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Someone asked me the other day how things are going at Bolster, the new company I started along with a bunch of long-time colleagues from Return Path last year. My visceral answer was “I’m having a blast!”  I thought about it more after and came up with five reasons why. 

First, I am working with a hand-picked group of people. My co-founders, I’ve worked with for an average of 15 years – we know and trust each other tremendously. And for the most part, the same is true about our cap table. Almost everyone else at the company is also someone multiple of us have known or worked with for years. That may not last forever, but it makes things so much easier and almost friction-free out of the gate here. 

Second, this is the “second lap around the track” for a few of us on the founding team in terms of starting something from scratch, and even those at the company who haven’t done a raw startup before are super experienced professionals and many have worked in and around early stage businesses a lot. All this combines to cut down our error rate, reduce anxiety, and speed up the pace of work. More friction-free or at least low-friction work.

Third, after a 20-year run at Return Path, it’s great to start with a clean slate. No mountains of tech debt and legacy code bases. No installed base of customers with contracts or pricing we no longer like or offer. No institutional debt like a messy cap table, legacy people issues, leases for offices we don’t want or need any more.  This also points to low friction as part of what’s going on…and while that’s a theme, the next two areas are different. 

The fourth reason I’m having a blast at Bolster is that I love — and really live in — the problem space we are working in.  When we started Return Path, I was deeply familiar with email marketing and the challenges faced by our client set and had a good vision for the early product.  But as the years went on, the product got geekier and nicher — and even when it wasn’t, I was never a USER of the product since I’m not an email marketer.  In fact, at our peak of 500 people, the company employed one email marketer and therefore had one user of our own product.  At Bolster, we have three user personas — Member, Client, and Partner.  And I’m all three of them.  I’m constantly in the product, multiple times a day.  I’m deeply familiar with all angles of the executive search and board building process.  It’s MUCH better to be this close to the product, and the same is true for many of our team members.

Finally, the thing I was really worried about with starting another company from scratch — moving from a leadership role into an individual contributor role — has been nothing short of fantastic.  I love working with clients.  I love talking to members.  I love advising and coaching CEOs. I love being a pretend product manager.  I love writing marketing copy.  It’s just great to be on the front lines. (I still love working on strategy and leading the board and engaging with people internally — but those are things that never stopped being part of my day to day.)

I was trying to think if there’s some priority to this list. Almost all of these items are or can be made to be true in your second+ startup. But while four of the five can theoretically be true in your first startup as well, I don’t think it’s quite the same. So I’d have to weight “second lap around the track” a bit higher and also note that during your second lap around the track, hand-picking your team and cap table, appreciating a clean slate, and appreciating individual contributor work are that much easier and things you can appreciate a lot more as a repeat entrepreneur.

Marketing is Like Baskin Robbins

A couple years ago, I wrote that Marketing is Like French Fries, since you can always take on one more small incremental marketing task, just as you can always eat one more fry, even long after you should have stopped. Today, inspired in part by our ongoing search for a new head of marketing at Return Path and in part by Bill McCloskey’s follow up article about passion in email marketing in Mediapost, I declare that Marketing is also like Baskin Robbins – there are at least 31 flavors of it that you have to get right.

McCloskey writes:

I submit that the über marketer who is expert in all the various forms of interactive marketing is someone who just doesn’t exist, or is very bad at a lot of things. An interactive jack of all trades, master of none, is not the person you want heading up your email marketing efforts. What you want is someone who is corralling those passionate about search, RSS, email, banners, rich media, mobile marketing, WOMM, social networks, viral into a room and figuring out an integrated strategy that makes sense.

Boy, is he right.  But what Bill says is just the front row of ice cream cartons — the interactive flavors. Let’s not forget that running a full marketing department includes also being an expert in print, broadcast, direct mail, analytics, lead gen, sales collateral and presentations, creative design, copywriting, branding, PR, events, and sponsorships.  Wow.  I’m getting an ice cream headache just thinking about it.  No wonder CMOs have the highest turnover rate of any other C-level executive.

I think Bill’s prescription is the right one for larger companies — get yourself a generalist at the helm of marketing who is good at strategy and execution and can corral functional experts to coordinate an overall plan of attack.  It’s a little harder in small companies where the entire marketing department might only be 2-3 people.  Where do you put your focus?  Do you have all generalists?  Or do you place a couple bets on one or two specialties that you think best line up with your business?

I think my main point can be summed up neatly like this:  Running Marketing?  Be careful – it’s a rocky road out there.

I’m fascinated with this topic and how it’s evolving in society. In Part I, a couple years ago now, I changed my long-held point of view from “CEOs should only wade into politics when there’s a direct impact on their business” (things like taxes and specific regulations, legal immigration) — to believing that CEOs can/should wade into politics when there’s an indirect impact on business. In that post, I defined my new line/scope as being one that includes the health and functioning of our democracy, which you can tie to business interests in so many ways, not the least of which this week is the Fitch downgrade of the US credit rating over governance concerns. Other CEOs will have other definitions of indirect, and obviously that’s ok. No judgment here!

I am a regular viewer of Meet the Press on Monday mornings in the gym on DVR. Have been for years. This weekend, Chuck Todd’s “Data Download” segment was all about this topic. The data he presented is really interesting:

58% of people think it’s inappropriate for companies to take stands on issues. The best that gets by party is that Democrats are slightly more inclined to think it’s appropriate for companies to take stands on issues (47/43), but for Republicans and Independents, it’s a losing issue by a wide margin.

To that end, consumers are likely to punish companies who DO take stands on issues, by an overall margin of 47/24 (not sure where everyone else is). The “more likely” applies to people of all political persuasions.

These last two tables of his are interesting. Lower income people feel like it’s inappropriate for companies to take stands on issues more than higher earners, but all income levels have an unfavorable view, and…

…older people are also more likely to have an unfavorable view of companies who wade into politics than younger people, but again, all ages have an unfavorable view

As I said in Part I of this series, “I still believe that on a number of issues in current events, CEOs face a lose-lose proposition by wading into politics,” risking alienation of customers, employees, and other stakeholders. The data from Meet the Press supports that, at least to some extent. That said, I also acknowledge that the more polarized and less functional the government is…the more of a leadership vacuum there is on issues facing us all.

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 influence, it highlights the fable the entire illusion is based on…You’re responsible for what you do, but you don’t have authority and control over the outcome. We can hide from that, or we can embrace it.

Moving onto the much longer HBR article, the key thesis there is that certainty shapes our behavior, as the more certain we are of a belief (whether it’s correct or incorrect), the more it influences us:

In short, certainty is the catalyst that turns attitudes into action, bringing beliefs to life and imbuing them with meaning and consequence.

At first, it seems like these two positions might be at odds with each other, but there are other interesting nuggets in the HBR article as well that tie the two positions together.  First, that the packaging of information influences the certainty of the consumers of that information (for example, when a generally positive product reviews takes pains to admit the product’s deficiencies).  Second, that your own position in a given situation may influence your level of certainty (for example, when you are the most senior person in the room, as opposed to when you are the most junior person in the room).

The HBR article then goes on to talk about four ways companies can boost certainty in their employee population, since certainty is a driver of behavior:

1. Consensus – showing your view is widely shared (or shaping your view to perceptions)
2. Repetition – having people express their own opinions repeatedly (encourage customers, employees, etc. to express positive opinions or opinions aligned with corporate goals)
3. Ease – how easily an idea comes to mind (making good, regular visual use of key concepts)
4. Defense – people are more certain after defending a position (being a devil’s advocate in an argument to get employees to defend their position)

My initial reaction to reading both Seth’s post and the HBR article was that if Certainty is nothing but an illusion, and yet it’s a key driver of behavior, then using Certainty by definition a manipulative management technique.  Say something’s true enough, get people to believe it, hope it’s right.  Or worse, get people to say it themselves enough so they believe their own inner monologues, not just yours.  But then I thought about the feedback that I get — that I deliver too many mixed messages — and changed my view. Coming across as certain, even when certainty may or may not be real, isn’t any more manipulative than any other management or even sales technique.  Our job as leaders is to generate inspiration and activity in our teams, isn’t it?  Using certainty isn’t by definition disingenuous, even if it’s an illusion at times.  It’s one thing to be All In, Until You’re Not, for example, and another thing entirely to publicly support a position that you know is false.  All we can do as leaders is to do our best.

Having said that, I think using certainty as a management tool is something leaders need to do judiciously given how powerful it is, and also given its fragility.  If business results are mixed, you can’t stand up in front of a room full of people and say things are great (or terrible), even if your people are seeking a black and white answer.  However, you can (and should) communicate your certainty that the direction you choose to take your team or your company is the right one.  And you can use transparency to further bolster your position.  Share the details of HOW you reached your decision with the people on your team.  After all, if you’re not certain, or if the logic that drove your certainty is flawed, why would anyone follow you?

ROI Radio Interview

Greg Cangialosi, CEO of Blue Sky Factory and a client of ours, runs a podcast series on his blog called ROI Radio.  Last week, he interviewed me.  It’s a bit long, but feel free to listen or download here.  We mostly cover things related to Return Path — our products and how we do things — but we also talk a bit about the growth and development RSS/feed technology and FeedBurner.

I Can’t Tell If I Like This Or Not

I am blogging at 35,000 feet, using American Airlines’ new GoGo in-flight Wi-Fi service. I am definitely having mixed feelings about it. On one hand, it’s nice to download the 47 emails I just wrote before two-hours after landing (sorry, team!). It’s also nice to be able to clean out my Inbox so it’s not overflowing when I get to our California office.

On the other hand, it has the potential to destroy one of the last few places in my life that’s completely free of connectivity. That kind of makes me sad.

I think I’m going to turn it off once I do a single pass at the Inbox. I guess I can turn it back on for the same $12.95 fee if I need it again. This service is a great convenience but a bit of a luxury. At least the guy next to me isn’t using Skype!

Book Short:  Continuing to make “sustainability” a mainstream business topic

The Big Pivot: Radically Practical Strategies for a Hotter, Scarcer, and More Open World, by my friend Andrew Winston, is a great book.  It just got awarded one of the Top 10 business books of 2014 by Strategy+Business, which is a great honor.

Andrew builds nicely on his first book, Green to Gold:  How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage (post, book link) (and second book, which I didn’t review, Green Recovery), as I said in my review of Green to Gold, to bring:

the theoretical and scientific to the practical and treat sustainability as the corporate world must treat it in order to adopt it as a mainstream practice — as a driver of capitalistic profit and competitive advantage.

Andrew’s central thesis, with plenty of proof points in the book for our planet of 7 Billion people, rapidly heading to 9-10 Billion, is this:

Whether you take a purely fiscal view of these challenges or look through a human-focused lens, one thing is clear: we’ve passed the economic tipping point. A weakening of the pillars of our planetary infrastructure— a stable climate, clean air and water, healthy biodiversity, and abundant resources— is costing business real money. It’s not some futuristic scenario and model to debate, but reality now, and it threatens our ability to sustain an expanding global economy… If this hotter, scarcer, more transparent, and unpredictable world is the new normal, then how must companies act to ensure a prosperous future for all, including themselves?

Andrew’s writing is accessible and colorful.  The book is full of useful analogies and metaphors like this one:

Climate can also seem easy to write off because the warming numbers don’t sound scary. A couple degrees warmer may sound pleasant, but we’re not really talking about going from 75 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit on a nice spring day. As many others have pointed out, the right metaphor is a fever. Take your core body temperature up one degree, and you don’t feel so great. Five degrees, and you’re sick as a dog. Ten degrees, and you’re dead.

The book also does a really nice job of looking at the externalities of climate change in a different way.  Not the usual “I can pollute, because there’s no cost to me to doing so,” but more along the lines of “If I had to pay for all the natural resources my business consumes, I would treat them differently.”

Some of Andrew’s points are good but general and maybe better made elsewhere (like the problems of short-termism on Wall Street), but overall, this book is a great think piece for all business leaders, especially in businesses that consume a lot of natural resources, around how to make the challenge of climate change work for your business, not against it.

Two things occurred to me during my read of The Big Pivot that I think are worth sharing for the people in my life who still don’t believe climate change is real or threatening.  The first is Y2K.  Remember the potentially cataclysmic circumstance where mission critical systems all around the world were going to go haywire at midnight at the turn of the millennium?  The conventional wisdom on why nothing major went wrong is that society did enough work ahead of time to prevent it, even though the outcomes weren’t clear and no one system problem alone would have been an issue.  I was thinking about this during the book…and then Andrew mentioned it explicitly towards the end.

The second is something I read several years ago in my personal news bible, The Economist.  I couldn’t find the exact quote online just now, but it was something to the effect of “Even if you don’t believe man created climate change, or that climate change is real and imperiling to humanity and can be fixed by man, the risks of climate change are so great, the potential consequences so dire, and the path to solve the problem so lengthy and complex and global…it’s worth investing in that solution now.”

Let’s all pivot towards that, shall we?  If you want to download the introduction to the book for free, you can find it on Andrew’s web site.  Or for a three-minute version of the story, you can watch this whiteboard animation on YouTube.

Email Deliverability Data

We just published our 2004 year-end email deliverability report.  Feel free to download the pdf, but I’ll summarize here.  First, this report is very different from the reports you see published by Email Service Providers like Digital Impact and DoubleClick, because (a) it measures deliverability across a broad cross-section of mailers, not just a single ESP’s clients, and (b) it is a true measure of deliverability — what made it to the inbox — as opposed to the way some ESPs measure and report on deliverability, which is usually just the percentage of email that didn’t bounce or get outright blocked as spam.

Headline number one:  the “false positive” problem (non-spam ending up in the junk mailbox) is getting worse, not better.  Here’s the trend:

Full year 2004:  22%
Second half 2003:  18.7%
First half 2003:   17%
Second half 2002:  15%

Headline number two:  mailers who work on the problem can have a huge impact on their deliverability.  Obviously, I’m biased to Return Path’s own solution for mailers, but I think you can extrapolate our data to the broader universe:  companies that work on understanding, measuring, and solving the root causes of weak deliverablility can raise their inbox rate dramatically in a short time — in our study, the average improvement was a decrease in false positives from 22% to about 9% over the first three months.  But we have a number of mailers who are now closer to the 2% false positive level on a regular basis.

Be Ruthless With Your Time

I have historically been very open with my calendar.  For most of my career, people who want to meet with me, both internally or externally (with the exception of random vendor solicitation), generally have gotten to meet with me.  Some of this is generosity, but I’m also a compulsive networker and have always made time proactively to meet with people just to meet them, learn more about different pockets of the industry or finance, meet other entrepreneurs and find out what they’re up to or help them, and connect more broadly from there.  I’ve also routinely been on multiple boards at the same time, as I’ve found that’s a very helpful part of my management routine.

But of late, I’m struggling more and more with calendar management.  There are more and more demands on my time internally as Return Path gets bigger.  There are more asks from people with whom I really don’t want to meet.  More travel, which sucks up a lot time.  A longer commute and more people who I want to see at home who have early bedtimes.  So I’ve taken to being more ruthless with my time.  I could probably do an even better job at it than I am now.

The main shifts I’m trying to make are to be proactive instead of so reactive; to cut meetings, shrink them, or group them when appropriate internally; to use videoconferencing instead of travel where possible; and honestly to just be a little more selfish and guarded with my time.  If the meeting doesn’t have something in it for me or Return Path — some promise of learning something or meeting someone either directly or indirectly helpful — I’m unlikely to do it any more as I once would, or I’m pickier about it (it has to be in my office so I don’t have to travel…it can only be 30 minutes long, etc.).

The two main tools I’m trying to use to manage my calendar proactively, mostly driven my brilliant executive assistant Andrea, might be useful to others, so I thought I’d share them here.

The first one is a networking list.  Andrea and I created a simple spreadsheet of everyone externally that I like to keep in touch with, and we prioritized it.  Every time I meet with someone on it, we mark the date.  Then when we meet to review my calendar periodically, we look at the list and figure out who I should reach out to in order to set up the next wave of meetings.  (I have one for internal check-in meetings with people other than my direct reports as well.)

The second is a time allocation model.  I am sure I got this idea from David Allen or Jim Collins or some other author that I read along the way.  First, we are religious about keeping an accurate calendar, including travel time, and we even go back and clean up meetings after they’ve happened to make the calendar an accurate reflection of what transpired.  At the end of each quarter, we download the prior three months’ worth of meetings, we categorize them, and we see where my time went.  Then we make changes to the upcoming quarter’s calendar to match my targets based on what I’m trying to accomplish.  For what it’s worth, my categories have changed over time, but currently, they are Free, Travel, Non-Return Path, Internal, Board, Client/External.  Pretty high level.  This exercise has been really helpful in keeping me proactive and on track.

I miss some of the more random networking that I used to do.  I am at least a moderate believer in serendipity, and the likelihood of serendipity goes down as I clamp down on my calendar.  And I will miss being on some outside Boards or helping new entrepreneurs figure out how to be first time CEOs.  But hopefully my combination of being selectively proactive and exercising good judgment about what inbound things to jump on will keep the machine humming.

Fifth in my series on creating the best place to work – Being the best enabler.  As any management guru will tell you, as you have a larger and larger team, your job is much less about getting good work done than it is enabling others to get good work done.  What does that mean?

First, don’t be a bottleneck.  You don’t have to be an Inbox-Zero nut (but feel free if you’d like), but you do need to make sure you don’t have people in the company chronically waiting on you before they can take their next actions on projects.  Otherwise, you lose all the leverage you have in hiring a team.  Don’t let approvals or requests pile up!

Second, run great meetings.  Meetings are a company’s most expensive endeavor.  Sometime in a senior staff meeting, calculate the cost in salary of everyone sitting there for an hour or two!  Run good meetings yourself and don’t enable bad behavior…and in the course of doing that, role model the same for your senior staff members who do their own staff or team meetings.  Make sure your meetings are as short as possible, as actionable as possible, and as interesting as possible.  Don’t hold a meeting when an email or 5-minute recorded message will suffice.  Don’t hold a weekly standing meeting when it can be biweekly.  Cancel meetings if there’s nothing to cover.  End them early if you can’t fill the time productively.  Vary the tempo of your meetings to match their purpose – the same staff group can have a weekly with one agenda, a monthly with a different agenda, and a quarterly with a different agenda.

Finally, don’t run a hub-and-spoke system of communications.  Some managers who are a bit command-and-control like hoarding information or forcing all communication to go through them or surface in staff meetings.  No need for that!  Almost everyone on your team, if you are a senior manager, should have individual bilateral relationships and regular 1:1 meetings without you there.  The same goes for your Board and your staff, if you are the CEO.  They should have individual relationships that don’t go through you.  if you are a choke point for communication, it’s just as bad as being a bottleneck for approvals.

Enabling your team to give it their all is a gift to yourself and your organization as much as it is a gift to your team – give that gift early and often.