My dad (one of my main CEO/entrepreneur role models) and I team-teach a business school class in entrepreneurial leadership every year at USD where a friend of his is the professor. Sometimes I go in person, usually I just do it by video. We did this a few weeks ago, and my dad talked through a decision-making framework that I’d never heard him mention before. I sketched it out and really like it and am already using it internally, so I thought I would share it here as well: To walk through it, delegating decision-making to someone on your team can be as simple as understanding where a decision falls along two different spectrums. On the vertical axis is “How familiar…
Category
Startup CEO
Why You Won’t See Us Trash Talk Our Competition
We’ve been in business at Return Path for almost 18 years now. We’ve seen a number of competitors come and go across a bunch of different related businesses that we’ve been in. One of the things I’ve noticed and never quite understood is that many of our competitors expend a lot of time and energy publicly trash talking us in the market. Sometimes this takes the form of calling us or our products out by name in a presentation at a conference; other times it takes the form of a blog post; other times it’s just in sales calls. It’s weird. You don’t see that all that often in other industries, even when people take aim at market leaders. During…
Being a CEO is Like Playing a Game of Hearts
Hearts was one of my favorite card games in college. I remember staying up deep into the night regularly with my roommates playing it. I recently taught our kids how to play and have been playing with them more regularly of late…and I was reminded how much I enjoy the game. No metaphor or simile is perfect, and this one isn’t either, but it occurred to me the other night that being a CEO is a little bit like playing a game of Hearts. First and foremost, you have to play the hand that you’re dealt. No matter how proactive you want to be about running your own agenda, things happen around you — with your people, your customers, your…
A Two Week Vacation is More Than Twice As Good As a One Week Vacation
I’ve said this for years, but as I sit on the train commuting into work after a week off relaxing with my family for my Dad’s 75th birthday (or as he prefers to call it, the 46th anniversary of his 29th birthday), I feel particularly inclined to write it up! I love my job, so I almost never mind going to work. But I also love being on vacation and traveling with my family and try to do as much of it as I can. Years ago before we had kids and became tethered to school and sports schedules, we used to take at least one full two week vacation, completely unplugged, at least once a year. I miss that!…
Ideas Matter Less Than Execution Which Matters Less Than Timing Which Matters Less Than Luck
Well, that’s a mouthful. Let me break it down. Ideas Matter Less Than Execution Execution Matters Less Than Timing Timing Matters Less Than Luck There’s a persistent myth about entrepreneurs as heroes – the people with the brilliant ideas and Eureka moments that bring companies to life and create success. I’ve never believed in that myth, or at least not in its universality, as I’ve always valued both ideation and execution in terms of business building. But as I was thinking about that construct more the other day, it occurred to me that there’s actually a hierarchy of the two, and not just of the two, but of timing and luck as well. The best businesses — the runaway successes…
The Illusion and (Mis)uses of Certainty
September’s Harvard Business Review had a really thought-provoking article for me called How Certainty Transforms Persuasion. Seth Godin wrote a blog post around the same time called The Illusion of Control. The two together make for an interesting think about using information to shape behavior as leaders. I’ve often been accused of delivering too many mixed messages to the company at all-hands meetings, so I enjoyed the think, though not in the way I expected to. Let’s start with Seth’s thesis, which is easier to get through. Essentially he says that nothing is certain, at best we can influence events, we’re never actually in control of situations…but that we think we are: When the illusion of control collides with the reality of…
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…
You Have To Be All In, Until You’re Not
One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that as the organization scales, you have to be all-in, until you’re not. What the heck does that mean? It means that, other than confiding your indecision to a very small number of trusted advisors on a given issue, indecision is poison to the people around you and to the organization in general. So even if you’re thinking of doing something new or different or making a tough call on something, you generally need to project confidence until you’ve made the call. One example of this is around a decision to fire someone on the team, especially a senior executive. Public indecision about this reminds me of years ago when…
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…
The Joy of Coaching
I was the head coach of my two older kids’ little league team this past spring. The whole thing was a little bit of an accident – I vaguely volunteered for something and ended up in charge. The commitment was a little daunting, but I was ok with it since the season was only a couple months long, it was both Casey and Wilson, and both kids, especially Wilson, are really into baseball. Other than helping out a bit here and there, I’d never coached a sports team before. What started off as an unclear assignment ended up as one of the most fun and fulfilling things I’ve done in years. I loved every minute of it, looked forward to…
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…