Half Your Waking Hours

I just came back from our annual Board/Management ski trip (and Board meeting) — we had about half of both groups join, which is typical given the time commitment.  We had a great time, and the conversation for the three days was a nice blend of business and personal. 

The thing that struck me during the weekend — and I am reminded of this regularly in the office and at other work events as well — is how much I genuinely enjoy the company of the people with whom I work.  Whether it’s my senior staff, my Board, or anyone I can think of in other roles within Return Path, we can manage to have a good time together and have fun as well as be productively thinking about and discussing work.

With generic assumptions of 8 hours of sleep a night and 8 hours of work a day (neither one being true of course, but canceling each other somewhat out here), we spend half our waking hours on the job.  So we might as well choose to work with people that we get along with!  That doesn’t mean everyone we hire at Return Path has to be like-minded or have the same sense of humor.  But it does mean that we look for people who have that spark in their eye that says "I get it"; it means we want to find people who are articulate and have strong convictions and are not afraid to speak their mind; and it means we screen for people who can be light-hearted and don’t take themselves too too too seriously when we recruit, interview, and hire.

Think about that "half your waking hours" thing the next time you’re hiring someone.  Which candidate (of the technically qualified ones who are in the right zone in terms of compensation) would you rather spend your day with?  In my former career in management consulting, we used to call this the "Cleveland Airport test" — as in, if you were stuck in the Cleveland Airport with this candidate, would you be happy or sad about it?

Closure

This past weekend was a weekend of closure for me. As I prepare to leave the city after almost 17 years and the apartment I’ve lived in for almost 15, we had my two original roommates from this apartment in town for the weekend with their families for a bit of a farewell party. Times certainly have changed – from three single guys to three families and 7, almost 8 kids between us. Sitting around and noting that all three couples had either gotten engaged or first started dating within the confines of Apartment 35B, then saying goodbye as everyone left the apartment for the last time, was a little surreal. But overall, having everyone around was great fun and was a fitting way to mark the occasion.

If that wasn’t enough to drive the point home, we were lucky enough to get tickets to the Yankees game last night, which was the last home game the Yanks will play in their 85-year old stadium before moving across the street next season to their fancy new home. The ceremony before the game, which featured a bunch of prominent Yankee greats and their progeny (Babe Ruth’s daughter threw out the opening pitch!), was similarly surreal, but a fitting ending to a long-standing tradition.

Why is closure important? I’m not a psychologist, but for me and my brain anyway, celebrating or formally noting the END of something helps move on to the BEGINNING of the next thing. It helps compartmentalize and define an experience. It provides time to reflect on a change and WHY it’s (inevitably) both good and bad. And I suppose it appeals to the sentimentalist in me.

I think it’s important to create these moments in business as well as in one’s personal life. We and I have done them sporadically at Return Path over the years. Moving offices as we expand. Post-mortems on projects gone well or badly. Retrospectives with employees who didn’t work out, sometimes months after the fact. Whether the moment is an event, a speech at an all-hands meeting, or even just an email to ALL, one of the main jobs of a leader in building and driving a corporate culture is to identify them and mark them.

Sometimes You Just Need a 2×4 Between the Eyes

Freshman year in college, fall semester, my friend Peggy and I were in a small seminar class together on Dante. We thought we were pretty smart before the class started. And that we were great writers. Lots of As in high school. Then we wrote our first paper. Professor Bob Hollander gave me a C-. I think Peggy got a D. We were devastated. And pissed. Sure, the ensuing cocktail took the edge off (this was college, after all), but we both scheduled time with the professor during his office hours to figure out where our carefully honed academic trains had gone off the tracks.

Essentially what he said to each of us was this (you have to picture the 60-something professor in a turtleneck smoking a pipe with gravely voice for full effect): “Matthew, your writing wasn’t the worst I’ve ever seen. But I feel like you can do better, and sometimes you just need a 2×4 between the eyes.” End of meeting. Thank you, sir, may I please have another?

I couldn’t have been more irritated. But I will tell you one thing. I worked four times as hard on my next paper, got an A-, and elevated my game permanently. Not just for this one class, but for all of them. Bob was right. His 2×4 between my eyes worked.

Sometimes when we deliver performance feedback in business, this approach makes sense. There are times when someone is really doing poorly and needs harsh (fair, but honest) feedback. There are also times when someone is doing so-so but generally just not living up to his or her promise and should be doing better. And in those cases, you have to just make a judgment call about whether to give feedback on the margin or go for the full 2×4 to drive the point home and get someone to really elevate his or her game for good.

Clients at Different Levels

Recently, I’ve become more aware that we have a huge range of clients when it comes to the level of the person we interact with at the client organization.  I suppose this has always been true, but it’s struck me much more of late as we’ve really ramped up our client base in the social networking/web 2.0 arena, where most of our clients are CEOs and COOs as opposed to Email Marketing Managers.

Of course, we don’t care who our day-to-day client is, as long as the person is enough of a decision maker and subject matter expert to effectively partner with us, whether it’s on deliverability via Sender Score or on list management or advertising via the Postmaster Network.  There are two main differences I have seen between the levels of client.  I suppose neither one is an earth-shattering revelation in the end, though.

First, the CEO/COO as client tends to be a MUCH MORE ENGAGED and knowledgeable client.  Some of these people know far, far more about the ins and outs of micro details of their businesses (and in the case of deliverability, the micro details of how ISPs filter email) than our average client.  I’d expect this type of client to be in command of the macro details of his or her business, but the level of "in the weeds" knowledge is impressive.  These clients are thirsty for information that goes beyond the scope of our work together.

Second, the CEO/COO as client is MUCH MORE PASSIONATE about his or her business.  It pisses them off when their email doesn’t get delivered.  They care deeply that our Postmaster opt-in might impact their registration rates by 0.5%.  They get very animated in discussions and tend to nod and gesture a lot more than take notes in a notebook.

My main takeaway from this?  If you run a business — how do you make sure your front line people are as fired up as you are?  You may never be able to give people the same kind of macro view you have of the company or the industry (although you can certainly make a good effort at it), but keeping people excited about what they do and igniting their intellectual curiosity on a regular basis will almost certainly lead to more successful outcomes in the details of your company.

Physical Therapist or Chiropractor?

I was talking to a good friend the other day who is an executive coach. He was telling me that his clients are all over the map in terms of role (CEO or functional senior exec), need (small issue to large issue), company size and stage. But most important, he noted that his clients have different ways of learning, and that he has to tailor his coaching style to the client.

I had two main takeaways from this interaction.

First, he had a particularly memorable way of phrasing the differences in client learning styles that inform his approach. Some of his clients, he noted, need a physical therapist. They need someone to work with them every week, using whatever issues that come up that week as a means of stretching and building muscles. Other clients need a chiropractor. They are all good but once in a while need to stop by for him to wrench their spine for a few minutes and get things back in line. This is a brilliant metaphor.

Second, for anyone who manages, coaches, or mentors out there, if you can’t tailor your style to meet the needs of your direct reports or mentees, you aren’t being as effective as possible. We all learn and work in different ways. Good management isn’t ramming a set style down people’s throats. It’s getting the most out of people given who they are. I wrote a bit about this years ago and it’s still so true.

Compression

I had one of those "aha" moments the other day when I saw these powerful charts for the first time. It’s not that I didn’t realize that we humans have been adopting new technologies faster and faster over the last century (that would be a "duh" moment).  It’s that I didn’t realize just how much faster the adoption had gotten relative to other technologies.

The first chart here, from a report issued by the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve, shows the U.S. household penetration of new technologies on the vertical axis and years from date of introduction on the horizontal axis.

And in case that wasn’t a clear enough visual representation, here’s the critical tabular data.

It just makes me wonder — what’s next on the list, and how vertical will its line be?  Thanks to Carl Turza for pointing me to this interesting data.

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.

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.

Feature Requests

Here are two new features I’d like to see in life:

1. Any time you hit “reply to all” when you are in the BCC line – a giant red alert should pop up and say “are you really sure you want to let all these people know that you were BCCd on this thread?”
2. Any time you place a call to a cell phone that’s outside of the person’s normal time zone – a giant red alert should pop up and say “are you sure you want to call this person at 3 a.m. in Singapore?” before completing the call

I’m not sure to whom these requests should be addressed, so I’ll just start with the open web.

We’re Right Up (Down?) There With Lawyers Now

I remember reading somewhere a while ago that the least respected professions in America were used car salesmen, politicians, and lawyers.  Well, step aside everyone — according to a J. Walter Thompson study reported in DMNews, only 14% of Americans have respect for people in the advertising business.  I’m going to include that anyone who works in marketing services, by extension.

Don’t get me wrong – I wouldn’t have expected people in the advertising profession to join the upper echelons of the study with military personnel, doctors, and teachers.  But 14% is a pretty low number.  Beneath that single number, though, lie some conflicting data.  For example,

· 72 percent agree, “I get tired of people trying to grab my attention and sell me stuff,” and

· 52 percent agree, “There’s too much advertising — I would support stricter limits.”

And yet

· 82 percent indicate a positive engagement with media overall, and

· Two-thirds claimed, “Advertising is an important part of the American culture.”

My bottom line from these data is simple.  You know something is wrong with your industry when 52% of the general population wants to regulate it.  But with the dual movements towards more free content and more restrictions on data that could be used to target advertising…I’m afraid our profession will continue to do the things that consumers don’t like for years to come.

Who Are Your CPO and COO?

Every senior management team needs a CPO and a COO.  No, I’m not talking about Privacy and Operations.  I’m talking about Paranoia and Optimism.  On my leadership team at Return Path, many of us are Paranoid and many of us are Optimistic, and many of us can play both roles.  But I’m fortunate to have two business partners who are the Chiefs – George Bilbrey is our Chief Paranoia Officer, and Anita Absey is our Chief Optimism Officer.  Those monikers fit their respective roles (product and sales) as well as their personalities.

My view is simple – both traits are critical to have around the management table, and they’re best when they’re in some kind of equilibrium.  Optimism keeps you running forward in a straight line.  The belief that you can successfully execute on your plan, with a spring in your step and a smile on your face, is very motivating.  Paranoia keeps you looking around corners.  It may also keep you awake at night, but it’s the driving force for seeing potential threats to the business that aren’t necessarily obvious and keeping you on your toes.  I wrote about the benefits and limits of paranoia (with an extreme example) years ago here.

Too much of either trait would be a disaster for a team’s psyche.  But both are critical points of view that need a loud voice in any management discussion.  It’s a little bit like making sure your management team knows its actual and target location along the Fear/Greed Continuum.