Book Short: Steve Jobs and Lessons for CEOs and Founders First, if you work in the internet, grew up during the rise of the PC, or are an avid consumer of Apple products, read the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs (book, kindle). It’s long but well worth it. I know much has been written about the subject and the book, so I won’t be long or formal, but here are the things that struck me from my perspective as a founder and CEO, many taken from specific passages from the book: In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important. Man is that ever true. I’ve come up with some…
Category
Management
The Best Laid Plans, Part IV
The Best Laid Plans, IV I have had a bunch of good comments from readers about the three posts in this series about creating strategic plans (input phase, analysis phase, output phase). Many of them are leading me to write a fourth post in the series, one about how to make sure the result of the plan isn’t shelfware, but flawless execution. There’s a bit of middleware that has to happen between the completion of the strategic plan and the work getting done, and that is an operating plan. In my observation over the years, this is where most companies explode. They have good ideas and capable workers, just no cohesive way to organize and contextualize the work. There are…
The Best Laid Plans, Part III
The Best Laid Plans, Part III Once you’ve finished the Input Phase and the Analysis Phase of producing your strategic plan, you’re ready for the final Output Phase, which goes something like this: Vision articulation. Get it right for yourself first. You should be able to answer “where do we want to be in three years?” in 25 words or less. Roadmap from today. Make sure to lay out clearly what things need to happen to get from where you are today to where you want to be. The sooner-in stuff needs to be much clearer than the further out stuff. Resource Requirements. Identify the things you will need to get there, and the timing of those needs – More…
Is It Normal?
A friend who is a newly promoted CEO just wrote me and asked me this: I’m having a sort of guilt complex. Let me explain. I’ve set up a bunch of positions, which people are grooving into. We just completed our budget for our new fiscal year, probably faster and easier than ever before. Sales are going really, really well. BUT, despite all of this, I feel more relaxed than I have in years. And I am struggling with that. I’m relaxed because we seem out in front of stuff, I’ve reduced my span of control from a dozen direct reports to four. Things are progressing in good ways. I also have time now that I’ve not had in ages…
Scaling the Team
Scaling the Team (This post was requested by my long-time Board member Fred Wilson and is also running concurrently on his blog today. I’ll be back with the third and fourth installments of “The Best Laid Plans” next Thursday and the following Thursday) When Return Path reached 100 employees a few years back, I had a dinner with my Board one night at which they basically told me, “Management teams never scale intact as you grow the business. Someone always breaks.” I’m sure they were right based on their own experience; I, of course, took this as a challenge. And ever since then, my senior management team and I have become obsessed with scaling ourselves as managers. So far, so…
The Best Laid Plans, Part II
The Best Laid Plans, Part II Once you’ve finished the Input Phase (see last week’s post) of producing your strategic plan, you’re ready for the Analysis Phase, which goes something like this: Assemble the facts. Keep notes along the way on the input phase items, assemble them into a coherent document with key thoughts and common themes highlighted. Select/apply framework. Go back to the reading and come up with one or more strategic frameworks. Adapted them from the academic stuff to fit our situation. Academic frameworks don’t solve problems on their own, but they do force you to think through problems in a structured way. Step back. Leave everything alone for two weeks and try not to think about it. …
The Best Laid Plans, Part I
The Best Laid Plans, Part I One of my readers asked me if I have a formula that I use to develop strategic plans. While every year and every situation is different, I do have a general outline that I’ve followed that has been pretty successful over the years at Return Path. There are three phases — input, analysis, and output. I’ll break this up into three postings over the next three weeks. The Input Phase goes something like this: Conduct stakeholder interviews with a few top clients, resellers, suppliers; Board of directors; and junior staff roundtables. Formal interviews set up in advance, with questions given ahead. Goal for customers: find out their view of the business today, how we’re…
Return Path Core Values, Part II
Return Path Core Values, Part II As I said at the beginning of this series, I was excited to share the values that have made us successful with the world and to also articulate more for the company some of the thinking behind the statements. You can click on the tag for all the posts on the 13 Return Path’s core values, but the full list of the values is below, with links to each individual post, for reference: We believe that people come first We believe in doing the right thing We solve problems together and always present problems with potential solutions or paths to solutions We believe in keeping the commitments we make, and communicate obsessively when we…
Transparency Rules
Transparency Rules I think each and every one of our 13 core values at Return Path is important to our culture and to our success. And I generally don’t rank them. But if I did, People First is a leading contender to be at the top of the list. The other leading contender would be this last one in the series: We believe in being transparent and direct The big Inc. Magazine story about us last year talked a lot about our commitment to transparency and some of the challenges that come with being transparent and direct with people. I’d like to highlight here some of the benefits of being transparent, and the benefits of being direct (sometimes those two things…
To Err is Human, To Admit it is Divine
To Err is Human, To Admit it is Divine Forget about forgiveness. Admitting mistakes is much harder. The second-to-last value that I’m writing up of our 13 core values at Return Path is We don’t want you to be embarrassed if you make a mistake; communicate about it and learn from it People don’t like to feel vulnerable. And there’s no more vulnerable feeling in business than publicly acknowledging that you goofed, whether to your peers, your boss, or your team (hard to say which is worse — eating crow never tastes good no matter who is serving it). But wow is it a valuable trait for an organization to have. Here are the benefits that come from being good…
B+ for Effort?
B+ for Effort? Effort is important in life. If Woody Allen is right, and 80% of success in life is just showing up, then perhaps 89% is in showing up AND putting in good effort. But there is no A for Effort in a fast-paced work environment. The best you can get without demonstrating results is a B+. The converse is also true, that the best you can get with good results AND without good effort is a B+. Now, a B+ isn’t a bad grade either way. But it’s not the best grade. In continuing with this series of our 13 core values at Return Path, the next one I’ll cover is: We believe that results and effort are…