Keeping It All In Sync? I just read a great quote in a non-business book, Richard Dawkins’ River out of Eden, Dawkins himself quoting Darwinian psychologist Nicholas Humphrey’s revolting of a likely apocryphal story about Henry Ford. The full “double” quote is: It is said that Ford, the patron saint of manufacturing efficiency, once commissioned a survey of the car scrapyards in America to find out if there were parts of the Model T Fird which never failed. His inspectors came back with reports of almost every kind of breakdown: axles, brakes, pistons — all were liable to go wrong. But they drew attention to one notable exception, the kingpins of the scrapped cars invariably had years of life left…
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Business
Sometimes, Things Are Messy
Sometimes, Things Are Messy Many people who run companies have highly organized and methodical personality types – in lots of cases, that’s probably how they got where they got in life. And if you work long enough to espouse the virtues of fairness and equality with the way you manage and treat people, it become second nature to want things to be somewhat consistent across an organization. But the longer we’re in business at Return Path and the larger the organization gets, the more I realize that some things aren’t meant to fit in a neat box, and sometimes inconsistency is not only healthy but critical for a business to flourish. Let me give a few examples that I’ve observed…
Try It On For Size
Try It On For Size I’ve always been a big fan of taking a decision or a change in direction I’m contemplating and trying it on for size. Just as you never know how a pair of pants is really going to fit until you slip them on in a dressing room, I think you need to see how decisions feel once you’re closing in on them. Here’s why: decisions have consequences. No matter how prescient leaders are, no matter if they’ve been trained in chess-like (three-moves-ahead) thinking, they can almost never perfectly foresee all the downstream reactions and effects of decisions. Figuring out how to create “mental fittings” is a skill that I think is critical for CEOs and…
Pret a Manager
Pret a Manager My friend James is the GM of the Pret a Manger (a chain of about 250 “everyday luxury” quick service restaurants in the UK and US) at 36th and 5th in Manhattan. James recently won the President’s Award at Pret for doing an outstanding job opening up a new restaurant. As part of my ongoing effort to learn and grow as a manager, I thought it would be interesting to spend a day shadowing James and seeing what his operation and management style looked like for a team of two dozen colleagues in a completely different environment than Return Path. That day was today. I’ll try to write up the day as combination of observations and learnings…
Blogiversary, Part VII
Blogiversary, Part VII Today marks the seventh anniversary of OnlyOnce. I haven’t marked the date with a post in three years, but here was my last such post (with links to prior posts in it). In sum up until now, my reasons for blogging have been written up as: “Thinking” (writing short posts helps me crystallize my thinking) “Employees” (one of our senior people once called reading OnlyOnce “getting a peek inside Matt’s head) My book reviews help me crystallize my takeaways from books and serve as a bit of a personal reference library I like writing and don’t get to do it often After seven years, though, I’m going to add another important point of value for me for…
Why Winning Matters (Especially When You’re Young)
The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has long been a leading voice for direct marketing for nearly 100 years – back when direct marketing was really only about postal. It has evolved in that time to include phone, fax (for the nanosecond that was relevant), and then interactive tactics, including email. While the DMA has not always incorporated the new technologies in the most elegant way – the tendency has been to apply previous best practices, even when consumers have demanded a new way of thinking – the organization has made tremendous strides in recent years to re-shape itself into an organization that will be relevant for another 100 years. And one way it is doing that is by supporting and…
First Rate Intelligence
First Rate Intelligence One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald, as he wrote in 1936 in “The Crack Up” (which you can read here in Esquire): The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. Before seeing this article recently, though, I’m not sure I’d ever seen the sentence that follows: One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. I’ve talked about the Highs and Lows of being an entrepreneur a couple times in the past — here as it relates to the…
Guest Post: Staying Innovative as Your Business Grows (Part Two)
As I mentioned in a previous post, I write a column for The Magill Report, the new venture by Ken Magill, previously of Direct magazine and even more previously DMNews. I share the column with my colleagues Jack Sinclair and George Bilbrey and we cover how to approach the business of email marketing, thoughts on the future of email and other digital technologies, and more general articles on company-building in the online industry – all from the perspective of an entrepreneur. I recently posted George’s column on Staying Innovative as Your Business Grows (Part One). Below is a re-post of George’s second part of that column from this week, which I think my OnlyOnce readers will enjoy. Guest Post: Staying…
Backwards
Backwards I came to an interesting conclusion about Return Path recently. We’re building our business backwards, at least according to what I have observed over time as the natural course of events for a startup. Here are a few examples of what I mean by that. Most companies build organically for years…then start acquiring others. We’ve done it backwards. In the first 9 years of our company’s life, we acquired 8 other businesses (SmartBounce, Veripost, Re-Route, NetCreations, Assurance Systems, GasPedal Consulting, Bonded Sender, Habeas). Since then, we’ve acquired none. There are a bunch of reasons why we front loaded M&A: we were working hard to morph our business model to achieve maximum success during the first internet downturn, we knew…
The Fear/Greed Continuum
The Fear/Greed Continuum My old boss from a prior job used to say that every buyer (perhaps every human in general) could be placed at any point in time somewhere on the “fear/greed continuum” of motivation, meaning that you could win him or her over by appealing to the appropriate mix of those two driving forces if you could only figure out where the person sat on the spectrum. I’ve found this to be true in life, more in selling situations than anything else, but probably in any negotiation. Think about some examples: Is your product an ROI sale (you’re appealing to greed), or do all your prospect’s larger competitors use you (fear they’ll get fired if they don’t adopt)?…
Should You Have a Board?
Should You Have a Board? As I mentioned last week, Fred’s post from a few months ago about an M&A Case study involving WhatCounts had a couple of provocative thoughts in it from CEO David Geller. The second one I wanted to address is whether or not you should have take on institutional investors and have a Board. As David said in the post: Fewer outsiders dictating (or strongly suggesting) direction means that you will be able to pursue your goals more closely and with less friction Although I have a lot of respect for David, I disagree with the notion that outsiders around the Board table is inherently bad for a business, or at least that the friction from…