Well-read Resources

Enjoy the circa 1994 era of “this guy has a list of links to various cool things”. But what was done in the ’90s still applies today; there’s nothing new under the sun.

These have significantly altered my thinking, my approach, and my leadership. I encourage you to explore how you can become a better person and leader within your community and company.

Articles

Leadership

  1. Give Away Your Legos…
  2. Work at Different Management Levels
  3. Let Your Workers Rebel
  4. Distributing Authority
  5. Areas of Responsibility
  6. Questions For Our First 1:1
  7. Management Trinity
  8. Role Power

Customer Success

  1. Everything at Sixteen Ventures
  2. Documentation, Support, and Customer Success

Operations

  1. Many Strategies Fail Because They’re Not Actually Strategies
  2. The Company-Changing Magic of Sales Operations Done Right
  3. Sales Operations
  4. The Value of Customer Success Operations

Hiring

  1. 23 Interview Questions…

SaaS

  1. SaaS Metrics: Benchmarking Your Churn Rates
  2. Measures of Success: SaaS Metrics & Benchmarks Resource Guide
  3. CAC Payback Period:  The Most Misunderstood SaaS Metric

Productivity

  1. The Focus Funnel
  2. OKRs
  3. The Advantage of Being a Little Underemployed

Videos

  1. Motivation
  2. Simon Sinek videos (here are a few, but there are more)
    1. Start with Why
    2. Why Good Leaders Make You Feel Safe
    3. Why Leaders Eat Last
  3. OKRs (John Doerr)
  4. Driving SaaS Success Using Key Metrics (David Skok)

Books

I suspect the question “what’s the ONE book I need to ask?” is a bad one. That implies I have limited time for learning. Articles, podcasts, and Twitter are helpful; however, they are all short form and do not allow for long treatises or thoughts to be experienced. Books take us into far away lands (or big corporations). There’s a difference between reading a book over days or weeks versus a 10 minute article.

So here are a few recommended books, but please use this as a springboard for even more books. There were many I wanted to add. Ping me if you want a recent recommendation!

  1. The Effective Executive, by Peter Drucker
  2. The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, by Patrick Lencioni
  3. Essentialism, by Greg McKeown
  4. Never Split the Difference, by Chriss Voss
  5. Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell
  6. Influence, by Robert Cialdini
  7. Creativity Inc, by Ed Catmull
  8. Customer Success, (multiple authors from Gainsight)
  9. Death by Meeting, by Patrick Lencioni
  10. Execution, by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan
  11. Getting Naked, by Patrick Lencioni
  12. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni
  13. Extreme Ownership, by Jocko Willink
  14. Making Friends and Influencing People, by Dale Carnegie
  15. What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture, by Ben Horowitz
  16. Leadership Strategy and Tactics: Field Manual, by Jocko Willink
  17. The Dichotomy of Leadership: Balancing the Challenges of Extreme Ownership to Lead and Win, by Jocko Willink
  18. Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, by Nassim Taleb
  19. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg
  20. Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts, by Annie Duke
  21. The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, by Atul Gawande
  22. Pre-Suasion: Channeling Attention for Change, by Robert Cialdini
  23. Siloes, Politics, and Turf Wars, by Patrick Lencioni
  24. Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, by Richard Rumelt
  25. Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, (several authors)
  26. Prediction Machines, by Ajay Agrawal
  27. Hit Refresh, by Satya Nadella
  28. Remarkable!, by Randy Ross
  29. A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, by Daniel Pink
  30. When, by Daniel Pink
  31. To Sell is Human, by Daniel Pink
  32. What You Do is Who You Are, by Ben Horowitz

Podcasts

  1. SaaStr (all things SaaS)
  2. Animal Spirits (investing and finance)
  3. At the Table with Patrick Lencioni (author of Five Dysfunctions of a Team, the podcast is on leadership)
  4. a16z (Andreesson Horowitz VC firm’s podcast)
  5. exponent (Ben Thompson’s podcast on world events, technology, and digital governance — author of Stratechery)
  6. Akimbo (Seth Godin)
  7. Building a Storybrand with Donald Miller
  8. Manager Tools (a GREAT podcast on learning and growing in being a manager)
  9. Lead to Win (Michael Hyatt)
  10. Operations with Sean Lane (SaaS Operations podcast)
  11. Second in Command (podcast generally interviewing company COOs and their insights on operations)
  12. The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish (brilliant podcast with in-depth interviews)
  13. Masters of Scale (Reid Hoffman)
  14. Naval
  15. Sales Leadership Podcast
  16. ‘Nuffsaid: Real Strategies for Customer Success (great podcast with short episodes on CS)

Self Promotion

Here are a few resources where I’ve been interviewed. It’s at the bottom of the page because truthfully you should learn from the above people first.

  1. Podcast – NiceReply: Energizing Customer Experience with Success Ops at GitLab (Apple download)
  2. Podcast – Hey Salespeople: Proving Your Value With Jeff Beaumont (Apple download)
  3. Podcast – ‘Nuffsaid: GitLab’s Jeff Beaumont on How CS Ops Drives Net Retention (Apple download)
  4. Article: Issue #85: 3 Ways GitLab’s CS Ops Team Drives Retention
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