Category Archives: Leadership

Please God, Don’t Run Your Own Race

Posted on December 5, 2024 | 1 comment

Of all the dime-store clichés that pass for business strategy, the one I hate the most is, “run your own race.”

Why?

  • As a quote from the winner, it’s almost always survivor bias. “How’d I win? Well, I ran my own race.” Well, I’m sure most of the losers ran their own race too, but nobody’s interviewing them for pearls of wisdom.
  • It’s frequently used to imply that you should ignore the competition. “Oh, I didn’t worry too much about the other runners, I just ran my own race and stuck to the plan.” The part they leave out is that the plan was designed to beat the other runners. Sticking to the plan was all about the other runners, even if reacting their every move wasn’t part of it.
  • It sounds oh-so-good to say. So focused. So above the fray. So wise. So unencumbered by the competitive market. And it paints such a pretty picture: just run your own race, don’t get tangled up in distractions, and you will win.

Look, it’s not a bad response to an interview question. It’s arguably a very good one. But it’s rotten management advice. “Run your own race” isn’t strategy. It’s solipsism.

Sure, if you’re running a race recreationally, by all means run your own race and I hope you have a great time.

But if you’re in business, if you’re running a startup and trying to apply this advice, then you need to consider yourself an elite competitor. You are running to win. So, if running your own race means sticking to your race plan, and that race plan is a plan to win and one that you can execute, then go ahead and run your own race. Because, by transitivity, it is a plan to win. Which is one definition of strategy.

One thing I dislike is when great executives from great companies who were in unique situations talk about “running your own race” as if everybody should. Don’t be too focused on the competition. Just focus on customers. The rest will take care of itself.

And it will — if you’re, e.g., Tableau and it’s 2010. They had an amazing product, a great team, a greenfield market — and virtually no viable competitors. They ran their own race for a long time, and it worked. But just because they could run their own race doesn’t mean that you can run yours. If you’re the number four vendor in a high-switching cost, platform market, then running your own race is more dangerous than being an Alaskan crab fisherman.

In some deep vertical SaaS markets, I’ve found companies that can ignore the competition and run their own race. That’s either because there is no competition or it’s a handful of low-growth, bootstrapped companies in a space where everyone can achieve their objectives without smacking into each other too much. (Think: there’s enough market here for everyone.)

But if you don’t happen to be in that situation. If you’re VC-backed, you’re definitionally playing to win. If you’re PE-backed you’re either playing to win or playing to make plan. (Or win, if you define “winning” as making the plan that gets your investors a 3x in 4-6 years.)

Startups are a competitive sport. Exciting new spaces attract numerous brilliant teams to fight for the emerging market. Too many retired executives forget this, preferring to dish out nostalgia over practical advice. Markets are composed of deals and deals are often streetfights. There’s big money at stake in Silicon Valley startups and lots of management teams come playing to win. Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.

This is not the environment to run your own race, focus on your world-changing vision, and ignore the competition. This is the environment that calls for strong execution of competitive strategy to win deals and company strategy to overcome your largest obstacles.

Sure, you can run your own race. As long as your plan is the plan to win and within your ability to execute. Then go right ahead. Otherwise, make a new race plan.

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Posted in Competition, Leadership, Management, Startups, Strategy

Design Your Organization for the Conflicts You Want to Hear About

Posted on October 12, 2024 | 2 comments

Organization design seems a popular topic these days. Maybe it’s the downturn. Maybe it’s just planning season. But either way, many people are asking me questions about how to design their organizations for 2025 and beyond. Questions like:

  • Should marketing report into sales?
  • Should engineering and product management (PM) report into a combined product org?
  • Should we unite customer success and sales?
  • Should North American and Europe report into a single head of sales?

The argument for combining teams is always about reducing span of control. This is a goal that many CEOs (and some boards) share, but one that somehow escaped one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, Jensen Huang, who has about 60 direct reports.

While 60 seems a bit much, I’ve frankly never understood span-of-control reduction as a top organization design goal. As CEO, you should be managing senior people so they shouldn’t take that much time. So, why not have 8 or 10 direct reports? If you can’t handle that, maybe the problem isn’t that you have too many reports, but that you’re managing them too closely. Maybe the solution isn’t to reduce their number, but to loosen the reins.

I have two rules for organization design:

  • Design for conflict. Specifically, design your organization for the conflicts you want to hear about.
  • Ensure value-add. Don’t put thing B under thing A unless the executive in charge can add value to both.

Design for Conflict

When you put, for example, engineering under product, what don’t you hear about anymore? Conflicts between PM and ENG about the time and resources required to build things. Those conflicts get silenced because the SVP of Product will suppress them, resolving them in the family.

When you put marketing under sales, what don’t you hear about anymore? Conflicts about whether sales strategy is too unfocused to enable marketing targeting. Or whether sales follows-up on new oppties in a timely manner. Those get silenced because the CRO wants to manage their own house. “Let’s resolve that at the sales QBR, not the e-staff meeting.”

When you put customer success under sales, what don’t you hear about anymore? Conflicts about whether sales is overselling to the point that customers won’t be successful and ergo won’t renew. If churn looks high, well, it must be the product. It’s not delivering, but against what expectations, set by whom? All silenced.

The rule is simple. By combining two departments, you are asking one person to resolve the conflicts between them. They’re not evil to do so; it’s the job you asked them to do. They will keep these conflicts in the family. And, as the organization grows, you will hire increasingly senior people to do just that. But with each layer and with each combination, you get more insulated from the ground truth.

So the question is simple: which conflicts do you want to hear about? Which do you want to pay someone else to resolve and which do you want brought to your office? Which are strategic to the company and potentially involve Crux-level issues?

  • If you separate PM and ENG, you’ll hear a lot about specs, resources, and timelines.
  • If you separate sales and marketing, you’ll hear a lot about awareness, leads, and follow-up.
  • If you separate customer success and sales, you’ll hear a lot about over-selling.

There’s no magical answer here. Just a framework for thinking about it. Determine the conflicts you want to hear about — presumably because you can add the most value in resolving them — and then design the organization to make sure you do.

Ensure Value-Add

The other principle is to always ensure value-add, beyond the (sometimes merely assumed) alignment that comes from having a common boss. So, sales wants the SDRs to report to them? Why? Has the sales VP managed an SDR team before? Are they good at it? Are they even interested in it? Can they add value? Are they sufficiently metrics and process-oriented, particularly if the VP comes from an enterprise background?

This principle drives a number of positive effects:

  • It defeats empire building. Sometimes the VP wants the SDR team not because they care about them, but because they want a bigger organization. Or they think it will look good on their resume for their next job search. They’re not actually interested in the job. They’re interested only in being able to say that they did it. That’s not good enough.
  • It encourages learning and development. When the VP of sales first asks about managing the SDRs, you can tell them to go make themselves a valid candidate. Get close to the SDRs now. Understand their challenges and offer to help out. Network with friends and colleagues on SDR team management. Read up on best practices. Convince me that you’d make the short list of candidates and then we can have a conversation.
  • You attract stronger department heads. Everyone should work for someone they can learn from. Saying the boss is the boss because, “well, we had to plug the team in somewhere,” is a terrible reason for an organizational structure. If you apply the value-add rule, functions will tend to report higher in the chain, creating a flatter org, and be placed only under those who can add value to them. This, in turn, attracts stronger candidates to run them. Who wants to be the CMO when it reports to a CRO who understands nothing about marketing? Nobody.

One great example is whether the VP of European Sales should report to the existing VP of Sales when you expand into Europe. If your VP of Sales is clever, they’ve already given themselves the title “VP of Worldwide Sales,” and you let them do it because it was moot at the time. But now they’ll argue it’s a demotion if Europe doesn’t report to them. And they’ll argue that they know how to sell the software in North America (really, the USA) and that knowledge should translate anywhere. And that everybody does it this way. You can almost hear them screaming: pick me, pick me!

But what they should be screaming is: I can add value, I can add value! And if they can, you should listen. But my questions would be:

  • Do you have a passport? (This wipes out about half of Americans.)
  • Have you ever lived in Europe?
  • Do you speak any European languages?
  • Have you ever sold and/or managed people in Europe?
  • Do you you have a network of people we can hire in Europe?
  • Do you have relationships with contacts at target customers in Europe?
  • Do you know any strategic partners we can work with in Europe?

So, other than not having a passport, never having been there, knowing no one, and not being able to communicate, you strike me as an outstanding candidate for the job.

We do this all the time nevertheless, and Europeans have grown accustomed to reporting into people who can’t add value. But for my nickel, I’d rather hire a VP of EMEA who had great answers to my questions and reported directly to me.

Mitigation Strategies

As your organization grows, you will invariably combine teams and lose your line of communication into certain conflicts. I know three ways to mitigate this:

  • Build a culture of transparency where direct reports into e-staffers are encouraged to and rewarded for speaking frankly about in-the-family problems.
  • Run an extended QBR. Don’t just invite the e-staff to the quarterly business review, but also invite people among their direct reports. For example, the head of customer success if it reports into the CRO, or the head of engineering if it reports into product. Ask them to deliver the same, standard presentation that the e-staffers do. This effectively flattens the organization by creating an extended leadership team that goes beyond the CEO’s direct reports.
  • Use reporting. Good reporting can reach through organizational layers and keep you in touch with what’s happening. For example, even if customer support doesn’t report to you and isn’t represented on the extended leadership team, you can still keep an eye on metrics and KPIs as well as simply on OKRs.

In this post, I’ve argued that the primary goal in organization design should not be reducing of span-of-control, but in surfacing conflicts most important to the company. I’ve also introduced a value-add rule that says no department should report into an executive who can’t add value to it. And finally, knowing that consolidation is inevitable over time as a successful company scales, I’ve offered three strategies to mitigate some of the signal loss that comes with such expansion.

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Posted in Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Management, Scaling, Startups

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The “Idea Bake Sale” and Why It’s a Bad Idea to Have One

Posted on September 21, 2024 | 1 comment

“Phew, we sure have a lot of challenges right now,” the frustrated CEO mused after completing a day at the annual planning offsite. “While my executive team is pretty solid day to day, they’re too in-the-box. They’re not creative. They never have any new ideas about how to fix our problems.”

“Other than asking me for more headcount. They’re pretty darn good at doing that,” the CEO chuckled, gazing pensively over the whitecaps from the patio of the luxury resort where the executive leadership team (ELT) was huddled.

“Wait. I’ve got an idea. We can rely on our people. They’re great. They’re out there every day with our customers. I bet they have tons of ideas on what we can do better. How we can improve our organization and processes. What features we should put into the product to make customers happier. And maybe even what new products we should build.”

“Eureka!” the CEO thought. “Since we feel kind of stuck here, I’ll declare the Leverage Our Super Team initiative. We’ll ask every employee for a good idea about how to improve the company. They’re going to love this. People are going to feel so engaged and they’ll love that all their voices are being heard.”

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And there are plenty of good intentions here. Intentions are not the problem.

But what happens Monday morning, when everyone sees the company-wide message announcing the new initiative?

By noon, half the company is polishing up their resumes. And that’s after having called their significant others to delay any pending large purchases.

This is what you might hear, if you could eavesdrop by the virtual watercooler:

  • We’re screwed with a capital S.
  • Jeez, I thought we were in trouble before, but now I’m sure.
  • Our leadership team is quite simply out of its depth. Nice people, but they don’t know how to run the company.
  • We’re caught in a strategic squeeze and the best they can come up with — after three days at an offsite — is asking us what to do?
  • Don’t they get the big bucks in order to actually run the company?
  • Sure, we’re in a tough situation right now, but we can get out of it. What we need is leadership, but this ain’t it.
  • Did anybody notice that the acronym for the new, save-the-company initiative is LOST? Leverage Our Super Team. That’s just perfect.

This happens all the time. I’ve seen it at just about every company I’ve worked at for 30+ years.

The first time I saw one of these initiatives, it came complete with a marketing graphic, a depiction of teamwork featuring an eight-person crew boat with everyone pulling together — but missing the coxswain.

You literally cannot make this shit up.

The point here being:

  • People expect leaders to lead.
  • They get scared when they don’t.
  • People understand when the company’s in a tough spot.
  • All they generally want to hear is that leadership is aware of the situation (i.e., not in denial) and has a reasonable plan to address it.

As for the “idea bake sale” (think: sales will make brownies, marketing will make cookies, and finance will make cupcakes to save the company), it’s a terrible idea because it does the opposite:

  • Leaders abdicate instead of lead.
  • It clearly demonstrates that there is no plan. (Let’s hold the idea bake sale to make one.)
  • In some cases, it’s patently absurd. (Let’s ask the receptionist what new products to build.)
  • And, if everyone were doing their job, for the most part we wouldn’t need one.

Isn’t it PM’s job to know what features customers want? Isn’t it management’s job to work on improving our processes? Isn’t it the CEO, CPO, and CTO’s job to work on product strategy, including product line expansion? If those processes aren’t working, let’s fix the root cause. Not have an idea bake sale.

I’m all for the odd hackathon to flush out potential new features. Or the brainstorming meeting with PM to discuss product line strategy. Or the town hall with the sellers to hear concerns about our sales process. Or the partner summit where we can hear from people outside the company about how we’re doing. These events harness energy and drive discussion. And they’re all normal parts of a leader’s job.

But that is not the same as throwing your hands in the air and effectively saying, “we don’t know what to do — what do you people think?”

The moral: one day, if you find yourself in a meeting where somebody suggests an idea bake sale, do these three things:

  • Kill the idea off quickly
  • Directly address any failing core processes that made it seem necessary
  • Ensure that you’re doing the usual communications and strategy events

Most importantly, recognize that the bake sale might just be a distraction from an elephant in the room, and what needs discussion is the elephant, not the bake sale.

You can use The Crux to help you do that.

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Strategy as a Series of Beliefs

Posted on May 12, 2024 | 2 comments

I’m always looking for better ways to distill strategy. My favorite strategy author is Richard Rumelt, who wrote Good Strategy, Bad Strategy and the more recent but less acclaimed follow-on, The Crux.

I love Rumelt’s work for two reasons:

  • He takes a wrecking ball to the garbage that is often passed off as strategy. Aspirations are not strategy. Goals and OKRs are not strategy. Financial projections and forecasts are not strategy. SWOT analyses and five forces analyses are not strategy. Driving results is not strategy. Deciding to be a butcher, baker, or candlestick maker is not strategy. You may, like me, find reading these takedowns not only educational, but therapeutic.
  • He whittles strategy down to the head of a pin. First, by defining strategy as identifying and planning to overcome a company’s most important challenge (aka, challenge-driven strategy). Then, by capturing what he calls the kernel of strategy: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and a set of coherent actions.

Much as I love the kernel idea, in one assignment a few years back we tried to apply this framework and stumbled into a problem. We arrived at a diagnosis fairly easily, but got stuck trying to create a guiding policy. We found that the diagnosis alone wasn’t enough to arrive at a guiding policy. We kept needing to insert a few assumptions (or beliefs) about the future before we could agree on a guiding policy. We drifted to a modified framework that looked like this:

  • Given diagnosis X,
  • And beliefs Y,
  • We choose guiding policy Z,
  • And coherent actions 1-5 to implement it.

I was so excited with this discovery that I emailed Rumelt. While he kindly did reply, I don’t think my point landed. He directed me to his then-upcoming book and suggested it would be addressed there. The Crux was subsequently published and I don’t think it was. Never meet your heroes, as Flaubert wrote, a little gold always rubs off when you do.

Undeterred, I continued to use Rumelt’s framework, but added beliefs as an explicit part. I’ve always felt that diagnosis was by far the hardest part of strategy, as I believe does Rumelt, given this excerpt from his first book:

“After my colleague John Mamer stepped down as dean of the UCLA Anderson School of Management, he wanted to take a stab at teaching strategy. To acquaint himself with the subject, he sat in on ten of my class sessions. Somewhere around class number seven we were chatting about pedagogy and I noted that many of the lessons learned in a strategy course come in the form of the questions asked as study assignments and asked in class. These questions distill decades of experience about useful things to think about in exploring complex situations. John gave me a sidelong look and said, “It looks to me as if there is really only one question you are asking in each case. That question is ‘What’s going on here?’ ” John’s comment was something I had never heard said explicitly, but it was instantly and obviously correct. A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.”

I believe Rumelt would say that what I call beliefs are simply part of the diagnosis. For example, he said, “Netflix’s overall challenge (in 2018) was that it could no longer count on contracting for existing good TV and studio films at reasonable prices.” I’d argue that Rumelt’s Netflix diagnosis is actually two statements in one. Writing from the viewpoint of Netflix:

  • That today we find ourselves increasingly hit with large price increases and/or a non-desire to renew distribution agreements for content.
  • We believe the vast majority of the content producers will enter the content distribution business via streaming services in the next few years and ergo will not want or need to work with us.

First, that’s one hell of a “gnarly challenge” as Rumelt likes to call the crux issue. Second, I like splitting it because, particularly when working with a good-sized group to build strategy, it helps to distinguish between what we are seeing right now versus what we anticipate in the future. The former are facts, the latter are beliefs — and most of the interesting debate is not about the facts, but the beliefs.

I was happy with this modified framework until a strange thing happened the other day. I was talking with a founder and — lightbulb moment — I realized I could further distill strategy simply by looking only at beliefs. Not a laundry list of them (which can easily get generated in such a process), but what I call the primary belief, the big one, the one that resolves the crux issue and drives all the rest.

I immediately tried to apply this idea to my experience at Business Objects where, for nearly a decade, I worked as one of the top executives as we grew the company from $30M to $1B. I found it was pretty easy to divide 16 years of history into four eras categorized by primary belief:

  • Era 1 (5 years). We believe customers will pay 5x the price of commodity query and reporting (Q&R) tools for an enterprise solution.
  • Era 2 (4 years). We believe that Q&R and online analytical processing (OLAP) tools should be integrated in one product.
  • Era 3 (4 years). We believe the Internet will require a wholesale rewrite of business intelligence (BI) and enable both existing internal and new external use-cases.
  • Era 4 (3 years). We believe that customers will increasingly want to buy an integrated suite of BI tools, including Q&R, OLAP, and enterprise reporting.

These beliefs were largely heretical at the time. $500/seat for a Q&R tool? Insane. Integrating Q&R and OLAP? Can’t be done (and “they” were nearly right). Extranet BI? Never, corporate data is highly proprietary. BI suites? No, customers still want best of breed!

But those four beliefs took us from $0 to $1B in revenues. The beliefs alone are not enough, of course. You need to build strategies (e.g., product, go-to-market) and execute against them. In era 1, we needed a highly targeted strategy to break into the market with this radical idea. In era 2, we needed to build and market the integrated product. In era 3, we needed to devise the right web product strategy, a task that befuddled several of our competitors.

But I can and will argue that it all flowed from the underlying primary belief.

I worked with Alation in various capacities for many years, so I feel I know their evolution pretty well. Let me try the same exercise, as an outsider looking in, separating Alation’s history into three eras and assign a name to each:

  • Era 1 (search and discovery). We believe that companies will need a centralized data catalog to help people find the data they need, and that machine-learning can help with that finding.
  • Era 2 (data governance). We believe that data catalogs (almost surprisingly) turn out to be an ideal tool for data governance, particularly the non-invasive variety.
  • Era 3 (data intelligence platform). We believe that customers will increasingly want to buy a data intelligence platform that includes data search & discovery, governance, and lineage.

I’m probably missing the company’s strong commitment to cloud platforms as part of era 3 and there may be a new era 4, but you get the idea. Again these beliefs were often heretical at the time. A lot of people didn’t believe data catalogs were even needed. Most people believed data governance was a distinct category and that the “prevent access” ethos of data governance ran strongly counter to the “enable access” ethos of data catalogs. Until recently, many people didn’t believe in data intelligence platforms (but with help from IDC and Databricks that debate has been put to bed). Again, beliefs alone are not enough. There are numerous also-ran data catalog companies who presumably shared some of these beliefs, but built the wrong strategies in response or lacked Alation’s relentless drive in execution.

I often say that strategy is best analyzed in reflection. Meaning that somehow everything is clearer and simpler when you look back 10 or 20 years to reflect upon what happened. In fact, I often encourage people to do a future look-back when formulating strategy: “imagine it’s ten years from now and your company won in the market — now tell me why.”

My conclusions from all this are:

  • Read Rumelt. Both Good Strategy, Bad Strategy and The Crux.
  • Add beliefs to the framework. More precisely, separate the diagnosis into present truths and future beliefs.
  • Work to find the one primary belief for your current situation. If you’re a new startup, that belief is probably embedded in the answer to, “why did you found the company?” If you’ve been around for a while, start by analyzing your history and trying to break it into belief-driven eras.
  • Once you’ve found a potentially era-defining primary belief, resume the Rumelt exercise: define guiding policy and coherent actions around it.

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Do Superachievers Read Business Books?

Posted on November 8, 2023 | Leave a comment

I spoke a while back on go-to-market scaling at the 10X CEO Accelerate conference in Deer Valley to about eighty startup CEOs. I dropped a few references to popular business books into the material (e.g., Blue Ocean Strategy, Inside the Tornado, The Crux), as I often do, and discussed them quickly in passing.

This prompted a question at the end of the session that went something like this:

“You mentioned several business books in your speech.  I must admit that I don’t read a lot of business books.  I don’t have any time.  And I don’t particularly like reading.  So, my question is do superachievers actually read these books and view reading them as part of their success?”

It was a helluva good question. 

While I certainly have my own take on the answer, I must admit that I’m an information junkie who loves reading (so my view will likely be non-representative) and while I’m an achiever, I wouldn’t say I’m a superachiever. But, I thought, I know some superachievers [1] and some of them work with other superachievers [2] so I can ask for their takes and then fuse those composite opinions into a blog post [3].

Here it is.

Do Super Achievers (Actually) Read Business Books?

Before answering, let me address the fact that it’s often presented as a loaded question, where you can almost feel the word “actually” silently slipped into the phrasing. In its loaded form, the question comes implicitly packed with some of these widely-held assumptions:

  • Business books are bullshit.
  • They’re the province of professors and MBAs.
  • At best, they contain one good idea inflated into a 250-page book because you can’t sell pamphlets for $25.
  • Wannabes read business books as a way to lead their business life by proxy as opposed to putting it all on the playing field.

To the extent you can view attitudes about MBAs as representative of attitudes towards business books [4], you can feel a further lack of love.

“As much as possible, avoid hiring MBAs.  Our position is that we hire someone in spite of an MBA, not because of one.” — Elon Musk

“Never, ever hire an MBA.  They will ruin your company.” — Peter Thiel

“When it comes to success in business, the MBA degree is optional.  But a GSD, which is only earned by getting shit done, is required.” — Christine Comaford

Overall, there is a strong sentiment in Silicon Valley that the best teacher is doing.  Then again, there is also a strong sentiment that failure is a better teacher than success, yet in 35 years I have never seen a single job specification that listed any form of failure as required experience.  Strong sentiment and action are seemingly two different things.

Now, let’s directly answer the question:  do superachievers read business books?

Remembering that there is no single mold of superachiever, I think the answer is:

  • Yes, but not religiously.
  • And they really like to read broader books as well.

I think the driving philosophies behind this are:

  • The realization that most business books really are one good idea inflated to 250 pages.  So, if they can learn the basics of a good idea without having to read the full 250 pages, then all the better. Superachievers guard their time.
  • The point is to understand the core concepts in which fluency is required to function in Silicon Valley (e.g., The Chasm, The Innovator’s Dilemma, The Lean Startup).  There are probably about 20 of these in total and the important part is understanding the concepts, not reading the book.  Superachievers are often fast learners and self-taught.  Skimming the book, reading a summary [5], or watching a video is likely enough. 
  • It is foolish not to learn from the mistakes of others.  While skeptical of finding the universal keys to success in any book, they are more open to hearing concrete stories of success and failure.  Thus, they are less interested in pop business concept books [6] than reading real stories of successful and unsuccessful companies.
  • Superachievers want to be the best versions of themselves.  They are highly motivated for self improvement and if convinced that reading certain books will help improve their performance, they will find the time to read them. But books are just one way to improve. So are conversations with other founders — a key reason why organizations like YPO and 10X CEO do so well. So is execution education, like Stanford’s great programs. So are great podcasts (e.g., Acquired, Founders) on the treadmill.
  • It is important to step outside the all-consuming world of the startup to gain perspective.   That’s why reading world history, business history, military history, behavioral economics, sports, competition, and motivation are popular topics for superachievers. It is possible to spend too much time on the standard material. Reading more broadly is both energizing and helps you get outside the proverbial box.
  • Doing is the best teacher.  While reading is great, you need to do a lot and try a lot. Move fast and break things, as they say. The Silicon Valley way.

In short, on the question of business books, I’d say that superachievers are universally well informed, if not necessarily well read.

More broadly, I’d say that superchievers are generally well read. In Silicon Valley, this results from the energizing effect of reading non-business material often combined with some intellectual flex to demonstrate your polymath abilities. That’s why you’ll find almost certainly find authors like Daniel Kahneman, Robert Cialdini, or Sun Tzu — who write one level of indirection away from startups — on most reading lists, as well as others (e.g., Robert Heinlein, Ayn Rand, William Irvine), who write several levels beyond that.

If you can’t identify John Galt, recite the three primary beliefs of the Stoics, or reveal the Martian etymology of the word grok, then well, perhaps you’re an outsider on Sand Hill Road after all. Superachiever or not.

# # #

Notes

[1] To respect privacy, I won’t do any attribution here, but simply say that I’ve spoken with successful startup founders and with deca-, centa-, and even a kilo-millionaire (aka, billionaire) about this topic. If you’re one of those people, let me thank you again for answering my questions.

[2] For example: a top-performing VC who is a superachiever in their own right and who, by virtue of their startup work, frequently engages with other achievers and superachivers.

[3] Someone could obviously do a study here — and maybe someone already has, but I couldn’t find it — and doing one on my own is well beyond the scope of a Kellblog post.

[4] After all, you certainly do read a lot of business books in b-school.

[5] For some business authors, chapter 1 of book N is an excellent summary of book N-1 (e.g., Moore, Christensen)

[6] Which tend to argue, get this one thing right and the rest takes care of itself (e.g., Storybranding, Grit, Purple Cow). This is a weakness of many pop marketing books.

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