Big Apple, Little Company Ed Daciuk, on of my blog subscribers, questions: What is your view on the benefits of being in NYC as a startup? Fred wrote a good posting several months ago and a related one this week on early stage investing in the NYC market from the perspective of a venture capitalist. His main points: (1) NYC is a great place to invest in early stage tech-related businesses as long as they’re not "core technology" businesses like semiconductor or hardware, because (2) core technology companies are more exciting to investors, and therefore the investors have clustered around those companies in places like Silicon Valley or Boston. He also thinks this dynamic is changing as more and more…
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Business
Book Short: Great Marketing Checklists
Book Short: Great Marketing Checklists Trade Show and Event Marketing: Plan, Promote, and Profit, by our direct marketing colleague Ruth Stevens, is hardly a page-turner, but it is a great read and well worth the money for anyone in your B2B marketing department. That’s true as much for the event marketing specialist as the marketing generalist. The author brings a very ROI-focused approach to planning and executing events – whether big trade shows or smaller corporate events, which are becoming increasingly popular in recent years for cost, focus, and control reasons. But beyond events, the book has a number of excellent checklists that are more general for marketers that I found quite useful both as a reminder of things we…
Doing Well By Doing Good, Part III
Doing Well By Doing Good, Part III In Part I of this series, I blogged about my friend Raj Vinnakota and his amazing adventure starting the SEED School and Foundation in Washington, D.C. In Part II, I extended the conversation to some of the things we do at Return Path to help make the world a better place — even though our business model is less “inherently virtuous” than that of many other organizations, particularly non-profits. One thing we did last fall in the wake of the hurricane devastation on the Gulf Coast was pledge to send one or two groups down to New Orleans with Habitat for Humanity to assist in the recovery and reconstruction efforts, giving people the…
Counter Cliche: Pick a Geek Term
Counter Cliche: Pick a Geek Term Fred has a good cliche this week — he talks about how an organization has a particular "clock speed" and needs to hire people who can operate at that speed. I agree whole-heartedly but have always referred to this exact thing in a different way. We have always said when we’ve acquired another company that we need to "port that company onto our Operating System." So pick your favorite geek term, but I like the notion of porting someone to another operating system better because it implies that people can change a little bit more.
Book short: Myers-Briggs Redux
Book short: Myers-Briggs Redux Instinct: Tapping Your Entrepreneurial DNA to Achieve Your Business Goals, by Tom Harrison of Omnicom, is an ok book, although I wouldn’t rush out to buy it tomorrow. The author talks about five broad aspects of our personalities that influence how we operate in a business setting: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. These traits are remarkably similar to those in the popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator that so many executives have taken over the years. It’s not just that you want to be high, high, high, high, and low in the Big 5. Harrison asserts that successful entrepreneurs need a balance of openness and conscientiousness in order to be receptive to new ideas, but…
Buying Back Your Own Left Leg
Buying Back Your Own Left Leg There has been much written about the spectacular sale of Pixar to Disney for $7.4 billion this week. The fact that Steve Jobs is now Disney’s largest individual shareholder is amazing news on many levels. Fred has a great posting on this today from the investor perspective. Another angle that I find interesting about this transaction is that it reminds me to some extent of Yahoo’s purchase of Overture a couple years back. Yahoo OWNED the search business. For years. Invented it. Synonymous with it. Then they let others lap them they became more of a diversified online media company, and voila! Others focused, innovated, and created a massive business in paid search. Yahoo…
Book short: Proto Gladwell
Book short: Proto Gladwell I’m sure author Robert Cialdini would blanch if he read this comparison, but then again, I can’t be the first person to make it, either. His book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, is an outstanding read for any marketing or sales professional, but boy does it remind me of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Blink (book; blog post). Of course, Cialdini’s book came out a decade before Gladwell’s! Anyway, Influence is a great social science look at the psychology that makes sales and marketing work. Cialdini talks about sales and marketing professionals as “compliance practitioners,” which is a great way to think about them, quite frankly. He boils down the things that make sales and…
Book Short: Fables and Morals
Book Short: Fables and Morals Courtesy of my colleague Stephanie Miller, I had a quick holiday read of Aesop & The CEO: Powerful Business Lessons from Aesop and America’s Best Leaders, by David Noonan, which I enjoyed. The book was similar in some ways to Squirrel, Inc., which I recently posted about, in that it makes its points by allegory and example (and not that it’s relevant, but that it relies on animals to make its points). Noonan takes a couple dozen of Aesop’s ancient Greek fables and groups them in to categories like Rewards & Incentives, Management & Leadership, Strategy, HR, Marketing, and Negotiations & Alliances – and for each one, he gives modern-day management examples of the lessons….
Four Balls or One Strike?
Four Balls or One Strike? In baseball, four balls is a walk. Today in New York, all it took was one strike, and lots of us were taking long walks – to work, from work, to dinner. Even though I’m a CEO and “management” and part of the establishment, I don’t have a systematic bias against organized labor or strikes. Sometimes, they’re entirely warranted. (Perhaps it helps that my mother-in-law is a senior exec at a major union – hi, Carmen.) Also, to be fair, I am not up close and personal on the issue of the transit strike here, so maybe I’m missing something. Those caveats aside, I have a limited amount of sympathy for the TWU and the…
How Much Marketing Is Too Much Marketing?
How Much Marketing Is Too Much Marketing? It seems like a busy holiday season is already underway for marketers, and hopefully for the economy, shoppers as well. Just for kicks, I thought I’d take a rough count of how many marketing messages I was exposed to in a given day. Here’s what the day looked like: 5:30 a.m. – alarm clock goes off with 1010 WINS news radio in the middle of an ad cycle – 2 ads total. Nice start to the day. 5:45-6:30 – in the gym, watching Today In New York News on NBC for 30 minutes, approximately 6 ad pods, 6 ads per pod – 36 ads total. So we’re at 38, and it’s still dark…
Holiday Card Anon, Part II
Holiday Card Anon, Part II Last year, I posted about all the holiday cards I received at work that were effectively anonymous since the signature was a scribble and the name wasn’t printed anywhere on the card; no business card was included; and if the sender was relying on the envelope’s return address to clue me in, he or she was out of luck because the cards got separated from the envelopes. We just had the same thing happen last week — Whit received a gift of a holiday tin of Hershey’s Kisses without a card or return address from one of our tech vendors. So remember — sign those cards legibly or include a business card if you don’t…