Over the years, I’ve written a lot about the Agile methodology on this blog. For those of you who are regular readers, you may remember a post I wrote about our Agile Everywhere initiative— where all Return Path teams were tasked with implementing agile practices. A little over a year later, I want to update you on our agile journey–where we are now and how we got there. My colleague Cathy Hawley (our head of People) will write a more detailed series of guest posts for those of you who want to get more details of our transformation process. Before we started our Agile Everywhere initiative, only our product and engineering teams were using agile. The rest of the organization…
Category
Leadership
The Value and Limitations of Pattern Recognition
My father-in-law, who is a doctor by training but now a health care executive, was recently talking about an unusual medical condition that someone in the family was fighting. He had a wonderful expression he said docs use from time to time: When you hear hoof beats, it’s probably horses. But you never know when it might be a zebra. With experience (and presumably some mental wiring) comes the ability to recognize patterns. It’s one of those things that doesn’t happen, no matter how smart you are, without the passage of time and seeing different scenarios play out in the wild. It’s one of the big things that I’ve found that VC investors as Board members, and independent directors, bring…
Delegating Decision-Making
My dad (one of my main CEO/entrepreneur role models) and I team-teach a business school class in entrepreneurial leadership every year at USD where a friend of his is the professor. Sometimes I go in person, usually I just do it by video. We did this a few weeks ago, and my dad talked through a decision-making framework that I’d never heard him mention before. I sketched it out and really like it and am already using it internally, so I thought I would share it here as well: To walk through it, delegating decision-making to someone on your team can be as simple as understanding where a decision falls along two different spectrums. On the vertical axis is “How familiar…
A Two Week Vacation is More Than Twice As Good As a One Week Vacation
I’ve said this for years, but as I sit on the train commuting into work after a week off relaxing with my family for my Dad’s 75th birthday (or as he prefers to call it, the 46th anniversary of his 29th birthday), I feel particularly inclined to write it up! I love my job, so I almost never mind going to work. But I also love being on vacation and traveling with my family and try to do as much of it as I can. Years ago before we had kids and became tethered to school and sports schedules, we used to take at least one full two week vacation, completely unplugged, at least once a year. I miss that!…
What kind of team do you run? Of Generalists and Specialists…
A friend of mine just left his job as CEO of a growth stage company to become CFO of a Fortune 500 company. That’s a big deal…and also a big change. When I was talking to him about the move, he said the following to me: Some executive teams are like baseball teams. You play shortstop, and you bat 8th. That’s just what you do. The team needs one of those because the sport is structured that way. The CEO of my new company likes to run his executive team as a basketball team. Everyone has a position, but everyone also has to be capable of doing everything on the court well – shooting, blocking, rebounding, passing – and is expected to go…
Everything is Data, Part II – Get Those Expenses In
Everything is Data, Part II – Get Those Expenses In My friend and former colleague Angela Baldonero (used to run our People Team at Return Path, now is COO of super cool startup Procurify), used to say about her job as head of HR, “Everything is Data.” She guest blogged about that principle on OnlyOnce years ago here , and she particularly cited this theory when talking about the recruiting and hiring process. I’ve thought about this principle a lot over the years, and I’ve occasionally come up with other examples where I think peripheral data can inform whether or not an employee will succeed, at least in my world. I don’t know how many of these can be caught in…
Reboot – Where do a company’s Values come from, and where do they go?
I’ve written a lot over the years about Return Path’s Core Values (summary post with lots of links to other posts here). And I’ve also written and believe strongly that there’s a big difference between values, which are pretty unchanging, and culture, which can evolve a lot over time. But I had a couple conversations recently that led me to think more philosophically about a company’s values. The first conversation was at a recent dinner for a group of us working on fundraising for my upcoming 25th reunion from Princeton. Our guest speaker was a fellow alumnus who I’ve gotten to know and respect tremendously over the years as one of the school’s most senior and influential volunteer leaders. He was speaking…
Book Short: Why Wait?
A Sense of Urgency, by John Kotter, is a solid book – not his best, but worth a read and happily short, as most business books should be. I originally was going to hold off on writing this post until I had more time, but the subject matter alone made me think that was a mistake and that I should write it while it’s fresh in my mind. <g> The three tools to fight complacency are the organizing framework for the book — bring the outside in, behave with urgency every day, and turn crises into opportunities — are all good thoughts, and good reminders of basic management principles. But there were a couple other themes worth calling out even more. First up,…
Reboot – Back to Basics
As I mentioned in last week’s post, I’m rebooting my work self this year, and this quarter in particular. One of the things I am doing is getting back to basics on a few fronts. Over the holiday break, as I was contemplating a reboot, I emailed a handful of people with whom I’ve worked closely over the years, but for the most part people with whom I no longer work day in day out, to ask them a few questions. The questions were fairly backward looking: 1. When I was at my best, what were my personal habits or routines that stand out in your mind? 2. When I was at my best, what were my work behaviors or routines…
You, Too, Can Take Six Weeks Off
You, Too, Can Take Six Weeks Off Note: I have been really quite on OnlyOnce for a few months, I realize. It’s been a busy stretch at work and at home. I keep a steady backlog of blog topics to write about, and finally today I’ve grabbed a couple minutes on a flight to knock one out. We’ll see if this starts me back on a more steady diet of blogging – I miss it! I’ve written in the past about our sabbatical policy at Return Path, from what it is (here) to how much I enjoyed my own (here), to how great it is when my direct reports have been on Sabbatical so I can walk a few miles…
Managing Up
(The following post was written by one of Return Path’s long-time senior managers, Chris Borgia, who runs one of our data science teams and has run other support organizations in the past, both at Return Path and at AOL. I don’t usually run guest posts, but I loved the topic with Chris suggested it, and it’s a topic that I’d only have a limited perspective on!) Managing Up in a Growing, Global Workplace For many years, I thought “managing up” was a cheap way of getting ahead. I thought someone who managed up was skilled at deceiving their boss into thinking they were more accomplished than they really were. I have since learned that managing up, or managing your boss,…