Wal-Mart stocks on shelf), the number of units purchased way down “in the tail of the curve,” say at the 750,000th most popular unit, are still meaningful — and when you add up all of the units purchased beyond the top 1,000 that Wal-Mart can carry, the revenue growth and diversity of consumer choice become *really* meaningful.
The book is chock full o’ interesting examples and stats and is reasonably short and easy to read, as Anderson is a journalist and writes in a very accessible style. You may or may not think it’s revolutionary based on how deep you are in Internet media, but it will at a minimum help you crystallize your thinking about it.
Book Short: Reality Doesn’t have to Bite
I just read Confronting Reality (book; audio), the sequel to Execution, by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. Except I didn’t read it, I listened to it on Mariquita’s iPod Shuffle over the course of two or three long runs in the past week. The book was good enough, but I also learned two valuable lessons. Lesson 1: Listening to audio books when running is difficult – it’s hard to focus enough, easy to lose one’s place, can’t refer back to anything or take notes. Lesson 2: If you sweat enough on your spouse’s Shuffle, you can end up owning a Shuffle of your own.
Anyway, I was able to focus on the book enough to know that it’s a good one. It’s chock full of case studies from the last few years, including some “new economy” ones instead of just the industrial types covered in books like Built to Last and Good to Great. Cisco, Sun, EMC, and Thomson are all among those covered. The basic message is that you really have to dig into external market realities when crafting a strategic plan or business model and make sure they’re in alignment with your financial targets as well as people and processes. But the devil’s in the details, and the case studies here are great.
Book Short: The Most Rapacious Guys in the Room
I just finished The Smartest Guys in the Room, by journalists Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. This is the story of Enron, and what a tale it is! The book is a good quick business novel read. It reminded me a lot of Barbarians at the Gate, except that it made me far angrier. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m at a different place in my career now than I was 10 years ago and therefore have a different appreciation for what goes on in companies, or if the Enron guys were just far worse than anyone surrounding RJR Nabisco. But in any case, as my Grandpa Bill would have said, this one certainly raised my hackles.
Anyway, I can’t even get into the details without working myself into a frenzy about these crooks, but suffice to say there are lots of “what not to do” lessons in this book, starting with CEO Ken Lay’s wuss-like, disconnected approach to leading the company and ending with CFO Andy Fastow’s insane rationalizations for using the company as his own piggy bank. Anyway, I thought it would just be easier to just list out a few simple things to look for in your own company if you’re concerned you might be having some financial scandals within. You know you have a problem if…
– Your company has 3,000 off-balance sheet special purpose entities, including 800 in the Caymans
– Your CEO has waived your company code of ethics twice so that the CFO could negotiate deals for his own profit against the company
– Your President combatively calls an analyst an asshole on an earnings call when asked why the company couldn’t produce a balance sheet and cash flow statement with its income statement and earnings release
– Your staffers meet someone from your auditor and say “oh, you’re the guy that won’t let us do something”
– Your accounting department becomes viewed as a major profit center because of its treatment of revenue
It’s truly astonishing what these bozos thought they could get away with. Thank God they’re going to jail. Thanks to my colleague Patty Mah (a friend of the author) for this book.
