Not Just About Us When we updated our values this year, we felt there were a couple critical business elements missing from this otherwise “how” series of statements. One thing missing was our clients and users! So we added this value to our list: Not Just About Us: We know we’re successful when our clients are successful and our users are happy. This may be one of the most straightforward statements of all our values, so this will be a short post. We serve lots of constituencies at Return Path. And we always talk about how we’re a “People First” organization and what that means. I suppose that inherently means we are a “Client Second” organization, though I’m not sure…
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Business
Two Ears, One Mouth
Two Ears, One Mouth Brace yourself for a post full of pithy quotes from others. I’m not sure how we missed this one when drafted our original values statements at Return Path years ago, because it’s always been central to the way we operate. We aren’t just the world’s biggest data-driven email intelligence company – we are a data-driven organization. So another one of our newly written Core Values is: Two Ears, One Mouth: We ask, listen, learn, and collect data. We engage in constructive debate to reach conclusions and move forward together. I’m not sure which of my colleagues first said this to me, but I’m going to give credit to Anita, our long-time head of sales (almost a…
Job 1
Job 1 The first “new” post in my series of posts about Return Path’s 14 Core Values is, fittingly, Job 1: We are all responsible for championing and extending our unique culture as a competitive advantage. The single most frequently asked question I have gotten internally over the last few years since we grew quickly from 100 employees to 350 has been some variant of “Are you worried about our ability to scale our culture as we hire in so many new people?” This value is the answer to that question, though the short answer is “no.” I am not solely responsible for our culture at Return Path. I’m not sure I ever was, even when we were small. Neither…
Think Global, Act Local
Think Global, Act Local At Return Path, we have always had a commitment to community service and helping make the world around us a better place. We ratcheted that up a lot in the last year, which is why we added the following statement in as one of our 14 Core Values: Think Global, Act Local. We commit our time and energy to support our local communities. We feel strongly that companies can and should make the world a better place in several different ways. Certainly, many companies’ core businesses do that — just look at all the breakthroughs in medicine and social services over the years brought to market by private enterprises, including my friend Raj Vinnakota, who…
Return Path Core Values, Part III
Return Path Core Values, Part III Last year, I wrote a series of 13 posts documenting and illustrating Return Path’s core values. This year, we just went through a comprehensive all-company process of updating our values. We didn’t change our values – you can’t do that! – but we did revise the way we present our values to ourselves and the world. It had been four years since we wrote the original values up, and the business has evolved in many ways. Quite frankly, the process of writing up all these blog posts for OnlyOnce last year was what led me to think it was time for a bit of a refresh. The result of the process was that we…
Email Intelligence and the new Return Path
Welcome to the new Return Path. For a tech company to grow and thrive in the 21st century it must be in a state of constant adaptation. We have been the global market leaders in email deliverability since my co-founder George Bilbrey coined that term back in 2002. In fact, back in 2008 we announced a major corporate reorganization, divesting ourselves of some legacy businesses in order to focus on deliverability as our core business. Since then Return Path has grown tremendously thanks to that focus, but we have grown to the point where it’s time for us to redefine ourselves once again. Now we’re launching a new chapter in the company’s history to meet evolving needs in our…
Hiring vs. Promoting – and a Must-Read Blog
Hiring vs. Promoting – and a Must-Read Blog I have to admit that I have a bit of blog envy when it comes to Fred and Brad. We all started blogging roughly at the same time over 8 years ago (Brad and I the same day, Fred a few month before), and both have hugely large audiences compared to mine. I don’t care all that much — mostly I blog for me and for my company, not for any other reason. But one of the things I admire about both their blogs, particularly Fred, is the size of their *active* audiences. (Both of them tell me not to worry about it when it comes up in conversation — as they…
Post on Return Path and People
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.
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…