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
- Give Away Your Legos…
- Work at Different Management Levels
- Let Your Workers Rebel
- Distributing Authority
- Areas of Responsibility
- Questions For Our First 1:1
- Management Trinity
- Role Power
Customer Success
Operations
- Many Strategies Fail Because They’re Not Actually Strategies
- The Company-Changing Magic of Sales Operations Done Right
- Sales Operations
- The Value of Customer Success Operations
Hiring
SaaS
- SaaS Metrics: Benchmarking Your Churn Rates
- Measures of Success: SaaS Metrics & Benchmarks Resource Guide
- CAC Payback Period: The Most Misunderstood SaaS Metric
Productivity
Videos
- Motivation
- Simon Sinek videos (here are a few, but there are more)
- OKRs (John Doerr)
- 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!
- The Effective Executive, by Peter Drucker
- The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, by Patrick Lencioni
- Essentialism, by Greg McKeown
- Never Split the Difference, by Chriss Voss
- Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell
- Influence, by Robert Cialdini
- Creativity Inc, by Ed Catmull
- Customer Success, (multiple authors from Gainsight)
- Death by Meeting, by Patrick Lencioni
- Execution, by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan
- Getting Naked, by Patrick Lencioni
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni
- Extreme Ownership, by Jocko Willink
- Making Friends and Influencing People, by Dale Carnegie
- What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture, by Ben Horowitz
- Leadership Strategy and Tactics: Field Manual, by Jocko Willink
- The Dichotomy of Leadership: Balancing the Challenges of Extreme Ownership to Lead and Win, by Jocko Willink
- Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, by Nassim Taleb
- The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg
- Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts, by Annie Duke
- The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, by Atul Gawande
- Pre-Suasion: Channeling Attention for Change, by Robert Cialdini
Podcasts
- SaaStr (all things SaaS)
- Animal Spirits (investing and finance)
- At the Table with Patrick Lencioni (author of Five Dysfunctions of a Team, the podcast is on leadership)
- a16z (Andreesson Horowitz VC firm’s podcast)
- exponent (Ben Thompson’s podcast on world events, technology, and digital governance — author of Stratechery)
- Akimbo (Seth Godin)
- Building a Storybrand with Donald Miller
- Manager Tools (a GREAT podcast on learning and growing in being a manager)
- Lead to Win (Michael Hyatt)
- Operations with Sean Lane (SaaS Operations podcast)
- Second in Command (podcast generally interviewing company COOs and their insights on operations)
- The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish (brilliant podcast with in-depth interviews)
- Masters of Scale (Reid Hoffman)
- Naval
- Sales Leadership Podcast
