Counter Cliche: Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There Fred had a great posting the other day about Analysis Paralysis. And he’s right, a lot of the time. But I’ve always thought that Newton’s third law of motion can be applied to cliches — that every cliche has an equal and opposite cliche (think “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” vs. “Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder”). The counter cliche to Analysis Paralysis is “Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There” — another great lesson taught to me by my old boss at MovieFone. While startup businesses generally do need to move quickly and nimbly, there are times and places, particularly when negotiating something, where stopping or moving very slowly works to…
Category
Leadership
Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Well, Part II
Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Well, Part II I posted Part I a really long time ago — it’s pretty self explanatory. I was given a related gem today from fellow blogger Hawaiian leadership coach Rosa Say: "If you don’t have the time to do it right, when will you have the time to do it over?" Now there’s something to keep in mind every time you’re doing something halfway!
Boiling the Frog
Boiling the Frog We boiled the frog recently at Return Path. What the heck does this mean? There was an old story, I’ve since been told apocryphal, we told a lot back when I was a management consultant trying to work on change management projects. It was basically that: If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will leap right back out. But if you put a frog in a pot of water on the stove and then heat it up to boiling, you’ll boil the frog because it never quite realized that it’s being cooked until its muscles and brain are slightly too cooked to jump out. How have we boiled the frog? Two ways…
The Hiring Challenge
The Hiring Challenge Fred had a great posting a couple weeks back called The Talent Economy. In it, he writes: The CEOs who survived the downturn with their companies intact proved that they were tenacious, creative, hard nosed, and financially savvy. Now they are waking up to find out that the game has changed. They have to start focusing on the people side of the business a lot more. Hiring, managing, and retaining the talent is back at the top of the priority list. Retaining good people has always been at the top of my list, even in the dark days. But hiring and managing in an environment that’s once-stagnant-now-growing presents some real challenges. Many of these aren’t unique…
Being the Client
Being the Client My friend and colleague Sophie Miller, a long-time sales executive in the direct marketing industry, once said, "In my next life, I want to come back as a client." She didn’t mean it this way (I think she meant it as "I want to be in the driver’s seat next time ’round"), but this is great advice for any member of an entrepreneurial team in a software or services business that serves other businesses. The good news is, it doesn’t require the afterlife to achieve it! Mariquita and I have done some work in our spare time the past two years for two different organizations to help them out with their technology. One is our golf course,…
Everyone’s a Marketer, Part II
Everyone’s a Marketer, Part II In Part I of this posting, I talked about how everyone’s job function is increasingly touching customers and therefore, in our networked world, everyone needs to think like a marketer. This posting has the same theme but a different spin. From the perspective of the individual person (in a company, and in life), marketing is central to success, although the definition of your target market needs to change with the circumstances. Interviewing for a job? How good a job have you done building the brand of you (your list of accomplishments)? How good is your collateral (resume)? Want to get an increase in your department’s budget or buy a new piece of hardware? Have you…
Why is Seth Godin so Grumpy?
Why is Seth Godin so Grumpy? Permission marketing guru Seth Godin says we should all Beware the CEO blog. His logic? Blogs should have six characteristics: Candor, Urgency, Timeliness, Pithiness, Controversy, and maybe Utility — and apparently in his book, CEOs don’t possess those characteristics. Certainly, CEOs who view blogs as a promotional tool are wasting their time, or are at least missing a fundamental understanding about the power of blogs and interactivity. But many of the ones I read (and the one I write) do their best to be anything but promotional. One of my colleagues here describes my blog as “a peek inside the CEO’s head,” which is a great way of putting it. And I still stand…
Everyone's a Marketer, Part I
Everyone’s a Marketer, Part I While there’s a specific marketing department at most companies, I think in today’s inter-connected, service-oriented business, everyone in the company is a marketer. Ok, it’s probably more true in some industries than others, but consider these pockets of marketing activity from non-sales/marketing personnel: – Our front line customer service manager, Anthony, is on the phone with hundreds of customers each week answering questions about their email subscriptions or helping them unsubscribe. His mission? Make sure they understand our services and try to get as many of them as possible to stay on with us. – Our client data coordinators Jeremy and Tom talk and email with clients regularly as we send data back and forth…
Giving Away State Secrets
Giving Away State Secrets Ed Daciuk, one of my subscribers, questions me: “I am wondering how a CEO who blogs balances the disparate goals of giving enough insight to be interesting but not give away trade secrets like positioning or financial drivers.” Good question, and one that I thought about along with my prior posting. It’s a tough balance sometimes, but the goal is to stimulate thinking and communicate in broad strokes more than it is to detail things out, especially with non-public information. So for example, in the prior posting, I didn’t mention the client’s name, industry, or location; the data was close but not exact; and I refrained from discussing some of Return Path’s efforts to solve this…
Political versus Corporate Leadership, Part III: The First Debate
Political versus Corporate Leadership, Part III: The First Debate Well, there you have it. Both of my first two postings on this subject — Realism vs. Idealism and Admitting Mistakes — came up in last night’s debate. At one point, in response to Kerry’s attempted criticism of him for expressing two different views on the situation in Iraq, Bush responded that he thought he could — and had to — be simultaneously a realist and an optimist. And a few minutes later, Kerry admitted a mistake and brilliantly turned the tables on Bush by saying something to the effect of “I made a mistake in how I talked about Iraq, and he made a mistake by taking us to war…
Comment on Political versus Corporate Leadership, Part II: Admitting Mistakes
Comment on Political versus Corporate Leadership, Part II: Admitting Mistakes My colleague Mike Mayor writes: So you’e only asking for politicians to be honest Matt? Is that all? 🙂 Couldn’t agree more on the CEO side. A CEO who cannot admit to failure is doomed to be surrounded by “yes men” and, therefore, must go it alone, whereas the CEO who admits to having the odd bad idea every now and then is more likely to get truthful and accuruate information from those around him/her. Which scenario would you prefer to base your next decision on? However, I look more to Hollywood for fostering the faux CEO/Board Room stereotypes, not politics. Look no further than the highest ranked show among…