Closer to the Front Lines When we started Return Path, we added a little clause to our employee handbook that entitled people to a sabbatical after 7 years of service (and then after every 5 incremental years). Six weeks off, 3/4 pay. Full pay if you do something “work related.” Sure, we thought. That’s an easy thing to give. We’ll never be 7 years old as a company. Now, 8 1/2 years later, of course, the first wave of people are reaching their sabbatical date. A couple have already gone (one trip around the world, one quality time with the kids). A couple others are pending. Four of us at the exec level are overdue to take ours, and we…
Category
Leadership
Don't Ever Do a Conference Call from an Airport
Don’t Ever Do a Conference Call from an Airport Ever. Just say no thank you, you’re not available. Airports are terrible places to be on a phone call. You can’t hear the call, the call is barraged with P.A. system announcements. It’s disjointed and difficult. Better to force the call to happen at another time or send a delegate from your team or company on your behalf. If you *must* do a call from an airport, I’d say best practices are: 1. Let the meeting organizer know ahead of time that you have no choice (if the meeting must be scheduled at that time) 2. Remind all participants up front that you’re in an airport 3. Make liberal use of…
The Gift of Feedback
The Gift of Feedback My colleague Anita Absey always says that “feedback is a gift.” I’ve written in the past about our extensive 360 review process at Return Path, and also about how I handle my review and bring the Board in on it. But this past week, I finished delivering all of our senior staff 360 reviews, and I received the write-up and analysis of my own review. And once again, I have to say, the process is incredibly valuable. For the first time in a long time this year, I got a resounding “much improved” on all of my prior year’s development items from my team and from the Board. This was great to hear. As usual, this…
Book Short: Chock Full O Management & Leadership
Book Short: Chock Full O Management & Leadership I just finished The Better People Leader, by Charles Coonradt, which was a very short, good, rich read. It was a pretty expansive book on management & leadership topics — 100 short pages of material that are probably covered by 1,000 pages in other books. What separates this book from the pack is the rich examples from non-business life that Coonradt sprinkles throughout the book. They include the tale of a special ed kid who became a mainstream student within a year because his teacher had the courage to ask his fellow students to treat him normally, and the story of how Korean War POWs died in massive numbers not from physical…
Are You As Versatile As Running?
Are You As Versatile As Running? Today was my first day back in the city after two weeks working and playing at our house in the mountains. And a beautiful day it was — 46 and sunny! I went for a great run, reflecting on how incredibly versatile running is. Less than 48 hours before, I had also been running, but bundled up, in a 17 degree snowfall, wearing my new Icebugs (thanks for the tip, Brad), up and down the hills of a quiet country road at 6500 feet in Idaho. Today — sea level, flat, urban, sunny and crisp out, wearing shorts (I’ll let you guess which was easier). How versatile can a sport be? Are you as…
When Good Companies Go Bad
When Good Companies Go Bad This post could just as easily be entitled, “When Small Companies Go Big.” I know risk management is an important part of business, but I have run into several examples in the past few months where another company’s insanely aggressive staff roles — legal, procurement, and HR in particular — have driven me batty. We have a big financial services client who, after much wrangling with their legal time, signed a two year contract with us that was based on our standard form of agreement, though modified quite a bit to their specifications. A few months into the contract, we and our client wanted to add a new service into the agreement via a simple addendum. Someone…
Book Short: a Corporate Team of Rivals
Book Short: a Corporate Team of Rivals One of the many things I have come to love about the Christmas holiday every year is that I get to go running in Washington DC. Running the Monuments is one of the best runs in America. Today, at my mother-in-law’s suggestion, I stopped i8n at the Lincoln Memorial mid-run and read his second inaugural address again (along with the Gettysburg Address). I had just last week finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and while I wasn’t going to blog about it as it’s not a business book, it’s certainly a book about leadership from which any senior executive or CEO can derive lessons. Derided by…
Academic Inspiration
Academic Inspiration I just read in my alumni magazine that at Opening Exercises for incoming freshmen this year, Princeton President Shirley Tilghman closed her remarks with the following: For the next four years, you will be encouraged – and indeed sometimes even exhorted – to develop the qualities of mind that allowed Katherine Newman, Simon Morrison, and Alan Krueger to change what we know about the world. Those qualities are the willingness to ask an unorthodox question and pursue its solution relentlessly; to cultivate the suppleness of mind to see what lies between black and white; to reject knee-jerk reactions to ideas and ideologies; to recognize nuance and complexity in an argument; to differentiate between knowledge and belief; to be…
Saying Goodbye
Saying Goodbye Seth Godin’s post yesterday of the same title has this good advice for businesses who are shutting down: It seems to me that you ought to say goodbye with the same care and attention to detail and honesty you use to say hello. You never know when you’ll be back. The same should be said of companies and employees. We always try in interviews to be as kind as possible to candidates who we are not going to hire. I’m sure we don’t always get it right at all levels, but I always make a personal phone call and usually send a handwritten letter to finalists for senior jobs. Once, when I had to “ding” a candidate for…
The Social Aspects of Running a Board
The Social Aspects of Running a Board I’ve posted about the the topic of Boards of Directors a couple of times before, here and here. We had one of our quarterly in-person Board meetings yesterday, which I always enjoy, and one of my directors pointed out that I never posted about the social aspects of running a Board. Since this is a critical component of the job, it is certainly worth mentioning. A high functioning Board isn’t materially different from any other high functioning team. The group needs to have a clear charter or set of responsibilities, clear lines of communication, and open dialog. And as with any team, making sure that the people on a Board know how to…
Impact of a Leader
Impact of a Leader I had an interesting moment of clarity the other day around the impact of a leader that’s not from the business world but that does have lessons for the business world. This may take a couple of minutes to set up, so bear with me. One of my extracurricular activities is raising money for Princeton from fellow alumni. For this effort, we use two basic metrics to track success in any given year’s campaign: participation (what % of alumni give) and dollars (how much $ we raise). While dollars raised are escalating year over year as you’d expect with inflation and with an expanding alumni base due to larger classes in more recent years, participation rates…