OnlyOnce

Book Short:  Chip Off the Old Block

 

I have to admit, I was more than a little skeptical when Craig Spiezle handed me a copy of The Speed of Trust, by Stephen M. R. Covey, at the OTA summit last week.  The author is the son of THE Stephen Covey, author of the world famous Seven Habits of Highly Effective People as well as The Eighth Habit (book, post).  Would the book have substance and merit or be drafting off the dad's good name?

 

I dog-ear pages of books as I read them, noting the pages that are most interesting if I ever want to go back and take a quick pass through the book to remind me about it (and yes, Ezra, I can do this on the Kindle as well via the bookmark feature).  If dog-ear quantity is a mark of how impactful a book is, The Speed of Trust is towards the top of the list for me.

 

The book builds nicely on Seven Habits and The Eighth Habit and almost reads like the work of Stephen the father.  The meat of the book is divided into two sections:  one on developing what Covey calls "self trust," a concept not unlike what I blogged about a few months ago, that if you make and keep commitments to yourself, you build a level of self-confidence and discipline that translates directly into better work and a better mental state.  The other core section is one on building trust in relationships, where Covey lists out 13 behaviors that all lead to the development of trust.

 

In fact, we just had a medium-size trust breach a couple weeks ago with one of our key clients.  Reading the book just as we are struggling to "right the wrong" was particularly impactful to me and gave me a number of good ideas for how to move past the issue without simply relying on self-flagellation and blunt apologies.  This is a book full of practical applications.

 

It's not a perfect book (no book is), and in particular its notion of societal trust through contribution is a bit weak relative to the rest of the book, but The Speed of Trust is an excellent read for anyone who wants to understand the fastest way to build -- and destroy -- a winning culture.  It reads like a sequel of Covey senior's books, but that's a good thing.

Book Short: Go Where They Ain't

Book Short:  Go Where They Ain't

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant, by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne isn't bad, but it could literally be summed up by the title of this post.  I think it's probably a better book for people who aren't already entrepreneurs.

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.

Book Short: Worth Buying Free

Book Short:  Worth Buying Free

The cynic in me wanted to start this book review of  Free: The Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson, by complaining that I had to pay for the book.  But it ended up being good enough that I won't do that (plus, the author said there are free digital versions available -- though the Kindle edition still costs money).  At any rate, a bunch of reviews I read about the book panned it when compared to Anderson's prior book, The Long Tail (post, link to book). 

I won't get into the details of the book, though you'll get an idea from the paragraph below, but Anderson has a few gems worth quoting:

• Any topic that can divide critics into two opposite camps -- "totally wrong" and "so obvious" -- has got to be a good one
• Free makes Paid more profitable
• Younger players have more time than money...older players have more money than time
• Doing things we like without pay often makes us happier than the work we do for a salary
• It's true that each generation takes for granted some things their parents valued, but that doesn't mean that generation values everything less
  

While Free is s probably not quite as good as The Long Tail, it does a good job of organizing and classifying and explaining the power of different economic models that involve a free component, and I found it very thought provoking about our own business at Return Path. 

We already do a couple forms of Free -- we practice the "third party" model, by giving things away to ISPs but selling them to mailers; and we practice Freemium by providing Senderscore.org and Feedback Loops for free in order to attract paying customers to our testing and monitoring application and whitelist.  But could we do others?  Maybe.  They may not be revolutionary, but they're smart marketing.

As some of the reviewers write, the book isn't the be-all-end-all of marketing, it overreaches at times, and it is more applicable to some businesses than others, but Free was definitely worth paying for.

Book Short: A Twofer

Book Short:  A Twofer

My friend Andrew Winston, who is one of the nation's gurus in corporate sustainability, just published his second book, this one from Harvard Business Press -- Green Recovery:  Get Lean, Get Smart, and Emerge from the Downturn on Top.  It builds on the cases and successes he had with his first book, Green to Gold (post, link to book), which came out a couple years ago and has become the standard for how businesses embrace sustainability and use it to their financial and strategic competitive advantage rather than thinking of it as a burden or a cost center.

Green Recovery is a shorter read (my kind of business book), and it hits a few key themes:

• Going green not only shouldn't wait for better economic times, it's a key way out of this mess
• Businesses have relied on layoffs to cut costs for far too long -- it's time to get lean on stuff, not people
• This is about survival for many businesses:  Detroit died because it missed the green wave of environmental interest and rising energy prices
• And the overarching theme…Green doesn’t raise costs, it lowers them – it’s a source of profit and innovation
  

The book reminds me a lot of my post Living With Less, For Good, which I wrote at the beginning of the financial market freefall last fall, talking about how we as a company were figuring out how to cut back without cutting people (something we've managed to do).  Although I wasn't talking about green initiatives specifically, the point of getting leaner on "stuff" really resonates with me.

At the end of the day, Andrew proves that steering your company to go green -- no matter what industry you're in -- is a twofer:  you can increase the strength of the business and simultaneously do your part to clean up the environment.  That's definitely the "change we can believe in" mentality applied quite pragmatically!

Book Short: Bringing it on Home

Book Short:  Bringing it on Home

Silos, Politics and Turf Wars: A Leadership Fable About Destroying the Barriers That Turn Colleagues Into Competitors wasn't Patrick Lencion's best book, but it wasn't bad, either.  I think all six of his books are well worth a read (list at the bottom of the post).  And in fact, they really belong in two categories. 

The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (post, link), The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link), and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link) are all related around the topic of management.

Death by Meeting (post, link), The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (post, link), and Silos, Politics and Turf Wars, on the other hand, are all related around the topic of leading a team and healthy team dynamics.  This latest book, which is the last of his six books for me, rounds out this topic nicely, in a fun "novel" format as is the case with his other books.

The book hammers home the theme of an executive team needing to first be a team and then second be a collection of group heads as a means of breaking down barriers that exist inside organizations.  It also lays out a framework for creating high-level alignment inside a team.  The framework may or may not be perfect -- we are using a different one at Return Path (the Balanced Scorecard) that accomplishes most of the same things -- but for those companies who don't have one, it's as good as any.

The most compelling point in the book, though is the point that teams often make the most progress, change the most, and do their best work when their backs are up against a wall.  And the point Lencioni makes here is -- "why wait for a crisis?" 

At any rate, another good, quick book, and absolutely worth reading along with the others, particularly along with the other two closely related ones.  I'm definitely sorry to be done with the series.  We may try the "field guide" companion to The Five Dysfunctions and see how the practical exercises work out.

The full series roundup is:

• The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (post, link)
• The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link)
• The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link)
• Death by Meeting (post, link)
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (post, link, Field Guide)
• Silos, Politics and Turf Wars
  

Silos, Politics and Turf Wars: A Leadership Fable About Destroying the Barriers That Turn Colleagues Into Competitors wasn't Patrick Lencion's best book, but it wasn't bad, either.  I think all six of his books are well worth a read (list at the bottom of the post).  And in fact, they really belong in two categories. 

The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (post, link), The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link), and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link) are all related around the topic of management.

Death by Meeting (post, link), The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (post, link), and Silos, Politics and Turf Wars, on the other hand, are all related around the topic of leading a team and healthy team dynamics.  This latest book, which is the last of his six books for me, rounds out this topic nicely, in a fun "novel" format as is the case with his other books.

The book hammers home the theme of an executive team needing to first be a team and then second be a collection of group heads as a means of breaking down barriers that exist inside organizations.  It also lays out a framework for creating high-level alignment inside a team.  The framework may or may not be perfect -- we are using a different one at Return Path (the Balanced Scorecard) that accomplishes most of the same things -- but for those companies who don't have one, it's as good as any.

The most compelling point in the book, though is the point that teams often make the most progress, change the most, and do their best work when their backs are up against a wall.  And the point Lencioni makes here is -- "why wait for a crisis?" 

At any rate, another good, quick book, and absolutely worth reading along with the others, particularly along with the other two closely related ones.  I'm definitely sorry to be done with the series.  We may try the "field guide" companion to The Five Dysfunctions and see how the practical exercises work out.

The full series roundup is:

• The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (post, link)
• The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link)
• The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link)
• Death by Meeting (post, link)
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (post, link, Field Guide)
• Silos, Politics and Turf Wars
  

Book Short: Entrepreneurs in Government

Book Short:  Entrepreneurs in Government

Leadership and Innovation:  Entrepreneurs in Government, edited by a professor I had at Princeton, Jim Doig, is an interesting series of mini-biographies of second- and third-tier government officials, mostly from the 1930s through the 1970s.  The book's thesis is that some of the most interesting movers and shakers in the public arena (not elected officials) have a lot of the same core skills as private sector entrepreneurs.

The thesis is borne out by the book, and the examples are interesting, if for no other reason than they are about a series of highly influential people you've probably never heard of.  The guy who ran the Port Authority of New York for 30 years.  The guy who built the Navy's fleet of nuclear submarines.  The head of NASA who put a man on the moon. 

The biggest gap I identified between the success of these individuals and business entrepreneurs is the need for cultivation of direct relationships with congressional leaders, true in almost all cases.  I'm not sure there's a proper analog -- shareholders, maybe -- but that's clearly a skill that is required for the heads of agencies to succeed with their political patrons.

It's an interesting read overall, particularly if you're an entrepreneur who is considering a future career change into government.

Book Short: Wither the Team

Book Short:  Wither the Team

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.

So far the series includes:

• The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (post, link)
• The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link)
• The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link)
• Death by Meeting (post, link)
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

I have one or two more to go, which I'll tackle in due course and am looking forward to.

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.

So far the series includes:

• The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (post, link)
• The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link)
• The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link)
• Death by Meeting (post, link)
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Book Short: Loving the Strengths Movement More Than the Book

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: The Religion of Heresy

Book Short:  The Religion of Heresy

At the end of Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, Seth Godin's new book, Seth says this:

I'm going to get a lot of flak from people about what you just read. People might say that it's too disorganized or not practical enough or that I require you to do too much work to actually accomplsh anything. That's ok.

He's kind of right. The book is a little breezy and meanders around, just like riffing with Seth. It's not practical in the sense that if the entire world operated this way in the extreme, we'd have serious problems. But the fact that he requires you to do "too much work to actually accomplish anything" is part of the brilliance of his message.

This was Seth's best book in years, mostly because it is fresh. It is not a rant about marketing; it is a wonderfully succinct look at how we as a society are rallying and organizing around causes, campaigns, companies, and collective beliefs. It's not about the Internet, though its principles are easily implemented and amplified using online tools. It's not a how-to guide to being a fancy corporate leader, but it's one of the most pointed descriptions of the ethos of a certain type of leader (the upstart, or as Seth says, the heretic). It's not about a particular revolution; it's about how mini-revolutions are becoming the norm these days.

Tribes is short, inspirational, and pure Seth. Though quite different in its nature and mission, it really evoked for me Mark Penn's Microtrends (post, link) -- a study of larger tribes and heretics in contemporary America.

A listing of Seth's books over the years follows:

• Permission Marketing -- the original

• Unleashing the Ideavirus -- good follow up on viral marketing

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

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

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

• Free Prize Inside -- on being buzzworthy

• Purple Cow -- on being remarkable, a great book

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

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

• All Marketers Are Liars -- fine, a little "more of the same"

• The Dip -- haven't read it

• Meatball Sundae -- haven't read it

• Tribes -- see above

Book Short: A Marketing-Led Turnaround

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.