OnlyOnce

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
  

On the Other Hand...

On the Other Hand...

A couple days ago, I wrote about how crummy the customer service experience was with Clear going out of business with no notice and no apology. 

Today my inbox revealed the exact opposite experience:

Greetings from Amazon.com.

 

You saved $1.40 with Amazon.com's Pre-order Price Guarantee!

 

The price of the item(s) decreased after you ordered them, and we gave you the lowest price.

I didn't even know Amazon had a Pre-order Price Guarantee.  They could have gotten away with not giving it to me, and I would have never even thought about it.  Great experience!

A Clear Problem

A Clear Problem

I got this email in my inbox late last night:

Dear Matt Blumberg,

At 11:00 p.m. PST today, Clear will cease operations. Clear's parent company, Verified Identity Pass, Inc. has been unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations.

After today, Clear lanes will be unavailable.

Sincerely,
Clear Customer Support

Regardless of what you think of the Clear service (these are the paid-express lanes in a handful of airports), this is just a crummy way to shut down a business.  Not even a hint of "we're sorry we took your money and are keeping the money and can't give you the service we promised any more."

Maybe this particular situation or Chapter 7 bankruptcies don't allow for much time, but come on.  There must be a more dignified way of shutting down a business.

Vertical (Dis)Integration

Vertical (Dis)Integration

A couple years ago, Dave Morgan wrote one of the best thought pieces on the future of the newspaper business in his Mediapost column.  Essentially his observation was that newspapers are an outdated vertical integration, and that to survive, smart papers would disaggregate into 5 separate companies and run each one as a separate business, taking on a new life unshackled from the newspaper:  local ad sales (they could own that franchise for the Yelps and Yodles of the world), local content (who better to syndicate local content?), local distribution (no other companies drop something on every doorstep every day), printing (still a business that requires scale), and digital.  It's just a brilliant idea.

And it's a shame none of them followed his advice, since they're all going out of business now.

What occurred to me this week as I'm soaking in the goodness that is my new Amazon Kindle is that while newspapers may need to disaggregate to stay alive, Amazon is slowly amassing a strategy of very clever vertical integration that could well fuel its growth for decades to come.

The Kindle is brilliant vertical integration -- it's the device, the distribution, and the retail model all in one.  And if Amazon is smart, eventually once they have enough market share, they'll just start doing deals directly with authors and cut out the publishing industry altogether and own the content as well.  They can hit both the long tail (with publishing and distribution costs approaching zero, the risk associated with signing a new untested writer for a revenue share deal are nil) as well as the head (cool place to release your newest book if you're, say, Steven King).  And at that point, they'll have a model that should produce an enormous amount of profit for them.

It's interesting to look at these two situations in parallel -- the transition of old media to new media, with one set of losers and a winner, where winning strategies are polar opposites.

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: 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. 

Book Short: Be Less Clever

Book Short:  Be Less Clever

In Search of the Obvious: The Antidote for Today's Marketing Mess, by Jack Trout, is probably deserving of a read by most CEOs.  Trout at this point is a bit old school and curmudgeonly, the book has some sections which are a bit repetitive of other books he and his former partner Al Reis have written over the years, he does go off on some irrelevant rants, and his examples are a bit too focused on TV advertising, BUT his premise is great, and it's universally applicable.  So much so that my colleagues Leah, Anita, and I had "book club" about it one night last week and had a very productive debate about our own positioning and marketing statements and how obvious they were (they need work!).

The premise in short is that, in advertising:

Logical, direct, obvious = relevant, and

Entertaining, emotional = irrelevant

And he's got data to back it up, including a great case study from TiVo on which ads are skipped and not skipped - the ones that aren't skipped are from companies like Bowflex, Hooters, and the Dominican Republic, where the presentation of the ad is very direct, explanatory of the product, and clear.  His reasons why advertising have drifted away from the obvious are probably right, ranging from the egos of marketing people, to CEOs being to disconnected from marketing, to the rise in importance of advertising awards, and his solution, of course is to refocus on your core positioning/competitive positioning. 

It is true that when the only tool in your box is a hammer, everything starts to look a bit like a nail, but Trout is probably right in this case.  He does remind us in this book that "Marketing is not a battle of products. It is a battle of perceptions"-- words to live by. 

And some of his examples of great obvious advertising statements, either real or ones he thinks should have been used, are very revealing:

• Kerry should have turned charges that he was a flip-flopper in 2004 around on Bush with the simple line that Bush was "strong but wrong"
• New Zealand: "the world's most beautiful two islands"
• The brilliance of the VW Beetle in a big-car era and "thinking small"
• Johnny Cochrane's winning (over)simplification of the OJ case -- "If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit"
• BMW is still, 30 years later, The Ultimate Driving Machine
• "Every day, the Kremlin gets 12 copies of the Wall Street Journal. Maybe they know something you don't know."

If you are looking for a good marketing book to read as a refresher this year, this one could be it.  And if you're not a very market-focused CEO, this kind of thinking is a must.

And for the record, the library of books by Trout and/or Reis (sometimes including Reis' daughter Laura as well) that I've read, all of which are quite good, is:

• Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind - the original - a brilliant, short, classic
• The New Positioning (link, post) - good refresher on the original, gets into repositioning
• Marketing Warfare -
• The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR - excellent but pre-social media
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding -
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk! -
• Bottom-up Marketing -
• Differentiate or Die: Survival in Our Era of Killer Competition - 
• In Search of the Obvious: The Antidote for Today's Marketing Mess - the current book
  

Book Short: What's Your Meeting Routine?

Book Short: What's Your Meeting Routine?

Patrick Lencioni's Death by Meeting is, as Brad advertised, a great read, and much in line with his other books (running list at the end of the post).  His books are just like candy.  If only all business books were this short and easy to read.

This fable isn't quite what I thought it was going to be at the outset - it's not about too many meetings, which is what I've always called "death by meeting."  It's about staff meetings that bore you to death.  With a great story around them featuring characters named Casey and Will (my two oldest kids' names, which had me chuckling the whole time), Lencioni describes a great framework for splitting up your staff meetings into four different types of meetings:  the daily stand-up, the weekly tactical, the monthly strategic, and the quarterly offsite.

There's definitely something to the framework.  We have over the years done all four types of meetings, though we never had all four in our rotation at once as that felt like overkill.  But I think at a minimum, any 2 get the job done much better than a single format recurring meeting.  As long as you figure out how to separate status updates from more strategic conversations, you're directionally in good shape.  We have almost entirely eliminated or automated status update meetings at this point at my staff level.

The book has some other good stuff in it, though, about the role of conflict in staff meetings, which I'll save for your own read of the book!

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)

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

Patrick Lencioni's Death by Meeting is, as Brad advertised, a great read, and much in line with his other books (running list at the end of the post).  His books are just like candy.  If only all business books were this short and easy to read.

This fable isn't quite what I thought it was going to be at the outset - it's not about too many meetings, which is what I've always called "death by meeting."  It's about staff meetings that bore you to death.  With a great story around them featuring characters named Casey and Will (my two oldest kids' names, which had me chuckling the whole time), Lencioni describes a great framework for splitting up your staff meetings into four different types of meetings:  the daily stand-up, the weekly tactical, the monthly strategic, and the quarterly offsite.

There's definitely something to the framework.  We have over the years done all four types of meetings, though we never had all four in our rotation at once as that felt like overkill.  But I think at a minimum, any 2 get the job done much better than a single format recurring meeting.  As long as you figure out how to separate status updates from more strategic conversations, you're directionally in good shape.  We have almost entirely eliminated or automated status update meetings at this point at my staff level.

The book has some other good stuff in it, though, about the role of conflict in staff meetings, which I'll save for your own read of the book!

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)

Why Are We Financing Fortune 500 Companies?

Why Are We Financing Fortune 500 Companies?

And here's another problem of the economic meltdown -- companies are stretching out their payables like mad.  Our average payable has increased 50% in the last 120 days. That translates into millions of dollars of cash shortfall versus our plan.  We believe it's all still collectible, but we just can't seem to speed up payment.  We are going to launch some new and more meaningful efforts to collect, but it just shouldn't be that hard.  And you hate to be heavy handed with customers in this environment.

Is it a good idea to threaten to suspend service?  When do you cut someone off?  Is it appropriate for the CEO to make a collections call?  All these questions now come into play.  We never had to think about them before.

What's particularly irritating is that, with very few exceptions, every company on our account roster is larger than we are, with bigger balance sheets.  So we find ourselves in a position where WE are financing big companies.  It is absolutely maddening.