(This is the sixth post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT.  Other posts in order are 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.)

As these posts have been running, a few people have asked me to quickly compare this experience to the experience of being a Startup CEO.  And that’s an interesting way to think about it. In a lot of ways, the couple of weeks of getting the IRT up and running felt like starting up a new business, only a lot more intense.  Following the outline of sections in Startup CEO:  a field guide to scaling up your business…

Part One: Storytelling.  The whole timeframe was super compressed.  It took us 2 days to be able to spend 4 hours writing our initial pitch deck defining scope, structure, and staffing request – and that was while we were working hard on our first two workstreams.  In a startup environment, that process would have taken much longer, involved more customer discovery and product/market fit research and spending 100% of our time on that. But then we got our “approval and funding” in about 45 minutes – that would have taken weeks and involved dozens of pitch meetings.  In terms of creating the organization’s Mission, Vision, and Values, we didn’t even bother, although I think it helped that the three of us were generally on the same page with how to work and that urgency was the essence of our job. The larger emergency operations team that we were more or less embedded in also had a very clear set of values and operating principles on display…although we didn’t actually go read them, I think they were in sync with our view of our team’s mission and principles.  In terms of “bringing our story to life,” that was wholly unnecessary!

Part Two: Building The Company’s Human Capital.  Like a startup, getting it right with the first handful of employees means everything.  In this case, the first two deputies on the team, handpicked by the Governor’s staff, were awesome and critical.  Bringing someone in from the private sector to run a public sector team only works when the rest of the team is incredibly knowledgeable about how the machinery of state government works.  And in the end, I think Sarah will be a better leader for the team than I was because she had a combination of private and public sector experience (and within her public sector experience, she had a lot of emergency response experience).  In general, the recruiting process was soooo different than private sector and public sector normally are. The first two team members handpicked the best people they knew in other relevant parts of the government. People were brought onto the team after one short phone call.  Other state departments heads loaned their people willingly. No such thing as a comp negotiation or a reference check. There were a bunch of other things under the “Human Capital” heading that are interesting notes/comparables as well. First, feedback in a compressed-timeframe emergency is something that you absolutely can’t skip – and you can’t wait for a formal process either.  Our team was pretty good about giving feedback at least daily in a semi-structured way as well as in the moment. We didn’t really have time to get into things like career pathing and compensation and firing. We did, after about 6 days at the suggestion of Kacey, our Chief of Staff, move the team to almost entirely remote (other than leadership and occasional critical meetings). This worked surprisingly well for a workforce probably unaccustomed to remote work.  The rest of the world is also learning how to do a lot of that now, too.

Part Three: Execution.  This whole experience was 97% execution.  In fact, we had a hard time finding time for things like strategy and planning because there was a crushing amount of work to do (welcome to emergency response), and a small team to do it.  We didn’t have to worry about raising money, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and some of the other major execution steps in the private sector. We did do a good job of creating goals and milestones for our workstreams, but even that took a couple of weeks, and in retrospect, I wish we’d been able to do some of those sooner.  In terms of how our work got done, we were very conscious of creating daily meeting routines to structure our day and work – but there was no such thing as even a weekly meeting (let alone monthly strategics or quarterly offsites!), only daily meetings, multiple times per day. One thing that was interesting – I talk in the book about being deliberate and consistent with your platforms, especially around communication.  Channel proliferation is a real issue today (much more so than when I wrote the book), but we had an interesting mismatch at the beginning. The public sector team was used to email, text, and Google hangouts for comms. Nothing else. The private sector team used those things but was a lot more comfortable with Trello, Zoom, and Slack. Thank goodness both teams used G-Suite and not a mix of that and LiveOffice. But getting everyone on the team to converge on a couple systems is a work in progress and was messy, as evidenced in this great moment where Kacey was holding a laptop up to an actual whiteboard to show one of our private sector teams how she was thinking about something. 

Part Four: Building and Leading a Board of Directors.  This is kind of N/A, although the proxy for it in our case on the IRT was the leadership structure of the Emergency Operations Center and then the Governor and the part of his cabinet that was keyed into the emergency response.  In this regard, the main differences between the private sector and public sector were speed/formality (no room for formality when you’re meeting daily or at a moment’s notice!), and, interesting, the need for integration. A company reports to its board on how it’s doing.  This team had to use its “board” to make sure it was integrating with other state agencies and initiatives. In this way, the team functioned more like a business unit within a company than an actual company.

Part Five: Managing Yourself So You can Manage Others.  This was obviously critical…and obviously quite difficult.  And within the overall Emergency Operations Center (outside of our team, the real emergency professionals), there were people, including leaders, who were working 7 days/week for multiple weeks on end, and long days, too.  At one point, the EOC leader posted this note on the wall, and he frequently took time in daily briefings to encourage everyone to take a day or two off and take care of themselves physically.  He role-modeled that behavior as well. You can only run a sprint for so long. Once it becomes clear it’s a marathon, well, you know.

Stay tuned for the final post in the series tomorrow…

(This is the fifth post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT.  Other posts in order are 1, 2, 3, and 4.)

Thursday, March 26, Day 10

• Sarah continuing to take over and stronger by the day
• Sarah cleared me to go home, only one more person to ask
• Deep deep dive on Mass Testing – so good to spend that time 
• Pretty much got the strategy right – shocking we could get that close with so little public health experience – Kyle awesome – EOC leadership briefing
• That was most of the day
• Some downloads to Sarah and Kacey
• Feeling that two of our project teams are going sideways – that will be a big focus for me tomorrow before I leave
• Quick assignments for tomorrow
• Talked to Jared – he’s good with me going now that Sarah is in place and things are running.  Awesome!

Friday, March 27,  Day 11

• Download with a couple of the project teams to help get them back on track 
• This whole thing is one big exercise in Agile!
• Serendipitously might have found private sector partner for one of the teams in need.  Reminded of George’s great line, “when the student is ready, the teacher appears”
• Gov briefing on mass testing plan
• Spent a lot of the day on strategy/overview/retrospective deck.  Have to review it with Brad and core team members. Gov wants to get it in front of the National Governors Association to share learnings/best practices for the states behind us in this fight
• Gov thankful goodbye
• Brad thank you Haiku – so awesome – “You see things others don’t see”
• FInal team check-in, lots of nice thank yous from people on team
• Close out drinks with Sarah, Kacey, Kyle – persevered despite lack of corkscrew.  Poor Kyle’s shirt looks like he was standing next to a shooting victim
• Incredibly thankful moment with team – really like and care about these people – we’ve done such great work together – 11 days but feels like months and months
• Close out email to Governor and Chief of Staff about team

Saturday, March 28, Day 12

• Check out!  Fly home! Happy to see Mariquita, Casey, Wilson, and Elyse!

Stay tuned for two more wrap-up posts, tomorrow and the next day…

(This is the fourth post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT.  Other posts in order are 1, 2, and 3.)

Monday, March 23, Day 7

• Wellness screening – put hot cup of coffee against my temples – now finally the thermometer works (although I can’t say that it gives me a high degree of comfort that I have figured out a workaround!)
• Furious execution and still backlog is growing no matter how much I do – thank goodness team is growing.  Never seen this before – work coming in faster than I can process it, and I am a fast processer. Inbox clean when I go to bed, up to 75 when I wake up, never slows down
• Private sector explosion – this guy can print 3D swabs – but are they compliant?  This guy has an idea for cleansing PPE, this guy can do 3D printing of Ventilator replacement parts, etc.  How to corral?
• Corporate Volunteer form is up – 225 entries in the first 12 hours – WOW
• Congressmen and Senators – people contact them, so they want to help, they want to make news, not coordinated enough with state efforts
• Jay Want – early diagnosis losing sense of smell – low tech way to New Normal
• Coordination continues to be key – multiple cabinet level agencies doing their own thing while multiple private sector groups are doing their own thing (e.g. App – “everyone thinks they’re the only people who have this idea”)
• Mayor of Denver just announced lockdown, I guess that trumps the state solution in town, maybe it’s ok since that just leaves rural areas a bit fuzzier
• Need to revise OS – team is about to go from 3 to 9, private sector spinning up
• Brad OS and State employee OS are different – Slack/Trello/Zoom are not tools state employees are familiar with or can even access.  Now what?
• Kacey insists the team works remotely other than leaders and critical meetings so we can role model social distancing.  GOOD CALL
• One of our private sector guys goes rogue on PR, total bummer – this part (comms) about what we are doing could be more coordinated for sure, but not a priority
• Lots of texts/call with Jared, such a smart and thoughtful guy, really interesting

Tuesday, March 24, Day 8

• Been a week, feels like a month
• Fluid changes to both OS for team and OS for private sector group
• Zoom licenses – state will take a couple weeks to procure them, gotta work around it with Brad
• Slack app won’t get through the firewall.  Maybe IT’s supervisor can do us a favor?
• Comp – interesting expedited process – normally takes 65 days to get approval for temps, today we got it done in an hour!  Comp levels seem incredibly low. But we got done what we needed to get done
• Some minor territorial conflicts with state tech team and our private sector tech team.  Will have to resolve. Surprising how few of these there have been so far given that our team is new and shiny and breaking rules
• Big new Team meeting for first time with Sarah in lead, Red/Yellow/Green check-in (I like that – may have to borrow it!)
• Starting to feel obsolete – love that!  Sarah crushing it, totally feels like the right leader, need to make sure she has enough support (might need an admin?)
• Also…maybe I’m not feeling well?  A little worried I am getting sick. Hope that’s not true, or if it is, hope it’s not the BAD kind of sick.  Going to go work from hotel rest of afternoon
• Call with Jared – concern about managing state’s psychology – testing and isolation services
• Prep for press conference tomorrow

Wednesday, March 25, Day 9

• Woke up feeling awesome – phew – hopefully that was just fatigue or stress induced
• Sarah drowning a bit, feels like me on my 3rd day so makes sense
• Reigning in and organizing private sector seems like a full time job.  We are going to recruit my friend Michelle (ex-RP) to come work with Brad on volunteer management. HALLELUJAH!
• Whiteboard meeting with Kacey holding up her laptop so they can see it on Zoom – hilarious – technology not really working, but we are making the best of it
• State role – facilitate alt supply chain to hospitals since normal chain is broken…also maintain emergency state cache – complex but makes more sense now
• More territorial things starting to pop up with state government…processing volunteers
• Comms overload – here comes the text to alert you to the email to alert you to the phone call
• This team/project is clearly a case of finite resources meets infinite scope and infinite volunteer hand-raising
• Gov press conference – issues Stay at Home order through April 11 (interesting, that wasn’t in the version of the talking points I saw several hours before)
• Meeting some of our new team members.  I can’t even keep up with them, I think we’re up to 15+ now.  Kacey and Kyle are recruiting machines and all these people’s managers are just loaning to us immediately.  Love that.
• Amazingly talented and dedicated state employees – seem young, probably not paid well, but superior to private sector comprables in some ways 
• Talk with Kacey and Sarah about staff/not drowning
• Kacey feels like Sarah is doing a great job, so she cleared me to go home (wouldn’t have gone without her saying ok, she understands how this whole thing is working way better than I do – I guess that’s what a good chief of staff does!)

Stay tuned for more tomorrow…

(This is the third post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT.  First two posts are here and here.)

Friday, March 20, Day 4

• Morning pilates going pretty well, a good daily routine here
• Wellness Screening on the way in for the first time.  Uniformed National Guard guys taking temperature on surface of face/temples.  Can’t get it to work – takes 6x
• Leadership and prioritization of important over urgent – staff the team
• Strategic National Stockpile failure – they send us 60,000 masks and Colorado is using 68,000/day.  They send us ZERO ventilators. Seems like it’s neither strategic nor a stockpile. Guess it really is every state for itself
• Unclear sometimes what the actual role of the state is – sometimes procuring, sometimes getting private sector to procure with some coordination, etc.
• Getting out in front of the parade – the private sector is swarming all over this, how can we help coordinate and channel the energy?
• State gov seems incredibly nimble here – seconding people from departments all over to the crisis, etc.  Bureaucracy is real, but it can melt away in an emergency, or when the governor wants it to. Really impressive
• Going to try DoorDash and see if it’s any different than UberEats.  (It’s not.) Big night.

Saturday, March 21, Day 5

• Saturday but office still 75%
• Wellness Screening again.  Still can’t get thermometer to work for quite a while
• Mike Willis asked for feedback and observations (good) – they are
  • Atmosphere in EOC calm, focused, integrated, SMART, nimble, fast – opposite of “government”
  • Opening meeting on Tuesday morning – calm, focused, caring, quiet urgency
  • Didn’t realize he was military
  • Mentioned yesterday’s “not vetted, not integrated, not helpful” moment, poignant but respectful
• Team pull up, drowning in emails, plan to get organized
• Governor briefing
• Working on replacing me…
• Seamless prioritization of things that are gateway items and enablers.  We have a project tracker, but it’s almost useless. Mostly we are just doing prioritization in the moment.  No choice. Crisis mode
• Gov call – carefully weighing isolation strategy (economic as well as risk of civil disobedience) with number of projected deaths – sounds like the same conversation I’m reading about in the papers at the national level, but really interesting to see it up close and personal. Asked for plan around making food and services safer – super thoughtful “it’s not the economic activity that causes problems, it’s social proximity, are there ways we can keep one and minimize the other?”
• Colorado still has around 500 cases statewide – about ¼ of Westchester County.  Denver has less than 100. Still, feels like we are watching the tsunami coming at us in slow motion
• Dinner at a very close friend’s house who lives in town – elbow bumps and sat at the other end of the table.  Fun and social, but feels like even things like this are about to come to an end. Got to do laundry

Sunday, March 22, Day 6

• Sunday but office still 75%
• Multiple failures again with wellness screen, then we figure it out – on the walk over from the hotel, it’s cold enough that my skin temperature is out of range for the contact thermometers they have.  Since I am coming in early when there is no line, my face is too cold when I get to the front
• Adding staff, nowhere to put them, no organized email lists, working on org charts, have to retool O/S for meetings/tasks.  A little chaotic, but at least I know how to do this stuff
• Finally got connection to NY State to do some benchmarking on testing – doesn’t seem like states coordinate or share info a lot, but the team there was happy to 
• Finally have a few minutes to do planning on major swim lanes
• More working on replacing me
• This is the problem with statistics.  Models are only as good as the inputs, and the inputs here seem like they’re all over the place…not just here in CO, but everywhere.  It’s not like we have a pandemic every year to refine our math
• Interviewing Sarah Tuneberg (came in via Brad) to replace me with Lisa and Stan – she’s AWESOME and she’s hired – starts on the spot by coming in to stand with us behind the Governor at a press conference.  Talk about a rapid recruiting process!
• Seems like she will be awesome.  Probably way better than me – has a ton of public health and emergency/disaster response experience in addition to some private sector/startup/tech experience
• Her first worry never even occurred to me – Fatality Management – morgue surge capacity.  “Gift to the living” – so awesome
• Lameness of Trump press conference – self praise followed by sycophants in the midst of a typhoon
• Gov press conference (here) – authentic and well received.  “Grim reaper” was quite poignant. He worked in the key messages we asked him to about public misinformation of testing, talking points was Google Doc with 30+ people in it – good example of collaboration and control, seamless, last minute but still came out great.  Announces social distancing and lots of good examples about groceries, jogging, still no lockdown
• Lots of RP Colorado people seeing press conference…phone buzzing like mad in my pocket!  So many awesome notes from friends and former colleagues thanking me for being there to help, only one or two snarky comments about my orange tee shirt while others were in blazers (hey, it was a Sunday and the presser was called last minute!)

Stay tuned for more tomorrow…

(This is the second post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT.  Introductory post is here.)

Tuesday, March 17, Day 1

• Extended stay hotel does not have a gym.  Hopefully there is one at work
• Walking into office for the first time.  We are in a government building in a random town just south of Denver that houses the State Emergency Operations Center (SEOC) and the Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.  These are the teams who are on point for emergency response in Colorado when there is any kind of fire, flood, cyberattack, or other emergency
• 
• 
• MAJOR Imposter Syndrome – I don’t know anything about anything
• 7:45 meeting with Stan
• 8:15 department briefing
• Met two deputies – Kacey Wulff and Kyle Brown.  Both seem awesome. On loan from governor’s health care office and insurance department
• Team “get to know you” was 4 minutes long.  So different than calm normal 
• Emergency Operations Center in Department of Public Health
• Small open room with over 100 people in it and everyone freaking out about not following best practices – no social distancing
• 
• Leader giving remote guidelines
• Lots of “Sorry, who are you and why are you here?”
• Local ops leader Mike Willis excellent – calm, inspirational, critical messages around teamwork, self-management, check ego at the door (turns out he is a retired Brigadier General)
• HHS call – maxxed at 300 participants, people not getting through, leader had to ask people to volunteer to get off the line (oops)
• Lunch and snacks in mass quantities here – it’s not quite Google, but this part does feel very startup.  I wonder if the Emergency Ops Center does this all the time or just in a crisis. Guessing crisis only but still super nice.  Also guessing I will gain weight this week between this and all gyms in the state being closed down
• Lots of new people and acronyms
• Multiple agencies at multiple layers of government require a lot of coordination and leadership that’s not always there, but everyone was incredibly clear, effective, low ego.  A lot of overlap
• Got my official badge – fancy
• Jared calls – just spoke to Pence, his guy is going to call you – tell him what we need…”uh, ok, now all I have to do is figure out what we need!”
• Fog of War – this room is healthy and bustling and a little disconnected from what’s going on, no freak out
• Kacey and call from Lisa about Seattle being on “Critical Care” because they don’t have enough supplies, meaning they are prepared to let the sickest people die – oh shit, we can’t let that happen here (or is it too late?)
• Got oriented, sort of
• Slight orientation to broader command structure and team
• My charter and structure are a little fuzzy, guess that’s why I’m here to figure that out
• Late night working back at hotel.  Thinking I will become a power user of UberEats this week

Wednesday, March 18, Day 2

• Gym at work is closed along with all gyms everywhere.  Looks like a lot of hotel floor exercises are in order
• Ideas and efforts and volunteers coming in like mad and random from the private sector – no one to corral, some are good, some are duplicative, all are well intentioned.  Lots of “solve the problem 5 ways”
• Shelter in place?  Every day saves thousands of lives in the model – credibility with governor
• State-level work is so inefficient for global and national problems, but Trump said “every man for himself” basically when it comes to states
• Not feeling productive
• Productivity is in the eye of the beholder.  Kacey totally calmed me down. Said I am adding value in ways I don’t think about (not sure if she was just being nice!):
  • Connection to Governor really useful for crisis team
  • Basic management and leadership stuff good
  • Asking dumb questions
  • Out of the box thinking
  • Liaison to industry and understanding that ecosystem
  • Arms and legs
  • People used to working in teams on things – different expectations in general
• Ok, so maybe I am helping
• Colleague tells me about Drizly, the UberEats equivalent for alcohol delivery. Good discovery.

Thursday, March 19, Day 3

• Weird – my back feels better than it has in months.  Maybe it’s the pilates, but still, seems weird.  I wonder if the higher altitude helps. If so, we will be moving to Nepal. Have to remember to mention that to family later
• Governor Policy meeting 9 am – “Cuomo is killing it” – words matter – “shelter in place” and “extreme social distancing” debate
• “The models are wrong – so let’s average them”
• We need 10,000 ventilators. We have 700.  Uh oh.
• Raised issues around test types and team capacity…Gov expanded scope to include app and still pushing hard on test scaling.  Gov asked for proposal for expanded scope and staff by 4:30. Guess that’s the day today!
• Recruited Brad to lead Private Sector side of the IRT’s work. Important to have a great counterpart on that side. Glad he agreed to do it, even though he’s already vice chair of another state task force on Economic Recovery
• Senior Ops leader interrupts someone during daily briefing – quietly says to the whole room “not vetted, not integrated, not helpful” – incredible.  In the moment, in public which normally you don’t want to do but had no choice in this circumstance – 6 words gave actionable and gentle feedback. Great example of quiet leadership
• Private sector inbound – well intentioned and innovative but overwhelming and hard to figure out how to fit in with public sector (e.g., financing to spin up distributed manufacturing)
• Team huddled and created proposal for new name, structure, staffing, charter, rationale, etc.
• Present to senior EOC staff for vetting, feedback
• Feels like I’m adding value finally – plan creation and “bring stakeholders along for the ride” presentation/vetting AND getting the team to stop being hair on fire and focus on thinking and planning and staffing
• Present to Gov – “brilliant” – then after, Kyle says “I’ve worked for multiple governors and senators, and this is the first time I’ve heard something called brilliant” (not sure it was brilliant)
• Now to operationalize it, stand up a team, replace myself so I can get home once this is marching in the right direction at the right speed
• Transferable skills (leadership, comms, strategy, planning) – not just missing context here but missing triple context – healthcare, public sector, CO
• Day 3.  Feels like longer
• Still, feels like adding value now.  Whew.  
• Dinner with a Return Path friend who came down to my hotel’s breakfast room, picked up takeout on the way, and sat 6 feet apart. 

Stay tuned for more tomorrow…

(This is going to be an interesting week.  I expect in a couple days, a group of friends and former Return Path colleagues and I are going to officially start a new company once initial funding closes.  I will write about that down the road, but first, this message brought to you by COVID-19.)

I just returned from spending an intense two weeks in Denver.  On March 15, my long-time friend and Board member Brad Feld called me with an interesting idea.  His friend, Colorado Governor Jared Polis (who I’d met a briefly couple times over the years), had an idea of starting and rapidly scaling up a task force in the state government and wanted to tap a private sector entrepreneur to lead the effort.  After some back and forth over 36 hours, and strong encouragement from Mariquita to go help despite the pending lockdown at home in New York, I decided to jump on a plane and go do it. Here’s the description of the group, called the Innovation Response Team (IRT) that I wrote up on LinkedIn:

Governor Jared Polis established the state of Colorado’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team (IRT), and I was its initial leader to get it off the ground. The team is responsible for pulling together rapid-response creative programs as part of the state’s response to the pandemic that require entrepreneurial, out-of-the-box thinking and deep connections to the private sector (as well as cross-agency within various levels of government), integrated with the state’s Emergency Operations Center. Along with two key deputies from state government, I was responsible for starting the group, both the public sector and private sector sides; recruiting the state team, a leader for the private sector side, and a long-term replacement for myself; and leading the development of the group’s structure, workstreams, and initial plans along with the rest of the team. In the first two weeks, the team grew from 0 to over 200 people (including an army of private sector volunteers) and started to make a significant impact on the state’s response to the crisis.

At Brad’s suggestion out of the gate, I took daily notes as the project unfolded.  I thought the most interesting way to present the experience here on OnlyOnce (because you *definitely* Only lead a COVID-19 state emergency task force Once) would be to share the daily chronicle, a few days at a time, along with a couple photos I took along the way.  So I’ll do that here, then at the end, I’ll do a wrap-up post that compares the work to running a private sector company.  Because the pace of news around COVID-19 is moving so fast, I’ll post a few days’ worth of daily notes at a time.

Sunday, March 15 – Day -1

• Brad text/call to ask me if I’m interested in doing this
• Lukewarm – not excited about leaving home for 2-4 weeks
• Mariquita encourages me to do it – “when else are you going to get an opportunity to have an impact like this?”
• Jared (Governor) called (spoke a mile a minute), outlined his vision and a couple potential workstreams and discussion ends with “talk tomorrow”
• Can’t sleep – started a Google doc in bed with notes on the first workstreams

Monday, March 16, Day 0

• More back and forth with Jared and his team – Lisa (Chief of Staff) and Stan (supervising cabinet member)
• Officially invited to come at 3 pm
• Kids bummed but supportive
• By 6 pm, packed, cleaned up odds and ends at home and was in a car to Kennedy
• 8 pm flight and airport both still ⅔ full 
• Feeling full of purpose
• Worked on more reading and enhanced doc and Day 1 goals
• Texted Brad:  “Thank you. Wish me luck. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. Fortunately I never have and that’s usually been ok.”  Brad LOL.
• Notified parents…a bit shocked
• Good to see and surprise Khalid, the driver we used for years at Return Path
• Crashed in extended stay hotel

Stay tuned for more tomorrow! Apologies if any of these notes or posts aren’t quite right…anyone who was there doing the work with me, please send me any corrections you’d like me to post!

Several years ago, I blogged about the training program we created for entry-level employees at Return Path, including an embedded presentation that we used to use (which I hope still works on the blog after all these years).

My brother Michael, who is an experienced manager and leader in the digital marketing space, recently sent me this email that I thought I’d share along the same lines to colleagues who are new to the working world. Enjoy!

I signed up to give advice on LinkedIn, and had someone just starting her first job reach out to me asking for general advice. I came up with the attached, and thought it might make for a good blog post on Only Once. If you decide not to publish it, I’m totally cool with that, but thought I would share it. After all, you’re only a brand new employee once too 🙂

1) Listen as much as possible. One of my mentors was fond of reminding me, “God gave you two ears and one mouth!” You should listen at least twice as much as you talk. Get to know your environment and the people around you. Take notes. Observe as much as possible. Learn how others are able to provide value to the organization. Start to anticipate little things that need to be done, and then do them before your manager asks you to. Then bit by bit, use your creativity to start to develop bigger hypotheses about how you can provide even greater value. 

2) “In business, the best story wins.” That’s another quote from a former manager of mine that I have found to be universally true. People in business respond to many things: numbers, bullet points, graphs and visualizations. But they respond to all of those things better when they are wrapped in stories. A great book you can read about storytelling is not about business at all. It’s called “Story” by Robert McKee, and it’s about screenwriting. Despite its apparent lack of applicability, I assure you it will help you think about characters, goals, antagonists, drama, obstacles, and structure — all the elements that go into a good story. When you can present your hypotheses in the context of a story, about your business, your customers, what you want to achieve, how you will do it, and why it matters, you will build consensus and show leadership. Another great book you can read here, again, not about business at all, is “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari. It really opened my eyes about how so much of human history and behavior is really just based on stories. 

3) Be lean. There is another book you should read, called “The Lean Startup”, by Eric Ries. This one is actually about business :). As you think about your hypotheses, think of them in the context of how you can get to market quickly and inexpensively. How you can easily perform experiments that will test your hypotheses. Some of your experiments will not achieve your desired result, but it’s not a failure if you can learn something that helps you pivot towards success. Learnings enable you to adjust and refine your hypotheses as you try to find more value for your organization. 

4) “Objections are requirements” and a corollary “ask questions, don’t make statements.” These two gems are from that first mentor in item number one. Even if you can tell great stories, and even if you can devise and execute lean experiments that achieve business results or provide validated learnings, sometimes “haters gonna hate.” There will always be inhibitors to your bold ideas, with reasons not to proceed with your experiments. Inertia is part of human nature. But don’t fear! When an inhibitor comes along, the first thing you do is start to ask questions. “Why do you object to x?” “Oh,” they’ll say, “because of y and z.” Then ask another question “So if we can resolve y and z, then can we proceed with x?” Rather than repeating yourself and making more statements, by asking questions you’ve just turned their objections into requirements. That inhibitor no longer has their reasons not to proceed with your bold idea. You’ve turned them from antagonists into allies. This kind of creative problem solving is critical to getting your experiments into market, and building consensus and showing your leadership without alienating anyone. 

5) Ok I know I said four, but this one is optional (albeit important). Have fun! Do not take yourself or your role too seriously. Show your personality. Be yourself. That sort of general approach to work and life will draw people to you. They will be relaxed and comfortable around you. They will look forward to meetings with you. You will be successful if you are a good listener, a creative thinker with bold ideas, a fantastic storyteller, an agile experiment developer, and a leader who can build consensus and drive value. But if you are all those things, and you’re fun to be around? Then you will be unstoppable.

Thank you, Michael, for the contribution!

I wrote part I of this post in 2011, and I feel even more strongly about it today. I generally keep this blog away from politics (don’t we have enough of that running around?), but periodically, I find some common sense, centrist piece of information worth sharing. In this case, I just read a great and very short book, Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution, by former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, that, if you care about the polarization and fractiousness going on in our country now, you’d appreciate.

If nothing else, the shattered norms and customs of the last several years should point people to the fact that our Constitution needs some revision. Not a massive structural overhaul, but some changes on the margin to keep it fresh, as we approach its 250th anniversary in the next couple decades.

I wrote a post in 2013 entitled Debunking the Myth of Hiring for Domain Expertise vs. Functional Expertise. In it, I talk about how in hiring senior executives, sometimes you can’t get both functional expertise (great Head of X) and great domain expertise (subject matter expert in X), but that in scaling businesses, there’s another important vector to consider, which is that if your principal business challenge is scaling, then a critical thing to look for in a potential executive is experience with scaling businesses, or at least experience working at businesses of different sizes/stages.

Today’s post is about a fourth vector beyond functional expertise, domain expertise, and scaling expertise: Context, an important vector to consider as well. When I first had this thought, I was having trouble distinguishing it from domain expertise. Now a few months later, I think I am clear on the distinction.

I worked for a while as an interim executive at a company that had giant companies for clients – very, very large companies. Tens and Hundreds of Thousands of employees. And the scope of services we provided was very internal to our clients, meaning our services touch 100% of employees. Early in my career, I worked as a management consultant and did spend the bulk of two years working in very large companies, frequently onsite for several months at a time. Most of my career, though, I have worked in startups/small companies, and while the clients I’ve worked with often included some very large companies, we’ve typically served very small, externally-oriented teams at large companies. So my personal context for this job is somewhat limited.

Why is that relevant? It’s different to work in a small, well lit, high energy, open plan, newly designed urban office than it is to work in a massive footprint office filled with high-wall cubicles and no windows in a suburban office park. It’s different to work in an environment where there are 5+ layers of management between someone and a department head. It’s different to work in a place where career paths are largely vertical (or involve switching business units) as opposed to what I’m used to, which is careers that can Scale Horizontally. And on and on. All these things are important Context for how our clients consume our services. And they’re all different from what I’m used to.

There is no substitute for actually working years on end in large companies, just as there is no substitute for working years in the startup context. Having said that, I think context can be learned about as quickly as subject matter, and about at the same depth.

I was honored this week to be in a small group “fireside chat” with Angela Duckworth, author of the book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, and to meet her and ask a question.

I want to hit on one theme here from the book and dialog, but I’ll start by sharing a 2×2 matrix (remember, I’m an ex-consultant, I think in frameworks) that we’ve used at home with our kids periodically. For the most part, we use it to talk to them about why they should work harder on math homework, but it’s had other use cases as well. Hopefully it makes sense on the face of it…

…but essentially the framework teaches that if you are talented AND work hard at something, you can achieve great things. If you have talent and slack off, you can get by perfectly fine. If you have no talent but work your butt off, you can get there…but it’s hard. And if there’s an area of life where you have no talent and don’t work at it, so be it, but you’re punting on that whole thing.

In the book, Duckworth takes this to a whole new level by adding a simultaneous second equation:

• Talent x Effort = Skill
• Skill x Effort = Achievement

This makes the statement that “your first bit of talent, combined with effort increases your skill level. Your increasing skill, multiplied by effort, leads to achievement. That means effort counts twice. Once for skill and once for achievement. But that doesn’t mean it’s twice as important. If you substitute the skill equation into the achievement equation, you end up with

• Talent x Effort x Effort = Achievement, which means that 
• Talent x Effort² = Achievement.

Or in other words, “Your effort is exponentially more important than how talented you are.”

All I have to say is that while I won’t create a second graphical explanation of this and probably won’t go back and amend my 2×2 for my kids, I think Duckworth is right, with one caveat. If you don’t have a certain baseline of talent in a certain area, it just doesn’t matter how much effort you apply – your achievement has some kind of natural governor to it. When I was a kid, I would dearly have loved to be the shortstop for the San Diego Padres, but between being a lefty, a kid, and not what you would call overly athletic, it wouldn’t have mattered if I spent every waking hour of a decade working at it…I never would have gotten there. Having said that, those cases may be edge cases, and again, I find that the emphasis on effort on top of my framework is a very worth application.

But go read Grit. It’s much better and more detailed than this blog post!

My friend George, one of our co-founders at Return Path (according to him, the best looking of the three), has a wonderful and simple framing question for thinking about product strategy:  what job is your customer hiring you to do?  No matter what I’m working on, I am finding George’s wisdom as relevant as ever, maybe even more so since I am still learning the new context.

Why is this a useful question to ask?  It seems really simple – maybe even too simple to drive strategy, doesn’t it?

It’s very easy in technology and content businesses (maybe other spaces too) to get caught up in a landslide of features and topics. In a dynamic world of competition and feature parity, product roadmaps can easily get cluttered. They can also get cluttered by product teams who have their own view of what should be the next feature, module, or content widget. Sometimes looking at product usage data is helpful, but sometimes it produces more noise than signal because it can easily miss the “why” or change day to day.

And once a product is mature, it can be very difficult to understand which of its many elements — even if they are all used — are the ones truly driving the most value for customers. It’s easy to assume it’s the newest, the slickest, the ones that are generating the most buzz. It’s even easier to assume that when it comes to content. But sometimes it’s now. Sometimes it’s the legacy part of the product. Sometimes it’s a small side feature you don’t focus on. Sometimes it’s something you used to do but don’t really do any more!

By asking customers the simple question — what are you hiring us to do for you? — you can start to get to the heart of the matter, the heart of what your strategy should be.  Peeling the onion once you understand that and getting into the specifics of the different tasks or jobs your customer does that derive from your main point of value, as George would say, “jobs to be done,” is much more straightforward. When defining a Job to Be Done:

• Focus on a functional job (not an emotional one, e.g, “I need to look smart to the boss”)
• Try to ensure that you are looking at the whole job, not just a piece of the job. It’s easy to get too narrow in your definition
• Make sure it is the customer’s definition of the job, not yours

There’s always a role and a need for innovative product owners to help define a space, define value, demonstrate it for customers.  This framework is meant to be additive to a high functioning product owner’s job, it can never replace it.

(As a small post-script, Friday December 6 marks 20 years since we started Return Path…a fitting day to post a bit of a tribute to George!)