Book Short – Another Must-Read by Lencioni

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.

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.

Peter Principle, Applied to Management

My Management by Chameleon Post from a couple weeks ago generated more comments than usual, and an entertaining email thread among my friends and former staff from MovieFone.  One comment that came off-blog is worth summarizing and addressing:

There are those of us who should not manage, whose personalities don’t work in a management context, and there is nothing wrong with not managing.  Also, there promotion to management by merit has always been a curiosity to me. If I am good at my job, why does it mean that I would be good at managing people who do my job? In other words, a good ‘line worker’ doth not a good manager make. I’d prefer to see people adept at being team leads be hired in, to manage, then promotion of someone ill-fitted for such a position be appointed from within. This latter happens far to often, to the detriment of many teams and companies.

For those of you not familiar with the Peter Principle, the Wikipedia definition is useful, but the short of it is that “people are promoted to their level of incompetence, when they stop getting promoted…so in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out their duties.”

Back when I worked in management consulting, I always used to wonder how it was that all the senior people spent all their time selling business.  They hadn’t been trained to sell business.  And a lot of the people great at executing complex analysis and client cases hated selling. Or look at the challenge the other way around:  should a company take its best sales people and turn them into sales managers?

We’ve had numerous examples over the years at Return Path of people who are great at their jobs but make terrible, or at least less great, managers.  The problem with promoting someone into a management role mistakenly isn’t only that you’re taking one of your best producers off “the line.”  The problem is that those roles are coveted because they almost always come with higher comp and more status; and if a promotion backfires, it generally (though not always) dooms the employment relationship.  People don’t like admitting failure, people don’t like “moving backward,” and comp is almost always an issue.

What can be done about this?  We have tried over the years to create a culture where being a senior individual contributor can be just as challenging, fun, rewarding, impactful, and well compensated as being a manager, including getting promotions of a different sort.  But there are limits to this.  One obvious one is at the highest levels of an organization, there can only be one or two people like this (at most) by definition.  A CEO can only have so many direct reports.  But another limit is societal. Most OTHER companies define success as span of control.  You get a funny look if you apply for a job with 15 years of experience and a $100k+ salary yet have never managed anyone before.  After all, the conventional wisdom mistakenly goes, how can you have a big impact on the business if all you do is your own work?

The fact is that management is a different skill.  It needs to be learned, studied, practiced, and reviewed as much as any other line of work.  In most ways, it’s even more critical to have competent and superstar managers, since they impact others all day long.  Obviously, people can be grown or trained into being managers, but the principle of my commenter – and “Peter” – is spot on:  just because you are good at one job doesn’t mean you should be promoted to the next one.

I’m not sure there’s a good answer to this challenge, but I welcome any thoughts on it here.

Self-Discipline:  Broken Windows Applied to You

Just as my last post about New Shoes was touching a bit of a nerve around, as one friend put it, "mental housecleaning," my colleague Angela pointed me to a great post on a blog I've never seen before ("advice at the intersection of work and life" — I just subscribed), called How to Have More Self-Discipline.  Man, is that article targeted at me, especially about working out. 

I think the author is right — more discipline around the edges does impact happiness.  But it also impacts productivity.  Not just because working out gives you more energy.  Because having your act together in small ways makes you feel like you have your act together in all ways.  As the author notes (without this specific analogy), it's a little like the "broken windows" theory of policing.  You crack down on graffiti and broken windows, you stop more violent crime, in part because the same people commit small and large crimes, in part because you create a more orderly society in visible, if sometimes a bit small and symbolic, ways.

I agree that the best example in the "non work" world is fitness.  But what about the "work world"?  What's relevant around self-discipline for professionals?  Consider these examples:

– A clean inbox at the end of the day.  Yes, it's the David Allen theory of workplace productivity which I espouse, but it does actually work.  A clean mind is free to think, dream, solve problems.  The quickest path to keeping it clean is not having a pile of little things to deal with in front of it, taking up space

– Showing up on time.  It may sound dumb, but people who are chronically late to meetings are constantly behind.  The day is spent rushing around, cutting conversations short — in other words, unhappy and not as productive.  The discipline of ending meetings on time with enough buffer to travel or even just prepare for the next meeting so you can start it on time (and not waste the time of the other people in the meeting) is important.  Have too many meetings that you can't be at all of them on time?  Say no to some — or make them shorter to force efficiency.  There's nothing wrong with a 10-minute meeting

– Dressing for success.  We live in a casual world, especially in our industry.  I admit, once in a while I wear jeans or a Hawaiian shirt to work — even shorts if it's a particularly hot and humid day.  (And even in New York, not just in Boulder.)  But no matter what you wear, you can make sure you look neat and professional, not sloppy.  Skip the ripped jeans or faded/frayed/rock concert t-shirt.  Tuck in the shirt if it's that kind of shirt, and wear a belt.  The discipline of "dressing up" carries productivity a long way.  Want to really test this out at the edges?  Try wearing a suit or tie one day to work.  You feel different, and you sound different

– Doing your expenses.  Honestly, I've never seen an area where more smart and conscientious people fall apart than producing a simple expense report.  Come up with a system for it — do one every week, every trip on the plane home, every time you have an expense — and just take the 5 minutes and finish it off.  Sure, expenses are a pain, but they only really become a pain and a millstone around your brain when you let them sit for months because you "don't have time" to fill them out, then you get accounting all pissed off at you, and the project's size, complexity, and distance from the actual event all mount

– Follow rules of grammar and punctuation.  Writing, whether for external or internal consumption, is still writing.  I'm not sure when everyone became ee cummings and decided that it's ok to forget the basic rules of English grammar and punctuation.  Make sure your emails and even your IMs, at least when they're for business, follow the rules.  You look smarter when you do.  Maybe — maybe — with Twitter or SMS you can excuse some of this and go with abbreviations.  But I wouldn't normally consider a lot of those formal business communications

I could go on and on, but I think you get the idea.  A little self-discipline goes a long way at work (and in life)!

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:  Chock Full O Management & Leadership

I just finished The Better People Leader, by Charles Coonradt, which was a very short, good, rich read.  It was a pretty expansive book on management & leadership topics — 100 short pages of material that are probably covered by 1,000 pages in other books.

What separates this book from the pack is the rich examples from non-business life that Coonradt sprinkles throughout the book.  They include the tale of a special ed kid who became a mainstream student within a year because his teacher had the courage to ask his fellow students to treat him normally, and the story of how Korean War POWs died in massive numbers not from physical torture but from negative feedback loops.

The closing quote of the book says it all, from Ronald Reagan:  “A great leader is not necessarily one who does the greatest things. He is the one who gets the people to do the greatest things.”  This book gives you quick tips on how to do just that.

The Gift of Feedback, Part IV

I wrote a few weeks ago about my live 360 – the first time I’ve ever been in the room for my own review discussion.  I now have a development plan drafted coming out of the session, and having cycled it through the contributors to the review, I’m ready to go with it.  As I did in 2008, 2009, and 2011, I’m posting it here publicly.  This time around, there are three development items:

1. Continue to spend enough time in-market.  In particular, look for opportunities to spend more time with direct clients.  There was a lot of discussion about this at my review.  One director suggested I should spend at least 20% of my time in-market, thinking I was spending less than that.  We track my time to the minute each quarter, and I spend roughly 1/3 of my time in-market.  The problem is the definition of in-market.  We have a lot of large partners (ESPs, ISPs, etc.) with whom I spend a lot of time at senior levels.  Where I spend very little time is with direct clients, either as prospects or as existing clients.  Even though, given our ASP, there isn’t as much leverage in any individual client relationship, I will work harder to engage with both our sales team and a couple of larger accounts to more deeply understand our individual client experience.
2. Strengthen the Executive Committee as a team as well as using the EC as the primary platform for driving accountability throughout the organization.  On the surface, this sounds like “duh,” isn’t that the CEO’s job in the first place?  But there are some important tactical items underneath this, especially given that we’ve changed over half of our executive team in the last 12 months.  I need to keep my foot on the accelerator in a few specific ways:  using our new goals and metrics process and our system of record (7Geese) rigorously with each team member every week or two; being more authoritative about the goals that end up in the system in the first place to make sure my top priorities for the organization are being met; finishing our new team development plan, which will have an emphasis on organizational accountability; and finding the next opportiunity for our EC to go through a management training program as a team.
3. Help stakeholders connect with the inherent complexity of the business.  This is an interesting one.  It started out as “make the business less complex,” until I realized that much of the competitive advantage and inherent value from our business comes fom the fact that we’ve built a series of overlapping, complex, data machines that drive unique insights for clients.  So reducing complexity may not make sense.  But helping everyone in and around the business connect with, and understand the complexity, is key.  To execute this item, there are specifics for each major stakeholder.  For the Board, I am going to experiment with a radically simpler format of our Board Book.  For Investors, Customers, and Partners, we are hard at work revising our corporate positioning and messaging.  Internally, there are few things to work on — speaking at more team/department meetings, looking for other opportunities to streamline the organization, and contemplating a single theme or priority for 2015 instead of our usual 3-5 major priorities.

Again, I want to thank everyone who participated in my 360 this year – my board, my team, a few “lucky” skip-levels, and my coach Marc Maltz.  The feedback was rich, the experience of observing the conversation was very powerful, and I hope you like where the development plan came out!

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: A Marketing-Led Turnaround

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.

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 (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.