I love the concept of Servant Leadership. From the source, the definition is: While servant leadership is a timeless concept, the phrase “servant leadership” was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in The Servant as Leader, an essay that he first published in 1970. In that essay, Greenleaf said: “The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are…
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Company of Origin
Most psychologists, and lots of executive coaches, end up talking to their clients about their “Family of Origin” as a means of more deeply understanding the origins of their clients’ motivations, fears, hopes, and dreams. Presumably they do this in service of helping their clients gain self-awareness around those things to be more effective in their personal or professional lives. A smattering of highly-ranked search results on the term yields snippets like these for its definition: One’s family of origin—the family one grew up in, as opposed to the people one currently lives with—is the place that people typically learn to become who they are From the family of origin a person learns how to communicate, process emotions, and get…
Why Our Executive Team Does Daily Standup Meetings
Another CEO with whom I trade notes on the craft of running a company asked me this question the other day, and I thought the answer would make a for a good blog post. Any product team (or other kind of team) who has Agile practices, does some kind of a Daily Standup (DSU) meeting in which each team member reviews progress against goals for a given period and highlights issues where he or she is blocked and needs help. I wrote about Return Path‘s journey to implement Agile across the whole company last year here. My meeting routines have been shaped over the years but the current versions are largely influenced by Lencioni’s Death by Meeting, which is worth a…
Stamina
Stamina A couple years ago I had breakfast with Nick Mehta, my friend who runs the incredibly exciting Gainsight. I think at the time I had been running Return Path for 15 years, and he was probably 5 years into his journey. He said he wanted to run his company forever, and he asked me how I had developed the stamina to keep running Return Path as long as I had. My off the cuff answer had three points, although writing them down afterwards yielded a couple more. For entrepreneurs who love what they do, love running and building companies for the long haul, this is an important topic. CEOs have to change their thinking as their businesses scale, or…
Reboot – Founders’ Dinner
Brad wrote a fun post a couple years ago about rituals, including one about The Annual Dinner that he and Amy, Fred and Joanne Wilson, and Mariquita and I have been having not quite annually for almost 15 years now. His most poignant comment (other than that apparently he and I are both getting larger and greyer in sync with each other) is about the power of marking the passage of time together with the same group of people. We have a similar tradition at Return Path that’s worth noting in the context of my reboot program since it happened a few weeks ago and was part of the reboot cycle. On the first anniversary of Return Path’s founding, I took…
Agile Everywhere
I’ve written a bunch on this blog and in Startup CEO, about Agile Development and the Lean Canvas and Lean Startups in general (see a really old post on Agile Development from 10 years ago when we first adopted it here, and one on Agile Marketing here). The basic premise of all of this is that there is an old way to build software products and businesses, and a new lighter way loosely based on Toyota’s lean manufacturing principles. The old way is HEAVY — you spec out a product and build it and hope you got it right; you write a big business plan and start raising money and executing on it and hope your assumptions are correct. The new…
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…
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…
The Difference Between Culture and Values
The Difference Between Culture and Values This topic has been bugging me for a while, so I am going to use the writing of this post as a means of working through it. We have a great set of core values here at Return Path. And we also have a great corporate culture, as evidenced by our winning multiple employer of choice awards, including being Fortune Magazine’s #2 best medium-sized workplace in America. But the two things are different, and they’re often confused. I hear statements all the time, both here and at other companies, like “you can’t do that — it’s not part of our culture,” “I like working there, because the culture is so great,” and “I hope…
Typing as Core Competency
Typing as Core Competency We just had our annual typing tournament in the Return Path New York office, and it got me thinking on this topic. Fits, hats off to my colleague Rosemary Girouard for her smashing victory this year, even with an injury, and to fellow finalists Caroline Pearl and Nicole Niemiec for excellent showings. So this is going to sound silly, but I’m increasingly thinking that typing speed is a core competency for many jobs. With special thanks to my 8th grade typing teacher, Mrs. Van Vranken, my typing training on an old-school typewriter has paid off. I type 100 wpm+ on a full keyboard, about 75 wpm on a tablet, and 50 wpm on a phone. That enables me…
Autocorrect for life
Autocorrect for life I used to joke that life should have an undo button, the ultimate Control-Z for when something goes wrong. But lately, I’ve been more of the mind that life should work like an Apple device with a good Autocorrect function. Why just undo things when they can be fixed in the blink of an eye, before anyone even knows they went wrong? Press reply-all when you are bcc’d on an email because you forgot to look at the header closely enough? No problem, Autocorrect for Life(AFL) will change it to a simple reply. Fender bender while parallel parking? AFL is there to save the day and fit your car perfectly into the spot and right up against…