Book Short:  Awesome Title, So-So Book

Strategy and the Fat Smoker (book, Kindle), by David Maister, was a book that had me completely riveted in the first few chapters, then completely lost me for the rest.  That was a shame.  It might be worth reading it just for the beginning, though I’m not sure I can wholeheartedly recommend the purchase just for that.

The concept (as well as the title) is fantastic.  As the author says in the first words of the introduction:

We often (or even usually) know what we should be doing in both personal and professional life.  We also know why we should be doing it and (often) how to do it.  Figuring all that out is not too difficult.  What is very hard is actually doing what you know to be good for you in the long-run, in spite of short-run temptations.  The same is true for organizations.

The diagnosis is clear, which is as true for organizations as it is for fat people, smokers, fat smokers, etc.  The hard work (pain) is near-term, and the rewards (gain) are off in the future, without an obvious or visible correlation.  As someone who has had major up and down swings in weight for decades, I totally relate to this.

But the concept that

the necessary outcome of strategic planning is not analytical insight but resolve,

while accurate, is the equivalent of an entire book dedicated to the principle of “oh just shut up and do it already.”  The closest the author comes to answering the critical question of how to get “it” done is when he says

A large part of really bringing about strategic change is designing some new action or new system that visibly, inescapably, and irreversibly commits top management to the strategy.

Right.  That’s the same thing as saying that in order to lose weight, not only do you need to go on a diet and weigh yourself once in a while, but you need to make some major public declaration and have other people help hold you accountable, if by no other means than causing you to be embarrassed if you fail in your quest.

So all that is true, but unfortunately, the last 80% of the book, while peppered with moderately useful insights on management and leadership, felt largely divorced from the topic.  It all just left me wanting inspirational stories of organizations doing the equivalent of losing weight and quitting smoking before their heart attacks, frameworks of how to get there, and the like.  But those were almost nonexistent.  Maybe Strategy and the Fat Smoker works really well for consulting firms – that’s where a lot of the examples came from.  I find frequently that books written by consultants are fitting for that industry but harder to extrapolate from there to any business.

Book Short: Wellness Redefined

Well Being: The 5 Essential Elements, by Tom Rath and Jim Harter from the Gallup organization, is a solid read and incredibly short. It’s one of those books that’s really a long article stretched and bound. But it goes beyond the basics of what I expected, which was something like “having healthy employees cuts down on absenteeism” and has a couple great elements of food for thought for leaders looking to build cutting edge and uber-productive organizations. It comes out of the same general body of research as four other very strong books I’ve written about over time — First, Break all the Rules, Now, Discover Your Strengths, 12: The Great Elements of Managing (book, review), and Go Put Your Strengths to Work (book, review).

The authors define well being as having five separate components:  career well being, social well being, physical well being, financial well being, and community well being. Ok, that makes sense, but the three most interesting points the book made from my perspective were:

1. Well being isn’t just about one of these five elements – it’s about all five, and how they interact together, and how the workplace can support all of them
2. Achieving long-term objectives around well being requires finding short-term incentives that drive the same behavior in more obvious and immediate ways, as most long-term well being drivers require short term sacrifice. So figure out how to make eating a salad better for you not just years from now but TODAY (you’ll have more energy after lunch than if you eat that cheeseburger), for example
3. Financial well being isn’t something a lot of companies focus on, and maybe it should be. Particularly in our industry we hire knowledge workers and assume therefore that they’re smart and educated about everything…but maybe there are ways that the company can support financial well being that aren’t necessarily obvious

The book is full of stats from the underlying research, most of which show that most people are shockingly unhappy, and that most workplaces dont do enough to support employee wellness. The book also notes, as is the case with most things, that promoting well being among employees requires more than just setting up programs. Doing it right requires constant vigilance, measurement, and follow up. At Return Path, we do a bunch of programs along the lines suggested by the book (but can and should do more!), but we’ve never been rigorous with follow up. Good food for thought.

Note there is also a free whitepaper on the economics of well being that you can download here.  The white paper is ok…but not nearly as interesting as the book, and note that it does not substitute for the book.  Thanks to my colleague Cathy Hawley for this book!

Boards That Lead, by Ram Charan, Dennis Carey, and Michael Useem, was recommended to me by a CEO Coach in the Bolster network, Tim Porthouse, who said he’s been referring it to his clients alongside Startup Boards. I don’t exactly belong in the company of Ram Charan (Brad and Mahendra probably do!), so I was excited to read it. While it’s definitely the “big company” version to Startup Boards, there are some good lessons for startup CEOs and founder to take away from it.

The best part about the book as it relates to ALL boards is the framework of Partner, Take Charge, Stay out of the Way, and Monitor. You can probably lump all potential board activities into these four buckets. If you look at it that way…these are pretty logical:

• Monitor – what you’d expect any board to do
• Stay out of the Way – basic execution/operations
• Partner – strategy, goals, risk, budget, leadership talent development
• Take Charge – CEO hiring/firing, Exec compensation, Ethics, and Board Governance itself.

There was an interesting nugget in the book as well called the Central Idea that I hadn’t seen articulated quite this way before. It’s basically a statement of what the business is and how it’s going to win. It’s about a page long, 8-10 bullet points, and it includes things like mission, strategy, key goals, and key operating pillars that underlie the goals. It basically wraps up all of Lencioni’s key questions in one page with a little more meat on the bones. I like it and may adopt it. The authors put the creation of the Central Idea into the Take Charge bucket, but I’d put it squarely in the Partner bucket.

Other than that, the book is what you’d expect and does have a lot of overlap with the world of startups. Its criteria for director selection are very similar to what we use at Bolster, as is its director evaluation framework. The book has a ton of handy checklists as well, some of which are more applicable than others to startups, for example Dealing with Nonperforming Directors and Spotting a Failing CEO.

All in, a good read if you’re a student of Boards.

Book Short:  You’d Never Run Your Business This Way…

I am an unabashed conservative, so you might wonder what I was doing reading  A Country That Works, by union chief Andy Stern, the President of SEIU (Service Workers International Union) this weekend.  Well, part of it is that my mother-in-law Carmen works for him.  Part was that he was quite inspiring during his recent appearance on the Colbert Report a week or two ago.  And part was that I always like reading about different points of view, especially with the current, somewhat dismal state of the Republican leadership in Washington.

The book was very short and a worthwhile read.  I may not agree with Stern on some of his illustrations of the problems — his statistical presentations were a bit apples-to-oranges at times — and some of his solutions, which were a bit high on the big-government-tax-and-spend side for me, but the book was very plain-speak, apolitical, and solution-oriented, all of which I found refreshing.

He certainly had at least one underlying premise about “labor as electricity ” (compete on something else other than forcing wages to go lower) that is making me think hard about my long-standing philosophical opposition to federally-mandated minimum wages.  His notion of the importance of a global labor movement to act as a check/balance on corporate globalization both make sense.  Actually, now that I think about it, those two things put together start working well as one plank in a solution to global poverty.

But the best part of the book was the fact that Stern is clear that, like his ideas or hate them,  he is at least proposing that we DEAL with them.  America is missing serious debate about some critical issues facing our society.  Anyone who doesn’t think we have serious problems facing our future around retirement savings, education, and health care is not facing reality.  The debate happening in Washington today is weak at best, and over-politicized.

The bottom line is that I think we’re in danger as a country of boiling the frog when it comes to some major structural issues in our society, and, most important to me, You’d Never Run Your Business This Way.  Any good entrepreneur knows that when danger lurks around the corner, you have to reinvent yourself, and we as a country aren’t doing that at this moment when we’d benefit from it greatly for the long term.  Stern displays that mix of optimism for the future and serious reality check today known as the Stockdale Paradox and revered by Jim Collins in his two books on corporate leadership, Good to Great and Built to Last.

My biggest criticism of the book was that it was too short.  It was basically 1/3 Andy’s story, 1/3 SEIU’s story, and 1/3 labor’s story — and it could have been at least twice as long and gone into more detail on Stern’s points, especially in the last chapter where he starts spelling out his plan to get America back on track.  But presumably when Stern runs for national office or gets a cabinet appointment someday (no inside knowledge here, but the book certainly reads that way), he’ll flesh things out a bit!

Book Short:  Unsung Heroes

If you like “entrepreneurship by analogy” books, you’ll like The Innovators:  The Engineering Pioneers Who Made America Modern, by David Billington.  I have to admit some bias here — Professor Billington was my favorite teacher and senior thesis advisor at Princeton (I almost majored in civil engineering because of him), and this book is one of a number he’s written that are outgrowths of his most popular courses at Princeton.  And while there’s no substitute for the length or energy of his lectures, the book works.

The book is basically a person-focused engineering history of America from 1776-1883.  Billington talks about four classes of engineering product:  public structures (mostly bridges), machines that produced power, networks like the railroads and telegraphs, and processes like steel manufacturing.

His approach is to acknowledge that the Americans innovators couldn’t do much without the right context:  learnings from their counterparts in Britain, a supportive government here at home, and abundant raw materials and capital.  But with that backdrop in place, Billington tells the tale of a number of the inventions that built our modern society with a focus on the engineers who got things right.  While some of them are familiar names (Morse, Edison), many are not (Thomas Telford, J. Edgar Thomson, Joseph Henry).

Sound familiar?  It feels at many point in the book that you could insert some different names and dates and be reading a history of the Internet or information age.  And as with the Industrial Revolution, while many of the innovators in our world today are known (Bezos, Yang, Brin/Page), there are probably an equal number who are unsung heroes — either software engineers or even buisness model pioneers who haven’t sought or won’t end up in the spotlight even though their contributions to society or to their companies are giant.  I know there are a number of unsung heroes in our own engineering department at Return Path — people who aren’t market facing and who never get quoted in press releases, but who really make a difference in how the company works and how competitive we are.  This book celebrates those people as much as it does the entrepreneurs you’ve heard of.

Warning, there are lots of pages which are full of mathematical formulas, which may or may not be interesting to you, but the book still holds together 100% if you skip over them.

Book Short:  Crazy Eights

In honor of Return Path being in the midst of its eighth year, I recently read a pair of books with 8 in the title (ok, I would have read them anyway, but that made for a convenient criterion when selecting out of my very large “to read” pile).

Ram Charan’s latest, Know-How:  The 8 Skills That Separate People People Who Perform From Those Who Don’t, was pretty good and classic Charan.  Quick, easy to skim and still get the main points.  The book lost a little credibility with me when Charan lionized Verizon (perhaps he uses a different carrier himself) and Bob Nardelli (the book was published before Nardelli’s high profile dismissal), but makes good points nonetheless.  Some of the 8 Skills he talks about are what you’d expect on the soft side of leadership — building the team, understanding the social system, judging people — but his best examples were particularly actionable around positioning, goal setting, and setting priorities.  The book reminded me much more of Execution and much less of Confronting Reality (which is a good thing).

For years I’ve felt like the last person around to still not have read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, so I thought I’d skip straight to the punchline and read Stephen Covey’s newer book, The 8th Habit:  From Effectiveness to Greatness.  Fortunately, as I’d hoped, the new book summarizes the prior book several times over, so if you haven’t read the first, you could certainly just start with this one.  The book also comes with a DVD of 16 short films, some of which are great — both inspirational and poignant.  Unlike most business books, the 8th Habit is NOT skimmable.  It almost has too much material in it and could probably be read multiple times or at least in smaller pieces.  The actual 8th habit Covey talks about is what he calls Find Your Voice and Help Others Find Their Voices and is a great encapsulation of what leading a knowledge worker business is all about.  But the book is much deeper and richer than that in its many models and frameworks and examples/tie-ins to business and goes beyond the “touchy feely” into hard-nosed topics around execution and strategy.

Now I’m looking for the DVD of the first season of Eight is Enough!

(This post was written by my colleague Bethany Crystal and originally published on the Bolster blog yesterday. While I am still trying to figure out what posts to put on this blog vs. Bolster’s blog since the blogs are pretty similar, I will occasionally run something in both places.)

At Bolster, we believe that 2021 will mark the rise of the on-demand economy for executives. More than ever before, executives are seeking out roles that distinctly aren’t full-time for a variety of reasons – they’re in between full-time roles and want to stay engaged and meet a wide range of potential employers; they’re retired or semi-retired/post-exit and want to keep working, just not full-time; they’re fully employed but are looking for advisory opportunities to help others; or they are committed to the more flexible lifestyle that being an on-demand affords. As business leaders, you might be wondering how to take advantage of this trend and incorporate on-demand talent onto your existing team. Don’t worry – we’ve got you covered.

Let’s start with a quick primer on the distinct types of on-demand talent. Here are the four most common themes we see among our member network at Bolster:

The Four Types of On-Demand Talent

1. Interim: Someone who is partially or fully dedicated to working with your company, but only temporarily (you can think of them as “filling a gap”)
2. Fractional: Someone who works part-time (or “fractionally”) with your company on an ongoing basis (they “own” the function on a long-term, part-time basis)
3. Advisor or Coach: Someone who supports your existing team by offering external advising, coaching, or mentorship as needed (this might be on a temporary or long-term basis)
4. Project-Based: Someone who is brought on to complete a specific project or a fixed span of work (this is the closest to typical consulting work)

Depending on your business needs, the capacity of your existing team, and your resourcing, you might find it useful to have one or more on-demand executives in the mix at any given time. We’ve also found this can be a great way to keep things fresh at the leadership level and make sure new ideas are circulated with some regularity.

Business Opportunities for On-Demand Talent

While every company’s on-demand talent needs will vary, we’ve already seen a few patterns emerge from the 2,000 executives in our member network. Here are a few times to think about bringing on-demand work to your business.

Choose interim work if you need…

• A temporarily placeholder at the exec level
  Whether unexpected or planned, transitions at the executive level can come with a high cost: Any week that goes by with an unfilled seat adds more work to the team, contributes to business lag, or both. While full executive searches can take six months (or more!) to get right, many CEOs find it helpful to bring on interim help as a “stopgap” in the meantime. The most obvious benefit of interim on-demand work is to prevent your business from falling behind in areas where you may not have a deep bench below the executive level. And you might also consider that bringing in a seasoned professional as you conduct your full-time search will give your team a proxy to compare against, making that placement process a bit easier. Last – while it’s not a guarantee, there’s always the chance that your interim hire is a great fit for you and wants to stick around for the long term! You then benefit from an on-the-job “interview” or audition.
• Surge capacity staffing
  Imagine a situation where your business doesn’t need an executive in a particular function. You’re small, scrappy, and you’re getting along perfectly well with the team you have in place – and you can fill in the bits of executive leadership required for that function yourself from time to time. But then something pops up where you need to be the CEO and can’t afford to ALSO be the CXO. An interim CXO could be the right solution. For example, the 3-5 months run-up to a Series A or B financing could be a good time to bring on an experienced CFO if your only relevant team members are handling AP, AR, and Payroll. Or you could be working on your company’s public launch with a less experienced marketing team and an agency – and an interim CMO could make all the difference between success and sideways.
• Parental leave coverage
  With a growing business trend of increased parental leave coverage, CEOs are starting to use interim executives to fill holes that might temporarily exist on the leadership team. Interim work is particularly useful if there isn’t an obvious “second in command” role on that team who might take on a stretch project in their absence. Implemented correctly, bringing on an interim exec can also help to squash any fears of “getting replaced” while someone is away on leave. As an added bonus, bringing in a new face (if only temporarily) can give the remaining team a chance to “try out” a new leadership style and share feedback about what worked and didn’t work during the interim period.

Choose fractional work if you need…

• A seasoned professional’s experience and skillset (but not all the time)
  Before every full-time leadership hire, there is the sticky “in between” period of need. That’s the period when some work starts piling up, but not quite enough to fill an entire work week for one person at the executive level – or the period when you know you need a more seasoned leader in a function but just can’t afford one full-time. If you don’t have an experienced executive in the role, you miss opportunities for effectively setting up scalable practices and processes. Often, a lack of senior focus in a functional area means that you miss strategic opportunities, and sometimes it also means that you expose yourself to risk that could be avoided with the right person having ownership of the function. This is the perfect time to introduce fractional work to your business. The most classic example of fractional executive talent is the CFO who oversees the bookkeeping and accounting for several companies at once. But you can find a fractional executive for just about anything. You might consider this type of on-demand executive if you don’t yet have anyone in that functional area, if you have a team of less experienced specialists or even a more junior generalist leader in that functional area, if you want a taste of what it’d be like to dedicate more resources there, or if you need just a few things done right, without having to think about them yourself.

Choose advisory or coaching work if you need…

• Mentorship for your current executives
  Sometimes it’s helpful to see what “great” looks like in order to achieve greatness yourself. If you’re looking for a way to give a current leader an added boost to their development plan, consider bringing on someone who can serve as a mentor or advisor on a temporary or long-term basis. Someone who has been in your shoes before and can give advice and guidance based on their experience. This on-demand exec role has two big benefits: The first being that it demonstrates to your executive team that you’re committed to their ongoing success and growth, which boosts morale (and hopefully performance). The second is that you’ll be able to equip your current team with the tools they each need to scale instead of having to bring on a new wave of executives for each business stage. The advisor or coach usually works a few hours per month, once they’ve set up a strong coaching relationship.
• Access to top talent without the full-time price tag
  Just as remote work unlocked the potential to find “the best of the best” without geographic constraints, on-demand work does the same at the executive level. More and more, we’re seeing CEOs incorporate advisors to their business as a way to gain exposure to best in class talent (at a fraction of the cost). This can be a great way to introduce subject matter or functional expertise into your organization without committing to a full-time salary.

Choose project work if you need…

• A fixed-scope expert engagement at the executive level
  Just as tools like Task Rabbit made it possible to find experts to accomplish tasks on a personal level (such as moving furniture or painting a bedroom), on-demand talent makes it possible to find seasoned executives to complete one-off projects at an expert level. That’s why, on Bolster, we ask each each member to indicate what roles they can take on, and also what projects they can be hired to do. As a CEO, you might consider outsourcing some of the crunchy stuff at the exec level that might take a lot of time, or in cases where you need a quick turnaround to get to an MVP. Common projects we’ve seen to date include building sales commission plan structures, designing a go-to-market launch plan for a new product, running due diligence on an acquisition, overhauling pricing and packaging, working on a strategic plan, TAM analysis, budgeting process, or creating a diversity & inclusion strategy for the company.
• An experimental project that won’t distract the current team
  One final area where you might consider on-demand work is for a project that feels more like an addendum to your current business, or an early experiment. At Bolster, we brought on an on-demand executive to help us think through and roll out a brand new product that we’re in the early days of testing right now. We’ve seen other CEOs use project-based work at the exec level for things like evaluating market expansion possibilities or speccing out the MVP of a potential new product.

This is just a short list of some of the possibilities where on-demand talent might support you in your business today. One of our favorite parts about this type of work is just that – the flexibility it offers to you and your team. Whether your business is just getting started or if you’re operating on all cylinders, don’t forget to consider on-demand work as part of your CEO toolkit for this year and beyond.

– Bethany Crystal, February 2, 2021

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!

Book Short:  I Wish This Existed 12 Years Ago

Brad Feld has been on my board for over a decade now, and when he and his partner Jason Mendelson told me about a new book they were writing a bunch of months ago called Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist, I took note.  I thought, “Hmmm.  I’d like to be smarter than my lawyer or venture capitalist.”

Then I read an advanced copy.  I loved it.  At first, I thought, I would really have benefited from this when I started Return Path way back when.  Then as I finished reading it, I realized it’s just a great reference book even now, all these years and financings later.  But as much as I enjoyed the early read, I felt like something was missing from the book, since its intended audience is entrepreneurs.

Brad and Jason took me up on my offer to participate in the book’s content a little bit, and they are including in the book a series of 50-75 sidebars called “The Entrepreneur’s Perspective” which I wrote and which they and others edited.  For almost every topic and sub-topic in the book, I chime in, either building on, or disagreeing, with Brad and Jason’s view on the subject.

The book is now out.  As Brad noted in his launch post, the book’s table of contents says a lot:

1. The Players
2. How to Raise Money
3. Overview of the Term Sheet
4. Economic Terms of the Term Sheet
5. Control Terms of the Term Sheet
6. Other Terms of the Term Sheet
7. The Capitalization Table
8. How Venture Capital Funds Work
9. Negotiation Tactics
10. Raising Money the Right Way
11. Issues at Different Financing States
12. Letters of Intent – The Other Term Sheet
13. Legal Things Every Entrepreneur Should Know

Fred has posted his review of the book as well.

Bottom line:  if you are an aspiring or actual entrepreneur, buy this book.  Even if you’ve done a couple of financings, this is fantastic reference material, and Brad and Jason’s points of view on things are incredibly insightful beyond the facts.  And I hope my small contributions to the book are useful for entrepreneurs as well.

Book Short: Chip Off the Old Block

I have to admit, I was more than a little skeptical when Craig Spiezle handed me a copy of The Speed of Trust, by Stephen M. R. Covey, at the OTA summit last week. The author is the son of THE Stephen Covey, author of the world famous Seven Habits of Highly Effective People as well as The Eighth Habit (book, post). Would the book have substance and merit or be drafting off the dad’s good name?

I dog-ear pages of books as I read them, noting the pages that are most interesting if I ever want to go back and take a quick pass through the book to remind me about it (and yes, Ezra, I can do this on the Kindle as well via the bookmark feature). If dog-ear quantity is a mark of how impactful a book is, The Speed of Trust is towards the top of the list for me.

The book builds nicely on Seven Habits and The Eighth Habit and almost reads like the work of Stephen the father. The meat of the book is divided into two sections: one on developing what Covey calls “self trust,” a concept not unlike what I blogged about a few months ago, that if you make and keep commitments to yourself, you build a level of self-confidence and discipline that translates directly into better work and a better mental state. The other core section is one on building trust in relationships, where Covey lists out 13 behaviors that all lead to the development of trust.

In fact, we just had a medium-size trust breach a couple weeks ago with one of our key clients. Reading the book just as we are struggling to “right the wrong” was particularly impactful to me and gave me a number of good ideas for how to move past the issue without simply relying on self-flagellation and blunt apologies. This is a book full of practical applications.

It’s not a perfect book (no book is), and in particular its notion of societal trust through contribution is a bit weak relative to the rest of the book, but The Speed of Trust is an excellent read for anyone who wants to understand the fastest way to build — and destroy — a winning culture. It reads like a sequel of Covey senior’s books, but that’s a good thing.

I enjoy reading books written by people I know. I can always picture the person narrating the book, or hear their voice saying the words, I can periodically see their personality showing through the words on the page, and books bring out so much more detail than I’d ever get from a conversation. Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products, by Martina Lauchengco, is one of those books. Martina is an operating partner at Costanoa Venture Capital, an investor in both Return Path and Bolster, and I’d known Martina for several years before she joined Costanoa through Greg Sands. She’s the best product marketer on the planet. She’s the also one of the nicest people around.

Product Marketing is a tricky discipline. A brand marketer on my leadership team years ago referred to it somewhat derisively as a “tweener” function, one of those things that’s not quite marketing and not quite product. We didn’t get the function right for many years at Return Path because we treated it that way, thinking “well, it’s neither fish nor fowl, so we’re not quite sure what to do with it.” Then we hired Scott Roth, who has gone on to have a storied career as a multi-time CEO. Scott’s background was in product marketing. He said to me in his interview process, “Product Marketing isn’t a tweener function with no home. It’s a glue function. It holds product and marketing together.” It’s amazing how that simple change in framing, combined with great leadership, led us to completely rethink the function and make it one of the most important functions in the company.

Martina brings that to live with Loved. Simply put, Loved is a handbook or a field guide to running the Product Marketing function. I can imagine it being a section of Startup CXO in that way — it’s incredibly practical, hands-on, how-to, and rich with examples from Martina’s amazing career at Microsoft, Netscape, Silicon Valley Product Group, and Costanoa. And she believes in Agile Marketing, which is always a plus in my book (and I find rare in marketers).

Martina has lots of great frameworks and stories in the book – key responsibilities of product marketing, key metrics, the release scale, the connection to Geoffrey Moore’s TALC, strategies for messaging, pricing and packaging, and more. I won’t spoil more than one here, but I will paraphrase one that I found particularly impactful, a bit of a checklist on the essence of great product marketing:

• Share data around shifting trends in buyer behavior
• Connect your product’s purpose with broader trends
• Rebrand to make your product seem bigger than it is (and save room for expansion down the road)
• Make it free, especially if you’re defining a new category
• Share the “why” and advance access with influencers

If the measure of a book’s impact is how many pages you dog ear or highlight, this says it all about Loved.