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.
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:Â 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!
Generally, I love books by practitioners even more than those by academics. That’s why Steve McKee’s first (I assume) book, When Growth Stalls: How it Happens, Why You’re Stuck, and What to do About It (book, Kindle edition) appealed to me right out of the gate. The author is CEO of a mid-size agency and a prior Inc. 500 winner who has experienced the problem firsthand – then went out, researched it, and wrote about it. As a two-time Inc. 500 winner ourselves, Return Path has also struggled with keeping the growth flames burning over the years, so I was eager to dig into the research. The title also grabbed my attention, as there are few if any business books really geared at growth stage companies.
I’d say the book was “solid” in the end, not spectacular. Overall, it felt very consistent with a lot of other business books I’ve read over the years, from Trout & Reis to Lencioni to Collins, which is good. The first half of the book, describing the reasons why growth stalls, was quite good and very multi-faceted. His labeling description of “market tectonics” is vivid and well done. He gets into management and leadership failings around both focus and consensus, all true. Perhaps his most poignant cause of stalls in growth is what he calls “loss of nerve,” which is a brilliant way of capturing the tendence of weak leadership when times get tough to play defense instead of offense.
The problem with the book in the end is that the second section, which is the “how to reverse the stall” section, is way too focused on marketing. That can be the problem with a specialty practitioner writing a general business book. What’s in the books makes a lot of sense about going back to ground zero on positioning, market and target customer definition and understanding, and the like. But reversing the stall of company can and usually must involve lots of the other same facets that are documented in the first half of the book — and some other things as well, like aggressive change management and internal communication, systems and process changes, financial work, etc.
At any rate, if you are in a company where growth is stalling, it’s certainly a good read and worth your time, as what’s in it is good (it’s what’s missing that tempers my enthusiasm for it). In this same category, I’d also strongly recommend Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End, by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, as well.
The cynic in me wanted to start this book review of Free: The Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson, by complaining that I had to pay for the book. But it ended up being good enough that I won’t do that (plus, the author said there are free digital versions available — though the Kindle edition still costs money). At any rate, a bunch of reviews I read about the book panned it when compared to Anderson’s prior book, The Long Tail (post, link to book).
I won’t get into the details of the book, though you’ll get an idea from the paragraph below, but Anderson has a few gems worth quoting:
Any topic that can divide critics into two opposite camps — “totally wrong” and “so obvious” — has got to be a good one
Free makes Paid more profitable
Younger players have more time than money…older players have more money than time
Doing things we like without pay often makes us happier than the work we do for a salary
It’s true that each generation takes for granted some things their parents valued, but that doesn’t mean that generation values everything less
While Free is s probably not quite as good as The Long Tail, it does a good job of organizing and classifying and explaining the power of different economic models that involve a free component, and I found it very thought provoking about our own business at Return Path.
We already do a couple forms of Free — we practice the “third party” model, by giving things away to ISPs but selling them to mailers; and we practice Freemium by providing Senderscore.org and Feedback Loops for free in order to attract paying customers to our testing and monitoring application and whitelist. But could we do others? Maybe. They may not be revolutionary, but they’re smart marketing.
As some of the reviewers write, the book isn’t the be-all-end-all of marketing, it overreaches at times, and it is more applicable to some businesses than others, but Free was definitely worth paying for.
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.
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.
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:
In Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell (post, buy), we are taught, among other things, that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something, as well as a dash of luck and timing, as opposed to huge amounts of innate and unique talent. In Talent is Overrated, by Geoff Colvin, this theory comes to life, with a very clear differentiating point – it’s not just logging the 10,000 hours, it’s HOW the hours are spent.
Colvin’s main point is that the hours need to be spent in what he calls “deliberate practice.” The elements of deliberate practice are best explained with his example of Jerry Rice, although you can apply these to any discipline:
He spent very little time playing football (e.g., most of his practice was building specific skills, not playing the game)
He designed his practice to work on specific needs
While supported by others, he did much of the work on his own (e.g., it can be repeated a lot, and there are built-in feedback loops)
It wasn’t fun
He defied the conventional limits of age
If you’re the kind of person who cares deeply about your own performance, let alone the performance of people around you, it doesn’t take long to be completely riveted by Colvin’s points. They ring true, and his examples are great and cross a lot of disciplines (though not a ton about business in particular). I wasn’t 50% done with the book before I had made my list of three key things that I need to Deliberately Practice.
There are some other great aspects to the book as well — including a section on Making Organizations Innovative, from creating a culture of innovation to allowing people the freedom to think, to a section on where passion and drive come from, but hopefully this post conveys the gist of it all. Want to be a better CEO? Or a better anything? This is a good place to start the process.
Thanks to Greg Sands for sending me this excellent book. I’m going to work it into my rotation for Return Path anniversary presents.
The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate The Three Essential Virtues(hardcover,kindle is Patrick Lencioni’s latest and greatest. It’s not my favorite of his, which is still The Advantage (post,buy ), but it’s pretty good and well worth a read. It builds on his model for accountability in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (post,buy)and brings it back to “how can you spot or develop and a good team player?”
The central thesis of the book is that great team players have three attributes – hungry, humble, and people-smart. While I can’t disagree with those three things, as with all consultants’ frameworks, I sound two cautionary notes: (1) they aren’t the absolute truth, just a truth, and (2) different organizations and different cultures sometimes thrive with different recipes. That said, certainly for my company, this framework rings true, if not the only truth.
Some great nuggets from the book:
-The basketball coach who says he loves kids who want to come to practice and work as hard as they can at practice to avoid losing
-The concept of Addition by Addition and Addition by Subtraction in the same book – both are real and true. The notion that three people can get more done than four if the fourth is a problem is VERY REAL
-When you’re desperate for people, you do stupid things – you bring people on who can get the job done but shouldn’t be in your environment. I don’t know a single CEO who hasn’t made this mistake, even knowing sometimes that they’re in the process of making it
The framing of the “edge” people – people who have two of the three virtues, but not the third, is quite good:
-Hungry and Humble but not People-Smart – The Accidental Mess Maker -Humble and People-Smart, but not Hungry – The Lovable Slacker -Hungry and People-Smart, but not Humble – The Skillful Politician
In my experience, and Lencioni may say this in the book, too (I can’t remember and can’t find it), none of these is great…but the last one is by far the most problematic for a culture that values teamwork and collaboration.
Anyway, I realize this is a long summary for a short book, but it’s worth buying and reading and having on your (real or virtual) shelf. In addition to the story, there are some REALLY GOOD interview guides/questions and team surveys in the back of the book.
I’ve written a couple times in the past about how we sell at Return Path. I’ve written about our principle sales methodology for the past decade, SPIN Selling, by Neil Rackham (and Major Account Strategy, also by Rackham, which is basically SPIN Selling for Account Managers), which focuses on a specific technique for solution selling by using questioning to get the prospective client to identify his or her own needs, as well as Jeffrey Gitomer’s two short books, the Little Red Book of Selling and Little Red Book of Sales Answers, which are long on sales questioning techniques. And I also wrote this post about another book called Why People Don’t Buy Things, by Kim Wallace and Harry Washburn. The great thing about this book is that it dives into the need for variation in sales communication strategies based on BUYER personae, such as The Commander, The Thinker, and The Visualizer.
While both these principles are good – asking questions and tailoring communication styles based on the buyer – anyone who has ever tried to run a whole sales call by asking questions knows that it’s REALLY HARD and can sometimes just outright flop. There’s a new movement that I’ve been reading articles about for a few months now called The Challenger Sale, and I finally finished the book about it this past week.
If you run a company or a sales team that has any kind of complex sale or a hybrid software/service model, then you should read The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. Whether you adopt the methodology or not, there are a few really great insights in the book that will help you recruit and manage a sales team. Some of the insights include:
Understanding the five types of sales reps and why/when they’re successful/not successful. The labels are telling in and of themselves: the Lone Wolf, the Hard Worker, the Relationship Building, the Reactive Problem Solver, and the Challenger
Why sales reps can be trained as Challengers, and how important it is to rally an entire organization around this sales model, not just train sales reps on it (that’s probably a good reminder for any sales methodology)
The ingredients of the Challenger sale – Commercial Teaching for Differentiation, Tailoring for Resonance, Taking Control of the Conversation. I found the section on Commercial Teaching the most enlightening, particularly in our business, where we’re not selling an established category with established budget line items
The Challenger Sale feels like the beginning of a wave that will take over a lot of selling organizations in the next decade, either directly as written or as it inspires ancillary works and related techniques. For that reason alone, it’s worth a read.
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.
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