Book recommendations for Float center owners – DSP 156

It’s no secret Graham and Ashkahn love to read, often about business methodology and philosophy. In this episode, they provide a list of the books they would consider to be their biggest influences that helped shape their own business philosophies and methods, along with what exactly about each of these titles is so interesting and engaging.

The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig

The Seven Day Weekend by Ricardo Semler

Maverick by Ricardo Semler

Leading Wisely (Podcast) with Ricardo Semler

Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh

The Lean Startup by Eric Reis

Nudge by Richard Thayler

The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb

Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb

Antifragile by Nassim Taleb

Scrum by Jeff Sutherland

The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes

Sprint by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Joffe Numeroff

Listen to Just the Audio

Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: And today’s question for you is, “What books have influenced you?”

Ashkahn: In terms of influence, I mean, “The Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar” would probably be a big influence on me.

Graham: I was going to say “Give a Mouse a Cookie” ya know? Being on this podcast with you has really reinforced some of the basic principles involved in that one.

Ashkahn: So business books that we like. Probably the biggest one-

Graham: Are you going to start with the biggest one? I was going to start with the most skeptical one.

Ashkahn: Okay.

Graham: I always, my first recommendation for business books to read is “The Halo Effect”, because it’s a business book about why to not trust other business books. Or at least what to look for in general information consumption to cue you that something might be worth your time or trust.

Ashkahn: There such a lot of bad business books out there. I think that’s the problem. There’s so many business books that are just fluff. Like they have maybe like 15 pages of stuff to say and it’s like a 250 page book.

Graham: Yeah they’re just illogical, you know? There’s a lot of business books out there that really play on your emotions and not necessarily the reality of running a business day in and day out.

Ashkahn: I think it’s because you’re a business owner and you’re trying to think about marketing, and you’re like, “I should write a book. That would be great for my business.” It’s kind of this natural thing, whether anybody wants it or not, there’s people out there writing business books who think they have something to say. And so there’s a lot of stuff that people write about that seems like they’re backing up their advice, or they’re using kind of evidence through examples from the real world that could just as easily be examples that show the opposite depending on your perspective and your context. The Halo Effect is a book that kind of lays out a lot of those logical inconsistencies.

Like a classic one is taking the stocks of a company and seeing seven years that they did really well, and looking at a range of time for just that seven years. Where you’re like “From 1991 to 98 they had this meteoric rise,” whereas you could just sample a different chunk of years and tell a different story depending on where you’re setting the beginning and end of the date range you’re looking at.

There’s just a lot of that. Kind of after the fact analysis, or hindsight, where you look at a company that’s done something successful and you assume that these specific decisions they made on the way is what actually led to them being successful, and that’s like the business advice.

Graham: And the name, of course, comes from the bias called The Halo Effect, which is that when something is already successful in some kind of realm or category, that we’re likely to consider it successful in others, whether or not that’s justified at all.

So an attractive human being is a good example. If someone’s good looking, we assume that they’re also great at keeping their taxes and that they floss every night, and all these other great things about them.

Well it’s the same with business, so when we see a successful business it’s really easy to look at things that it did to get there, but that might have completely failed in another case. Anyways, this is a story about books, no biases. Sorry, we get really passionate when we start talking about logical biases.

Ashkahn: It is a really good first business book to read, because it helps give you the tool set for dissecting other business books as you go forward.

Graham: Okay, what were you going to, what is our top recommendation?

Ashkahn: The one that probably has had the most influence on the way we run our business, on the operations side of things, is a book called “The Seven Day Weekend” by a guy named Ricardo Semler.

Graham: Awesome.

Ashkahn: Dude is just super cool. He runs this Brazilian company that started in the 80s, I think. The early 80s. That started by making giant parts for big ships. Huge industrial manufacturing, and has ended up becoming a huge force in revolutionizing business structure, and basically a big proponent of democratic business structure, and being cool to your employees. Trusting them and treating them well. Letting them have more autonomy than a lot of businesses were used to doing, and grew the company very successfully from there. Has gone on to teach business seminars, go in to other fields like education. All kinds of cool stuff. Just a super, super cool dude. Great book. Really awesome book to read.

Graham: A lot of people don’t know Ricardo Semler, at least in the United States as much. I feel like in the business world. He’s one of the dudes who influenced the people who now influence business thoughts. All the people pretty much who’ve written alternative business books on how you don’t have to structure things, just the biggest corporations. Like 37 Signals is a great example of people who have gotten a lot of attention, and Ricardo Semler is the antecedent to that. Also, he’s just awesome. The stuff he does blows your mind. You read it and it’s really delightful to read, and it feels like that one is the one I recommend to just take off the shackles of what you feel you should do in business. It really makes you realize there’s a way broader possibility of how to run your company.

Ashkahn: If you like that books he’s got a book he wrote previous of that, which is called “Maverick”, which is much more of his story of developing these procedures and the way that his business runs, which is also a really great read. It shows you a little bit more of the struggle and how it’s not, you don’t just snap your fingers, and run a super cool company. It’s also hard and it also comes with challenges.

Graham: And if you go through that and you still want more Ricardo Semler, he also released a series of podcasts. I think it’s about 12 long. Maybe ten. Interviews with people who have kind of followed in his footsteps and are using the lessons that he learned in business and applied to Semco in fields like nursing, and education, the police force and things like that, and in business.

Ashkahn: Along those same lines, pretty much every big company owner has a book written by them or about them at this point. Some of them are good, and some of them are bad, but the one by the guy who runs Zappos, Tony Hsieh, is a pretty good one. Same kind of idea. Just running a company that is really nice to its employees, and a really cool place to work, and really encouraging creating that great environment to work in. So that’s another good one, “Delivering Happiness” by Tony Hsieh.

Graham: Yeah, for sure.

Ashkahn: In terms of a more recent book along the same lines.

Graham: Yeah, and of course, they’re really known, Zappos is, for their extraordinary customer service, and also the freedom that employees are allowed to implement that customer service, which is definitely tied right into that.

Ashkahn: I think one of the things I liked about the book was him talking about his own goals for running a business, and how that influenced him, and actually just wanting to run a place that was cool for his life and cool for other people’s life, and stuff like that. Which was kind of refreshing to hear, rather than everything being directed about growing profits or whatever.

Graham: Another one that I’d say is in my top three, is “The Lean Startup”, which is another really good template for running a scientific business, I guess. It’s all about experimentation and the need to constantly iterate and never feel like where you’re at is where you ultimately should be. So running a lot of small tests, slowly getting better, and learning from those lessons as you go along. Making mistakes, making successes, and gradually building into what will be an amazing business. So, very centered on this idea of experimentation, constant improvement.

Ashkahn: Yeah, that’s definitely one of the pillars of modern business advice, is that book. It spawned all kinds of other books off of it, and a lot of modern business mentalities is based off of its principals.

This one’s not as directly related to business, but I really like the book “Nudge”. It’s just about being aware of how you set up your systems in terms of the influence, your defaults, and kind of basic, little bits of … I guess, basically how you set up things to make easy paths for people to follow ends up being very important.

Graham: So they call it “paternalistic libertarianism”.

Ashkahn: Yeah, that’s their phrase for it.

Graham: Which is basically the idea that everyone should be allowed to choose. You can’t just force things down people’s throats, and then say, “This is the only way to do things.” So give people a choice, let them do what they want, but make it really easy for them to choose what’s good for them.

Ashkahn: Be aware that what you set up as the default, or the normal choice, or the first option people have, ends up being a big part of what people end up doing.

Graham: So a great example is paying people every two weeks as opposed to every month, for your own business. Which is paying people every month and paying them every two weeks, you end up with the same amount of money at the end of the year. But if you pay people every two weeks then twice a year you’ll end up with months where you get paid three times during that month instead of just twice, and it turns out, just that difference of two months getting an extra paycheck helps people save money better than if they were getting paid every month, and then at the end of that month they just have this predictable amount that’s left in their bank account. So by choosing to pay every two weeks, you’re nudging them toward saving. You’re not saying, “You have to set aside money in order to be a good employee or a good human being,” or something like that. But just that decision is enough that people will, on average, save much more money than on a monthly basis.

Ashkahn: Yeah, and just super cool. Super cool dude who wrote that book too. Richard Thaler, who is the father of behavioral economics.

Graham: Yeah, definitely. I also recommend reading “Black Swan”, and along with that “Fooled by Randomness” and “Anti-Fragile”. It’s kind of this trilogy by a guy named Nassim Taleb, who is one of our favorite modern philosophical, economical, curmudgeons. He really has a chip on his shoulder for a lot of the ways people who pretend to know what’s going on think about the world. It’s just a great reminder that a lot of things that happen both, in our lives and in business, are due to randomness and chance than we might like to think. So a reminder to be humble in your successes, and maybe not so hard on yourself during your losses as well.

Ashkahn: Another good one on the operations side of things is a book called “Scrum”.

Graham: Oh yeah.

Ashkahn: Which is by a guy who invented a system called Scrum, and this basically has to do with project management and workflows. It’s kind of the idea that …

He really invented it for big, big projects, and it’s been adopted into the world of coding. And basically with big construction projects, or any kind of big projects, a lot of companies will typically make these huge project flow charts or they’d have these tasks starting at this time. These descending trees of what gets triggered by the next thing stopping, and all this stuff, and they’re just these beastly, beastly project layouts that people would make, and he really wanted to create a more efficient system than that. He found that frequently people were not even looking at them, and always way off schedule, and all sorts of stuff like that.

So to create a more agile system, he developed a system called Scrum, which is based more on these two week work periods where you set a small goal. You have these quick meetings literally where you stand up, so that everyone is just encouraged to have them be as short as possible. You go through these little sprint cycles where you work on getting something actually deliverable every two weeks, and it allows for things to be more efficient. It allows for you to adjust easier. The specifics are not, maybe, the most applicable thing to running a float center, but the mentality almost is what I’d say is more valuable to a float center operator, coming out of it. Just that idea of trying to keep an eye open for both efficiency and adjustability in your plans. To be a little bit more responsive to the world, and not to get too bogged down into big, crazy, burdensome systems for getting stuff done.

Graham: Right. At some point, if you’re trying to make a map of the world, you can’t make that map one to one. Otherwise, it’s going to take up the space of the world. So it’s the same with project management or organizing what you’re doing. The more you try to document it, eventually you end up getting closer and closer to this one-on-one. You’re spending more time on documenting and keeping track of the project than you’re making useful steps forward, and Scrum is kind of meant to fight that.

And another one I really like is “Ultimate Sales Machine” by Chet Holmes. Just because it covers a lot of, more than basic sales tactics and things that go into selling an individual customer. I guess more life philosophies that contribute to being good in sales, and in my mind, just being an efficient business person or even an efficient human being.

So some of my favorite things he covers are bull-headed determination, just pushing forward no matter what’s in your way. And getting through those 45 nos in order to get the yes on the 46th time. Things like that. Getting the most out of your actions. Doing one thing that has multiple results. So, although it has almost a cheesy name, and might turn you off from its salesiness, it’s just an excellent read as a business owner.

Ashkahn: I feel like I gotta give a special shout out to this book called “Sprint” by, let’s see. I just looked up the names of the authors here. It’s Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz. It’s about these, like, they have this very specific regimen for a five day work cycle of getting from having an idea to actually testing it out in the real world and trying to do big development on big crucial ideas for your business. And ya know, the specifics of whether you’re gonna implement this and all that stuff is one thing, but the reason I like to mention this is because it is unbelievably specific.

When you read business books, so often they tell you these abstract thoughts or their general theories, and they don’t tell you at all the context or the workings of how to actually do something like this. And this book is like to the point of telling you how many, what color, and what size of Post-Its to purchase for certain steps, and how many minutes this other chunk should take. It’s shockingly detailed. I just think that’s kind of commendable in a business book for someone to actually go to the point of literally giving you every single step by step in how to do what they’re doing. So, I don’t know. Interesting, interesting book. Definitely worth taking a look at.

Graham: So yeah, if you haven’t noticed, we really like books on how you don’t have to run business like everyone else. That you should give people personal freedom, and on specifics of what you should do rather than fluffy generalities. So maybe I don’t know, we could keep going forever. Our list of books that we’ve enjoyed and gone through is incredibly long.

Ashkahn: And they get weirder.

Graham: Stranger and stranger. The nice thing, too, is if you go to look up any of these books and enjoy them, and start reading them or listening to them, you know?  If you’re on Amazon or Audible, you’ll get a lot of recommendations for very similar books. Ones that are in the same vein and kind of in this whole field of logical biases and empowerment and things like that. So yeah, go educate yourself.

I guess we could speak just to the importance of going through these books that we found, and continuing self-education too, which has been a really valuable process.

Ashkahn: Yeah, it’s nice. Sometimes it feels almost like there’s almost a disconnect between running a small business, like a float center, and reading some of these books where they’re talking about having a thousand employees or running factories.

Graham: What to do with my five million dollar a year budget.

Ashkahn: Yeah, exactly. So, you gotta kinda put it into the right perspective, but the important thing is taking the ideas and even if they don’t seem immediately applicable, you’re in your head building up a better tool set to respond to questions and issues in the future. When something comes up, when an employee says something and asks you how you want to deal with the situation, or when you’re dealing with some kind of marketing thing. You kind of just rattling back there in your head are these various pieces of advice you’ve had from reading these books. You know, over time, as you build those up, it gives you a better ability to naturally respond in ways that I think are to the benefit of your business.

Graham: And with us having so many managers and different business owners, I felt like it almost gives us our own language to talk in, you know? When we’ve gone through a lot of the similar texts and similar podcasts, and just these lessons we’ve learned from content we’ve taken in. We’re able to reference those with each other and say, “Oh, maybe we should do like Chet says in Ultimate Sales Machine for this problem in front of us.” Or “Oh maybe we should think about Nudge and actually choose some really intelligent defaults instead of powering forward.” And having those mutual points of reference, I find, are really helpful.

Ashkahn: Yeah, definitely. Having a language you can communicate in on topics that are difficult to discuss. Like the abstractness of how to run a business.

Graham: Sometimes it takes an entire book to really get to the core of them, right? And now you can just reference them with a single word and say “It’s kind of like in Nudge.”

Ashkahn: All the books also have their own acronym, like every book does this nowadays, seems to come out with some acronym that stands for the key lessons they’re trying to get across in the book.

Graham: I wish they wouldn’t do that, really.

Ashkahn: Which seemed like whoever did it first had a good idea, and because it’s been used so much I don’t remember any of them. I don’t anybody’s acronyms, or which ones are to do with which books, or-

Graham: There’s other ways to remember. They should come out with their own jingle or something, included music file.

Ashkahn: That was my question. I don’t know, that’s just the funny thing I’d say wholeheartedly ignore as you read it in business books.

Graham: You don’t actually need to memorize those acronyms. No one uses them except that one author.

Alright, so again, there’s a little glimpse into our bookshelf and especially some of the influential ones, or ones that are both useful and at least entertaining and fun to go through too.

Ashkahn: If you guys have other questions you can go to FloatTankSolutions.com/podcast and send them over to us.

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