Book Short: Scrum ptious I just finished reading Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, by Jeff Sutherland and JJ Sutherland. This reading was in anticipation of an Agile Facilitation training my executive team and I are going through next week, as part of Return Path’s Agile Everywhere initiative. But it’s a book I should’ve read along time ago, and a book that I enjoyed. Sutherland gets credit for creating the agile framework and bringing the concept scrum to software development over 20 years ago. The book very clearly lays out not just the color behind the creation of the framework, and the central tenets of practice again, but also clear and simple illustrations of…
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Books
The Phoenix Project
The Phoenix Project: a novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford is a logical intellectual successor and regularly quotes Eli Goldratt’s seminal work The Goal and its good but less known sequel It’s Not Luck. The more business books I read, the more I appreciate the novel or fable format. Most business books are a bit boring and way too long to make a single point. The Phoenix Project is a novel, though unlike Goldratt’s books (and even Lencioni’s), it takes it easy on the cheesy and personal side stories. It just uses storytelling techniques to make its points and give color and examples for more memorable learning. If your…
Book Short: Blink Part II
Book Short: Blink Part II Years ago I wrote a post about Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent book, Blink (post, buy). While my post has lots of specifics in it for entrepreneurs, for VCs, and for marketers, my quick summary was this: Where The Tipping Point theorizes about how humans relate to each other and how fads start and flourish in our society, Blink theorizes about how humans make decisions and about the interplay between the subconscious, learned expertise, and real-time inputs. But Gladwell does more than theorize — he has plenty of real world examples which seem quite plausible, and he peppers the book with evidence from some (though hardly a complete coverage of relevant) scientific and quasi-scientific studies. I recently…
Book Short: Internet Fiction, part II
Book Short: Internet Fiction, part II I hate to write a lame post, but here’s what I wrote earlier in the year about Eliot Peper’s first Internet thriller, Uncommon Stock: Eliot Pepper’s brand new startup thriller, Uncommon Stock, was a breezy and quick read that I enjoyed tremendously. It’s got just the right mix of reality and fantasy in it. For anyone in the tech startup world, it’s a must read. But it would be equally fun and enjoyable for anyone who likes a good juicy thriller. Like my memory of Hackoff, the book has all kinds of startup details in it, like co-founder struggles and a great presentation of the angel investor vs. VC dilemma. But it also has a great…
Book Short: Continuing to make “sustainability” a mainstream business topic
Book Short: Continuing to make “sustainability” a mainstream business topic The Big Pivot: Radically Practical Strategies for a Hotter, Scarcer, and More Open World, by my friend Andrew Winston, is a great book. It just got awarded one of the Top 10 business books of 2014 by Strategy+Business, which is a great honor. Andrew builds nicely on his first book, Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage (post, book link) (and second book, which I didn’t review, Green Recovery), as I said in my review of Green to Gold, to bring: the theoretical and scientific to the practical and treat sustainability as the corporate world must treat it in order…
Book Short: Way, Way Beyond Books
Book Short: Way, Way Beyond Books The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, by Brad Stone, was a great read. Amazon is a fascinating, and phenomenally successful company, and Jeff is a legendary technology leader. The Everything Store is a company and personal biography and totally delivers. Forget about the fact that Amazon is now almost $100B in revenues and still growing like mad. I find it even more amazing that a single company could be the largest ecommerce site on the planet while successfully pioneering both cloud computing services and e-readers. The stories of all these things are in the book. As a CEO, I enjoyed reading more of the vignettes behind the things that Amazon…
Startup CEO: The Online Course Part II
Startup CEO: The Online Course Part II Startup CEO the online course offered by the Kauffman Fellows Academy is back this fall starting September 15! As many of you know, the course is based on my book Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Your Business. When the course first ran earlier this year, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Hundreds of students from six continents signed up, all eager to learn as much as they could about entrepreneurship and how to develop their startups. The students worked together in teams to develop their startup ideas on the unique online educational platform NovoEd. I was amazed at the enthusiasm of students who dove into lectures and the book and then exchanged ideas…
Book Short: Best Book Ever
Book Short: Best Book Ever The Hard Thing About Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz, is the best business book I’ve ever read. Or at least the best book on management and leadership that I’ve ever read. Period. It’s certainly the best CEO book on the market. It’s about 1000 times better than my book although my book is intended to be different in several ways. I suppose they’re complementary, but if you only had time left on this planet for one book, read Ben’s first. I’m not even going to get into specifics on it, other than that Ben does a great job of telling the LoudCloud/Opsware story in a way that shows the grit, psychology, and pain of being…
Book Short: Culture is King
Book Short: Culture is King Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love, by Richard Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations, was a really good read. Like Remote which I reviewed a few weeks ago, Joy, Inc. is ostensibly a book about one thing — culture — but is also full of good general advice for CEOs and senior managers. Also like Remote, the book was written by the founder and CEO of a relatively small firm that is predominately software engineers, so there are some limitations to its specific lessons unless you adapt them to your own environment. Unlike Remote, though, it’s neither preachy nor ranty, so it’s a more pleasant read. And I suppose fitting of its title,…
Book short: Life Isn’t Just a Wiki
Book short: Life Isn’t Just a Wiki One of the best things I can say about Remote: Office Not Required, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, is that it was short. That sounds a little harsh – part of what I mean is that business books are usually WAY TOO LONG to make their point, and this one was blessedly short. But the book was also a little bit of an angry rant against bad management wrapped inside some otherwise good points about remote management. The book was a particularly interesting read juxtaposed against Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last which I just finished recently and blogged about here, which stressed the importance of face-to-face and in-person contact in order for…
Book Short: Like Reading a Good Speech
Book Short: Like Reading a Good Speech Leaders Eat Last, by Simon Sinek, is a self-described “polemic” that reads like some of the author’s famous TED talks and other speeches in that it’s punchy, full of interesting stories, has some attempted basis in scientific fact like Gladwell, and wanders around a bit. That said, I enjoyed the book, and it hit on a number of themes in which I am a big believer – and it extended and shaped my view on a couple of them. Sinek’s central concept in the book is the Circle of Safety, which is his way of saying that when people feel safe, they are at their best and healthiest. Applied to workplaces, this isn’t…