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:  Next, Write a Sequel

Written by Rodd Wagner and James K. Harter and billed as “the long awaited sequel to First, Break All the Rules” (one of the best management books I’ve ever read), I thought 12: The Elements of Great Managing, was good, but not great.  12…, along with the original book First… and Now, Discover Your Strengths, the latter two both by Marcus Buckingham, are all based on an extensive database of research done on corporate America by the Gallup organization over many years.  All three are valuable reads in one way or another, although I found this to be the weakest of the three.  (Note that Now… is different from the other two in that it’s not about management, it’s about self-management — very different, though based on the same research.)

Anyway, the elements of great managing, so say the authors, is all about creating employee engagement.  I totally buy into that.  And since no book short on 12… would be complete if it didn’t list out the 12…

1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?
8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?
9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
10. Do I have a best friend at work?
11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
12. This last year, have I had the opportunities at work to learn and grow?

The book fleshes out each of the 12, gives examples (some of which are better/clearer than others), and then addresses compensation in a very interesting chapter at the end.  Key takeaways on comp:

– Higher pay doesn’t guarantee greater engagement
– Good and bad employees are equally likely to think they deserve a raise
– Money without meaning isn’t enough
– Most employees, most of the time, feel undercompensated
– Individual pay can/should be private, but comp criteria should be very public
– People who feel well-compensated generally work harder

The book also cites a very provocative article suggesting that organizations would handle comp better if they made everyone’s comp public (in contrast to the final bullet above, yes).  I’m going to write more about compensation in future postings, so I’ll leave this section on those notes.

Finally, the book’s two closing thoughts are perhaps its most prescient:  one critical element of BEING a great manager is HAVING a great manager; and the managers who put the most into their people, get the most out of their people.

Book Short: Hire Great

It’s certainly not hiring season for most of America The World The Universe, but we are still making some limited hires here at Return Path, and I thought – what better time to retool our interviewing and hiring process than in a relatively slow period?

So I just read Who: The A Method for Hiring, by Geoff Smart and Randy Street.  It’s a bit of a sequel, or I guess more of a successor book, to the best book I’ve ever read about hiring and interviewing, Topgrading, by Geoff Smart and his father Brad (post, link to buy).  This one wasn’t bad, and it was much shorter and crisper.

I’m not sure I believe the oft-quoted stat that a bad hire costs a company $1.5mm.  Maybe sometimes (say, if the person embezzles $1.4mm), but certainly the point that bad hires are a nightmare for an organization in any number of ways is well taken.   The book does a good job of explaining the linkage from strategy and execution straight to recruiting, with good examples and tips for how to create the linkage.  That alone makes it a worthwhile read.

The method they describe may seem like common sense, but I bet 95 out of 100 companies don’t come close.  We are very good and quite deliberate about the hiring process and have a good success average, but even we have a lot of room to improve.  The book is divided into four main sections:

• Scorecard: creating job descriptions that are linked to company strategy and that are outcome and competency based, not task based
• Sourcing: going beyond internal and external recruiters to make your entire company a talent seeker and magnet
• Selection: the meat of the book – good detail on how to conduct lots of different kinds of interviews, from screening to topgrading (a must) to focused to reference
• Sell:  how to reel ’em in once they’re on the line (for us anyway, the least useful section as we rarely lose a candidate once we have an offer out)

One of the most poignant examples in the book centered around hiring someone who had been fired from his previous job.  The hiring method in the book uncovered it (that’s hard enough to do sometimes) but then dug deep enough to understand the context and reasons why, and, matching up what they then knew about the candidate to their required competencies and outcomes for the job, decided the firing wasn’t a show-stopper and went ahead and made the hire.

I’d think of these two books the way I think about the Covey books.  If you have never read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, you could just get away with reading Stephen Covey’s newer book, The 8th Habit:  From Effectiveness to Greatness, though the original is much richer.

Book short:  Blink

Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, is a must read for marketers, entrepreneurs, and VCs alike, just as is the case with Gladwell’s first book, The Tipping Point.

Where The Tipping Point theorizes about how humans relate to each other and how fads start and flourish in our society, Blink theorizes about how humans make decisions and about the interplay between the subconscious, learned expertise, and real-time inputs.  But Gladwell does more than theorize — he has plenty of real world examples which seem quite plausible, and he peppers the book with evidence from some (though hardly a complete coverage of relevant) scientific and quasi-scientific studies.

Blink for Entrepreneurs/CEOs:  What’s the most critical lesson in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, as it relates to entrepreneurs/CEOs?  It’s about bias in hiring.  Most of us make judgments about potential new hires quite quickly in the initial interview.  The symphony example in the book is the most painfully poignant — most major symphony orchestras hired extremely few women until they started conducting auditions behind a screen.  It’s not clear to me yet how to stop or even shrink hiring bias, but I suspect the answer lies in pre-interview work around defining specific criteria for the job and scoring all candidates on the same set of criteria.

Blink for VCs:  What’s the most critical lesson in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, as it relates to VCs?  It’s about picking companies to back.  Even VCs who are virtuosos, as Gladwell would call them, can make poor judgments on companies to back based on their own personal reaction to a company’s product or service, as opposed to the broader marketplace’s reaction.  Someone poured a whole lot of money into Webvan, Pets.com, eToys, and the like.

Blink for Marketers:  What’s the most critical lesson in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, as it relates to Marketers?  It’s the importance of multivariate regression testing.  No, really, I’m not kidding, although there’s no doubt a less math-y way of saying it — “test everything.”  The Coca-Cola Company thought they were doing the right thing in creating New Coke because they were losing the Pepsi Challenge.  But what they didn’t realize was that Pepsi (unintentionally or not) had suckered them into believing that the single-sip test was cause for reengineering a century of product, when in reality Coke was probably just being out-advertised.  Christian Brothers Brandy was going out of its mind losing market share to competitor E&J until someone realized that they just needed to change the shape of their bottle.

If you haven’t yet done so, go buy the book!  It’s a very quick read and incredibly thought provoking.  And if you haven’t yet read The Tipping Point, it’s a must as well.

Book Short:  Allegory of Allegories

Squirrel, Inc., by Stephen Denning, is a good quick read for leaders who want a refreshing look at effective ways to motivate and communicate to their teams. The book focuses on storytelling as a method of communication, and Denning employs the storytelling method fairly successfully as a framework for the book.

The specific kinds of messages he focuses on, where he says storytelling can have the biggest impact, are:  communicating a complex idea and sparking action; communicating identity – who YOU as leader are; transmitting values; getting a group or team to work together more effectively; neutralizing gossip or taming the grapevine; knowledge-sharing; and painting a vision of the future that a team can hang onto.   The book even has a nice summary “how to” table at the end of it.

Thanks to email guru David Baker at Agency.com for giving me the book.

Book Short:  Fixing America

I usually only blog about business books, but since I occasionally comment on politics, I thought I would also post on That Used to be Us:  How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, by Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum (book, Kindle), which I just finished.

There is much that is good about America.  And yet, there is much that is broken and in need of serious repair.  I wrote about some thought on fixing our political system last year in The Beginnings of a Roadmap to Fix America’s Badly Broken Political System?, but fixing our political system can only do so much.  Tom Friedman, with whom I usually agree a lot, but only in part, nailed it in his latest book.  Instead of blaming one party or the other (he points the finger at both!), he blames our overall system, and our will as a people, for the country’s current problems.

The authors talk about the four challenges facing America today – globalization, the IT revolution, deficits and debt, and rising energy demand and climate change, and about how the interplay of those four challenges are more long term and less obvious than challenges we’ve faced as a country in the past, like World Wars or The Great Depression, or even The Great Recession.  The reason, according to the authors, that we have lost our way a bit in the last 20-40 years, is that we have strayed from the five-point formula that has made us successful for the bulk of our history:

• Providing excellent public education for more and more Americans
• Building and continually modernizing our infrastructure
• Keeping America’s doors to immigration open
• Government support for basic research and development
• Implementation of necessary regulations on private economic activity

It’s hard not to be in violent agreement with the book as a normal person with common sense.  Even the last point of the five-point formula, which can rankle those on the right, makes sense when you read the specifics.  And the authors rail against excessive regulation enough in the book to give them credibility on this point.

The authors’ description of the labor market of the future and how we as a country can be competitive in it is quite well thought through.  And they have some other great arguments to make – for example, about how the prior decade of wars was, for the first time in American history, not accompanied by tax increases and non-essential program cuts; or about how we can’t let ourselves be held hostage to AARP and have “funding old age” trump “funding youth” at every turn.

The one thing I disagree with a bit is the authors’ assertion that “we cannot simply cut our way to fiscal sanity.”  I saw a table in the Wall Street Journal the same day I was reading this book that noted the federal budget has grown from $2.6T in 2007 to $3.6T today – 40% in four years!  Sure sounds to me like mostly a spending program, though I do support closing loopholes, eliminating subsidies, and potentially some kind of energy tax for other reasons.

I’ll save their solution for those who read the book.  It’s not as good as the meat of the book itself, but it’s solid, and it actually mirrors something my dad has been talking about for a while now.  If you care about where we are as a country and how we can do better, read this book!

Book Short:  Is CX the new UX?

Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business, by Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine from Forrester Research, was a good read that kept crossing back and forth between good on the subject at hand, and good business advice in general.  The Customer Experience (CX) movement is gaining more and more steam these days, especially in B2B companies like Return Path.  The authors define Customer Experience as “how your customers perceive their interactions with your company,” and who doesn’t care about that?

A few years ago, people started talking a lot more about User Experience (UX) as a new crossover discipline between design and engineering, and our experience at Return Path has been that UX is an incredibly powerful tool in our arsenal to build great technical products via lean/agile methods.  The recurring thought I had reading this book, especially for companies like ours, was “Is CX the new UX?”

In other words, should we just be taking the same kind of lean/agile approach to CX that we do with technical product development and UX — but basically do it more holistically across every customer touchpoint, from marketing to invoice?  It’s hard to see the answer being “no” to that question, although as with all things, the devil is in the implementation details.  And that’s true at the high level (the authors talk about making sure you align CX strategy with corporate strategy and brand attributes and values) as well as a more granular level (what metrics get tracked for CX, and how do those align with the rest of the companies KPIs).

The book’s framework for CX is six high-level disciplines: strategy, customer understanding, design, measurement, governance, and culture — but you really have to read the book to get at the specifics.

Some other thoughts and quotes from the book:

• the book contains some good advice on how to handle management of cross-functional project teams in general (which is always difficult), including a good discussion of various governance models
• “to achieve the full potential of customer experience as a business strategy, you have to change the way you run your business. You must manage from the perspective of your customers, and you must do it in a systematic, repeatable, and disciplined way.”
• one suggestion the book had for weaving the customer experience into your culture (if it’s not there already) is to invite customers to speak all-hands meetings
• another suggestion the book had for weaving the customer experience into everyone’s objectives was one company’s tactic of linking compensation (in this case, 401k match) to customer experience metrics
• “Customer Experience is a journey, not a project. It has a beginning but it doesn’t have an end.”

Thanks to my colleague Jeremy Goldsmith for recommending this book.

Book Short:  Like Reading a Good Speech

Leaders Eat Last, by Simon Sinek, is a self-described “polemic” that reads like some of the author’s famous TED talks and other speeches in that it’s punchy, full of interesting stories, has some attempted basis in scientific fact like Gladwell, and wanders around a bit.  That said, I enjoyed the book, and it hit on a number of themes in which I am a big believer – and it extended and shaped my view on a couple of them.

Sinek’s central concept in the book is the Circle of Safety, which is his way of saying that when people feel safe, they are at their best and healthiest.  Applied to workplaces, this isn’t far off from Lencioni’s concept of the trust foundational layer in his outstanding book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team.  His stories and examples about the kinds of things that create a Circle of Safety at work (and the kinds of things that destroy them) were very poignant.  Some of his points about how leaders set the tone and “eat last,” both literally and figuratively, are solid.  But his most interesting vignettes are the ones about how spending time face-to-face in person with people as opposed to virtually are incredibly important aspects of creating trust and bringing humanity to leadership.

My favorite one-liner from the book, which builds on the above point and extends it to a corporate philosophy of people first, customer second, shareholders third (which I have espoused at Return Path for almost 15 years now) is

Customers will never love a company unless employees love it first.

A couple of Sinek’s speeches that are worth watching are the one based on this book, also called Leaders Eat Last, and a much shorter one called How Great Leaders Inspire Action.

Bottom line:  this is a rambly book, but the nuggets of wisdom in it are probably worth the exercise of having to find them and figure out how to connect them (or not connect them).

Thanks to my fellow NYC CEO Seth Besmertnik for giving me this book as well as the links to Sinek’s speeches.

Book Short:  A Good Dose of Introspection

I rarely blog about non-business books since this is a business blog — and I read a lot of them!  But occasionally, one manages to slip in, and this time, it’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom.  From the author of Tuesdays With Morrie, which I also liked quite a bit, this one is excellent.  And a very, very quick read.

The book, in short (i.e., a book short <g>), is about a guy who dies, and who, in heaven, meets five people who have shaped his life and died before him.  Some he knows well, some he knows barely, some he’s never met.  Each one tells him a story that explains some part of his life to him and in doing so, helps him understand more about himself and why/how he lived on earth.

The book, as I said, is a short read.  But more than that, it’s a wonderful story and provides an opportunity for a structured moment of introspection, one that I found very valuable.  Quite frankly, this book should be a “once every year or two” read.

Book Short:  Be Less Clever

In Search of the Obvious: The Antidote for Today’s Marketing Mess, by Jack Trout, is probably deserving of a read by most CEOs.  Trout at this point is a bit old school and curmudgeonly, the book has some sections which are a bit repetitive of other books he and his former partner Al Reis have written over the years, he does go off on some irrelevant rants, and his examples are a bit too focused on TV advertising, BUT his premise is great, and it’s universally applicable.  So much so that my colleagues Leah, Anita, and I had “book club” about it one night last week and had a very productive debate about our own positioning and marketing statements and how obvious they were (they need work!).

The premise in short is that, in advertising:

Logical, direct, obvious = relevant, and

Entertaining, emotional = irrelevant

And he’s got data to back it up, including a great case study from TiVo on which ads are skipped and not skipped – the ones that aren’t skipped are from companies like Bowflex, Hooters, and the Dominican Republic, where the presentation of the ad is very direct, explanatory of the product, and clear.  His reasons why advertising have drifted away from the obvious are probably right, ranging from the egos of marketing people, to CEOs being to disconnected from marketing, to the rise in importance of advertising awards, and his solution, of course is to refocus on your core positioning/competitive positioning.

It is true that when the only tool in your box is a hammer, everything starts to look a bit like a nail, but Trout is probably right in this case.  He does remind us in this book that “Marketing is not a battle of products. It is a battle of perceptions”– words to live by.

And some of his examples of great obvious advertising statements, either real or ones he thinks should have been used, are very revealing:

• Kerry should have turned charges that he was a flip-flopper in 2004 around on Bush with the simple line that Bush was “strong but wrong”
• New Zealand: “the world’s most beautiful two islands”
• The brilliance of the VW Beetle in a big-car era and “thinking small”
• Johnny Cochrane’s winning (over)simplification of the OJ case — “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit”
• BMW is still, 30 years later, The Ultimate Driving Machine
• “Every day, the Kremlin gets 12 copies of the Wall Street Journal. Maybe they know something you don’t know.”

If you are looking for a good marketing book to read as a refresher this year, this one could be it.  And if you’re not a very market-focused CEO, this kind of thinking is a must.

And for the record, the library of books by Trout and/or Reis (sometimes including Reis’ daughter Laura as well) that I’ve read, all of which are quite good, is:

• Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind – the original – a brilliant, short, classic
• The New Positioning (link, post) – good refresher on the original, gets into repositioning
• Marketing Warfare –
• The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR – excellent but pre-social media
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding –
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk! –
• Bottom-up Marketing –
• Differentiate or Die: Survival in Our Era of Killer Competition –
• In Search of the Obvious: The Antidote for Today’s Marketing Mess – the current book

Book Short (and great concept): Moments of Truth

TouchPoints:  Creating Powerdul Leadership Connections in the Smallest of Moments, by Douglas Conant, former CEO of Campbell’s Soup Corporation, and Mette Norgaard (book, kindle), is a very good nugget of an idea wrapped in lots of other good, though only loosely connected management advice around self awareness and communication — something I’m increasingly finding in business books these days.

It’s a very short book. I read it on the Kindle, so I don’t know how many pages it is or the size of the font, but it was only 2900 kindles (or whatever you call a unit on the device) and only took a few Metro North train rides to finish.  It’s probably worth a read just to get your head around the core concept a bit more, though it’s far from a great business book.

I won’t spend a lot of time on the book itself, but the concept echoes something I’ve been referring to a while here at Return Path as “Moments of Truth.”  Moments of Truth are very short interactions between you and an employee that are high impact and, once you get the hang of them, low effort.  At least, they’re low effort relative to long form meetings.

Here are a few thoughts about Moments of Truth:

• They are critical opportunities to get things both very right and very wrong with an employee
• They are more powerful than meets the eye – both for what they are and because they get amplified as employees mention them to other employees
• They can come to you (people popping into your office and the like), you can seek them out (management by walking around), and you can institutionalize them (for example, one of the things I do is call every employee on their Return Path anniversary to congratulate them on the milestone)
• They are no different than any other kind of interaction you have, just a lot shorter and therefore can be more intense (and numerous)
• Their use cases are as broad as any management interaction — coaching, positive or negative feedback, input, support, etc.

What can you as a manager or leader do to perfect your handling of Moments of Truth?

First, learn how to spot them when they come to you, and think about a typical employee’s day/week/month/year to think about when you can find opportunities to seek them out.  Their first day on the job.  When they get a promotion.  When they get a great performance review, or new stock options.  Maybe when they get a poor performance review or denied a promotion they were seeking.

Second, learn to appreciate them and leave space for them.  If you have zero free minutes in every single day, you not only won’t have time to create or seek out Moments of Truth, you’ll be rushed or blow them off when they come to you.

Finally, like everything else, you have to develop a formula for handling them and then practice that formula.  The book does talk about a formula of “head, heart, hand” (e.g., being logical, authentic, and competent) that’s not bad.  Although I’d never thought about it systematically before writing this post, I have a few different kinds of Moments of Truth, and each one has its own rhythm to it, and its own regular ending.

But regardless of how you handle them, once you think about your day through this lens, you’ll start seeing them all over the place.  Recognize their power, and dive in!