Designed for the Rest of Us

12 great books that are constant guides

I read a lot of books, and aim to read a book a week. I think that when you stop learning you die, at least mentally. Recently I decided I just had to get rid of some books. Partly this was due to a move from New Zealand back to the USA – twenty boxes went to a local charity bookstore in NZ, they were very happy. More recently I cut down again, simply too hard to store them all – since more keep getting acquired! However, a significant factor was I’ve discovered I can get most books I want on my eReader. I decided to keep only the physical books that met one of these criteria:

I picked out a baker’s dozen books that had a large impact on me and I tend to refer to, or I find myself referring to other people. I put them on a shelf by my desk as visual reminders to the wisdom within. These old friends are presented here in no particular order. Most of them have detailed reviews available on the web, for instance at Amazon.com

The Innovators Solution – Clayton Christensen
In his original book ‘The Innovators Dilemma’, Christenson explained how established companies get blind-sided by disruptive smaller companies. This book offers a solution and summarizes the first book in a few chapters – as a result you get to focus on what to do about the problem. It’s a great read for people with a new technology seeking to enter an established market. Its also useful for established players to recognize disruptive ideas they can exploit. A great strategic read.

What Customers Want – Anthony Ulwick
I first learned of Ulwick’s work from Darrel Rhea – he shared with me Anthony’s Harvard Business Review article “Turn Customer Input into Innovation”. The book is a great insight into how to work with customers to understand their unmet needs. Ulwick has developed a full framework, which can be used as a method for requirements gathering, and here’s the important part – feature validation. There are many examples of companies who have uncovered compelling problems and then developed solutions because they understood the unmet needs behind the problems. A great book for product managers and design researchers.

Inside the Tornado – Geoffrey Moore
Moore is a legend in the tech industry for his insight into how new products get adopted. I was introduced to Crossing the Chasm by Bud Smith and we applied the theory on the Apple QuickTime VR project as we moved from version 1 to 2 to very good effect. Since then it has become a key part of my thinking on many product development and marketing efforts. Moore has several books, but I think Tornado is the best. It is a really practical guide to how to get over the chasm and into the tornado, where your market takes off. A must read for any product manager or startup CEO.

Customer Visits – Edward McQuarrie
At Apple I got exposed to Ed McQuarrie on an imaging device project. Ed taught a workshop for our team and we implemented a customer visits program to better understand three potential markets. The results helped us to understand where to apply a new technology. It was an inspiring experience. A couple of years later I was managing a group at Apple and the first thing I did was to run a visits program to help us understand our customers. I managed to get Ed to do the workshop and help coach the team. The results were quite dramatic. Not only was the research valuable but the experience of doing the visits got the team working together. Ed’s approach is very pragmatic. His book is full of practical and realistic advice. A practical guide for product managers and design researchers.

Good to Great – Jim Collins
‘First get the right people on the bus, then decide where it is going’ – this is one of the lessons Collins distilled from his intensive research into what makes great companies win. Collins’ work is rigorous. Required reading for any CEO or senior leader. A book to read multiple times.

The First 90 Days – Michael Watkins
A great guide to read when you have just won a new job. Watkins explains how to identify the situation you are in – is your role a startup, turn around, realignment, or sustaining success mode? Then what do you do next? How do you work with your new boss? I’ve given this to several new hires or people who’ve I’ve promoted into new roles and been pleased to see how they have risen up to the challenge using Watkins’ framework. A particularly great read for anyone in a new leadership position.

Leading Change – John Kotter
I’ve been involved in several large change management efforts. The ones I did after I read Kotter’s book went a lot better. Kotter lays out a tried and true eight-stage process for making change happen and stick. It’s organized around developing a vision. If you can add into that a hard look at values, you’ve got a winning solution for change. A great book for any manager or leader.

Skunk Works – Ben Rich
Over a long period of time Lockheed produced revolutionary aircraft that gave the US Airforce an incredible advantage. Not only were these aircraft innovative, they were produced in record time and defied the odds. Ben Rich led this group following in the footsteps of his mentor Kelly Johnson. I’ve been involved in a few ‘Skunk works’ efforts and we applied some valuable lessons from this book. If you have to set up a special project, which has to deliver, I recommend learning some tips from Ben Rich. It is especially applicable to special project teams within large organizations.

The Toyota Way – Jeffrey Liker
Toyota is a consistent leader in quality and profitability. Its manufacturing processes are based on 14 management principles, which are behind their lean production process. This is really a handbook for improving manufacturing and engineering process. Important for company leaders and those in operations to understand.

The E-Myth Revisited – Michael Gerber
So many people start a small business doing something they love, but end up hating their ‘new job’ and ultimately failing. Gerber explains why. He provides a framework for how to make a small business succeed by recognizing the need to capture the business process and take yourself out of the critical path. Recommended reading for those seeking to grow a small business.

The Mythical Man Month – Frederick Brooks
One of the great books on software project management. Although Brooks’ experience was on systems that seem a generation out of date, his ideas are still compelling. It is inspiring and rational. If you have to manage a large software effort this is required reading. It has good insight for non-engineers on the perils of trying to throw more resources onto projects – when its already too late. It is pretty well summed up in the assertion that ‘while one woman can make a baby in 9 months, 9 women can’t make one in one month’. An important element of this book is also the description given of the ‘architect’ in a large software effort. Required reading for anyone managing a large and complex project.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team – Patrick Lencioni
Lencioni has created an interesting genre – the management fable. He tells a fictional story from which we can learn lessons. At the end of the book he lays out the lesson. I’ve read all his books and I like them. In this book, he points out five dysfunctions that build on each other. Absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. Lencioni explains how to actively avoid these. A great framework for a team leader, which I’ve found helps to share with a team, it can also scale to an organization.

The Living Company – Arie De Geus
A leader at Royal Dutch/Shell, De Geus was a pioneer of the famous scenario planning approach, more of this is available in ‘the art of the long view’ by Hawkins which I had a hard time not including in this dozen books. De Geus is really the inventor of the term ‘learning organization’. He lays out a rationale behind what a company is and argues it is much more than an engine for generating profit. A book that was ahead of its time and has particular relevance to our renewed interest in sustainability and environmentalism. If you want to build a company that has an objective beyond just profit, this is a foundation read. Interestingly, companies that apply De Geus’ thinking seem to also get quite profitable!

Companies all over the world are looking for ways to be disruptive, especially in these times of economic uncertainty (read ‘opportunity’). The disruptive term was coined in 1997 by Clayton Christenson in his seminal book ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’, if you haven’t read it you’re in luck – go straight to his second book from 2003 ‘The Innovator’s Solution’ and read it instead because it explains how to get disruptive. There is a real nugget of gold on page 75 where Clayton introduces what I have always found to be a sure fired path to innovation – looking at the customer and the job they’re going to do with your product.

Here’s the key – get out and understand what people are actually doing with your product. Look at the problems they have and probe behind these to figure out what really matters to them. They’ll tell you lots of things, and they’ll tell you what they want (free, lots of features, delivered yesterday). However, this is not what’s really useful, as it is your job to figure out what they really need. If you do a good job on this, you’ll identify their ‘unmet needs’.

There are other paths to disruption, but this one is a low risk approach. Identifying the unmet need is the challenge and I recommend Anthony Ulwick’s outcome-driven approach. Another major advantage is this is a great method to get an interdisciplinary team started on working together by focusing on a clear understanding of the customer.

I’ve used this approach on a lot of projects, I learned it at Apple, then applied it at Palm, Sun, Microsoft, SPIE, Navman, HumanWare, and a host of lesser known companies.

Of course, this is just one approach to innovation, equally important is making sure you foster innovation in technology, but that’s a future post.

We often hear people say that you can’t ask customers to design your product. I agree. However, I’m a big advocate of having a solid understanding of who is going to use a product and what they’re going to try to do with it – this knowledge can really help you in making design decisions and tradeoffs. Ed McQuarrie has worked with many companies over the years to teach teams how to do effective customer visit programs. His approach is fast and effective. I’ve used it on many projects as a way to quickly gather useful information that can help inform the design process. Ed visited New Zealand in 2007 and 2008 and had such a great time that he’s returning in March 2009. Sandra Lukey is organizing his workshops and her SmartNet events are always high value. There are a few spots left so I encourage my New Zealand friends to take advantage of the opportunity to hear it ‘from the master’. Here’s a link to the flier. The workshops are sponsored by the NZ Government’s TechNZ team – guys who know how to take the long view.

An interesting side note on Ed – while at HumanWare I wanted to expose our product managers to some new ideas on design research. I picked a few books that I thought might be good background – Ed’s ‘Customer Visits’ was one of them. My problem was that a few of the people who’d need to read them were blind, I needed to try to get them on tape. I emailed the authors, some never replied, one said he’d ask the publisher. Ed replied within an hour with the latest edition attached as a word file and granted permission to record it or have it printed in braille – somehow that wasn’t a surprising reaction from the man who understands how to meet customer needs.