COMMENTARY Fantastic four: A leading CEO’s summer reading list Klipfolio co-founder Allan Wille is an avid reader who finds business books to be great sources of inspiration and insight. Here are his four top picks for summer:
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read every evening, usually before going to bed. I’ll flip between fiction and non-fiction, and in the non-fiction realm, books on how to succeed in business and grow personally are high on my list of interests. Not all of these books are heavy and serious; some of them are fast and fun reads. What they all have in common is their ability to provide ideas and insights about situations I encounter every day at work. In fact, if you’re open to it, it’s easy to find useful insights even in works of fiction; I find them all the time. Today, I’m providing my suggestion for a summer reading list based on business books I’ve recently read. I’ve found each of the four books here useful, and I recommend them to anyone looking for ideas, inspiration and insight. These books are in no particular order. Numbers one and three focus on tactics, numbers two and four explore values.
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1. The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, by Ben Horowitz (HarperBusiness, 2014) The author, Ben Horowitz, is a co-founder and general partner in the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. After running several product divisions at Netscape Communications (remember Netscape?), he became vice-president and general manager of America Online’s e-commerce platform division. He was also co-founder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was bought by Hewlett-Packard in 2007 for $1.6 billion, and he served as vice-president and general manager of business technology optimization for software at HP. The book tells the story of Mr. Horowitz’s rise, and it chronicles the volatile career journey that has led him to where he is today: a leader of one of the largest and most successful venture capital funds in the United States. The reader will get a lot of tough, unvarnished advice about dealing with a variety of difficult situations, everything from managing your cash to how to focus on what matters. As the Amazon blurb about his book says, it’s about providing “practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems
business school doesn’t cover.” “Hard” is the operative word with this book. The things Mr. Horowitz recommends are tough. No sugar-coating here! But overall, the advice is good. For that reason, I think this book is a must-read for any entrepreneur, especially one whose business is going through a period of growth. I also get the impression that Mr. Horowitz, too, is tough. Perhaps too tough. It seems to me he ran his shops like a general runs an army, from the top down. He was the voice and the decisionmaker, and very directive with his employees. I suspect that his work culture and my work culture are not compatible. I think there are better ways to inspire a team than to come down hard on them. But that speaks to one of the points I want to make about any kind of reading: You don’t have to agree with the author. A good book provides the opportunity to learn, and sometimes some things make you bristle. 2. Lead By Greatness: How Character Can Power Your Success, by David Lapin (Avoda Books, 2012) David Lapin is a South Africanborn rabbi who is the CEO of Lapin Consulting International. His coaching is based on the principle that companies that discover their unique corporate souls can use that information to drive performance. As his firm’s website explains: “With laser-beam precision, we go deep into the soul of a company to discover its unique capabilities, removing the blockages that prevent it from optimizing its full potential.”
Lead By Greatness, he says, was inspired by working with South African business leaders and Nelson Mandela and his government to transform the country from a repressive apartheid regime to a modern economy. Mr. Lapin’s approach is in stark contrast to Mr. Horowitz’s. Where Mr. Horowitz is all about toughness, Mr. Lapin focuses on kindness. The core of his belief is that businesses succeed by understanding what drives them and building on that. Everything else is an output. Mr. Lapin encourages CEOs to understand why they work and why their companies exist. He calls it their fingerprint. For example, an individual CEO might be motivated to work in order to provide for his or her family. In that case, it’s family that’s the driver; money is just an output. Other people may be motivated by money. (The reality is that most CEOs aren’t in it just for the money; otherwise they’d retire once they had earned enough. Instead, many go on to create new startups after a successful first venture.) The book includes exercises that allow readers to discover what drives them personally and then apply the same methodology to management – for example, learning about what drives each member of the management team. Mr. Lapin also encourages companies to develop a rationale for why they exist – a rationale that extends beyond making a profit. This company fingerprint becomes something to rally around, and it’s easy to sell to employees and clients because it is authentic. What struck me most was Mr. Lapin’s consistent emphasis on the need to lead with authenticity, kindness and
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