Entrepreneurship « 800 CEO Read

May 20, 2013

Reinventing You

Filed under: Blog,Book Reviews,Careers,Entrepreneurship,Personal Development — Tags: Dorie Clark, Harvard Business Review Press — Michael @ 11:39 am

“What do people think of you? What do they say when you leave the room?” Maybe you don’t think you have a brand. Hopefully you don’t think that. As Dorie Clark demonstrates in her new book, Reinventing You, taking control of your professional future hinges on your acceptance and understanding of your current brand, and your ability to take control of where that brand is going.

OK—we can call it a reputation, if that makes you feel better. As Clark points out early on, we simply can’t afford to disregard the impact that our personal brand has on our success.

The idea that you can just keep your head down and work without any regard to office politics, for instance, has been thoroughly discredited.

Some might perceive a keen interest in one’s own reputation as tacky, but so what? If ‘too cool to care’ is your M.O., you might be risking your professional future. Even further, a lack of concern for your public image is a red flag to your manager—future or current—and if you’re a freelancer, it’s a warning to your potential clients. Companies and managers want to work with people on whom they can rely to be not only effective on the job, but also friendly and conscientious. If you’re not actively engaging your bosses (i.e. maintaining your brand), you’re risking being forgotten, or worse.

Reinventing You is a step-by-step manual for actively steering your career. The beginning is an assessment. Clark provides strategies for discovering the reality of your current brand, so that you can get an idea of what needs to change. This includes asking friends and colleagues to participate in focus groups, as well as using data from past performance reviews from employers. Especially if you’ve never done an assessment of your brand, you will learn a lot. One important thing to remember is that others’ perception of you is effectively reality. Whether you agree with the results of your assessment or not, it’s important that you take them seriously and use those results as your starting point.

After you have some idea how you look to the public, you’re ready to take aim on your destination and try your hand at living your future. Clark advises trying the work you’re interested in. It might not be easy to land your new dream job right off the bat, but you can get started on your new path by volunteering or shadowing in your target field. As Clark says:

To avoid costly mistakes—and wasting your energy—you can take a short-term test-drive.

This experience is often unpaid, but the most important part has already been stated: experience. It’s out there if you want it.

Throughout the rest of the book, Clark walks us through essentials like key skill development, finding a mentor, and one of my favorite topics, leveraging your points of difference. As a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ myself, I love bringing the crucial ‘outsider perspective’ to a project. In the current market, your diverse background is much more likely to be a benefit than a drawback. Clark demonstrates the benefits of transferable skills and your unique identity, and the importance of analyzing your skills through the lens of the current marketplace. Skills you’ve had and valued for a decade might no longer be valued, while other skills you perhaps have taken for granted might be more highly-valued than you thought. Don’t miss the value you bring to the job.

Your reinvention won’t be as simple as point A to point B. In fact, it’s almost certainly going to be hard work, and it doesn’t stop once you land that new job. Wherever you are going, Reinventing You will help you map your path and arrive to a newly-defined you with the skills and image to make your new career a success. The book even contains a self-assessment, re-cap questions at the end of each chapter, and group discussion questions at the back of the book. Start by reminding yourself that your future is too important to be left up to chance; then open Reinventing You and get started.

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February 15, 2013

Jack Covert Selects – Creating Room to Read

Filed under: Book Reviews,Entrepreneurship,General Business,Jack Covert Selects — Tags: Creating, good, Literacy, nonprofit, Read, RoomToRead, Wood — Sally @ 10:34 am

Creating Room to Read: A Story of Hope in the Battle for Global Literacy by John Wood, Viking Books, 320 pages, $27.95, Hardcover, February 2013, ISBN 9780670025985

Some of us have a hard time turning our desire to “do good” into real action, which is why the option to donate to foundations active in doing good is so beneficial. This same desire to do good is what makes reading John Wood’s new book, Creating Room to Read, energizing. The former Microsoft executive has created a nonprofit with true impact, which at the same time provides a model for other do-gooders who want to do more than simply donate money.

Wood introduces Creating Room to Read with a summary of the circumstances—a “perfect storm” of sorts—that enabled and motivated him to launch Room to Read: supportive parents, an impressive career as an executive in one of the world’s largest software companies, and an epiphany after witnessing an almost total lack of fundamental literary tools at a Nepalese school. With Room to Read, Wood’s audacious goal is to give children worldwide access to literacy.

There is no single factor that Wood points to in accounting for the incredible growth and success of Room to Read, but there’s a recurring theme throughout his book, and it extends to the people that he’s hired: “ … most of them have been what I call GSD people. I lifted one of Room to Read’s early directives from my old boss Steve Ballmer: ‘Get sh** [sic] done!’” This modus operandi has proven so effective that Room to Read doubled their staff size in twelve months.

Wood also introduces a companion concept to GSD when he shares one of his ten laws of fund-raising: “No Money = No Mission.” Maybe the story of Room to Read is so exciting because it marries the benevolent nature of a non-profit with the intensely ambitious goal of the organization. For example, Wood’s chapter titled “The War on Overhead” reveals his organization to have the same scrappy countenance that you’d expect to find in well-organized and super-lean startups. Room to Read is run like a business, not like a charity—a word banished from organizational language.

The non-profit path is not for all, and the pool shallows dramatically when you introduce globe trekking to low-traffic regions in which the odds are poor of finding well-run schools. But when an organization can so completely break the mold of the traditional non-profit and see such quick and undeniable success, there are universal insights to be learned. Because of that, Creating Room to Read for do-gooders and profiteers alike.

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December 18, 2012

The Elite Eight: Our Picks for the Top Business Books of 2012

Filed under: Book Awards,Entrepreneurship,Finance and Economics,General Business,General Management,Innovation,Leadership,Marketing,Personal Development,Sales,Small Business — Tags: 2012, awards, best, books, Business, list — Sally @ 12:40 pm

In anticipation of announcing the winner of the 2012 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year tomorrow, here’s a recap of the category winners. Click on the links below to read more about these top books of 2012.

Which book is *your* pick for the top book of the year?

~General Business: PRIVATE EMPIRE | Steve Coll
~Leadership: THE COMMITMENT ENGINE | John Jansch
~Management: THE ADVANTAGE | Pat Lencioni
~Innovation & Creativity: THE ICARUS DECEPTION | Seth Godin
~Small Business & Entrepreneurship: THE $100 STARTUP | Chris Guillibeau
~Sales & Marketing: TO SELL IS HUMAN | Dan Pink
~Personal Development: SO GOOD THEY CAN’T IGNORE YOU | Cal Newport
~Finance & Economics: FINANCE & THE GOOD SOCIETY | Robert Shiller

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November 29, 2012

Startup Communities

Filed under: Blog,Book Reviews,Entrepreneurship,Start-ups,Strategy — Michael @ 6:30 am

In the foreward to Brad Feld’s most recent book, Startup Communities, Steve Case begins:

During the past three decades, startups in the United States have created 40 million American jobs, all the net job creation in the country over that period. As we recover from a deep recession, our ability to innovate, build iconic companies, put people back to work, and inspire the world will once again be determined by whether entrepreneurs continue taking chances on a dream to start a business.

This point demonstrates the importance of Startup Communities. Somewhat similar to how Chris Guillibeau created The $100 Startup for first-time ‘solopreneurs’, Feld has created a kind of field guide for what he calls startup communities, clusters of startup activity inside a common geographic location. But Startup Communities is much more philosophical. The book is formatted such that it provides plenty of case studies that demonstrate success and sustainability, and Feld uses as a primary example Boulder, Colorado, a community he personally has worked inside of for nearly two decades. Feld asserts that Boulder may have the highest ‘entrepreneurial density’ in the world. Leave it to a serial entrepreneur to create new words and phrases where they are needed—Feld defines his entrepreneurial density this way: (number of entrepreneurs + number of people working for startups or high growth companies)/adult population.

Looking at the common explanations for why entrepreneurial success seems to naturally form these geographic clusters, we get an array of contributing factors: economy, geography and sociology. These three frameworks are how we have previously understood the startup community phenomena occurring across the US and globally. And now we have a fourth, with what Feld dubs The Boulder Thesis. This new framework identifies startup aggregation to a kind of intrinsic set of qualities that entrepreneurs tend toward. Entrepreneurs must be leaders, they must be committed, they must be inclusive and inviting, and they must be proactive at engaging their community. These four qualities might explain why startups form clusters; entrepreneurs are productive and magnetic, creating industry and drawing others to it naturally.

Throughout Startup Communities, Brad Feld brings into focus exactly which qualities define sustainable entrepreneurial clusters and how these communities can draw on other elements to thrive. He touches on the defining characteristics of a good startup leader, the common problems that stifle success in communities, and how tapping certain existing pools (peers, universities) can help to foster sustained growth. Much of what’s suggested in Startup Communities draws for me an immediate similarity to what Steven Johnson wrote about in his recently-published Future Perfect (another inspired read, and one of my favorites from 2012). Feld is advocating for the same distributed network structure that Johnson diagrammed: an open, inclusive network of doers. The chapter “Contrasts Between Entrepreneurs and Government” epitomizes this similarity; startups must aspire to action and produce results, an end with which government entities often struggle. The contrast underscores the importance of the community and how entrepreneurial success depends on successful connections inside and between networks.

Startup Communities is an exciting beginning to Feld’s new series for Wiley, “Startup Revolution”, and I look forward to what’s coming. You don’t need to be an entrepreneur to glean some wisdom from this dialogue. In our hyper-connected post-industrial age, there seem to be increasingly more large-scale logistical troubles that our out-of-touch (i.e. centralized) governments can’t solve. But there is one common element that looks promising when it comes to finding solutions and making real progress: community.

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September 24, 2012

Wild Company

Filed under: Blog,Entrepreneurship,General Business,Retail,Start-ups — Michael @ 2:40 pm

Experience is the best teacher. I learn with my hands. If you find yourself saying things like these, perhaps you’ll find Mel and Patricia Ziegler’s story about the birth of Banana Republic to be an interesting item. Judging by the success of both Banana Republic and The Republic of Tea, one would think the couple were wed in the church of entrepreneurial genius, only to honeymoon on the beaches of business administration. The Ziegler’s new book is called Wild Company: The Untold Story of Banana Republic, and it uncovers an entertaining and enlightening history that provides a new understanding of what has now become a ubiquitous brand.

The book’s title does not exaggerate; the story of how Banana Republic began is a wild one. In the mid-1970s, Mel and Patricia—a journalist and a graphic artist, respectively—did not seem likely candidates for entrepreneurial enterprise. But similar to the case with our beloved Chris Guillebeau, there existed in this couple the raw determination toward independence. They coupled this determination with a set of unique skills and perspectives and the result was a clothing retail enterprise unlike anyone had seen.

The hiccups were plentiful over their first few years’ operation, and even at the company’s earliest moments:

“When we picked up the catalogues, we couldn’t wait to get some reaction. We rushed over to see two friends who lived close by, a couple who were also writers.

We handed them each a copy. They stared at the leopard print cover. We beamed.

“Go ahead, read it!” Mel said as we plunked ourselves down on their sofa.

Quietly. Watching them. Turning the pages. We waited for laughs, smiles, wows. But when they finished, they looked first at each other and then at us. Uncomfortably puzzled.

“You don’t expect this to sell anything, do you?” she asked, checking to assure herself that it was just a literary exercise.

Again and again, the Zieglers tell of incidents that for many businesses would have prefigured failure. But maybe that’s what makes the story of Banana Republic’s early years so interesting and fun: every time the company’s downfall is imminent, some turn of fate appears to change the future. To heap another cliché on top of the two lines leading this review: you can’t make this stuff up!

What makes Wild Company such a page turner is the background of the authors. At a point well into the book, Mel has a constructive digression, offering us a quick explanation of his and Patricia’s backgrounds—their lives prior to meeting in San Francisco, and the forces that shaped their shared personality, goals, and vision:

…the social upheaval came in our high school and college years. It shattered any plans our parents had for us living conventional lives. In our minds, our futures became all about freedom, the freedom to disengage from the safe and suffocating middle-class consumer-driven existence we had each come to disdain. We were determined to live life our own way; the last thing either of us wanted was orthodoxy in any form, particularly in our work, and we saw self-sufficiency as key.

There’s no denying the success of Banana Republic, even at the point when it was acquired by Don Fisher, owner of The Gap (also covered in the book). The Gap was already very successful then, and Fisher obviously knew what he was doing when he made the couple an offer. Wild Company gives us a reminder regarding the fickle nature of success in the world of entrepreneurs, and it does so with a friendly narrative that’s difficult to set aside. Finally, it should be noted that this book is primarily a story about a creative couple and their early experiences with running a retail clothing store. The Banana Republic of today bears almost no resemblance to the Banana Republic of 1982. You most certainly don’t have to be a patron of the current Banana Republic to enjoy reading Wild Company.

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May 21, 2012

KnowledgeBlocks

Filed under: Ask 8cr!,Big Ideas,Book Reviews,Careers,Entrepreneurship,General Business,General Management,InBubbleWrap,Innovation,Internet,Leadership,Personal Development,Publishing Industry,Small Business,Technology,The Company,Thought Leaders,Training and Development — 800-CEO-READ @ 3:34 pm

We’re very pleased to announce the official opening of KnowledgeBlocks, a subscription-based service and online resource that gives readers access to quality content and business resources, a way to save, organize, and customize the information that is important to them, and engages business authors and thought leaders to help solve business problems and build new knowledge.

Among the key features of the site, subscribers have access to the following:

Explorations: Every month we publish three business book explorations that examine a narrow subject within a broader business topic. Each begins with a featured book and then branches out in unexpected directions, introducing you to author insights via podcast or interview, other related must-reads, curated links, and brief analyses that will help you build your business knowledge.
Thinkers-in-Residence: This key feature of the site offers authors the opportunity to connect directly to a dedicated audience via webinar and a stand-alone page of author-contributed material such as Q&As, blocks, and featured books.

Giveaways: Continuing the weekly book giveaway tradition of our inBubbleWrap program, we will put the latest releases in the hands of a smart, dedicated, interested and influential business audience.

The site is being administered and curated by the immensely talented and capable Sally Haldorson, who has been with the company for 14 years and was the editor of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, giving her a wealth of knowledge on the business genre that is hard to top.

We hope to see you over there.

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April 4, 2012

World Changers and Fortune

Filed under: Entrepreneurship — dylan @ 2:54 pm

John A. Byrne, former executive editor of BusinessWeek, editor in chief of Fast Company, and associate editor at Forbes, put out a great book in December with Portfolio called Game Changers: 25 Entrepreneurs Who Changed Business as We Knew It. It’s a really intriguing read, especially great for those who love biographies and personalities.

He recently revisited his list, picked The 12 Greatest Entrepreneurs of Our Time, and wrote a magazine piece for Fortune magazine on them. We all know the stories of many of these men—Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sam Walton (and yes, unlike the book, this list is all men which Byrne said came as a surprise to him)—but how many have heard the story of Infosys’s Narayana Murthy?

In 1974, Narayana Murthy was a 28-year-old politically left-leaning engineer on his way home to India from France. During his journey on a train, he struck up a conversation with one of the passengers “about the travails of living in an Iron Curtain country.” He says: “We were interrupted by some policemen who, I later gathered, were summoned by a young man who thought we were criticizing the Communist government of Bulgaria.”

Murthy was dragged out of the train and left in a small room without food or water for 72 hours, then thrown back on another departing train and released in Istanbul. His treatment purged Murthy of any affinity he had for the left and would ultimately help make him one of India’s and the world’s most successful capitalists. If he was to be a reformer, he realized, it would have to be through a system that was rejected by the Communists.

He proved that India could compete with the world by taking on the software development work that had long been the province of the West. As one of six co-founders of Infosys and the CEO for 21 years, Murthy helped spark the outsourcing revolution that has brought billions of dollars in wealth into the Indian economy and transformed his country into the world’s back office.

His important lesson: An organization starting from scratch must coalesce around a team of people with an enduring value system. “It is all about sacrifice today, fulfillment tomorrow,” explains Murthy, 65, who is now chairman emeritus. “It is all about sacrifice, hard work, lots of frustration, being away from your family, in the hope that someday you will get adequate returns from that.”

One entrepreneur who didn’t make the magazine cut was Herb Kohler Jr., who is one of only two people in the book who wasn’t the founder of the organization they run, and one of my favorites—probably in part because he and his company are from Wisconsin, but also because he’s a strong and original thinker who still retains an open mind. When asked by the author if he’d ever consider taking his company public public, Kohler responds:

Never. Never. Never. Never. In my lifetime, we never will. And I don’t think in my kid’s lifetime, they will. Privacy is an amazing benefit. Not because you are concealing anything. Internally we are very transparent. Concealment is not the issue. It’s a whole different set of rules. As a private company, you can sustain a project in periods of adversity that our competitors would quit. We keep going most of the time. Our thinking in managing and operations is at least for a year, not the quarter. At the top, we’re thinking as long as five to ten years out. And 50 percent of my life is very different because we’re not public. I can think more creatively instead of trying to appease twenty-two-year-old graduates on Wall Street.

Howard Schultz expressed similar frustrations with Wall Street in his book Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul (which Rodale just put out in paperback), but being the head of a public company, he actually had to deal with them or watch his stock price take a hit. Howard Schultz, incidentally, did make “>Byrnes’s article.

The most interesting thing about Kohler, other than his entire back story and the fact that he apparently rarely used the bathtubs his family is famous for during his rebellious hippie youth, is how his disbelief in vision opens up possibilities for his company:

Interestingly … I’m a person who doesn’t believe in vision. Obviously, I have some ideas about what I want to get done, but if I were to prescribe a vision for each of our major businesses I feel I would restrict how they develop. So we strongly encourage development in product processes within the confines of the business. I don’t want to narrow it or alter it. I don’t want to wipe out significant alternatives. We have a pretty thriving development community as a result.

Contrast that with others in the book like Steve Jobs or Oprah Winfrey, Muhammad Yunus or Richard Branson, and you’ll see that there isn’t one personality type or style that leads to being a great entrepreneur. You also begin to understand why a book like World Changers is so entertaining—and important to those just starting out.

Go get a taste with the article over at Fortune, and pick up the book for the full course. It’s delicious reading.

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March 28, 2012

The Milwaukee Leatherworker

Filed under: Entrepreneurship — dylan @ 4:05 pm

I don’t have a book for you today, but a video. From Milwaukee filmmaker Brian Artka, it profiles David Mitchell, the owner of the Mitchell Leather Factory and retail shop on Water Street here in the Third Ward of Milwaukee—just a few blocks away from us.

A part of downtown once known for its factories (the building we’re in was once a hosiery manufacturer), David is the last representative of the neighborhood’s manufacturing culture. It’s a story of family tradition, fine craftsmanship, love of and pride in one’s work, and a factory that would no longer be here if not for the efforts of a single individual. When Seth Godin talks of Linchpins, he is talking about men like David Mitchell. If you didn’t think manufacturing could be beautiful, well… check this out.

Size43 Presents: Mitchell Leather from size43, LLC on Vimeo.

Hat tip to Mike Rohde, who business book readers might know as the illustrator of Rework, for passing this along.

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November 22, 2011

LeaveSmarter: Carol Roth

Filed under: Blog,Entrepreneurship,Events,Small Business — Jon @ 4:18 pm

Business Strategist and Deal Maker Carol Roth visited Milwaukee last week for our LeaveSmarter series, sponsored by M&I Bank/BMO Financial Group, and Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek.

For those unfamiliar with Carol’s work, she comes from the investment banking industry, having raised over a billion dollars in venture capital, as well as completing multi-millions of dollars in mergers and acquisitions for her clients. Her philosophy is solid, but straight-truth, as she calls it, “Tough Love For Business.” These ideas are gathered and presented in her New York Times Bestselling book, The Entrepreneur Equation: Evaluating the Realities, Risks, and Rewards of Having Your Own Business.

For this event, the audience consisted mostly of established business owners and executives, so Carol focused her entrepreneurial principles on new product development, growth, partnerships, and other areas of expanding business. One of the most well-attended LeaveSmarter events yet, the captive audience asked many interesting questions – which I would gladly have posted video if our camera were not in for repairs.

For now, to see the event, you’ll have to use your imagination along with Dylan’s photographs above, and be sure to pick up a copy of Carol’s book if you haven’t yet. Also, catch her sometime on the Fox Network. Maybe someday she’ll have her own show?

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