More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 23, 2021 - August 8, 2022
40 to 70 employees (a senior team of five to seven people, leading teams of seven to 10 — in a company where you still know everyone’s name)
Repetition encompasses consistency. Finish what you start. Mean what you say. And don’t say one thing and do something else. Consistency is an important aspect of repetition.
It’s Regis McKenna, author of the classic Relationship Marketing: Successful Strategies for The Age of the Customer, who taught Steve Jobs, Andy Grove, and most of the Silicon Valley tech stars how to market in the 80’s. It was McKenna and his firm that also guided Verne as he built his early global entrepreneurship organizations.
pricing tends to get the least attention yet is one of the most important decisions you’ll make. Whereas we’ll spend hours working on the cost side of the business; the pricing side is lucky to get an educated guess. To up your skills in this area we strongly recommend reading pricing guru Hermann Simon’s book Confessions of a Pricing Man: How Pricing Affects Everything. His firm Simon-Kucher & Partners is the leading pricing consultancy in the world — you might consider engaging them.
Last, we encourage you to read Adele Revella’s book Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer’s Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business.
For an inspirational story about an entrepreneur who used his wealth to help millions, read Conor O’Clery’s The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune (you’ll also pick up some important tips on scaling up a global business).
The Business of Happiness: 6 Secrets to Extraordinary Success in Life and Work. He notes in his book a strong correlation between happiness and the number of diverse communities in which you are active.
“All assets become liabilities!”),
Lynne Twist’s insightful book titled The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Life expounds upon this idea.
(It’s no accident that Eric Ries called his book The Lean Startup.)
In his book The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Dr. Atul Gawande shares how his research on improving success in surgeries came down to a simple surgery checklist.
(For more practical insights about building Job Scorecards, read Bluewire Media’s excellent blog on the topic.)
Author of Change to Strange: Create a Great Organization by Building a Strange Workforce (a book that we strongly suggest you read),
A book written by the CEO (something we strongly recommend); a regular column in the local biz journal; a popular blog; and/or regular LinkedIn Influencer posts are great recruiting (and marketing) tools and ways to grab attention in an industry.
For an excellent overview, read Geoff Smart and Randy Street’s book Who: The A Method for Hiring; to learn the details of the process, read Bradford D. Smart’s book Topgrading: The Proven Hiring and Promoting Method That Turbocharges Company Performance.
Daniel H. Pink, in his best-selling book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, shows why compensation is a lot less effective as a motivational tool than we thought.
To get ideas on how to create a culture of recognition and appreciation, see Chip Conley’s excellent book Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, Chapter 5.
This is what Jack Stack, author of the book The Great Game of Business: The Only Sensible Way to Run a Company, calls “line of sight,” an important concept to create engagement and a sense of purpose. Can your employees explain how what they’re doing helps deliver on your company’s purpose, strategy, and Brand Promise?
Do you need to bring in a Lean expert to help your people design new processes or streamline existing ones?
And before starting the “love and loathe” exercise, have your team take the inexpensive online StrengthsFinder assessment offered by Gallup (gallupstrengthscenter.com).
Facebook’s celebrity COO Sheryl Sandberg recently called Buckingham’s follow-up book with Donald O. Clifton, Now, Discover Your Strengths, the most important book she had read in recent years.
(Marcus Buckingham, this time in his book The One Thing You Need to Know ... About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, explains this difference between managing and leading.)
The company set up an internal learning academy named “Garbage University.”
At MOM’s Organic Market, in addition to executive education, produce managers will typically read four to five books together every year. Recent titles on their list include business books such as Liz Wiseman’s Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter and Patrick M. Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable.
And this investment in people is the biggest single predictor of a company’s ability to beat its direct competitors and the overall market, based on exhaustive research done by Laurie Bassi, co-author of Good Company: Business Success in the Worthiness Era.
As Harvard professor Frances Frei and organization builder Anne Morriss remind leaders in their breakthrough strategy book Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business,
or CJ Advertising in Nashville is paying employees to read industry-related materials from its library, the best growth firms are, first and foremost, training companies.
We require our Scaling Up Certified Coaches to commit to 45 hours of annual professional education to keep their certification.
One book that has been a hit among Croft’s team is The Weekly Coaching Conversation: A Business Fable About Taking Your Game and Your Team to the Next Level by Brian Souza. “Managers absolutely love that book and the conversations around that book,” Croft says.
Another that sparked passionate feedback was Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, by Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg. A discussion among the leadership team that Croft expected would last two hours stretched to four, with the head of HR at MOM’s furiously taking notes on potential changes to make the company more family-friendly. As a result, CFO Kelly Moler decided to form a committee to work on such initiatives. “We are going to take a good look at our policies and procedures,” says Croft.
Read the short management fable Leadership and the One Minute Manager: Increasing Effectiveness Through Situational Leadership, by Ken Blanchard, Patricia Zigarmi, and Drea Zigarmi, to gain more insight into this powerful coaching framework.
Again, read Blanchard’s book on Situational Leadership. We also recommend Beverly Kaye and Julie Winkle Giulioni’s book Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Employees Want. It is a great resource with many practical tips and hands-on guidelines on how to structure your one-on-one conversations. Add Brian Souza’s book The Weekly Coaching Conversation to help get your managers into the mindset required for great coaching. And last, read Chapters 5 and 6 in Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman’s First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently to learn
...more
Verne’s mentor Hermann Simon wrote the definitive book on privately held growth firms called Hidden Champions of the 21st Century. For an excellent summary of the seven lessons he discerned from studying thousands of mid-market firms that dominate their niches globally, read Simon’s article, “Hidden Champions (1): What German Companies Can Teach You About Innovation.” — it details a key formula for crushing your competition and is worth the 7 minutes to review Simon’s 7 lessons.
In addition, Salim Ismail’s breakthrough book Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it) is a must read if you want to 10x your organization using the same strategies Silicon Valley’s “unicorns” (startups that zoom to $1 billion in valuation) have used to scaleup. For a comprehensive online course by Ismail go to www.growthinstitute.com.
For additional examples, read the Harvard Business Review article titled “Building Your Company’s Vision,” by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras. You’ll notice that all the Values listed are phrases, not single words. And they are not all feel-good Values. One of Disney’s Core Values is “Preservation and control of the Disney magic,” which accurately describes one of the most controlling cultures you’ll ever experience. Values are neither good nor bad. They just are! The key is to articulate them accurately.
take a page from Tyabji’s blue book.
“Building Your Company’s Vision,” the HBR article referenced above, also lists several Purposes for well-known companies. Also check out Peter Diamandis’ “Massively Transformative Purpose.”
Gary Hamel and the late C.K. Prahalad labeled them Core Competencies in their groundbreaking May 1990 Harvard Business Review article titled “The Core Competence of the Corporation.” Purchase a copy online and have the strategic thinking team read it; then discuss and determine your company’s Core Competencies.
Grab a copy of Collins’ Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... And Others Don’t and read the three most important pages ever written in business — Pages 114 to 116 — where he describes the 11 guidelines for structuring such a council.
Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World,
Then take a page from the best-selling book The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly.
For more on how to use content to drive revenue, read Joe Pulizzi’s highly insightful Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less.
KEY RESOURCES: Robert H. Bloom and Dave Conti’s book The Inside Advantage: The Strategy That Unlocks the Hidden Growth in Your Business, and Rick Kash and David Calhoun’s book How Companies Win: Profiting From Demand-Driven Business Models No Matter What Business You’re In
Jim Collins’ article will give you many more examples, as will the marketplace, when you start paying attention to what other companies are doing to guarantee their promises.
KEY RESOURCE: Frances Frei and Anne Morriss’ book Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business
Add to this a flair for design and the best Swedish meatballs on the planet,
The book Uncommon Service will give you a myriad number of examples and walk you through how to both “be bad” the right and highly profitable way and “be great” via a few Brand Promises. It takes real guts to ignore or even alienate 93% of customers, focusing instead on the 7% of the market that is fanatical about you and willing to put up with the trade-offs.
“A vision is a dream with a plan.”
There’s not a lot of space to write, so you must be concise.
خير الكلام ما قل ودل
Decades ago, Charles Schwab, CEO of Bethlehem Steel, asked management consultant Ivy Lee to show him how to get more done. As the famous story goes, Lee asked Schwab to write down and prioritize his six most important tasks to complete the next business day. Then he instructed Schwab to start on item #1 the next day and not move on to item #2 until item #1 was completed.
