Book Short:  Two New Ones from Veteran Writers

I’m feeling very New York this week.  I just read both Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell, and Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – and How It Can Renew America, by Tom Friedman.  Both are great, and if you like the respective authors’ prior works, are must reads.

In Outliers, Gladwell’s simple premise is that talents are both carefully cultivated and subject to accidents of fate as much as they are genetic.  I guess that’s not such a brilliant premise when you look at it like that.  But as with his other two books, The Tipping Point (about how trends and social movements start and spread) and Blink (about how the mind makes judgments), his examples are fascinating, well researched, and very well written.  Here are a couple quick nuggets, noting that I don’t have the book in front of me, so my numbers might be slightly off:

• Of the 200 wealthiest people in human history, 9 were Americans born within 5 years of each other in the 1830s – far from a normal distribution for wealth holders/creators
• Most Silicon Valley titans were both within 2 years of each other in 1954-1955
• 40% of great hockey players are born in Q1; 30% in Q2; 20% in Q3; and 10% in Q4, as the “cutoff date” for most youth leagues is January 1, so the biggest/oldest kids end up performing the best, getting the best coaches and most attention that propels them throughout their careers

Also, as with his other books, it’s hard to necessarily draw great and sweeping conclusions or create lots of social policy, both of which are quite tempting, as a result of the data.  Scholarly, comprehensive research it might not be, but boy does he make you think twice about, well, lots of things.

In Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Tom Friedman makes a convincing case that two wrongs can make a right, or more to the point, that fixing two wrongs at the same time is a good way of fixing each one more than otherwise would be possible.  What I like best about this book is that it’s not just another liberal journalist trashing America — Friedman’s whole premise here (not to mention language) is fiercely optimistic and patriotic, that if we as a country take a sweeping global leadership role in containing CO2 emissions, we will both save the planet and revive our economy, sustaining our global economic leadership position into the next century at a time when others are decrying the end of the American empire.

His examples are real and vivid.  Like Gladwell, one never knows how unbiased or comprehensive Friedman is, but he covers some of these topics very poignantly:

• The very strong negative correlation between control of oil supply and democracy/freedom
• A comprehensive vision for the energy world of the future that’s very cool, apparently has already been piloted somewhere, and feels like it’s actually doable
• The startling numbers, even if you sort of know them already, about the sheer number of people who will be sharing our planet and consuming more and more resources in the coming decades
• How too many years of being a privileged nation has led to politics he brilliantly calls “dumb as we wanna be”

Friedman calls his mood sober optimism — that’s a good description.  It’s a very timely book as many Americans hold out hope for the new administration’s ability to lead the country in a positive direction and also restore American’s damaged image in the world come January 20. I have to confess that I still haven’t read Friedman’s The Earth Is Flat, although I read him in the New York Times enough and have seen enough excerpts (and lived in business enough the last 5 years!) to get the point.  And actually, Hot, Flat, and Crowded has enough of the “Flat” part in it that even if you haven’t read The Earth is Flat, you’ll get more than just the gist of it.

Challenge

I do a decent amount of fundraising for my high school and college, and we frequently employ “challenges” as a means of hitting our goal.  For a fundraising campaign, that usually takes the form of finding a large donor to give matching gifts, or $X for everyone who gives more than $X, or $X for any new donor — something like that.

We did a fun challenge program at Return Path this December that worked out pretty well for everyone, company and employees alike.  We’ve been working the team pretty hard the last 4-5 months, and we wanted to give everyone some kind of fun noncash bonus as a thank you.  We also had two major milestones that we as a company really wanted to hit before the end of the year, one financial and one operating.  The challenge was that if we hit both, we’d officially close the company for all business days between Christmas and New Year’s to give people basically a free week off as a reward for a good year as well as the “icing on the cake” of the challenge.  To make it seasonal yet nondenominational, and to pay a little homage to Seinfeld, we called this the Festivus Challenge. 

The good thing about both milestones is that while not 100% of the company was involved in hitting them, huge percentages of the company were involved in at least one — and both were pretty high profile.  So it was a good rallying cry.

In the end, we missed one, but we not only made the other one, we actually blew threw it and went way above and beyond on the success metric, so we ended up giving three bonus days, the day before Christmas and the two “dead” Fridays.  Everyone is getting a four-day and five-day weekend back to back, and some people will just end up taking three vacation days to get a full 12 day holiday.

This was a fun one — we may have to do it again next year if there’s a good challenge lurking in our business.

Hertz Giveth, Hertz Taketh Away

For years, I’ve hated all rental car companies for forcing me to scramble and find a gas station to fill up on the way to returning a car at the airport or get faced with an insane refueling charge.  I never understood why one smart company didn’t decide to just do away with that moronic policy, figure out another way to make a profit, market the heck out of it, and endear themselves to customers. 

Finally, Hertz jumped in a few months ago with just that.  Return a car without refueling?  No problem.  A modest $5 surcharge and market rate for the actual gas required solves the problem.  Brilliant!  They were even marketing it to their customers in-car and online. 

The last time I rented, I returned the car with 3/4 of a tank and was handed an extra $35 or so on my bill for refueling at $7.99/gallon.  I asked what was going on.  The check-in clerk told me “Oh we stopped doing that new refueling program.  It’s too bad – all our customers loved it.  You should say something about it to someone higher up.”

Bad enough to quietly discontinue a program like that without telling your customers (I did just get a quiet little email from Hertz today, a month after discontinuing the program, that it was over — no explanation).  But why would you ever launch a customer-friendly program and then just take it away?  It can’t be that it wasn’t popular. And while it may have been less profitable for Hertz, why take a step backwards and just remove the program rather than figure out another solution to replace the profits?  What about asking customers what they want and why?

Profits are important, but seems like this is not the right economic environment to irritate your customers.

Projection

A few years ago, I wrote about how smiling and nodding or waving at strangers while running was a fun way to start the day and that once in a while, someone actually smiled back.  My not-so-revolutionary discovery was that people are generally in their own cocoons and not particularly receptive to a friendly gesture, but that when they are, they're completely receptive and quite friendly in return.

In the last couple of days, I've rediscovered that principle with a twist.  As I get myself used to a new routine of train commuting and working out in a big New York Sports Club gym, I'm seeing people in cocoons all over the place again.  And I've started being more friendly and smiley — on the walk to the village train station, on the train platform, on the train, on the treadmill.  Same reaction as before.  Most people ignore, an occasional one is incredibly friendly in return.

But what I'm now noticing is that I don't care what the reaction is.  It actually makes ME happier to be friendly.  I'm not sure what that says about me, probably nothing more than that I'm projecting on others, but you can bet I'm going to do more of that in the future.  It's much better to start and end a long day with a smile than a frown or a blank stare!

Half the Benefit is in the Preparation

This past week, we had what has become an annual tradition for us – a two-day Board meeting that’s Board and senior management (usually offsite, not this year to keep costs down) and geared to recapping the prior year and planning out 2009 together.  Since we are now two companies, we did two of them back-to-back, one for Authentic Response and the other for Return Path.

It’s a little exhausting to do these meetings, and it’s exhausting to attend them, but they’re well worth it.  The intensity of the sessions, discussion, and even social time in between meetings is great for everyone to get on the same page and remember what’s working, what’s not, and what the world around us looks like as we dive off the high dive for another year.

The most exhausting part is probably the preparation for the meetings.  We probably send out over 400 pages of material in advance – binders, tabs, the works.  It’s the only eco-unfriendly Board packet of the year.  It feels like the old days in management consulting.  It takes days of intense preparation — meetings, spreadsheets, powerpoints, occasionally even some soul searching — to get the books right.  And then, once those are out (the week before the meeting), we spend almost as much time getting the presentations down for the actual meeting, since presenting 400 pages of material that people have already read is completely useless.

By the end of the meetings, we’re in good shape for the next year.  But before the meetings have even started, we’ve gotten a huge percentage of the benefit out of the process.  Pulling materials together is one thing, but figuring out how to craft the overall story (then each piece of it in 10-15 minutes or less) for a semi-external audience is something entirely different.  That’s where the rubber meets the road and where good executives are able to step back; remember what the core drivers and critical success factors are; separate the laundry list of tactics from the kernel that includes strategy, development of competitive advantage, and value creation; and then articulate it quickly, crisply, and convincingly. 

I’m incredibly proud of how both management teams drove the process this year – and I’m charged up for a great 2009 (economy be damned!).

Next One is the Big One, a.k.a. Nine is Fine

Today, Return Path turns nine years old. 

What an exciting year we’ve had, too.  As I mentioned a couple months back, we completely reorganized the company this year, marking a major transition and a new stage in the life of the business.  We acquired our largest competitor, Habeas, consolidating our space and further establishing ourselves as the leader in email deliverability and whitelisting.  We marched right past our 1,000th client milestone and now are well on our way to our 1,500th.

Thanks again to our fantastic team and our great group of investors and Board members for another fun and exciting year.  Nine is fine…and now the march to The Big 1-0 begins.

Book Short:  A Brand Extension That Works

Usually, brand or line extensions don’t work out well in the end.  They dilute and confuse the brand.  Companies with them tend to see their total market share shrink, while focused competitors flourish.  As the authors of the seminal work from years ago, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Jack Trout and Al Reis would be the first people to tell you this.

That said, The New Positioning, which I guess you could call a line extension by Jack Trout (without Reis), was a fantastic read.  Not quite as good as the original, but well worth it.  It’s actually not a new new book – I think it’s 12 years old as opposed to the original, which is now something like 25 years old, but I just read it and think it’s incredibly relevant to today’s world.

Building on the original work, Trout focuses more this time on Repositioning and Brand Extensions — two things critical to most businesses today.  How to do the impossible, to change people’s minds about your brand or product mid-stream, whether in response to new competitive activity or general changes in the world around you.  And how to think about brand extensions (hint:  don’t do them, create a new brand like Levi’s did with Dockers).

The book also has a very valuable section on the importance of sound and words to branding and positioning, relative to imagery.  Trout has a short but very colorful metaphor about women named Gertrude here that’s reminiscent of the research Malcolm Gladwell cited in Blink.

If you haven’t read the original Positioning, that should be on your wish list for the holidays.  If you have, then maybe Santa can deliver The New Positioning!

Delicious Irony

 

Great coverage in The Washington Post of an ironic aspect to the auto industry's poverty plea for a government bail-out this week.

 

The three execs from GM, Ford, and Chrysler each took a separate private jet from Detroit to DC for the Congressional hearings for the occasion. 

 

I'm not a fan of Congressional hearing grandstanding and think most members of congress are asses when they do things like this, but not this time.  These guys had it coming and clearly don't have a clue about symbolism (either the importance of it or the art of it). 

 

The details are rich.  Read them here.  Thanks to my colleague Stephanie Miller for pointing this one out.  Yeesh.

I Wonder if I Could Ever Work for a Big Company

And I mean a REALLY BIG one.  At my high school reunion last weekend, my friend Jason, who I hadn’t seen in 10 years (and only once in the last 20), heard what I’m doing with my life, and said to me “I’m so glad for you.  I couldn’t figure out if you were going to do big company or something entrepreneurial.  I’m sure you would have done well either way, but isn’t what you’re doing more fun?”

 

I think he’s right.  It is more fun.  Every time I have a meaningful interaction with a friend or client inside a huge company, I come away shaking my head a bit.  The politics of huge organizations are a little mind-numbing.  People seem obsessed with it – who reports to whom, who is in and who is out, to the point where it must distract them from their actual work.  And as far as I can tell, most (though certainly not all) large companies do major reorganizations every 12 months that also stop business dead in its tracks.  It’s a wonder companies like that get anything done at all.

 

This notion was reinforced for me at a two-day training seminar I attended last week on Balanced Scorecard implementation, something we’re rolling out now at Return Path.  It was a good training course, but not geared to C-level execs at growth companies.  Most of the people in attendance were mid-level managers at big companies who were “project managing” Balanced Scorecards.  As a result, sections of the course were devoted to topics like “finding an executive sponsor” and “selling the idea up the management chain.”  Oy!

 

The kind of work I love doing is work that has a direct impact, a real connection to the company’s results.  Work that is, well, work, not time spent figuring out how to get work done.  Maybe this isn’t fair – I’m sure there are perfectly good BIG companies out there that don’t function this way – but they do seem to be few and far between.

 

I hope Jason is right – if I were to work in a big company, I’d do well – but boy does it sound like not fun.  Or at least it sounds like not productive work.

If You’re Going to Do Something, Do It First Class

 

I have long made this statement, not just about business, but about life.  Why bother doing something big if you’re not going to do it right?  Don’t just write a senior thesis, get an A on it.  Don’t invite the boss over for dinner and serve chicken nuggets.  You get the idea.

 

Our marketing team at Return Path totally nailed this last week with our IN conference on Reputation.  They selected a venue, the American Museum of Natural History, that wasn’t just a standard issue hotel conference room.  They sought out a killer keynote speaker, Seth Godin, instead of just having Return Path staff and clients talk.  They used Perception Analyzer, a new technology to integrate audience polling into the presentations instead of just serving up one bullet-point slide after the next.  They went above and beyond and paid attention to every last detail. 

 

All these things made the event harder to pull off (and more expensive), but collectively they made the day absolutely First Class — and that was noted by every attendee who I spoke with during and after the event as they gushed about the quality of the conference.

 

The proof is always in the pudding with these things, and we’ll have to measure our ROI on the event over the next few months in terms of new sales and client retention, but I bet that the quality and remarkability of the event will prove the axiom that If You’re Going to Do Something, Do It First Class.

Why Do I Have to Be Frisked to Go to an NFL Game?

 

I am freaked out about terrorism as much as the next person, but our obsession with security has gone too far.  Some of the airport-related security is dumb enough — I can’t hijack a plane with my shampoo any more — but at least there’s some logic to the general premise.

 

But the major pat-down I got last weekend when I went to see the Chargers beat the Chiefs was just silly.  It certainly didn’t make me feel more secure sitting in the stadium.  It wouldn’t have even occurred to me to feel insecure in the first place. 

 

The experience reminded me of all the medium-security office buildings in New York City.  What does signing-in really do for the building’s safety?  If you want to x-ray people and their bags on the way in, fine.  But a quick visual scan of my drivers’ license and asking me to write in which floor I’m going to…what does that actually do?

 

And in the meantime, my understanding is that 95% of cargo containers coming into our ports still go uninspected.  Go figure.