Russell McGuire

There’s No Such Things as Business Ethics was written both at the peak of John Maxwell’s popularity and in response to a number of high profile corporate ethical failures (Enron, MCI WorldCom, Tyco, Adelphia, etc.). I only recently picked the book up when I had sold a box-load of books at the local Half Price Books and scanned the shelves for an interesting title I could buy with my paltry earnings. The book is 134 pages, but the pages are small and the type is large. Each of the 8 chapters can be read in 10–15 minutes, so the entire book could be consumed in a couple of hours.

If you want to know the key takeaway from the book, it’s quite simple: The Golden Rule (“So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.” Matthew 7:12) is the only guideline necessary for business ethics.

It doesn’t take 134 pages to make that point. What makes the book worth reading is the 7 chapters plus conclusion that follow that observation. Each provides practical guidance for how to consistently put the Golden Rule into practice in your life and your work. Each chapter introduces it’s topic, uses a list of things we need to understand or practice, heavily relies on quotes from well known leaders throughout history, and uses helpful examples to show what good and bad behavior looks like.

Click here to read the full review.

Last week I wrote that sometimes an early stage startup simply doesn’t have what it takes to single-handedly create a new category. The first example I recall of watching that happen first-hand was at the birth of what we now know as the Internet.

Towards the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s (even before the Web was invented) more and more companies were looking for ways to leverage the global connectivity that the Internet provided. It was becoming apparent that some commercial form of the network would emerge. IBM and MCI were anxious to monetize the investment they’d made in building and operating the NSFnet backbone. Both companies thought the current model of telecommunications worked just fine. They wanted to build a commercial Internet modeled on the status quo with toll gates and usage-based billing.

At the same time entrepreneurs were developing a very different vision for a commercial Internet. UUNET and PSInet recognized that the world was changing. Packet switching was riding Moore’s Law to drive the cost of connectivity towards zero and new applications were emerging that would drive network utilization exponentially higher. Metering the Internet would limit both usage and innovation. Their vision for the commercial Internet was not just better, it was different. It was a new category, not just a new service in the old category.

But how could these early stage startups hope to challenge the status quo, change the thinking at government bureaucracies like the NSF, and take on corporate giants like IBM and MCI? By themselves, they didn’t stand a chance.

Click the link below to read my story of how they formed a coalition to challenge the status quo. I believe that the Internet would be very different today if those early stage startups hadn’t joined together to establish the Commercial Internet category. I am thankful that otherwise fierce rivals were willing to come together to establish the better and different vision that they shared.

Read the full story here.

Creating a new category is a long, hard, and expensive process. In the best cases, customers quickly see the value in the new category, change their ways, and adopt the new way of doing things. Even these seeming overnight success are the results of years of innovation and foundation building. They take time and a lot of money.

However, when the target customers are risk averse and the category creators are early stage startups, an innovator may simply not have what it takes to establish the category on their own. 

For example, IT decision makers at large corporations are, almost by definition, risk averse. A big part of their job is to make sure that the company’s information infrastructure is always available. They are always busy behind the scenes keeping everything running well. No one notices when IT does their job well and everything runs as expected, but as soon as something fails, everyone starts pointing fingers at IT. Therefore, IT leaders often live by the mantra “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” They are reticent to make changes, especially when those innovations come from unproven new vendors. By sticking with the long established industry “best practices”, even if something does go wrong, the IT leaders can claim that they did everything “right.”

So, what does it take to change their minds? Category makers need to develop a compelling story that explains why the long established industry standards no longer work or will soon cause major problems. They need to educate IT buyers on how their technology overcomes these challenges, and they need to convince those buyers that implementing their new solution is actually the lowest risk option for buyers. They then need to tell that story over and over again through multiple platforms with a high level of consistency so that it starts to sink in and eventually become ingrained in how potential buyers think about the future.

But early stage startups lack the three things most critical to creating credibility and trust with potential customers. First, they haven’t established their brand. Customers have never heard of them. They have no reputation and there’s no reason for customers to take a chance on them. Second, early stage startups often offer a relatively small part of the total solution. IT decision makers will need to combine the startup’s part with parts from other vendors to have a complete solution to replace the status quo. That increases both the effort and the risk for the IT leaders and often simply isn’t worth it. Third, telling the story loudly, persistently, and consistently will typically require a level of investment well beyond the resources of an early stage startup.

A powerful move to overcome these challenges is for startups to pull together into a coalition to clearly establish the viability and value of the new category in the minds of IT decision makers. Together these startups should develop one consistent compelling story that each can each tell over and over again to awaken potential buyers to the risks they are already taking and to position the new category as a great solution. Their combined voices create greater credibility and their combined spending creates greater reach. The unique capabilities each startup brings to the table adds to the overall value of the category, providing a more complete solution for the customer.

Click the link below to read my full article on what this looks like in practice.

Let me know if you need any help on your category making journey, whether that be on your own or as part of a coalition.

https://clearpurpose.media/when-it-takes-collaboration-to-create-a-category-94939a81f72?sk=9826c23394d236b1a7968b39df1171ed

As I continue my tour of classic books that I haven’t previously reviewed, this week I come to Every Good Endeavor by pastor Tim Keller with Katherine Alsdorf.

With Keller’s passing earlier this year, it seemed like the right time to pick this book back up and read it from beginning to end. Keller was a talented and accomplished writer, but he was really a pastor at heart. At times, the content comes across as sermons on specific passages of scripture. At other times, the pastor seems to be encouraging his flock as a trusted counselor. The book as a whole tells a complete story that follows the Bible’s complete story. 

Every Good Endeavor provides a gospel-centered framework for understanding why work is good, why it is challenged, and how it can be redeemed for the glory of God. For Christians, the book provides fresh insights and encouragement. It doesn’t provide simple checklists for how to “connect your work to God’s work” but will cause you to think deeply and differently about why your work matters and how you can approach it with a new perspective.

Read my complete chapter-by-chapter review here.

Going on Offense is the third book that Behnam Tabrizi has written on the topic of establishing innovation and agility as how organizations operate. This book is subtitled a “playbook” and leans heavily on studies of five companies that have done so: Apple, Tesla, Amazon, Starbucks, and Microsoft, along with references to 21 other companies more or less successful in sustaining innovation. The result of their research is the identification of eight elements common to companies that are successful at perpetual innovation. The book is structured into a chapter on each of these characteristics along with a closing chapter providing a five step process for establishing those elements.

Read my full review here.

For the next stop on my tour of classic books I hadn’t yet reviewed, I revisit Good to Great by Jim Collins.

Good to Great is one of a very small set of classic business books that has fundamentally changed how leaders think about and talk about their businesses. In just over 20 years, the terminology and concepts introduced by the book have become so ingrained in business thinking that, in writing this review, I stopped several times to Google a phrase or idea to try to figure out who, before Collins, had originated it. If you’re a business leader and haven’t read the book, you’ve undoubtedly been influenced indirectly by it.

Read my full review here.

The new book Madison Avenue Makeover by Michael Farmer effectively documents the transformation process that ad agency Huge has followed in defining a new operating and business model.

What it does well is describe how ad agencies work and the challenges in the industry. It does a good job of documenting the specific meetings, decisions, and personnel changes made throughout the journey from July 2021 to the end of 2022. It clearly documents the new operating model for Huge and how this new model is expected to overcome the business model challenges facing the industry.

However, the author admits that it’s still too early to know whether or not it’s going to work. The new model is a collection of hypotheses that are still being tested and are expected to be tweaked over time. It’s also not a very exciting story for those outside the industry. For those in the industry (especially those at Huge), the book may provoke some important questions or uncover some meaningful insights.

Read my full review here.

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