Book (Not So) Short: Raise Your Hand If You’re Sure
I couldn’t get the catchy jingle from the 80’s commercial for Sure deodorant (you remember, the one with the Statue of Liberty at the end of it – thanks, YouTube) out of my head while I was reading the relatively new book, Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End. Written by HBS professor Rosabeth Moss Kantor, Confidence is one of the few business books I’ve read that’s both long and worth reading in full.
The book has scores of examples of both winning and losing streaks, from sports, business, politics, and other walks of life, and it does a great job of breaking down the core elements that go into creating a winning streak or turnaround (Accountability, Collaboration, Innovation). Kantor also puts a very fine point on the “doom loop” of losing streaks and just how hard it is to turn them around. The book also has a good crisp definition of why winning streaks end — arrogange, anyone? — and has consistent, but not preachy recipes for avoiding pitfalls and driving success. All in all, very inspirational, even if many of the roots of success lie in well-documented leadership qualities like those expressed in Jim Collins’ Built to Last and Good to Great. The book is good enough that Kantor can even be forgiven for lauding Verizon, probably the most consistently awful customer service company I’ve ever dealt with.
But even more of the roots of success and disappointment around streaks are psychological, and these examples really rang true for me as I reflected back on our acquisition of the troubled NetCreations in 2004. That company was in the midst of a serious slump, a losing streak dating back to 2000, at the peak of the original Internet boom. Year over year, the company had lost revenues, profits, customers, and key personnel. Its parent company saw poor results and set it into the doom loop of starving it for resources and alternating between ignoring it and micromanaging it, and when we acquired the business, we found great assets and some fantastic people (many of whom I’m proud to say are still with us today), but a dispirited, blame-oriented, passive culture that was poised to continue wallowing in decline.
I can hardly claim that we’ve turned the business around in full, or that I personally made happen whatever turnaround there has been, but I do think we did a few things right as far as Kantor and Confidence would see it. Her formula for a turnaround (Espouse the new message, Exemplify it with leadership actions, Establish programs to systematically drive it home throughout the organization) is right in line with our philosophy here at Return Path.
First, we accelerated the separation and autonomy of a fledgeling NetCreations spin-off unit, now our Authentic Response market research group, and let a culture of collaboration and innovation flourish under an exceptionally talented leader, Jeff Mattes.
But that was the easy part (for me anyway), because that part of the business was actually working well, and we just let it do its thing, with more support from HQ. The turnaround of the core list rental and lead generation business of NetCreations, the original Postmaster Direct, was much tougher and is still a work in progress. In the last six months, we’ve finally turned the corner, but it hasn’t been easy. Even though we knew lots of what had to be done early on, actually doing it is much harder than b-school platitudes or even the best-written books make it seem.
The one thing that Kantor probably gives short shrift to, although she does mention it in passing a couple times, is that frequently turnarounds require massive major amounts of purging of personnel (not just management) to take hold. As one of my former colleagues from Mercer Management Consulting used to say, “sometimes the only way to effect Change Management is to change management.” Sometimes even very talented people are just bogged down with baggage — the “ghost of quarters past” — and nothing you do or say can break that psychological barrier.
Boy, have we learned that lesson here at Return Path the hard way. I’m extremely grateful to our team at Return Path, from the old RP people who’ve seen it all happen, to the old NetCreations people who are thriving in the new environment, to the new blood we’ve brought in to help effect the turnaround, for playing such important roles in our own Confidence-building exercises here. And I’m super Confident that 2007 will be the year that we officially turn the old NetCreations/Postmaster losing streak into a big, multi-year winning streak.
Anyway, I realize this may redefine the “short” in book short, but Confidence is without question a good general management and leadership read.
Book Short: Fixing America
I usually only blog about business books, but since I occasionally comment on politics, I thought I would also post on That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, by Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum (book, Kindle), which I just finished.
There is much that is good about America. And yet, there is much that is broken and in need of serious repair. I wrote about some thought on fixing our political system last year in The Beginnings of a Roadmap to Fix America’s Badly Broken Political System?, but fixing our political system can only do so much. Tom Friedman, with whom I usually agree a lot, but only in part, nailed it in his latest book. Instead of blaming one party or the other (he points the finger at both!), he blames our overall system, and our will as a people, for the country’s current problems.
The authors talk about the four challenges facing America today – globalization, the IT revolution, deficits and debt, and rising energy demand and climate change, and about how the interplay of those four challenges are more long term and less obvious than challenges we’ve faced as a country in the past, like World Wars or The Great Depression, or even The Great Recession. The reason, according to the authors, that we have lost our way a bit in the last 20-40 years, is that we have strayed from the five-point formula that has made us successful for the bulk of our history:
- Providing excellent public education for more and more Americans
- Building and continually modernizing our infrastructure
- Keeping America’s doors to immigration open
- Government support for basic research and development
- Implementation of necessary regulations on private economic activity
It’s hard not to be in violent agreement with the book as a normal person with common sense. Even the last point of the five-point formula, which can rankle those on the right, makes sense when you read the specifics. And the authors rail against excessive regulation enough in the book to give them credibility on this point.
The authors’ description of the labor market of the future and how we as a country can be competitive in it is quite well thought through. And they have some other great arguments to make – for example, about how the prior decade of wars was, for the first time in American history, not accompanied by tax increases and non-essential program cuts; or about how we can’t let ourselves be held hostage to AARP and have “funding old age” trump “funding youth” at every turn.
The one thing I disagree with a bit is the authors’ assertion that “we cannot simply cut our way to fiscal sanity.” I saw a table in the Wall Street Journal the same day I was reading this book that noted the federal budget has grown from $2.6T in 2007 to $3.6T today – 40% in four years! Sure sounds to me like mostly a spending program, though I do support closing loopholes, eliminating subsidies, and potentially some kind of energy tax for other reasons.
I’ll save their solution for those who read the book. It’s not as good as the meat of the book itself, but it’s solid, and it actually mirrors something my dad has been talking about for a while now. If you care about where we are as a country and how we can do better, read this book!
Please go put Decide and Conquer: 44 Decisions that will Make or Break All Leaders by David Siegel on your reading list, or buy it. David’s book is up there on my list with Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It’s a totally different kind of book than Startup CEO, and in some ways a much better one in that there’s a great through-line or storyline, as David shares his leadership framework in the context of his journey of getting hired to replace founder Scott Heiferman as Meetup’s CEO after its acquisition by WeWork, including some juicy interactions with Adam Neumann, through the trials and tribulations of WeWork as a parent company, through COVID and its impact on an in-person meeting facilitator like Meetup, through to the sale of Meetup OUT of WeWork.
It’s hard to do the book justice with a quick write up. It’s incredibly concise. It’s clear. It’s witty. Most of all, it’s very human, and David shares a very human, common sense approach to leadership. I particularly like a device he uses to reinforce his main points and principles by bolding the key phrases every time they show up in the book: be kind, be confident, be bold, expand your options, focus on the long-term picture, be pragmatic, be honest, be speedy, do what’s right for the business, work for your people and they’ll work for you, be surprised only about being surprised. These all resonate with me so much.
One of the interesting things about the book is that David is a CEO, but not a founder (although he was sort of a re-founder in this case). A lot of CEO books talk about how to run a company, or give stories from the trials and tribulations thereof, but few focus on the elements of interviewing for the CEO job, or taking over the reins of a company in the midst of a turbulent flight. So the book is about getting the job, starting the job, doing a turnaround, leading a company through growth, a buy-out, and managing a company inside of another company. And because Meetup is such an iconic brand and business, it’s easy to understand a lot of the backdrop to David’s story.
I just met David for the first time a few weeks ago. We knew a bunch of people in common from his DoubleClick days. We instantly hit it off and traded copies of our books, and then were reading them at the same time trading emails about the parts that clicked. I just can’t recommend the book enough to any CEO or founder. In my view, it joins a pretty elite canon.
Book Short: Like Reading a Good Speech
Leaders Eat Last, by Simon Sinek, is a self-described “polemic” that reads like some of the author’s famous TED talks and other speeches in that it’s punchy, full of interesting stories, has some attempted basis in scientific fact like Gladwell, and wanders around a bit. That said, I enjoyed the book, and it hit on a number of themes in which I am a big believer – and it extended and shaped my view on a couple of them.
Sinek’s central concept in the book is the Circle of Safety, which is his way of saying that when people feel safe, they are at their best and healthiest. Applied to workplaces, this isn’t far off from Lencioni’s concept of the trust foundational layer in his outstanding book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team. His stories and examples about the kinds of things that create a Circle of Safety at work (and the kinds of things that destroy them) were very poignant. Some of his points about how leaders set the tone and “eat last,” both literally and figuratively, are solid. But his most interesting vignettes are the ones about how spending time face-to-face in person with people as opposed to virtually are incredibly important aspects of creating trust and bringing humanity to leadership.
My favorite one-liner from the book, which builds on the above point and extends it to a corporate philosophy of people first, customer second, shareholders third (which I have espoused at Return Path for almost 15 years now) is
Customers will never love a company unless employees love it first.
A couple of Sinek’s speeches that are worth watching are the one based on this book, also called Leaders Eat Last, and a much shorter one called How Great Leaders Inspire Action.
Bottom line: this is a rambly book, but the nuggets of wisdom in it are probably worth the exercise of having to find them and figure out how to connect them (or not connect them).
Thanks to my fellow NYC CEO Seth Besmertnik for giving me this book as well as the links to Sinek’s speeches.
Book Short: 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: Choose Voice!
I took a couple days off last week and decided to re-read two old favorites. One –Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead — my fourth reading — will take me a little longer to process and figure out if there’s a good intersection with the blog. One would think so with entrepreneurship as the topic, but my head still hurts from all the objectivism. The second — Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, by Albert O. Hirschman — is today’s topic.
I can’t remember when I first read Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. It was either in senior year of high school Economics or Government; or in freshman year of college Political Philosophy. Either way, it was a long time ago, and for some reason, some of the core messages of this quirkly little 125 page political/economic philosophy book have stayed with me over the years. I remembered the book incorrectly as a book about political systems, and I think it was born consciously in the wake of Eugene McCarthy’s somewhat revolutionary challenge to a sitting President Johnson for the Democratic Party nomination in 1968. But the book is actually about business; it’s just about businesses and their customers, not corporations as social structures (the latter being more of an interest to me). Written by an academic economist (I think), the book has its share of gratuitous demonstrative graphs, 2×2 matrices, and SAT words. But its central premise is a gem for anyone who runs an organization of any size.
The central premise is that there are really two paths by which one can express dissatisfaction with a temporary, curable lapse in an organization: exit (bailing), or voice (trying to fix what’s wrong from within). The third key element, Loyalty, is less a path in and of itself but more an agent that “holds exit at bay and activates voice.”
You need to read the book and apply it to your own circumstances to really get into it, but for me, it’s all about breeding loyalty as a means of making voice the path of least resistance, even when exit is a freely available option (few of us run totalitarian states or monopolies, after all). That to me is the definition of a successful enterprise, both internally and externally.
With your customers: make your product so irresistible, and make your customer service so deep, that your customers feel an obligation to help you fix what they perceive to be wrong with your product first, rather than simply complain about price or flee to a competitor.
With your employees: make your company the best possible place you can think of to work so that even in as ridiculously fluid a job market as we live in, your employees will come to their manager, their department head, the head of HR, or you as leader to tell you when they’re unhappy instead of just leaving, or worse, sulking.
With your company (you as employee): make yourself indispensible to the organization and do such a great job that if things go wrong with your performance or with your role, your manager’s loyalty to you leads him or her to give you open feedback and coach you to success rather than unceremoniously show you the door.
Ok, this wasn’t such a short book short — probably the longest I’ve ever written in this blog, and certainly the highest ratio of short:actual book. But if you’re up for a serious academic framework (quasi-business but not exclusively) to apply to your management techniques, this short 1970 book is as valid today as when it was written. Thanks to David Ramert (I am pretty sure I read it in high school) for introducing it to me way back when!
Book Short: Multiplying Your Team’s Productivity
No matter how frustrated a kids’ soccer coach gets, he never, ever runs onto the field in the middle of a game to step in and play. It’s not just against the rules, it isn’t his or her role.
Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown (book, Kindle) takes this concept and drives it home. The book was a great read, one of the better business books I’ve read in a long time. I read a preview of it via an article in a recent Harvard Business Review (walled garden alert – you can only get the first page of the article without buying it), then my colleague George Bilbrey got the book and suggested I read it. George also has a good post up on his blog about it.
One of the things I love about the book is that unlike a lot of business books, it applies to big companies and small companies with equal relevance. The book echoes a lot of other contemporary literature on leadership (Collins, Charan, Welch) but pulls it into a more accessible framework based on a more direct form of impact: not long-term shareholder value, but staff productivity and intelligence. The book’s thesis is that the best managers get more than 2x out of their people than the average – some of that comes from having people more motivated and stretching, but some comes from literally making people more intelligent by challenging them, investing in them, and leaving them room to grow and learn.
The thesis has similar roots to many successful sales philosophies – that asking value-based questions is more effective than presenting features and benefits (that’s probably a good subject for a whole other post sometime). The method of selling we use at Return Path which I’ve written about before, SPIN Selling, based on the book by Neil Rackham, gets into that in good detail. One colorful quote in the book around this came from someone who met two famous 19th century British Prime Ministers and noted that when he came back from a meeting with Gladstone, he was convinced that Gladstone was the smartest person in the world, but when he came back from a meeting with Disraeli, he was convinced that he (not Disraeli) was the smartest person in the world.
Anyway, the book creates archetypal good and bad leaders, called Multipliers and Diminishers, and discusses five traits of both:
- Talent Magnet vs. Empire Builder (find people’s native genius and amplify it)
- Liberator vs. Tyrant (create space, demand the best work, delineate your “hard opinions” from your “soft opinions”)
- Challenger vs. Know-It-All (lay down challenges, ask hard questions)
- Debate Maker vs. Decision Maker (ask for data, ask each person, limit your own participation in debates)
- Investor vs. Micromanager (delegate, teach and coach, practice public accountability)
This was a great read. Any manager who is trying to get more done with less (and who isn’t these days) can benefit from figuring out how to multiply the performance of his or her team by more than 2x.
Book Short: The Joys of Slinging Hash
Patrick Lencioni’s The Three Signs of a Miserable Job is a good read, as were his last two books, The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link), and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link). They’re all super short, easy reads (four express train rides on Metro North got the job done), with a single simple message and great examples. This one is probably my second favorite so far.
This book, which has a downright dreary title, is great. It points to and proposes a solution to a problem I’ve thought about for a long time, which is how do you create meaning for people in their day to day work when they’re not doing something intrinsically meaningful like curing a disease or feeding the homeless. His recipe for success is simple:
– Get people to articulate the relevance in their jobs…the meaning they derive out of their work…an understanding of the people whose lives are made better, even in small ways, by what they do every day
– Get people to measure what they do (duh, management 101), IN RELATION TO THE RELEVANCE learnings from the last point (ahh, that’s an interesting twist)
– Get to know your people as people
All of these are things you’d generally read in good books on management, but this book ties them together artfully, simply, and in a good story about a roadside pizza restaurant. It also stands in stark contrast to the book I reviewed and panned a few days ago by Jerry Porras in that it is nothing but examples from non-celebrities, non-success stories — ordinary people doing ordinary jobs.
Brad has blogged glowingly about Death by Meeting, so I’ll probably make that my next Lencioni read next month, with two more to go after that.
Book short: Life Isn’t Just a Wiki
One of the best things I can say about Remote: Office Not Required, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, is that it was short. That sounds a little harsh – part of what I mean is that business books are usually WAY TOO LONG to make their point, and this one was blessedly short. But the book was also a little bit of an angry rant against bad management wrapped inside some otherwise good points about remote management.
The book was a particularly interesting read juxtaposed against Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last which I just finished recently and blogged about here, which stressed the importance of face-to-face and in-person contact in order for leaders to most effectively do their jobs and stay in touch with the needs of their organizations.
The authors of Remote, who run a relatively small (and really good) engineering-oriented company, have a bit of an extreme point of view that has worked really well for their company but which, at best, needs to be adapted for companies of other sizes, other employee types, and other cultures. That said, the flip side of their views, which is the “everyone must be at their cubicle from 9 to 5 each day,” is even dumber for most businesses these days. As usual with these things, the right answer is probably somewhere in between the extremes, and I was reminded of the African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go farm go together” when I read it. Different target outcomes, different paths.
I totally agree with the authors around their comments about trusting employees and “the work is what matters.” And we have a ton of flexibility in our work at Return Path. With 400 people in the company, I personally spend six weeks over the summer working largely remote, and I value that time quite a bit. But I couldn’t do it all the time. We humans learn from each other better and treat each other better when we look at each other face to face. That’s why, with the amount of remote work we do, we strongly encourage the use of any form of video conferencing at all times. The importance of what the authors dismiss as “the last 1 or 2% of high fidelity” quality to the conversation is critical. Being in person is not just about firing and hiring and occasional sync up, it’s about managing performance and building relationships.
Remote might have been better if the authors had stressed the value that they get out of their approach more than ranting against the approaches of others. While there are serious benefits of remote work in terms of cost and individual productivity (particularly in maker roles), there are serious penalties to too much of it as well in terms of travel, communication burden, misunderstandings, and isolation. It’s not for everyone.
Thanks to my colleague Hoon Park for recommending this to me. When I asked Hoon what his main takeaway from the book was, he replied:
The importance of open communication that is archived (thus searchable), accessible (transparent and open to others) and asynchronous (doesn’t require people to be in the same place or even the same “timespace”). I love the asynchronous communication that the teams in Austin have tried: chatrooms, email lists (that anyone can subscribe to or read the archives of), SaaS project management tools. Others I would love to try or take more advantage of include internal blogs (specifically the P2 and upcoming O2 WordPress themes; http://ma.tt/2009/05/how-p2-changed-automattic/), GitHub pull requests (even for non-code) and a simple wiki.
These are great points, and good examples of the kinds of systems and processes you need to have in place to facilitate high quality, high volume remote work.
Book Short: The Religion of Heresy
At the end of Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, Seth Godin’s new book, Seth says this:
I’m going to get a lot of flak from people about what you just read. People might say that it’s too disorganized or not practical enough or that I require you to do too much work to actually accomplsh anything. That’s ok.
He’s kind of right. The book is a little breezy and meanders around, just like riffing with Seth. It’s not practical in the sense that if the entire world operated this way in the extreme, we’d have serious problems. But the fact that he requires you to do “too much work to actually accomplish anything” is part of the brilliance of his message.
This was Seth’s best book in years, mostly because it is fresh. It is not a rant about marketing; it is a wonderfully succinct look at how we as a society are rallying and organizing around causes, campaigns, companies, and collective beliefs. It’s not about the Internet, though its principles are easily implemented and amplified using online tools. It’s not a how-to guide to being a fancy corporate leader, but it’s one of the most pointed descriptions of the ethos of a certain type of leader (the upstart, or as Seth says, the heretic). It’s not about a particular revolution; it’s about how mini-revolutions are becoming the norm these days.
Tribes is short, inspirational, and pure Seth. Though quite different in its nature and mission, it really evoked for me Mark Penn’s Microtrends (post, link) — a study of larger tribes and heretics in contemporary America.
A listing of Seth’s books over the years follows:
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:
- 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
- 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
- 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!
