Introduction
This book was heavily recommended by by Brené Brown in her newest book, Strong Ground. She went to great lengths to extol the amount of knowledge and insights available in the original version of the book and how Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0 takes that history and makes it even better.
I found this book to be not much of a guide to starting a small business, but an overall Masterclass in business insights, knowledge, and lessons from two authors that have been in the trenches for a long time. The information is varied, comprehensive, and should be useful at any stage in someone's career.
Many of the books in my list tend to contain one solid idea from a blog post or keynote speech that is fluffed out to a full book. I recently overheard Raman Ohri tell someone that if you can take away one great insight from a business book that's a win. I not only agree, but have used those words myself on multiple occasions. Mindset by Carol Dweck comes to mind... A solid idea that you understand in the first few paragraphs or pages and the rest of book is simply repeating examples until you set the book on fire. Raman mentioned he had a similar example of book like that called Punished by Rewards written by Alfie Kohn. I haven't read it, and likely will try dig up some cliff notes to make sure I understand the concept.
Sticky Ideas
As I often do I'll go through some of the stickiest ideas rather than a comprehensive review as other people can and have done a great job on that elsewhere.
Opposing Ideas as Intelligence
F. Scott Fitzgerald has an awesome quote that I think about sometimes:
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
This is a great quote getting to heart of paradox and conflicting ideas. This isn't the first time I've heard it, but the authors made it really impactful. For some people understanding and holding two opposing viewpoints can be terribly difficult. Probably because of a recency bias I'm reminded of how much Brené Brown talks about paradox, tension, and living in the middle of two competing ideas in her new book Strong Ground.
As I progress through my career it is becoming more and more important to be able to hold paradoxes and ideas in tension. One example that came to mind right away:
I feel less empowered as I go up in the organization because I have more teams/opinions/constraints I need to think about. At an executive level there are politics in play and more visibility across the organization can sometimes mean simple-sounding problems aren't that simple. When I was a younger individual contributor I would have just ignored all that and built the thing. Having a bigger title while being less able to move quickly is a paradox I never would have predicted when I was younger.
Tyranny of the Or, Opportunity of the And
In a similar but different direction, the authors hit this concept of tyranny of the or and opportunity of the and really hard. It stuck with me as it's not one I've heard before. Good organizations and good leaders often find the way to make the and work rather than accepting an or in it's place.
Market pressures may push towards stability or agility, innovation or core business, moving fast or building a customer base. When people push back on those ideas and find ways to do both items,good things often happen. This, once again, is a callback to Brené's talk on paradoxes. I wonder if I'm seeing them everywhere, or if they really are everywhere...
Bullets Before Cannonballs
This was a cool idea with an even cooler visual to explain it. Jim uses a visual of two pirate ships fighting. If the captain uses all his gunpowder to shoot a cannonball at the other ship (and misses) that powder is gone and he is going to lose. If he fires a bullet and misses, he can adjust and fire another as many times as needed. Once he's on-target, he can fire a big cannonball and know he'll hit the target and sink his enemy.
This is a clever way to suggest running experiments. This reminds me both of The Lean Startup as well as learning to fail well described in Right Kind of Wrong. The concept is powerful, easy to forget in the moment it matters, and hard to do well. But doing it well pays off in spades because you get low-risk high-reward learning from failing you can't get otherwise. Another reference here is Working Backwards which describes Jeff Bezos' one-way door or two-way door decisions. If you can go go back through the door (by changing your mind) then you shouldn't spend a lot of time and research up-front. If the decision is the "one-way" type (e.g. building a factory) you can't easily undo it if it's wrong so it's worth a large up-front investment of time and energy to ensure you're right.
The visual to explain the concept reminds me of the opening paragraph of Upstream by Dan Heath which mentions two boys rescuing kids from a river. One leaves suddenly (scaring you because he isn't saving the kids anymore) to go upstream and stop the person throwing kids in the river. What a powerful visual.
Clock Building > Time Telling
Another great visual reference is this time-related lesson. The authors talk about building organizations, teams, and behaviors around clock building or time telling. This was a reference to an older book of his called Built to Last and you can read a longer excerpt about this over here. Essentially, lots of different behaviors can be connected to one of these two ideas. If you are a charismatic leader with many helpers you may have a team of time tellers. But building a strong organization that will continue to function well after you've left means you've built a clock that will be able to tell time for anyone who needs it long after you're gone. The phrasing of the concept tends to get a bit muddy, but the idea is very sticky and useful. I think it also speaks to the journey many of us make from individual contributor to manager.
Innovation Through Movement
The final point to make is just a little bit sad. I recently gave a keynote talk at the TechPoint Community Connect event. You can see a long form of that talk and the slides in my post. One of the key ideas in that was the concept of moving people around to unlock innovation. People build problem solving skills in one area and often stay in that area over time. Throughout that process they also build in assumptions, accepted roadblocks, and resistance to truly novel ways of thinking. By moving them to another domain you can unlock innovation because they won't know the standard things that simply aren't done.
I had assumed that was an original idea, and I still think I came to it honestly as my career essentially had me doing exactly that since I switched from a traditional casting/forging/materials engineer in 2017 to a software engineer and software start-up founder. In this book, however, there is a single bullet point in the longest chapter (Chapter 8) devoted to innovation where the authors mention "moving people around to unlock new ideas". I guess almost no ideas in business are actually new. It was a little frustrating to hear someone else had already thought of it, but far more exciting to hear that people as experienced as Jim and Bill found the idea both useful and effective at unlocking innovation.
Wrap-Up
Overall, this was a great book and I'm glad that Brené recommended it. It was full of strong ideas, concepts, and lessons. It far exceeded my expectations as just another entrepreneurship book. I plan to look through the list of previous books by these authors and see if any others should hit my reading backlog.
