The Need for Speed

Shortcut Your Startup: Speed Success with Unconventional Advice from the Trenches – Courtney Reum and Carter Reum – (Gallery/Jeter)

Former Goldman Sachs investment banking brothers Courtney and Carter Reum have evolved to become entrepreneurs, investor, and brand development gurus that has seen them score big with development, scaling and sell off of their premium spirits brand VEEV.

They have been involved in the investment or brand acceleration of a veritable who’s who of household brand names like; Lyft, Warby Parker, Shake Shack, Ring, Blue Bottle, Slack, Space-X and a seemingly never ending list of others.

The Reum brothers have distilled the knowledge they have acquired over the course of working with these high level projects into the book, Shortcut Your Startup: Speed Up Success with Unconventional Advice from the Trenches. They boil that distillation down to what they’ve dubbed their 10 Key Startup Switchups.

While much of the advice they arm entrepreneurs with is certainly success tested and offers insight that should be put into play by startups and existing entrepreneurial efforts, the ten switchups have the tendency to read like stand alone blog entries or articles that have been collected under one cover, rather than a cohesive, comprehensive strategy.

As with any business strategy book, I always like to look for even kernels of knowledge or useful ideas that I can put to use when developing (new) strategies. With business and particularly startups accelerating at such a rapid pace, it only makes sense to tap into the base of experience that the Reums offer to get you and your business up to speed.

Human Capital

Time, Talent and Energy: Overcome Organizational Drag and Unleash Your Team’s Productive Power – Michael C. Mankins and Eric Garton (Harvard Business Review Press)

You’ve probably seen it posted on an office wall or on the back of a tractor trailer or some other highly visible location; the reads something like, “Our people are our biggest/most important/best/strongest asset. That line has been used in some variation of the form by any number of businesses in a wide array of industries – to the point where it has moved beyond cliché to become utterly meaningless.

For many of the companies posting this phrase it raises the question – who are they trying to convince? Their customers, their employees or themselves? The striking thing that many businesses are slow to realize, is that, that simple statement is absolutely true and the companies that live up to that statement are at an immediate strategic advantage over those who don’t grasp that reality.

Recently I have spent time working through a series of books dealing with employee engagement and the advantages companies that recognize this most important business tenant have in a competitive market place. During a break in a group session with an executive coach I asked the coach what the best book he had encountered on the subject and without hesitation he recommended Time, Talent and Energy: Overcome Organizational Drag and Unleash Your Team’s Productive Power, by a pair of Bain and Company business consultants Michael C. Mankins and Eric Garton.

While most recognize the value of employee engagement to the businesses bottom line, I think that Mankins and Garton separate from the pack by demonstrating how a company can effectively engage their teams and move beyond doing for the sake of doing. They make the clear cut case that for most companies the scarcest of resources across the board are time talent and energy.

The pair spell out strategies for tracking things like meetings and communications strategies on eliminating wasted time and draining energy so that the team can focus on execution. They spell out how to strike a balance between autonomy and eliminating back and spirit breaking bureaucracy and micromanagement. Nothing will drive your best people to the exit faster.

I found the section of the book that focused on operational models and how nothing can stop execution dead in its tracks faster than the operational decision making process. Decision making can cause operational inertia that can be difficult if not impossible to overcome. Mankins and Garton make the case that leaders have to closely monitor and streamline the approval process to keep the execution train moving forward.

Hard Work

Rise and Grind: Outperform, Outwork, and Outhustle Your Way to a More Successful and Rewarding Life – Daymond John and Daniel Paisner (Currency)

Shark Tank investor and FUBU founder Daymond John, along with co-author Daniel Paisner, is out with his latest book, Rise and Grind: Outperform, Outwork, and Outhustle Your Way to a More Successful and Rewarding Life, in which they interview a diverse mix of successful entrepreneurs and celebrities to get their take on how they scratch out success.

Call it grit, determination, hustle or just plain old fashioned hard work it is the level of determination that you bring to business that is more often than not the determining factor when it comes to success or failure. It reminds me of one of my favorite business quotes that goes something like; “an entrepreneur is someone who will give up a 40 hour a week job to work an 80 hour a week one.”

As I worked my way through Rise and Grind, I found that it was the parts of the book where John detailed his hard work and grind to make FUBU into an $6 billion in sales, empire that were the most interesting and beneficial. With chapter heads like, Embrace the Grind, Grind All Night, and All Rise, you pretty much get what you expect.

The parts I had the most difficulty gravitating to, were the “celebrity” bits with Catherine Zeta Jones, Wendy Williams and Carlos Santana, which came off as either spiritual mumbo jumbo or generally not helpful to the average stiff looking to grind their way to success. While I like the concept, I think you will get more out of Tim Ferris’s Tools for Titans or Tribe of Mentors which run in a similar vein and are easy to pick and choose the content that best suits your needs.

Leadership Revised

Developing the Leader Within You 2.0 – John C. Maxwell – (Harper Collins Leadership)

Twenty-five years ago, John C. Maxwell first released the leadership development book Developing the Leader Within You, one of the truly classic texts that offered his early insight into how individuals could develop a leadership vision and values and put them to work influencing their teams and others around them.

Now, Maxwell has revisited and revised this classic to account for the trends and influences that have impacted on his process over the course of the past two and half decades, in Developing the Leader Within You 2.0. Reading through the revised text offers you a real insight into how prescient Maxwell’s original work truly was.

Current business and leadership buzzwords like influencer and change agent were part and parcel of what Maxwell did and continues to impart on his readers. For so many, developing influence and then knowing how to wield it is one of the most challenging aspects of being a leader. Maxwell offers a grand primer of how you can not only become influential, but the proper use and maintenance of it once it is in place.  

One thing I always like about Maxwell’s books is that they offer guidance and insight based on experience, but they never fall into the realm of snake oil by promising the magic elixir of leadership. Let’s face it, there is a lot of hard work and heavy lifting that goes into becoming a leader and while Maxwell is a master at offering tools and resources you can utilize to become a leader or a better leader, he also maintains a level of realism that is refreshing in a world filled with folks huckstering a new program to solve all of your leadership problems for a price.

Advertising as Social Incubator

Ogilvy on Advertising in the Digital Age – Miles Young – (Bloomsbury)

Those who don’t either work in the business of advertising or who don’t follow the business may not be aware of the name David Ogilvy. Mr. Ogilvy was one of the preeminent practitioners of the form; his name, written in his distinctive script, still adorns the fronts of the offices of his worldwide agency, Ogilvy & Mather.

Ogilvy is the author of what is widely proclaimed to be the go to treatise on the subject of advertising and how it is supposed to done, Ogilvy on Advertising, in which he offers a primer on all facets of advertising. Since its publication nearly 35 years ago the world and in particular the world of advertising has evolved at an astonishing pace.

Given that evolution it seems only fitting that this classic text would be updated and enhanced for the digital age in the form of Ogilvy on Advertising in the Digital Age. Equally fitting is the choice of who would be tasked with that update; Miles Young, joined Ogilvy & Mather in 1983 and rose through the ranks to become the worldwide chairman of the agency in 2009. In September of 2016 he became the dean of New College, Oxford and he remains the non-executive chairman of Ogilvy & Mather.

Delving into this densely written and researched volume is a time consuming and at times difficult task. Given its seemingly microscopic text and literally thousands of miniaturized graphic examples of you will find yourself having to reexamine passages and the visuals multiple times to take in their full meaning.

While the concepts Young/Ogilvy describe in the course of the book are certainly of interest to me, since I make my living working in advertising/marketing, I found myself wondering at times what Mr. Ogilvy’s take on this update might be. At times Young seems to suggest, and certainly there are a multitude of examples of the business drifting in this direction, that advertising has moved away from trying to influence the buying behaviors of customers and into the realm of social incubator; more focused on shifting social mores than selling products and services.

Influence has become a massive commodity in this day and age of social and digital media, not always for the better. Businesses, often enabled by advertising and social agencies, no longer seem to concern themselves with the possibility that they may piss off half of their potential consumers by staking out a position on a social issue. What used to be focused on moving products and selling services has become more of a social dance of political correctness.

Young seems to champion this direction to distraction. He posits that there is a need to change the perception of advertising and how women are perceived by upping the influence of women in the leadership roles of ad agencies. While that is certainly laudable, has Mr. Young taken a look at an average hour of network television and the overwhelming legion of stereotypically stupid men who populate ads ranging from household cleaning supplies and car ads to latest fixes from the pharmaceutical industry?

While Ogilvy on Advertising in the Digital Age, certainly offers some keen insight into the current state of advertising, it left me reaching for a well-thumbed copy of the original.

The Push You Need to Succeed

The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business: Make Great Money. Work The Way You Like. Have the Life You Want. – Elaine Pofeldt – (Lorena Jones Books)

You’ve thought about it…maybe for a long time. You really want to give it a whirl, but the thought of hitting up your obnoxious brother-in-law or rich cousin for some start up funding is enough to have you avoid pulling the trigger on your great idea. Or maybe you hold off because you think you don’t know what it takes to run a business, hire and deal with employees and everything involved with that.

Well, maybe the answer isn’t going down the road of building a traditional business with an office or storefront or warehouse; it could be as simple as starting a one person business that you can develop, grow and scale all by yourself without all of the startup funding and hassles of hiring people.

Elaine Pofeldt has made a career out of profiling small businesses for Fortune, Inc, Forbes and Money, among others; and when I say small I mean the number of employees (or lack thereof) not the bottom line. In Pofeldt’s new book, The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business: Make Great Money. Work The Way You Like. Have the Life You Want, she profiles a wide array of businesses in equally wide range of fields, that all have one thing in common, they are all a part of the growing movement of one person shops or so-called solopreneurs.

While The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business gives you some tremendous insight into how to get rolling with a one person business, please don’t expect it to tell you what business to start or for it to hold your hand and lead you to a big payday. What Pofeldt does is give you the basic tools to take the plunge into following your dream, often by citing how the folks she profiles made that leap. 

She also helps you avoid some of the repetitive pitfalls and mistakes that folks starting out make; in a sense you can learn from the mistakes of others.

Pofeldt also points you to some tools that will help you build your “team”, those folks who will help support you in a range of areas from production and fulfillment to content and growth strategy. If you’ve had the thought of starting your own thing, pursuing a dream, and just needed a push to get you rolling, then The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business, could be the push you need to succeed.

Strategic Collection

The Art of War: The Quintessential Collection of Military Strategy (Knickerbocker Classics) Sun Tzu, Nicolo Machiavelli, with An Introduction by Erik O. Ronningen - (Racepoint Publishing)

Over the course of time there have been shelves full of books written about strategic thinking and how to apply strategy to business. While many of these books have been touted as classics and have offered up nuggets of useful information most have not held up in the same fashion as the classic military strategy books that date back hundreds, if not thousands of years.

These military treatises have been interpreted and re-interpreted many times and have had variations that point to a way to utilize them in the world of business. Four of these truly classical takes on strategy are collected in a beautiful and extremely useful package dubbed, The Art of War: The Quintessential Collection of Military Strategy.

Housed in a sturdy slip cover, this well designed collection includes; Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Nicolo Machiavelli’s, The Prince, General Carl von Clausewitz’s, On War, and Fredrick the Great’s, Instructions to His Generals. Military veteran Erik O. Ronningen provides an introduction to the collection that not only informs, but adds historical context for each of the individual books.

While many renditions and interpretations of Sun Tzu have come before; I have muddle through any number of variations, the version included in this set tracks very well and is among the most relatible versions I have encountered. The von Clausewitz is a book that I have recommended many times after an instructor at West Point passed along his recommendation to me. There is something quintessential about each of these pieces that translates to even modern situations.

Perfect for fans of military history or business strategy, it has allowed me to jettison the individual, often dog eared copies of the four books. There is something substantial about the heft of this book/case that tells me it will stand the test of time, much like the texts it contains. While I have gifted my son with some of these books individually, I plan to purchase an additional copy to pass along to him this holiday season.