An Execution Problem My biggest takeaway from the TED Conference this week is that we — that is to say, all of us in the world — have an execution problem. This is a common phrase in business, right? You’ve done the work of market research, positioning, and strategy and feel good about it. Perhaps as a bigger company you splurge and hire McKinsey or the like to validate your assumptions or develop some new ones. And now all you have to do is execute — make it happen. And yet so many businesses can’t make the right things happen so that it all comes together. I’d guess, completely unscientifically, that far, far more businesses have execution problems than strategic…
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Business
Humbled at TED
Humbled at TED I’m at my first TED Conference this week, and while I’ve watched countless other bloggers around me pounding out post after post summarizing different presentations (which I won’t do — feel free to see the site for official stuff), I’ve been struggling to find something to write about. Then it hit me today. I kind of feel at this conference the way I did when I started college. Totally humbled. I was #2 in my class in high school. Straight As, a few A+s thrown in for good measure. Then I got to Princeton and felt like an idiot. I was convinced I was bottom quartile at best. Everyone around me was either like me or better,…
Why I Love My Board
Why I Love My Board Fred may be the only one of my directors who has done something this dorky, this publicly, but quite frankly, I could see any of us in the same position. Guys, next meeting, we’re having nerd olympics.
Book Short: Next, Write a Sequel
Book Short: Next, Write a Sequel Written by Rodd Wagner and James K. Harter and billed as “the long awaited sequel to First, Break All the Rules” (one of the best management books I’ve ever read), I thought 12: The Elements of Great Managing, was good, but not great. 12…, along with the original book First… and Now, Discover Your Strengths, the latter two both by Marcus Buckingham, are all based on an extensive database of research done on corporate America by the Gallup organization over many years. All three are valuable reads in one way or another, although I found this to be the weakest of the three. (Note that Now… is different from the other two in that…
Right, That's MY Job
Right, That’s MY Job I made a dumb comment at our recent Board meeting that got me thinking. We came into the meeting with, in addition to lots of the regular updating and reporting, one specific strategic topic we wanted guidance on from the Board about something that’s been nagging the management team for a while without an obvious solution. We had a great conversation about the topic with the Board and got very clear guidance as to their perspective on what we should do. I agreed with most of it, albeit with a couple modifications, but more than anything else, I was happy for the note of clarity on an issue with which we’d been struggling as a management…
Book Short: Finishing First
Book Short: Finishing First The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness, by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, is one of those “airport books” that takes about an hour to read. I had an ear-to-ear grin reading the book, in part because, well, it’s just a happy book, filled with anecdotes about how a smile here or a gesture of kindness there made a difference in someone’s life — both personally and professionally. But part of my interest in the book was also driven by a long-standing debate we have at Return Path over whether we’re “too nice” as a company and whether we should have “sharper elbows.” I was struck by a few comments…
Book Short: Virtuous Cycle
Book Short: Virtuous Cycle Danny Meyer’s Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business is a fun read if you’re a New Yorker who eats out a lot; a good read for entrepreneurs around scaling leadership skills as the business grows; and a great read for anyone who runs a serious customer service-oriented organization. I’ve eaten at all of his restaurants multiple times over the years except for the new ones at MOMA (perhaps a few too many times at the Shake Shack), and while I like some more than others (perhaps the Shake Shack a bit too much), they all do have great hospitality as a common theme. While there are a lot of good lessons in…
Book Short: Unsung Heroes
Book Short: Unsung Heroes If you like “entrepreneurship by analogy” books, you’ll like The Innovators: The Engineering Pioneers Who Made America Modern, by David Billington. I have to admit some bias here — Professor Billington was my favorite teacher and senior thesis advisor at Princeton (I almost majored in civil engineering because of him), and this book is one of a number he’s written that are outgrowths of his most popular courses at Princeton. And while there’s no substitute for the length or energy of his lectures, the book works. The book is basically a person-focused engineering history of America from 1776-1883. Billington talks about four classes of engineering product: public structures (mostly bridges), machines that produced power, networks like…
They’ve Destroyed Both Companies
They’ve Destroyed Both Companies Just when you thought Verizon was in fact the worst company in the world to do business with (see my post here if for some reason you’re not on that page), along comes FedEx/Kinkos. I used to be a huge fan of both companies. I was even a fan of the merger and felt like it particularly made sense in light of UPS purchasing Mailboxes Etc. And I don’t know if our experiences are representative, but Mariquita and I have had nothing but bad experiences with both FedEx and Kinkos for the past couple of years. Kinkos is the worst — most of the people are surly, unhelpful, not smart, have massive attitude, and ignore you…
Book (Not So) Short: Raise Your Hand If You’re Sure
Book (Not So) Short: Raise Your Hand If You’re Sure I couldn’t get the catchy jingle from the 80’s commercial for Sure deodorant (you remember, the one with the Statue of Liberty at the end of it – thanks, YouTube) out of my head while I was reading the relatively new book, Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End. Written by HBS professor Rosabeth Moss Kantor, Confidence is one of the few business books I’ve read that’s both long and worth reading in full. The book has scores of examples of both winning and losing streaks, from sports, business, politics, and other walks of life, and it does a great job of breaking down the core elements…
Merry Whatever
Merry Whatever We had two horrendous customer service experiences at Return Path lately that just leave me scratching my head about how one could possibly run a business that way. In the process of buying some holiday gifts for a few of our larger clients, we first tried to order gift baskets from Harry & David. But we couldn’t, because they wouldn’t take our order via Excel spreadsheet — our office manager would have had to enter each order in a web form by hand. I imagine the conversation going something like this: Andrea from Return Path: “Hi, I’d like to give you $2,500.” Clerk from Harry & David: “Um, no thanks.” So, ok, fine, we moved on to vendor…