5 Reasons Blogs Are Better Than Books

Scott Young had a good post the other day asking the question, “are blogs better than books for mastering complex ideas?” I’ve written in the past that most top selling business books are a waste of time and could be summed up in a couple of blog posts. Most business books start with a good idea but are executed terribly. They’re too long. They’re repetitive. They have too many redundant examples.

The reason for this is simple: the most effective way for a business writer to monetize an idea is to put it in a 300 page book and get it published -- regardless of whether or not that idea warrants 300 pages.

But the problem is you don’t need 300 pages to communicate most ideas. You really only need 1 to 3 pages.

With that in mind, here are five reasons that business blogs are better than business books:

1. Blogs allow you to read about an idea every day or every week in short bursts, instead of in one, single commitment, so it continues to be top of mind. A much better way to learn.
2. Because blogs enable real-time communities you can see the challenges with the idea and see it continuously evolve and improve.
3. You can participate in conversations about the idea with people that care about it. Again, a better way to learn.
4. Blog posts tend to be sharper and a bit more opinionated or controversial than business books. When you’re trying to sell your product to millions of people you sort of have to find a middle ground that most people will like. Bloggers generally don’t do this – blog post are shorter and sharper.
   
5. Most people don’t read blogs – and they certainly don’t participate in the communities. You have an advantage over most people who just consume the initial idea and don’t iterate or engage.

I’m not saying I’m going to stop reading business books – I’m usually reading a couple at a time -- but I'm finding that more and more of the good stuff I read is in my blog feed and not my Kindle.

Open Conversations

Back in 2005, Union Square Ventures -- the well-known NYC-based venture capital firm -- converted the homepage of their website into a blog. Brad Burnham, one of USV’s partners explained their reasoning at the time.

"We realized that our thesis evolves incrementally as a result of our dialogue with the market, and that the best way to manage that was to accept that we would never get to an answer, so we should just publish the conversation. The best way to do that is with a blog. So here it is."

A few months ago, they took this a step further and turned their website into a conversation, allowing anyone to share links and discuss topics related to the firm and the firm's investments. They also now cross-post their own blog posts and even take pitches from entrepreneurs on their site. Really cool.

In some ways, it’s surprising that an institutional investor would be so open and willing to have a public conversation about their investments and their investment strategy. VCs don’t have hard assets, they don’t have engineering talent, and they don’t have a product. Their entire value is really their investment thesis and their ability to execute on that thesis. So it’s a pretty bold move for them to open up all of that intellectual capital to the world.

But as Brad noted, he believes that opening up the conversation actually puts them at an advantage.

I’d love to see more companies be as open as USV, and to begin having open conversations with their employees, vendors, partners and customers. Personally, I’m constantly having conversations with my colleagues and with the market about the things I’m working on. These conversations help me get better at what I do. Part of the reason I write on this blog is to help me think things through.

What USV has done is scale their conversations and their ability to get better at what they do enormously. Instead of just having conversations with their colleagues that sit across the hall, they're having conversations with (potentially) anyone in the world. That kind of scale has to put them at an advantage over other VCs.

The obvious concern with this approach is that opening up the conversation about your work and what your company does will give away sensitive, proprietary information that would put the company at a disadvantage against the competition.

But I think there are two critical insights here that strongly counter that concern.

1. With very, very few exceptions, companies don’t have some secret and final solution that will drive their success. As Brad notes, most growth and success comes incrementally as a result of perpetual interaction with the market. The thesis is never final, it is always evolving. This is true of nearly every company.
2. Just because you can view and participate in the conversation that a company is having doesn't mean you can recreate what that company is doing. When I write about a new approach I'm taking, by the time someone reads it, internalizes it, and acts on it, I've already moved on and improved on that approach. In addition, my approach is probably wrong for you anyway. You're in a different situation, have different resources, have different connections, have different opportunities and different constraints. It's useful for us to have a conversation, it will help us both. But it doesn't put either of us at risk.

So with very, very few exceptions, I think more companies should begin to open up their internal conversations, challenges and ideas to the public. In the book The Wisdom Of the Crowds, James Surowiecki talks about the fact that across multiple applications (business, military, psychology) large groups of average people are much smarter than any small group of elite thinkers.  I think it's a mistake for companies to think through their challenges in private. A company's likelihood of success is much greater if they open up their challenges to the 6 billion people outside of their walls -- in addition to the small group of individuals inside them.

Put simply, in most cases, the long-term benefits of open conversations are far greater than any potential short-term risk.

Selling Innovation & The Challenger Sale

When you go to market with an innovative product the good news and bad news quickly become obvious. The good news is that, depending on how novel your product is, there’s generally little (if any) competition.

The bad news is that your buyer doesn’t need what you’re selling.

Your buyer has been running their business just fine without your product. They’re busy. They generally don’t want to think about something that isn’t already on their radar.

Trucking companies need tires. Building developers need concrete. Apartment buildings need insurance. Of course selling that stuff is never easy, but buyers have budgets, buying processes and an understood need for those products. If you do the things that good sellers do -- present well, build relationships, follow-up promptly, address concerns, be responsive -- by the end of the year you’ll sell some tires.

But when you’re selling innovation -- that is, selling something that your buyer has never bought and doesn't know they need -- you can do all of the things that good sellers do and still end up selling nothing. Literally nothing. Zero.

This is why the notion of the Challenger Sale is so important. To sell innovation the seller has to challenge the buyer.

• Challenge what business they’re in
• Challenge their buying process
• Challenge their future state
• Challenge their goals
• Challenge their understanding of their own market and where their market is heading
• Challenge how they think of themselves against the competition
• Challenge who their customer is and what that customer wants

A buyer has a point of view on their work that satisfies them, that makes them comfortable. And that point of view, up until now, doesn't include your product. To win, you have to break that point of view and shift the context so that they see a future where your product is a must have. Successful innovation selling is a function of a seller's ability to change the context and point of view of the buyer.

5 Great Apps You Probably Don't Use

The other day I was talking with a few colleagues about some of the less conventional apps we use on a day-to-day basis. Here are five that I've begun using regularly that you may not have heard of but are definitely worth checking out:

1. SoundGecko reads to you. If you ever come across a long article online that you want to read but never have time to get to, copy and paste the link into this app and SoundGecko will read it to you. This is great for long Atlantic or New Yorker pieces that I know I'll never get to -- you can listen while driving or walking around town. I've used it quite a bit over the last several weeks. Thanks to Michael Katz for the recommendation on this one.
2. Lift helps you create good habits. There's lots of research that suggests that habits are the secret to high performance -- it's just too hard to motivate yourself to do the hard stuff every day. You have to create good habits. Exercise has to be a habit like brushing your teeth is a habit. The Lift app helps you do that by allowing you to track and share your habits. Spark Capital invested in these guys a while back and Bijan Sabet wrote a good post on them that gives a good summary of how people use the product.
3. Amazon Instant Video is a no-brainer. If you're an Amazon Prime subscriber (if you're not, you should be) you get free access to Amazon Instant Video. Download the app -- it's comparable to Netflix, can be streamed to your television and is included with your Prime Subscription.
4. Cal is the best calendar app I've ever come across. The challenge I've always had with calendar apps is that they typically have terrible usability. They never seem to work nearly as well as desktop calendars. Cal has a fantastic look and feel and is super easy to navigate. It instantly syncs with your work and personal calendars. It even syncs your Facebook calendar and TripIt itineraries so everything is one place.
5. Refresh gives you the 411 on people that you meet. This one was recommended to me by a colleague and I have to caveat this in that I've only been using it for a few days. But so far I like what I see. Refresh integrates your calendar and social networks to create a quick snapshot of the people that you're meeting with. When you open that app you'll see a snapshot of your upcoming meetings and the people that will be attending those meetings. Refresh then aggregates a ton of information (mostly from social networks) into a "dossier" for each individual --where they've worked, where they went to school, what they Tweet about, what their interests are, etc. It's basically a more accessible and beefed up LinkedIn profile. I haven't been using it long enough to speak to its utility but it works well and has a slick design. If you have lots of external meetings with people you don't know a lot about it's worth checking out.

Healthcare Reform & Prioritizing The User

I was really interested to read the other day that the president of Comchart Medical Software (an EMR vendor) just announced in a blog post that his product is no longer going to be certified for Meaningful Use. For those readers that don’t work in healthcare and don't know what I'm talking about, Meaningful Use is a really important qualification program happening right now in healthcare.

Some background. As part of healthcare reform, the government wants healthcare providers to use software (as opposed to paper) when providing care. Specifically, they want providers to invest in and use an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system. The hope is that the use of these EMRs will enable interoperability between providers; improve care quality, safety, and efficiency; engage patients in their care; and improve overall population health.

With that in mind, the government has laid out a five year plan and three stages of Meaningful Use implementation and compliance that EMRs must meet. Just like the name suggests, the government wants providers to use their EMRs “meaningfully." In each stage of the implementation, the usage requirements of electronic healthcare become more and more significant.

The government is pretty serious about this effort. In the short term, they’re providing financial incentives (specifically, higher Medicare reimbursements) to providers that meet Meaningful Use requirements.  In the longer term, those incentives will turn into penalties.

As you can imagine, this change in the law has led to massive technology investments on the part of healthcare providers. They’re all scrambling as fast as possible to implement their EMRs -- and vendors that make software for healthcare have seen their sales skyrocket. On a side note, this is a large part of the reason that you’re seeing more and more independent doctors becoming employed by large hospitals and health systems. They can’t bear the cost of installing an EMR on their own.

But now that EMRs have gotten some traction with providers (Stage 2 goes into effect in 2014), things are starting to get interesting. As providers are further along in their meaningful use certification, they’re finding that they actually use (and need) these products to run their businesses. Like most users, they want the software to be user friendly and to align with what's important to them and their patients.

And of course, the good EMR vendors -- like most good software companies -- are learning, iterating and releasing changes and improvements to delight these providers.

But, wait a second, not so fast. Maybe they're not.

Remember, the priority and goal of the EMR vendors isn’t necessarily to serve their customers (the providers) and, by extension, patients. The priority and goal of the EMR vendors is to help their customers reach a specific list of objectives as laid out by the government 4 years ago. The EMR vendor's goal isn't to make a product that helps providers and patients, their goal is to make a product that complies with a series of strict government mandates and timelines.

Anybody that knows anything about product development, especially software development, knows that the the product you set out to build in the beginning is always wrong. You have to launch and iterate and iterate and iterate to get it right. You can't know in the beginning what is right so you must change and release, change and release.

But given that the government is likely the least agile organization you'll ever find, they can't change their product requirements to meet provider needs. Or at least they can't do it quickly. So it was just a matter of time before Meaningful Use requirements and what's good for providers and patients began to diverge.

And that’s what we’re seeing with Comchart’s decision to halt their product’s Meaningful Use certification. Take a look at this excerpt from their President's blog post:

While the individual people involved in promulgating these EMR mandates (mostly) have the best of intentions, they clearly do not understand what transpires in the exam room, as many of the mandated features confer little or no benefit to either the patient or the healthcare provider.

And this:

As a result of the mountain of mandates, ComChart EMR  and the other small EMR companies will have to choose to implement the mandates or use their resources to add “innovative” features to their EMR. 

So, in short, a software vendor has decided to prioritize its users over government mandates.

Now of course I don’t know enough about the clinical value of Meaningful Use requirements to understand how off base they actually are, but I’m confident that we’re going to see more of this in the months to come. You just have to assume that, despite their good intentions, the government missed the mark with these mandates. And because big government mandates aren’t at all agile – like software development needs to be – you just know that Meaningful Use mandates are getting further and further away from what’s best for providers and patients (they just didn’t know what they didn’t know whenthe requirements were written).

Related to this, I’ve written a quite a bit about how bad enterprise software is when compared to consumer software. For the simple fact that, traditionally, big enterprise software companies could get away with it – they just needed good salespeople that could sell an individual or a small group of individuals on their product and those individuals would force their employees to use the product. Enterprise software companies can survive (and thrive) with a weak product.

But what's happening here is even worse. The government, who’s even further removed from the needs and wants of the end user, is mandating what the software must do with virtually no ability to iterate on it as priorities change and new discoveries are made.

Despite everyone's best intentions, this is a recipe for a terrible product. It is so far removed from what's good for the end user.

In the long term, I think we'll see more and more of these small, user-driven EMRs abandon Meaningful Use certification. And this will result in two types of products, or two different somewhat radical product directions: one that meets Meaningful Use requirements but is painful to use, and one that doesn't meet those requirements but is a delight to use.

In my view, in the long, long term, as Meaningful Use requirements are scaled back or phased out completely, the lighter-weight, user-driven EMRs will be the vendors that win. They'll have such a strong and inherent product advantage over those that were forced to rely on the government to design and dictate their product roadmap.

That said, I recognize the challenges for EMR companies that go their own course. This is going to create a major client management problem in the short term. And I recognize that it's likely going to take years for these vendors to win back clients. But physicians are no different than any other consumer; they want great products that are beautiful and intuitive and easy and seamless. Eventually they'll demand it. And eventually they'll get it.

As I wrote about in my post about the business to employee to business sales strategy, this is the same course that companies like Yammer and DropBox and Xobni are taking. They've prioritized the user and built a sales and product strategy that relies on user satisfaction and product quality to succeed. These companies are winning because they're bypassing the bureaucracy and misplaced priorities that lead to large, lumpy sales and mediocre product offerings.

They've prioritized the user. And the EMR vendors that do the same will be the ones that win.

This is going to be fascinating to watch.