Parenting and Corporate Leadership

Let me be clear up front:  I do not think of my colleagues at Return Path as children, and I do not think of Casey, Wilson, and Elyse as employees.  That said, after a couple weeks of good quality family time in January, I was struck by the realization that being a CEO for a long time before having kids has made me a better parent…and I think being a new parent the last three years has made me a better CEO. 

Here's why.  The two roles have a heavy overlap in required core interpersonal competencies.  And doing both of them well means you're practicing those competencies twice as many hours in a week than just doing one – and in different settings.  It's like cross training.  In no order, the cross-over competencies I can think of are…

Decisiveness.  Be wishy washy at work, and the team can get stuck in a holding pattern.  Be wishy washy with kids, they run their agenda, not yours.

Listening.  As my friend Anita says, you have two ears and one mouth for a reason.  Listening to your team at work, and also listening for what's not being said, is the best way to understand what's going on in your organization.  Kids need to be heard as well.  The best way to teach good verbal communication skills is to ask questions and then listen actively and attentively to the responses.

Focus.  Basically, no one benefits from multitasking, even if it feels like a more efficient way of working.  Anyone you're spending time with, whether professionally or at home, deserves your full attention. The reality is that the human brain is full of entropy anyway, so even a focused conversation, meeting, or play time, is somehow compromised.  Actually doing other activities at the same time destroys the human connection.

Patience.  For the most part, steering people to draw their own conclusions about things at work is key.  Even if it takes longer than just telling them what to do, it produces better results.  With kids, patience takes on a whole new meaning, but giving them space to work through issues and scenarios on their own, while hard, clearly fosters independence.

Alignment.  If you and your senior staff disagree about something, cross-communication confuses the team.  If you and your spouse aren't on the same page about something, watch those kids play the two of you off each other.  A united front at the top is key!

I'm sure there are others…but these are the main things that jump to mind.  And of course one can be great in one area without being in the other area at all, or without being great in it.  Are you a parent and a business leader?  What do you think?

Context is King

A small post with a good point.  I noticed in The Economist this week something that struck me.  They posted a correction to a prior article.  Publications do that all the time, but this particular correction was placed on a page in the same section of the magazine in which the error appeared a couple weeks before.  Most print publications tend to bury their corrections in the front or the back where they never get seen.  But this one was right in the middle of the magazine, saying “we made a mistake – right here.”  Noteworthy to me for its show of transparency, always appreciated but not seen frequently enough in “official” things.

Book Short: Not About Going With The…

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (book, Kindle), was a great read and a nice change from either strictly business books or my regular fiction/non-fiction reading. It’s basically about the process of achieving happiness through control over one’s inner life, but it’s far from a self-help book. It’s almost more of practical psychology deep dive into what brings about happiness and peak performance – a state the author calls Flow but others have called other things over time, like being “in the zone.”

The author talks about achieving this control as synonymous with the enviable ability to persevere despite obstacles and setbacks and transform hopeless situations into challenges to be overcome, just through the force of personality. This ability comes directly from ways to order consciousness so as to be in control of feelings and thoughts. The normal entropy/chaos of the mind is the enemy. There were a few key moments or takeaways in the book for me.

1. When one’s experience is most positive – when one is achieving Flow – people cite the following conditions in this order of importance:

– Confront tasks we have a chance of completing

– Able to concentrate

– Concentration is possible because the task has clear goals and…

– …provides immediate feedback

– Act with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life

– Exercise a sense of control over actions

– Concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the experience is over

2. Becoming more Autotelic – learning how to make experiences ends in and of themselves – coming from the Greek words for “self” and “goal,” this concept is savoring a given activity for its own sake, NOT for its consequences and is a key to achieving Flow. Whether you create a mental construct around beating a personal record, doing math or pattern matching in your head, or something else, being able to focus enough energy on the task at hand and not be distracted by the world around (present or future) is key. It’s a little like what I wrote a few months ago about how achieving mental discipline in the small areas of one’s life can lead to much greater things by building confidence and clearing mental clutter.

3. The concept of the “Flow channel” – as skill increases, challenges must also increase proportionally in order for us to continue learning, growing, and excelling – and achieving Flow.

4. Transformational coping is the ability to cheat chaos – transforming a hopeless situation into a new flow activity that can be controlled and enjoyed and emerge stronger from…

– Unselfconscious self-assurance – ego absent but confident, not at odds with environment but part of it

– Focusing attention on the world – looking outward, not inward

– The discovery of new solutions – being able to perceive unexpected opportunities as a result

5. How to develop the autotelic self

– Set clear goals

– Become immersed in the activity

– Pay attention to what’s happening

– Learn to enjoy immediate experience

The book reminded me of a couple other things I’ve read, in case any of these resonate with you. First, Tim Gallwey’s “Inner Game” books where he talks about “relaxed concentration,” basically the Flow state, and the inner conflict between focus on the event and focus on the consequences, between mental chaos and mental discipline, personified as Self 1 and Self 2. If you haven’t read these, any are good and give you the general idea, depending on which piques your interest the most: The Inner Game of Golf (book, Kindle), The Inner Game of Tennis (book only), and The Inner Game of Work (book, Kindle). Second, David Allen’s Getting Things Done theory about how a clear, uncluttered mind can do its best work. As Flow says, achieving an ordered mental condition is difficult – unless a person knows how to give order to his or her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment.

I’m not sure this book short does the book justice. It’s pretty complex and is rich with examples, but Flow (book, Kindle) is well worth a read if you’re into the theory of self control leading to better results and more happiness in life. Thanks to my friend Jonathan Shapiro for this book.

The Beginning of the DMA’s Next Chapter

 

As I wrote a few months back, I recently joined the DMA’s Board of Directors and its Executive Committee to try to help the association – one of the largest and highest profile groups representing marketers – advance its agenda in a few specific ways.  At the time, I noted that my interests would be on consumer advocacy and engagement, execution around interactive marketing issues and the internet community, and transparency around the organization itself.

 

Yesterday, John Greco, the association’s CEO, announced he is stepping down to make way for the next generation of leadership.  John has done some great work the past five years running the DMA and has advanced it materially from where the association was when he took over in terms of interactive marketing, but he recognized (the hallmark of a good leader) that it was time for a change.

 

There are all sorts of questions people have about this announcement, and I’ve already gotten a number of calls and emails from people trying to read between the lines and get some inside scoop.  Some of the questions have answers – others don’t at this stage or can’t given confidentiality agreements. 

 

That said, as a new Board member helping the DMA build some bridges to the interactive marketing community, I thought I would share a few perspectives on this situation:

 

–          There is not a final search committee yet, nor are there final search criteria.  That said, there is a strong commitment to find a leader for the DMA who is not only capable of running a broad-based $30mm+ trade association and running a world class advocacy operating in Washington, but who also has deep roots in the Internet

–          There are many, many initiatives in the works – some of which have been underway for quite some time now – for the DMA to evolve as an association to more effectively execute its mission in the interactive marketing arena.  These will start to unfold relatively quickly

–          The DMA’s Board and Executive Committee are fantastic groups with very progressive, committed volunteers who understand the things that need to happen.  “Reform,” which probably isn’t quite the right word anyway, isn’t being pushed on the association – it is coming from within

–          The DMA is committed in its search process, and in its new “operating system” going forward, to embrace not just its membership but the broader interactive and direct marketing community as it evolves its strategy, broadens its mission, and looks for a new leader

 

So the bottom line is – this announcement of one change is the first of many.  Stay tuned, and look for much more open and transparent communication from the DMA, including a lot more community-oriented dialog as opposed to just one-way statements, than you’ve ever seen before in the coming weeks and months.

   

What Gets Said vs. What Gets Heard

I’ve been on the edge of a few different situations lately at work where what seems like a very clear (even by objective standards) conversation ends up with two very different understandings down the road.  This is the problem I’d characterize as “What gets said isn’t necessarily what gets heard.”  More often than not, this is around delivering bad news, but there are other use cases as well.  Imagine these three fictitious examples:

• Edward was surprised he got fired, even though his manager said he gave him repeated warnings and performance feedback
• Jacob thought his assignment was to write a proposal and get it out the door before a deadline, but his manager thought the assignment was to schedule a brainstorming meeting with all internal stakeholders to get everyone on the same page before finalizing the proposal
• Bella gets an interim promotion – she still needs to prove herself for 90 days in the new job before the promotion is permanent and there is a comp adjustment – then gets upset when the “email to all” mentions that she is “acting”

Why does this happen?  There are probably two main causes, each with a solution or two.  The first is that What Gets Said isn’t 100% crystal clear.  Delivering difficult news is hard and not for the squeamish.  What can be done about it?  The first problem — the crystal clear one — can be fixed by brute force.  If you are giving someone their last warning before firing him, don’t mumble something about “not great performance” and “consequences.”  Look him in the eye and say “If you do not do x, y, and z in the next 30 days, you will be fired.” 

The second cause is that, even if the conversation is objectively clear, the person on the receiving end of the conversation may WANT to hear something else or believes something else, so that’s what “sticks” out of the conversation.  Solving this problem is more challenging.  Approaching it with a lengthy conversation process like the Action Design model or the Difficult Conversations model is one way; but we don’t always have the time to prepare for or engage in that level of conversation, and it’s not always appropriate.  I’d offer two shortcut tips to get around this issue.  First, ask the person to whom you’re speaking to “play back in your own words what you just heard.”  See it she gets it right.  Second, send a very clear follow-up email after the conversation recapping it and asking for email confirmation.

People are only human (for the most part, in my experience), and even when delivering good news or assignments, sometimes things get lost in translation.  But clarity of message, boldness of approach, and forcing playback and confirmation are a few ways to close the gap between What Gets Said and What Gets Heard.

Learning How to Stop

This is my last post about thoughts I had coming out of the NYC Lean Startup Meetup that I spoke at a couple weeks ago.  Being lean, the discussion went at this event, means not doing extraneous things.  While it’s true for startups that it’s important to make great decisions about what to do up front, it’s also true — especially as companies get larger and more important older — that organizations and individuals have to be vigilant about stopping activities that become extraneous over time.

This is HARD.  Once things — product features, business processes, reports, ways of communicating or thinking about things — get ingrained in an organization, there’s never a natural impetus to stop doing them.  Even the smartest and most thoughtful individuals often find themselves doing things that once made sense but no longer do. 

We encourage people at Return Path to create space to work OTB (on the business), not just ITB (in the business).  Take time not just to perfect what you’re doing and do it, but take time to reexamine what you’re doing and ask whether or not it needs to be done.  My staff is going to start doing an exercise at least quarterly around pruning/simplifying activities.  

Focus is not just about saying “no” to new tasks.  It’s also about saying “no longer” to old ones.

Innovating in New York City

Last week I wrote about speaking at the NYC Lean Startup Meetup.  One of my other key takeaways from this, which I’ve known for a while and have been meaning to blog about, is just how vibrant the tech startup community is here in New York.  I know others have been blogging about this like mad – Fred has some thoughts here, here, and here, and Charlie has some here and here.  Chris Dixon’s seminal post on this is here. (I even blogged a bit about why NYC is a good place to start a business back in 2006 here.)

I’ve had a little more time for networking and speaking in the past year than the prior year, and I’ve been blown away by how many startups there are here.  Like most things, New York City is such a massive and diverse place that it’s easy to “get lost in the crowd,” and there’s a lot going on.  So startups don’t tend to get the same level of social buzz that they do in Silicon Valley.  But Fred’s stat in one of those links above that over 150 startups were founded in NYC this year compared to over 300 in the Valley is interesting when you consider the geographic density here.  There are many more per square mile in New York.

Despite the geographic density to the startups, the New York startup scene is a long way from being a community.  There are some encouraging signs of late.  Charlie’s establishing a physical presence for First Round Capital is one. NextNY, with over 2500 members, is another, along with various Meetups.  I am learning more and more every day about local incubator-type organizations as well (take that term with a grain of salt).  I thought John Borthwick’s Betaworks was the only one until Charlie told me about Sunshine Suites, TechSpace, and the NYU/Poly program.  But something is still missing.  Some glue to hold it all together.

In the Valley, the startup community is  a cultural thing — plus, startups are part and parcel of a larger tech community.  Most of the big acquirers of internet companies are out there, so the ecosystem keeps cycling through companies and talent and investors.  In smaller cities like Denver/Boulder and Boston (and soon to be Seattle), TechStars fills a good void by providing a high profile “lure the talent here” combined with “meet the money” program. Seedcamp does that nicely in London, which, while it’s a big city, has a much smaller and more dispersed startup community than New York.

Since we’re unlikely to suddenly sprout a bunch of Fortune 500 tech companies in NYC, where’s our version of one of those programs in NYC?  Or is there some other “glue” lurking out there to tie it all together?

Pivot, Don’t Jump!

I spoke last night at the NYC Lean Startup Meetup, which was fun.  I will write a couple other posts based on the experience over the next week or so.  The Meetup is all about creating “lean startups,” not just meaning lean as in cheap and lightweight, but meaning smart at doing product development from the perspective of finding the quickest path to product-market fit.  No wasted cycles of innovation.  Something we are spending a lot of time on right now at Return Path, actually.

My topic was “The Pivot,” by which the group meant How do you change your product idea/formation quickly and nimbly when you discover that your prior conception of “product-market fit” is off?  I talked a bit about the pivots we’ve done over the years here, not just the corporate ones, but some of the essential product ones as well.  One of the comments a member of the Meetup made that really stuck with me was that you have to “Pivot, Don’t Jump” when making changes to your business or product.

This has been true of Return Path’s pivots over the years.  Our pivots have all had two very solid foundation points — the company’s deep expertise in email, and our customer base.  Every pivot we’ve done has been in some way at the request/urging of our clients, and the new directions have always been in line with our core capabilities.  While we have a talented team that probably could execute lots of different businesses well, it’s hard to see us being successful in other areas that are farther afield.

People over the years, for example, have suggested that we should get into SMS deliverability — isn’t that going to be a hot topic?  We don’t know.  We don’t spend our lives immersed in text messaging.  What about getting into measurement of social media messaging — isn’t that related?  Maybe, but it’s not in our wheelhouse.  Expanding from email deliverability software and analytics, into services, into data, into whitelisting on the other hand – those were pivots, not jumps.

One other note of course, is that the larger your business is, and the more investors have a stake in it, the harder it is to make BIG pivots or any kind of jumps.  Innovation is still critical, but innovating from a well-protected core is what it’s all about, not chasing new shiny objects.

Book Short:  Innovation and Discipline

The Puritan Gift, by Kenneth and William Hopper, is a bit of a mixed bag.  The authors have a wonderful point to make — that American businesses have thrived over the centuries due to a mix of innovation and discipline that descended from the country’s Puritan roots, and that when they lose their way, it’s because they diverge from those roots.  The book is also an interesting, if somewhat cursory, history of American industry.  And it playfully debunks some great myths of corporate American life over the last 50 years.  But the book has a few too many moments where assertions aren’t supported by data — where its theories overreach into explanations of other aspects of American life that may or may not be appropriate.

That said, it is a good read.  The main point is that there are five driving principles behind American business success over the years, the first four coming from the Puritans and the fifth from the French:

– the melding of the workplace with the search for a higher purpose in life
– an aptitude for the application of mechanical skills
– the subordination of the individual to the group
– the ability to assemble and galvanize forces to a single purpose on a massive scale
– a keen interest in and passion for technology

These things ring true as driving forces of successful businesses today.  The distillation (or abstraction) of these forces, though, is the most powerful lesson from the book as far as I’m concerned, which is that businesses, and organizations in general, succeed the most when they are led by people who really understand the substance of the business and not by professional managers or financial engineers, and when they practice integrated decision-making, which is to say that the same people make decisions, plan for execution, execute, and follow up.  You don’t have to look too far to see a lot of examples of how the absence of domain expertise and integrated decision-making has led to spectacular failures, from Enron to Wall Street’s meltdown to the Iraq War.

The Puritan Gift ends on a hopeful note about restoring America’s leadership in global industry by returning to our Puritan roots.  It’s way too early to assess whether or not this hypothesis will turn out to be correct, but the examples the authors give in the concluding chapter are certainly good food for thought for anyone who runs a business.  Thanks to my friend Marc Maltz of Triad Consulting for the book.

A Perfect Ten

Return Path turns 10 years old today.  We are in the midst of a fun week of internal celebrations, combined with our holiday parties in each office as well as year-end all-hands meetings.  I thought I would share some of my reflections on being 10 in the blog as I’ve shared them with our team. What being 10 means to me – and what’s enabled us to make it this long:

• It means we’ve beaten the odds.  Two major global economic meltdowns.  The fact that 90% of new small businesses fail before they get to this point.  Probably a higher percentage of venture backed startups fail before they get to 10 as well
• We’ve gotten here because we’ve been nimble and flexible.  Over our 10 years, we’ve seen lots of companies come and go, clinging to a model that doesn’t work.  We may have taken a while and a few iterations to get to this point, but as one of my Board members says, “we’re an overnight success, ten years in the making!”
• We’ve also made it this long because we have had an amazing track record with our three core constituencies – employees, clients, and investors – including navigating the sometimes difficult boundaries or conflicts between the three

What I’m most proud of from our first decade:

• We’ve built a great culture.  Yes, it’s still a job.  But for most of our team members most of the time, they like work, they like their colleagues, and they have a fun and engaging time at work.  That’s worth its weight in gold to me
• We’ve built a great brand and have been hawkish about protecting our reputation in the marketplace.  That’s also the kind of thing that can’t be bought
• We haven’t sacrificed our core principles.  We’ve always, going back to our founding and the ECOA business, had a consumer-first philosophy that runs deep.  This core principle continues to serve us well in deliverability (a non-consumer-facing business) and is clearly the right thing to do in the email ecosystem

What I most regret or would do differently if given the chance:

• We have not raised capital as efficiently as possible – mostly because our company has shifted business models a couple of times.  Investors who participated in multiple rounds of financing will do very well with their investments.  First or second round angel investors who didn’t or couldn’t invest in later rounds will lose money in the end
• I wish we were in one location, not five.  We are embracing our geographic diversity and using it to our advantage in the marketplace, but we pay a penalty for that in terms of travel and communication overhead
• We have at times spread ourselves a little too thin in pursuit of a fairly complex agenda out of a relatively small company.  I think we’re doing a good job of reigning that in now (or growing into it), but our eyes have historically been bigger than our stomachs

Thanks to all our investors and Board members, especially Greg Sands from Sutter Hill Ventures, Fred Wilson from Flatiron Partners and Union Square Ventures, Brad Feld from Mobius Venture Capital, and Scott Weiss for their unwavering support and for constantly challenging us to do better all these years.  Thanks to our many customers and partners for making our business work and for driving us to innovate and solve their problems.  Thanks to our many alumni for their past efforts, often with nothing more to show for it than a line item on their resume.  And most of all, thanks to our hardworking and loyal team of nearly 200 for a great 2009 and many more exciting years ahead!