As I mentioned in last week’s post, I’m rebooting my work self this year, and this quarter in particular. One of the things I am doing is getting back to basics on a few fronts. Over the holiday break, as I was contemplating a reboot, I emailed a handful of people with whom I’ve worked closely over the years, but for the most part people with whom I no longer work day in day out, to ask them a few questions. The questions were fairly backward looking: 1. When I was at my best, what were my personal habits or routines that stand out in your mind? 2. When I was at my best, what were my work behaviors or routines…
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Return Path
You, Too, Can Take Six Weeks Off
You, Too, Can Take Six Weeks Off Note: I have been really quite on OnlyOnce for a few months, I realize. It’s been a busy stretch at work and at home. I keep a steady backlog of blog topics to write about, and finally today I’ve grabbed a couple minutes on a flight to knock one out. We’ll see if this starts me back on a more steady diet of blogging – I miss it! I’ve written in the past about our sabbatical policy at Return Path, from what it is (here) to how much I enjoyed my own (here), to how great it is when my direct reports have been on Sabbatical so I can walk a few miles…
Book Short: Scrum ptious
Book Short: Scrum ptious I just finished reading Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, by Jeff Sutherland and JJ Sutherland. This reading was in anticipation of an Agile Facilitation training my executive team and I are going through next week, as part of Return Path’s Agile Everywhere initiative. But it’s a book I should’ve read along time ago, and a book that I enjoyed. Sutherland gets credit for creating the agile framework and bringing the concept scrum to software development over 20 years ago. The book very clearly lays out not just the color behind the creation of the framework, and the central tenets of practice again, but also clear and simple illustrations of…
Managing Up
(The following post was written by one of Return Path’s long-time senior managers, Chris Borgia, who runs one of our data science teams and has run other support organizations in the past, both at Return Path and at AOL. I don’t usually run guest posts, but I loved the topic with Chris suggested it, and it’s a topic that I’d only have a limited perspective on!) Managing Up in a Growing, Global Workplace For many years, I thought “managing up” was a cheap way of getting ahead. I thought someone who managed up was skilled at deceiving their boss into thinking they were more accomplished than they really were. I have since learned that managing up, or managing your boss,…
A New Path Forward
A New Path Forward Welcome to the world, Path Forward, Inc.! I’m thrilled to announce the launch today of Path Forward, a new non-profit with a goal of empowering millions of women to rejoin the workforce after taking time out for childcare. We are launching today with a Crowdrise campaign. See more about that below. And we launched with a bang, too – the organization is featured in this really amazing story on Fortune. The concept started at Return Path two years ago, as I wrote about here and again here, when our CTO Andy Sautins came to me with a simple but powerful idea of creating a structured program of paid fellowships with training for women who want to…
Sweet Sixteen (Sixteen Candles?)
Today marks Return Path’s 16th anniversary. I am incredibly proud of so many things we have accomplished here and am brimming with optimism about the road ahead. While we are still a bit of an awkward teenager as a company continuing to scale, 16 is much less of an awkward teen year than 13, both metaphorically and actually. Hey – we are going to head off for college in two short years! In honor of 16 Candles, one of my favorite movies that came out when I was a teenager, I thought I’d mark this occasion by drawing the more obvious comparisons between us and some of the main characters from the movie. My apologies to those who may have missed this…
The Playbook
As Return Path gets older, we are having more and more alums go on to be successful senior executives at other companies – some in our space, some not. It’s a great thing, and something I’m really proud of. I was wondering the other day if there’s effectively some kind of “RP Playbook” that these people have taken with them. Here’s what I learned from asking five of them. People-related practices are all prominent as part of the Playbook, not surprising for a People First company. Our Peer Recognition program, which is almost as old as the company and has evolved over time, was on almost everyone’s list. Open Vacation is also part of the mix, as was a focus…
ReturnShip Program, Part III
I’ve written a couple times this past year about our ReturnShip program, which is a 4-month paid internship program designed for women who have been out of the workforce for more than 3 year to re-enter and build credible and relevant experience, and to expand the talent pool for our organization. I wrote about the initial concept when we launched v2 of the program, and then again when v2 concluded with the hiring of four of the six participants. I’m immensely proud of our organization for inventing the program (Andy Sautins, our CTO, gets credit) and for managing it so well during the last cycle (Cathy Hawley, our VP People, and Miranda Reeves, VP Solution Management, get lead credit, but…
The Phoenix Project
The Phoenix Project: a novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford is a logical intellectual successor and regularly quotes Eli Goldratt’s seminal work The Goal and its good but less known sequel It’s Not Luck. The more business books I read, the more I appreciate the novel or fable format. Most business books are a bit boring and way too long to make a single point. The Phoenix Project is a novel, though unlike Goldratt’s books (and even Lencioni’s), it takes it easy on the cheesy and personal side stories. It just uses storytelling techniques to make its points and give color and examples for more memorable learning. If your…
Everything Is Data
Everything Is Data As our former head of People, Angela used to say during the recruiting process, “Everything is Data.” What she meant is that you can learn a lot about a candidate from things that happen along the way during an interview cycle, not just during the interviews themselves. Does the candidate for the Communications role write a thank you note, and is it coherent? Does the candidate for an outside sales role dribble food all over himself at a restaurant? Here are two great examples of this that have happened here at Return Path over time: Once we had a candidate in the office, waiting in our café/reception area before his first interview. Our office manager came in…
Give the Gift of a 360 to Your Board of Directors
Give the Gift of a 360 to Your Board of Directors I recently ran our biennial Board 360, and I thought it would be interesting to share the details. Attached are a few pages from, my book, Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business which describe the process as well as share the survey I developed, which I adapted from one that the legendary Bill Campbell uses at larger public companies like Intuit. If you’ve read this blog a lot over the years, you know that we are big on 360s for staff at all levels at Return Path , and at some point a few years ago, I thought, “hmmm, shouldn’t we do this for the Board as well?”…