It’s been a while since I’ve posted a book review on my blog. I still read quite a bit (My reading list on linkedin) but with my new gig at SOASTA I had to prioritize some of my activities But this book was so good that I wanted to share it with you all. It’s been recommended by my boss, Tom Lounibos, and he’s been spot on! What a fantastic read!

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos has been written by Sarah Lacy who is TechCrunch Editor. It’s an incredible piece of journalism which makes you travel to China, Brazil, Rwanda, Israel and try to explain how entrepreneurs, despite difficult living condition, are able to rock their own part of the world. Sarah traveled to 11 different countries in 40 weeks to bring back incredible stories!

You’ll find the story of Marco Gomes who grew up in the slums of before and started his company, raised capital and launched boo-box. The story of Jean de Dieu Kagabo who first started his entrepreneurial journey by selling toilet paper. Pony Ma, CEO of Tencent that is now the third largest internet company in the world! All stories are completely different with different context, different culture and challenges. But they have one thing in common: they describe people who wants to make a difference whatever the difficulties.

There have been many books written on emerging markets, especially China. I can’t be called an expert, but I keep my eyes open, all the time. And frankly, while the Silicon Valley is far from being doomed, the next 20 years might shift the balance of power toward these countries. Chapter 1 by itself gives an interesting and realistic outlook:

These entrepreneurs have an inkling of how modern venture capital works. They know tiny companies can become huge powerhouses quickly. They know high risk can be highly rewarded. They know David can beat Goliath. And this new global entrepreneur has three big advantages. The first one is the home field advantage. Americans may wish the next few decades’ growth was in the American heartland where the demise of manufacturing has left millions unemployed and local economies sputtering, but it’s not. It’s in emerging markets.

Goldman Sachs first argued this point to Wall Street in 2001 with a paper entitled “Building Better Global Economic BRICs,”2 in which the investment bank predicted that Brazil, Russia, India, and China would make up more than 10 percent of the world GDP by 2010. By 2007, it was already 15 percent. So much for the all-important G7 nations of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States; by the middle of this century, the seven largest economies in the world will be China, the United States, India, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, and Indonesia.

The second advantage is that in today’s globalized world, money and talent don’t have boundaries; they flow where the opportunity is. And the flow has already started to the emerging world. Right now, there is more than $100 billion in venture capital and private equity hungry to make money off the developing world, especially after the zero stock market growth over the last decade in the United States.

Meanwhile, many of the immigrants who came to the United States over the last few decades seeking opportunity are returning home. Duke Researcher Vivek Wadhwa expects hundreds of thousands of immigrants will return home to China and India in the next five years. Many more are getting shoved out of the United States by an increasingly hostile attitude toward immigrants and H-1b Visa holders. Still more who might have come to the United States a few years ago for college or graduate school aren’t coming now. The year 2009 was the first year that foreign-born admissions to top U.S. grad schools fell.

The final advantage is the hardest to quantify: These emerging markets and their entrepreneurs have nothing to lose. When a country, industry, or entrepreneur has nothing to lose, it is freed from all the normal restrictions of the way things are usually done. Having nothing to lose gives one the luxury of starting with a clean sheet of paper and far more freedom to take risk—or, as it’s called in business circles, a greenfield opportunity. It’s the reason South Korea has better broadband than the United States ever will. It’s the reason I can get a clear cell phone signal amid pygmy huts in central Africa but not in my living room in San Francisco. It’s the reason Japanese cities are connected by futuristic bullet trains that New York and Los Angeles may never have.

Sarah’s definition of an entrepreneur is one of the best I’ve read so far: “It’s a way of thinking and problem solving, coupled with the internal compass to believe in the idea and the confidence and determination to carry it out. Great entrepreneurs’ minds just work differently than others people’s. They can see solutions to problems clearly. And while those solutions seem to make obvious sense when explained, few others can come up with them… True entrepreneurship can’t be taught. It can’t be faked. It can’t be silenced. You either have it or you don’t.”

Here are two short videos where Sarah discusses her book.

Have you read the book? What did you think? Do you have any similar recommendation? I need my next book fix!

Related posts:

1. Richard Branson: Losing my virginity
2. Behind the cloud is a great read !
3. The Art of War – Sun Tzu
4. Jack Welch: Straight from the Gut
5. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days

Damn ! I just realized that my latest article is almost 1 month old ! This is unacceptable for my trusted readers and as I spend a night in London I decided to share one of my latest read. I did read during the past months but for once, I indulged myself with some great science-fiction books I had in my stack: The forever war from Joe Hadelman (always trust a classic. This is an awesome read !), the Ophiuchi Hotline from John Varley and The Currents of Space from the man himself, Isaac Asimov (I’m a huge fan …).

But I finally took some time 2 days ago to pick up my copy of “Behind the Cloud: The untold story of how salesforce.com went from idea to billion-dollar company and revoluzioned and infustry” from Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com CEO, and I actually couldn’t stop reading it ! I’ve just finished it on the plane to London and I have to say that I had a blast !

I’ve always been interested about Salesforce.com as I was reading a lot of articles about the agile transformation they made some years ago. As my organization is going throught such transformation I always been impressed and inspired by what they did. By picking up this book, I wanted to understand the bigger picture and how Marc Benioff pulled it off 10 years ago. He was the first one to have this vision around Saas and then Paas. With the strong emergence of cloud computing the past few years, I wanted to understand why this guy got it right way ahead of everybody else.

The story is a bit different from the Google and Facebook story. Marc was already a successful executive at Oracle when he built the company. He seeded the company with $6 millions which he had saved from working at Oracle and various successful technology investment he made. That’s pretty impressive if you ask me and it does help implement a great idea in the first place. The actual great idea is actually priceless.

The book is divided into playbooks and gave me some great insights into the whole process. I’m not at this stage into a startup mode (I’m working for Experian Decision Analytics, part of the Experian group, a 15k+ people company. Not what I would call a startup!) but there are some really nice ideas which can be applied to the corporate world. I’m a strong believer that it doesn’t matter if you work for a large company or a very small one. Entrepreneurship spirit can and should be encouraged in either one of them.

The playbooks are the following

The startup playbook: How to turn a simple idea into a high-growth company

This playbook really apply to startup but can also be applied to new products your company is building. I mean, do the following ring a bell whether you work in a startup or in a large company?

• Have a big dream.
• Work only on what is important.
• Listen to your prospective customers.
• Defy convention.
• Hire the best players you know.
• Take risk.
• Think bigger.

From my perspective, these plays are a given in any size company.

The marketing playbook: How to cut through the noise and pitch the bigger picture
The events playbook: How to use events to build buzz and drive business

I combine both playbooks as they go along very well. I’m not, by far, the marketing specialist. But reading about it is really appealing. When you work in software development, you’re proud about what you design and build. But who really care if you’re not able to market it? To go against your competitor? To tell a great story about what you’ve built? To be innovative to separate yourself from the pack? In these 2 playbooks, there are some great advices for any startup to build up their brand. Some can without a doubt be applied to larger company.

The sales playbook: How to energize your customer into a million-member sales team

This was an interesting part of the book, but nothing really new under the sun. I don’t think Benioff really revolutionized the sales process but applied best practices to engage customers, make them Salesforce’s partners and grow the seeds. I’m not a sales expert but from my perspective what I read was sales by the book.

The technology playbook: How to develop products users love

I consider myself as technology driven so you can bet that I was particularly interested by this chapter. But more than technology, this part is all about innovation and users. It reminds us to  have the courage to pursue innovation, to set a strong (and simple) foundation (can you spell KISS?), to reuse as much as possible (Can you say open-source?), to transcend technical paradigm, and most important of all in my opinion: Harness customers’ ideas.

The corporate philanthropy playbook: How to make your company about more than just the bottom line

This part is perfectly placed within the book and remind us all than a company is more than revenue and profit but also about what it can give back to the community. I was actually astonished by what Salesforce.com, a fairly young company, is able to bring to the community. This is a great example of corporate citizenship.

The global playbook: How to launch your product and introduce your model to new markets

This is one of the best part I would say. It tells you how Salesforce.com was able to scale globally without overspending, to adapt to different market (either through partnership or by replicating what they did in the US), how they’ve handled some IP dispute (especially in Australia) and how not to use a seagull approach (Swooping in, messing up the place, and flying away) but commit yourself fully to your new reach.

The finance playbook: How to raise capital, create a return, and never sell your soul

There are some great concepts Benioff reminds us in this part:

• Everything takes twice as long and cost twice as much as you’d expect.
• “Revenue is vanity; profit is sanity” only apply to well established company. Not startup (duh !)
• Be innovative and edgy in everything you do. Except when it comes to your finance. This is a very interesting part giving some details around the IPO process and why they chose to go to the NYSE vs the NASDAQ (“We need the credibility and the panache of the NYSE brand; it’s traditional, old-line, well established; it’s the antithesis of salesforce.com“)

The leadership playbook: How to create alignment, the key to organizational success

I was very eager to read about this part as this is maybe my top priority in my current position. I’m always open to new idea s !

I have to say that I’m not disappointed with what Bernioff has to share with us as leadership was a key foundation to his success (how else could it be?)

He shares with us what he’s used to formalized his management process. He’s called it V2MOM which stands for Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles and Measures. This is something he had used to guide every discussion at salesforce.com. From 1999 to today ! As an example, here is what V2MOM looked like back in 1999:

Vision (What do you want?)

• Rapidly create a world-class internet company/site for Sales Force Automation

Values (what’s important about it?)

• World-class Organization
• Time to market
• Functional
• Usability (Amazon quality)
• Value-added partnerships

Methods (how do you get it?)

• Hire the team
• Finalize product specification and technical architecture
• Rapidly develop the product specification to beta and production stages
• Build partnerships with big e-commerce, content, and hosting companies
• build a launch plan
• Develop an exit strategy; IPO/acquisition

Obstacles (what might stand in the way?)

• Developers (I did chuckle with that one )
• Product manager/Business development person

Measures (How will you know when you have it?)

• Prototype is state-of-the-art
• High-quality functional system
• Partnerships are online and integrated
• Salesforce.com is regarded as leader and visionary
• We are all rich

Benioff rewrites and communicate the V2MOM every 6 months.

The rest of the chapter reminds us about some great concepts to implement when building a great leadership team:,

• Build a recruiting culture: Hire a HR manager right away. Hiring is a top priority. That’s true in a startup and in a large company.
• Use aggressive interviews: 360-degree interviews, have your candidate presents so you can check how they perform on the fly, how they handle curve balls.
• Make sure you hire people who fit the culture you’re trying to grow. Typically at Salesforce.com they had trouble hiring people coming from the client-server world.
• Make sure everyone in the company understands the importance of Mahalo: Mahalo is the Hawaiian spirit of gratitude and praise. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of telling someone “Thank You” in any corporation, large or small. I’ve been astonished in my career by some people not understanding the value of such a simple concept. This is particularly important in a tough economy when monetary rewards  are a bit more difficult to give.

“Behind the Cloud: The untold story of how salesforce.com went from idea to billion-dollar company and revoluzioned and infustry” from Marc Benioff is a fantastic read I recommend everyone to read ! Whether you work for a small startup or a very large company !

Related posts:

1. Jack Welch: Straight from the Gut
2. The Art of War – Sun Tzu
3. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days
4. Richard Branson: Losing my virginity
5. A week in the Cloud ! EuroCloud + Innovation Cloud Summit. Let’s meet !

But it’s not all about the stories. You will get a lot of advice from the book and some are really commons across all startups: Be prepared to change direction quite often, listen to your customers, don’t focus too much on the competition, make it simple, don’t grow too fast, don’t sleep There is a lot of advice you can pick up even if you’re not working for a Startup company but for a well established one such as Experian. Especially when you come up with a new set of products which is what I’m involved in right now …

This is a definite read for all wannabe entrepreneur !

Here are some quotes I’ve picked up from the book:

Joshua Schachter, cofounder of del.icio.us

“Reduce. Do as little as possible to get what you have to get done. Do less of it; get it done… Doing less is so important… It’s the traditional “I apologize for the long letter. I didn’t have time to make it shorter.””

Caterina Fake, cofounder of Flickr

“I’m a big believer that constraints inspire creativity. The less money you have, the fewer people and resources you have, the more creative you have to become.”

Joe Kraus, Excite

“You never know anything. The hardest part in a startup is that you wake up one morning, and you feel great about the day, and you think, ‘We’re kicking ass.’ And then you wake up the next morning, and you think ‘We’re dead.’ And literally nothing’s changed.”

Charles Geschke, Adobe Systems

“If you aren’t passionate about what you are going to do, don’t do it. Work smart and not long, because you need to preserve all your life, not just your work life. One of the things that I felt really good about is that we – from the very first employees, including John and me – enabled telecommuting from day one.”

Philip Greenspun, ArsDigita

“Programmers are isolated. They sit in their cubicle; they don’t think about the larger picture. To my mind, a programmer is not an engineer, because an engineer is somebody who starts with a social problem that an organization or a society has and says, ‘OK, here’s this problem that we have – how can we solve it?’ The engineer comes up with a clever, cost-effective solution to address that problem, builds it, tests it to make sure it solves the problem. That’s engineering.”

“The programmers were in the corner doing what they were told. That’s one reason they were so easy to outsource. If a programmer really never talks to the customer, never thinks, just solves little puzzles, well that’s a perfect candidate for something to offshore. So I said, ‘I don’t want my students to end up like this. I want them to be able to sit at the table with decision-makes and be real engineers – to be able to sit with the publisher of an online community or an e-commerce site and say, ‘OK, I’ve looked at your business and your goals; here are some ideas that we can bring in from these 10 other sites that I build, these 100 other sites that I’ve used.’ And be an equal partner in the design, not just a coder.”

“Consider McKinsey, which holds itself out as one of the world’s leading repositories of knowledge on how to manage a business. They say they’ll never grow their company by more than 25 percent per year, because otherwise it’s just too hard to transmit the corporate culture. So if you’re growing faster than 25 percent a year, you have to ask yourself, ‘What do I know about management that McKinsey doesn’t know?’”

This is the list of interviewees:

1. Max Levchin (Paypal)
2. Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail)
3. Steve Wozniak (Apple Computer)
4. Joe Kraus (Excite)
5. Dan Bricklin (Software Arts)
6. Mitchell Kapor (Lotus Development)
7. Ray Ozzie (Iris Associates, Groove Networks)
8. Evan Williams (Pyra Labs – Blogger.com)
9. Tim Brady (Yahoo)
10. Mike Lazaridis (Research in Motion)
11. Arthur Van Hoff (Marimba)
12. Paul Buchheit (Gmail)
13. Steve Perlman (WebTV)
14. Mike Ramsay (TiVo)
15. Paul Graham (Viaweb)
16. Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us)
17. Mark Fletcher (ONEList, Bloglines)
18. Craig Newmark (craigslist)
19. Caterina Fake (Flickr)
20. Brewster Kahle (WAIS, Internet Archive, Alexa Internet)
21. Charles Geschke (Adobe Systems)
22. Ann Winblad (Open Systems, Hummer Winblad)
23. David Heinemeier Hansson (37signals)
24. Philip Greenspun (ArsDigita)
25. Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek Software)
26. Stephen Kauffer (TripAdvisor)
27. James Hong (Hot or Not)
28. James Currier (Tickle)
29. Blake Ross (Firefox)
30. Mena Trott (Six Apart)
31. Bob Davis (Lycos)
32. Ron Gruner (Alliant Computer Systems, Shareholder.com)

Related posts:

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3. The Art of War – Sun Tzu
4. Jack Welch: Straight from the Gut
5. Behind the cloud is a great read !

Method and Tools

Methods & Tools is a free magazine with PDF and text issues that provide practical knowledge and information on all topics of software development and software engineering: UML, Agile Methodologies (eXtreme Programming, Scrum, TDD, FDD,..), Software Testing, Software Configuration Management, Database Modeling, Java, .NET, RUP, Software Project Planning and Management, Test Automation, Programming, Software Analysis and Design, Quality Assurance, Software Process Assessment and Improvement, Software Development Tools, Risk Management, Refactoring, IT News, etc.

Summer 2009 issue

• Coding and Testing: Testers and Programmers Working Together
• Responsibility Driven Design with Mock Objects
• How to Quantify Quality: Finding Scales of Measure
• Scrum Roles – an Unsolvable Puzzle?
• TDD – FDD – BDD… Why not PDD?
• Open-Source Messaging Servers

Better Software Magazine

Better Software is the magazine for software professionals who care about quality. Each issue brings you relevant, timely information to help you build better software. Continuing to deliver in-depth articles on testing, tools, defect tracking, metrics, and management, it’s the only commercial magazine exclusively dedicated to software professionals. Within the pages of each issue you’ll find heavy hitting articles about solutions to common management problems, coverage on emerging technologies, and more. You’ll benefit from expert analysis and real-world case studies in the areas of Testing & Analysis, Managing People & Teams, and Tools & Techniques.

Subscribe free to the digital edition

Software Test and Performance

My favorite !

Download June 2009 issue here

CrossTalk

A bit more Software Engineering oriented but with regular articles on testing.

CrossTalk, The Journal of Defense Software Engineering is an approved Department of Defense journal. CrossTalk’s mission is to encourage the engineering development of software in order to improve the reliability, sustainability, and responsiveness of our warfighting capability and to inform and educate readers on up-to-date policy decisions and new software engineering technologies.

Download May/June 2009 issue here

(IN) Secure Magazine

(IN)SECURE Magazine is a free digital security publication discussing some of the hottest information security topics.

Link to the latest issue.

Testing Experience



Link to the latest issue
Subscribe for free here

T.E.S.T

T.E.S.T is a publication that gives a ‘real reflection’ of the issues taxing the software testing market. What this means is that the content by its very nature is challenging but informative, pragmatic yet inspirational and includes, but is not limited to, in-depth thought leadership pieces, case studies, news articles, opinion pieces, best practice, and strategy and leadership.
Consequently the types of articles to be expected in T.E.S.T range from Test Methodologies, Effective Unit Testing, Testing Web Services and SOA’s, right through to Security & Code Analysis, Configuration Management, and Application Profiling to name but a few. As a generalisation T.E.S.T aims to highlight the importance of software testing in modern business and capture the current state of the market .

Link to the latest issue

Software Quality Professional

The Software Quality Professional (SQP) is a quarterly, peer-reviewed journal, published by the American Society for Quality (ASQ). Its mission is to help software professionals apply quality principles to the development and use of software and software-based systems. SQP publishes case studies, experienced-based reports, and state-of-the-art reviews in order to provide practitioners with an understanding of those software quality practices that have proven effective in a wide range of industries, applications, and organizational settings.

Link to the latest issue

Automated Software Testing Magazine

The Automated Software Testing (AST) Magazine is a quarterly Automated Testing Institute magazine geared towards IT professionals involved in Software Quality Engineering. This magazine is an excellent source of relevant, up-to-date information from the world of automated software testing. Each issue contains contemporary test automation concepts and approaches provided by industry experts and practitioners, which will help the reader more effectively implement test automation in their own projects

Link to the latest issue

Related posts:

1. Software Test and Performance magazine
2. Measuring Software Quality
3. My favorite cheat sheets for Software Testing
4. Performance Testing – When will they learn?
5. Software visualization for better testing

I finally had a chance to finish reading Richard Branson’s biography: Losing my virginity.

If you’re looking for insights, tips or advice you might be disappointed. Branson is simply telling his story, his success and failures, what drives him and how he approaches business decision (quite simply actually with a lot of instinct). It’s up to you to discover what to make of his story. I might read his other book “screw it, let’s do it !” which summarizes quite nicely his life and the decision he had to make.

Related posts:

1. The Art of War – Sun Tzu
2. Jack Welch: Straight from the Gut
3. Behind the cloud is a great read !
4. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days
5. Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos

Another way to get some inspiration and motivation is to read biographies about very successful people in whatever industry they are working in. Jack Welch, is one of these people and his biography Straight from the Gut is a fantastic read !

As you know, Jack is the former GE CEO. During 20 years, he has implemented some very innovative management strategies and leadership style which are covered in the book in the form of advice and autobiographical stories. The book covers his youth and his strong relationship with his parents, his beginnings as an engineer at GE in the 1960s, the tough decisions he had to make during his early years as CEO, business stories about his successes (e-business strategy is a great one) and failures (the purchase of the Kidder Peabody company).

Jack Welch took fairly established strategy (Number 1 and number 2, Six Sigma, e-Business etc.) embraced them and used his extremely high passion to execute at an amazing level. His strong focus on people is also something I put on top of my management strategy (who doesn’t?).

The book can really be read as a novel and I finished (devoured!) it during one long flight to Kuala Lumpur.

Here are a few inspiring quotes from the book:

Legitimate self-confidence is a winner – the true test of self-confidence is the courage to be open.

Understand where real value is added and put your best people there.

Be open to the best of what everyone, everywhere, has to offer; transfer learning across your organisation.

Confidence gives you courage and extends your reach. It lets you take greater risks and achieve far more than you ever thought possible. Building self-confidence in others is a huge part of leadership. It comes from providing opportunities and challenges for people to do things they never imagined they could do.. rewarding them after each success in every way possible.

Related posts:

1. The Art of War – Sun Tzu
2. Behind the cloud is a great read !
3. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days
4. Richard Branson: Losing my virginity
5. Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos

I’m particularly interested in business biography these days: just finished one about Jack Welsh (former GE CEO), one about Lou Gertsner (former IBM CEO) and I’m looking forward reading one about Richard Branson (current Virgin CEO).

I’m also very interested in the business fundamentals and in my opinion, The Art of War from Sun Tzu falls into any business library. Yes, it focuses primarily on warfare and it’s been a reference for the past two and a half thousand years but a lot of it is relevant to a business and corporate environment. Sun Tzu has influenced all the greatest military leaders, including Napoleon who only failed when he did not follow all the rules set down by Sun Tzu.

The book covers all major aspects of military strategy including planning, taking advantage of different terrain, placement, energy, maneuvering, spying and deception etc. It clearly describes the type of leaders a king should look for to run his conquest, focus extensively on the important of knowing your enemy techniques and plan, explain diplomacy principles and how it was used in 400BC, the importance of weather etc. All these concepts can be easily applied to a business environment where you can see the enemy as the competition, the leaders as your managers at all level of an organization, the terrain as the operational environment etc.

One of the reason the Art of War is so popular is that it is written in an interesting aphoristic style, with full of maxims which can be applied in your everyday business life. It is today the book of choice for leaders such as Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com CEO) and former Chelsea’s coach Luiz Felipe Scolari.

It’s definitely a book I recommend reading.

Some of my favorites aphorism from the book:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

“Fighting with a large army under your command is nowise different from fighting with a small one: it is merely a question of instituting signs and signals.”

“Unhappy is the fate of one who tries to win his battles and succeed in his attacks without cultivating the spirit of enterprise; for the result is waste of time and general stagnation. Hence the saying: The enlightened ruler lays his plans well ahead; the good general cultivates his resources.”

Related posts:

1. Jack Welch: Straight from the Gut
2. Richard Branson: Losing my virginity
3. Behind the cloud is a great read !
4. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days
5. Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos