I Love My Job The picture below is a picture of my dress shoes in my closet at home. You may note that they all have dust on them. That's because I didn't put them on once for six weeks. When we started Return Path back in 1999, we sat down to write our employee handbook, and all I could think was "what things can we add in here that will make this company a unique place to work?" And one of them was a six week paid sabbatical after 7 years. It didn't occur to me that we'd even exist after 7 years. Then for good measure, we said, "7 years and every 5 years after that." I'm happy…
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Business
Book Short: There is No Blueprint to $1B
Book Short: There is No Blueprint to $1B Blueprint to a Billion: 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth, by David Thomson (book, Kindle) sounds more formulaic than it is. It’s not a bad book, but you have to dig a little bit for the non-obvious nuggets (yes, I get that growing your company to $1B in sales requires having a great value proposition in a high growth market!). The author looked for commonalities among the 387 American companies that have gone public since 1980 with less than $1B in revenues when they went public and had more than $1B in revenue (and were still in existence) at the time of the book’s writing in 2005. Thompson classifies the blueprint into…
Call Me
Call Me A fine song by Blondie from 1980 and from the soundtrack of the movie American Gigolo. And also something that reminded me about the importance of not relying too much on email this past month. I had surgery on my left wrist in early March to hopefully fix a nagging tendonitis problem. And while I could still write and type post-op, I got sore pretty quickly every day, so I tried to keep those activities to a minimum. As you might imaging, I do an awful lot of email and IM in my line of work. So what was my short response to a huge number of emails and IMs for a few weeks? “Call me.” My communications,…
Yiddish for Business
Yiddish for Business Contrary to popular belief, Yiddish isn’t “Jewish slang” (I hear that a lot). According to Wikipedia, Yiddish is a basically a High Germanic language with Hebrew influence of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. It developed as a fusion of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages. It is written in the Hebrew alphabet. I don’t speak Yiddish. Like many American Jews whose families came to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, my grandparents spoke it somewhat, or at least had a ton of phrases they wove into everyday speech. Presumably their parents spoke it fluently before coming here and Americanizing their families. My own parents…
New People Electrify the Organization
New People Electrify the Organization We had a good year in 2009, but it was tough. Whose wasn’t? Sales were harder to come by, more existing customers left or asked for price relief than usual, and bills were hard to collect. Worse than that, internally a lot of people were in a funk all year. Someone on our team started calling it “corporate ennui.” Even though our business was strong overall and we didn’t do any layoffs or salary cuts, I think people had a hard time looking around them, seeing friends and relatives losing their jobs en masse, and feeling happy and secure. And as a company, we were doing well and growing the top line, but we…
Not Dead Yet
Not Dead Yet Ah Spring. Flowers bloom. Love is in the air. And it’s time for the annual round of “email is dead” articles and blog posts. With apologies to Monty Python, and on the heels of last week’s fracas about social networking having more users than email, once again I say, email is Not Dead Yet! Three articles of late are pretty interesting and point out that the trends in online channel usage are far murkier than meets the eye. First, Sherry Chiger’s story in Direct that One in Five Merchants Shuns Marketing Email has a poor headline for an interesting, data-rich article. The article should be about how “Four in Five” adopt. The article has…
The Human Whiteboard Syndrome
The Human Whiteboard Syndrome I am working on a project with someone now (not at Return Path) who is proving to be a very frustrating colleague with whom to collaborate. He has a condition that a friend of mine once referred to as “The Human Whiteboard Syndrome,” which means that his thoughts always reflect the last thing he heard on any given subject. This condition is unhealthy. It leads to the following symptoms: Whiplash: you send people in one direction one day, another direction the next day Fatigue: rework is exhausting for those who are constantly in fluid situations, especially if they don’t have full access to information flow Headaches: it turns out that constantly changing one’s mind is painful…
Book Short: Gladwell Lite
Book Short: Gladwell Lite What the Dog Saw, And Other Adventures (book, Kindle) is Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book. Unlike his three other books, which I quite enjoyed: The Tipping Point (about how trends and social movements start and spread) Blink (about how the mind makes judgments) Outliers: The Story of Success (about how talents are genetic, situational, and cultivated) this was not a complete book, but rather a compendium of his New Yorker articles loosely grouped into three themes. If you love Gladwell and don’t read The New Yorker, it’s not a bad read. He’s a fantastic writer, and his vignettes are interesting. There are many “hmmm” moments as we learn why ketchup always tastes the same but mustard doesn’t;…
Context is King
Context is King A small post with a good point. I noticed in The Economist this week something that struck me. They posted a correction to a prior article. Publications do that all the time, but this particular correction was placed on a page in the same section of the magazine in which the error appeared a couple weeks before. Most print publications tend to bury their corrections in the front or the back where they never get seen. But this one was right in the middle of the magazine, saying “we made a mistake – right here.” Noteworthy to me for its show of transparency, always appreciated but not seen frequently enough in “official” things.
Book Short: Not About Going With The…
Book Short: Not About Going With The… Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (book, Kindle), was a great read and a nice change from either strictly business books or my regular fiction/non-fiction reading. It’s basically about the process of achieving happiness through control over one’s inner life, but it’s far from a self-help book. It’s almost more of practical psychology deep dive into what brings about happiness and peak performance – a state the author calls Flow but others have called other things over time, like being “in the zone.” The author talks about achieving this control as synonymous with the enviable ability to persevere despite obstacles and setbacks and transform hopeless situations into challenges to be…
The Beginning of the DMA’s Next Chapter
The Beginning of the DMA’s Next Chapter As I wrote a few months back, I recently joined the DMA’s Board of Directors and its Executive Committee to try to help the association – one of the largest and highest profile groups representing marketers – advance its agenda in a few specific ways. At the time, I noted that my interests would be on consumer advocacy and engagement, execution around interactive marketing issues and the internet community, and transparency around the organization itself. Yesterday, John Greco, the association’s CEO, announced he is stepping down to make way for the next generation of leadership. John has done some great work the past five years running the DMA and has advanced…