July 2023

For the next stop on my summertime tour of “classic” books that I haven’t yet reviewed, I’ve taken a look at Wireless Nation by James Murray, Jr. Maybe you don’t consider this book a classic, but it is one of my all-time favorites.

When I was still in college, my dad introduced me to a company that he had made a small investment in. They were acquiring wireless spectrum and contracted me to do some computer programming to model the reach of wireless signals using that spectrum. It was a small project that provided some pizza money. I did what they asked for, hopefully with high quality, but otherwise didn’t think much about it. Little did I know at the time that much of my career would be in telecom and specifically in wireless. 

When I graduated college, wireless was still a relatively insignificant part of the telecom industry, so that experience wouldn’t become relevant to me until more than 15 years later when I joined Sprint. I picked up this book to better understand the wireless industry I was joining. It was fascinating to travel back in time to the mid-1980s and realize how crazy and formative those days had been in the industry that I had slightly touched through my IBM-PC keyboard in my college apartment.

Wireless Nation is one of my two favorite books about the history of digital technology (the other being Nerds 2.0.1 about the birth of the Internet). Both books tell the stories of those crazy people that saw a future that didn’t yet exist, ignored the nay-sayers, and made the future a reality. The stories are great stories — filled with heroes and villains and anti-heroes, and tracing the narrative arc from the “call to adventure” to a series of challenges and temptations to finally resolving those challenges, resisting those temptations, and ultimately gaining the reward. What makes these books so fascinating is the before and after picture they paint and even to consider how different the “after-after” (today’s world) is from the world described as “modern” when the books were published.

Can you remember a world before cellphones? That almost seems like an ancient world seen only in black and white photos, and yet for many of us, it was in our lifetime. This year the wireless industry celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first cellphone call ever placed (by Motorola’s Martin Cooper). But it was another 10 years before the technology was available as a commercial service (the first commercial cellphone call was 40 years ago this October). I can remember 1983. Can you?

What’s equally amazing is to think of what has changed since Wireless Nation was published in 2001. In 2001 there were six wireless carriers with at least 4% market share: Cingular (34%), Verizon (20%), Sprint (11%), Nextel (9%), ALLTEL (5%) and T-Mobile (4%). Today, of those only Verizon and T-Mobile still exist (ALLTEL is part of Verizon, Sprint and Nextel are part of T-Mobile and Cingular became AT&T). In 2001, the leading “smartphone” was the Nokia 9210. (For those that remember the Handspring Treo, it would come in 2002). Apple was still a computer company and Google was still a search company. There weren’t any social networks, unless you count America Online. (MySpace was launched in 2003.) In 2001, only 55% of the adult population even owned a cellphone and on average, the phone was only used about 5 hours per month (all voice). Many people today use their phones that much each day. How the world has changed!

Wireless Nation tells the industry’s fascinating story from inception to 2001 by colorfully telling the stories of the individuals who were part of it. Some of these people you may have heard of (e.g. Craig McCaw). Many of them I had never heard of before reading the book. It was the wild west frontier days of an industry that has become central to our lives and Murray does an excellent job painting the picture of heroes, villains, and (mostly) anti-heroes and making this time come alive in our own minds.

I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of technology or business, or who simply wants to better understand how today’s wireless industry came to be.

Read the full review here.

The Lean Startup is a good introduction to how modern technology-driven entrepreneurs launch new businesses. If you aren’t familiar with the Lean Startup methodology, and you care about innovation and entrepreneurship, then this book is a good place to start.

Read the full review here.

I’m taking advantage of the lazy days of summer to revisit some classic books that I haven’t yet reviewed.
This week’s title is Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur.

I first read Business Model Generation over a decade ago while I was a strategy leader in a large corporation because we had launched a startup accelerator program. The book helped me realize how dramatically entrepreneurship had changed since my previous startup in the first few years of the 21st century. The Business Model Canvas struck me as a brilliant way to represent everything involved in successfully launching a new business and I immediately shared it with my team for use even in documenting business ideas within a corporate setting.

I often recommend Business Model Generation to leaders new to the Lean Startup approach to entrepreneurship. For those trained in traditional business management, the book does a great job of introducing the game-changing design-driven approach to innovation. I strongly recommend this book for anyone wanting to understand business models or are open to unconventional approaches to developing new ideas.

Click the link below to read my full review.https://clearpurpose.media/book-brief-business-model-generation-e1964afaaf8d?sk=288ff93c89f810ca70d15c82386956b9

Leadership Not By The Book was released as part of the celebration of Hobby Lobby’s 50th anniversary year. Founder and CEO David Green is now 80+ years old and he wrote the book (with Bill High’s help) to share the biblically-informed wisdom that has shaped key (unconventional) business practices that he believes have played a key role in the company’s long-term success. The book is structured as 12 chapters, each titled based on one of those practices. The book is organized in three sections (God-centered practices, People-focused practices, and Commonsense practices), each containing 4 chapters. Each chapter explains the principle behind the practice and the basis for it (usually drawn from the Bible) while telling multiple stories to demonstrate why it makes sense and how it has contributed to Hobby Lobby’s success. The writing style is somewhat folksy — neither trying to be a theological treatise, nor a “serious” business book. It’s written by a down-to-earth business owner for other practical business owners.

Bottom line, Leadership Not By The Book provides twelve Bible-based principles that David Green has followed over the past 50 years in growing Hobby Lobby into a successful business. While I may not agree with exactly how Hobby Lobby is applying those principles in operating their business today, they are still worthy of consideration by any business leader, especially a Christian one.

Click here to read my full review.

Nvidia was formed in 1993 with $40,000 in startup capital from its three founders and their family and friends. The company entered the graphics accelerator market in 1995 with the NV1, but the product’s innovative design limited market adoption and nearly sank the company. Fast forward to this Spring when the 30 year old company became just the ninth in history to reach a valuation of $1 trillion. Creating an entirely new category of product was key to the company’s success and massive value creation.

What can we learn from Nvidia’s category creating journey? In previous articles I’ve explained that category making involves three distinct phases: defining the category, establishing the category, and owning the category. We can trace Nvidia’s movement through these three phases by observing five key steps in their journey:

1. Understand how the world is changing.
2. Identify the potential compelling story.
3. Define the category.
4. Launch the category.
5. Sustain category momentum and leadership.

The core value of the GPU category that Nvidia created was offloading compute-intensive processing from general purpose CPUs. In the late 1990s, the apps that benefitted the most were graphics-intensive and video-intensive apps (e.g. video games). More recently this core value has been essential to blockchain, cryptocurrency mining, and artificial intelligence. Each jump in demand for these applications has resulted in an equivalent jump in demand for the company’s GPUs.

In the article linked below, I walk through Nvidia’s history, explaining how they executed each of these steps towards creating tremendous value for its customers and its shareholders. Let me know if you need help on your own category making journey.

Read the full article here.