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Book Short: Unsung Heroes

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

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

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

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

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

Book Not-So-Short: Not Just for Women

At the request of the women in our Professional Services team, I recently read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, and while it may seem like dancing the meringue in a minefield for a male CEO to blog about it, I think it’s an important enough topic to give it a shot. So here goes.

First, given the minefield potential, let me issue a few caveats up front. These are deep, ages old, complex, societal issues and behaviors we’re talking about here. There is no quick answer to anything. There is no universal answer to anything. Men don’t have the same perspective as women and can come across as observers (which in some respects, they are). Working moms don’t have the same perspective as stay-at-home moms, or as single women. We try to be good about all these issues at Return Path, but I’m sure we’ve only scratched the surface. </caveats>

Perhaps most important, my overall take on the book is that it’s a very good business book that everyone should read – not just women. I have a strong reaction to the reactions I’ve read and heard about the book – mostly from women dismissing the book because Sandberg has immense financial resources, so how could she possibly know the plight of the ordinary mom, and how could she understand what it is like to be a stay-at-home mom? That reaction is to dismiss the dismissals! I found the book to be very broadly applicable. Of course things about life with a two-working parent family are easier if you have more money. But that’s completely not the point of the book. And Sandberg doesn’t once criticize stay-at-home moms for that choice – in fact, she acknowledges feelings of guilt and inferiority around them and admiration for the work they do that benefits all families and kids, not just their own.

Here are a few of the biggest areas of thinking, AHA, or questioning, that the book gave me:

One of Sandberg’s underlying points is that the world would be a better place with more women in leadership positions, so that’s an important goal. It’s interesting that few enough of our leaders are women, that it’s hard for me to draw that same conclusion, but it makes sense to me on the surface, and there’s some research about management teams and boards to back it up. As far as I can tell, the world has yet to see a brutal female dictator. Or a fair share of political or corporate scandals caused by women. There are definitely some horror stories of “tough boss” women, but probably no more than “tough boss” men. It’s interesting to note that in our society, leadership roles seem to be prized for their power and monetary reward, so even if the world wouldn’t be a better place with more female leaders, it would certainly be a more fair place along those two dimensions
I felt that a bunch of Sandberg’s points about women were more generalizations about certain personality types which can be inherent in men and women. Maybe they’re more prevalent in women, even much more, but some are issues for some men as well. For example, her general point about women not speaking up even if they have something to say. I have seen this trait in women as well as more introverted men. As a leader, I work hard to draw comments out of people who look like they have something to say in a meeting but aren’t speaking up. This is something that leaders need to pay close attention to across the board so that they hear all the voices around their tables. Same goes for some of the fears she enumerates. Many male leaders I know, myself included at times, have the “fear of being found out as a fraud” thought. Same goes for the “desire to be liked by everyone” holding people back – that’s not gender specific, either. All that said, if these traits are much more prevalent in women, and they are traits that drive attainment of leadership roles, well, you get the point
The fact that women earn 77 cents on the dollar in equivalent jobs for men is appalling. I’ve asked our People Team to do a study of this by level, factoring in experience and tenure, to make sure we don’t have that bias at Return Path. I know for sure we don’t at the leadership level. And I sure as heck hope we don’t anywhere in the organization. We are also about to launch an Unconscious Bias training program, which should be interesting
Sandberg made a really interesting point that most of the women who don’t work are either on the low end or high end of the income spectrum. Her point about the low end really resonated with me – that women who don’t earn a lot stop working if their salaries only barely cover childcare costs. However, she argues that that’s a very short term view, and that staying in the workforce means your salary will escalate over time, while childcare costs stay relatively flat. This is compounded by the fact that women who lean back early in their careers simply because they are anticipating someday having children are earning less than they should be earning when they do finally have children.
The other end of the income spectrum also made sense once I parsed through it – why do women whose husbands make a lot of money (most of whom make a lot of money as well) decide to off-ramp? Sandberg’s point about the “Leadership ambition gap” is interesting, and her example of running a marathon with the spectators screaming “you know you don’t have to do this” as opposed to “you’ve got this” is really vivid. See two bullets down for more on this one. But it might not be straight-up Leadership Ambition Gap so much as a recognition that some of the high-earning jobs out there are so demanding that having two of them in the household would be a nightmare (noting that Dave and Sheryl seem to have figured some of that out), or that moms don’t want to miss out on that much of their children’s lives. They want to be there…and they can afford to. Another related topic that I wish Sandberg had covered in more depth is the path of moms who off-ramp, then re-on-ramp once their youngest children are in school, whether into the career they left or a different one. That would be an interesting topic on many fronts
Societal influences must matter. The facts that, in 2011 – Gymboree manufactured onesies that say “smart like Daddy” and “pretty like Mommy,” and that JC Penney teenage girl t-shirts say “I’m too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me” are more than a little troublesome on the surface (unless Gymboree also produces “handsome like Daddy” and “wicked smart like Mommy,” which somehow I doubt). The fact that women do worse on math and science tests when they have to identify their gender at the top of the test is surprising and shocking
I am really fortunate that Mariquita only works part time, and it’s unclear to me how our lives would work if we both worked full time, especially given my extremely heavy travel schedule, though I am sure we’d figure it out. And there’s no way that I carry 50% of the burden of household responsibilities. Maybe 20-25% at best. But I was struck by Sandberg’s comments (I am sure true) that in two-working-parent families, women still carry the preponderance of household responsibilities on their shoulders. I totally don’t get this. If you both work, how can you not be equal partners at home? A quick mental survey of a couple of the two-working-parent families we know would indicate that the parents split household responsibilities somewhat evenly, though you can never know this from the outside. This should be a no brainer. Sandberg’s point that men need to “lean into their families” is spot on in these cases for sure
On a related note, Sandberg’s comment that “as women must be more empowered at work, men must be more empowered at home…moms can be controlling and critical…if he’s forced to do things her way, pretty soon she’ll be doing them herself” made me smile. I have definitely seen this “learned helplessness” on the home front with dads quite a bit over the years
One really good point Sandberg makes is that younger employees who don’t have kids should be allowed to have a life outside of work just as much as women who do have kids. And that she pays people for the quality and quantity of their output, not their hours. These are principles that match our values and philosophy at Return Path 100%
Probably the most startling moment in the book for me – and I suspect many other men – was Sandberg’s vignette about the young woman at Facebook who was starting to “lean back” because she might someday have a family – before she was even dating anyone! This really gave me a lot of pause. If widespread (and I assume it is), there are clearly societal forces at work that we need to do more to help women early in their careers overcome, if they want to overcome them
Sandberg’s point that a rich and fulfilling career “is a Jungle Gym, not a Ladder” is spot on, but this is true for men as well as women. It matches our philosophy of Scaling Horizontally perfectly
Another very poignant moment in the book was when Sandberg talked about how she herself had shown bias against women in terms of who she called on in meetings or lectures during Q&A. Again, lots of pause for me. If female leaders have the same societal bias against women, that’s a sign that we all have real work in front of us to help level the playing field around giving women air time. Similarly, her example of the Heidi/Howard study was fascinating around how women with the same characteristics are perceived differently by both male and female co-workers gives me pause (for the record, I know the Heidi in question, and I like her!). Likewise, the fact that female leaders are often given unflattering nicknames like “The Iron Lady” – you’d never see something like that for a man in the same position. At least Thatcher wore the name as a badge of honor

I hope this post doesn’t end up as a no-win piece of writing where all I do is touch a few nerves and inspire no ongoing dialog. “Let’s start talking about it,” the ending theme of the book, is a great way to end this post as well. As with all tough issues, articulating the problem is the first step toward solving it. Women need to allow men (as long as the men are open-minded, of course!) to think what they think, say what they think in a safe space, and blunder through their own learnings without feeling threatened. And men need to be comfortable having conversations about topics like these if the paradigmatic relationship between women and leadership is going to continue to shift instead of avoiding the topic or just calling in HR.

Hopefully this blog post is one step towards that at my company. Return Path colleagues – feel free to comment on the blog or via email and share stories of how we’ve either helped you or held you back! But overall, I’m glad I read this book, and I’d encourage anyone and everyone to read it.

Book Short: Hire Great

It’s certainly not hiring season for most of America The World The Universe, but we are still making some limited hires here at Return Path, and I thought – what better time to retool our interviewing and hiring process than in a relatively slow period?

So I just read Who: The A Method for Hiring, by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. It’s a bit of a sequel, or I guess more of a successor book, to the best book I’ve ever read about hiring and interviewing, Topgrading, by Geoff Smart and his father Brad (post, link to buy). This one wasn’t bad, and it was much shorter and crisper.

I’m not sure I believe the oft-quoted stat that a bad hire costs a company $1.5mm. Maybe sometimes (say, if the person embezzles $1.4mm), but certainly the point that bad hires are a nightmare for an organization in any number of ways is well taken. The book does a good job of explaining the linkage from strategy and execution straight to recruiting, with good examples and tips for how to create the linkage. That alone makes it a worthwhile read.

The method they describe may seem like common sense, but I bet 95 out of 100 companies don’t come close. We are very good and quite deliberate about the hiring process and have a good success average, but even we have a lot of room to improve. The book is divided into four main sections:

Scorecard: creating job descriptions that are linked to company strategy and that are outcome and competency based, not task based
Sourcing: going beyond internal and external recruiters to make your entire company a talent seeker and magnet
Selection: the meat of the book – good detail on how to conduct lots of different kinds of interviews, from screening to topgrading (a must) to focused to reference
Sell: how to reel ’em in once they’re on the line (for us anyway, the least useful section as we rarely lose a candidate once we have an offer out)

One of the most poignant examples in the book centered around hiring someone who had been fired from his previous job. The hiring method in the book uncovered it (that’s hard enough to do sometimes) but then dug deep enough to understand the context and reasons why, and, matching up what they then knew about the candidate to their required competencies and outcomes for the job, decided the firing wasn’t a show-stopper and went ahead and made the hire.

I’d think of these two books the way I think about the Covey books. If you have never read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, you could just get away with reading Stephen Covey’s newer book, The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness, though the original is much richer.

Book Short: Sloppy Sequel

SuperFreakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, wasn’t a bad book, but it wasn’t nearly as good as the original Freakonomics, either. I always find the results of “naturally controlled experiments” and taking a data-driven view of the world to be very refreshing. And as much as I like the social scientist versions of these kinds of books like Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Blink (book; blog post), there’s usually something about reading something data driven written by a professional quant jock that’s more reassuring.

That’s where SuperFreakonomics fell down a bit for me. Paul Krugman has described the book in a couple different places as “snarky and contrarian.” I typically enjoy books that carry those descriptors, but this one seemed a bit over the top for economists — like a series of theories looking for data more than raw data adding up to theories.Nowhere is this more true than the chapter on climate change. It’s a shame that that chapter seems to be swallowing up all the public discussion about the book, because there are some good points in that chapter, and the rest of the book is better than that particular chapter, but such is life.

As with all things related to the environment, I turned to my friend Andrew Winston’s blog, where he has a good post about how the authors kind of miss the point about climate change…and he also has a series of links to other blog posts debunking this one chapter. If you’re into the topic, or if you read the book, follow the chain here for good reading. My conclusion about this chapter, being at least somewhat informed about the climate change debate, is that the book seems to have sloppy writing and editing at best, possibly deliberately misleading at worst. (Incidentally, the reaction in the blogosphere seems highly emotional, other than Andrew’s, which probably doesn’t serve the reactors well.)

But I’ll assume the best of intentions. Some of the points made aren’t bad – there is no debate about the problem or the need to solve it, the authors express legitimate concern that current solutions, especially those requiring behavioral change, will be too little too late, and most interestingly, they show an interest in alternative approaches like geo-engineering. I hadn’t been familiar with that topic at all, but I’m now much more interested in it, not because it’s a “silver bullet” approach to dealing with climate change, but because it’s a different approach, and complex problems like climate change deserve to have a wide range of people working on multiple types of solutions. I met Nathan Myhrvold once (I almost threw up on him during a job interview, which is another story for another day), and it makes me very happy that his brilliance is being applied to this problem as a general principle.

As I said, though, beyond this one chapter, the book is good-not-great. But it certainly is chock full of cocktail party nuggets!

Book Short: Long on Platitudes, Short on Value

I approached Success Built to Last: Creating a Life That Matters, by Jerry Porras, Stewart Emery, and Mark Thompson, with great enthusiasm, as Porras was co-author, along with Jim Collins, of two of my favorite business books of all time, Built to Last and Good to Great. I was very disappointed in the end. This wasn’t really a business book, despite its marketing and hype. At best, it was a poor attempt at doing what Malcolm Gladwell just did in Outliers in attempting to zero in on the innate, learned, and environmental qualities that drive success.

The book had some reasonably good points to make and definitely some great quotes, but it was very rambly and hard to follow. Its attempt at creating an overall framework like the one used in Built to Last and Good to Great just plain didn’t work, as two of the three legs of the stool were almost incomprehensible, or to put it more charitably, didn’t hang together well.

This isn’t a terrible book to have on your shelf, and it might be good to skim, but remember that “skim” is only one letter away from “skip.”

Book Short: Loving the Strengths Movement More Than the Book

I’m a big believer in the so-called Strengths Movement — that we would all be better served by playing to our strengths than agonizing over fixing our weaknesses. I think it’s true both in professional and personal settings.

The books written by Marcus Buckingham that come out of Gallup’s extensive research into corporate America, First, Break All the Rules (about management) and Now, Discover Your Strengths (self-management) are both quite good. Another book written by someone else off the same research corpus, 12: The Elements of Great Managing is ok, but not as good, as I wrote about here.

Buckingham’s newest, Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance, is fine and has some good points but is way too long, a little hokey, and has a lot of online companion material that is far more interesting sounding than it is actually useful.

The book does build nicely on Now, Discover Your Strengths by giving you inspiration and a framework for taking those signature themes from the prior book and translating them into action — stuff you actually do every day that plays to your strengths and draws out your weaknesses. And that’s helpful. Some of his suggestions for what you do with that information are ok but a bit common sense only and way too drawn out (“here’s how to talk to your boss…”).

To be fair, I am going to do some of the work that Buckingham recommended doing — so I guess that says something about the power of the book, or at least the movement underlying it. But not the best read in the world.

Book Short: Is CX the new UX?

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.

The Gift of Feedback, Part III

I’ve written about our 360 Review process at Return Path a few times in the past:

And the last two times around, I’ve also posted the output of my own review publicly here in the form of my development plan:

Here in 2008
Here in 2009

So here we are again. I have my new development plan all spruced up and ready to go. Many thanks to my team and Board for this valuable input, and to Angela Baldonero (my fantastic SVP People and in-house coach), and Marc Maltz of Triad Consulting for helping me interpret the data and draft this plan. Here at a high level is what I’m going to be working on for the next 1-2 years:

Institutionalize impatience and lessen the dependency dynamic on me. What does this mean? Basically it means that I want to make others in the organization and on my team in particular as impatient as I am for progress, success, reinvention, streamlining and overcoming/minimizing operational realities. I’ll talk more about something I’ve taken to calling “productive disruption” in a future blog post
Focus on making every staff interaction at all levels a coaching session. Despite some efforts over the years, I still feel like I talk too much when I interact with people in the organization on a 1:1 or small group basis. I should be asking many more questions and teaching people to fish, not fishing for them
Continue to foster deep and sustained engagement at all levels. We’ve done a lot of this, really well, over the years. But at nearly 250 people now and growing rapidly, it’s getting harder and harder. I want to focus some real time and energy in the months to come on making sure we keep this critical element of our culture vibrant at our new size and stage
I have some other more tactical goals as well like improving at public speaking and getting more involved with leadership recruiting and management training, but the above items are more or less the nub of it

One thing I know I’ll have to do with some of these items and some of the tactical ones in particular is engage in some form of deliberate practice, as defined by Geoffrey Colvin in his book Talent is Overrated (blog post on the book here). That will be interesting to figure out.

But that’s the story. Everyone at Return Path and on my Board – please help me meet these important goals for my development over the next couple of years!

How to Get Laid Off – an Employee’s Perspective

One of my colleagues at Return Path saw my post about How to Quit Your Job about 5 years ago and was inspired to share this story with me. Don’t read anything into this post, team! There is no other meaning behind my posting it at this time, or any time, other than thinking it’s a very good way of approaching a very difficult situation, especially coming from an employee.

In 2009 I was working at a software security start up in the Silicon Valley. Times were exceedingly tough, there were several rounds of layoffs that year, and in May I was finally on the list. I was informed on a Tuesday that my last day was that Friday. It was a horrible time to be without a job (and benefits), there was almost no hiring at all that year, one of the worst economic down turns on record. While it was a hard message, I knew that it was not personal, I was just caught up on a bad math problem.

After calling home to share the bad news, I went back to my desk and kept working. I had never been laid off and was not sure what to do, but I was pretty sure I would have plenty of free time in the short term, so I set about figuring out how to wrap things up there. Later that day the founder of the company came by, asked why I had not gone home, and I replied that I would be fine with working till the end of the week if he was okay with it. He thanked me.

Later that week, in a meeting where we reviewed and prioritized the projects I was working on, we discussed who would take on the top three that were quite important to the future of the company. A few names were mentioned of who could keep them alive, but they were people who I knew would not focus on them at all. So I suggested they have me continue to work on them, that got an funny look but when he thought about it , it made sense, they could 1099 me one day a week. The next day we set it up. I made more money than I could of on unemployment, but even better I kept my laptop and work email, so I looked employed which paid off later.

That one day later became two days and then three, however, I eventually found other full time work in 2010. Layoffs are hard, but it is not a time to burn bridges. In fact one of the execs of that company is a reference and has offered me other opportunities for employment.

Book Shorts: One Up, One Down

I read new books by two of my favorite authors today: Geoffrey Moore and Seth Godin. Moore’s was his best book in years; Godin’s was his worst.

Geoffrey Moore’s latest book, Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of their Evolution, is Moore’s best book in a while. While I loved Crossing the Chasm and thought Inside the Tornado was a close second, both The Gorilla Game and Living on the Fault Line didn’t do it for me — they both felt like a pile of Silicon Valley buzzwords as opposed to the insightful and groundbreaking market definition in his first two books.

But Darwin is a gem. It goes back to Moore’s strengths in analyzing leading companies and creating a powerful framework for innovation that transcends industry and stage of company. And even better, the book has a few very useful “how to” lists to help readers interpret the content and adapt it to their own environments.

So whether you’re a Geoffrey Moore fan or not — assuming you are a fan of innovation and kicking your competitors’ collective butts — this book’s for you.

By contrast, Seth Godin’s Small Is the New Big is old news if you are a Seth Godin fan. It is literally a repackaging of essays, articles, and blog postings he’s written over the years. He’s trended down lately in his writing, like Moore (and most authors who have a single theme or two, it should be said), but unlike Moore, this book isn’t his recovery. The book is a must-have if you (a) love Seth’s writing and want a hard copy archive of his soft-copy stuff, (b) you don’t read Seth’s blog and want to see what you’ve been missing, or (c) you have his other books and are compulsive enough that you can’t stand incomplete collections.

Otherwise, wait for his next book, which hopefully will have some more of the original thinking and writing and ideas that made books like Permission Marketing, Unleashing the Ideavirus, and Purple Cow such new business classics. I have to say, the thing that disappointed me most here is that I felt like Seth totally sold out with this book — as a regular reader of his, I just felt duped by the Godin Marketing Machine, which is precisely the kind of thing he rants against. There was definitely NO Free Prize Inside this one.

Book Short: Triumph over Adversity

In truth, Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, was a bit of a disappointment. I thought his first three books, Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, were fantastic, and I routinely refer to them in business. David and Goliath isn’t bad, it’s just a little light and hangs together a lot less than Gladwell’s other books.

I just read a scathing review of it in The New Republic, which I won’t bother linking to, mostly because the reviewer was on a total rant about Gladwell in general and was particularly insulting to people who read Gladwell (an interesting approach to a book review), essentially calling us self-help seekers who aren’t interested in reality or wisdom. Nice.

Two seminal quotes from the book that get at its essence are:

To play by David’s rules you have to be desperate. You have to be so bad that you have no choice.

and

He was an underdog and a misfit, and that gave him the freedom to try things no one else ever dreamt of.

Those things are probably generally true in life, but also applicable to business. A business book I read years ago called The Underdog Advantage: Using the Power of Insurgent Strategy to Put Your Business on Top, by David Morey and Scott Miller, brings this principle to life for work.

I also liked the concept Gladwell talked about a few times in the book about being a big fish in a small pond, and how that can sometimes be a better place to be than a small fish in a big pond in terms of building self-confidence. That’s certainly been true for me in my life.

If you go back the premise of Gladwell’s books in general, as I heard him say on The Daily Show the other night — “to get people to look at the world a little differently” — then David and Goliath does that on some level. And for that alone, it’s probably worth a quick read.