Seeking Growth

Drive

Author: Daniel Pink

Who should read it: Entrepreneurs, Managers, Parents,

This review was first posted at VentureBeat's Entrepreneur Corner

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Successful entrepreneurs know that bringing their ideas to the most powerful reality is a function of building a team of the right caliber and with the right motivation.  

Drive proposes a new model to develop that motivation and deliver far more than you can with purely monetary rewards.   Daniel Pink argues that business is in the midst of a transformation, from a monetary-focused compensation model (Motivation 2.0) to one that relies on more intrinsic motivation (Motivation 3.0).  Success unlocks exponentially improved performance – and organizations whose leaders and employees have tremendous drive are capable of amazing results.

If you doubt that we are in a non-monetary business revolution (and you should be skeptical – it’s different from what we learned), stop and consider which of the following two business plans you would have bet on succeeding in 1995:

The Innovator’s Dilemma

Author: Clayton Christiansen

Who should read this book: Entrepreneurs, Company Owners, CEOs, Product Marketers

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An abridged version of this review first appeared on Vitesse Media's Growth Business

  This is a ground-breaking business strategy book for entrepreneurs. It provides counter-intuitive insights into how and where massive markets are created by new entrants.  First published in 1997 (republished in 2003), it’s the closest thing I have found to a “treasure map” for new business leaders.

Disruptive innovations are ideal for entrepreneurs because they are typically developed with off-the-shelf technologies by small, capital-efficient businesses and, best of all, have a lower failure rate than those that compete directly with incumbents.

Clayton Christiansen offers three key lessons on disruptive innovations:  why market leaders typically don’t/won’t pursue the disruptive innovations which create new market leaders; where to look for those opportunities; and how to pursue them effectively.  

It is an entertaining read:  told through interesting case studies that describe challenges faced by market leaders in multiple industries.  This is masterful storytelling, with example after example of bright, well intentioned CEOs losing their company’s market leadership position to entrepreneurial companies because they followed sound business practices.  That’s right – following good business practices and sound management decisions will eventually lead to your demise as a market leader when competitive and disruptive technologies emerge.  In this situation, if you listen to your customers, investors and employees you are doomed.   Now that’s counter-intuitive.  

The New Strategic Selling

Authors : Robert B. Miller and Stephen E. Heiman

Who should read it: CEOs, Company Founders, Entrepreneurs, VP Sales, Sales Execs

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The single best book on sales I have ever read, it lays out a process that for sales management is intelligent, customer solution focused, and analytical. I have employed these principals personally and have had one of my companies standardize on the methodology.  It is highly effective in developing a common language for prospects, resource allocation, marketing investments and growth expectations.

If you are sales oriented and know Miller/Heiman you may find some of my applications below of interest.  The real benefit is not sales process but sales management improvement and the ability to get to key decision makers effectively.  If you have a non-sales background, this book is critical since it will give you a punch list of questions to ask your sales managers to gauge the quality of a pipeline. It will also help you understand the resources you need to provide to help get to the economic buyers in your customer base.  Just like you innovated your product, you need to innovate how to get people to listen and provide solid feedback on their needs, be it through purchases or by vocalizing unaddressed pain points.

The Global Achievement Gap

Author: Tony Wagner

Who should read it: educators, parents and commercial/social entrepreneurs

 This is an excellent book on the challenges and potential solutions in today’s education system. Tony Wagner sees a major gap between what students are being taught, and the skills they need to master to succeed in the 21st century economy. 

Unlike many that complain about the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, he favors testing, but believes that it should be about ability to acquire critical skills needed by the market place, not just recalling content.   His diagnosis is that the primary challenge facing education is in the way educators manage themselves: where, unlike other professions there is little peer review.  Without a way for teachers to assess themselves, they will be challenged to improve their practice and student outcomes. 

He also recognizes that to motivate students in today’s digital media environment we need to change how we teach them – with more media, interactivity, peer interaction, rapid metric-based feedback, real world projects and success coaching.   There is massive technology-based innovation disrupting the Education sector, and that will create significant opportunities for social and commercial entrepreneurs offering solutions that cost-effectively improve results.  This book highlights several social entrepreneurs doing exactly that: improving results while also teaching success skills most schools don’t address. His insights are enlightening for educators, parents and commercial/social entrepreneurs seeking opportunities to improve education. 

Free

 Author: Chris Anderson

Who should read it: CEOs, Company Founders, Entrepreneurs

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A very interesting book on the subject of things that are available ‘Free’, and the implication of that for entrepreneurs – particularly digital entrepreneurs.   Free as a component of business models is not a new concept, but its use is becoming increasingly important.  In his view, if it’s digital, it will eventually be free.  It’s a subject I am spending a fair amount of time on as I think we are going to see an explosion of Free enabled models in the enterprise applications/services market – more on that later.

First a bit about Chris.  He is probably one of the best trend-spotting reporters of our time.  He is the Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine, wrote The Long Tail (another great book) and is a highly sought after public speaker.   His strength is in identifying emerging (mainstream?) trends, why they happen, where they happen, and commenting accurately on what is going to happen as a result.  I appreciate his insights and expect to profit from them – even in a world of Free.   

I will say that the book targets a broad range of readers so depending on your age and what business you are in, you will probably need a twitchy thumb for the next page button on your Kindle in a few sections.

Whatever it Takes: The Geoffrey Canada Story

Author: Paul Tough 

Who should read it: Company Founders, Entrepreneurs, Managers, Educators, Parents  

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I am excited to recommend this book because there are so many great take lessons and, best of all: it’s a ‘feel good’ book.  This should be on the 'Parents’ recommended reading' list for our kids’ schools because of the important lessons about parenting and education.  For entrepreneurs it’s highly inspirational for making the impossible possible with commitment and focus, and by applying sustained innovation and analytical discipline.  Finally, it’s a great example of the power of social entrepreneurism: a growing movement that I think will make transformative changes in our society.

The book is about an experiment, called the Harlem Children’s Zone, funded largely (2/3) through private donations. The project delivers an array of interventions and educational services to parents and students within a 10 square block area of Harlem. The aim is to eradicate the education/achievement gap between the poorest and the richest social economic groups in the community.  Canada insisted on taking a random allocation of students, to prove that his model would work for everyone. His goal is to build a replicable model so, once developed, it can be implemented everywhere. It’s hard to imagine a more ambitious or transformative goal for our society.   He is looking to wipe out poverty in one generation by giving every one of the kids the preparation, desire and opportunity to go to college.

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Guns Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Author: Jared Diamond

Who should read it: CEOs, Founders, Managers and Entrepreneurs

  This is a ‘must read’ for entrepreneurs - one of the best reads in the last few decades. It is all about innovation; not just in technology but in other major areas that impacted the development of societies: farming, writing, and politics.  The book explains why it is that the Spaniards conquered the Incas instead of vice versa.  Sure, the Spaniards had the ships and the guns but how is it that they got them first? The question is historic but still relevant; what is it that determines which society wins when they come into conflict? In answering that, the author helps us understand the current distribution of wealth, power and influence among states. It also sheds light on the connection between the pace of innovation and the scale and level of interactions between societies. Not bad for 400 pages!

Jared Diamond is worth listening to. His background is unique: he has training in evolutionary biology, and biogeography, and is a linguist.  He has studied hundreds of societies in South America, Africa, Indonesia, Australia and New Guinea and has developed a model for how those societies evolved as well as the geographic forces that supported them.  He makes his historical detective work interesting: not unlike a CSI episode, explaining why the conclusions are the only logical answer.   The book won a Pulitizer Prize and is recommended widely:  McKinsey Global Research, for example, bought copies for all their partners (smart guys!) because of its valuable insights.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Author: Stephen R. Covey

Who should read it: CEOs, Company Founders, Entrepreneurs, Managers  

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  This is a ‘classic’ for entrepreneurs and executives.  First published 1989, it has become a cornerstone book on how to achieve success and make your visions reality.  In it, Steven Covey discusses how to set your goals, how to manage your time and resources against them, and how to align with others so that you achieve success.   If you are new to the book, it is a ‘must read’. To the many of you who have already read it, I trust that my experience on how to apply it will be useful.

I regard this as one of the top three reads (the other two to be reviewed soon – stay tuned). Of the three, this is THE book to read on developing a game plan for accomplishing what you want in life.  If there is one book you should recommend to that graduating student (MBA, college, high school) who looks to you for advice, and to your executive team – this is it. 

 The biggest challenge with this book is that there is so much in it that readers often have to put it down before it is finished, so they can ‘process’ what it says. When I first read it, I had to stop half way through. I have now read it three times and strongly recommend that you persevere too, since every chapter is rich with powerful advice.

About the blog and my book reviews

I have received a lot of questions on my blog, and the purpose of the book reviews, so I thought I would answer them in a post.

I like to read – a lot.  For me it’s like snowboarding; you get so intensely focused on what you are doing (in the case of snowboarding it’s so you don’t break your neck) that it puts the rest of the world on hold for a while.  Reading has the added benefit that you are also learning while you read so you have the benefit of distracting yourself form one productive task while doing another.    You also have that fun “aha!” feeling when you learn something and somehow your mental map of this incredibly complex world sharpens.  With a better map, your pattern recognition improves as does your ability to reduce stress.

 I think it is amazing the learning you get from a book for such a modest investment.  Think about it for a minute:  a professional spends his or her entire career mastering a subject and then spends 6 to 12 months or more distilling those ideas into a few hundred pages.  Three thousand books are published a day, and of these only the very few/best get recommended.  So when I read a book I am often getting the very best of the available knowledge on a subject.  I get the benefit of an expert’s life work for a trivial amount of money and an investment of a handful of hours, during which I am being entertained by the author. 

Super Crunchers

Author: Ian Ayres

Who should read it: CEOs, CMOs, Company Founders, Entrepreneurs

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Supercrunchers is a great primer for entrepreneurs on mining value from data.  It is a fun read and the money-making opportunities it spotlights, makes it worth its weight in gold. 

Data mining and selling the discovered insights presents one of the most lucrative opportunities of our decade. Think Google and Netflix : this book is a roadmap for founders to capitalize on a megatrend. The format is entertaining, comprising dozens of real stories of startups, businesses, doctors, artists and government groups using analytics to change how decisions are made.

Supercrunchers highlights  a number of ‘big ideas’ and gives clear suggestions on how to implement them. 

   First the big ideas:

1. The use of predictive analytics is becoming endemic in consumer and professional life. It is changing how we work, buy things, meet people, recreate and deliver/receive expert advice.   This presents one of the biggest money-making opportunities for founder entrepreneurs in the next decade. I am doing a lot of work in this category.