Good Meeting BehaviorI've been in meetings with large groups of people at big companies where they're all on laptops the whole meeting, no one makes any eye contact with the speaker/facilitator, and it's hard to get a pulse out of the group as a result. I almost entirely stopped bringing laptops and smartphones into business meetings a few years back. There's nothing I find more irritating than when other people are using them when it's my meeting. Even if they're taking notes, I never know if they're really taking notes or sneaking a peek at email. And in my experience, people who are on laptops and phones in meetings, whatever they're doing on those devices and however good they are…
Category
Business
Stuck In Legal, Responses
Stuck In Legal, Responses Well, I certainly struck a nerve with my Stuck In Legal rant/post last week. As of now, there are 32 comments on the blog — my typical post generates 0-1 — and I've picked up between 50 and 75 new followers on Twitter, probably mostly because Fred tweeted about the post. Most of the comments on the blog were cheering me on; a couple were from lawyers, one well reasoned and another just a counter rant against stupid business people that had one or two good points buried in it. You can certainly click through the link above if you want to read them. But two comments didn't get put on the blog, which I thought…
Stuck in Legal
Stuck in LegalIf I had a nickel for every time I heard from someone on our sales or business development team that a critical contract, to which both sides had agreed on the fundamental business terms, was "stuck in legal," I'd be rich. Maybe not rich enough to pay all the world's legal bills, but that's a separate story. I completely understand the need for contracts and lawyers to review them — and sometimes, they do have to be long and complex. But here's what I don't understand: Why companies' legal departments or outside counsel aren't directed to be as efficient in doing their work as their other departments Why companies insist on using their standard form of agreement if…
Book Short: Worth Buying Free
Book Short: Worth Buying Free The cynic in me wanted to start this book review of Free: The Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson, by complaining that I had to pay for the book. But it ended up being good enough that I won’t do that (plus, the author said there are free digital versions available — though the Kindle edition still costs money). At any rate, a bunch of reviews I read about the book panned it when compared to Anderson’s prior book, The Long Tail (post, link to book). I won’t get into the details of the book, though you’ll get an idea from the paragraph below, but Anderson has a few gems worth quoting: Any…
Book Short: A Twofer
Book Short: A Twofer My friend Andrew Winston, who is one of the nation’s gurus in corporate sustainability, just published his second book, this one from Harvard Business Press — Green Recovery: Get Lean, Get Smart, and Emerge from the Downturn on Top. It builds on the cases and successes he had with his first book, Green to Gold (post, link to book), which came out a couple years ago and has become the standard for how businesses embrace sustainability and use it to their financial and strategic competitive advantage rather than thinking of it as a burden or a cost center. Green Recovery is a shorter read (my kind of business book), and it hits a few key themes:…
Book Short: Bringing it on Home
Book Short: Bringing it on Home Silos, Politics and Turf Wars: A Leadership Fable About Destroying the Barriers That Turn Colleagues Into Competitors wasn’t Patrick Lencion’s best book, but it wasn’t bad, either. I think all six of his books are well worth a read (list at the bottom of the post). And in fact, they really belong in two categories. The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (post, link), The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link), and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link) are all related around the topic of management. Death by Meeting (post, link), The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (post, link), and Silos, Politics and Turf Wars, on the other hand, are…
On the Other Hand…
On the Other Hand… A couple days ago, I wrote about how crummy the customer service experience was with Clear going out of business with no notice and no apology. Today my inbox revealed the exact opposite experience: Greetings from Amazon.com. You saved $1.40 with Amazon.com’s Pre-order Price Guarantee! The price of the item(s) decreased after you ordered them, and we gave you the lowest price. I didn’t even know Amazon had a Pre-order Price Guarantee. They could have gotten away with not giving it to me, and I would have never even thought about it. Great experience!
A Clear Problem
A Clear Problem I got this email in my inbox late last night: Dear Matt Blumberg, At 11:00 p.m. PST today, Clear will cease operations. Clear's parent company, Verified Identity Pass, Inc. has been unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations. After today, Clear lanes will be unavailable. Sincerely, Clear Customer Support Regardless of what you think of the Clear service (these are the paid-express lanes in a handful of airports), this is just a crummy way to shut down a business. Not even a hint of "we're sorry we took your money and are keeping the money and can't give you the service we promised any more." Maybe this particular situation or Chapter 7…
A Network of Teams, Not an Integrated System
A Network of Teams, Not an Integrated System We were in and out of the hospital a lot back in March/April for the last few weeks with one of our kids (she’s ok now). One of us was with her 24 hours a day for the 10-11 days she was hospitalized, with lots of down time, which gave me lots of time to observe health care in action. While she ultimately got very good care at a very good hospital, it was incredibly clear to me that the hospital functioned as a network of teams, not as an integrated system. The nurses were great. Followed their routine practices and responded to doctors’ orders on cue. Same with the nursing assistants. …
Vertical (Dis)Integration
Vertical (Dis)Integration A couple years ago, Dave Morgan wrote one of the best thought pieces on the future of the newspaper business in his Mediapost column. Essentially his observation was that newspapers are an outdated vertical integration, and that to survive, smart papers would disaggregate into 5 separate companies and run each one as a separate business, taking on a new life unshackled from the newspaper: local ad sales (they could own that franchise for the Yelps and Yodles of the world), local content (who better to syndicate local content?), local distribution (no other companies drop something on every doorstep every day), printing (still a business that requires scale), and digital. It’s just a brilliant idea. And it’s a shame…
Book Short: Wither the Team
Book Short: Wither the Team I keep expecting one of his books to be repetitive or boring, but Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team held my interest all the way through, as did his others. It builds nicely on the last one I read, Death by Meeting (post, link). I’d say that over the 9 1/2 years we’ve been in business at Return Path, we’ve systematically improved the quality of our management team. Sometimes that’s because we’ve added or changed people, but mostly it’s because we’ve been deliberate about improving the way in which we work together. This particular book has a nice framework for spotting troubles on a team, and it both reassured me that we have done…