October 2023

Start-Up Nation by Dan Senor and Saul Singer seeks to explain why Israel produces more start-ups and entrepreneurs per capita than other countries. The book tells many interesting stories about the start-up nation that is modern Israel along with technology start-up companies born out of the unique mix of cultural, demographic, military, geographic, and historical factors that shape how Israelis think, innovate, and act. Although the lessons learned may have few direct applications inside of our businesses, the book still gives us much to consider about the world in which we live.

I started reading Start-Up Nation several weeks ago, before Hamas terrorists invaded Israel. As I read the Forward by former prime minister and president Shimon Peres, I was concerned the book would be a “puff piece”, telling the story of Israel in an overly positive manner. I know the issues behind the continuing unrest in the Middle East are far more complex than I can claim to appreciate, but the tone and the claims of the Forward put me on notice that the rest of the book would clearly be told from the Israelis’ perspective.

More than anything, Start-Up Nation has helped me better understand the Israeli experience from the birth of the nation 75 years ago to today. Because the book was written in the language of business, I can more easily understand and appreciate the stories being told. These stories help me understand what I see on the news: the long standing animosity, the geography of the surrounding Israeli enemies, the nature of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), the close-knit relationships across the country underlying statements that everyone knows someone killed or taken hostage, and the strength of the national identity.

While Start-Up Nation should be most helpful to policy makers who can influence the factors described to increase entrepreneurship and innovation within their communities, others will find the stories interesting and informative, especially in light of continuing conflict in the Middle East.

Read my full review here.

Today we take mobile apps for granted. They are integral to every aspect of our lives. And yet most of us can at least vaguely remember that this wasn’t always the case. In the article linked below I trace the beginning of the mobile app revolution to the early 2000s when a bunch of scrappy startups came together to help businesses start leveraging the power of mobility to improve how their teams worked.

Workers who were constantly moving around but needing to stay connected as a team came to love Nextel’s solution. With a push of a button, they could open a channel to one person or an entire team. The company quickly became the market leader within industries and departments that relied on mobile workers, whether they be blue collar laborers or white collar sales and service reps. Customers’ value of the Nextel service translated into them paying, on average, $69 per month, compared to the industry average of $51. Although it had become a big company, Nextel maintained its scrappy startup culture, constantly challenging the status quo.

Traditional software companies were also working to serve the kinds of mobile workgroups that were buying Nextel push-to-talk phones. What companies wanted, and workers would accept, was a software-based solution that actually ran on the phone they carried with them. But that would require the wireless carriers to make some major investments. Between 1999 and 2002 Nextel and Motorola worked together on four capabilities critical to the establishment of the Mobile Business App category. Those were a true packet data network, a software platform, GPS capabilities, and a business support platform.

I like to describe the value that carriers like Nextel brought to pre-iPhone software developers as being in three buckets: bits, bills, and bags. First, Nextel provided the core data capabilities (bits) including the packet data network, the development platform, and the GPS data. Second, the company provided the business infrastructure (bills) including the “bill on behalf of” capability and frontline customer support. Third, Nextel served as a sales channel for the software companies (bags), both through the download site as well as through the growing Nextel salesforce, many of whom were focused on the specific industry verticals being targeted by the mobile business application developers.

Through the business solutions team, Nextel pulled together a loose coalition of developers to firmly establish the Mobile Business App category. In addition to OpenWave and TeleNav, the team also helped startups focused specifically on business applications including GearWorks, Xora, Digital Cyclone, Trimble, and many more. Nextel became the title sponsor for NASCAR races and would invite car-loving customers to pre-race events where they would hear from a variety of the company’s software partners about how these new applications could dramatically improve the performance of their business.

Read the full article here.

Whatever You Do from Made to Flourish is a thoughtful and thought-inspiring book. Made to Flourish is a ministry focused on helping local churches help their people integrate their faith into their work lives. The book explores how we can pursue integrating our faith into our life through six theological themes: the Bible’s grand narrative, redemption and renewal, personal wholeness, flourishing-minded work, economic wisdom, and the local church. Christians seeking to integrate their faith more holistically into their life will likely find some ideas and concepts here that will help them on that journey. 

Whatever You Do is a theologically-rich book. Three of the six authors are theology professors at major Christian universities. They don’t shy away from digging into theological topics and applying them to the world of work. The book calls us all out, as individual Christians and as local churches, and challenges us to think deeply about how the Bible’s grand story, and God’s call on our lives, translates into our daily work. The book doesn’t try to provide specific answers, but rather helps each of us to think through what we believe and how that should impact the decisions we make every day.

Read the full review here.

One of the highlights early in my career was playing a small role in the creation of the new category of frame relay services. However, if WilTel and its earliest competitor in the category hadn’t made an essential change in their marketing and sales tactics, the category may have never become established.

The article linked below tells the full story, but a few of the key lessons learned include:

1. There’s no such thing as a category of one
2. Early adopters are essential for learning from/adapting and for building credibility
3. Additional entrants, especially if established brands, can accelerate category adoption
4. You aren’t really competing against other category entrants. Focus negative messaging on the status quo.

Click here to read the full story of WilTel’s launch of WilPak, the world’s first frame relay service.

Bottom line, Playing to Win is likely the best book on strategy that I have yet read. It teaches concepts in an easy to understand way, provides frameworks that are easy to use in real world situations, and provides lots of examples to show how the frameworks work in a real company. I strongly recommend Playing to Win to anyone involved in strategy development and strategic decision making.

At the time Playing to Win was published, Roger Martin was Dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and A.G. Lafley was the former Chairman and CEO of Proctor & Gamble. The book’s title stems from the authors’ contention that companies must “play to win” or else they are wasting everyone’s time and investors’ money. Too many companies “play to play” which can appear to work for a time, but in the long run simply destroys value. 

Playing to Win is mostly structured around the Strategy Choice Cascade. Proctor & Gamble examples are used throughout the book to demonstrate how the framework works in real life. The Strategy Choice Cascade is a series of five questions that define a company’s strategy:

• What is our winning aspiration?
• Where will we play?
• How will we win?
• What capabilities must be in place?
• What management systems are required?

Chapters 2 through 6 each deal with one of the questions in the cascade. The chapters often include tutorials in basic concepts of competitive strategy such as market segmentation, customer needs research, generic strategies, differentiation, etc. Each chapter includes detailed step-by-step case studies from P&G, a list of “dos and don’ts”, and often a story from either Martin or Lafley (or both) to share their personal experiences (sometimes painful) that helped them learn the key concepts covered in the chapter. There’s a lot of detail in these chapters beyond what the simple questions in the cascade might imply. Anyone involved in the kinds of hard strategic questions any business (especially a large one) faces will be able to relate to and learn from the many stories told and lessons taught.

Chapter 7 is titled “Think Through Strategy.” At the beginning of the chapter the authors point out that the cascade is helpful, but in the real world leaders will ask: “But how and where do you start? And how do you generate and choose between possibilities at each stage?” They offer another framework as a starting point. The final full chapter in the book introduces yet another framework to help with strategy development. The book closes with a short Conclusion titled “The Endless Pursuit of Winning” which ties the three main frameworks from the book into what the authors call a “playbook” for strategic management in a dynamic competitive world. 

Read my full review here.