Customer Reviews

How to Castrate a Bull: Unexpected Lessons on Risk, Growth, and Success in Business

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Management books, even those written (or mostly written) by industry luminaries, can offer informative looks into the exclusive world of the corporate executive. But they also tend to be very, very dry.

This book, of the other hand, is a funny and enlightening romp through the early days of a Silicon Valley startup written by one of the founders, but written in a light and clear fashion that even my parents would understand. In fact, I bought a copy for them too.

The book covers both the creation and evolution of a technology company as well as a brief outline of the author's life and influences that contributed to his development and growth as an entrepreneur and manager.

It is full of insightful and humorous tales of success and failure, both personal and professional, of the author and the company he founded. It is worth the price just to learn how his company got to be so successful, but the extras (including the funny sidebars and Interludes) make it worth so much more. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has always wished someone would make a management book fun to read. This is it!

This book, by NetApp's founder, Dave Hitz, provides direct, honest, thoughtful business advice, applicable to business founders and leaders throughout the growth cycle of a business. He puts special emphasis on hard choices and decision-making processes, with an understanding that comes from a life-time of risk taking. If you are a first time entrepreneur, read this book. If you are entering a growth phase for your company, read this book. If you failed at your first venture and want to understand why, read this book. And if you want a few good laughs, read this book.

This is a really fantastic book! It's such a fun and easy read! Dave Hitz really simplified big ideas into very valuable, understandable lessons. I think that anyone on any level, can apply some of these golden nuggets to their job, no matter where you are on the org chart.

As a 4 year NetAppee, it's also been fun to learn the history and trivia and backtrack to how we got to where we are today. When I got to NetApp, we had 3,000 employees and hundreds of millions in revenue, and the largest company I had ever worked for before was 300 and in the red, so it's always been a mystery to me what happens between start-up and a mature company. This book helped make sense of that process.

Some of the advice that I especially found valuable:

* Always start with the conclusion
* The first lesson on hypergrowth is "everything is always broken" - is a good thing.
* The greatest magic is not one human mind, it is multiple minds working together.
* The importance of culture and the struggle to map it and apply it
* The definition of consensus and how to make it work

The book is peppered with lots of cool anecdotes and stories that are both entertaining and to which we can all relate, no matter which organization you're part of. Dave has a talent for distilling ideas that took years to learn into easy-to-grasp simple take-aways.

Read Enjoy Learn

~Marian

Dave Hitz is one of the cofounders of NetApp, which is a Silicon Valley success story, and has been with the company since 1992. I just finished reading his new book, How to Castrate a Bull: Unexpected Lessons on Risk, Growth, and Success in Business, and I highly recommend it.

In the book, Dave tells the intertwined stories of both his professional history (which included a stint as a working cowboy on an isolated cattle ranch; thus the title of the book) and the history of NetApp, and he shares many of the insightful lessons that he has learned along the way.

Dave is a natural story teller, and besides being fun to hear, his stories usually manage to memorably convey some point of wisdom. He's also a very nice guy, which is unfortunately rarer than you might wish in Silicon Valley. I've had the privilege of knowing Dave socially and professionally for a number of years, and I'm always pleased when I run into him at some event, because I know that a fun and interesting conversation will likely ensue.

The book is a great peek into what it takes to grow a startup from scratch to 8000 employees and billions of dollars in annual revenue, while also making it one of the most respected Silicon Valley companies and a fixture on every year's Fortune Magazine "Best Companies to Work For" list. He talks about the various stages of the company's growth, from the early product development days ("beat Auspex!"), to the hyper-growth phase (double the company's size and revenue every year for several years in a row), to the dark days following the dot-com crash in 2001 or so, to today's renewed growth in "The Age of Data".

Dave especially focuses on how NetApp has built, maintained, and continues to evolve the positive corporate culture that is one of its major strengths; that didn't happen by accident, and Dave discusses how they did it (and why!).

Strongly recommended.

I loved this book. Yes, it is a great summary of how one of Silicon Valley's more successful entrepreneurs `made it big'. But what sets this book apart from dozens of others like it is the openness, honesty and humor with which Dave Hitz shares the life lessons that put him on the track to success and taught him what success really means (hint: it is not just about the money and power).

This is the ideal `business book' for high school and college students who are just starting to think about what they want to do in life and how they want to measure their own personal success. My son, a high school senior, read the book and really related to Dave's sincere style of writing. Nothing pompous or ivory tower in this book! But he also liked how Dave, who is clearly a very successful business person, showed that success can be measured in many ways. This was a welcome alternative point of view for my child whose high school peers seem obsessed with measuring success only by grades and test scores.

Like other reviewers have noted, this is an ideal business book for the non-business person or soon to be business person. In today's world of win-at-any-cost, Dave's book provides an alternative view of what success is all about that is a welcome relief.

A must read for anyone starting off their business careers, rethinking their business careers, or just wanting a different view of the path to success in Silicon Valley.

Oh, and you just might learn a thing or two about data storage and management!

I had modest expectations about this book and was blown away. The book is full of insightful, comical and brilliant anecdotes from the co-founder a great tech company (that most people probably have never heard of). This review is probably being stored on a netapp NAS system so I better be careful what I write...Dave provides great detail on tough decisions (going around his co-founder and CEO to get him replaced), getting things done (wanna double revenue -> where's your plan to double to salesforce?) and the many micro level decisions that have a real impact on the ability to successfully grow a small company into a real deal tech silicon valley company. It's a pretty easy read and I polished it off within a week.

I enjoyed this book very much. Many details about the history of the company I worked for and its founders.
Could be very helpful for someone who plans to startup an own business.
Last not least - funny anecdotes from Dave
Thanks

This book talks about the risks inherent in business and how to face them. The author also intersperses substantial amounts of his insight and beliefs throughout the book. His experience as a ranch hand gives title to the book and the story of castrating a bull is very informative within the context of the message he is giving.

This book was a good read and helpful to me. It provided a common sense way of looking at business risk. The author's own experiences frame the stories and each was both entertaining and enlightening.

Others have covered this quite well.

It's also quite real, and Dave has retained his sense of humor.

Disclosure: in 1986, I hired him into MIPS directly from Princeton undergrad school, although he'd offered the strangest resume I'd ever seen. This mentioned the skill in the book title, and listed substantial experience with "softwear", i.e., leather.

Sad to say, I didn't save preserve that resume.

It is the story of growing a startup from zero to a multi-billions company. The book is not a manual or essay, but it tells you a real story about real people and facts. I was involved in the last New Economy bubble and this book makes focus on many of the events of those days, plus how some companies have been able to recover and learn the lesson. Full of useful information and hints but also very fun to read.
A must-read for anybody working in IT or running a business these days of financial crisis.