 I was fortunate enough to receive a book from Chris Brogan at PodCamp Toronto. Thanks Chris!
Strategy and the Fat Smoker; Doing What’s Obvious But Not Easy is a book written by David H. Maister. David is acknowledged as an authority on the management of professional service firms. The premise behind this book is rooted in the theory that most strategies fail because of the structure and commitment behind them. He summarizes that passion, people and principles are the cornerstone of any strategy. Combined they will offer a network of people with natural desire to achieve and are guided by a defined and trusted ideology. When asked whether you can succeed without each component, he offered a quote from his wife: “the most important ingredient in any recipe in the one you forgot to put in!” There were a number of takeaways from the book that I plan to incorporate into my thinking. Here are a few:
Mr. Maister admits in the introduction that this book is designed more as a reference and recommends you “dip into” as sections are of interest. The first five chapters cover strategy, the next section is applying strategy to excellence in client relationships, then a section on management and lastly he pulls it together with some real life examples and summary thoughts on what it takes to stay true to your strategies. One chapter that I found particular interesting was the “The Chief Executive’s Speech” where David re-printed a speech he wrote for a CEO that was about to begin his role for a large professional firm. You can listen to the podcast here. Overall, this was an interesting read and I recommend it to others. Image source: DavidMaister.com |
|
| If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed to receive future updates. You can also follow me on Twitter. Tell other people about this post. |
Entries from March 2009 ↓
Book Review: Strategy and the Fat Smoker
March 25th, 2009 — Book Review, Strategy
Book Review: The Art of Product Management
March 17th, 2009 — Book Review, Product Management
 I suspect by now most of you have read the book. Kudos! If not, consider it recommended by many. There were many positive reviews, including this one by Adam – Book Review: The Art of Product Management. I enjoyed reading this book very much. This book is a collection of articles that Rich has been writing over the past decade as part of his Product Bytes newsletter. Fortunately the context of each article is still relevant. Here is quick summary of a couple of my favorite chapters… The Accidental Agilist: This is a great 5-minute overview of what Agile Software Development means to product management. It highlights the positives to Product Management including frequent customer feedback, simpler requirements and better estimates. The Roadmap Less Travelled: Rich discusses creating three flavors of your roadmap for press and analysts, customers or prospects and development. Each will vary in specifics and details. The Strategic Secret Shopper: In this article, Rich discusses some competitive intelligence activities for gathering information on your competitors. Overall this book weaves its way through a variety of topics that are relevant to product managers. It is written in a language that is easy to understand and doesn’t weigh you down with specific details allowing you to take the gist of the story and apply it to your own situation. Tying this back to strategy, there are bits and pieces scattered that are relevant such as the article on roadmaps, pricing and competitive strategy. I would be remiss if I didn’t comment on the title of the book. Although I appreciate the subtle dance that is product management, product management is a science that is rooted in fact-based decisions for achieving very business-like objectives. There I feel better. Despite the title, I recommend this book to all product managers as both an educational read and future reference guide. You can order a copy from here… Write That Down – Amazon Book Store Image source: Amazon |
|
| If you enjoyed this post, please leave a comment or subscribe to the feed to receive future updates. You can also follow me on Twitter. Tell other people about this post. |
Keeping your Strategy Simple
March 8th, 2009 — Strategy
Ugh, 9:15 PM on a Sunday night and I am about to start a blog post with no crisp idea yet. This is going completely against my new strategy for writing to this blog. Rough start.
Couple weeks ago I asked for a list of strategies that would begin to make up your product strategy. One could say, I was overwhelmed by the response. In a moment of openness, I have no idea what some of them mean. I can make one guarantee, you don’t need all of them. Too much.
How can we keep this simple? If we scale back to the definition of strategy that I like to use…
“a long-term plan for success.”
… it will give us a framework for where to begin. For one, we need to know what the timeline is, so as to know how far out we need to plan. Also the success statement, our mission and goals will be guiding factors in determining the activities for our strategies.
We also know that your product strategy needs to be aligned with your corporate strategy and that each individual supporting strategy needs to be aligned with your product strategy (and corporate strategies if there are cross-functional components).
I’ll leave it to you to determine which strategies you need to define. To formulate this list you will want to consider your product, your supporting product network (i.e. embedded widgets, integrations, etc.) and the people involved in the construction and distribution of your product.
This is a good place to start, list all the affected parties. Once you have that done, we’ll work through what to do next. Bear in mind for some parties you will not be able to define the strategy, but you will need to be aware of it for your own planning.
NB: For your product a long-term may be 3 weeks or 3 years. It does not really matter as long as you communicate the length and plan for it.
Still here…
March 3rd, 2009 — General
I have had a few revelations from this blog… When I started in January I wanted to do three posts a week. Still my goal. I never realized how long it took to write a high quality post. I never realized how hard it was. I admire the regular bloggers more now (you went from stars to rock stars) because their posts are well thought out, creative and offer valuable insight.
With that said, I have been doing some soul searching, attended a podcamp (there were a few sessions on creativity) and I am starting to work through a strategy for better posts. I think success for me means three a week and something that generates comments.
Of course this all happened in the middle of four weeks of travel so time is at premium. I hope you will stay tuned.
It seemed easier at the Product Management View. Not sure why.
