There was a great essay in the New York Times yesterday about multitasking. The gist of the article is that multitasking, when taken to an extreme, is unproductive at best and in the case of driving, quite dangerous.

I’ve long believed that in business, as in any activity relying in part on interpersonal relationships, it’s important to be fully present when talking to other people. This is especially true in one-on-one conversations, but true even in larger meetings. The article talks about the clicking you hear when you’re talking to someone on the phone and he or she is typing in the background. And we’ve all been in meetings where someone picks up a Blackberry to reply to a presumably non-urgent email. How annoying! Better to step out of the meeting if the email is that important…or tell the person who called you that you don’t have time to talk now.

Even forgetting the annoying part, how can you possibly connect with another person when you’re reading or writing at the same time? How can you make a point or read their body language? How can you convey to the rest of the room that you’re taking the subject seriously?

Like most of us these days, I too am addicted to multitasking, repsonding to emails, answering cell phones, and the like. The only way I’ve been able to make sure I focus on the meeting at hand is to turn off the phone, leave the Blackberry or laptop in another room, bring nothing other than a piece of paper and pen to the meeting. Sure, I have to go back and enter a couple things on my computer in my to-do list afterwards instead of in real time, but it’s a worthwhile tradeoff. If I’m on the phone, I turn away from my desk or put my headset on and walk around the office to remove other temptations.

I don’t think all multitasking is bad…in fact there are lots of times where it makes great sense and is productive. But the principle of Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Well applies here in spades — having a conversation with another person, or being fully present and accounted for in a meeting, are usually worth doing well!

I’ve always thought that the ability to stare down adversity in business — or turning lemons into lemonade, as a former boss of mine used to say — is a critical part of being a mature professional. We had a prime example of this a couple weeks ago at Return Path.

We had scheduled a webinar on email deliverability, a critical topic for our market, and the moment of the webinar had come, with over 100 clients and prospects on the line for the audio and web conference. There was a major technical glitch with our provider, Webex (no link for you, Webex), and after 5 or 10 minutes, we had to cancel the webinar — telling all 100 members of our target audience that we were sorry, we’d have to reschedule. What a nightmare! Even worse, Webex displayed atrocious customer service to us, not apologizing for the problem, blaming it on us (as if somehow it was our fault that half the people on the line couldn’t hear anything), and not offering us any compensation for the situation.

As you can imagine, our marketing guru Jennifer Wilson was devastated. But instead of sulking, she turned the situation on its head. She rescheduled the event for three weeks out with a different provider who was technically competent and a pleasure to work with, Raindance, and sent every person who’d been on our aborted webinar a gift certificate to Starbucks so they could enjoy a snack on our dime during the rescheduled event. Not only did we have full attendance at the rescheduled event, but Jennifer received dozens of emails from clients sympathizing with her, commending her on her attitude, and of course thanking her for the free latte.

It’s hard to do, and you hate to have to do it, but successfully turning lemons into lemonade is one of the most satisfying feelings in business!

People rarely comment on this blog (or most non-political blogs, I’ve noticed), so feel free to share your best lemons-to-lemonade story with me in a comment, and I promise I’ll post the best couple of them pronto!

I haven’t done a book review yet on this blog because I haven’t found a very relevant one. I will do more as I go here — I’ve actually read a few pretty useful business books lately — but there’s no better book to kick off a new category of postings here than the one I just finished: The MouseDriver Chronicles: The True-Life Adventures of Two First-Time Entrepreneurs.

The book details how two freshly-minted Wharton MBAs skipped the dot com and investment banking job offers to start a two-person company that produced the MouseDriver (a computer mouse shaped like a the head of a golf club) back in 1999-2000. It’s a great, quick read and really captures the spirit of much of what I’m trying to do with this blog, which is talk about first-time CEO issues, or company leadership/management issues in general.

Although it’s not about an internet business, the book also has an interesting side story, which is the powerful impact that email had on the MouseDriver business, with an email newsletter the entrepreneurs started that developed great readership and ultimately some viral marketing. Sort of like a blog, circa 1999.

Thanks to Stephanie Miller at Return Path for giving me the book!

Old news by now, but John Kerry has selected John Edwards as his running mate for this fall’s presidential election. What I found particularly interesting was a line buried in one of the various news reports I read on the web this morning, which said that Kerry, still stinging from the fact that he heard the bad news that he was not to be Al Gore’s running mate in 2000 from the media and not from Gore himself, had kept this decision-making process deliberately private up until the very last moment to avoid making that same mistake and to spare the feelings of those he passed over for the job.

How many of us in business have learned things over the years from negative role models, as much as from positive role models? I actually wrote a comment in an upward review several years back that I learned a ton from observing my boss, but that much of what I was learning was what not to do!

I think negative role models can be an even more powerful influence on leaders than positive role models over time, although both are clearly important. My experience with this tracks this decision of Kerry’s pretty closely — in a particular instance where I apply something learned from a negative role model, I tend to overcompensate for what is usually, in hindsight, a smallish detail. At the end of the day, I feel much better about it myself, and although I generally think it makes a difference, sometimes that difference is lost on others in my organization who don’t have that same benchmark.

Anyway, I hope Gephardt, Vilsack, Richardson, and the other Democrats who were not selected by Kerry today feel good about the way the decision and communication went down — because I know how hard Kerry worked to make them feel good about it!

Fred beat me to it. I wasn’t at a computer to post this yesterday on the actual 4th of July, so today will have to do. I’ve read lots of books on the American revolution and the founding fathers over the years. It’s absolutely my favorite historical period, probably because it appeals to the entrepreneur in me. Think about what our founding fathers accomplished:

– Articulated a compelling vision for a better future with home democratic rule and capitalist principles. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is really the ultimate tag line when you think about it.

– Raised strategic debt financing from, and built critical strategic alliances with France, the Netherlands, and Spain.

– Assembled a team of A players to lead the effort in Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, and numerous others who haven’t been afforded the same level of historical stature.

– Built early prototypes to prove the model of democratic home rule in the form of most of the 13 colonial assemblies, the Committees of Correspondence, and the Articles of Confederation.

– Relentlessly executed their plans until they were successful, changing tactics several times over the years of 1774-1783 but never wavering from their commitment to the ultimate vision.

– Followed through on their commitments by establishing a new nation along the principles to which they publicly committed early on, and taking it to the next level with the Constitution and our current form of government in 1789.

And let’s not forget, these guys accomplished all of this at a time when it took several days to get a letter from Virginia to Boston on horseback and six weeks to get a message across the Atlantic on a sailboat. Can you imagine what Washington would have been able to accomplish if he could have IMd with Adams in Paris?

So happy 4th to all, with a big thanks to this country’s founding fathers for pulling off the greatest spin-off of all time.

I am now a big fan of my new Treo 600. It’s not so new, I’ve had it for a couple of months, but I figured out a couple of things on it today that really throw it over the top in my book.

In general, it’s a very good convergence device. The combination of phone, Palm apps, and email is very well done. It needs a longer battery life, but it lasts for a full day with pretty heavy usage, which is acceptable. I love not carrying around both a phone and a blackberry any more.

The first thing that took it from being a good device to being a great one was our installation of the GoodLink Exchange server software. It is instantaneous, two-way wireless synch between the device and my Outlook profile. That means no docking, never being out of step with changes made to my profile in my office, and full access to all my Outlook folders, not just the inbox.

But what really made the difference for me was that I figured out how to rig the device to also be an MP3 player today. So now, on short business trips anyway, I am down to one device and one battery charger from three and three.

It’s a combination of Pocket-Tunes software on the device, an SD chip, which you can now get up to 1GB of storage (about 300 MP3 files), and an adaptor that connects my computer to the SD chip via USB to load the MP3 files. The sound quality is much better than I expected, although I do miss my ipod, and it plays both through headphones (you need an adaptor for that, too), and outloud using the phone’s speaker capabilities. So you have to do a little work to make it an MP3 player, but it’s worth it!

Now the only thing that has to happen is that Verizon needs to offer service on this device. T-Mobile’s coverage in NYC is awful.

Today, we are announcing the big news that my company, Return Path, has acquired NetCreations, Inc. Since there ought to be some small perk for subscribing to a CEO’s ramblings on a blog or via RSS, I thought I’d give everyone here the heads up before the news hits the wire tomorrow. (I am fully aware that this is also an excuse for a rare bit of self-promotion, so my apologies in advance.)

We are very excited about this move. It puts, under one roof, a great client base and an unparalleled collection of advanced, ROI-generating email services: customer acquisition, customer retention, delivery assurance, and quick turnaround market research.

Most marketers and publishers we talk to say the two hardest things to execute in email are building their customer database and getting their email into the inbox (not blocked and filtered). Now, we can help them with both, and more. We are very excited to join forces with NetCreations to create an email powerhouse in New York and Colorado…and a big welcome to Mike Mayor and his team to Return Path.

A while ago, Fred Wilson wrote a posting about the incredible ubiquity Starbucks has achieved in recent years. I wrote a comment at the time, but I never know who actually reads blog comments other than the author.

The comment was:

Talk about ubiquity…my wife and I were just travelling in Asia and saw many Starbucks there, which was not a surprise. The one that WAS a surprise, however, which completely blew me away, was the Starbucks located in the middle of the Forbidden City/Imperial Palace in Beijing, the 600+ year old home of China’s emperors from the Ming and Qing Dynasties. To be fair, it was tastefully done (no big green awning), and if it weren’t in its particular location, some other refreshment stand would be in its place, but still, I couldn’t help but feel like the conspicuous American in the crowd as I walked past it.

Anyway, now that Mariquita and I have finished our vacation web site, here’s the image of the implausible Starbucks Forbidden City location, in all its glory (even without the big green awning).

If you want to be tortured by a full complement of China and Japan pictures and the accompanying travelog, feel free. From the Wall to temples to big Buddhas to a well-chronicled sashimi dinner, it’s all here.

Well, not everything yet, but that day is getting closer.

Jack, my VP Finance and an avid blog reader (but not yet publisher) pointed me to Beyond Bullets, a relatively new blog about Powerpoint written by Cliff Atkinson, described in his bio as “a leading authority on Powerpoint and organizational communications.” Who knew such an expert existed?

The blog is pretty good and worth reading for people who regularly design and give stand-up presentations and are tired of the same old, same old Powerpoint templates. I read through most of the postings so far, and while some are a little esoteric, many of the tips are great. Most are either about the actual software and things you can do with it or presentation design and organization. I’ve always thought I was good at Powerpoint, but I don’t hold a candle to Cliff.

After reading Brad’s post this morning on The Torturous World of Powerpoint, I can’t help but wonder if he’d be less tortured if more people knew how to design and give good presentations.

I went to an amazing event this weekend. One of my close friends, Raj Vinnakota, started an education foundation about 7 years ago in Washington, D.C., called the SEED Foundation. The foundation’s first venture is the nation’s first urban public charter boarding school, located in the Anacostia section of town and dedicated to providing a college prep environment for kids who otherwise might not even finish high school in the inner city of D.C. The school has had a tremendous amount of national recognition, from Oprah, to Time, to Good Morning America, to Newsweek.

The school has now been up and running for six years, starting with a group of seventh graders back in 1998, and this Saturday, that first class graduated. Impressively, all 21 seniors are going to college, including some going to Princeton, Georgetown, and Penn. Alma Powell spoke at commencement. The event was one of the most moving things I’ve ever attended. The kids and their families were all so proud, and justifiably so.

Raj and I have followed fairly similar paths since meeting in college. Almost 100% of the same activities at Princeton, same first job after college at Mercer Management Consulting, lots of friends in common, similar family backgrounds. The only thing we have in common from the last 5 years, though, is that we’ve raised the same amount of money as leaders of our respective organizations — me for the for-profit Return Path, Raj for SEED.

Attending the SEED graduation gave me a twinge of guilt that I’m not doing something quite as overtly good for society, but it has an inspirational effect on me in two ways. First, it gave me hope for mankind’s future that people as talented as Raj are doing overt good for the less fortunate every single day. Second, it gave me lots of encouragement to build a successful company so that both the company, and I personally, can give back to society over time in other ways, both with money and with time.

Raj tells me that, now that he’s proven the model, he’s going to have a second school up and running by 2006, with more to come after that. All I can say is, good luck, and let me know how I can help!

My dad, one of the smartest people I know, asked me a good question last week. “How’s the blog working out so far?”

My answer was generally “I’m not sure,” but as I thought about it more, I saw “good” coming from four different categories, in order of importance to me:

Thinking: One of the best things publishing a blog has done has been to force me to spend a few minutes here and there thinking about issues I encounter in a more structured way and crystallizing my point of view on them. Invaluable, but mostly for me.

Employees: A number of my employees read it, although I’m not exactly sure who since RSS is anonymous. I know this is helpful in that some of the folks in the company who I don’t speak with every day can hear more directly some of the things I’m thinking about instead of getting a filtered view from normal communication channels.

Technology: One of the main reasons I started the blog was to get more experience with blog/alert/publishing/RSS tools as I try to learn more about new technologies related to my company. This has paid off for me well so far (the technology has a long way to go!).

Business development: I have met two or three other companies who may be potential partners for Return Path through this. I also believe that the postings on industry-related topics have been helpful for both business development and PR purposes.

I promised my Dad I’d do a posting on this sometime soon…so happy Father’s Day, Pops! (I also got him a real present, don’t worry.)