The Know-It-All

Like so many of my generation, I have spent endless hours on Wikipedia learning about the offbeat subjects such as the history of the Embarcadero Freeway, the Munich U-Bahn, the Voodoo 2 chipset, and my great enemy, the MIME standard.

I was happy to learn that someone chose to take the quest for knowledge to its logical extreme: To read the Encyclopedia Brittanica from A-Z. The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs is a hilarious book. The author, a writer for Esquire magazine, spent over a year reading the 65k+ entries in the encyclopedia. Highly compressed and intermixed with his life in New York, it makes for an entertaining read. If you've spent significant chunks of your life surfing Wikipedia, this book is for you.

How the Mighty Fall

Wow, I haven't blogged in a while. A little while ago, I went to Europe for a week to see my parents and friends. Since then, I've been busy working on a new version of reMail, which has been consuming most of my time.

On the way back, I ran out of reading material for the flight. At Amsterdam Schipol airport, I bought How the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins' new book, at an unprecedented level of markup, even for an airport bookstore. But it was worth it.

Unlike Collins' previous books, this isn't about how to build a great company or turn a good one into a great one. It's about how great companies die, and how some of them almost die, and then recover.

For me, the main takeaway was this: Usually, when great companies start struggling, they don't die because they ignore their problems, or stop innovating. Instead, what happens is often they see that their current model isn't working, and then try to branch out into various, disconnected directions in an uncoordinated fashion.

A great example from the book is Rubbermaid, which in the 1990's was churning out one new product a day. Another common example of grasping for salvation seems to be bringing on a new, charismatic CEO or a game-changing acquisition.

Contrast this with Louis Gerstner's approach to turn around IBM. He didn't make big flashy moves in his first 100 days in office. Instead, he talked to customers and employees, came up with a single plan to turn IBM into a services company, and executed against that plan in a focused and disciplined manner, making IBM great again.

This is one common theme that runs through Collison's books: Avoid the flashy, the bold, the excessive. Be clear about the company's core values. Build your business through disciplined thought, disciplined action, and one small step at a time.

Update: Here's a great contrary opinion on this book.

The Alchemist

Some have ridiculed me for only having read business, programming, and economics books in the last few years - maybe with the occasional spy novel as long-haul flight fare. Thus, I was ready for some fiction, and I'm happy to say I chose the right book: The Alchemist by Paul Coelho [1]. Bill Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, and Will Smith all liked it, so I figured it must be good.

The Alchemist is a fable about following one's great goals in life. While the religious side of the book is not for me, it's underlying message is very strong: Identify your dreams, and follow them at all costs. Santiago, the main character, suffers various setbacks and distractions, spends a year working on something unrelated, and leaves much behind in the search for his treasure. The writing is simple and the book is brilliantly written. Perfect reading for entrepreneurs.

[1] Ironically, I read about The Alchemist in David Rothkopf's Superclass, a non-fiction book about how a small group of 6000 people runs the globe. I disagree with that book in many parts - more in a future book.

Re-Reading Built to Last

I'm re-reading Built to Last, the one book I keep referencing when talking about my startup. For one, it's one of the business books that's backed solid comparison studies, and its claims are backed by evidence. But it also emphasizes a style of building a company that makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. It promotes building your company such that it has:

• Core Values, out of which profits are not the #1 goal, but in balance with interests of employees, customers, and investors. A great example of this is Johnson & Johnson’s Credo.
• Big Hairy Audacious Goals - clear-cut, compelling, cutting edge goals the company sets to progress forward. An example is Boeing’s BHAG of building the 747.
• Cult-like Cultures: A cohesive staff of people who share company’s core ideology, are indoctrinated into the company culture, and develop a tight fit with others in the company, Nordstrom's sales teams operate in this manner.
• No charismatic figurehead leader, but leadership that focuses on building the organization instead of investing their time in extensive PR work. Sam Walton is this kind of guy.
• Constant experimentation that quickly addresses emerging market opportunities. While this is especially true for technology companies, a great example in the book is how Marriott invented the highly profitable flight catering business after seeing its customers buy lunch boxes for flights.

As an entrepreneur, if you haven’t read this book, you should.

P.S.: Here's a great article about the book's validity today.

Book Review: Send

Send is a refreshing book. In email research and email software startups, we spend our time coming up with better ways of displaying and organizing email. In this book, David Shipley, Op-Ed page editor of the New York Times and Will Schwalbe, a journalist and editor, discuss the other part of the equation: The humans behind those messages.

Send shines the light on emotions and motives: The emails that are sent to create the impression of progress. The passive-aggressive messages you send when you feel like you’ve been wronged and, more importantly, how to avoid them.

At parts, the book reads like "Email for Dummies", but there are some highlights: I shiver when people send me subject lines like "Quick question" and "Great News", when they should have written "Release date for next version?" and "Expenses approved". This is the book you want to hand out to the guilty.

I'm already wondering about how to put this into a product: Could we make software that orders people to rewrite the email in a more effective manner? It could pop up "Your subject line sucks" and make you rewrite it before you send. Could we find out the mood someone was in when sending a message and display it alongside the email? Food for thought.

Disclosure: I didn't buy this book - I found it in my snail mail one day, and I can only guess that the authors sent it to me. Keep'em coming - this is a good way to get your ideas read by the email community.

Pictures of Silicon Valley

I got a present! It's Gabriele Basilico's Silicon Valley 07, which accompanies an exhibition that is currently on display at the SF MOMA.

These photographs were all taken during Basilico's short visit to Silicon Valley last year. They show this region without pretense: In San Francisco, he took pictures of pretty hills with the Golden Gate in the background, but also of sketchier parts, used car dealerships, and deteriorating warehouses. In Silicon Valley, he photographs the sleek headquarters of Oracle and Sun, the villas of Palo Alto, and the cookie-cutter clone houses and McMansions.

For someone who lives here, everything seems very familiar: The images from highway 101, the annoying Verizon billboards, the skyline of San Francisco.

The book starts with a panorama on which you can see my bedroom window, and page 118 pictures the apartment complex where I used to live in Mountain View. That's almost a bit close to home.