Entries Tagged 'Book Review' ↓

can•dor (kndr) n. Frankness or sincerity of expression; openness.

Despite the book having leadership undertones throughout, there was a great chapter on leadership where Jack discussed eight things leaders do. This list includes team evaluation, coaching, articulating the vision, making decisions, probing and pushing with curiosity and inspiring risk taking.

lead•er•ship (lē-dər-ˌship n. The act or an instance of leading.

Lastly, he wrote a chapter on strategy. Given my interest in what strategy is and how people perceive, it was refreshing to see him try to simplify it. I loved this quote:

… strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.

After reading that, there is no wonder the first chapter was all about mission and values. His definition of strategy is:

Strategy means making clear-cut choices about how to compete. You cannot be everything to everybody, no matter what the size of your business or how deep its pockets.

I cannot disagree with that.

He then broke down five questions to make your strategy real:

1. What the playing field looks like now?
2. What the competition has been up to?
3. What you’ve been up to?
4. What’s around the corner?
5. What’s your winning move?

I could go on with lessons learned from this book, but like Made to Stick I highly recommend that you read this book.

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This is a repost of a post that I did on the Product Management View.

Just finished the book, Tuned In (by Phil Myers, Craig Stull, and David Meerman Scott), and I must say. Well done! The book, by simply stating, outlines the following steps: find unresolved problems, understand buyer personas, quantify the impact, create breakthrough experiences, articulate powerful ideas, establish authentic connections to create a resonator. A resonator is the perfect solution to a specific problem. It is a product or service so powerful that it sells itself, an offering that connects to what your market values most and an idea people immediately understand has value to them. I grabbed this content from their blog, Get Tuned In which is a great resource as well. I like the emphasis on problem statements and the potential buyer. So much time is spent today by Product Management on the post-sales Buyer.

Tuned In is one of those books that you will be entertained by, amazed by, not be able to put down and be inspired to change the way you approach product management. Most importantly, you will want your Executives to read it.

Here are some other bits of wisdom from the crowd on Tuned In.

• Get the book “Tuned In” today, it will breathe fun and enthusiasm into anything you do called work!
• The Tuned-In Product Manager
• How Product Managers can tune in
• Tuning Into Your Market
• The book on “Tuned In” companies

Buy the book here: Amazon, Chapters.ca

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Without trying to oversell, this is a MUST READ for product management.

An ‘idea‘ is a funny concept. It can be concrete or it can be abstract and for a lot people the vagueness of an idea may be translated into many different things including ideas as new products or ideas as new features for existing products. The relevancy of this book for product managers is that they live in a world of ideas and they need some to stick and some to slip away. (Note: The principles will help make sure the right ones stick and the wrong ones slip away.) They also need to communicate a variety of messages including problem statements, vision statements and strategies all of which can be parsed through the principles of this book. This book provided an excellent framework to help you successfully disseminate those ideas.

The authors explain the six qualities of an idea that will stick:

• Simplicity: This is perhaps my favourite quality because too often I see too much content and part way through the description people’s eyes start to glaze over. Every idea has a core message and it important for your idea to draw attention to that core message. Focus on the core and keep it simple.
• Unexpectedness: The concept here is that people remember what they weren’t expecting to hear, something out of the ordinary. I think the key for product management is being able to articulate your idea in such a way that makes the impact stand out. You will want people to walk away remembering the impact and feeling compassion for people who are dealing with the impact of the idea every day.
• Concreteness: How do you make it real? The book gave a classic product management example (read: customer visits) of an employee of General Mills who poured through reams of data only to try a novel approach of going into the homes of actual customers and observing them. Imagine that?!?! Needless to say the observations were not only concrete but some were even unexpected.
• Credibility: To be honest, I think this is one that most product managers will suffer from the most (easily correctable, read concreteness again). A lot of your credibility will come from the supporting data you have collected, but also your leadership skills will play here. Be mindful of how you play the credibility card in this situation as just throwing out names or titles can instantly kill credibility.
• Emotional: The interesting line from this section was: “For people to take action, they have to care.” As you start to champion your idea, think about the factors that will encourage people to take action.
• Stories: Great section on how to complement your idea with stories. Again, I direct you to refer to the concreteness section for inspiration in developing stories. The right story will also draw on the emotional and credible aspect of your idea.

The overarching concept through the book that plagues the stickiness of ideas is what the authors call the “Curse of Knowledge.” They define this as a common tendency people have that reduces their ability to create ideas that stick. People tend to communicate ideas in a way that is constrained by the fact that they already know what they are talking about and find it hard to imagine what it was like to not know. The authors offer that the best way to beat the curse is to apply the six principles and transform your ideas. The other tip for beating the Curse of Knowledge is to ask why as many times as necessary for a truer understanding of the problem (and therefore idea).

This is book is officially going my “must-read” list for product managers. It’ll shape the way you write and communicate your ideas in way that will hopefully make them stick.

P.S. I found this, the The Stickiness Aptitude Test, for you to validate whether your idea is sticky. Enjoy!

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Jeff defines (link) crowdsourcing as the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.

Interesting.

I thought about whether I would try to do a review on it for this blog and I was not sure if I found it relevant to the scope of the blog. If product management is involved in crowdsourcing, then it is mostly definitely a tactic in helping to achieve a strategy and if managed properly, with the proper expectations I would support a crowdsourcing initiative for you as a roadmap supporting activity. Not that you need my support or approval.

That being said, as product managers (or all associated types) start hearing the word “crowdsourcing” being used (or consider using it themselves), I highly recommend reading the book so that you can understand really what it means. I suspect most people think of it as a way to outsource a role or worse that crowdsourcing just magically manages itself.

I know what you are thinking. Jeff’s definition says, “taking a job … and outsourcing”, but I don’t read this as a job job I read this more as a outsourcing tasks.

I think crowdsourcing can be a successful tactic and as more people execute successful crowdsourcing projects you will hear more about it. My advice is be prepared.

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A world wide rave: What the heck is that?

A World Wide Rave is when people around the world are talking about you, your company, and your products. Whether you’re located in San Francisco, Dubai, or Reykjavík, it’s when global communities eagerly link to your stuff on the Web. It’s when online buzz drives buyers to your virtual doorstep. And it’s when tons of fans visit your Web site and your blog because they genuinely want to be there.

This book challenges you, with highly effective examples, to think about the ways you engage your buyers. By using blogs, e-books, videos, Twitter, Facebook, podcasts and any other online medium you are able to connect with your buyers in ways that weren’t possible before, but more importantly using the tools that they are using today. The evidence shows that if you understand their problems, tell them stories, and enable them to share those stories people will choose to do business with you.

There are six rules to creating a ‘world wide rave’ and they are:

1. Nobody cares about your products (except you)
2. No coercion required
3. Lose Control
4. Put Down Roots
5. Create Triggers to Encourage People to Share
6. Point the World to your Virtual Doorstep

I highly recommend you read the book to learn more about these six rules, but the gist of them is to stop talking about you, be open, freely share, have an online profile, be prepared to fail and have an online home.

One final point, Scott makes a great case that creating a ‘world wide rave’ will not happen overnight. You have to submerse yourself in understanding your buyer persona, their problems and start sharing. As product managers we already know that, but it is always nice to read additional reasons to reinforce that.

Now the challenge is adding at least two new activities, either starting a blog (targeted towards your buyers) or writing an e-book to your roadmap.

About the Author
David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist, keynote speaker, seminar leader, and the author of five books including World Wide Rave, The New Rules of Marketing & PR and Tuned In (with Craig Stull and Phil Myers). Check out his blog Web Ink Now and follow him on Twitter @dmscott.

Image source: worldwiderave.com

First, the red and blue ocean concept is very simple. Red oceans are well known and typically crowded with competitors where as blue oceans represent a potentially new market with a real opportunity and no competitors (we know there are always competitors).

The book was organized into two parts, first discovering a blue ocean and the second formulating a blue ocean strategy. In the simplest summary, maybe too simple, discovering a blue ocean seems to consist of finding new opportunities within your market that extend your offering (i.e. product, feature, solution, etc.) beyond where solutions exist today. The take-away from this is that you need to be open to (and probably exclusively focused on) the possibility that the market needs do not exist today and some market sensing will need to be executed. Basically, I like to spell ‘blue ocean’ like this I-N-N-O-V-A-T-I-O-N . That being said, the first section offered some interesting tools and suggestion for analyzing your market and contrasting your offering with your competitors to identify where you are successful and potentially competing to your own red ocean death. See footnote [1] for more information on those tools. The second part of this book runs through some basic strategy concepts for formulating the strategy.

One term I really liked from the book was ‘value innovation’. They define ‘value innovation’ as a process that focuses on value creation. Not rocket science but that extra word, value, really helps keep you focused on your innovation, now value innovation, activities.

Overall, this was a decent read. I picked up some interesting new terms and some best-practices on uncovering potential opportunities. I also learned bits and pieces about sequencing strategy (utility, price [2], cost and adoption), overcoming organizational hurdles (leadership) and building execution (fair process[3]) into your strategy.

[1] If you are interested in another product management related review – including working examples of the tools, please read Personas Make Blue Ocean Strategy Proactive on the Tyner Blain blog.

[2] Interesting discussion in the book about determining target price and then using that to shape the cost. Not vice-versa.

[3] Fair process builds execution into strategy by creating people’s buy-in up front.

Image source: Amazon.com, Inc.

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:

“… the only way you can achieve any strategic distinction is to do that (turn away business). Strategy is deciding whose business you are going to turn away.”

“Strategy is a set of rules or guidelines that tell you how to go about making decisions”

“The firm exists to help its people succeed, not the other way round.”

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