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.
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.
Sargent’s book is geeky but well-written. He dives into a couple dozen examples across many fields and disciplines of how nanotechnology holds extraordinary promise for solving some of mankind’s toughest scientific challenges — while creating a few new ethical and economic ones.
The science is for the most part beyond me, but the practical applications are fascinating:
– making solar power the sole source of global energy needs a possibility
– detecting cancer at the level of a single cancer cell rather than waiting to discover a grape-sized tumor; curing that cancer through embedded “pharmacy on a chip” drugs that release the right drugs over long periods of time locally at the spot of the disease
– figuring out how to keep proving the ever-more-challenging Moore’s law when only 4 years from now, parts of a transistor will need to be only 5 atoms across
– curing blindness with wireless retinal implants
Once every year or so, I read a book that makes me sad I didn’t go into engineering or science. The Dance of Molecules is that kind of book.
I just read Confronting Reality (book; audio), the sequel to Execution, by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. Except I didn’t read it, I listened to it on Mariquita’s iPod Shuffle over the course of two or three long runs in the past week. The book was good enough, but I also learned two valuable lessons. Lesson 1: Listening to audio books when running is difficult – it’s hard to focus enough, easy to lose one’s place, can’t refer back to anything or take notes. Lesson 2: If you sweat enough on your spouse’s Shuffle, you can end up owning a Shuffle of your own.
Anyway, I was able to focus on the book enough to know that it’s a good one. It’s chock full of case studies from the last few years, including some “new economy” ones instead of just the industrial types covered in books like Built to Last and Good to Great. Cisco, Sun, EMC, and Thomson are all among those covered. The basic message is that you really have to dig into external market realities when crafting a strategic plan or business model and make sure they’re in alignment with your financial targets as well as people and processes. But the devil’s in the details, and the case studies here are great.
Craig Hickman’s Mind of a Manager, Soul of a Leader talks about how tapping the natural tension between managers and leaders allows an organization to achieve its best. It covers dozens of topical areas and for each compares how a prototypical manager handles the area (practical, reasonable, decisive) vs. how a prototypical leader handles it (visionary, empathetic, and flexible). Of course, the book describes the ideal organization as “balanced an integrated” between the two extremes.
My take for startups, a topic not addressed in the book, is that the job of the entrepreneur CEO is to be both manager and leader, and try to do both roles effectively without driving the team nuts. The book says that “managers wield authority, leaders apply influence.” Entrepreneurs have to be comfortable with both styles. Thanks to my colleague Stephanie Miller for giving me a copy of this one.
I just finished The Smartest Guys in the Room, by journalists Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. This is the story of Enron, and what a tale it is! The book is a good quick business novel read. It reminded me a lot of Barbarians at the Gate, except that it made me far angrier. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m at a different place in my career now than I was 10 years ago and therefore have a different appreciation for what goes on in companies, or if the Enron guys were just far worse than anyone surrounding RJR Nabisco. But in any case, as my Grandpa Bill would have said, this one certainly raised my hackles.
Anyway, I can’t even get into the details without working myself into a frenzy about these crooks, but suffice to say there are lots of “what not to do” lessons in this book, starting with CEO Ken Lay’s wuss-like, disconnected approach to leading the company and ending with CFO Andy Fastow’s insane rationalizations for using the company as his own piggy bank. Anyway, I thought it would just be easier to just list out a few simple things to look for in your own company if you’re concerned you might be having some financial scandals within. You know you have a problem if…
– Your company has 3,000 off-balance sheet special purpose entities, including 800 in the Caymans
– Your CEO has waived your company code of ethics twice so that the CFO could negotiate deals for his own profit against the company
– Your President combatively calls an analyst an asshole on an earnings call when asked why the company couldn’t produce a balance sheet and cash flow statement with its income statement and earnings release
– Your staffers meet someone from your auditor and say “oh, you’re the guy that won’t let us do something”
– Your accounting department becomes viewed as a major profit center because of its treatment of revenue
It’s truly astonishing what these bozos thought they could get away with. Thank God they’re going to jail. Thanks to my colleague Patty Mah (a friend of the author) for this book.
I keep expecting one of his books to be repetitive or boring, but Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team held my interest all the way through, as did his others. It builds nicely on the last one I read, Death by Meeting (post, link).
I’d say that over the 9 1/2 years we’ve been in business at Return Path, we’ve systematically improved the quality of our management team. Sometimes that’s because we’ve added or changed people, but mostly it’s because we’ve been deliberate about improving the way in which we work together. This particular book has a nice framework for spotting troubles on a team, and it both reassured me that we have done a nice job stamping out at least three of the dysfunctions in the model and fired me up that we still have some work to do to completely stamp out the final two (we’ve identified them and made progress, but we’re not quite there yet.
The dysfunctions make much more sense in context, but they are (in descending order of importance):
Absence of trust
Fear of conflict (everyone plays politically nice)
Lack of commitment (decisions don’t stick)
Avoidance of accountability
Inattention to results (individual ego vs. team success)
For those who are wondering, the two we’re still working on at the exec team level here are conflict and commitment. And the two are related. If you don’t produce engaged discussion about an issue and allow everyone to air their opinions, they will invariably be less bought into a decision (especially one they don’t agree with). But we’re getting there and will continue to work aggressively on it until we’ve rooted it out.
There’s one other interesting takeaway from the book that’s not part of the framework directly, which is that an executive has to be first and foremost a member of his/her team of peers, not the head of his/her department. That’s how successful teams get built. AND (this is key) this must trickle down in the organization as well. Everyone who manages a team of group heads or managers needs to make those people function well as a team first, then as managers of their own groups second.
At any rate, another quick gem of a book. I’m kind of sorry there’s only one left in the series.
I read a decent volume of business books (some of my favorites and more recent ones are listed in the left hand column of the blog). I have two main pet peeves with business books as a rule: the first is is that most business books have one central idea and a few good case examples and take way too many pages to get where they’re going; the other is that far too many of them are geared towards middle and upper management of 5,000+ person companies and are either not applicable or need to be adapted for startups.
Anyway, I thought I’d occasionally post quick synopses of some good ones I’ve read recently. Topgrading, by Brad Smart was so good that this post will be longer than most. It’s a must read for anyone who’s doing a lot of hiring (fellow entrepreneur blogger Terry Gold is a fan, as well).
The book is all about how to build an organization of A players and only A players, and it presents a great interviewing methodology. It’s very long for a business book, but also very valuable. Buy a copy for anyone in your company who’s doing a lot of hiring, not just for yourself or for your HR person. I think the book falls down a little bit on startup adaptation, but it’s still worth a read.
There’s been much talk lately about “the importance of B players” in Harvard Business Review and other places. I share the Topgrading perspective, which is a little different (although more semantically different than philosophically different).
The Topgrading perspective is that you should always hire A players — the definition of which is “one of the top 10% of the available people in the talent pool, for the job you have defined today, at the comp range you have specified.” I absolutely buy into this. Don’t like what you’re seeing while screening candidates? Change one of the three variables (job definition, comp, or geography) and you’ll get there.
The corrolary to the A-player-only theory is that there are three types of A players — the author calls them A1, A2, and A3. A1’s are capable of and interested in rapidly rising to be leaders of the organization. A2s are promotable over time. A3s are not capable of or interested in promotion.
I think what the HBR article on B players is talking about is really what Topgrading calls A3 players. A3 players are absolutely essential to an organization, especially as it grows over time and develops more operational jobs that leverage the powerhouse A1s and A2s that make up such a big percentage of successful startups. You just have to recognize (perhaps with them) that A3 players may not be interested in career growth and promotion and not try to push them into more advanced roles that they may not be interested in or capable of doing well.
I’m a huge believer in having a healthy balance of A1s, A2s, and A3s, but I will always want to hire A players per the above definition. Why would you ever settle for less?
That said, there are two chapters that I found pretty valuable. One is called “Reconstruct Market Boundaries,” which is a great way of thinking about either starting a new business or innovating an existing one. It’s a strategy that we’ve employed a few times over the years at both Return Path and Authentic Response. It’s hard to do, but it expands the available territory you have to cover. The classic Jack Welch/GE “we don’t just sell jet engines, we sell AND SERVICE jet engines” which expanded their addressable market 9x.
The other useful chapter was “Get the Strategic Sequence Right.” The sequence of questions to answer, according to the authors, is:
Will buyers get enough utility out of it?
What’s the right price?
Can you cost it low enough to make good margin?
Are you dealing with adoption hurdles?
The reason I found this sequence so interesting is that I think many entrepreneurs mix the order up once they get past the first one. It’s easy to start with market need and then quickly jump to adoption hurdles, cost things out, and go with a cost-plus pricing strategy. The book documents nicely why this order is more productive. In particular, pricing first, then costing second, is both more market-focused (what will people pay?) and more innovative (how can I think creatively to work within the constraint of that price point?).
The common theme that’s most interesting out of the book is that new frameworks for thought produce killer innovation. That’s clearly something most entrepreneurs and innovators can hang their hat on.
You have to admit, a book called The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich has a pretty enticing title. The email geek in me thinks that if it were a subject line, it would have a good open rate. Anyway, the book, by Timothy Ferriss, is a breezy read that blends self help with entrepreneurship, has a lot of good resource lists in it, and is worth reading if you don’t take it too seriously.
There are some good central points to the book. First, life has changed, and people don’t want to slave away until they’re 65 any more so they can do all the fun stuff in their old age — they want to change directions, unplug more regularly, and enjoy life with their families when they’re younger. I buy that.
Second, good companies are increasingly allowing employees more degrees of freedom in the where and when and even how of getting things done, just as long as they get things done — and people should take advantage of that. I buy that as well — we practice that at Return Path, generally speaking. Third, startups that are mainly virtual organizations and internet-based are easier, cheaper, and potentially more profitable than most businesses have been, historically speaking. Ok, fair enough.
Fourth, anyone can be just like the author and do all of this stuff, too, right? Start a business that turns into a cash machine that requires little to no maintenance while becoming one of the best tango dancers in the world in South America, etc. etc. etc. Well, maybe not. I guess the point of self-help books is to show an extreme example and inspire people to achieve it, and I do think there’s a lot to what Ferriss says about how people can live richly without being rich, but the fact is that the world would fall apart if everyone did what he does. And the other fact is that Ferriss is well above average in intellect and drive, and probably some physical talents as well from his descriptions of tango dancing and kick boxing, which must contribute to his success in life far more than his operating philosophy does.
But as I said, it’s a fun read, and if you don’t take it too seriously, or at least take the feedback directionally as opposed to whole hog, it’s well worth it.
As I finished up my work on the Second Edition of Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business and started working on a new startup, my colleagues and I started envisioning a new book as a sequel or companion to Startup CEO that is going to be published on June 9 with our same publisher, Wiley & Sons. The book is called Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company’s Critical Functions and Teams.
Simply put, the first book left me with the nagging feeling that it wasn’t enough to only help CEOs excel, because starting and scaling a business is a collective effort. What about the other critical leadership functions that are needed to grow a company? If you’re leading HR, or Finance, or Marketing, or any key function inside a startup, what resources are available to you? What should you be thinking about? What does ‘great’ look like? What challenges lurk around the corner as you scale your function that you might not be focused on today? If you’re a CEO who has never managed all these functions before, what should you be looking for when you hire and manage all these people? If you’re an aspiring executive, from entry-level to manager to director, what do you need to think about as you grow your career and develop your skills?
Startup CXO is a “book of books,” with one section for each major function inside a company. Each section is be composed of 15-20 discrete short chapters outlining the key “playbooks” for each functional role in the company – Chief People Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, etc., hence the title Startup CXO – which is a generally accepted label in the startup ecosystem for “Chief ____ Officer.”
Here are the front and back covers of the book, with some great endorsements we’re so proud of on the back.
This is an important topic to write about at this particular time because America’s “startup revolution” continues to gather steam. There are only increasing numbers of venture capital investors, seed funds, and accelerators supporting increasing numbers of entrepreneurial ventures. While there are a number of books in the marketplace about CEOs and leadership, and some about individual functional disciplines (lots of books about the topic of Sales, the topic of Product Development), there are very few books that are practical how-to guides for any individual function, and NONE that wrap all these functions into a compendium that can be used by a whole startup executive team. Very simply, each section of this book serves as a how-to guide for a given executive, and taken together, the book will be a good how-to guide for startup executive teams in general.
Startup CXO has my name on it as principal author, and I’m writing parts of it, but I can’t even pretend to write it on my own, so the book has a large number of contributors who have the experience, credibility, and expertise to share something of value with others in their specific functional disciplines — most of my Bolster co-founders are writing sections, and the others are being written by former Return Path executive colleagues — Jack Sinclair, Cathy Hawley, Ken Takahashi, Anita Absey, George Bilbrey, Dennis Dayman, Nick Badgett, Shawn Nussbaum, and Holly Enneking.
Startup CXO is also pretty closely related to Bolster’s business, since we are in the business of helping assess and place on-demand CXO talent, and as such, the final section of the book has a series of chapters written by Bolster members who are career Fractional Executives about their experience as a Fractional CXO.
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