Archives / March, 2009

Book Short: The Religion of Heresy

Book Short:  The Religion of Heresy At the end of Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, Seth Godin’s new book, Seth says this: I’m going to get a lot of flak from people about what you just read. People might say that it’s too disorganized or not practical enough or that I require you to do too much work to actually accomplsh anything. That’s ok. He’s kind of right. The book is a little breezy and meanders around, just like riffing with Seth. It’s not practical in the sense that if the entire world operated this way in the extreme, we’d have serious problems. But the fact that he requires you to do “too much work to actually accomplish…

Book Short: A Marketing-Led Turnaround

Book Short: A Marketing-Led Turnaround Generally, I love books by practitioners even more than those by academics.  That’s why Steve McKee’s first (I assume) book, When Growth Stalls:  How it Happens, Why You’re Stuck, and What to do About It (book, Kindle edition) appealed to me right out of the gate.  The author is CEO of a mid-size agency and a prior Inc. 500 winner who has experienced the problem firsthand – then went out, researched it, and wrote about it.  As a two-time Inc. 500 winner ourselves, Return Path has also struggled with keeping the growth flames burning over the years, so I was eager to dig into the research.  The title also grabbed my attention, as there are…

Book Short: Be Less Clever

Book Short:  Be Less Clever In Search of the Obvious: The Antidote for Today’s Marketing Mess, by Jack Trout, is probably deserving of a read by most CEOs.  Trout at this point is a bit old school and curmudgeonly, the book has some sections which are a bit repetitive of other books he and his former partner Al Reis have written over the years, he does go off on some irrelevant rants, and his examples are a bit too focused on TV advertising, BUT his premise is great, and it’s universally applicable.  So much so that my colleagues Leah, Anita, and I had “book club” about it one night last week and had a very productive debate about our own…

Book Short: What’s Your Meeting Routine?

Book Short: What’s Your Meeting Routine? Patrick Lencioni’s Death by Meeting is, as Brad advertised, a great read, and much in line with his other books (running list at the end of the post).  His books are just like candy.  If only all business books were this short and easy to read. This fable isn’t quite what I thought it was going to be at the outset – it’s not about too many meetings, which is what I’ve always called “death by meeting.”  It’s about staff meetings that bore you to death.  With a great story around them featuring characters named Casey and Will (my two oldest kids’ names, which had me chuckling the whole time), Lencioni describes a great…

Why Are We Financing Fortune 500 Companies?

Why Are We Financing Fortune 500 Companies? And here’s another problem of the economic meltdown — companies are stretching out their payables like mad.  Our average payable has increased 50% in the last 120 days. That translates into millions of dollars of cash shortfall versus our plan.  We believe it’s all still collectible, but we just can’t seem to speed up payment.  We are going to launch some new and more meaningful efforts to collect, but it just shouldn’t be that hard.  And you hate to be heavy handed with customers in this environment. Is it a good idea to threaten to suspend service?  When do you cut someone off?  Is it appropriate for the CEO to make a collections…

Education and Entrepreneurship

Education and Entrepreneurship   Fred posted his thoughts the other day that you don’t need a college degree to be a successful entrepreneur. He is clearly right in that one CAN be successful without it.  Gates, Zuckerberg, Dell have proven that.    I’ve always said that I didn’t think an MBA was a prerequisite for a successful business career.  That’s easy for me to say, as I don’t have one despite many years of applying, deferring, cancelling, reapplying and general hand-wringing over whether or not to go in the mid-90s.  An MBA is probably a positive on a resume for the most part (hard to argue it’s a negative), but it’s not a prerequisite.  Every time I see “MBA preferred”…