Post on Return Path and People For those readers of OnlyOnce who aren’t also readers of Fred’s AVC blog, Fred invited our SVP People, Angela, to guest post on his site this week as part of his series on HR/People. Her post is here, and it’s a great encapsulation of a lot of what we do at Return Path from a People perspective.
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Business
Running a Productive Offsite
Running a Productive Offsite A couple OnlyOnce readers asked me to do a post on how I run senior team offsites. It’s a great part of our management meeting routine at Return Path, and one that Patrick Lencioni talks about extensively in Death by Meeting (review, book) – a book worth reading if you care about this topic. My senior team has four offsites per year. I love them. They are, along with my Board meetings, my favorite times of the year at work. Here’s my formula for these meetings: – WHY: There are a few purposes to our offsites. One for us is that our senior team is geographically distributed across 4 geographies at the executive level and 6 or…
Book Short: Alignment Well Defined
The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business is Patrick Lencioni’s newest book. Unlike most or all of his other books (see the end of this post for the listing), this one is not a fable, although his writing style remains very quick and accessible. I liked this book a lot. First, the beginning section is a bit of a recap of his Five Dysfunctions of a Team which I think was his best book. And the ending section is a recap of his Death by Meeting, another really good one. The middle sections of the book are just a great reminder of the basic building blocks of creating and communicating strategy and values – about driving alignment….
Book Short: Internet True Crime
Book Short: Internet True Crime Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet, by Joseph Menn (book, kindle) was a bit of a disappointment. I was really hoping for more of an explanation of how the “business” of Internet crime works — what the economics are like, what the landscape/scope/sectors are like, who the players are. What I got was a bit of a true crime novel, the story of Barrett Lyon and Andy Crocker, who are respectively a geek and a cop, and their very specific stories of tracking down a handful of internet criminals around a handful of technical tactics (DDOS attacks and botnets). It wasn’t bad, the stories were…
You Can’t Teach a Cat How to Bark, But You Might be Able to Teach it How to Walk on its Hind Legs
You Can’t Teach a Cat How to Bark, But You Might be Able to Teach it How to Walk on its Hind Legs My co-founder George and I have had this saying for a while. Cats don’t bark. They can’t. Never will. They also don’t usually walk on their hind legs in the wild, but some of them, after some training, could probably be taught to do so. Working with people on career evolution sometimes follows that same path. Lots of the time, an employee’s career evolution is natural and goes well. They’re playing to their strengths, in their sweet spot, progressing along nicely. But often that’s not the case. And it goes both ways. Some employees want something different. …
Learning Through Extremes, or Shifting Gears part II
OnlyOnce is 8 years old this week, which is hard to believe. So it is fitting that I got halfway through a new post this morning, then a little alarm bell went off in my head that I had written something similar before. The topic is around moderation versus extremes. I first wrote about this topic in 2005 in a post called Shifting Gears but I have thought about it more recently in a different way. Instead of phrasing this as a struggle between “Meden Agan,” which is Greek for “everything in moderation,” and “Gor oder gornischt,” which is Yiddish for “all or nothing,” I’d like to focus here on the value of occasionally going to an extreme. And that…
Skip-Level Meetings
I was talking to a CEO the other day who believed it was “wrong” (literally, his word) to meet directly 1:1 with people in the organization who did not report to him. I’ve heard from other CEOs in the past that they’re casual or informal or sporadic about this practice, but I’ve never heard someone articulate before that they actively stayed away from it. The CEO in question’s feeling was that these meetings, which I call Skip-Level Meetings, disempowers managers. I couldn’t disagree more. I have found Skip-Level Meetings to be an indispensable part of my management and leadership routine and have done them for years. If your culture is set up such that you as CEO can’t interact directly…
Book Short: Required Reading, Part II
Book Short: Required Reading, Part II Every once in a while, a business book nails it from all levels. Well written, practical, broadly applicable to any size or type of organization, full of good examples, full of practical tables and checklists. The Leadership Pipeline, which I wrote about here over six years ago, is one of those books — it lays out in great and clear detail a framework for understanding the transition from one level to another in an organization and how work behaviors must change in order for a person to succeed during and on the other side of that transition. In an organization like Return Path‘s which is rapidly expanding and promoting people regularly, this is critical. …
The Art of the Quest
Jim Collins, in both Good to Great and Built to Last talked about the BHAG – the Big, Hairy Audacious Goal – as one of the drivers of companies to achieve excellence. Perhaps that’s true, especially if those goals are singular enough and simplified enough for an entire company of 100-1000-10000 employees to rally around. I have also observed over the years that both star performers and strong leaders drive themselves by setting large goals. Sometimes they are Hairy or Audacious. Sometimes they are just Big. I suppose sometimes they are all three. Regardless, I think successfully managing to and accomplishing large personal goals is a sign of a person who is driven to be an achiever in life –…
Alter Ego
Alter Ego A couple people have asked me recently how I work with an Executive Assistant, what value that person provides, and even questioned the value of having that position in the company in an era where almost everything can be done in self-service, lightweight ways. At my old company (in the 90s), each VP-level person and up had a dedicated assistant – the world certainly doesn’t require that level of support any more. In our case, Andrea has other tasks for the company that take up about half of her time. I happen to have the absolute best, world class role model assistant in Andrea, who I’ve had the pleasure of working with for almost seven years now (which…
A Great American Experience
A Great American Experience President Obama signed into law today a bill called the JOBS Act. I haven’t read the full text of the law, but based on abstracts, my opinion of the JOBS Act is that it’s great for the startup community, but even greater for growth companies. I am less familiar with the Crowdsourcing components of the bill, but certainly that will make it easier for pure startups to attract micro capital. The Sarbanes-Oxley reforms that make it easier and less costly to go through an IPO and be a public company will really enable growth companies like Return Path and many others in the Internet industry to go public a little earlier and with less difficulty. Tapping…