Fifth in my series on creating the best place to work – Being the best enabler. As any management guru will tell you, as you have a larger and larger team, your job is much less about getting good work done than it is enabling others to get good work done. What does that mean?
First, don’t be a bottleneck. You don’t have to be an Inbox-Zero nut (but feel free if you’d like), but you do need to make sure you don’t have people in the company chronically waiting on you before they can take their next actions on projects. Otherwise, you lose all the leverage you have in hiring a team.  Don’t let approvals or requests pile up!
Second, run great meetings. Meetings are a company’s most expensive endeavor. Sometime in a senior staff meeting, calculate the cost in salary of everyone sitting there for an hour or two! Run good meetings yourself and don’t enable bad behavior…and in the course of doing that, role model the same for your senior staff members who do their own staff or team meetings. Make sure your meetings are as short as possible, as actionable as possible, and as interesting as possible. Don’t hold a meeting when an email or 5-minute recorded message will suffice. Don’t hold a weekly standing meeting when it can be biweekly. Cancel meetings if there’s nothing to cover. End them early if you can’t fill the time productively. Vary the tempo of your meetings to match their purpose – the same staff group can have a weekly with one agenda, a monthly with a different agenda, and a quarterly with a different agenda.
Finally, don’t run a hub-and-spoke system of communications. Some managers who are a bit command-and-control like hoarding information or forcing all communication to go through them or surface in staff meetings. No need for that! Almost everyone on your team, if you are a senior manager, should have individual bilateral relationships and regular 1:1 meetings without you there. The same goes for your Board and your staff, if you are the CEO. They should have individual relationships that don’t go through you. if you are a choke point for communication, it’s just as bad as being a bottleneck for approvals.
Enabling your team to give it their all is a gift to yourself and your organization as much as it is a gift to your team – give that gift early and often.
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.
I haven’t done short book summaries in a LONG time, but I’ll try to start adding that back into the mix as I read interesting and relevant books. Here’s one to add to your list: One Life to Lead, by Russell Benaroya. I was recently connected to Russell by a mutual friend, TA McCann at Pioneer Square Labs. TA had a sense Russell and I would hit it off, and we did. Russell is a multi-time founder/CEO, a Coach, and an author, so we have a lot in common.
One Life to Lead is an excellent book. First, it is short and easy to get through. Unlike a lot of business books, it doesn’t go on too long or contain anything extraneous. It’s to the point!
Second, the book is a business book that’s not really about business. It’s about life and what Russell calls Life Design, which is a great framing of how to be intentional about leading your life. 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, which I talk about in Startup CEO quite a bit in the nuts and bolts context of building your business.
Finally, Russell’s framework is easy to understand and full of concrete exercises you can to. Here are his five steps, but you’ll have to read the book to get the details:
Ground stories with facts. This reminds me a lot of the principles we have taught team members over the years in our Action/Design (and related) trainings. First, start with absolute concrete facts that everyone will agree are facts.
Establish your principles. This is brilliant. Your company has documented values or operating principles. Why don’t you?
Harness energy from the environment. Figuring out what makes you tick, and what drains your energy, is so important.
Get in and stay in your genius zone. Shouldn’t we all focus our time on the things we do best and love the most?
Take action. How to put it together and make it all happen.
If you don’t get out in front of life, it will happen to you, and Russell’s framework is about how to make sure you are in the driver’s seat of your own life. Here’s to that.
Book Short:Â 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!
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.
I love me a good framework. And Geoffrey Moore is the kind of good product/marketing frameworks for technology companies. Moore’s Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption is a must-read for anyone managing a larger technology organization (start reading it when you get to 200-250 people – it’s never too early to worry about disruption). More important, it’s really a companion book or coda to Escape Velocity: Free Your Company’s Future from the Pull of the Past, so if you haven’t read that one, start there and read both sequentially. Zone to Win is quite short and punchy, and it doesn’t disappoint.
I can’t believe is that I never blogged about Escape Velocity before since it was a very influential book in how we managed a bunch of things at Return Path in the later years when we got larger and were more in “disrupt or be disrupted” mode. I’ll start with the essence of that book before I move onto Zone to Win.EscapeVelocity‘sprincipal framework is to divide the different product lines/lines of business you have into three planning horizons:
Horizon 1 (H1): Current businesses that should be profitable and sustainable
Horizon 3 (H3): Nascent R&D efforts with the potential to be disruptors or game changers
Horizon 2 (H2): The bridge between H1 and H3 where an R&D effort that is taking off is scaled and hopefully achieves the eponymous Escape Velocity
The essence of the book is to talk about how larger companies become completely slavish to H1 businesses, their cash cows, and struggle to escape from their pull, whether that’s internal resource allocation or customer-driven demands. Failure to innovate properly beyond H1 businesses is why companies die. But the rest of the book is a lot less memorable, and it doesn’t quite prompt you into action.
That’s where Zone to Win comes in, and it helps me understand where we really got a couple things really wrong at Return Path (as an aside, Moore once met my Return Path cofounder George at a conference, and when George described our business to him, he said “Ah, a blue collar business. Those can work, too.” I think I understand what he meant by that, although it doesn’t sound like a compliment!)
In Zone to Win, Moore shows you how to put the three Horizons into action by creating an overlay framework to managing your company to help optimize all three zones simultaneously. The four zones are:
The key takeaways for me from this framework as well as the notes of where we got things wrong at Return Path, even while acknowledging that we had to play across H1, H2, and H3 simultaneously, were:
Performance Zone: Managing your main H1 business in a way that drives growth and customer success for the long haul
Productivity Zone: Managing your main H1 business for optimal profitability and scalability
Incubation Zone: Starting new H3 businesses and hoping they work
Transformation Zone: Getting your H3 business through H2 and into H1 to the point where it’s at least 10% of your overall revenue
What we got right at Return Path was first recognizing that we needed to incubate new businesses as the growth in our core business started to slow down, as well as recognizing that we needed to step up our game in managing the core business for performance. So, Moore would say something like “congratulations, you drew up the correct strategy.” But we fell down on implementation for reasons in three of the four zones. Our problem with the Performance Zone is that we discovered the three horizon model too late — there were several years where we were running R&D experiments in the middle of the core business, which created chaos. By the time we got religion around it, we were constantly playing catch up redesigning our management processes — like the teenager still wearing his kid clothes looking awkward and misfit. In the Productivity Zone, we did invest in productivity, but we weren’t aggressive enough about insisting on End of Life for some programs or products, and and we were bogged down by a convoluted legacy implementation of our CRM system that we never wholesale fixed. But the biggest problem we ran into was in the Transformation Zone, where we tried to jam two new businesses through that zone at the same time instead of focusing all our energies on one. I bet we could have pulled off even more of a transformational success with our security business (the one further along) if we hadn’t also been trying to get our consumer insights business through H2 at the same time. At least Moore notes that’s the hardest zone to get right, so I don’t feel quite so dumb.
There were probably other exogenous factors that caused us to fall down on implementation, too, but I think this had a lot to do with it. And don’t get me wrong, Return Path was a success in the end. It just could have been more successful if we had caught this book and adhered rigorously sooner. It was even published in time — somehow we just missed it. We were lured by customer traction and market pull into thinking we could do both. And it’s certainly possible that we were advised against this by one or more of our board members and plowed ahead anyway.
Moore is a masterful writer. If you haven’t read Crossing the Chasm or Inside the Tornado,for example, if you’re a GenZ founder and you think “wow those books came out before I was born, they can’t be relevant,” you should start by reading them. They’re still 100% applicable today, and Moore’s subsequent editions have updated some of the case studies, even if not totally contemporary — and these are worth reading even as a raw startup (in fact, especially as a raw startup). But once you finish those and your business gets larger, go straight into Escape Velocity and be sure to add on Zone to Win.
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!
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.
My friend Andrew Winston, who is one of the nation’s gurus in corporate sustainability, just published his second book, this one from Harvard Business Press — Green Recovery: Get Lean, Get Smart, and Emerge from the Downturn on Top. It builds on the cases and successes he had with his first book, Green to Gold (post, link to book), which came out a couple years ago and has become the standard for how businesses embrace sustainability and use it to their financial and strategic competitive advantage rather than thinking of it as a burden or a cost center.
Green Recovery is a shorter read (my kind of business book), and it hits a few key themes:
Going green not only shouldn’t wait for better economic times, it’s a key way out of this mess
Businesses have relied on layoffs to cut costs for far too long — it’s time to get lean on stuff, not people
This is about survival for many businesses:Â Detroit died because it missed the green wave of environmental interest and rising energy prices
And the overarching theme…Green doesn’t raise costs, it lowers them – it’s a source of profit and innovation
The book reminds me a lot of my post Living With Less, For Good, which I wrote at the beginning of the financial market freefall last fall, talking about how we as a company were figuring out how to cut back without cutting people (something we’ve managed to do). Although I wasn’t talking about green initiatives specifically, the point of getting leaner on “stuff” really resonates with me.
At the end of the day, Andrew proves that steering your company to go green — no matter what industry you’re in — is a twofer: you can increase the strength of the business and simultaneously do your part to clean up the environment. That’s definitely the “change we can believe in” mentality applied quite pragmatically!
The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, by Barry Schwartz, presents an enlightening, if somewhat distressing perspective on the proliferation of options and choices facing the average American today. The central thesis of the book is that some choice is better than no choice (I’d rather be able to pick blue jeans or black jeans), but that limited choice may be better in the end than too much choice (how do I know that the jeans I really want are relaxed cut, tapered leg, button fly, etc.?). We have this somewhat astonishing, recurring conversation at home every night, with the two of us sitting around paralyzed about where to eat dinner.
The author’s arguments and examples are very interesting throughout, and his “Laffer curve” type argument about choice vs. too much choice rings true. While there’s obviously no conclusive proof about this, the fact that our society is more rife with depression than ever before at least feels like it has a correlation with the fact that most of us now face a proliferation of choices and decisions to make exponentially more than we used to. The results of this involve ever-mounting levels of regret, or fear of regret, as well as internal struggles with control and expectations. Perhaps the best part of the book is the final chapter, which ties a lot of the material of the book together with 11 simple suggestions to cope better with all the choices and options in life — summed up in the last few words of the book suggestions that “choice within constraints, freedom within limits” is the way to go. Amen to that. We all need some basic structure and frameworks governing our lives, even if we create those constructs ourselves. The absence of them is chaos.
Overall, this is a good social science kind of read, not overwhelming, but definitely interesting for those who are students of human psychology, marketing, and decision making. It’s squarely in the genre of Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Blink, and Robert Cialdini’s Influence, most of which I’ve written about recently, and though not as engaging as Gladwell, worth a read on balance if you like the genre.
Thanks to my friend Jonathan Shapiro for this book.
Book Short:Â Which Runs Faster, You or Your Company?
Leading at the Speed of Growth, by Katherine Catlin at the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership is a must read for any entrepreneur or CEO of a growth company. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read targeted to that audience – its content is great, its format is a page-turner, and it’s concise and to the point.
The authors take you through three stages of a growth company’s lifestyle (Initial Growth, Rapid Growth, and Continuous Growth) and describe the “how to’s” of the transition into each stage:Â how you know it’s coming, how to behave in the new stage, how to leave the old stage behind.
I didn’t realize it when I started reading the book, but Brad had one of the quotes on the back cover that says it all: “There are business books about starting a company, but they tend to deal with the mechanics of business plans and financing. Then there are books about ‘how to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.’ This is the first book I’ve seen that details the role of the CEO of a small but growing company.” Thanks to my colleague George Bilbrey for pointing this one out to me.
UPDATE:Â Brad corrects me and says that I should mention Jana Matthews, who co-wrote the book with Katherine Catlin and is actually the Kauffman Center person of the duo.
