Scaling Me Two things have come up over the last couple years for me that are frustrations for me as a CEO of a high growth company. These are both people related — an area that’s always been the cornerstone of my leadership patterns. That probably makes them even more frustrating. Frustration 1: Not knowing if I can completely trust the feedback I get from deep in the organization. I’ve always relied on direct interactions with junior staff and personal observation and data collection in order to get a feel for what’s going on. But a couple times lately, people had been admonishing me (for the first time) when I’ve relayed feedback with comments like, “of course you heard that…
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Return Path
Canary in a Coal Mine
Canary in a Coal Mine From Wiktionary: An allusion to caged canaries mining workers would carry down into the tunnels with them. If dangerous gases such as methane or carbon monoxide leaked into the mine-shaft, the gases would kill the canary before killing the miners. Perhaps not the best analogy in the world, but I had an observation recently as we took on a massive new client: over the years, Return Path has had a handful of “bellwether” clients that I’ve jokingly referred to as the canaries in our proverbial coal mine. In the really early days of the business, it was eBay. When we first started working with Email Service Providers, it was the old DoubleClick. A couple years…
People Should Come with an Instruction Manual
People Should Come with an Instruction Manual Almost any time we humans buy or rent a big-ticket item, the item comes with an instruction manual. Why are people any different? No one is perfect. We all have faults and issues. We all have personal and professional development plans. And most of those things are LONG-TERM and surface in one form or another in every single performance review or 360 we receive over the years. So shouldn’t we, when we enter into a long-term personal or professional employment relationship, just present our development plans as instruction manuals on how to best work with, live with, manage, us? The traditional interview process, and even reference check questions around weaknesses tend to be…
Book Short (and great concept): Moments of Truth
Book Short (and great concept): Moments of Truth TouchPoints: Creating Powerdul Leadership Connections in the Smallest of Moments, by Douglas Conant, former CEO of Campbell’s Soup Corporation, and Mette Norgaard (book, kindle), is a very good nugget of an idea wrapped in lots of other good, though only loosely connected management advice around self awareness and communication — something I’m increasingly finding in business books these days. It’s a very short book. I read it on the Kindle, so I don’t know how many pages it is or the size of the font, but it was only 2900 kindles (or whatever you call a unit on the device) and only took a few Metro North train rides to finish. It’s…
What Makes an Awesome Board Member
What Makes an Awesome Board Member (This post was requested by my long-time Board member Brad Feld and is also running concurrently on his blog today) I’ve written a bunch of posts over the years about how I manage my Board at Return Path. And I think part of having awesome Board members is managing them well – giving transparent information, well organized, with enough lead time before a meeting; running great and engaging meetings; mixing social time with business time; and being a Board member yourself at some other organization so you see the other side of the equation. All those topics are covered in more detail in the following posts: Why I Love My Board, Part II, The…
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…
Articulating the Problem is the First Step Toward Solving It
A while back, we were having some specific challenges at Return Path that were *really* hard to diagnose. It was like peeling the proverbial onion. Every time we thought we had the answer to what was going on, we realized all we had was another symptom, not a root cause. We’re a pretty analytical bunch, so we kept looking for more and more data to give us answers. And we kept coming up with, well, not all that much, besides a lot of hand-wringing. It wasn’t until I went into a bit of a cave (e.g., took half a day’s quiet time to myself) and started writing things down for myself that I started to get some clarity around the…
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…