Archives / May, 2008

Inbox = Zero = Satisfying (Quasi Book Short)

Inbox = Zero = Satisfying (Quasi Book Short) I’m a big David Allen fan.  Amazingly enough, I haven’t blogged about him and his books yet, probably for the most part because I read the books before I started blogging.  But here they are.  The first one,  Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, is probably a little better than the sequel, Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life, but both are worth reading.  When I first read them, they didn’t revolutionize my thinking about productivity and workflow management (I was already at least decent at those things), but they did really sharpen my thinking around the edges and give me a great framework to plug all…

Do Business Books Suck for Entrepreneurs?

Do Business Books Suck for Entrepreneurs? Ben thinks they do.  Some of his reasons are pretty good, but I’d challenge a few of them, or at least his finer points. My experience over the years is that while most business books are not geared toward entrepreneurs, a good entrepreneur will figure out how to milk them for what they’re worth quickly and apply key learnings to his or her company.  The reality is that running a startup or high growth company is a multi-faceted and incredibly dynamic experience, and having a bunch of outside inputs in the form of business book examples and theories can be really helpful.  Even bad ideas can spur good thinking.

Morning Chuckle

Morning Chuckle From an internal email thread we had here, mainly from Angela, our VP People: So, I’ve just checked in at the Westin, I mean Wonderland. AB: walk up hotel driveway, notices woman carrying odd looking dogAB: looks more closely, not dog, pigAB: looks again, pig is snorting, she is carrying said pig like a baby Check In Desk AB: hi, what’s up with the pig in the lobby (singular)?Sally: oh yeah the pigs are here this weekAB: they are staying in the hotel? In the guest rooms?Sally: uh huhAB: blank stareSally: they all have namesAB: hmmm, really, pigs? Is there a convention? (I mean really, I was here during the bison convention, this seems like a logical question)Sally: oh no noAB: blank stareSally: they’re here for the ____ balloon festivalAB: ?Sally: they’re the only pigs allowed…

Legal Aggression

Legal Aggression I will write more posts on this topic later in the year after a ridiculous lawsuit we’re in the middle of now winds up, but today’s news from Techdirt is that shoe retailer DSW is suing Zappos, who as regular readers know is one of my favorite companies and shopping experiences around. The lawsuit sounds silly to me, but I’m not in the middle of the details of it.  But what absolutely amazes me is that DSW made no effort to contact Zappos prior to launching the lawsuit with a press release.  How incredibly irresponsible and rude and wasteful.  I hate it when lawyers run amok, or when overly aggressive business people think that a lawsuit is the…

Drawing the Line: Where We Come out

Drawing the Line:  Where We Come out In the first post in this series, I laid out a dilemma we’ve had internally at Return Path in recent months: whether and how we accept clients who are in “grey” businesses like alcohol, pornography, and neutriceuticals, and whether that applies uniformly across all of our products (software vs. consulting vs. whitelist). In the second post, I reposted a summary of all the comments we received from readers. Now comes the fun part — the so what. We had a good series of conversations internally on this issue that included some very spirited debate. Here’s where we come out. First, we drew a distinction between three types of potentially “troublesome” clients: those whose…

Book Short: A SPIN Selling Companion

Book Short:  A SPIN Selling Companion At Return Path, we’re big believers in the SPIN Selling methodology popularized by Neil Rackham. It just makes sense. Spend more time listening than talking on a sales call, uncover your prospect’s true needs and get him or her to articulate the need for YOUR product. Though it doesn’t reference SPIN Selling, Why People Don’t Buy Things, by Kim Wallace and Harry Washburn is a nice companion read. Rooted in psychology and cognitive science, Why People Don’t Buy Things presents a very practical sales methodology called Buying Path Selling. Understand how your prospect is making his or her buying decision and what kind of buyer he or she is, be more successful at uncovering…

Blogiversary, Part IV

Blogiversary, Part IV Four years on, as the British would say, OnlyOnce is going strong.  Cumulative stats show a steady 457 posts, about one every three days on average (same as it’s been all along), and a scant 409 non-spam comments. Maybe some day I’ll start being more edgy and provocative.  Or prolific.  Or Twitterific.  Or something. Looking back over my initial “how’s it going” post and the last three anniversary posts, I’d say my reasons for blogging, out of my four original ones, have consolidated now around “Thinking” (writing short posts helps me crystallize my thinking) and “Employees” (one of our senior people once called reading OnlyOnce “getting a peek inside Matt’s head).  But I’d also add two new…

Book Short: Presentation Zen

Book Short:  Presentation Zen A few years ago, I blogged about Cliff Atkinson’s book Beyond Bullets.  I don’t know whether it’s a better book, or whether the timing of reading it just made a deeper impression on me, but I just read and LOVED Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds. The concept is similar — a bad Powerpoint presentation kills your message as much as that horrendous high school physics teacher turned you off from the natural sciences.  Reynolds’s examples are rich, and there are tons of “before and after” slides in the book for the visual learners among us.  In addition, he articulates very clearly what I’ve always thought, since my consulting days, made for an excellent presentation:  offline storyboarding….