Buy First, Break All the Rules from Amazon

After a recent promotion to the ranks of management, I had a chance to read the classic business book First, Break All the Rules. It was an eye-opening education into best management practices.

The book is the result of years of surveys and interviews with managers across the world. The authors then distilled the vast amounts of data down to key principles that really distinguish a quality manager.

Employees = Profits

No matter the business, the only way to generate enduring profits is to begin by building the kind of work environment that attracts, focuses and keeps talented employees.

As you are well aware, acquiring and training new people is very costly. It is therefore in your financial best interest to hire the right people, with the right talents, and then keep them happy over the long term.

Good Manager = Increased Productivity

The talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits and its world-class training programs, but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while he is there is determined by his relationship with his supervisor.

A manager’s role is vital to the success of the company because they directly affect employee satisfaction. As the book highlights, “employees leave managers, not companies.”

Some Rules to Break

The book discusses the conventional wisdom that is broken by the most successful managers. Great managers:

• Treat each employee differently. They are, after all, each individuals.
• Hire talent and not experience. Forget the long resume of positions and projects. If the employee doesn’t have the talent for the job, past experience doesn’t really matter.
• Don’t try to fix weaknesses. Focus on strengths and manage around weaknesses.
• Focus on results and not the “process.” Don’t get hung up on official process or procedures.
• Don’t promote the best performers out of their role and throw them into management. Not everyone that is really good at what they do will make a good manager of their peers. Don’t make management the only career path. Recognize and honor your senior and talented role players.

Evaluation Questions

According to the authors’ research, if your employees can answer these 12 questions positively, you’re doing a great job:

1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best everyday?
4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
5. Does my supervisor or someone at work seem to care about me as a person?
6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?
8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?
9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
10. Do I have a best friend at work?
11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
12. This last year, have I had the opportunity at work to learn and grow?

Copyright (c) 1993 - 1998 The Gallup Organization, Washington, D.C. All rights reserved.

The companies where employees can positively answer these questions have lower turnover rates, higher customer satisfaction, and more productive businesses.

Recommended

First, Break All the Rules should be mandatory reading for all managers in your company. Pick up a copy today.

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Buy Kiss Theory Good Bye from Amazon

Bob Prosen’s new book Kiss Theory Good Bye delivers on it’s title by outlining practical steps you can take in your business to get the results you seek.

Crippling Habits

Prosen starts the book by highlighting the “five crippling habits that attack from within.” I guarantee you’ll see some of these problems in your company:

1. Absence of clear directives
2. Lack of accountability
3. Rationalizing inferior performance
4. Planning in lieu of action
5. Aversion to risk and change

These points often hit where it hurts and will show you how you may have problems and not even know it. Prosen details the symptoms of these crippling problems and how you can overcome them.

Highly Profitable Companies

After helping you identify the obvious problems in your business, Prosen jumps into the “five attributes of highly profitable companies.” These chapters are well worth the read:

1. Superior Leadership
2. Sales Effectiveness
3. Operational Excellence
4. Financial Management
5. Customer Loyalty

Prosen doesn’t write at a high theoretical level. He dives deep into the how-to steps required to better your business. Each chapter has thought-provoking questions to help you identify your situation and help you improve.

I particularly enjoyed Prosen’s points about rewarding results and not just activity. Too many times people seem busy and yet, nothing is completed. You can’t continue to give raises and praise to mediocre workers. The author encourages you to reward handsomely those who perform well. This will inspire the rest of the workforce to greatness.

Another disjoint Prosen highlights is the gulf between your company’s declared business goals and the line worker’s understanding of such. Do each of your employees understand the company goals and know how their work is affecting the overall company’s results? By helping your employees feel some ownership of the big puzzle, you’ll have an entire company of people aligned behind the same goals. This unity will lead to amazing accomplishments for your business.

Execution

The final section of the book discusses execution of the earlier topics. Overall, I thought this was a great read. Every manager at your company from the CEO down to the individual team lead should read this book. A lot of the material is tailored to upper management but the principles can be applied to any level of leadership.

Recommended

Kiss Theory Good Bye is an insightful read with concrete advice you can apply to your business today. Pick up a copy today.

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Buy Crossing the Chasm from Amazon

Geoffrey Moore’s bestseller Crossing the Chasm dives into the mechanics of marketing your high-tech product all the way from inception to the mainstream customer.

Moore groups customers by where they are most likely to buy in your product’s life cycle. Each of these categories is then analyzed and you are shown how best to market to each of these groups:

Innovators

Innovators pursue new technology products aggressively … because technology is a central interest in their life, regardless of what function it is performing.

This group is obviously the easiest to persuade to try out your product. They become pivotal in pushing your product along to the next group.

Early Adopters

Early Adopters … buy into new product concepts very early in their life cycle … they are people who find it easy to imagine, understand, and appreciate the benefits of a new technology, and to relate these potential benefits to their concerns.

These influencing individuals will help give credibility to your product in your attempts to move to the mainstream public.

Early Majority

The Early Majority … are driven by a strong sense of practicality. They know that many of these new-fangled inventions end up as passing fads, so they are content to wait and see how other people are making out before they buy in themselves.

Late Majority

They wait until something has become an established standard, and even then they want to see lots of support and tend to buy, therefore, from large, well-established companies.

Laggards

These people simply don’t want anything to do with new technology

Don’t waste your energy on this group. In fact, it may be more valuable to focus on a new product by the time you hit this part of the customer base.

The Bell Curve

These groups form a bell curve with Innovators on the left leading edge and Laggards on the far right. The Majority fit squarely in the middle of the curve with the largest amount of customers.

The Chasm

Unfortunately, marketers can’t progress smoothly from one category of customer to another across the bell curve. There are “cracks in the curve” with a huge chasm between the Early Adopters and the Early Majority.

Moore outlines specific strategies for marketing your product as you transition from one group of customers to another. The main focus of the book is, of course, how to cross the large chasm between the Early Adopters and the Mainstream customer.

Today’s Web Boom

I found this book of particular interest in today’s revived Web Application boom. If you’re building the next great web application, you need to read this book. Failure to cross the chasm after the TechCrunch/Silicon Valley crowd will destine your product to stagnate and fizzle out before it reaches the masses of customers needed for long-term growth and profitability.

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Getting Real is the self-published e-book by the guys at 37signals. I read their previous book Defensive Design for the Web and currently use their online organizer Backpack everyday. Since my experience with 37signals has been very positive, I gave their latest publication a spin.

What is Getting Real?

Getting Real is a collection of short essays on how to be more effective in building a web application. This book leans heavily on 37signal’s own experience in creating their successful suite of products. It also includes real world examples of success using these ideas. Many of the principles described will sound familiar to you if you’ve followed the authors’ blog Signal vs. Noise.

Get to Work

Getting Real is about skipping all the stuff that represents real (charts, graphs, boxes, arrows, schematics, wireframes, etc.) and actually building the real thing.

I hate nothing more than unneeded paperwork that is characteristic of bureaucracy. With an interactive web application, it is nearly impossible to communicate the user experience with any thing short of a working prototype. Besides, once you start building you’ll quickly discover issues that you never could have identified on paper.

Keep it Simple

Getting real is less. Less mass, less software, less features, less paperwork, less of everything that’s not essential (and most of what you think is essential actually isn’t).

The less overhead you have, the easier it is to adapt to changes and fix problems. Planning for hypothetical situations can easily overwhelm your project. Stay focused on the basics and cross the “hypothetical” bridges when they come.

Agility

Getting Real is staying small and being agile.

By nature, the larger the ship, the harder it is to turn. Small teams, unbound by red tape, can easily outmaneuver the bloated org charts of larger companies.

User Experience First

Getting Real starts with the interface, the real screens that people are going to use. It begins with what the customer actually experiences and builds backwards from there. This lets you get the interface right before you get the software wrong.

Using the interface as your guide, you can tailor your underlying code to the problem instead of conforming your interface to the code’s assumptions and restrictions.

Rinse and Repeat

Getting Real is about iterations and lowering the cost of change. Getting Real is all about launching, tweaking, and constantly improving which makes it a perfect approach for web-based software.

The beauty of web applications is that you don’t have to wait for the next year to release another software CD. You can roll out some changes during lunch if you like. Get something working and out for the public and then make continuous improvements.

No Fluff

Getting Real delivers just what customers need and eliminates anything they don’t.

Have you ever used all the hundreds of features tucked away in Microsoft Word? Probably not. Think about what the bare minimum your customers need to succeed and then implement that solution.

Conclusion

I love the simplicity of the ideas and examples presented in Getting Real. Although the content is focused specifically on building web applications, the principles can easily be applied to other business and marketing situations.

I recommend you pick up a copy of Getting Real and see what you can apply to your project today. I had several “light bulb” moments while I was reading that were worth more than the purchase price.

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Update April 21, 2006:
If you don’t already own a copy of Getting Real, you can enter Return Customer’s birthday contest and win one!

Buy The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing from Amazon

Authors Al Ries and Jack Trout outline The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing that you must follow if you’re to be successful in marketing your company. They warn the reader:

If you violate the immutable laws, you run the risk of failure.

With that said, they clearly lay out some contrarian concepts that may be hard to swallow for existing old-school business. The authors concede:

If you apply the immutable laws, you run the risk of being bad-mouthed, ignored, or even ostracized.

While these two points may seem to contradict each other, if you’re successful then your track record will silence the naysayers. If you have a small company or are just starting a business you can take these 22 laws and use them to your advantage against the big boys.

This book was written in the early 1990s so many of their examples are slightly dated. However, don’t let that stop you from reading this book because the principles discussed are timeless and applicable today more than ever.

Some of my favorite Laws are:

#2 The Law of the Category

If you can’t be first in a category, then set up a new category you can be first in.

You may not be first to market with your product but you can create a niche that will still be very profitable.

#7 The Law of the Ladder

The strategy to use depends on which rung you occupy on the ladder.

Evaluate where you company stands in the customer’s mind. Do they view you as the leader in the industry? Or a few steps behind at number two or three. You can’t claim to be the #1 company if you aren’t. Avis has been very successful at playing up it’s #2 status with their marketing campaign “we try harder.”

#9 The Law of Opposites

If you’re shooting for second place, your strategy is determined by the leader.

To successfully compete against the industry leader you need to take an opposite stand. This “opposite” must be a real opposite and not something you just make up. You can’t claim your product is fast because that implies your competition is slow. Are they really? Pepsi took the opposite stand against the “classic” (read: older) Coca-Cola by saying that Pepsi is “the choice of a new generation.”

#13 The Law of Sacrifice

You have to give something up in order to get something.

You can’t be all things to all people. Focus in on your niche and you’ll have to give up some potential customers. However, sacrificing those “general” prospects will enable you to become the go-to company in your niche.

#18 The Law of Success

Success leads to arrogance, and arrogance to failure.

The bigger and more successful your company the more degrees of separation top management will have from the common worker and the customers. Never lose sight of the customer even when you’re wildly successful. When you no longer have a finger on the pulse of the customer, your company will start to decline.

Apply the Laws

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing was a very quick read and will give you lots of food for thought. I recommend you read the book and pick a few Laws that you’re violating. Work on correcting those and you’ll be on your way to marketing success.

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Buy How to Drive Your Competition Crazy from Amazon

Every company should have a nemesis. You need someone to spur you on to greater innovation, service, and success. If you don’t have an enemy, get one. This is one of the tidbits of wisdom Guy Kawasaki outlines in his book How to Drive Your Competition Crazy.

In addition to Kawasaki’s solid principles, each chapter has an interview with someone demonstrating real-world success with the concepts discussed. These, combined with his other examples, validate the author’s points. Topics covered include the following:

Know Thyself

Before you can be more successful than your enemy, you need to understand your business. Kawasaki suggests some thought-provoking questions to ask about your company and its products.

Know Thy Customer

Hit the road and “press flesh” by meeting and talking with actual customers. See how they use your product and see what challenges they are having.

Know Thy Enemy

You can’t hope to defeat your enemy unless you’ve got good intelligence on it’s every move. Study your competition and see how it operates. How would it respond to your actions? Does it even consider you competition? One of my favorite ways to “know thy enemy” is to buy and use their product.

Focus on Customers

Kawasaki provides some great examples of success by focusing on customers first. When your customers are happy, your competition doesn’t have a chance.

Other Topics

• Focus your efforts on a decisive point. This could be a niche market or you providing an alternative to another existing solution on the market.
• Turn your customers into an effective sales force as customer evangelists.
• Give back to society and the community.
• “Build customer allegiance early and often.”
• Exploit problems with your competition’s products to your advantage.
• Partnering with your competition is one way to eliminate it.
• Be ready to defend your new market share.
• It helps to draw outside the lines and ditch the status quo in defeating your competition. See Rules for Revolutionaries

I enjoyed this book but after having read Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start and Rules for Revolutionaries, I did see some overlap with his other volumes. Nevertheless, this is a great read on how to get under your competition’s skin by making your customer happy.

Since this is an older book you may have trouble finding a copy. Check your public library, Amazon’s used books, or a local used book store!

Have you read How to Drive Your Competition Crazy? Tell us what you thought of the book in the comments below.

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Buy The Art of the Start from Amazon

Guy Kawasaki’s latest book, The Art of the Start, helps your business get started on the right foot. Each chapter focuses on the “art” of something and walks you through the principles needed to succeed every step of the way. Principles are intermingled with real-world examples to get your brain juices flowing.

The Art of Starting

You can read several of Kawasaki’s “Art of” principles on his blog. In fact, if you wait long enough he may just cover everything in this book on his blog.

I highlight the topics he covers in the book below.

Causation

• Make Meaning - your product or service should “make the world a better place.”
• Crafting a Mantra instead of a mission statement
• Get to work. You’ve got to get your product out the door, work on the business formalities later.
• Identify your business model
• Aim towards key milestones, identify your assumptions, and what tasks need to be completed.

Articulation

• Positioning - how to distinguish yourself from the competition, focusing on a niche, choosing your company/product name.
• Pitching - how to explain your company to anyone
• Writing a Business Plan - which should be a verbose version of your pitch.

Activation

• Bootstrapping - how to survive and succeed in the early, no-cash days of your company.
• Recruiting
• Raising Capital

Proliferation

• Partnering - when, with whom, and how to schmooze
• Branding
• Rainmaking

Obligation

• Being a Mensch - when you make the big time, or even on your way up: give back to others

I enjoyed this book and it gave me some great ideas on how to better kick off a project I’m starting. Kawasaki does reuse some stories and content from his previous books but includes enough new material to merit your attention.

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Buy Rules for Revolutionaries from Amazon

Former Apple Evangelist and current Venture Capitalist Guy Kawasaki delivers an inspiring book for all entrepreneurs in Rules for Revolutionaries.

Kawasaki breaks his book into three parts that help you be successful in your business venture:

• Create like a God
• Command like a King
• Work like a Slave

Overall I thought this was an excellent book and wanted to share some of Kawasaki’s points I found most enjoyable.

Create Like a God

To think like a revolutionary you need to purge the status quo from your mind. Dump your idols and reframe your way of viewing things.

Think about copying Mother Nature. She has been successful in solving problems for longer than you have.

Divide a problem into small parts and solve each as you go.

Customers will use your products in ways you never imagined. Embrace these uses and go with the flow on spin off applications or product uses.

Great Products

Kawasaki says you can spot a great product because it is ‘DICEE’:

• Deep - “Their features and functions satisfy desires that you didn’t know you had at the time of purchase.”
• Indulging - “It is more than what you minimally need and costs more than what you could have minimally spent.”
• Complete - “Provides all the attributes that make it delightful.”
• Elegant - honor aesthetics, form follows function, use materials in logical ways, allow direct manipulation, provide constant feedback, show forgiveness when the user messes up
• Evocative - “catalyzes strong feelings: People either love it or hate it.”

Great Teams

Great teams produce great products. Ideal teams are small, separate from the masses, have a great leader, and enjoy a casual atmosphere.

Great Practices

You’ll only get a revolutionary product or service if you follow great business practices:

• “Dare to find fault with existing products and services.”
• “Go with your gut”
• “Design for yourself” - design what you’d like to use.
• “Throw some simple and cheap ingredients in a bag, shake it, bake it, and go to market. Build a prototype and get on with it.”
• “Get on base” - concentrate on that solid single rather than a home run. Those will come.
• “Ignore Naysayers” - Customers don’t know they want your product if they’ve never seen it before. Your own company may not believe in you. Experts don’t know either.
• Ship your product when you can’t live without using it yourself internally.

Churn Baby Churn

A key to a great product is that you continuously improve it after its initial release.

Fix things for your current customers not non-buyers. This drives loyalty and evangelism. You may never convert nonbelievers no matter what you do for them.

Make your product flexible to allow for improvements. Don’t hide mistakes you make.

Command Like a King

Break down barriers

You have various barriers that stand between you and your product’s success. Kawasaki identifies some of these hurdles and how you can jump over them:

• ignorance - make people aware
• inertia - people know about you but don’t care
• complexity - make it easy for your parents
• channel - make sure customers have a place to buy
• price

You can break down barriers:

• enable test driving or give out samples
• give customers ownership in development
• focus on subset of customers

Erect Barriers

Use barriers in the marketplace to your advantage and to maintain your market share:

• exclusivity - make yours the best
• mind share - most people know about it
• price - cheapest
• customerization
• knowledge - you’re the expert
• infrastructure - big picture
• buddies - friends and partnerships

Evangelists

Add emotions to facts. Build a multi-appeal evangelism pitch. Present and see which one resonates more with people. Focus on that one at that meeting. Make sure you have an easy first step to start using your service.

Avoid Death Magnets

Some traps will kill your product before it even has a chance. Avoid these attitudes:

• “pick low-hanging fruit” - this might not be the best opportunity
• “our product sucks less” - customers don’t buy your product because it “sucks less”
• “budget is king” and unyielding to change. Always start afresh each year. Budget should be flexible to account for changing times and opportunities
• Being consistent to the end - Don’t have to stick to your decision if it is wrong.
• Don’t say yes to everyone. Focus on your niche.
• Over extending your brand to unrelated markets.
• Outsourcing probably costs more than it is worth for building a competitive advantage.
• Don’t work all the time. Concentrate your time and focus your efforts.
• Don’t mimic the big guys by living the high lifestyle. Work your way up to it.
• Don’t lower prices when you gain increased market share. Profits are OK to have and a sign of a successful company.
• “The best product wins” - just isn’t the case. The first to market often takes the cake

Eat Like a Bird, Poop like an Elephant

This comically named chapter boils down to absorbing as much information as you can through reading, conferences, etc. Take a different perspective when viewing your situation and product. It is OK share information with others, even competitors.

Think Digital, Act Analog

Leverage technology to enable you to be personal with customers. Create a community by involving customers in the creation process.

Don’t Ask People to Do Something That You Wouldn’t

• empower employees - for example, give them a dollar max they can spend to fix a problem without managerial approval
• ask the customer what he wants
• under promise and over deliver
• don’t give better deals to new customers over existing customers

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it. A lot of the principles discussed by Kawasaki are critical to business success. Read the book and apply the lessons in your endeavors.

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Buy Purple Cow

Seth Godin’s classic little purple book Purple Cow is about transforming your business by being remarkable. Why “Purple Cow?” You’ve probably seen so many cows in your life that they have become boring. You no longer pay attention to them or bubble with excitement when you see one. When is the last time you saw a purple cow? If you saw one, you’d probably pay attention.

Your business will be “purple” and remarkable if you do something different. In Purple Cow, Godin teaches several principles for making your company more successful. Some highlights include:

1. Don’t mass market. Focus on a niche. Dominate that area, and then move on to the next niche.
2. Forget traditional advertising on TV and other media. Take your advertising budget and sock it into development of a truly remarkable product.
3. You need to target innovators and early adopters with your product release. These individuals then spread the word to the mainstream public.
4. Don’t be boring. Be remarkable.
5. Take a chance on being different.
6. Once you get your “Purple Cow,” don’t just sit back and milk the cow. Start working on the next cow.

This book is a very quick read and the information is broken up into one or two page chapters that can easily be digested. Godin provides case studies of Purple Cows in numerous different industries and circumstances. He distills his main points into concise principles that can readily be scanned for later reference.

I think Purple Cow can best be summed up by Godin’s remarks at the very end of his book:

Ask, “Why not?” Almost everything you don’t do has no good reason for it. Almost everything you don’t do is the result of fear or inertia or a historical lack of someone asking, “Why not?”

Start asking “Why not?” and transform your products and services into remarkable Purple Cows.

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Buy Call to Action

The Eisenberg brothers have made some good money helping companies succeed on the web. Call To Action is a compilation of their years of experience that will help you achieve great online results in ecommerce or any website you operate.

The book is divided into six main sections:

• Planning
• Structure
• Momentum
• Communication
• Value
• Accountability

The sections on planning and structure take up the majority of the book and dive into the most detail. Each chapter averages only a few pages and focuses on individual aspects of these overall section themes.

Since the shorter chapters make for a quick read, it seems as if they were weekly newsletter articles that were pulled together to create the book. While that may be, it does allow you to read a chapter quickly and then ponder how it applies to your situation.

Almost every chapter will leave you with a list of action items for improving your website and your visitor’s experience. You’ll learn how to improve your efficiency and persuade customers to take action.

Some of my favorite parts of the book are recurring mini-chapters that are guidance from industry leaders. These real world examples are often coupled with sound advice that you can directly apply to your online business.

Call To Action will change the way you are doing business online for the better. By implementing even a few of the ideas in this book, you’ll reap the financial benefits.

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