I lived more than 25 years in and around Silicon Valley. There have been many books written about the area, people and happenings (one of my all time favorites is The Nudist On The Nightshift), with many focused on those who start companies—the famous and infamous Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

Contrary to much of what you may read in the media none of it is dead; not the VCs, who are raising new funds, or the angels, who invest their own money, and certainly not the entrepreneurs.

Nor are the folks who write about them; some write from the halls of academia, some from the heights of punditship and a few who have actually been there/done that.

One such is Sramana Mitra, a tech entrepreneur who founded three companies, consults with Silicon Valley VCs, writes a column for Forbes and has a MS in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT.

Bootstrapping: Weapon of Mass Reconstruction is the second book in her Entrepreneur’s Journeys series and it’s a great read.

As opposed to a series of lessons to be taught, the book is a series of interviews with entrepreneurs highlighting their fascinating histories, the different paths they took and the difficulties they overcame.

It’s about the need for solid management skill—a book about implementers with vision as opposed to visionaries who depend on others to make it happen.

What you learn from them is up to you, but whether you plan to start a business or not you would have to work very hard not to benefit from their experiences.

The book’s focus is on companies that started and progressed without venture investment. Mitra does an excellent job of pointing out that even without IPOs, M&A and VCs throwing money like beads at Mardi Gras starting a company in your garage with a few friends is not only a solid approach—but a better one.

“If the next Google is to emerge and bring with it thousands of new jobs, it must first start over some kitchen table where not only hope but opportunity is readily available. Where entrepreneurs not only start businesses at a higher rate, but also survive and thrive at a higher rate.”

She points that many businesses fail for lack of funding, but if you don’t look for funding that roadblock ceases to exist.

“Through much discussion, writing, and brainstorming on each topic, I arrived at one core thesis: Not just entrepreneurship, but bootstrapped entrepreneurship is the true weapon of mass reconstruction.”

Having lived through the dot com bubble I know that this is true. Too much available investment makes trust fund babies of companies that need to grow up hungry, tough and scrappy.

Image credit: Sramana Mitra

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I was sent an advance copy of The Pursuit of Something Better: How an Underdog Company Defied the Odds, Won Customers’ Hearts, and Grew its Employees into Better People and it’s a great read.

What do you do with a slightly-below-mediocre company that keeps its business going by staying in small markets where its dominance is assured by an almost total lack of competition; a company with little regard for its employees and less for the communities in which it operates?

You bring in a CEO who has a passionate belief that the interaction between customers and frontline associates has the greatest influence on success and that the greatest impact on that is the way their leaders/managers treat them.

In other words, employees at every level do unto customers as their bosses do unto them.

Jack Rooney is as far from a  rock star CEO as you can get, but he understands that real leadership must permeate the entire company and knows that while true cultural change is neither fast nor cheap it works and therefore is worth the effort.

Rooney calls his approach the Dynamic Organization; he developed it under challenging conditions at Ameritech and brought it to full fruition at US Cellular, which he joined in 1999.

The Pursuit of Something Better tells both stories, Rooney’s and US Cellular’s; they are told by Dave Esler and Myra Kruger, the culture consultants who worked with him at USC and his previous company.

Both stories are the culmination of a man who believed in doing the right thing and a company that was changed accordingly.

“Jack Rooney and his slowly-expanding team of believers challenged the long-prevailing assumptions that business is a blood sport, that the advantage inevitably goes to the ruthless and the greed, that the only way to win is to hold your nose and leave your values at the door. He has proved beyond question, once and for all, regardless of what happens from her on, that a values-based model works, that it can raids both a company and the individuals who are part of it to undreamed-of-heights, to peak experiences that will last a lifetime and change the way those lives are lived.”

And while the authors do a great job of telling the story, the real leadership that Rooney provided, along with his concept of the Dynamic Organization, aren’t broken down or spelled out as a set of lessons and how-to’s separated for you to memorize.

It’s your responsibility to learn from what was done, drawing out those lessons that are most in synch with your MAP, because if they aren’t in synch there’s no way you’ll be able to implement them.

And in case you’re tempted to shrug it off as a fluke, I suggest that you give some long hard thought to Zappos and its ilk.

I highly recommend The Pursuit of Something Better. It’s fun, it’s fascinating.  You might even start to believe that you don’t have to leave your ethics at the door; at the very least you’ll know what to look for in your next interview.

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Today is about an author, by an author and ideas for you to tweak and author for your company.

Do you know who Ray Bradbury is? An icon in the science fiction world, writer of screenplays, and hater of the internet and lover of libraries. “When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great and Built to Last offers a new look at why companies with everything going for them blow it. Check out this review; if you’re looking for some good summer reading you could do a lot worse than How the Mighty Fall … and Why Some Companies Never Give In.

Last, but certainly not least, is a white paper from McKinsey on creating a performance culture. It’s good reading and you’ll come away with ideas even if you aren’t ‘the boss’.

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Good grief. It’s already Memorial Day weekend and that means the year is half over, the weather will be kind and the kids will be underfoot out of school.

I have just one item for you today.

Not counting the current economic debacle, have you ever wondered why companies rise and then fail, much like the Roman Empire?

I’ve always wondered how things can go downhill so fast when it takes so much time to turn them around.

Fortunately for me and all like-minded folks, Jim Collins, author of Good To Great, wondered, too.

The result of Collins wondering is found in How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In.

Better than a review, read this excerpt and see if it grabs you as it did me.

On another level, what are you doing this holiday weekend? I plan to spend most of mine digging in the dirt, since our weather is finally cooperating.

Leave me a note and whoever has the most interesting plans will receive a business book. Actually, the winner will be decided at random.org.

Image credit: MykReeve on flickr

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During a conversation about positional leadership Richard Barrett said, “Reminds me of a Seinfeld joke. He pointed to professional sports teams and asked about team loyalty. The players change, the coaches change, and sometimes even the stadium changes. So, the people are really loyal to the logos on the team uniforms, just a pile of laundry. Maybe positional leadership is just laundry leadership?”

I like that—laundry leadership. Great term.

So what’s available instead of laundry leadership, especially these days when so much of the laundry is dirty?

Why not organizational leadership? Leadership that percolates from every nook and cranny of the enterprise driving innovation and productivity far beyond the norm.

Following this to its natural conclusion makes leadership a corporate asset and one that needs to be managed for it to have the highest possible impact.

Jim Stroup, whose blog I love, is a major proponent of this idea and defines and explains it in his book Managing Leadership: Toward a New and Usable Understanding of What Leadership Really Is And How To Manage It.

Of all the leadership books, Managing Leadership is the first book I’ve seen that breaks with the accepted idea of the larger-than-life leader whose visions people embrace and follow almost blindly.

Stroup says today’s corporations are far too complex for one person to know everything; that, given a chance, leadership will come naturally and unstoppably from all parts and levels of the organization making it a characteristic of the organization, rather than one person’s crown.

Sadly, fear makes the idea that leadership comes from all people at all levels and should be managed to make the most of it anathema to many senior managers; they consider leadership a perk of seniority and prefer squashing it when the source doesn’t occupy the ‘correct’ position.

I highly recommend Jim’s book. Even if the management above you doesn’t embrace this paradigm, you can within your own group. Encourage your people to take the initiative, guide them as needed, then get out of the way and watch them fly.

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Among the annual flood of business and economics books, two recent ones caught my attention.

Shaking the Globe: Courageous Decision-Making in a Changing World by Blythe McGarvie (230 pages, John Wiley & Sons, 2009) addresses the fragmented, multi-polar world of global business.

In this book, targeted to execs at mid-to-large businesses, Ms. McGarvie surveys the plethora of challenges and opportunities that companies face in the new century. She details the diversity in three major areas: cultures, nations, and generations.

Simply put, companies no longer have the luxury of ignoring any of these diverse constituencies. Even if a company is not competing internationally, then it is defending its domestic market against a multi-national competitor.

Likewise for multi-generational workforces and multi-generational customer bases. For the first time ever, many companies have up to four generations in their workforces, and possibly four or even five generations in their customer bases. Illustrating this trend, a recent survey identified the fastest growing age-group of employees in the US as people in their seventies.

The book amply documents the simultaneous interconnection and fragmentation of businesses, people and markets across the globe.  It identifies various segments and constituencies in each major area, providing a good overview for readers wanting an introduction to the topic. The book concludes with three key messages:

“First, we need to understand how the world is interconnected and that all people in it are interdependent… We need to transcend our nationality.

Second, we must face the financial realities that created this need for going global.

Third, we should become aware of the six forces shaping personal courage if we are to go global. Namely, we experience different cultural norms as evident through beliefs, family, and time horizons; communicate with youth in new ways; tap into the talents of women; understand shareholder interests; capture the entrepreneurial drive for innovation; and respect individuals’ value systems.”

Most interesting are the personal vignettes which Ms. McGarvie uses to illustrate particular topics.

As a reader, I look forward to another book by the author, possibly in a case study format, in which she explores specific situations in much more depth, based on her personal experience.

Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse by Tom Woods (194 pages, 2009, Regnery Publishing, Inc.) is a timely analysis of the underlying causes of the current recession. Although the style is light, the analysis is thorough and detailed. Mr. Woods explores and debunks a number of myths about the current recession.

“In both cases [the Great Depression and the current recession] an inflationary credit boom brought about by the Fed’s lowering of interest rates led to massive resource misallocation and a distorted capital structure. The Fed tried in vain to inflate each of these booms back into existence, and grew frustrated with banks that refused to lend out the new money it was pumping into the banking system. In both cases the federal government sought to prop up prices… rather than allowing them to fall to a level that made sense [in the market].”

Comparing this recession to the Great Depression and many other recessions in the 1800’s, the book identifies the common culprit in the boom/bust business cycles – government manipulation of the currency. Although this conclusion is no great surprise, the compelling analysis makes for good reading. He defends free markets, pointing out that the money supply is not a free market, but a government-controlled monopoly.

Mr. Woods makes a damning case against the Federal Reserve, condemning it for hidden dealings, a bias toward inflation, and backroom collusion with banks. His analysis demonstrates that government action not only causes the booms and busts, but that same government action significantly delays and cripples the eventual recovery.

As if on cue, in December the Fed strong-armed Bank of America to complete its acquisition of Merrill Lynch even when that purchase significantly weakened the bank and increased the risk to the economy. Of course these machinations occurred in secret, with no disclosure and no transparency for investors, customers, and employees of either company.

In his conclusion, Mr. Woods calls for the abolition of the Fed, proving that he is an incurable optimist. Failing that, Mr. Woods predicts significant inflation ahead, due to government debasement of the currency. Government tampering with money is not just a recent phenomenon, as the author illustrates with examples as early as the tenth century, of governments (then kings) cheating their subjects by debasing the currency.

Even in the age of the internet and electronic commerce, some things have not changed.

Image credit: Amazon

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I was delighted when I was sent a free copy of Barack, Inc.: Winning Business Lessons of the Obama Campaign to review. Not just because I voted for him, but because this is a book about how to sell change, major change, to strangers and in doing so turn them into a community of supporters.

That’s what Apple did with the iPod and that’s what every CEO recognizes as being of paramount importance.

In a post last summer I said, “You must constantly change MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™)—your own, your people’s and your culture’s.

But it’s not just about managing change; it’s about creating a desire for it. It’s about creating an environment where changes are being driven by your workers, not just by you and your execs.”

That’s what Obama and his team did brilliantly and that’s why you should read the book.

Forget politics, think about the challenges your company faces. Survival isn’t enough.

The business world and consumer landscapes are changing—industries that downplay or ignore innovation to focus on survival and the status quo out of fear of upsetting their current business model are likely to be swept away by the transformation rocking the global economy.

To thrive, you need to engage your current stakeholders (investors, employees, vendors, current customers)—just as Obama did.

His success turned on three main points, he

1. kept his cool under all provocations,
2. applied social technologies, including blogs, texting, and viral videos, and
3. made himself synonymous with what he was selling—change.

Obama allowed nothing to be set in stone and moved swiftly when the landscape changed.

One of my favorite examples was his choice to reject funding limitations, although he had previously said he would accept them. Why?

Because he realized that the amount of money he would raise via the Net more than compensated for McCain’s bashing him for the switch.

Now substitute ‘innovation’ for money and ‘quarterly results’ for bashing and give it some hard thought.

Read the book; adopt/tweak/adjust its lessons and tools for your company’s situation and then execute, because all the theory and examples won’t help unless you have the courage to use them.

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I am a reader of books; they are my true comfort food. Books are my greatest joy; they lift me up when I’m down; make me smile when I’m sad; enhance my joy when I’m happy and keep me company when I’m lonely. They teach me; introduce me to people I’ll never meet, visit countries I’ll never see and even worlds in other universes. Books make me rich—without them I’d be bankrupt. I love books.

“We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.” –B. F. Skinner (Not texts, not email, not even blogs; but literature in all its myriad glory, whether high or low; ‘improving’ or escapist.)

“Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.” –Oprah Winfrey (They take you further than you ever dreamed possible,)

“You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.” –Paul Sweeney (But you can revisit them at any time.)

“Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.” –Heinrich Heine (That includes the metaphorical burning that comes from people imposing their view of what’s acceptable—it’s called censorship.)

“The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity…” –A. Edward Newton (Mine’s been reaching for decades and I don’t expect it to stop any time soon.)

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Another day, another leadership book. I sometimes wonder how far around the earth they would stretch if laid end to end. Most have viable lessons, useable by everyone, not just the person running the show.

Many of the attitudes, actions and lessons learned and offered are similar, but each seeks a teaching mechanism that will catch and hold your interest.

Not an easy task in a time of information abundance.

Chris Warner and Don Schmincke manage to do it in High Altitude Leadership.

It’s not that their leadership guidance is new, but the presentation is riveting.

I like it because it directly addresses MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and offers examples from a world where screwing up easily results in death—real death as in gone from the world, not the company.

Amazing how different the advice feels when viewed through the lens of the “death zone,” i.e., the top altitude of the planet’s tallest mountains where mistakes are usually fatal.

“In achieving peak performance as a high-altitude leader, you also risk death. It could be the death of a career, project, team or company, or in extreme situations, someone’s physical death. Learning the best way to succeed comes from studying the death zone.”

Chris Warner is founder of Earth Treks (indoor climbing centers) and has led more than 150 international expeditions.

Don Schmincke started as a scientist and engineer who became a management consultant after realizing that most management theories fail to work.

There are eight dangers in the death zone and, although the authors stress that it’s the high altitude leaders that face the same eight dangers, I think that everybody faces them every day and in all facets of their lives.

The dangers are

1. Fear of Death
2. Selfishness
3. Tool Seduction
4. Arrogance
5. Lone Heroism
6. Cowardice
7. Comfort
8. Gravity

Not really new information, but when seen in the light of the death zone they have a very different impact.

High Altitude Leadership is an exciting, sometimes hair-raising read (even when the transference to business doesn’t work well) that will get you thinking whether you’re heading a Fortune 50 or trying to raise your kids. It’s a book that helps you see the problems in your own MAP.

What the book doesn’t offer are easy, paste on solutions—changing how you think means changing your MAP which is doable, but not easy.

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An excerpt at HBS Working Knowledge from the newly published Ownership Quotient: Putting the Service Profit Chain to Work for Unbeatable Competitive Advantage by James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, and Joe Wheeler gives good food for thought this holiday.

As stated, a strong culture outlasts any charisma offered up by the so-called leaders; in fact, it’s the foundation of any company’s success.

Here is the short version of ten reasons why it’s worth the effort to build a great culture.

1. Leadership is critical in codifying and maintaining an organizational purpose, values, and vision. Leaders must set the example by living the elements of culture…
2. Like anything worthwhile, culture is something in which you invest.
3. Employees at all levels in an organization notice and validate the elements of culture.
4. Organizations with clearly codified cultures enjoy labor cost advantages for the following reasons…
5. Organizations with clearly codified and enforced cultures enjoy great employee and customer loyalty…
6. An operating strategy based on a strong, effective culture is selective of prospective customers.
7. The result of all this is “the best serving the best…”
8. This self-reinforcing source of operating leverage must be managed carefully to make sure that it does not result in the development of dogmatic cults with little capacity for change.
9. Organizations with strong and adaptive cultures foster effective succession in the leadership ranks.
   
10. Cultures can sour.

Read the article; consider the book.

Culture matters and it’s worth your time!

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