I finished reading this earlier this week and thought that I would just write a few words about the book.
This book is a very detailed account of Starbucks’ journey back to greatness. Howard Schultz takes you through the challenges that the company and he faced when trying to turn the company around and restore the culture.
Overall I thought this book was pretty good and it made some thoroughly enjoyable reading. My favourite thing about the book was the fact that Howard had included the memos and emails sent out to Starbucks staff during the companies transformation. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone that is interested in business or Starbucks.
I’ve recently completed my stereotypical geek persona by rediscovering my love for books. I used to read quite a lot when I was younger but I was always a really slow reader (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire took me two years – seriously) and this kind of put me off reading.
The other day I decided to start reading a copy of ‘Wake up and change your life’ by Duncan Bannatyne (the business guy) which my dad had given me as a birthday present a few years back. It turns out it’s actually a pretty good book. Anyway for some reason I can now read at a decent speed so now reading is a lot more fun. I’ve managed to power my way through three books in the last week or so and I thought it would be a good idea to share with the readers of my blog (if there are any) some books that I think are really awesome. So in no particular order here goes.
Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
This is a great book about how Tony built up Zappos.com around focusing on the company’s culture and the service that it provides it’s customers. While these may sound like obvious things for a business to focus on Tony’s “lets WOW our customers” approach is a step above anything that I have ever heard about before.
Personally this has to be the best book that I have ever read. It has truly changed the way that I think about things and how I will run my company in the future.
ReWork by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
This book looks at taking a totally different approach to the way that you work. Jason and David talk of how regularly working late nights and ‘workaholism’ are poison that will do more harm to your company (and you) in the long-run than the short-term benefits that these activities bring.
This book questions so much of ‘traditional’ business ideals that I found a part of me reacting defensively to some of the claims that are made. However by making me question why I had that initial reaction I have come to see the benefits of this alternative way of running your business. If you’re in business or a self-confessed ‘workaholic’ then this is definitely worth a read.
Googled: The End of the World As We Know It by Ken Auletta
This book is all about how Google got to where they are today and offer’s a really interesting insight to the some of the goings on inside of Google. Ken takes you through the journey that Larry Page and Sergey Brin embarked upon when they decided to build a more useful search engine and the global business that subsequently followed.
As a fan of all things Google I found this book a really interesting read. There is a lot of focus in the last few chapters on the “Google vs Traditional Media” battle which does have a few dry spots but overall it’s a great book. If you’re interested in Google then this book will provide you with some really good knowledge about how they got to were they are today.
These are just a few of my favourite books. I’m reading Onwards by Howard Schultz (Starbucks) at the moment so I will post a mini review once I’ve finished it. Also ‘Delivering Happiness’ has changed the way I think about business (and business) so much that I plan to writing a post dedicated to some of the topics discussed in the book so keep an eye out for that one appearing on here soon.
Today you can find software to meet your every need from a task list app to keep track of what groceries you need to pick up to a business management system that is going to keep track of what your customers are purchasing and how much they are spending.
Oh and there’s software that does even more amazing things like running the rockets (and the retired shuttle fleet) that put people up into space. Although this is probably going to be a little out of budget for average city dweller. Reuters once reported that the software designed for the space shuttle program cost $5000 dollars per line, yes PER LINE! Now think that that code base had around 500,000 lines initially. $5000 × 500,000 = One expensive project ($2,500,000,000) Anyway back to the topic…
The problem with having all of these amazing systems that aim to make our lives that little bit easier is that you have your data in a large number of different places. This will always be an issue because certain applications will obviously need to store different data about you. However what happens when you want to move between services? The hard truth is that often it is a pain staking process of manually recreating a data profile item by item. This may be okay if you only have a few things to transfer but when you’re transferring years of invoices to a new invoicing system it’s painful (trust me, it will drive you to insanity). Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just get all of your data out of the old system with a simple click and then drop it into the new system. Well yes it would be, but who is interested in spending vital development time (and money) on helping people to leave their product.
Many traditional businessmen might ask you to visit a shrink after proposing something as utterly ridiculous as making it easy for people to leave. However there is a lot of good that can come out of investing time in making sure that you provide a positive user experience right to the end, after all the easier it is to leave the more confident your users will be when putting their data in your hands.
A pioneer of this open data movement is the Data Liberation Front, a team of Google engineers that strive to make it easier to move data in and out of Google products. Currently they have measures in place for 28 (that I know of) Google products and a website dedicated to providing information on how best to move your data. In true Google style once again this super-company’s engineers are right at the front of innovation. The data liberation front’s website outlines 3 main points that I think sum-up the data openness well:
You should be able to get out all of your data
It shouldn’t cost you any extra to get your data out
It should be as easy as possible
By fulfilling all of these points you are well on your way to making sure that you are providing your users with the best possible experience. You might also find that they are more likely to use your products again in the future. I plan to build ‘data liberation’ tools into all of the software that I produce in the future, and might even revisit some old projects. My view is that it’s time wisely invested, what do you think?
