Author Archives: caltrop-admin

Crack the Code by Renting Your Underwear

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Before even discussing the book’s contents, you’ll need to understand what the title is (and isn’t!) about. In fact, you’re not likely to find this book by the usual search terms!

  • Despite the terms “emotional” and “underwear”, this is not another in the series of bodice-ripper romances by one Jay S. Wilder.
  • “Renting your underwear” comes from a speech saying you will need to do things that make you recoil – such as wearing rented underwear – to achieve significant goals

So let’s get to what it is. It is a business-inspirational book intended to get you to put away all the distracting (and expensive) reasons why you will not take action now to start doing what you know you ought to do. It is a quick read, at 125 pages, although you’ll probably do well to skim first to see what is in it and then come back through to pick up on the detailed advice.

It has two critical messages:

  • All that conspicuous spending buys you very little in long-term satisfaction and cost you the capital you need for the things that are really important, whether it is investing in a business, taking the dream trip, etc. Get rid of excess stuff now and stop buying it in the future.
  • If your ambitions are to do something other than what you are doing, then doing nothing because it’s just easier that way will not get you any closer to your goal

The book spends a fair amount of time discussing specific actions you can take to stop avoiding what you need to do and to keep yourself focused on the important goals. There are also links to some supporting resources such as workbooks ot help you implement some of the ideas. If you’re sitting around thinking “there has to be more to life than this” or “is this how I am supposed to spend the rest of my life?”, then this is the book for you. It will also help if you’ve already had that thought and have established some vague goals for improving your situation but you’re still wondering why nothing seems to be getting better: the odds are that you’re avoiding the harder steps that are needed to get up on that path.

Even if you’re not having such pangs, reading the book should cause you to at least question whether you have really defined any goals, or whether you are just comfortably drifting along … to where? One thing the book can’t do is to help you define what your goals might be, and that might be the hardest task of all.

The one area where I didn’t go along with the flow of the book is its constant assertions that you do need to make drastic changes. There are many people who are in fact quite fat and happy (not to say dumb, not at all) and will be very content to keep drifting on the path of least resistance. But they’re not likely to be reading a book about how to do anything about it, so the book isn’t meant for them anyway.

Here’s The Deal

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Here's The Deal: Everything You Wish a Lawyer Would Tell You About Buying a Small Business by [Joel Ankney]

Subtitle: Everything you wish a lawyer would tell you about buying a small business.

The subtitle pretty much nails it. Whether you are a business buyer, seller or broker, you owe it to yourself to gain the perspective an experienced business lawyer can bring to the process. The book is chock-full of examples of what can go wrong if you decide to save a few dollars and wing it on your own. At the same time, Joel Ankney is very pragmatic, pointing out many issues that simply aren’t worth haggling over if your objective is to buy the business instead of torpedoing every deal you’re in. (It can also be a bit scary for a seller in realizing all the ways a buyer can create havoc if they feel like it and their own business lawyer isn’t up to it.)

It’s a sizable book, about 270 Kindle pages. The bulk of it is devoted to walking through a typical Purchase Agreement, first explaining the clauses and then pointing out the pitfalls and opportunities in each one.

One of the key points to understand is the difference between an equity sale (buying the business outright by taking over the ownership share) and an asset sale, which is not just a bankruptcy liquidation as many expect but rather a mans of transferring all the assets, including intangibles such as  “goodwill” and customer lists, to a company you own.  The point here is liability for past events and future discovered latent issues, and here I wish the book had gone into even more depth.

The author is so opposed to a buyer doing this that he gives it pretty short shrift, but there are several situations in which that’s not possible or preferable. Examples include when you’re buying a company with desirable government contracts (very common in Virginia) or with licenses that are not transferable, such as medical and elder-care facilities (also very popular right now). He does not say this, but (while conceding that I am not an lawyer and highly likely to be wrong since common sense and the law are not always aligned) it stands to reason that but I believe, that any sort of employee deals (e.g. key people, education retention, non-competes, etc.) would also be off the table if the prior company with which they signed their agreement disappeared in an asset sale; they would have no obligation to the new company and its owner.

Another key point is the non-viability of “agree to agree later”  clauses, at least in Virginia.

One area that deserves comment is the strong preference Ankney gives to using a Letter of Intent (LOI) instead of a Purchase Agreement. Of course the buyer would like that, as they are committed to nothing at all, while requiring the seller to do a lot of work and expose a lot of proprietary or competition-sensitive information. In Transworld’s experience, this approach may be more appropriate for larger purchases in the $3 million+ range, but is unreasonable to expect for a smaller deal.

Ankney has also had some bad experiences with business brokers. As with every profession, there are some snake-oil salesmen out there. That is a superficial basis for critiquing the entire role. I would agree that if a seller and a willing buyer have already found one another, then the broker’s basic task is complete.  Assuming they are competent as a “business intermediary”, the broker can still play a critical role in keeping everything at arms’ length to avoid the inevitable spats that occur over 6 months and often spiral out of control if there is no intervening party, and to keep the ball rolling so that inertia does not set in while the principals are both busy conducting their daily businesses.

Again, a book that all parties to a business deal should read.

Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Heres-Deal-Everything-Lawyer-Business-ebook/dp/B01N810N0T

Tuned In: Eight Lessons to Sales Success

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This short (83 pages) novella walks you through the basic steps of getting your name out there and the rewards of doing so. The approach allows you to compare the downside of refusing to do it through the character of the industry veteran who has become cynical about the whole process but is assigned as a mentor to a new and enthusiastic recruit. The book puts a human face onto the spammy side of sales and reminds us that people can only sell to other people, so establishing and maintaining relationships is critical. Naturally to make the points some of the storyline has to be a bit contrived but not to the extent that you often find in “business novels”. An easy read tat has enough depth that you will be back to refresh yourself from time to time.

Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1456731513

Old Boys

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The Old Boys by [McCarry, Charles]An excellent yarn about a group of former spies getting together for one last caper. The premises are an entertaining homage to several classics in this field – a central character who is declared to be dead but may not be, the mysterious jihadist who has also returned from the dead, and (surprisingly) a long-lost Gospel that could have enormous repercussions. This last item is in fact an enormously intriguing concept but it serves only as the omnipresent McGuffin; I should like to have seen it developed a lot further.

About the only objection I found was that the geezer factor really didn’t play into the story except as a running punchline: these old guys are still lethal, still able to undertake feats of derring-do, and still highly connected even though all their colleagues would also have been long gone. I would much rather have seen them overcome situations through recalling old situations or craftiness. But, having said that, the book is an entertaining read and well worth the small investment.

Only to be expected in a spy thriller, there is quite a lot of violence, but (thank goodness for geezerdom) no sex scenes, so it is more than safe for teens.

Amazon link

Boundary Spanning in Practice

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This book is an introduction to Kitty Wooley’s “Senior Fellows” initiative to develop and maintain an ongoing network of public servants (loosely defined) who are willing and able to work across organizational and functional lines to improve both public services and the conditions under which they are provided.

If you’re really interested in developing cross-functional working groups or styles, go to the source: https://seniorfellowsandfriends.org/unfettered-boundary-spanning/. If that doesn’t work, visit Decision Integration LLC at https://decisionintegration.com/resources-2/addl-resources/. (The book is published under a Creative Commons license, so it’s not for sale anywhere and we can give it to you).

Kitty’s LinkedIn handle is just her first name: truly a world-class networker! But she would be the first to say that this is not all about her. She does provide an introduction to the need for, and the concept of, setting up a wide informal network, with several thought-provoking scenarios, and I can certainly attest to the fact that these difficulties are by no means confined to government organizations.  She also provides a summary and call to action at the end of the book.

The bulk of the book is a framework provided by Adam Wolfberg, based on initial observations of an employee engagement program at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and his subsequent analysis of what worked there and in other situations. It is well formulated, and an over-summarization here would not do it justice, but many insights are powerful enough to stand on their own even for those who choose not to dive into it further.

  • Organizational boundaries may be physical (tangible) or entirely based on a mindset, but those latter ones are real boundaries nonetheless, and you’re not likely to breach them by running at them head-first. It’s not magic, but you do have to know how to use the tools and find the gaps. Boundaries aren’t all bad, as they serve to focus competencies and efforts, but they also lend themselves to over-control by insecure managers or to sharp political practices by manipulative managers.
  • Breaking through a boundary to achieve new behaviors simply results in establishing new boundaries around that behavior.
  • The tools for achieving and managing collaboration are much the same as those for managing change:  accepting it as a major initiative to be resourced and managed; personal involvement of top leadership; empowering and providing cover fro those who are doing the boundary-crossing; employing integrated teams from all sides (vs. sending out missionaries to promote your point of view in “their” territory); and finding motivational tools to encourage the organization to seek out collaboration rather than the usual reaction of trying to stamp it out.
  • It’a not a “one size fits all” solution. Each boundary issue needs to be detected and characterized, then an appropriate boundary spanner agent needs to be selected who can create an entry point, build a team approach, and chisel out a workable “new boundary”.
  • While these are all “people” activities, the traditional managers in the rest of the organization need feedback in the form of physical artifacts, such as plans, charters and status reports to convey the message that something useful is happening.

Without a framework, people jus thave to fumble through. That seldom works well. Diane Blumenthal reviews an engagement effort in a rightfully unnamed Department. It began with good intentions and set out in a promising way, but turned into an inventory of staff complaints with untenable solutions. Even if some of these issues were legitimate, over-participation at the grassroots level led to over-distribution of unfinished product and setting of unrealistic expectations, and when they were largely dismissed at the executive level, the effort left employees more disillusioned and angry than before. One lesson learned for me was that any effort that attempts to re-litigate what is already done and largely irreversible is simply stirring the pot to no good purpose; energy is much better spent deciding where we really can go from where we are. Oddly, however, the committee that spearheaded the effort did retain cohesiveness and continued their efforts to spread networking across the agency long after the dust had settled and the Obama appointees had moved on.

Kriste Jordan Smith’s contribution is to volunteer to lead the administration of a community to develop a formal guide on Boundary Spanning and, of course, to serve in a network of such people. You can participate, too. Read the book to see if it is for you.

The Phoenix Project

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The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by [Kim, Gene, Behr, Kevin, Spafford, George]

This is possibly the peak of the “business/technical book wrapped in a novel” genre, notably those by Eli Goldratt to whom this book pays appropriate tribute. It covers the essentials of portfolio management, IT Service management (ITIL, if you prefer), Theory of Constraints (Critical Chain), and DevOps. A lot to cover in a couple of hours of reading! I doubt that an organization could change its culture as quickly as written here, but I suppose you can focus a lot better if you really think the company’s going bankrupt. This is a must-read for anyone thinking of implementing new frameworks, and a great improvement over 100-slide decks laying out detailed implementation plans that will never come to pass.

Amazon link: https://amzn.to/36gXP27

 

Pink Goldfish: Defy Normal Expectation, Exploit Imperfection and Captivate Your Customers

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Pink Goldfish: Defy Normal, Exploit Imperfection and Captivate Your Customers by [Phelps, Stan, Rendall, David]A very easy reading book, packed with real-company examples to prove the points around the idea that you do much better by being very good at what you’re good at than by trying to copy what the most venerated institution is able to afford to do (but usually doesn’t). For a small entity there are plenty enough potential customers to thrive by being great at your core offering and by turning less-effective elements into points of differentiation.

This book is descriptive, not a recipe. The businesses are categorized by what they have become successful doing. Except were revealed in the anecdotes, you don’t know how or whether they decided on this specialization,  and if it was intentional, how they came up with the idea and validated it before launching out on it. I suspect that in many cases it was accidental and the sheer authenticity of the approach is what sold a certain segment of the market on it. If that is correct, you can’t just pick something out of the book and do it, hoping to succeed; the authors are really telling you that it is OK to be who you are and go all in on it, attracting a certain set of raving fans, rather than trying to go vanilla in hopes of not annoying anyone. Not-annoyed people don’t spend a lot of money to get a bit more not-annoyed.

You can get it at Amazon via this link.

David Savakerrva (Volume 1)

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A young man – a boy, really – is torn out of his world by forces he cannot understand and compelled to take on an improbable role as the only person who can save this civilization that is far beyond his understanding. The world on which David lands is, like Dune or Tattooine, a strange melding of desert tribes and off-planet advanced aliens, medieval societies armed at the same time with swords and air-scooters, marching robot dinosaur-like combat platforms and hand-to-hand battles with monsters, and of course the suicidal flight between anti-aircraft lasers to an impossibly rock-hard target that may or may not be the real focal point.

So, yes, we’ve seen much of this before, but the sci-fi realm is so richly populated with classics that it would be hard to write such a story that didn’t have elements borrowed from another. Larry Brown’s hero David Savakerrva is carried along by events but, unlike Forrest Gump, who is just an innocent abroad who happens to be a bystander in key events of his time, David rides on the coat-tails of a character that is probably unfamiliar to most US readers: Harry Flashman, the school bully of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. George McDonald Frazier produced the monumental Flashman Papers series,  which offers often hilarious but extremely well-documented readings about the great doings of the British Empire and other key world events from about 1830 to 1890. The whole thing is a spoof follow-on to the original book. Flashman’s poltroonery earns him the distinction of sole survivorship in one disaster after another, which convey on him the image of continued heroic survival against impossible odds, as a result of he is deemed impossibly brave and is carried to higher and higher esteem in his society.

Thus it is with David, who is consistent only in his attempts to avoid facing up to the challenges, which are admittedly daunting given that he has none of the required experience, talents or interest. As he stumbles from one evasion of duty to another, failure and defeat are snatched away and replaced with victories, sometimes by accident, sometimes by  the intervention of others who are more clued into what is really going on. Eventually, of course, we reach the point at which evasion is no longer possible. Has he grown in character, skill and wisdom to the point that the nemesis can be defeated, or will he collapse in a puddle and let the bad guys win?

The fact that one can still ask this question tells you that Larry Brown has put enough wrinkles in his first book that the story does not simply plod on to the perfect endings of Dune or Star Wars. It leaves you the chance to do what all good thrillers do: make you stay up later than you had intended so you can finish the story and find out what happened. Bravo, Larry!

Having reviewed both the initial draft and the current as-published versions of this book [for which purpose I did receive complimentary copies], I have seen how fast Larry is bringing up his game as a thriller writer. As quickly as he is moving up the curve, I’m really looking forward to Volume 2. Meanwhile, if you haven’t gotten into Volume 1 yet, you should find it very enjoyable. You can get it on Amazon at https://amzn.to/2LmPTTK.

Widows of Malabar Hill

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The Widows of Malabar Hill (A Perveen Mistry Novel Book 1) by [Massey, Sujata]A very engaging tale of a newly-minted attorney in 1920s Bombay (now Mumbai). Purveen Mistry is Bombay’s first and only female attorney, which presents several professional drawbacks, but it has one huge advantage: access to the class of women, often very wealthy, who are walled off from outside society in a harem and allow no contact with any males except their husband. This book is the story of a will-and-trust situation (a complex one, given the three surviving wives) that turns into a murder investigation, for which our heroine is quite unprepared. It also provides interesting insights into the interplay between India’s superficially-tolerant religious factions and the social issues (but also some of the equalizing and stabilizing influences) resulting from the British occupation which had then been going on for over 150 years. The events of the book also provide an introduction to some aspects of the Parsee religion (Zoroastrianism) imported from Persia in the middle ages, although mostly the book addresses only a few of the more dramatic practices rather than a fuller exposition of that very interesting religion.  This was read as an audio book, the quality of which was excellent, using several audio voices and tonalities to keep the characters distinct.

Link to the book on Amazon

Head in the Cloud

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The second of Jack Forsithe’s books is a fast-moving read that combines the genres of thriller and alien-type fantasy. It is an easier story to follow than the first volume, Heart in the Clouds, because the four original separate story-lines have merged into two at the book’s opening and quickly becomes a single plot. Naturally that would be easier to follow, although it is hard for me to assess that since I did read the first volume first, so I had already become familiar with the whole other-creature setup (and their tongue-twister moniker, the Zighorottiz). Although Forsithe does provide enough back story to pick up on the ideas, it would definitely be worth your while to read Heart also (here’s the review). Forsithe himself also seems to be more comfortable with his own story-telling style and there is less reliance on Clancy-style descriptions of equipment, and his voice is getting stronger.

At the end, Forsithe chooses not to employ the now-common device of leaving the characters hanging on a cliff in order to drive sales of the sequel (but driving readers like me away because of the cheesiness of it all). Instead, he presents a very satisfying conclusion to the installment of the tale while leaving the characters at a point from which several roads may plausibly diverge. I have a feeling that we are going in the direction of the Sith from Star wars, but that remains to be seen. I look forward to it.

As an added thrill – one I wasn’t aware of until I stumbled across it in the text – one of Caltrop Press’ other books gets a mention along with some of the great business books of our time.  Maybe you too will enjoy Let It Simmer.

Here’s a link to Head in the Cloud on Amazon: