Avances del proyecto - Enero

Lectura de Enero

Ya llevo un mes desde que me puse la meta de leerme como mínimo 26 libros en el año 2015. Decidí  medir mi progreso intentando leer 35 páginas por día en promedio. Me di cuenta que hay libros más cortos que otros, y al tener un número fijo de páginas por día que quiero leer, voy a poder ser más consistente con mi hábito de leer. 

Estos son los resultados de mis avances en el primer mes del 2015:

• 4 = Número de libros leídos 
• The Tao of Pooh
• Big History 
• How Will You Measure Your Life?
• The Art of Thinking Clearly
• Stumbling on Happiness (no lo he terminado todavía)

• 1040 = Total de páginas leídas en el mes de Enero
• 33.55 = Promedio de páginas leídas por día --> la meta es llegar a 35. 
• 7 = Mínimo de páginas leídas en un día
• 99 = Máximo de páginas leídas en un día. 

La base de datos de libros que estoy considerando leer, el listado de todos los libros que me he leído en mi vida, y el desglose de cuántas páginas leo cada día está en el siguiente link.

Mindset

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

by Carol Dweck

"The fixed mindset makes you concerned with how you’ll be judged; the growth mindset makes you concerned with improving. The message is: You can change your mindset"

I started reading this book after listening to a Tim Ferriss podcast where Tony Robbins mentions it is one of his favorite books. I had already heard about the book before -- Carol Dweck is a Stanford psychology professor and one of my friends from college told me about her research. I had also heard her Harvard Business Review interview where she talked about The Right Mindset for Success (link). Out of all the 22 books I read in 2014, this is the book that I enjoyed the most, and the one that I highly recommend everyone to read.

Carol Dweck explains what this book is about in the first page of the introduction section:

In this book, you’ll learn how a simple belief about yourself—a belief we discovered in our research— guides a large part of your life. In fact, it permeates every part of your life. Much of what you think of as your personality actually grows out of this “mindset.”

She categorizes people in one of two mindsets: the fixed mindset, and the growth mindset. This is how Dweck describes the fixed mindset:

Believing that your qualities are carved in stone— the fixed mindset— creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character— well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them.

She then describes the growth mindset in this way:

There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way— in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments— everyone can change and grow through application and experience.

This book explores how having a fixed or a growth mindset can have deep repercussions in every aspect of your life: from your personal life, to your professional life. It also expands on different groups of people - athletes, parents, negotiators, businessmen, teachers, etc... - and how they can experience enormous success or devastating failures depending on their mindset.

Here are some of the key lessons I learned from reading this book:

• When we (temporarily) put people in a fixed mindset, with its focus on permanent traits, they quickly fear challenge and devalue effort.
• The fixed mindset makes you concerned with how you’ll be judged; the growth mindset makes you concerned with improving.
• As a society we value natural, effortless accomplishment over achievement through effort. We endow our heroes with superhuman abilities that led them inevitably toward their greatness.
• Telling children they’re smart , in the end, made them feel dumber and act dumber, but claim they were smarter. I don’t think this is what we’re aiming for when we put positive labels—“ gifted,” “talented,”“brilliant”—on people. We don’t mean to rob them of their zest for challenge and their recipes for success. But that’s the danger.
• When you’re given a positive label, you’re afraid of losing it, and when you’re hit with a negative label, you’re afraid of deserving it.
• A growth mindset helps people to see prejudice for what it is— someone else’s view of them —and to confront it with their confidence and abilities intact.
• Praising children’s intelligence harms their motivation and it harms their performance.

Here is a chapter-by-chapter summary of the lessons I learned from the book - link

Man's Search for Meaning

Man's Search for Meaning 

by Viktor Frankl

"Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning."

Viktor Frankl is the founder of logotherapy - meaning-centered psychotherapy - which is considered the "Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy". 

As Sigmund Freud argued that man's motivations are based on obtaining pleasure, and Alfred Adler argued that man's motivations are based on obtaining power, Frankl argues through logotherapy that man's motivation are based on searching for their life's meaning. 

When Frankl, who was Jewish, was in the middle of finishing his thesis on logotherapy, he is captured by the Nazis and taken to a concentration camp. After he survived the concentration camp, he wrote this book were he uses examples of the experiences he lived in the concentration camp to validate his thesis that man primary motivation in life is to search for meaning. 

The book's foreword explains the intention of the book in a very clear and concise way:

Typically , if a book has one passage, one idea with the power to change a person’s life, that alone justifies reading it, rereading it, and finding room for it on one’s shelves. This book has several such passages.

It is first of all a book about survival. Like so many German and East European Jews who thought themselves secure in the 1930s, Frankl was cast into the Nazi network of concentration and extermination camps.  Several times in the course of the book, Frankl approvingly quotes the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”

He describes poignantly those prisoners who gave up on life, who had lost all hope for a future and were inevitably the first to die. They died less from lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for. Frankl’s concern is less with the question of why most died than it is with the question of why anyone at all survived. Terrible as it was, his experience in Auschwitz reinforced what was already one of his key ideas: Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.

Here are some of the key lessons I learned from reading this book:

• No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
• Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms— to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
• When a man suffers, no one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.
• Nietzsche : “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
• I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium.
• What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
• What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.
• If one cannot change a situation that causes his suffering, he can still choose his attitude.

Here is a chapter-by-chapter summary of the lessons I learned from the book - link

Traction

Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers

by Gabriel Weinberg

"Traction is growth: the pursuit of traction is what defines a startup... Startups can get traction through 19 different channels... Poor distribution — not product — is the number one cause of failure"

This book argues that each successful startup goes through three phases:

1. Phase I - making something people want
2. Phase II - marketing something people want
3. Phase III - scaling your business

In order to go from Phase I to Phase II you must acquire customers. Gabriel Weinberg enumerates 19 different ways in which a startup can get its first couple of customers. Weinberg also mentions that startups tend to pivot (change their product strategy) before changing the traction channel to see if another way of getting customers would yield better results. His advices companies to change traction channels when the growth curve flattens, since a traction channel that initially worked may not be the best channel forever. 

The book introduces the Bulls-eye Framework to help readers find the best traction channels for their startups. This framework tells you to brainstorm all traction channels and pass them through the following funnel: brainstorm, rank, prioritize, test, and focus.

Weinberg then offers examples of how 19 successful startups have used each of the 19 traction channels as their primary way of acquiring customers. The 19 traction channels are:

1. Viral Marketing
2. Public Relations
3. Unconventional Public Relations
4. Search Engine Marketing
5. Social & Display Ads
6. Offline Ads
7. Search Engine Optimization
8. Content Marketing
9. Email Marketing
10. Engineering as Marketing
11. Targeting Blogs
12. Business Development
13. Sales
14. Affiliate Programs
15. Existing Platforms
16. Trade Shows
17. Offline Events
18. Speaking Engagements
19. Community Building

Here are some of the key lessons I learned from reading this book:

• If you are not getting traction which your channel, change channels before pivoting.
• Different channels may be ideal at different stages of your startup. 
• 50% rule: spend 50% of your time on product development and 50% on traction. 
• The Product Trap: the fallacy that the best use of your time is always improving your product. 
• Constantly running small traction tests will allow you to stay ahead of competitors pursuing the same channels.
• The path to reaching your traction goal with the fewest number of steps is your critical path.
• You should always have a traction goal you are working towards.
• You can get a competitive advantage by acquiring customers in ways your competition isn’t.

Here is a chapter-by-chapter summary of the lessons I learned from the book - link

The Alliance

The Alliance: Managing Talent In The Networked Age

by Reid Hoffman

"Alignment means that managers should explicitly seek and highlight the commonality between the company’s purpose and values and the employee’s career purpose and values"

This book presents a framework to manage, recruit, and retain talent in the modern age. It is based on the premise that employees are no longer looking to build their whole careers by working at the same place and moving up the chain of command. Simply said, 

"The traditional model of lifetime employment, so well-suited to periods of relative stability, is too rigid for today’s networked age."

Reid Hoffman suggests that employees should be treated as free agents joining a team, not as children that belong to their professional family. In The Alliance, Hoffman argues that by being completely transparent and having an honest conversation, both the employer and the employee will understand each other's expectations and a trustworthy and effective relationship will develop.

Hoffman presents the tour of duty concept, which he borrows from the military forces. In a tour of duty, a person is given a clear mission, with a given set of goals, constraints, milestones and deliverables. The job is not done until the tour of duty is completed. By offering tours of duty to employees, the employer accepts the fact that the employee might leave the company after the tour of duty has been completed. The key is to align the tour of duty with the employee's personal goals to guarantee that the employee will want to at least finish the tour of duty before leaving the company.

There are three types of tour of duties that can be offered:

1. Rotational
2. Transformational
3. Foundational

Rotational

These tours of duty assume a high turnover rate after completion of the duty. Therefore, the employee's role will be predefined and structured.

"The purpose of this type of Rotational tour is to allow both parties to assess the potential long-term fit between employer and employee"

Transformational

The idea of a transformational tour of duty is for it to be flexible and personalized to each candidate. It attempts to align with the midterm goals of the employee. They consist of 1-3 year plans where the employee will work to transform the company in a significant way. 

"Transformational tours provide adaptability by helping companies bring in the specific skills and experiences required."

Foundational

The focus of the foundational tour of duty is to provide an environment where the company's long term strategy is aligned with the employee's long term goals. Exceptional alignment of employer and employee is the hallmark of a Foundational tour. Ideally, most of the top executives of a company should be on Foundational tours.

This book goes into detail on how to implement each tour of duty, and which tour of duty works best for different job requirements. Here are some of the key lessons I learned from this book:

• Think of employment as an alliance: a mutually beneficial deal, with explicit terms, between independent players.
• Employees need to tell their bosses, “Help me grow and flourish , and I’ll help the company grow and flourish.”
• Tours of duty focus on honorably accomplishing a specific, finite mission.
• Rotational tours provide scalability by helping companies hire large numbers of employees into stable, well-understood roles. 
• Transformational tours provide adaptability by helping companies bring in the specific skills and experiences required.
• Foundational tours provide continuity by helping companies retain employees who focus on the long term.
• By focusing on building alignment for the duration of a specific mission, a tour of duty reduces the issue of aligning values and aspirations to a manageable scope.
• Both manager and employee have an explicit (albeit non-binding) agreement with shared objectives and realistic expectations. This agreement provides the criteria for regular, mutual performance measurement and management. 
• The employee and the company don’t have to be aligned forever, just for the length of the tour of duty.

Here is a chapter-by-chapter summary of the lessons I learned from the book - link

Crossing the Chasm

Crossing the Chasm

by Geoffrey Moore

"Everyone in the company should focus solely on crossing the chasm!! Not just marketing

Company unity is required before crossing the chasm.. Everyone must be aware of the stakes

This is not a time for gambling.. This is a time for taking careful steps towards the cross"

Crossing the Chasm is one of the most recommended books for aspiring technology entrepreneurs. Geoffrey Moore explains in this book his technology adoption life cycle, which states that a customer's willingness to adopt a new technology relates to the customer's attitude towards change in the area where the new technology will be used. Assuming people's attitude towards change follows a normal distribution (bell-curve) that goes from innovators to skeptics, Moore gives a detailed explanation on how this framework could be used to market to these different types of customers and become more effective at distributing your product. 

The book's main argument is that you must first close a number of clients from each customer group before advancing to get customers from the next group (from left to right). The biggest challenge is to transition between early adopters and the early majority (pragmatists). Moore explains that the attitude and expectations between these two groups are so different, that there is a chasm between them. Since the early majority represents a significant percentage of total market, and the transition between early to late majority is relatively smooth, Moore argues that crossing the chasm between early adopters and the early majority could be considered the single most important initiative to determine the long term success of a new technology that is entering a market. 

To offer some guidance, here are some ways in which you can determine how a customer should be categorized in this framework, and some comments about each customer group:

Innovators

• Innovators are attracted to disruptive technology and are always trying to be ahead of the competition by taking big risks in technology. 
• Winning the innovators is key!! They will use and promote your product! They will seek you out, so please them.
• Use innovators to get the product debugged!

Early Adopters

• Early adopters — the visionaries
• Early adopters like something when they see it, and believe in them even if they don't  completely understand it.
• Early adopters are motivated by a dream, and they are willing to try what it takes to get it done
• Early adopters are not looking for improvements, ellos quieren que quantum leaps
• Early adopters will work with new companies, untested products and will understand the dev process it takes to get it right for the potential of that quantum leap
• Easy to sell -- hard to please, because they are buying a dream
• Visionaries: in terms of communications, you don't find them, they typically find you!
• Visionaries: they can match your proposal with their existing needs

Early Majority

• Early majority — the pragmatists
• Early majority-- very similar to early adopters, but their decision making process is based on practicality
• They say things like "leading edge but not bleeding edge”
• Goal of pragmatist-- always looking for improvement, but for incremental, predictable progress
• Before installing a new product, they want to know how other people have fared with it
• Pragmatist are extremely loyal
• It is very tough to enter a new industry through a pragmatist 
• Value added resellers is a good way to get to this group... Get introduced by trusted sources
• Pragmatist want market competition and they want to buy from the leader
• You need to create brand awareness!!

Late Majority

• Late majority—  the conservatives
• Late majority -- need the product to be established before switching
• Conservatives are against discontinuous innovation
• Tradition > progress
• Conservatives fear high tech!
• Only buy commodities, when there is a clear market leader and everyone has it
• Conservatives want to every product they buy to be like their refrigerator.. How often do you think about your refrigerator?
• You need special marketing and sales pitch for conservatives: you will need a phone line for support and face to face responses, even though your plan is to "only have a digital presence”
• To maintain the mainstream markets you no longer have to be the most innovative in product development, you must simply be up to par with the competition and the mainstream markets will not leave you

Laggards

• Laggards—  the skeptics
• Laggards-- so reluctant is not even worth pursuing
• Fail to recognize the shortcomings of the status quo

Some of the key concepts I learned from this book are:

• Visionaries want to hear "state of the art", pragmatists want to hear "industry standard"
• Early majority is willing to adapt, late majority is waiting for you to adapt
• Early majority wants evolution, not revolution
• Each new client must become a new referenceable source for future clients. 
• You can’t attack the pragmatists without a defined strategy
• Whole Product Concept
• • Generic product — minimum product to get it shipped
  • Expected product —  set of minimal things needed to achieve buying objective
  • Augmented product — the maximum set of things that will fully achieve buying objective
  • Potential product — product's room for growth
• You sell to innovators with the generic product, you sell to early adopters  with the expected product, you sell to early majority with augmented product. 
• Pragmatists evaluate and buy whole products!
• Every additional new target customer will put additional new demands on the whole product
• You should focus early on a Product Centric approach (for innovators) — then switch to Market Centric approach (for early majority).

Here is a chapter-by-chapter summary of the lessons I learned from the book - link

The Ultimate Sales Machine

The Ultimate Sales Machine

by Chet Holmes

"When people feel they’re being “sold,” they automatically resist you. When people are being educated, they have no resistance— especially if the information is good."

Chet Holmes was considered by Charles Munger to be "America's greatest sales and marketing executive".  In this book, Holmes lists the 12 key strategies to transform your organization into a sales machine. By machine, he refers to an automatic, reliable, predictable, effortless way of running a business so that the entire organization works in synergy with the sales initiatives. 

It reads as a Getting Things Done type of book. It has very practical advice on how to approach all interactions with clients, how to train salesmen, how to develop the correct sales pitch, how to organize meetings, etc... 

The book is organized in a way that each chapter elaborates on one of the 12 key strategies he claims will turbocharge your business. The 12 key strategies are:

1. How to Maximize Your Productivity and Help Your People Do the Same 
2. Instituting Higher Standards and Regular Training
3. Executing Effective Meetings
4. How to Get Up to Nine Times More Impact from Every Move You Make 
5. Hiring Superstars
6. The High Art of Getting the Best Buyers
7. Turbocharge Every Aspect of Your Primary Marketing Efforts
8. Attract and Close More Buyers by Using More Compelling Visuals
9. Step-by-Step, Day-by-Day Tactics to Land Your Dream Clients
10. The Deeper You Go, the More You Will Sell 
11. Follow-up and Client Bonding Skills
12. Setting Goals, Measuring Effectiveness, and Activating Your Master Plan

This book is full of great lessons. Some of the key lessons I learned and have implemented in my business include the following:

• "Do you function mostly in a reactive or a proactive mode? In my experience, most businesspeople don’t take the time to plan and take action because all of their time is consumed by reacting to the business they’ve already built. To build your business into the Ultimate Sales Machine, you need to be in a primarily proactive mode. Time management is crucial.”
• Establish a “learning mindset” —> take time to sharpen your saw
• “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”
• Who is in your stadium, when you are about to give your stadium pitch?
• There’s always a very small percentage of folks “buying now.”
• The fastest way to grow any company is to focus a special and dedicated effort on your dream clients.
• Most companies leave far too much of the sales process up to individual salespeople.
• It costs six times more to get a new client than to sell something additional to a current client.

Here is a chapter-by-chapter summary of the lessons I learned from the book - link