Book Review: Dealing with Darwin

Ever see a book in the bookstore that catches your attention and you realize it was a best-seller sometime in the past?  You realize you never picked it up to read it and decide that you should?

That’s what happened when I ran across Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution by Geoffrey Moore.

I heard about this book when it was released in 2005 and always meant to read it…but just never did.  Whilst perusing the local Half-Price Books, I decided I’d pick it up and read it…because I’m a book nerd, there is a dinosaur on the cover and I saw what I thought were fractals in the book!

I got the book home and started reading…and I made it to page xii in the preface to the paperback edition before realizing I may have made a mistake buying this book.  What happened?

I read this passage:

The key message is simple. In order to achieve competitive advantage in a commoditizing market, one must innovate so dramatically as to create definitive seperation between your offers and those of the low-cost commoditizers. That means selecting a vector of innovation that can set you apart and investing intensely along that vector…

Huh?  The key message is simple but the author makes the message difficult to understand.

Why didn’t Mr. Moore just say: To gain competitive advantage, you need to separate yourself from your competitor by choosing an innovation path and investing in that path.

After reading this passage, I was very very skeptical about the rest of the book.  Especially after this passage immediately following the above one:

Extract resource from context to fund core.

What does that mean?

There are some great ideas in this book but those ideas are often overshadowed by verbosity (as shown above) and/or using contextual language that makes little sense outside of the context of the book.

The book does do a good job of outlining the different types of innovation (e.g., disruptive, product,platform, etc). The author does a good job of describing the process of looking at the marketplace to determine how to attack innovation. The framework that Moore lays out is very useful and intriguing and is worth studying in further detail. Again, the author does know his stuff.

That said, the book is a difficult read.  If you are serious about innovation and competitive advantage, you should read this book..but be prepared to re-read many pages/sections.  I found myself stopping every  few paragraphs and trying to comprehend what I just read.

Is there anyone out there that has read this book and thoroughly enjoyed it?   Am I being to harsh on this book?  Could it be that I’m getting cranky in my old age?

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Book Review: On Writing Well

I just finished reading the 30th Anniversary Edition of On Writing Well by William K. Zinsser and I’m wiser for having read it.

I can sum this book up easily/quickly with this sentence:

If you want to improve your writing, buy this book…then write write write.

What a great book!

Up until this book I thought that writing ’serious’ non-fiction was something for other people to do…those people with a better command of the english language that I.  I now realize that non-fiction doesn’t have to (and according to Zinsser shouldn’t be) a dry, boring tome.  Non-fiction can be fun and take many forms and styles.

Another thing I learned: Writing is hard….and it should be!  There are many times on this blog that I’ve done some ’stream of consciousness’ writing and hit the “Publish” button and then later realized that I could have done so much more with the post if I’d just thought and did  some rewrites.  According to Zinsser, if you find yourself struggling with a piece you are writing, that means you are doing it right.

In this classic, Zinsser destroys the notion that a writer is someone ’special’.  Anyone can write and write well.  But, it takes practice practice practice.

If you do any sort of writing or want to write, go buy this book immediately.  It’s only $11 at amazon but will bring you a hundred times that in value and knowledge.

I enjoyed this book so much, I bought Zinsser’s “Writing to Learn“…look for a review of that book soon.

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Book Review: Think Better

The last book from my ‘vacation reading list” is Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking by Tim Hurson. Some of you may remember a brief mention of this book in a post titled “Critical Thinking vs Creative Thinking“.

This is a very interesting book full of great information….kudos go to the author for writing in a style that is engaging and easy to read.

The premise of the book is to stop trying to think ‘creatively’ or ‘critically’….start thinking productively. The author introduces the “Productive Thinking Model” that helps to combine and balance both creative thinking and critical thinking.

This model is made up of six steps, which are outlined below.

Step 1: What’s going on?

In this step, you are encouraged to answer five questions to get a feel for what issue you are trying to resolve.  These questions are:

• What’s the Itch? This question helps you determine what needs to be fixed or improved.
• What’s the Impact? This question makes you think about how the issue is affecting you.
• What’s the Information?This question forces you to examine the information that you have about the issue to determine if you have enough information to address the issue.
  
• Who’s Involved? This question takes a look at the stakeholders and what might be at stake for each one.
  
• What’s the Vision?This question helps you make the switch from ‘what is’ to ‘what might be’ by asking things like “What would the future look like if the issue is resolved?”

Step 2: What’s Success?

Using the Vision developed in Step 1, begin to think about the future if the issue is resolved.  Begin to imagine what life would be like with the problem solved.  Once you’ve got a good feel for how life might change, you would then create a list specific, measurable outcomes.

Step 3: What’s The Question?

In step 3, you begin to develop the questions that must be answered in order to reach the vision of success that you developed in Steps 1 & 2. During this step, you rephrase each issue/problem as a question to help your subconscious understand there is something ‘to work on’.  An example conversion given as the Problem Statement “We don’t have enough budget” can be converted to the Problem Question “How might we increase our budget?”. During this step, you would try to generate as many problem questions as possible….you want a long long list.  Once you’ve exhaustively listed your questions, you can then begin to narrow them down to the two key questions that would have the most impact on the issue.

Step 4: Generate Answers

This is where you generate the ideas to answer the questions created in step 3.  You again create a very long list of answers and then sift through them looking for the most ideal and promising answers.

Step 5: Forge the Solution

This step is where you take your most promising answers from step 4 and develop them into a robust solution.

Step 6: Align Resources

This final step requires you to identify the necessary steps and resources for implementing your solution. In addition, you ensure that all implementation steps are assigned to a designated resource who will be held accountable for their implementation.

With these six steps, the author has provided a framework for thinking more productively.    The key throughout all six steps is to keep an open mind at all times.  Do not criticize ideas.  Do not discard ideas.  By keeping an open mind, you’ll be amazed at how many ideas you are able to generate.

If you are the least bit interested in the topic of creative/critical thinking, go buy this book.

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Book Review: Super Crunchers

I picked up Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way to be Smart by Ian Ayres while on vacation…it looked like an interesting read…and it was.

The entire book is based on showing the reader how organizations are using statistics, data mining and regression analysis to determine how to better run their businesses and/or get more money from you.   The book is not too technical nor full of numbers and the author writes the book for the non-technical/non-geeks out there.

What I found most interesting about this book was the ‘behind-the-scenes’ details of how companies like Wal-Mart are using data mining and other techniques to model and manage their logistical systems.

Ayers also provides some very interesting (and slightly disturbing) anecdotes about the use of these methods by Casinos to ensure that gamblers don’t lose cross their ‘pain threshold’ while gambling (this threshold is calculated based on various statistics about the gambler).  The casino will nonchalantly ask the gambler if they’d like to receive a free dinner…this isn’t really to ‘comp’ the gambler…its just to make them forget about the money they’ve lost.

Another interesting/disturbing example shows credit card companies using data mining and modeling techniques to ‘get the most from’ their customers.

This book is a fun read and one that I think everyone should pick up. It is a purely non-technical book on the subject of data mining, modeling and statistical analysis and is full if interesting nuggets of informaiton.  If you read the book Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner, you’ll like this book.

PS – If you are wondering why 2 book reviews in one week, its because I got caught up on reading during vacation.

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Book Review: The Rise of the Creative Class

This book was recommended to me by an acquaintance a few weeks ago…I’m glad they mentioned it.  I grabbed this book to read while spending last week on the beach.

The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (Paperback) by Richard Florida is an informative book that covers A LOT of ground and has A LOT of data….but not as much “information” as I would have expected.  Let me explain.

The premise of this book is that society today is that a new Creative Class exists and is driving the way we live today.    Florida uses this creative class to explain why societal changes and patterns of living as well as why some cities are more attractive than others (e.g., Silicon Valley vs Oklahoma City).

The question behind much of the research for the book is:

How do we decide where to live and work? What really matters to us in making this kind of life decision?  How has this changed – and why?

This is an interesting question…and one that Florida tries to answer throughout the book by using statistics, quotes from other authors and a good deal of words.

The first 3/4’s of the book is dedicated to describing the Creative Class, how they live and work and why they are different from their ‘parents’.  There is a ton of data and a lot of time is spent by Florida quoting research, arguing against other theorists and using statistics to “make his case” that the Creative Class is the most important class of our time.  During this portion of the book, Florida makes the argument that there is a strong correlation between those cities/regions that are more tolerant and the number of creative class works that live and work in the area.

One interesting section of the book describes the changing work environment that is making it possible for people to set their own schedules, work from home and be much less constrained by the old ‘8 to 5′ mentality that has been a part of American business for so long. Chapters 6 through 9 are probably the most interesting and descriptive of the book.  These chapters describe the reasons behind why people in my generation (and those younger than me) are looking for more than ‘just a job’ and why many people are tiring of the ‘8 to 5′ experience.

The last quarter of the book describes how cities and regions have developed themselves into a magnet for the creative class. Florida states that in order for a city (or region) to become a ‘creative class’ magnet, they must have the “3T’s of Economic Development”…Technology, Talent and Tolerance.  A brief description of each follows.

• Technology – a city/region much have the technological infrastructure in place to fuel a creative and  entrepreneurial culture.
• Talent – A city/region must have a talented and highly educated workforce
• Tolerance – A city/region much have a high tolerance level and not try to force people to ‘fit in’

The topic of the book was interesting to me but the delivery was somewhat confusing, repetitive and at times poorly constructed. Many times I got lost in the middle of a paragraph and had to start over…this from a guy who reads many many books a year on various topics.  I’m used to reading dry material…but this was worst than most.

With that said, I would still recommend this book to those folks interested in the topic of economic development, regional development, city planning or just a general review of social science literature. If you pick up this book, take my advice and skim it rather than read every word…there is a lot of “stuff” that isn’t relevant to the overall message of the book.

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Book Review: Small Giants

I ran across a great book at Half-Price Books last week.  The book, Small Giants: Companies that Choose to be Great Instead of Big by Bo Burlingham, looked like an interested read and I thought I’d take it with me on my upcoming vacation.  My impatience got the best of me and I bumped the book up to the top of my reading list.

I’m glad I did…this is a great book.

The book is in the same genre as Jim Collins’ Good to Great, Jim Champy’s Outsmart! and other similar books although it is closer to Outsmart! than Good to Great.   Unlike the other books in this genre, Small Giants doesn’t try to provide a step by strep instructional manual for running your business and/or making your organization ‘Great’.

The author chose fourteen privately held companies that he claims has “mojo” and have remained true to the founders ideals rather then ‘get big’.  From the jacket of the book:

It’s a widely accepted axiom of business that great companies grow their revenues and profits year after year. Yet quietly, under the radar, some entrepreneurs have rejected the pressure of endless growth to focus on more satisfying business goals. Goals like being great at what they do . . . creating a great place to work . . . providing great customer service . . . making great contributions to their communities . . . and finding great ways to lead their lives.

What I found most interesting about the companies in this book is that they each have their own belief system and organizational structures.  Some organizations believe in a very rigorous reporting structure while others believe in Results Oriented environments.  Some believe that you must be in the office every day and others are OK with virtual work.  One organization even keeps track of tardiness and will fire a person who is late more than 5 times….seems pretty old fashioned to me.  But it works for that organization.

The true genius of this book is its ability to shed light on a few simple facts about running a business:

• Build a corporate culture that fits your organization. If that means allowing people to work remotely and with full autonomy…so be it.  If it means having a “butt in seat by 8AM” policy…more power to you.
• Hire the best people you can and keep them happy. Salary isn’t the only thing that makes people happy.  Go take a look at Anchor Brewing…they pay a decent salary but they also give everyone a chance to advance their education, travel around the world and provide input to how the organization is run.
• Focus on your people first and your customers second.  If your employees are happy, excited to be a part of your organization and they understand how their job affects the organization, then your customers will be able to tell…and they’ll be taken care of as well.

This is a really good book…nothing earth shattering but definitely worth the read.

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Book Review: Website Optimization

In July, I was approached by Andy King to see if I’d be interested in reviewing his new book from O’Reilly titled “Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets“.

If you don’t know who Andy is, go read his resume….I’ll wait….OK…you back?    Great pedigree right?  Been involved in the web since 1993.  Founded WebReference.com and Javascript.com in 1997.  It’s safe to say he knows his stuff.

When Andy approached me, I was skeptical initially….could I do this book justice?  I’ve got a technical background and have been around the web since 1995 but I know very little about Search Engine Optimization…then I look at the synopsis of the book and realized that this is about much more than SEO.

This book does more than talk about the basics of SEO.  It dives into topics that go well beyond the ‘technical’ aspects (e.g., keywords, titles, etc) and talks about persuasive language, fast load times and engaging websites. Once I saw this, I was very intrigued and told Andy that I’d be happy to review the book.

I’m glad I said yes.  The book is excellent…and from what I’ve seen, it is THE book on Website Optimization. Gone are the days of scouring the web for bits and pieces of info on how to optimize….this book contains it all.

Unlike most other books in this genre, this book is much more than just an overview of the concepts of website optimization. Detailed descriptions, case studies and in-depth discussions of the ‘why, what and how’ of optimization are provided to allow the reader to immediately take action with their own websites.

For those of you interested in the entire spectrum of website optimization (i.e., page load times, search engine friendliness, optimization techniques etc), this is the book for you.  I expect that this book will be THE website optimization book for years to come.

Now….I need to start using the recommendations from the book on my blog!

NOTE: This book was provided by the author for review.

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Book Review: Outsmart!

Jim Champy’s new book titled “Outsmart!: How to Do What Your Competitors Can’t” is an interesting book.  It’s short and easy to read…and full of some very interesting stories about building competitive advantage.

For those that don’t know, Jim Champy is the author of classics like “Reengineering the Corporation” and “Reengineering Management” and is the Chairman of Consulting at Perot Systems.

The book does do a good job of describing how eight ‘high velocity’ companies have used what Champy described as ’surprising counterintuitive lessons’ to grow into industry leaders in a short amount of time.    The ’surprising counterintuitive lessons’ are:

• Compete by seeing what others don’t
• Compete by thinking outside the bubble
• Compete by using all you know
• Compete by doing everything yourself
• Compete by tapping the success of others
• Compete by creating order out of chaos
• Compete by simplifying complexity.

The book is split into chapters with each chapter covering a different lesson.  Each lesson is presented to the reader by describing an organization that used that lesson to become successful and why that lesson should be considered by other companies.  Each chapter closes with questions that you can ask yourself and/or your organization to see if you can tap into these lessons to grow and become more competitive.

For anyone looking for another “Good to Great” type of book with statistics and detail about why companies were chosen and how these companies were built, this isn’t the book.  This book doesn’t go into detail about why/how companies were chosen or what ‘high velocity’ really means, but it does a good job of describing how the organizations listed were able to find their ‘niche’ by utilizing one of the above lessons to build themselves into industry leaders.

If you’re looking for an easy to read book that provides a brief overview a select number of companies who’ve applied the above lessons and been successful, this book is a good buy for you.

For further reading check out Jim Champy’s guest post titled “Where are all the great companies?” on Lisa Haneberg’s Management Craft blog.

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Book Review: Moose on the Table

Just finished reading “Moose on the Table“by Jim Clemmer.

Before I get into the review, let me define “moose on the table.”  According to the author, it is a rephrasing of the old saying “the elephant in the room”…as in…the thing nobody wants to discuss (or can discuss, etc).

Jim Clemmer uses a fable to tell the story of an organization that is in need of leadership and change…but the ‘leader’ is brow-beater who only wants someone to agree with him.  The story follows Pete Leonard as he works his way through some issues at work and at home.  Pete attends a seminar and realizes that the way his boss is acting is forcing the organization down into the depths of failure and that he and the other folks need to make an effort to “face the moose”.

The author provides some concepts about how to deal with the moose on the table…some are novel and others aren’t but all are great ideas that can be implemented by anyone trying to approach solving a problem like a moose on the table.

The basic outcome of the story is this:  When a problem rears up, communicate and solve the problem rather than rather than talk around it, place blame for the problem or go into ‘pity city’ (e.g., poor me, etc).  Leadership and communication are key to solving the “moose on the table” problem.

This book is a good read and is short enough to finish quickly.  The concept is a good one and the story is engaging.  I’d recommend it to anyone out there who is dealing with a “moose on the table”.

NOTE: This book was provided by the publisher as an advanced review copy.

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Book Review: The Milkshake Moment

Just finished up reading “The Milkshake Moment” by Steven S. Little. This is an interesting, well-written book worth picking up.  It’s easy to read with short chapters and contains some interesting, and at times funny, insights into the world of processes…especially bad processes (those that bind the hands of employees/organizations).

The book’s entire premise is that while processes are necessary and provide value to an organization, you should make sure they allow ‘wiggle’ room for individuals who use those processes.  This wiggle room is necessary to allow people to be creative and innovative in how they solve problems.  Most organization’s don’t stress that employees be creative and use processes at the same time…they’d prefer that an employee ’stick to the process’.

For example, the book uses the author’s attempt at ordering a milkshake from room service at a fancy hotel. The hotel didn’t have milkshakes on their menu and the room service personnel didn’t quite know how to handle the request.  The author asked if the hotel had milk, ice cream, a bowl and a spoon…the answer was yes.  The author ordered these items and made his own milkshake.

The author uses this simple example to point out that the room service personnel were stuck in a process and just because they didn’t sell milkshakes, they couldn’t provide one and didn’t have a ‘process’ in place to get one to the author.

The book provides a good overview of what it means to be process bound, but also steps into the role of trying to teach the reader how to take simple actions to change these processes to follow a more common sense approach.

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