Living With Less…For Good? Like all companies, Return Path is battening down the hatches a bit on expenses these days. Our business is very strong and still growing nicely, but in this environment, the specter of disaster looms large, so there's no reason not to be more cautious and more profitable. We weren't an extravagant company before this, and we never have been. But there is almost always room to save. Less travel, leaner budgets for office cafeterias, no more pilates classes in the Colorado office. We've been very clear internally that our three priorities are protecting everyone's job, everyone's salary, and everyone's health benefits. Hopefully things continue to go well and those can remain sacrosanct. We are now a…
Category
Leadership
Angry, Defiant, and Replete with Poor Grammar
Angry, Defiant, and Replete with Poor Grammar I didn’t see Bush’s farewell address on TV on Thursday, but Mariquita and I did see his press conference on Monday. It was exactly what you’d expect it to be and quite frankly just like the last eight years: angry, defiant, and replete with poor grammar. I’ve said repeatedly that I think Bush has destroyed the Republican party and will go down in history as one of the worst presidents this country has ever had, if not the worst. It’s not surprising that his tone at the end is as the title of this post describes. But it is a shame. His whole administration is a shame. The really sad part is that…
Fig Wasp #879
Fig Wasp #879 I have 7 categories of books in my somewhat regular reading rotation: Business (the only one I usually blog about), American History with a focus on the founding period, Humor, Fiction with a focus on trash, Classics I’ve Missed, Architecture and Urban Planning (my major), and Evolutionary Biology. I’m sure that statement says a lot about me, though I am happy to not figure it out until later in life. Anyway, I just finished another fascinating Richard Dawkins book about evolution, and while I usually don’t blog about non-business books, this one had an incredibly rich metaphor with several business lessons stemming from it, plus, evolution is running rampant in our household this week, so I figured,…
Challenge
Challenge I do a decent amount of fundraising for my high school and college, and we frequently employ “challenges” as a means of hitting our goal. For a fundraising campaign, that usually takes the form of finding a large donor to give matching gifts, or $X for everyone who gives more than $X, or $X for any new donor — something like that. We did a fun challenge program at Return Path this December that worked out pretty well for everyone, company and employees alike. We’ve been working the team pretty hard the last 4-5 months, and we wanted to give everyone some kind of fun noncash bonus as a thank you. We also had two major milestones that we…
Half the Benefit is in the Preparation
Half the Benefit is in the Preparation This past week, we had what has become an annual tradition for us – a two-day Board meeting that’s Board and senior management (usually offsite, not this year to keep costs down) and geared to recapping the prior year and planning out 2009 together. Since we are now two companies, we did two of them back-to-back, one for Authentic Response and the other for Return Path. It’s a little exhausting to do these meetings, and it’s exhausting to attend them, but they’re well worth it. The intensity of the sessions, discussion, and even social time in between meetings is great for everyone to get on the same page and remember what’s working, what’s…
Delicious Irony
Delicious Irony Great coverage in The Washington Post of an ironic aspect to the auto industry's poverty plea for a government bail-out this week. The three execs from GM, Ford, and Chrysler each took a separate private jet from Detroit to DC for the Congressional hearings for the occasion. I'm not a fan of Congressional hearing grandstanding and think most members of congress are asses when they do things like this, but not this time. These guys had it coming and clearly don't have a clue about symbolism (either the importance of it or the art of it). The details are rich. Read them here. Thanks to my colleague Stephanie Miller for pointing this one out. …
Lessons from the Election
Lessons from the Election There will be so many of these posts flying around the web today and in the coming weeks, but there’s at least one lesson from yesterday’s election that really struck me in the context of business leadership: the importance of authenticity. Obama won — and McCain lost — for many reasons. But I think one of the main ones is that McCain didn’t run as McCain. The number of Democrats and Independents who I heard say things like “I would have voted for the McCain who ran in 2000,” or Hillary supporters who said they’d never vote for Obama against McCain and then did, was huge. McCain is a maverick. There’s no doubt about that. But…
Managing in a Downturn
Managing in a Downturn I spoke at a NextNY event last night along with several others, including fellow entrepreneur David Kidder from Clickable and angel investor Roger Enhrenberg about this fine topic (Roger wrote a great post on it here) and thought I’d share a few of the key points made by all of us for anyone trying to figure out what to do tactically now that Sequoia has told us to be afraid, very afraid. Hope is Not a Strategy: Your business is not immune. It will do what everyone else’s will. Struggle to hit its numbers. Struggle to collect bills. Lose customers. There is no reason to hope you’ll be different. Get Into the Jet Stream: Develop your…
Book Short: The Anti-Level-5 Leader
Book Short: The Anti-Level-5 Leader The Five Temptations of a CEO, another short leadership fable in a series by Patrick Lencioni, wasn’t as meaningful to me as the last one I read, The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link), but it wasn’t bad and was also a quick read. The book to me was the 30 minute version of all the Level-5 Leadership stuff that Collins wrote about in Good to Great and Built to Last. All that said, it was a good quick read and a reminder of what not to do. The temptations are things that most CEOs I’ve ever known (present company very much included) have at least succumbed to at one point or another…
Just Ask a 5-Year Old
Just Ask a 5-Year Old I heard this short but potent story recently. I can’t for the life of me remember who told it to me, so please forgive me if I’m not attributing this properly to you! A man walks into a kindergarten classroom and stands in front of the class. “How many of you know how to dance?” he asks the kids. They all raise their hands up high into the air. “How many of you know how to sing?” he queries. Hands shoot up again with a lot of background chatter. “And how many of you know how to paint?” 100% hands up for a third time. The same man now walks into a room full of…
Like an Organ Transplant
Like an Organ Transplant I’ve often said that hiring a new senior person into an organization is a bit like doing an organ transplant. You can do all the scientific work up front to see if there’s a match, but you never know until the organ is in the new body, and often some months have gone by, whether the body will take or reject the organ. New senior people in particular have a vital role in organizations. Often they are brought in to fix something that’s broken, or to start up a new position that growth has created. Sometimes they are replacing a problematic person (or a beloved one). Usually the hope is that they will also bring a…