Book Short:  Finishing First

The Power of Nice:  How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness, by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, is one of those “airport books” that takes about an hour to read.  I had an ear-to-ear grin reading the book, in part because, well, it’s just a happy book, filled with anecdotes about how a smile here or a gesture of kindness there made a difference in someone’s life — both personally and professionally.

But part of my interest in the book was also driven by a long-standing debate we have at Return Path over whether we’re “too nice” as a company and whether we should have “sharper elbows.”  I was struck by a few comments the authors made, things you would expect like “nice doesn’t mean naïve” as well as things you wouldn’t like “help your enemies.”  To me, that says it all about success in business:  you can be a fierce competitor externally and demand accountability internally and still be a warm and kind person, and that’s the best (and most rewarding) place to be.

Understanding the Drivers of Success

Although generally business is great at Return Path  and by almost any standard in the world has been consistently strong over the years, as everyone internally knows, the second part of 2012 and most of 2013 were not our finest years/quarters.  We had a number of challenges scaling our business, many of which have since been addressed and improved significantly.

When I step back and reflect on “what went wrong” in the quarters where we came up short of our own expectations, I can come up with lots of specific answers around finer points of execution, and even a few abstracted ones around our industry, solutions, team, and processes.  But one interesting answer I came up with recently was that the reason we faltered a bit was that we didn’t clearly understand the drivers of success in our business in the 1-2 years prior to things getting tough.  And when I reflect back on our entire 14+ year history, I think that pattern has repeated itself a few times, so I’m going to conclude there’s something to it.

What does that mean?  Well, a rising tide — success in your company — papers over a lot of challenges in the business, things that probably aren’t working well that you ignore because the general trend, numbers, and success are there.  Similarly, a falling tide — when the going gets a little tough for you — quickly reveals the cracks in the foundation.

In our case, I think that while some of our success in 2010 and 2011 was due to our product, service, team, etc. — there were two other key drivers.  One was the massive growth in social media and daily deal sites (huge users of email), which led to more rapid customer acquisition and more rapid customer expansion coupled with less customer churn.  The second was the fact that the email filtering environment was undergoing a change, especially at Gmail and Yahoo, which caused more problems and disruption for our clients’ email programs than usual — the sweet spot of our solution.

While of course you always want to make hay while the sun shines, in both of these cases, a more careful analysis, even WHILE WE WERE MAKING HAY, would have led us to the conclusion that both of those trends were not only potentially short-term, but that the end of the trend could be a double negative — both the end of a specific positive (lots of new customers, lots more market need), and the beginning of a BROADER negative (more customer churn, reduced market need).

What are we going to do about this?  I am going to more consistently apply one of our learning principles, the Post-Mortem  –THE ART OF THE POST-MORTEM, to more general business performance issues instead of specific activities or incidents.  But more important, I am going to make sure we do that when things are going well…not just when the going gets tough.

What are the drivers of success in your business?  What would happen if they shifted tomorrow?

I wrote part I of this post in 2011, and I feel even more strongly about it today. I generally keep this blog away from politics (don’t we have enough of that running around?), but periodically, I find some common sense, centrist piece of information worth sharing. In this case, I just read a great and very short book, Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution, by former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, that, if you care about the polarization and fractiousness going on in our country now, you’d appreciate.

If nothing else, the shattered norms and customs of the last several years should point people to the fact that our Constitution needs some revision. Not a massive structural overhaul, but some changes on the margin to keep it fresh, as we approach its 250th anniversary in the next couple decades.

Book Short: Sequel Not Worth It

Mastering the 7 Essentials of High Growth Companies, by David Thomson, was a poor sequel to the solid Blueprint to a Billion [review] [buy]– and not worth reading if you’ve read the original.  It was very short for its price and contained mildly interesting examples of “blueprint companies” that augmented the original book but didn’t uncover any new material or add any thinking to the mix.  Basically, it was like another couple chapters that should have been part of Blueprint.

It is not a bad buy in lieu of the original if you haven’t read either one yet, as Blueprint is a bit longer than necessary, but otherwise, you can skip this one.

On a side note – the author’s interactive scorecard is a decent diagnostic tool (though also, I am sure, a lead gen tool for his consulting business).

A Sense of Urgency, by John Kotter, is a solid book – not his best, but worth a read and happily short, as most business books should be.  I originally was going to hold off on writing this post until I had more time, but the subject matter alone made me think that was a mistake and that I should write it while it’s fresh in my mind.  <g>

The three tools to fight complacency are the organizing framework for the book — bring the outside in, behave with urgency every day, and turn crises into opportunities — are all good thoughts, and good reminders of basic management principles.  But there were a couple other themes worth calling out even more.

First up, the notion that there is a vicious cycle at play in that urgency begets success which creates complacency which then requires but does not beget urgency.  The theme is really that success can drive arrogance, stability, and scale that requires inward focus — not that success itself is bad, just that it requires an extra level of vigilance to make sure it doesn’t lead to complacency.  I’ve seen this cycle at different times over the years in lots of organizations, and it’s one of the reasons that if you look at the original companies on the Dow Jones Industrials index when it was expanded from 12 to 30 around 100 years ago, only one of them (GE) still exists.

Second, that busy-ness can masquerade as urgency but actually undermines urgency.  A full calendar doesn’t mean you’re behaving with urgency.  Kotter’s example of an Indian manager is great:

If you watch the Indian manager’s behavior carefully and contrast it with the hospital executive’s, you find that the former relentlessly eliminates low-priority items from his appointment diary. He eliminates clutter on the agenda of the meetings that do make it into his diary. The space that is freed up allows him to move faster. It allows him to follow up quickly on the action items that come out of meetings. The time freed up allows him to hold impromptu interactions that push along important projects faster. The open space allows him to talk more about issues he thinks are crucial, about what is happening with customers and competitors, and about the technological change affecting his business.

Finally, Kotter’s theme of “Urgent patience” is a wonderful turn of phrase.  As he says,

It means acting each day with a sense of urgency but having a realistic view of time. It means recognizing that five years may be needed to attain important and ambitious goals, and yet coming to work each day committed to finding every opportunity to make progress toward those goals.

How true is that?  It’s not just that big ships take a long time to turn…it’s that big opportunities take a long time to pursue and get right.  If they didn’t…everyone would do them!  Urgent patience is what allows you to install a bias for action in your team without causing panic and frenzy, which is never productive.

Thanks to my friend Chad Dickerson for recommending this book, a great read as part of Operation Reboot Matt.

Book Short:  Internet True Crime

Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet, by Joseph Menn (book, kindle) was a bit of a disappointment.  I was really hoping for more of an explanation of how the “business” of Internet crime works — what the economics are like, what the landscape/scope/sectors are like, who the players are.

What I got was a bit of a true crime novel, the story of Barrett Lyon and Andy Crocker, who are respectively a geek and a cop, and their very specific stories of tracking down a handful of internet criminals around a handful of technical tactics (DDOS attacks and botnets).  It wasn’t bad, the stories were ok and occasionally entertaining, but it was very narrow.

It felt to me like there is a much more interesting story to tell around criminals who USE the Internet to commit crimes as opposed to people attacking the infrastructure.  Has anyone ever run across a book like that?

Book Short:  Shamu-rific

I re-read an old favorite last night in preparation for a management training course I’m co-teaching today at Return Path:  Ken Blanchard’s Whale Done! The Power of Positive Relationships.  I was reminded why it’s an old favorite.  It has a single concept which is simple but powerful.  And yes, it’s based loosely on killer whale  training tactics.

Accentuate the positive.

The best example in the book is actually a personal one more than a professional one.  The main character of the book has a “problem” in that he chronically works late, then comes home and gets beat up by his wife about coming home so late.  The result?  No behavior change — and probably even a reinforcement of the behavior because, after all, who wants to come home and get beat up?  The change as a result of the new philosophy?  The wife thanks her husband when he does come home at a more reasonable hour, makes him a nice dinner, etc. which makes the husband WANT to come home earlier.

That’s probably a poor paraphrasing of the story, and as I’m typing the story out here, boy does it sound a bit 1950s in terms of its portrayal of gender role stereotypes.  Nonetheless, I think it makes the point well.

Try it out sometime at work (or at home).  Pick a behavior you want to see more of out of a direct report, especially one that’s linked to another behavior you don’t like.  Accentuate the positive.  Make the person WANT to do more of it.  And watch the results!

Book Short:  Way, Way Beyond Books

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, by Brad Stone, was a great read.  Amazon is a fascinating, and phenomenally successful company, and Jeff is a legendary technology leader.  The Everything Store is a company and personal biography and totally delivers.

Forget about the fact that Amazon is now almost $100B in revenues and still growing like mad.  I find it even more amazing that a single company could be the largest ecommerce site on the planet while successfully pioneering both cloud computing services and e-readers.  The stories of all these things are in the book.

As a CEO, I enjoyed reading more of the vignettes behind the things that Amazon is reputationally known for in the tech world – doors as desks, their unique meeting formats, the toughness of the culture, the extensive risk taking of growth over profits, and what works and does not work about Bezos’ authoritative and domineering style.  And it’s always great to be reminded that even the biggest and best companies had to cheat death 10 times over before “arriving.”

This is good fun and learning for anyone in the business world.  It reminded me most of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs ,which I wrote about here, although it’s more of a company history and less of a biography than the Jobs book.

Thanks to my friend and long-time former Board member Jeff Epstein, I recently downed a new book, You’re in Charge – Now What?, by Thomas Neff and James Citrin.  I’m glad I read it.  But it was one of those business books that probably should have just been a Harvard Business Review article.  It’s best skimmed, with helpful short summaries at the end of every chapter that you could blow through quickly instead of hanging on every word. 

The authors’ 8-step plan is laid out as:

1. Prepare yourself during the countdown
2. Align expectations
3. Shape your management team
4. Craft your strategic agenda
5. Start transforming culture
6. Manage your board/boss
7. Communicate
8. Avoid common pitfalls

Ok fine, those make sense on the surface. Here are three things that really stood out for me from the book:

First, “working” before you’re officially working – the countdown period. I tried hard NOT to do this when I was between things, but I’m glad I did the things I did, and now, I wish I had done more. The most poignant phrase in the book is “scarce time available during your first hundred days.” That is an understatement. As my “to read” pile grows and grows and grows with no end in sight…I wish I had done more pre-work.

Second, remember that in every interaction, you are being evaluated as much as you are evaluating. And note that for many people, they will be thinking very critically, things like “do I want to work with this person…is he/she showing signs that he/she wants to work with me?” Yes, we all know as leaders, we live in a fishbowl. But I think that may be even more true during the first couple months on the job.

Finally, this phrase stood out for me: “Acknowledging and in some cases embracing your predecessor can sustain a sense of continuity within the organization and instill a sense of connectivity with employees’ shared past.” There is frequently a temptation to focus on things that need change, which invariably there are…and which invariably you will hear from people who are happy to find a willing new ear to listen to them. But this posture of acknowledge/embrace is especially true in my case, where my predecessor is the founder and 25-year CEO who continues on as our active chairman.

I know there are a ton of books like this on the market, and while I’ve only read this one, I’d say that if you’re starting a new CEO or executive-level job, this is a good one to at least skim to get some ideas.

Book Short:  Culture is King

Tony Hsieh’s story, Delivering Happiness (book, Kindle), is more than just the story of his life or the story of Zappos. It’s a great window into the soul of a very successful company and one that in many ways has become a model for great culture and a great customer service model.  It’s a relatively quick and breezy read, and it contains a handful of legendary anecdotes from Zappos’ history to demonstrate those two things — culture and customer service — in action.

As Hsieh himself says in the book, you can’t copy this stuff and believe it will work in your company’s environment as it does in Zappos’.  You have to come up with these things on your own, or better yet, you have to create an environment where the company develops its own culture and operating system along the broad lines you lay out.  I think Return Path has many similarities with Zappos in how we seek out WOW experiences and in our Core Values, as well as the evolutionary path we took to get to those places.  But as much as I enjoyed reading about a like-minded company, I also recognized the specific things that were different and had a good visceral understanding as to WHY the differences exist.

It is the rare company that gets to $1 billion in revenue ever – let alone within a decade.  For that reason alone, this is a worthwhile read.  But if you are a student of organizational culture and believe in the power of values-driven organizations, this is good affirmation and full of good examples.  And if you’re a doubter of the power of those things, this might just convince you to think twice about that!

Book Short – A Smattering of Good Ideas that further my Reboot path

Ram Charan’s The Attacker’s Advantage was not his best work, but it was worth the read.  It had a cohesive thesis and a smattering of good ideas in it, but it felt much more like the work of a management consultant than some of his better books like Know How (review, buy), Confronting Reality (review, buy), Execution (review, buy), What the CEO Wants You to Know ( buy), and my favorite of his that I refer people to all the time, The Leadership Pipeline (review, buy).

Charan’s framework for success in a crazy world full of digital and other disruption is this:

Perceptual acuity (I am still not 100% sure what this means)

1. A mindset to see opportunity in uncertainty
2. The ability to see a new path forward and commit to it
3. Adeptness in managing the transition to the new path
4. Skill in making the organization steerable and agile

The framework is basically about institutionalizing the ability to spot pending changes in the future landscape based on blips and early trends going on today and then about how to seize opportunity once you’ve spotted the future.  I like that theme.  It matches what I wrote about when I read Mark Penn’s Microtrends (review, buy) years ago.

Charan’s four points are important, but some of the suggestions for structuring an organization around them are very company-specific, and others are too generic (yes, you have to set clear priorities).  His conception of something he calls a Joint Practice Session is a lot like the practices involved in Agile that contemporary startups are more likely to just do in their sleep but which are probably helpful for larger companies.

I read the book over a year ago, and am finally getting around to blogging about it.  That time and distance were helpful in distilling my thinking about Charan’s words.  Probably my biggest series of takeaways from the book – and they fit into my Reboot theme this quarter/year, is to spend a little more time “flying at higher altitude,” as Charan puts it:  talking to people outside the company and asking them what they see and observe from the world around them; reading more and synthesizing takeaways and applicability to work more; expanding my information networks beyond industry and country; creating more routine mechanisms for my team to pool observations about the external landscape and potential impacts on the company; and developing a methodology for reviewing and improving predictions over time.

Bottom line:  like many business books, great to skim and pause for a deep dive at interesting sections, but not the author’s best work.