Retail, No Longer I’ve evolved my operating system as a CEO many times over the years as our business at Return Path has changed and as the company has scaled up. I’ve changed my meeting routines, I’ve delegated more things, and I’ve gotten less in the details of the business. But there’s one specific thing where I’ve remained very “retail,” or on the front lines, and that is the interview process. I still interview every new hire, usually on the phone or Skype and in most cases only for 15-30 minutes, and then I also do an in-person 15-30 minute check-in when someone is around the 90-day mark as an employee. For me, these have both been great mechanisms for…
Category
Leadership
The Value of Ownership
The Value of Ownership We believe in ownership at Return Path. One of our 13 core values, as I noted in my prior post, which kicks off a series of 13 posts, is: We are all owners in the business and think of our employment at the company as a two-way street We give stock options to every employee, and we regularly give additional grants to employees as well, as their initial grants vest, as they get promoted into more senior roles, and as they earn them through outstanding performance. But beyond giving those grants out, we regularly remind people that they are part owners of the business, and we encourage them to act that way. Among other mechanisms for…
Return Path Core Values
Return Path Core Values At Return Path, we have a list of 13 core values that was carefully cultivated and written by a committee of the whole (literally, every employee was involved) about 3 years ago. I love our values, and I think they serve us incredibly well — both for what they are, and for documenting them and discussing them publicly. So I’ve decided to publish a blog post about each one (not in order, and not to the exclusion of other blog posts) over the next few months. I’ll probably do one every other week through the end of the year. The first one will come in a few minutes. To whet your appetite, here’s the full list…
The Value of Constraints
The Value of Constraints The beauty of Twitter is that a tweet can only be 140 characters long. With that as a constraint, you end up seeing some amazingly creative messages on Twitter that manage to convey both a specific tone and a lot of content — in close quarters! The same logic can apply to business more generally. If you give your team two hours to solve a complex problem, you’ll be amazed at how far they can get with it, even if they don’t have enough time to do thorough research If you have to balance your budget every year, you’ll be amazed at the clarity of decision-making you find yourself with (Wonder why Congress can’t figure out…
Sometimes, Things Are Messy
Sometimes, Things Are Messy Many people who run companies have highly organized and methodical personality types – in lots of cases, that’s probably how they got where they got in life. And if you work long enough to espouse the virtues of fairness and equality with the way you manage and treat people, it become second nature to want things to be somewhat consistent across an organization. But the longer we’re in business at Return Path and the larger the organization gets, the more I realize that some things aren’t meant to fit in a neat box, and sometimes inconsistency is not only healthy but critical for a business to flourish. Let me give a few examples that I’ve observed…
Try It On For Size
Try It On For Size I’ve always been a big fan of taking a decision or a change in direction I’m contemplating and trying it on for size. Just as you never know how a pair of pants is really going to fit until you slip them on in a dressing room, I think you need to see how decisions feel once you’re closing in on them. Here’s why: decisions have consequences. No matter how prescient leaders are, no matter if they’ve been trained in chess-like (three-moves-ahead) thinking, they can almost never perfectly foresee all the downstream reactions and effects of decisions. Figuring out how to create “mental fittings” is a skill that I think is critical for CEOs and…
You Have to Throw a Stone to Get the Pond to Ripple
You Have to Throw a Stone to Get the Pond to Ripple This is a post about productive disruption. The title comes from one of my favorite lines from a song by Squeeze, Slap & Tickle. But the concept is an important one for leaders at all levels, especially as businesses mature. Founders and CEOs of early stage companies don’t disrupt the flow of the business. Most of the time, they ARE the flow of the business. They dominate the way everything works by definition — product development, major prospect calls, client dialog, strategy, and changes in strategy. But as businesses get out of the startup phase and into the “growth” phase (I’m still trying to figure out what to…
Backwards
Backwards I came to an interesting conclusion about Return Path recently. We’re building our business backwards, at least according to what I have observed over time as the natural course of events for a startup. Here are a few examples of what I mean by that. Most companies build organically for years…then start acquiring others. We’ve done it backwards. In the first 9 years of our company’s life, we acquired 8 other businesses (SmartBounce, Veripost, Re-Route, NetCreations, Assurance Systems, GasPedal Consulting, Bonded Sender, Habeas). Since then, we’ve acquired none. There are a bunch of reasons why we front loaded M&A: we were working hard to morph our business model to achieve maximum success during the first internet downturn, we knew…
Connecting with Other CEOs
Connecting with Other CEOs CEOs get introduced to each other regularly. Sometimes it’s through VCs or other investors, sometimes it’s through other CEOs, sometimes it’s because the two companies are already partners. I try hard to meet personally or at least on the phone with other CEOs every time I get a chance, sometimes because there’s business to be done between Return Path and the other company; but always because I come away from every interaction I have with another CEO with some learnings to apply to myself and the company. I have noticed two unrelated things over the years about my interactions with other CEOs who are in our industry, and therefore with whom I spend time more than…
The Art of the Post-Mortem
The Art of the Post-Mortem It has a bunch of names — the After-Action Review, the Critical Incident Review, the plain old Post-Mortem — but whatever you call it, it’s an absolute management best practice to follow when something has gone wrong. We just came out of one relating to last fall’s well document phishing attack, and boy was it productive and cathartic. In this case, our general takeaway was that our response went reasonably well, but we could have been more prepared or done more up front to prevent it from happening in the first place. We derived some fantastic learnings from the Post-Mortem, and true to our culture, it was full of finger-pointing at oneself, not at others,…
The Three Functions of a Management Team
The Three Functions of a Management Team After my quarterly Return Path exec team offsite last week, my team and I were rehashing the day’s conversation over dinner. Was it a good day or a bad day? An upper or a downer? We concluded that the day was as it should have been – a good mix of what I will now articulate as the three main functions of a management team. Here they are with some color: Create an environment for success: Do people like to come to work every day? When they get there, do they know what they’re supposed to do, and how it connects to the company’s mission? Are people learning and growing? Are you building…