StartupGarden: July 2003 Archives

Excellent entrepreneurial books/sites

An article of mine in the current Publishers Weekly recommends managerial books for bookstore managers. The list complements a talk I gave at the recent American Booksellers Association convention, and is meant to help any manager expand his or her entrepreneurial chops. By the way, the piece complements another article on developing managerial skills which I wrote a few years back for PW. Here's a few of my favorite websites that expand on the recommended titles.

The best sites are those that go provide material beyond the pages of the books. David Allen’s site, for example, shares his excellent newsletter, provides early access to his next book, Ready for Anything,and a wealth of other useful stuff about getting things done. Jim Collins supplements the wisdom of Built To Last and Good To Great with an expansive site that reveals his academic past. This sprightly site provides deep background to Collins ideas—packed with a decade’s worth of articles and other writings, pieces about him, discussion guides to the ideas, and even direct access to the research itself: you need look no further for a great start on his key ideas. My one slight gripe is that he doesn’t update the site with new material (like the recent cover story in Fortune on the ten greatest CEOs of all time.) Some of the recommended books have decent websites that give a sense of the book itself but no more—such as those for A Stake in the Outcome, a great book that is well-served to the extent that you can download a few generous excerpts. But I have yet to find a great online resource on the topic of Open Book Management.

By the way, I would like to cite several books that I overlooked in the piece: Open Book Management by John Case, the writer who really owns the phrase and the conceptual framing of this practice. Also, I am very fond of Guerilla Publicity’s savvy methods for leveraging your resources to generate sales and buzz. And finally, for bootstrappers: try this essay I wrote, which sells on Amazon.

Posted by tom at 05:26 PM

The Value of Design

Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World, a new book from MIT Press, is one of those rare business books that belong on the coffee table. This homage to the country’s leading industrial designer features more than 250 illustrations of gleaming passenger trains, sleek Evinrude motors and boats, squat yet spunky radios, and much more. The exuberance of these and other products remind us that companies could distinguish themselves through cutting edge design long before iPods and Air Jordans.

Stevens launched his design shop in Milwaukee in 1933, at a time when mass markets and marketing were giving way to more sophisticated approaches to customers. Alfred Sloan’s creation of separate cars for separate customer segments showed emerging big businesses that they could differentiate products by design. Stevens took this insight and ran with it. Yet while others sought differentiation through cosmetic iterations, Stevens focused on design choices that fundamentally added value to consumers and producers. As the book notes, he considered an industrial designer to be "a businessman, an engineer, and a stylist, in that order."

By melding form and function, Stevens sparked surprising and pleasing product innovations. He introduced the wide-mouth peanut butter jar, and was the first to place a clear window in the door of a Hamilton clothes dryer. He crafted beautiful art deco cooling fins along the side of a clothes iron that improved its performance while making it look, to use a technical term, cool.

In the Post WWII age of American spirit and bravado, he created bold, distinctive products that included the Jeep station wagon, the 1950 Harley-Davidson motorcyle, and the corporate logo for the Miller Brewing Company. There’s a proud, graceful, delight in Steven’s work that thrills anyone who really cares about building a better toaster. This book, coupled with an exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum, reflects his work beautifully.

Today his legacy can be seen in any company seeking an edge through smart industrial design. IDEO, the industrial design firm which is about the closest thing to a rock star that our New Economy has, has spawned a cult following. There’s a nice (albeit registration required) interview with CEO Tim Brown in the June issue of Technology Review. Design junkies read I.D., which does a great job of showcasing great design in context. And such organizations as the Industrial Designers Society of America push design forward. Finally, I’d recommend the work of design pundit Don Norman, whose The Invisible Computer does a great job of showing how the contemporary design process for high-tech products must always operate within the context of the way that individual businesses operate, not to mention the odd logic of markets.

A final thought on Stevens’ legacy: today he is best known (though not very well) for coining the phrase "planned obsolescence." Critics such as Vance Packard attacked this idea as cynical commercialism by merchants who made cheap products for quick bucks. Not so. Stevens meant to say that all good, organic products respond to specific times and customers, and that if done properly, they become naturally extinct. He says the phrase meant, "instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary."

I prefer to think of his greatest legacy to be the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. Stevens didn’t invent this great American icon. But in 1958 he changed our nation’s notion of a wienermobile with a simple innovation: he "put the wiener in the bun," as he puts it. The rest is history.

Posted by tom at 10:32 PM

Lean Thinking..and more from Drucker

One more great re-release of the summer (see entry below) is Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Organization (Free Press) by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones. Originally published in 1997, this ambitious book, just reissued with new material, may be the most comprehensive managerial primer of the past decade. Where other business books tend to focus on one strategic or operational insight, Lean Thinking offers a more holistic approach. The authors show how leading companies align themselves completely around the customer’s perception of value, creating robust organizations with extraordinary productivity, few defects, and the capacity to change rapidly.

This book matters today more than ever. A decade ago, much of the managerial thinking focused on manufacturing matters. How could our flailing dinosaurs regain American competitiveness by catching up to Japanese companies that took quality ideas (some developed by in this country) to a new level? People really cared about the inventory turn at Ford or the ability of Motorola to practice Six Sigma. Yet when high-profile companies began waves of layoffs in the name of Reengineering, the authenticity of managerial theories took a hit that lingers today. Moreover, the Real Time inanity of the Internet Economy skewed everyone’s perspective, and the irritating grind of getting things done took a big back seat to Big Ideas and Venture Capital.

Even today, such excellent books as Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan and Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's History Turnaround by Lou Gerstner focus more on the sexy topic of how top executives effect change and get people involved in the right strategies. Lean Thinking goes into far greater granularity on the organizational practices necessary to compete on a sustained basis. It is well written albeit slow-going. But key. If you want more information on the topic, the authors run a company (they call it a non-profit education and research organization) sharing these ideas with the public.

By the way, these two authors were part of the team that wrote The Machine That Changed The World: The Story of Lean Production. I include this title on any top ten business books in both quality and relevance. Brilliantly researched and written, this book gives a wonderful history of leading manufacturing practices, showing how folks such as Henry Ford and Toyota’s Taiichi Ohno continually pushed the bar in organizational effectiveness. Today the book remains as important as ever; and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Finally, a post-script to yesterday’s post. Because I really like The Effective Executive, here is a favorite passage, from page 23, that goes like so:

"Effectiveness, in other words, is a habit: that is, a complex of practices. And practices can always be learned. Practices are simple, deceptively so; even a seven-year-old has no difficulty in understanding a practice. But practices are always exceedingly hard to do well. They have to be acquired, as we all learn the multiplication table; that is, repeated ad nauseam until "6X6=36" has become unthinking, conditioned reflex, and firmly ingrained habit. Practices one learns by practicing and practicing again….

There are essentially five such practices—five such habits of the mind that have to be acquired to be an effective executive:
1. Effective executives know where their time goes. They work systematically at managing the little of their time that can be brought under their control.
2. Effective executives focus on outward contribution. They gear their efforts to results rather than to work. They start out with the question, "what results are to be expected of me?" rather than with the work to be done, let alone with its techniques and tools.
3. Effective executives build on strengths—their own strengths, the strengths of their superiors, colleagues, and subordinates; and on the strengths in the situation, that is, on what they can do. They do not build on weakness. They do not start out with the things they cannot do.
4. Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results. They force themselves to set priorities and stay with their priority decisions. They know that they have no choice but to do first things first—and second things not at all. The alternative is to get nothing done.
5. Effective executives, finally, make effective decisions. They know that this is, above all, a matter of system—of the right steps in the right sequence. They now that an effective decision is always a judgement based on "dissenting opinions" rather than on "consensus on the facts." And they know that to make many decisions fast means to make the wrong decisions. What is needed are few, but fundamental, decisions. What is needed is the right strategy rather than razzle-dazzle tactics.

Posted by tom at 04:52 PM

Old Books, New Relevance

In this summer of the movie sequel, I’m finding that my favorite new business books are…re-releases. Recently I raved about Indecent Exposure, a great and pioneering narrative about the movie business. The good news is that this book is but one of several classics that HarperBusiness is re-releasing through its Essentials line. The relevance and resonance of each of these gems only deepen with each new cycle of business ideas and technology.

The Effective Executive, by Peter Drucker may have spawned more business books and products than any other in the past 50 years. Without this book there is no Stephen Covey, no David Allen, no legions of executive coaches and seminars; one could also make the case that such leadership/operations guides as the recent Execution also pay homage to Drucker’s work. There has always been a science of self-improvement and individual management, yet nobody has applied the keen insight and wisdom of Drucker. Though he first published the book in 1966, its core ideas grew out of 20 years of consulting with the country’s leading executives, and in fact was codified as a program for the senior executives of the Eisenhower administration. Drucker’s insights into the emerging role of the so-called "knowledge worker" as the core characteristic of this economy are put to work in this guide. This book focuses on five principles that enable one to manage others—and especially oneself—to get things done in a new and productive manner. "Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results. By themselves, they only set limits to what can be attained," he writes.

The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing, by Benjamin Graham, is certainly working its way towards earning the big promise of its subtitle. This new version is, technically, a re-rerelease. This 1949 classic has been periodically republished with new material. This version includes substantial material from a past version that was informed by excellent essays from Grahman’s acolyte Warren Buffet. The new issue includes even more new material, from financial writer Jason Zweig, who applies Graham’s ideas today’s economy, while pointing to web resources and other data for eager readers. Again, at a time when business cycles may have changed shape in terms of boom-and-bust patterns or inflationary numbers, this classic resoundingly proves the resilience of great ideas.

And finally, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, is a marvelous read. These two Wall Street Journal reporters had a tremendous story to tell, and they pull it off with style. By sharing the remarkable details of the huge egos of this deal, set against the excesses of the late 80s, the authors give as good a window into the ethos of the time as any book you’d care to read.

Posted by tom at 01:30 PM