Posts

Staycation

/ Alec

The last few weeks has had me in: Miami, London, Helsinki, Chicago, and New York. So, I’m taking a week at home in VT to sleep in my own bed and wake up for runs with Odin. A few dinners catching up with old friends and getting my hands dirty with some projects will make a relaxing week.

I did get through several books on all my transatlantic flying:

  • Blah Blah Blah: What to Do When Words Don’t Work by Dan Roam – A good read on how to use the visual side of your brain.
  • The Start-up of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha – Worth reading lots of useful tips an tricks. A must read for recent college graduates.
  • The Mill River Recluse by Darcie Chan – A reasonable piece of VT fiction.
  • Great by Choice by Jim Collins – Not Good to Great but still worth your time.
  • Behind the Cloud by Marc Benioff – I’d pass on all the minutia of how great SalesForce is but if you work in the cloud a book worth skimming.
  • Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance by Jonathan Fields – Ok.

Best Books of 2011

/ Alec / 2 Comments

According to Amazon I made my way through 58 Kindle books this year and my best guess is about five hardcovers.  In no particular order here are ones worth reading:

Execution vs. Strategy

/ Alec

Sriram had this wonderful quote come across my Twitter stream, “You’re not Steve Jobs and your organization is not Apple. And your well-thought out strategy is probably terrible.”

I could not agree more. We all fall in love with our ideas, especially if your in a power point filled offsite. I find this all even more amusing as I’m the Chief Strategy Officer at 125 person SaaS company. I think a better title is Chief Trouble Maker as my role is really to push us to execute on the new while driving more of what is already working. Drive little experiments and kill the failures. One of those little experiments four years ago provides 55% of our revenue today.

It will always be about execution. Not the fancy strategy deck some agency/consultancy/CSO put together. I find the hardest point is to get your team use to the fact that it is ok to skin their knees. Regularly. Weekly. We all stumble. Just do it faster. Do more of it. Do it more often so you get use to it. Get promoted for it. Nose to the grind stone, capacity to execute your roll on the team, and a little blatant disregard for what can’t be done will take you much farther. As von Moltke said, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” Which does not mean don’t have a plan just be ready to adapt it to the reality on the ground and not the J curve someone analysts put on a chart.