Book Short:  Deep Dive on Customer Development

I continue to be on a tear reading books about startups as I finish and get ready for the publication of Startup CEO (now available for pre-ordering at Amazon).   This week’s selection was The Startup Owners Manual:  A Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company, by Steve Blank and Bon Dorf.  This book is a significantly more detailed version of Blank’s first book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, which was a revolutionary book a few years ago that helped spawn the Lean Startup movement.

And when I say significantly, I mean it!  The Startup Owners Manual is 600 pages of really detailed how-to around the first two steps of Blank’s four steps, Customer Discovery and Customer Validation.  It doesn’t get into the last two steps at all, Customer Creation and Company Building.  It has a lot of overlap with Ash Maurya’s Running Lean (post, book), although it’s significantly more detailed.  And essentially, especially around the topic of “Company Building,” my book starts where this one stops.

One of Blank’s great lines in the book is that a “A startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable, profitable business model.”  That frames the whole Lean Startup movement really, really well.  The whole concept of Customer Discovery and Validation, of testing hypotheses, is critical to getting product-marketing fit right in a capital-efficient manner.  If I were starting Return Path today, we’d be using these methods from the get-go.

But Lean principles are wholly compatible with larger companies, as well, and in fact we use all of these principles in our product development organization today.  We adapt them for our size and scale and the fact that often we are selling either new or enhanced versions of existing product into existing customers, but our product teams have all embraced the Lean principles and the vocabulary around them, and our goal is that we should never bring a product to market that isn’t already being bought.

Book Short:  The Little Engine that Could

Authors Steven Woods and Alex Shootman would make Watty Piper proud.  Instead of bringing toys to the children on the other side of the mountain, though, this engine brings revenue into your company.  If you run a SaaS business, or really if you run any B2B business, Revenue Engine:  Why Revenue Performance Management is the Next Frontier of Competitive Advantage, will change the way you think about Sales and Marketing. The authors, who were CTO and CRO of Eloqua (the largest SaaS player in the demand management software space that recently got acquired by Oracle), are thought leaders in the field, and the wisdom of the book reflects that.

The book chronicles the contemporary corporate buying process and shows that it has become increasingly like the consumer buying process in recent years.  The Consumer Decision Journey, first published by McKinsey in 2009, chronicles this process and talks about how the traditional funnel has been transformed by the availability of information and social media on the Internet.  Revenue Engine moves this concept to a B2B setting and examines how Marketing and Sales are no longer two separate departments, but stewards of a combined process that requires holistic analysis, investment decisions, and management attention.

In particular, the book does a good job of highlighting new stages in the buying process and the imperatives and metrics associated with getting this “new funnel” right.  One that resonated particularly strongly with me was the importance of consistent and clean data, which is hard but critical!  As my colleague Matt Spielman pointed out when we were discussing the book, the one area of the consumer journey that Revenue Engine leaves is out is Advocacy, which is essential for influencing the purchase process in a B2B environment as well.

One thing I didn’t love about the book is that it’s a little more theoretical than practical. There aren’t nearly enough detailed examples.  In fact, the book itself says it’s “a framework, not an answer.”  So you’ll be left wanting a bit more and needing to do a bit more work on your own to translate the wisdom to your reality, but you’ll have a great jumping off point.

Book Short:  A Primer on Viral Marketing

“People talk about Andy,” writes Seth Godin in the foreward to Andy Sernovitz’s new book, Word of Mouth Marketing:  How Smart Companies Get People Talking.   “He’s a living, breathing example of the power of word of mouth.”  Andy’s the CEO of WOMMA, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, and a former colleague of mine.

Ever since reading The Tipping Point, I keep looking for the secret sauce around viral marketing.  What is it that makes something cool enough to buzz about?  My conclusion from reading Andy’s book is that secret sauce doesn’t exist.  Like everything else, being buzzworthy comes from hard work, being inherently good, AND using the techniques and understanding in Andy’s book.  Tables like “The Three Reasons People Talk About You” and “The Five T’s of Word of Mouth Marketing” are worth the price of the book in and of themselves, as they explain how to manage, handle, and drive viral marketing — once you have your own secret sauce down.

Andy’s wanted to write a book for a long time (in fact, he got us started on ours), and I’m glad he finally did it.  If you’re interested in an easy-to-follow, practical, hands-on guide to viral, or word-of-mouth marketing, this is the book for you.

Book Short:  Tales of Two Cities

Return Path is basically dual-headquartered in New York City and Broomfield, Colorado, so two recently published books which provide history and insights into the tech industry in those two cities were both of interest to me.

Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City, by Brad Feld (book, kindle) came out a few months ago and is part of Brad’s Startup Revolution series which will also include my upcoming book Startup CEO, to be published this fall.  In the book, Brad uses the example of the Boulder/Denver area and a few different sectors to demonstrate a blueprint to creating an entrepreneurial ecosystem – the kind that are popping up all over the world of late.

Tech and the City: The Making of New York’s Startup Community, by Alessandro Piol (kindle only) hits on many of the same themes and topics as they relate to New York City, although the book is more of a history of the New York tech scene than a framework with examples.  The book draws heavily on quotes from Fred Wilson, like Brad, a long time friend and Board member.  One of the things the book left me thinking about was what the New York tech scene will look like in 30 years after the new Cornell-Technion campus is up and running.  That plus the current momentum of the tech industry in New York, plus the sheer commercial scale of the city, could really produce an interesting environment down the road that actually starts to rival Silicon Valley, though rival probably isn’t the right word.

All in, these two books do a good job of chronicling the industry I work in, in the two cities where I work, but they also abstract nicely to broader principles about public-private collaboration as well as sector development.

Book Short: Beyond 10,000 Hours

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.

Wither the News? (Plus a Bonus Book Short)

It’s unusual that I blog about a book before I’ve actually finished it, but this one is too timely to pass up given today’s news about newspapers.  The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen, at least the first 1/2 of it, is a pretty intense rant about how the Internet’s trend towards democratizing media and content production has a double dirty underbelly:

poor quality — “an endless digital forest of mediocrity,”

no checks and balances — “mainstream journalists and newspapers have the organization, financial muscle, and and credibility to gain access to sources and report the truth…professional journalists can go to jail for telling the truth” (or, I’d add, for libel)

So what’s today’s news about newspapers?  Another massive circulation drop — 3.6% in the last six months.  Newspaper readership across the country is at its lowest level since 1946, when the population was only 141 million, or less than half what it is today.  The digital revolution is well underway.  Print newspapers are declining asymptotically to zero.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m an Internet guy, and I love the democratization of media for many reasons.  I also think it will ultimately force old media companies to be more efficient as individual institutions and as an industry in order to survive (not to mention more environmentally friendly).  But Keen has good thoughts about quality and quantity that are interesting counterpoints to the revolution.  I hope at least some newspapers survive, change their models and their cost structures, and start competing on content quality.  The thought that everyone in the world will get their news ONLY from citizen journalists is scary.

I’m curious to see how the rest of the book turns out.  I’ll reblog if it’s radically different from the themes expressed here.

Update (having finished the book now): Keen puts the mud in curmudgeon. He doesn’t appear to have a good word to say about the Internet, and he allows his very good points about journalistic integrity and content quality and our ability to discern the truth to get washed up in a rant against online gambling, porn, and piracy. Even some of his rant points are valid, but saying, for example, that Craigslist is problematic to society because it only employs 22 people and is hugely profitable while destroying jobs and revenue at newspapers just comes across as missing some critical thinking and basically just pissing in the wind. His final section on Solutions is less blustry and has a couple good examples and points to offer, but it’s a case of too little, too late for my liking.

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:  Great Marketing Checklists

Trade Show and Event Marketing:  Plan, Promote, and Profit, by our direct marketing colleague Ruth Stevens, is hardly a page-turner, but it is a great read and well worth the money for anyone in your B2B marketing department.  That’s true as much for the event marketing specialist as the marketing generalist.

The author brings a very ROI-focused approach to planning and executing events – whether big trade shows or smaller corporate events, which are becoming increasingly popular in recent years for cost, focus, and control reasons.  But beyond events, the book has a number of excellent checklists that are more general for marketers that I found quite useful both as a reminder of things we should be doing at Return Path as well as ways we should be thinking about the different elements of our B2B marketing mix.

Some of the best tables and charts include:  strengths, weaknesses, and best applications of trade shows vs. corporate events; comparative analysis of marketing tools by channel (this was great – talks about best applications for all major tools from events to newsletters to search to inside sales); 12-month exhibitor timeline for trade shows; a great riff on bad booth signage vs. good booth signage (hint:  don’t make the visitor do the work – be obvious!); business event strategic planning grid; pre-show campaign and post-show follow-up checklists; dos, don’ts and options for corporate events; a great section on qualifying and handling leads that extends well beyond trade shows; and several good case studies that are show-focused.

Thanks to Ruth herself for an autographed copy!  Team Marketing and sales leaders at Return Path – your copies are on the way.

Book Short:  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:

• Permission Marketing — the original

• Unleashing the Ideavirus — good follow up on viral marketing

• Really Bad Powerpoint (ebook) — the standard for not being boring when you present

• The Big Red Fez — the standard on designing great web sites

• Survival Is Not Enough — motivating about being a nimble company

• Free Prize Inside — on being buzzworthy

• Purple Cow — on being remarkable, a great book

• The Big Moo — good follow-up with remarkable examples

• Small Is the New Big — not worth it if you read his blog

• All Marketers Are Liars — fine, a little “more of the same”

• The Dip — haven’t read it

• Meatball Sundae — haven’t read it

• Tribes — see above

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:  Alignment Well Defined, Part II

Getting the Right Things Done:  A Leader’s Guide to Planning and Execution, by Pascal Dennis, is an excellent and extraordinarily practical book to read if you’re trying to create or reengineer your company’s planning, goal setting, and accountability processes. It’s very similar to the framework that we have generally adapted our planning and goals process off of at Return Path for the last few years, Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage (book, post/Part I of this series).  My guess is that we will borrow from this and adapt our process even further for 2014.

The book’s history is in Toyota’s Lean Manufacturing system, and given the Lean meme floating around the land of tech startups these days, my guess is that its concepts will resonate with most of the readers of this blog.  The book’s language — True North and Mother Strategies and A3s and Baby A3s — is a little funky, but the principles of simplicity, having a clear target, building a few major initiatives to drive to the target, linking all the plans, and measuring progress are universal.  The “Plan-Do-Check-Adjust” cycle is smart and one of those things that is, to quote an old friend of mine, “common sense that turns out is not so common.”

One interesting thing that the book touches on a bit is the connection between planning/goals and performance management/reviews.  This is something we’ve done fairly well but somewhat piecemeal over the years that we’re increasingly trying to link together more formally.

All in, this is a good read.  It’s not a great fable like Lencioni’s books or Goldratt’s classic The Goal (reminiscent since its example is a manufacturing company).  But it’s approachable, and it comes with a slew of sample processes and reports that make the theory come to life.  If you’re in plan-to-plan mode, I’d recommend Getting the Right Things Done as well as The Advantage.