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After listening to few audiobooks with the last being “The Steve Jobs Way: iLeadership for a New Generation” I bought this book from my Audible monthly Gold subscription about 2 months back. The audio version is in two parts (8 hours each) and the best part it was read by the author “Douglas Edwards” himself.
Douglas Edwards joined Google as its 50 something employee on November 29, 1999 just about a year after founding and full 5 years till March 4, 2005 before its stunning IPO in 2004. Before Google he was working for San Jose Mercury News, a 150 year old newspaper managing their online product “Merc” (The Newspaper of Silicon Valley). Douglas was the first director of Google managing its early days marketing and brand management, much of what we saw of initial days Google marketing was written by him. He has penned the text and documentation of many of the early products the mountain view firm. One of the first products for which he wrote the welcome text was for Google Toolbar for which he wrote the below “…NOT THE USUAL YADA YADA” text, he seems to be so thrilled by this line that he repeats it often in the book.
Douglas recalls about the early crazy days of working in Google, late nights, mid night emails to getting to office next day early morning. His encounters with the Chef Charlie, interactions with Larry & Sergey, Product managers like
He recalls tales of how everyone in Google helped to add server capacity in their data center just before big customers like Yahoo! or AOL signed up. How Will Whitted, Hardware Engineer of Google designed Machines so cheap that they don’t need to care if they fail – this is something that all new age computing firms including FaceBook, Amazon seems to take advantage of today.The author goes into explaining what he saw happening on how Google won many of its early deals with Yahoo!, later with ISP as first customer for Adwords & then the biggest of all AOL
In the later chapters as Google evolves & grows big, teams were formally divided Douglas recalls many occasions where he was constantly in struggle with Marissa Mayer who was managing Product Development and Douglas was managing Branding & Marketing. What Douglas leaves out, probably we readers can guess the reason for Larry to be siding with Marissa was because he was dating her then. Douglas seems to have had a better relationship with other early product managers including Salar Kamangar (9th employee and presently CEO of YouTube).
Douglas talks of many Holiday parties at Google, how extravagant they were and the facilities in Googleplex. He talks of the founders obsession with trying to solve everything with Engineering & Algorithms, not having empathy or respect for conventional way of working with people & companies, sometimes this bordering on arrogance. He recalls how the founders disliked to spend money for vendors, they wanting a vendor of a CRM system they wanted to buy to give it free for the privilege of having Google as their customer. In the end how they went with a not so popular CRM solution to manage the thousand of email pouring in to Google from users and all the problems they had till finally writing an email & CRM system on their own. He recalls of what they did immediately after 9/11, pouring into Web logs trying to dig any clue that may be useful for security agencies.
Douglas talks on how Google went searching the next billion dollar idea after search’s success – how it accidentally got GMail! and Google News. He talked on how he got into preparing company’s IPO documentation, how he parked his car miles away from the Investment banking firm handling the deal.
An interesting book to read if you are interested to know the true Google story.
I have been listening to the Audiobook version of this book “The Steve Jobs Way: iLeadership for a New Generation” for last few weeks during my everyday commutes. The book is written by “Jay Elliot” who was Senior Vice President of Apple computer reporting directly to Steve Jobs, not in the recent decade but during Apple’s early days. Owning a MacBook Air (running Windows 7), iPhone and an iPad like many others I am eager to understand the success of Steve Jobs and his presentation skills are legendary. So when I saw this book in Audible listing I immediately bought it.
The book covers extensively Steve Jobs early days in Apple building Macintosh, but has very little on his days in NeXT or after his return – which is the most exciting period. The book is not a complete biography of either Apple or Steve Jobs or about Jay Elliot, though it attempts to be one when talking about the early days of Apple. The book is about the lessons on management Jay Elliot was able to distil from observing Steve Jobs. It goes into length on how Steve Jobs directly managed the team, selected the members, interior of the office (large atrium with a tree) and how he never took a “NO” or “Not Possible” as an answer from the engineers or anyone else.
In the first few chapters, Jay Elliot gives a brief about his childhood days in his ranch in California. He writes about how in age 15, he could single-handily fix his old 1932 Ford Model-A car and how Henry Ford and team had the wooden slabs in which the original parts came used to build the structure pieces for the floorboards, seats & the interior, the part numbers were etched in easy to find places and the car required no manuals to take apart or to be put together. When talking about how to design and use your own products, Jay Elliot mentions about how rust happens in almost all cans of Gillette Shaving Cream cans, all along I thought I was the only one who was having this problem. He continues to write on the Importance of the first experience of the user when he/she takes the computer or device out of the box, how quickly they can start using it.
Jay Elliot lists many of the abilities he has observed of Steve Jobs that led to Macintosh success. Steve’s obsession with perfection, no compromise attitude, identifying the most brilliant people and going for them (including going for John Sculley), caring for his people, attention to detail, wanting to have the best for the company and the product he is building. It seems Steve Jobs build a whole new factory and assembly line different from rest of Apple for manufacturing Macintosh. In the Mac early days, Steve motivated his people by calling them “Pirates” and not as Navy!. Steve has a power of vision that’s almost frightening, that power sweeps aside any problem or hurdles. How Steve Jobs accepted technologies that were not build in-house like Canon, Japan for Apple Laser Writer and the Celebrity status reception he got during his first visit to Sony, Japan. How Steve persisted on getting Regis McKenna to do the Advertisements for Apple and how he went ahead even with Apple board’s refusal on the1984 most popular TV commercial of Macintosh by Chiat\Day agency. Steve is first a consumer, the most demanding consumer and his Buddhist faith probably has lead him to have a minimalist approach to the products he design – simple, intuitive user interface and features. Steve believes every user wants to feel successful, feel good about using the product Jay Elliot talks briefly about how Steve Jobs hired John Sculley, got kicked out himself from Apple, how he passionately build NeXT & Pixar. How Steve betted his whole fortune on Pixar and the first Toy Story, which then became a huge hit and paying him and Disney a windfall. The book then talks about (again very briefly) about how Steve Jobs returned to Apple, build successful products like iPod, iPhone & iPad one after the other, how he will not ship something until the technology is ready.
The author goes into length to praise as Steve’s brilliance on getting into retail and opening the Apple Stores in 2001, then on entering into Music Retailing and iPods. The author showers lavish praises on Steve Jobs to an extend of becoming an unashamed fanboy. At the last chapters the Author talks about his latter years experience of starting Migo & Nuvel.
If you are interested on how Apple got started and early days then a good book to read will be iWoz by Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak.
I am not sure how came across this book, but I am extremely glad I did. The book is “Delivering Happiness” by Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh. When I bought the AudioBook from Audible.com I knew very little about Zappos other than having heard about their legendary Product Videos in their site and that they were bought by Amazon in 2009 (which implied they should be super smart on e-commerce & warehousing).
The book starts with Tony Hsieh (pronounced as shay) talking about his childhood and teenage misadventures and business ventures. Tony’s narrative style, especially listening to as Audio grabbed my interest. I was reminded of similar incidents in my own school & college days and it motivated me to immediately make a list of events of interest in my own growing years, thank you Tony. Then Tony talks about his founding days of LinkExchange, I remembered I was one of the early users of the service and loved it for generating traffic to EasyTools.com in those early days (~1998). He then goes on to sell LinkExchange in two years of founding to Microsoft for $265 Million after realizing the culture of the company deteriorating so badly that he couldn’t get himself up from bed to work one morning. Many entrepreneurs won’t have the luxury that Tony got of selling it and starting new – so it is important to listen to the second part of his story of how he build a fun & energetic culture in Zappos.
It was news to me that Tony didn’t start Zappos, instead it was by a young first time entrepreneur Nick Swinmurn. Tony Hsieh got involved in Zappos initially as an investor through his venture fund “Venture frogs” which had invested on Zappos, then after the Dotcom burst Tony became more hands-on and then to risk his entire LinkExchange fortune on Zappos – fascinating indeed. Many entrepreneurs including myself can easily relate to the struggles the company has gone through in early days from 2000 to 2003, but the growth story from 2003 to 2009 (when they hit a Billion Dollars) was like a fantasy come true. Tt would have been great to learn about those years had Tony chronicled them in detail (in preface of the book he did say this is not a Biography of Zappos, but I wish it was). Tony wants us to believe it was all due to the Culture he created in Zappos. May be it was the culture primarily, but I feel it got to have been helped greatly by other factors as well – their technology, marketing, warehousing capability and so on.
The book then focuses on what is happiness (sounded to me like a PR creation and retro-fitted in later years, though nothing wrong about it), what Tony has learned on the subject from research he read, Employees talking in their own voice on how Zappos culture impacted their happiness & well-being. Some of the things about Zappos stands out clearly & uniquely and those are certainly inspiring. They have something called as a culture book – you can see videos of it online and can even request a free copy of it (they ship anywhere outside USA to international as well). Their risky move from the “hip” San Francisco to Las Vegas (of all places on earth). The ability of Zappos to maintain their independence even after their sale to Amazon. Their willingness to share their ideas on Culture & Delivering happiness to rest of the world – through tours of their offices as part of Zappos Insights, through this book and now they even got a bus tour as well.
After listening to the AudioBook I have bought few copies of the paper-back from FlipKart.com to gift it to my colleagues for them to enjoy and learn. A great management book that is fun to read, which can bring happiness to employees around the globe if only every CEO under the sun reads it.
I like “30 Rock” TV Show and because of that Tina Fey. So when the book by Tina Fey “BossyPants” came out I wanted to buy it immediately. I read the initial description and figured out I will be too lazy to go through reading the book and decided to go for the AudioBook instead, that was a wise decision I made. The Audiobook set me back by $21.95 from iTunes. I did the entire 5 Hour listening over 2 weeks during my drives and at many places the book kept me entertained.
The book is not really her Autobiography, though it is easy to conclude that way from the description and the initial chapters. She talks in length about her childhood, teenage, her first job in YMCA, her acting training days in Chicago to such great detail that at times a bit boring. In her acting days description she talks about how she likes Impromptu acting on stage, that resonated with me as I have had few similar impromptu experiences on stage – which for me was certainly not on acting but on presentations & talks. She says that in Impromptu sessions it is important to always say “Yes” to whatever the other actors throw at you, keep the flow/story going and don’t take it to a dead-end – these are certainly a tell-tale of experienced live performer.
Then the book suddenly jumps into her TV job in NBC Saturday Night Live (SNL) and then full-throttles into 30 Rock days. Her limited description of 30 Rock work days sounds surprisingly similar to seeing a 30 Rock episode – which is planned I guess. She rants in length about Womanhood & Working Women in America – though she tries hard to make them sound comedy, it comes out pale and rhetoric.
Overall, if you like Tina Fey & 30 Rock, have $21.95 to spare and 5 Hours of listening time you can give this Audiobook a try, but don’t blame me!
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