Favorite books from the brand builder behind The North Face

Hap Klopp’s Required Reading

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In 1968, a newly minted Stanford School of Business MBA named Kenneth (Hap) Klopp bought a two-year-old outdoors store in the San Francisco Bay area named The North Face. Over the next two decades, he vertically integrated the business — expanding into the manufacturing and wholesaling of high-quality outdoor apparel and gear — and laid the foundation for a brand that generated US$2.3 billion in revenues in 2014.

 

Klopp sold The North Face in 1989 and embarked on a new career as a consultant, teacher, and writer. Today, he serves on the boards of several high-tech companies, including data visualization firm Obscura Digital and nanotechnology materials firms Cocona and Mission Athletecare. He is also a professor of marketing at Hult International University and the author of two decidedly irreverent business books, The Adventure of Leadership: An Unorthodox Business Guide by the Man who Conquered “The North Face” (with Brian Tarcy, Longmeadow Press, 1991) and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Business Management (with Brian Tarcy, Alpha Books, 1998).

I asked Klopp how he chooses business books, and he explained that he looks for books that relate to three themes: changing social values and trends; the disruptive effects of technology; and the preservation of entrepreneurial energy in mature companies — the last a challenge that he labels “turning the arrow back.” He recommended the following four books.

World Famous: How to Give Your Business a Kick-Ass Brand Identity,  by David Tyreman (AMACOM, 2009). “This book is essential because products come and go, but brands can endure. Tyreman gives you a methodology for figuring out what your brand stands for, how to differentiate it, and how to articulate that in the market. He also says a couple of things that I understood intuitively at The North Face: Without a brand, you’re just a vendor (and vending is for machines); and the job of a brand is to inspire customers at every touch point. If I had written a book about how to build a brand, this is the book I would have wanted to write.”

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be, by Moisés Naím (Basic Books, 2013). “A hundred years ago, a guy like Henry Ford had the power to say that you could buy a Model T in any color you wanted as long as it was black. Then, what I like to call ‘the arc of power’ shifted to large retailers, and, now, it is moving to consumers. This is linked to and supported by the shift from centralized to distributed power throughout society that Naím writes about. The implications of this for business are huge. If consumers are going to dictate what they want, variety is going to explode and product life cycles are going to keep getting shorter. That means the risks inherent in new products will increase dramatically, and, to me, it underscores the importance of brands. Naím’s book is also an antidote for the hubris that comes with success: If you run a big company, you can’t read it and come away believing that you are will be able to dictate the future of your industry or market or even your own company.”

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown, 2005). “This is a quick, easy read, but what really struck me about it was the thesis that fast, initial perceptions can be very valuable and quite accurate. If you accept the idea that product life cycles are going to get shorter and businesses will have to be more nimble, you have to figure that decision making will have to get faster, too. Gladwell gives you a leg up on that imperative. In a world overloaded with data, he tells us that we don’t have to wait for perfect information to act — we can make sound decisions without knowing everything.”

Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 2011). “Jobs said that we are here to ‘put a dent in the universe,’ and he surely did. Isaacson helps us understand how. He explains how someone so driven and not particularly likeable was still able to motivate the people around him to bring to market beautifully designed, technologically disruptive products. He emphasizes Jobs’s ability to commercialize technology — that’s a quality that drove our success at The North Face, and it’s essential in every business. This book drives that lesson home: Innovation is invention plus commercialization. And finally, the book illuminates the nature of failure and its role in success. Jobs captained the most spectacular success yet recorded in Silicon Valley, but his failures were the secret sauce that made it possible.”