Book Short:Â Deep Dive on Customer Development
I continue to be on a tear reading books about startups as I finish and get ready for the publication of Startup CEO (now available for pre-ordering at Amazon).  This week’s selection was The Startup Owners Manual:  A Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company, by Steve Blank and Bon Dorf. This book is a significantly more detailed version of Blank’s first book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, which was a revolutionary book a few years ago that helped spawn the Lean Startup movement.
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.
Book Short:Â Scrum ptiousÂ
I just finished reading Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, by Jeff Sutherland and JJ Sutherland. This reading was in anticipation of an Agile Facilitation training my executive team and I are going through next week, as part of Return Path’s Agile Everywhere initiative. But it’s a book I should’ve read along time ago, and a book that I enjoyed.
Sutherland gets credit for creating the agile framework and bringing the concept scrum to software development over 20 years ago. The book very clearly lays out not just the color behind the creation of the framework, and the central tenets of practice again, but also clear and simple illustrations of its value and benefits. And any book that employs the Fibonacci series and includes Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” quote — my all-time favorite — is off to a good start by me.
I’ve always appreciated a lot of the underlying philosophy of Agile, such as regularly checking on projects, course correcting in response to feedback from customers or other stakeholders, and working hard to remove any impediments to progress in real time.
One of the author’s most poignant points is that “multitasking makes you stupid.” I hadn’t focused in the past how agile allows you to clear away context shifts to focus on one task at a time, but that’s another great take away from the book.
Our Agile Everywhere initiative, which is designed to improve productivity across the organization, as well as increase accountability through transparency, is even more critical in my view after having read this book.
The thing that I am left struggling with, which is still very much a work in progress for us, and hopefully something that we will address more head on in our training next week, is the application of the agile framework to teams that are not involved in the production of a tangible work product, such as executive or other leadership teams. That is something that our Agile Everywhere deployment team has developed a theory about, but it still hasn’t entirely sunk in for me.
I can’t wait for next week’s training session! If you have any experience applying the agile framework to different types of teams in your company I’d love to hear more about it in the Comments.
Book Short:Â 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.
Book Short:Â Legal Aid
The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law, by Constance Bagley (HBS) and Craig Dauchy (Cooley Godward), while not exactly a page-turner, is a great reference book for even experienced CEOs. It’s pretty broad in its coverage of all major legal issues an entrepreneur will face, from patent law to firing employees.
Remember, you may make fun of lawyers on occasion or grips about their fees, but they DID attend law school for three years, after all. If nothing else, the $20 on this book will almost certainly save you at least 10x that in reduced legal fees someday, for something.
Book Short:Â Great Marketing Checklists
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.
Book Short:Â 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:Â 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: 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:Â Entrepreneurial Lessons
The Startup Playbook: Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from 42 Founders, by David Kidder, is the ultimate coffee table book for entrepreneurs and people who are interested in how they think about running their businesses.
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.
Book Short: How, Now
Every once in a while, I read a book that has me jump up and down saying “Yes! That’s so right!” How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything in Business (and in Life), by Dov Seidman, was one of those books. But beyond just agreeing with the things Seidman says, the book had some really valuable examples and two killer frameworks, one around culture, and one around leadership.
It’s a book about the way the world we now live in — a world of transparency and hyper-connectedness — is no longer about WHAT you do, but HOW you do it. It’s about how you can have a great brand and great advertising, but if your customers find out via a blog and YouTube clip that you run a low quality sweatshop in Malaysia, you are toast. It’s about you can…not outwork the competition, not outsmart the competition, but how you can out-behave the competition.
The book, which talks about principles like mutual gain, and thriving on the collaborative, reminds me a lot of a basic tenet of negotiation I learned years ago at the Harvard Program on Negotiation about finding a “third way” beyond a “me vs. you” negotiation by expanding the pie so both parties get more out of a deal.
Here are a few snippets from the book to inspire a purchase:
– How encouraging doctors to say “I’m sorry” radically reduces lawsuits
– How “micro-inequities” can subtly leech productivity from an organization
– How the majority of workers expect from their workplaces: equity, achievement, camaraderie
– How companies whose employees understand and embrace their mission, goals, and values see a 29% greater return than companies whose employees don’t
– How reputation is the new competitive advantage
– How people will do the right thing because in self-governing cultures, not doing the right thing no longer betrays just the company; it betrays individuals’ own values
– How increasing self-governance means moving values to the center of your efforts and making it clear — in how you reward, celebrate, communicate, and pursue — that those values form the guiding spirit of the enterprise
What type of organization do you run? One based on Anarchy & Lawlessness, one based on Blind Obedience, one based on Informed Acquiescence, or one of Values-Based Self-Governance? (Hint, it’s most likely the third category.) Read the book to find out more.
Book Short:Â A Primer on Viral Marketing
“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.
Book Short:Â 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:
