Chief No Officer: Confessions of an Unconventional Entrepreneur

By Bendrix Bailey

What would happen if you forbade everyone in your company from ever saying "no," to a customer? What if you posted your contact information on the company's public website and required all of your executives and department managers to do the same? What if you turned cash planning from a financial exercise into an operational priority where the VP of Finance was the last to weigh in? What if you paid your customers to read your advertisements? What would happen if you took a huge pay cut rather than lay off employees? In The Chief No Officer Bendrix Bailey explains what happened with each of the perplexing questions above, and more. Each chapter will surprise you with an unconventional response to a common business problem.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781624888908

Book preview

problem.

PREFACE

The purpose of this book is to help you make money. I made money; lots of it by any measure. The truth is though that I could have made much more. My business career started in 1979, coincident with the emergence of the personal computer. The PC was a tidal wave that carried thousands of entrepreneurs and their associates into the ranks of the super-wealthy. That tide carried Bill Gates among others. I mention Bill because he and I are the same age and we were living within a few miles of each other in Massachusetts when we started our first businesses. Bill is without a doubt the best strategist and fiercest competitor of the information age and today my net worth does not approach the interest on the interest of the money he has so far given to charity. The point is, on a tidal wave such as the personal computer, everyone, even the driftwood (me, not Bill), gets a great ride! The first lesson of this book is right here in the preface: Identify the rising tide of your time and get your boat on it. I’ve known excellent businessmen who made very little money, and seen fools who made much. The only difference was the market they served.

This book is a collection of problems and solutions. Other than encouragement to take the unconventional path, there is no single theme in this book as there is in so many of the business books published. I don’t claim to have discovered the one secret to understanding the rise and fall of markets, or the key to leading people, or the message that wins all customers. What I have learned are some practical lessons that can help you manage your company and perhaps save your bacon.

Because the methods in this book derive from my career, it is somewhat autobiographical; meaning it has some great war-stories. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed living them.

Have fun!

SECTION ONE

Its Called Leadership for a Reason

The CNO

Access to Management

Leadership

Leading by Example Through Hard Times

The Official Corporate Reading List

The Indispensable Employee

You Have the Last Word

Don’t Hire Your Friends

Don’t Promote Exclusively from Within

Stock Options Are Too Expensive

LEADERSHIP FROM THE START

It is called Leadership for a reason. Leaders must be out front where the action is in order to make informed decisions. While it may make sense for military commanders to keep back, out of the way of the bullets, that does not hold true for business leaders.

Leading from the front does not mean that you give speeches in front of your captive employee-audience. It does not mean that you write inspirational, motivational platitudes and hand them down from your sheltered office. Leadership from the front means that customers can find you and give you the brunt of their dissatisfaction. It means that you work alongside your employees servicing customers and winning sales. It means that you are there, pitching in wherever trouble comes.

Leadership from the front is unconventional to all but those who have no choice; start-up entrepreneurs in small companies. It is also the most powerful advantage over your competition that you can take, if you’ve the courage and the integrity to do so.

INTRODUCING THE CNO

Every company needs a CNO. What is a CNO? He is the Chief NO Officer. This is the single person in your company allowed to say no to a customer. That’s right. Absolutely nobody else is allowed to say no to a customer. Not under any circumstance, nor for any reason will a customer hear the word no from anyone other than you, the CNO.

Putting one person in charge of saying no for an entire company may sound impossible to manage, but it is not. I personally assure you that it worked for me as my company grew to service more than 15,000 customers, shipping more than 100,000 circuit boards per year.

When Are Customers Told NO?

Most CEO’s would claim that a customer will be told no only when asking for services not offered or products not manufactured by the firm. As cut and dried as that sounds, the truth is often more interesting. Saying no is not usually about the needs you cannot satisfy but rather the needs that will challenge and improve your company if you do find a way to satisfy them. In all but a few instances per year, when a customer makes a request of your organization that is not easily satisfied, finding a way to satisfy it will help you grow and make more money.

The customer may want you to do a better job at what you are already doing. The customer may want you to add new features and services so she can spend more money with you. The customer may want to tell you about your competitor’s offerings and what you need to do to stay competitive. The customer may want to show you new technologies and propose products that you could and should be offering to them.

If that is all that customers want from you, then every employee should be able to handle the customers who present requests you can’t satisfy, right? Why should you have to prohibit all your employees—and I mean every employee, from the Order Department right up to the vice president of Engineering—from ever uttering no to a customer? Simple: if you don’t prohibit it, they will do it too often and for all the wrong reasons.

Every one of us can be quick to say no when presented with a new challenge. We might even think we are doing the best we can for our company by telling a customer no. Few employees have the power to launch new products and services in response to special requests. Without the power to make those changes, frontline employees are trained to offer what you already have and service what you sell.

The customer who persists might get the attention of a manager. Perhaps the manager will welcome the challenge as a business opportunity and so will pass the information along. Unfortunately, the pressure to complete the department’s assigned work rather than add to his workload is more likely to prompt the manager to say no to the customer.

Every day there are many opportunities for your employees to say no. When faced with a request they cannot satisfy with an off-the-shelf solution, your employee will say no. You will lose an opportunity without ever knowing what you have lost. Employees don’t expect to be rewarded for taking the time to champion a customer’s unusual request. All companies are under pressure to run efficiently. That pressure is often translated into a focus on productivity as measured by numbers. Department managers are evaluated and compensated on productivity. Fear that taking time out to pursue a customer’s unusual request may not be productive, is rational.

Sometimes customers are told no just because you get impatient. Everyone who works at your company can have a bad day or a busy day or just plain not see the light of day when opportunity knocks.

As a business owner, I would occasionally stumble upon or learn after the fact about a no. Attempting to prevent our company from saying no to our customers, I experimented with a variety of different strategies and systems. Each was designed to capture the information when employees found themselves unable to satisfy a customer. None of the forms, entreaties or coaching worked until I discovered the role of the CNO. The only solution was to take full responsibility for saying no as the worst thing my company can do to our customer, our benefactor, our ally and source of all good things financial.

Because no is such a terrible thing to say to a customer it became my responsibility alone to say no to customers. Once I started communicating the message that the CEO would be the only person who can utter that terrible word, the organization was transformed. The same transformation is available to you.

Be Serious About No

As the organizational leader, you have to be serious about no. You have to communicate your new position to everyone as well as discuss the consequence should any other person try to do your job. You have to make it clear that anyone, at any level, who tells a customer no will receive a written warning. Twice, and you are gone. Sound tough? Well, if this function is in your job description exclusively, as is the ability to bind the organization contractually, then it is a serious breach of executive authority to usurp that function. This is the way I explained it: I take saying no to a customer as seriously as I do signing contracts and checks. Saying no to a customer is as serious a problem for you as it would be if you were to sign a check on the company bank account. That got the point across.

Tell Your Customers

You, your employees, and your corporate presence (Web site, advertising) have to tell your customers so they know that they don’t have to take a no from anyone else in the company. Put notices on your Web pages for Customer Service, Technical Support, Executive Access (see the chapter on Access to Management) and on your personal page advising customers that you are the CNO and that nobody else in the company should use that word with them. Ask them to please use the contact form on your personal page to let you know if they are feeling a no from any other person in the company.

Tell Your Employees

Communicate your new position to all your employees again, directing them to your personal page and the notice there. Explain what you hope to learn by being the CNO and why you consider a no to a customer to be of such strategic importance that you are investing your most precious resource, your time, in this policy. Most important in the recurring communication is to tell the stories of the benefits that have been won for the company by refusing to say no.

Do Not Fear No

Don’t worry that you might be saying no often. You will almost never have to say no. Every employee in the company will work hard to make sure you are not given the opportunity to hear those unusual customer requests. Your employees are loyal, creative, and often brilliant. They do understand the importance of customers and are able to craft innovative solutions to tough problems, create new products and services and find ways to reconfigure existing offerings to satisfy customers. Your commitment to satisfying your customers’ unusual requests validates their desire to satisfy the customer and prioritizes that investment relative to other productivity measures.

You might be concerned that proscribing a customer service representative’s or a manager’s freedom to say no to a customer is demeaning or constrains his sense of empowerment within the organization. That is a fair question but not a real outcome. Prohibited from telling a customer no, the managers and employees become empowered to find a way for the organization to say yes. Faced with a challenging problem that they must solve, employees will call upon their own creativity and initiative to reach deeper for solutions. Organizational resources and interdepartmental communication are encouraged because nobody wants to be identified as the cause of a no to a customer; therefore everybody prefers to join in the search for a resounding yes.

As you can imagine, the last thing any of your employees want to do is to explain their lack of initiative to you. Because you are serious about the strategy and have communicated it to both your employees and your customers, your employees will feel in their gut the serious implications of saying no and will avoid having to push that problem up to you.

So how much added work is created for you, the CNO? Before you read my answer, stop here and think for yourself by answering this question: Given the gravity of saying no to a customer, how thoroughly researched will any such request be before it reaches the desk of the CNO?

Never Delegate No

As the CNO you can never delegate the responsibility of communicating a no. The actual conversation with customers and saying no to them must be done by you personally. If you delegate the eventual communication of a corporate no, you will lose the respect of the organization. You’ve got to take responsibility for no. If and when the time comes for you to decide that your organization simply cannot satisfy the customer, get on the phone with the customer and explain why. Have a conversation about the effort your company put into researching her request. Explain the challenges you cannot overcome. Finally, encourage your customer to keep in touch .

The Real World – Why You Won’t Be Saying No

When you are the only person authorized to say no to a customer, will you spend your entire day doing so? Let me assure you that will not happen, for several reasons:

Your company has no reason to say no to a customer, in most cases. Delivery of large orders in a short time may take some careful reconfiguring of a manufacturing schedule, but the delivery can be made. The request for additional service can be met by a clever CSR putting extra time on a snippet of custom code, or a simple diagram. Sales Engineering can provide creative configurations of existing products, or a quote for a new custom product. Custom products eventually accounted for 5% of sales at MCC! Our strategic intent to never lose a sale to a competitor demanded that we respond aggressively to competitive products, services or pricing.

Refuse to say no and you’ll discover a hundred new ways to say yes.

The simple reason that you won’t be saying no very often is that nobody in your organization wants to present you with a problem and admit; I can’t solve it. At every level, your talented people will try to satisfy the unusual request rather than ask you to resolve it. Fewer than ten times every year did a customer request reach my desk. Sometimes the problem was simple; we just did not make what the customer wanted, so the decision to satisfy the need became a matter of resources and fit. Other times it was less clear.

My executives researched the options before bringing me a no. By the time it reached my desk the problem was clearly defined as were the gaps between the required solution and what we were presently capable of. The executive that brought me the potential to say no to a customer had always worked hard to avoid that necessity and so, as a result, by the time the problem got to me it was a pleasure to work on. Here was a challenge to my entire company; a real tough challenge that would require some realignment of resources, new research, a new approach to support, a powerful competitive response. Something EXCITING!

That kind of work got me into the office early and kept me there late. As a founder and CEO, it was just this sort of excitement that prompted me to start a company in the first place: the unsolved problem that beckons me onward and the elusive solution that keeps me up late working, sleeping on the floor to start again as soon as discomfort rouses me. The opportunity to discover and deliver something new excites me. Plus, this is how you make money, and I always enjoyed making money.

By becoming the CNO, you can improve your organization and bring out the best in those you lead. By accepting ultimate responsibility for the most terrible thing you can tell a customer, you communicate the gravity of that response. You ask that all who follow your lead strive to prevent a no from reaching a customer. If you don’t think becoming the CNO will work wonders for your company, then you have not tried it.

What about Very Large Businesses?

During and after the sale of my company to National Instruments, I enjoyed many conversations with NI’s vice president of Engineering, Tim Dehne. We discussed business tactics and strategy, specifically, the strategic culture of my company. Of the many ideas we exchanged, one intrigued Tim more than most - the concept of the CNO.

Tim could see the power in the concept but was daunted by the challenge of implementing the process in a 4,000-person company like NI, which had an established culture. How would a new concept like that fit in? How would you sell it to people? How could you ensure that it would be adhered to? How would you manage the huge burden it would place on the CEO while the organization adapted to it?

Excellent questions. What follows is what I would do given the challenge of implementing CNO in an organization the size of National Instruments. If it is not a good final answer, then I hope these ideas will prompt those of you in large organizations to think about and solve the problem.

First, when a company starts up, the CEO is the CNO, he just does not think about his role that way. The CEO is the CNO by default. With no layers of people between the CEO and the customer, the CEO talks to almost every customer and is the one to decide when to say no and is the person to say it. Only hired CEOs have no experience as CNO. Any founder/CEO has lots of experience being the CNO although he might never have thought about it before. The role of CNO is something the founder/CEO loses by default as success grows the organization under him. NI is run by a founder/CEO.

Organizational strategy and philosophy are not matters of scale, but matters of principle. The principle is simple. Don’t be a wimp and hide behind the organization. Get yourself out front and take the heat. If being the CNO means that you are handling a lot of problems, then the problem you have to fix is not your visibility, but the organizational reasons that so many customers have to be told no. Get out and fix that. And, if you want help bringing this power to your company, give me a call.

A CNO War Story

I have an example of CNO value that was worth millions to Measurement Computing Corp. The measurement electronics market is very conservative. It should be. Measurements are used to control expensive industrial processes or to monitor laboratory experiments on which lives could depend - in the case of medicine, for example.

Customers are not eager to adopt new technologies; however, occasionally something will come along that is too good to pass up. The personal computer was one. It completely changed the way measurement devices were built and what they cost. Among big changes after the introduction of the personal computer was the introduction of the PCI bus followed by the USB interface.

The PCI bus allowed personal computers to run faster and do more. The PCI bus also placed a cost burden on every board that plugs into a personal computer. The PCI chipset is expensive and complex.

Along came the USB interface, which was intended as a way to connect printers, cameras, and other peripherals to computers. It was designed to be fast, easy to use, and inexpensive. The USB interface has completely replaced the earlier interfaces such as RS232.

The price of measurement chips and of simple computer chips is falling all the time. You probably know Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every eighteen months. If you can put one million circuits on a chip in 2001, you can put four million on one in 2004, and sixteen million transistors on a chip in 2007. Nice law! That is why your computers get more powerful and don’t go up in price.

Simultaneous with the dominance of USB, integrated circuit companies introduced a new class of more completely integrated, less expensive measurement chips. They were cheap and complete, but not as accurate as the less-integrated solutions. We didn’t think our customers would want them….

As CNO, I received a request for a little USB measurement device. We did not make one but, one was available from a company called LabJack. The LabJack was a cheap little device with a USB interface with eight measurement inputs. It was not too accurate, but it worked.

The company was not even on the radar. Checking up on them, I learned it was not much more than a garage and two guys - not much threat to MCC with close to one hundred employees in a thirty-three thousand square-foot building. While I was considering what to do about that potential no, another request for a LabJack showed up.

After speaking with both customers, I ordered one for myself and received it the next day. Over the weekend I experimented with it and took it apart. Monday I showed it to my VP of engineering. I asked him to identify all the chips and cost it out for me. I also asked for a schedule to design one and get it into production. No new features, no improvements - just a copy, in production, on the shelf, ready to ship ASAP.

The cost came in surprisingly low. The little device offered a good profit margin and apparently some customers wanted them. We had the product ready for shipment six weeks later.

To make a long story short, that product was so successful it spawned a product line worth many millions of dollars in sales over the next three years. We sold over ten thousand units in the first year! The product line was so successful and so unexpected, it caught the market leader, National Instruments completely off guard. We used that product line to break into NI customers we had not been able to reach previously. I can assure you that had I not been the CNO, we never would have learned about that product in time. That little garage company, LabJack, may have taken many customers away from MCC, just as MCC did from established competitors when we started up.

Ask yourself what would happen at your company if a customer asked a front line technical sales engineer for a product you don’t manufacture. If your answer is anything other than; He’d say, sorry, we don’t make one of those, then you have an unusual company.

CEOs of large- and medium-sized companies who are also founders need only recall what it was like when you ran a startup. You were the CNO. If you think about how you handled those early, tough, customer requests, I’ll bet you’ll recall the opportunities gained as a result. Think about it, and you’ll say, Time to take that job back!

If rather than founding a company, you have worked your way to the top of a large company by recognition of your excellent performance, now is the time to take on a new challenge and try on this new hat. You’ll begin to understand why founders have such fun!

The Payoff

Good competitive insight is hard to come by. The best way to get facts about the competitive challenges you are facing on the front lines today is through unsatisfied customer requests. Customers don’t knowingly call your company expecting to be told the product they want is unavailable. Their time is too valuable to waste. If a customer calls, he had some reason to think you could help him, or he very much wanted to do business with you because of your reputation. If you learn why that customer made a request your company could not satisfy with an off-the-shelf solution, you probably lost the information you need to win a large number of similar customers who will never call.

Do this math. Divide your marketing communications budget plus your sales budget for the last twelve months by the total number of prospects that the sales force presented to in that same period. The result is the cost per prospect of marketing and sales. I think you will find the number staggering.

For most companies, the cost of getting the opportunity to present to a customer is very high. When you reject a prospect’s request, you toss that money aside. When you say no you also squander the opportunity to learn how to get that customer’s money.

The customer wants you to take his money. One of your employees is going to refuse. That should get you fired up!

ACCESS TO MANAGEMENT

Good Relationships Presume Access

I am an advocate of unrestricted access to management. Look around at 99% of companies you do business with. Can you find the CEO’s e-mail and phone number? No. Being out front and accessible is very unconventional, and it can set you and your business apart from the competition.

Before explaining the implications of granting your customers access to management, think about the role of access in your personal life. Imagine a home where your family could not communicate with you. Imagine isolating yourself in a private room. Your wife does not have your phone number or e-mail address, and your children can see you only if a wall of handlers miraculously lets them slip through. Of course you know that would not be a healthy family.

The CEO’s Relationship with Customers

Are you fully accessible to your customers? If you are, then your company is either very small, or you are in the minority of leaders. If you are accessible, you have decided that you feel confident about the value your company delivers to your customers, and you are eager to listen if a customer disagrees. You have the courage to interact with your customers one on one. You are willing to listen when a customer wants to speak to you in spite of other demands on your time. You feel good about your products, services, and customer relationships. If you are not fully accessible today and worried that total accessibility might be more than you can handle, then read on.

There are two equally valid reasons to provide your customers with a no-hassle way to contact you personally. One is ethical and the other financial.

Ethical reason: you are offering products and services for sale. Based on the terms and conditions of your offer, you are accepting money in exchange for the delivery of those promises. Your responsibility is ensuring that your company keeps those promises at all times. Because that is your responsibility, you must stand out front and listen if your company fails on that promise.

Financial reason: your customers consistently help you make money. By listening to them, you will learn how to improve your company’s products and services. You will find out what your competitors are making or doing to win business away from your company. From my own experience, I don’t recall one instance when I was sorry to have spoken to a customer.

Where Will I Find the Time?

Are you concerned that you don’t have enough time to speak to all the customers who want to communicate with you? After implementing the overall policy of accessibility to customers, my only disappointment was that so few of them took the time to contact the CEO. Perhaps customers are as intimidated as the employees about bringing problems to the CEO. In short, when all of your management team is visible and accessible, your customers will try to contact the CEO only as a last resort. In a well-run company, that will not happen very often.

If your company is not well-run then you are the only person who deserves the flogging your customers will give you if you quit hiding behind your organization.

Making Management Accessible at MCC

As leader of Measurement Computing, I was 100 percent accessible, as was each department vice president who reported to me. No calls were ever screened. On our Web site, we clearly identified each manager by name, phone extension, and area of responsibility, making it easy for customers to find out whom to call. To make it as simple as possible for a customer to reach me by email, we provided a form on the Web site, on a page labeled Contact the Founder. A link to that page was on the standard Contact Us page, along with our address, driving directions, and other information that every company provides. I’m sure you’ve visited such pages on company Web sites. But how often have you found a form to contact the president or founder as well? On the MCC Web site, the form promised an immediate response from me, so whenever a customer filled out the form, our IT system instantly generated an email to me. That email went into my general in-box like all the others, but with a special heading. You can bet I responded to those emails quickly—usually with a phone call. I may be old-fashioned, but I like talking to people. I’d rather talk face-to–face, but even a phone conversation beats email every time.

MCC had over 15,000 active customer records. Our average invoice was $800. Given the $19 million in peak annual sales, that equates to 23,750 invoices per year. When I say that I exposed myself and my executive team to a potential deluge of customer contacts, it is not without substance. Any serious problem in the field could have quickly jammed my schedule with customer requests.

I’ve spoken to a number of CEOs about the subject of accessibility. Many don’t want to listen to their own customers. A few don’t care and just want customer-service personnel to deal with those pesky customers who pay all the bills. Other CEOs worry about having their day monopolized by customers who are disgruntled or don’t want to read the instructions or are too lazy to learn to use their products correctly. Some CEOs imagine that given the chance, a large population of nutcases in the customer base will harass them into an unproductive corner. Could you really be selling your products to a bunch of nuts, sluggards, and troublemakers? Any CEO who believes that is not worthy of the position and needs to step down. Any CEO who harbors such a fear needs to get over it and spend more time with his customers.

Rising to leadership without ever dealing directly with customers is possible—I have worked for such a person—but it is unusual in well-run companies. Most entrepreneurial leaders have lots of customer contact when the company is small. If you are in the thick of your own startup or are considering one (and this book is really written for you), then take my word for it as someone who has been there: nothing is as valuable as regular and intense customer contact.

The Risks of Accessibility

The chief risk of making yourself accessible to customers is the potential reduction in your productivity. One fear—and it may be justified—is that allowing customers total access to leadership will result in a deluge of requests for your time. How could such a deluge occur? Simple. Fail in your delivery of product or service. Not only is that a surefire way to generate a lot of customer communications, it is the only way to generate a burdensome quantity of customer communications. If you have deficiencies in product or service, if your company is failing to deliver what your marketing collateral and sales force are promising, then don’t suddenly adopt a policy of accessibility. First you need to focus all your attention on solving those problems. You need to bring your products in line with your promises or downgrade your promises and start giving refunds to customers who want them. You cannot afford the time to be accessible if your company is a fraud.

Perhaps you fear you will attract the attention of a person with a personality disorder. I never experienced that and honestly don’t know anyone who has as a result of the products or services their company offered for sale. I certainly experienced a few customers who were so unreasonable in their expectations that I offered them full refunds rather than force any employees in my organization to deal with them. These people would have come to my attention eventually in my role as the CNO (see that chapter). Being visible and accessible simply saved a bunch of organizational time by allowing problem customers to approach me early on. To be clear, it happened only a handful of times in sixteen years at MCC, and the refunds I gave were not a high price to pay for the stress relief for us all.

Another CEO I spoke with was worried that by presenting himself to the public and inviting contact it would undermine the confidence of his customer support organization and his salespeople. Weren’t his customer service representatives employed to handle and satisfy all customer requests? Wouldn’t customers just threaten all those good people with a call to the boss, thereby undermining an employee’s ability to negotiate reasonable compromises with customers? Perhaps, but I did not find that to be the case. Several of my salespeople found MCC’s leadership accessibility to be a selling point. They would point to that attribute as solid proof of MCC’s unwavering customer advocacy. Certainly, in today’s world, management access is a unique attribute for your company to offer!

Are employees empowered when Management is not generally accessible? No. In fact, they are very much undermined. When the management is not generally accessible, the customer who is persistent enough to reach a manager directly will finally reach a manager who rarely talks directly to customers. Having cornered this customer-shy but powerful boss, the customer generally gets instant access to all sorts of policy bending power; a manager not used to fielding customer complaints will do anything to get rid of this pesky customer who is upsetting his nice comfortable world. The aftermath is usually not pleasant for one or several customer service reps as the now upset manager passes out blame to all concerned. At MCC, management carefully considered the policies for which customer service was directly answerable. Then we stood by those policies with customers.

Perhaps you are concerned that customers will call you with requests to provide, gasp, technical support or to track an order. They will not. I never once had a customer ask for my time for something they could get from the support services we provided. I did have a few customers call me to request better support. Looking into those problems more closely, I learned important lessons about our organization, documentation, CSR training, and a host of other worthwhile facts that helped me improve the product, reduce support costs, and live up to my ethical responsibility to my customers.

Everyone Must be Accessible

The best way to ensure that you, the CEO, are not asked to provide customer assistance that other managers in your organization are in a better position to provide, is to push management accessibility all the way down the line. Given the opportunity to contact exactly the right person to solve their problem, your customers, who are not stupid and do not wish to waste their own time, will contact the person identified as the most qualified to solve a problem. The customer who is unhappy with technical support will call the technical support manager, not you. You will only get

Reviews for Chief No Officer

[moyuan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A very nice book for inspiring young people to fight in the future age. This book tells you need to inspect the next wave such as internet of things or AI , then you need to adjust yourself attitude to the your own life and working. Anyway, this book can let you better!