Book Short: Beyond 10,000 Hours

In Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell (post, buy), we are taught, among other things, that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something, as well as a dash of luck and timing, as opposed to huge amounts of innate and unique talent.  In Talent is Overrated, by Geoff Colvin, this theory comes to life, with a very clear differentiating point – it’s not just logging the 10,000 hours, it’s HOW the hours are spent.

Colvin’s main point is that the hours need to be spent in what he calls “deliberate practice.”  The elements of deliberate practice are best explained with his example of Jerry Rice, although you can apply these to any discipline:

• He spent very little time playing football (e.g., most of his practice was building specific skills, not playing the game)
• He designed his practice to work on specific needs
• While supported by others, he did much of the work on his own (e.g., it can be repeated a lot, and there are built-in feedback loops)
• It wasn’t fun
• He defied the conventional limits of age

If you’re the kind of person who cares deeply about your own performance, let alone the performance of people around you, it doesn’t take long to be completely riveted by Colvin’s points.  They ring true, and his examples are great and cross a lot of disciplines (though not a ton about business in particular).  I wasn’t 50% done with the book before I had made my list of three key things that I need to Deliberately Practice.

There are some other great aspects to the book as well — including a section on Making Organizations Innovative, from creating a culture of innovation to allowing people the freedom to think, to a section on where passion and drive come from, but hopefully this post conveys the gist of it all.  Want to be a better CEO?  Or a better anything?  This is a good place to start the process.

Thanks to Greg Sands for sending me this excellent book.  I’m going to work it into my rotation for Return Path anniversary presents.

Selling a Line of Business

It’s been a couple of years since Return Path decided to focus on our deliverability business by divesting and spinning out our other legacy businesses. That link tells some of the story, and the rest is that subsequently, Authentic Response divested part of the Postmaster Direct business to Q Interactive.  Those three transactions, plus a number of experiences over the years on the buy side of similar transactions (Bonded Sender, Habeas, NetCreations), plus my learnings from talking to a number of other CEOs who have done similar things over the years, form the basis of this post.  The Authentic Response spin-out was also partially chronicled by Inc. Magazine in this article earlier this year.

It’s an important topic — as entrepreneurs build businesses, they frequently end up creating new revenue opportunities and go off on productive tangents.  Those new lines of business might or might not take off; but sometimes they can take off and still, down the road, end up being non-core to the overall mission of the company and therefore candidates for divestiture.  Even if they are good businesses, the overall enterprise might benefit from the focus or cash provided by a sale.  Look at the example of Occipital building the Red Laser app, then selling it to eBay to finance the rest of their business.

Here are some of the signs of a successful divestiture:

• Business is truly non-core or relies on starkly different competencies for success (e.g., one is B2B, the other is B2C)
• Business is growing rapidly and requires assistance to scale properly (either technology, or sales)
• Business has its own culture and operations and “a life of its own”

Conversely, here are some of the reasons why a divestitures of a business unit might stall or fail:

• Lack of a very compelling story as to why you’re selling the business unit
• Stand-alone financials of the unit are too hard for the buyer to determine with confidence
• Operations of the unit too tethered to the mothership
• There is some problem with the leadership of the unit (there is no stand-alone leader, the leader isn’t involved in the divestiture, the leader isn’t squarely behind the divestiture)
• Business performance weakens during the process

I have a couple points of advice to entrepreneurs in this situation.  The first is to clarify for yourself up front:  are you selling a true line of business, or are you selling assets?  If you are selling assets, you need to clearly define what they are, and what they aren’t, and you need to make sure all legal details (contracts, IP, etc.) are buttoned up before the process starts.

If you are selling a true line of business, beware that buyers will not be interested in doing any hard work, or if they feel like they have to do hard work, the price they pay for the business will reflect that in the form of a steep, steep discount.  The financials must be understandable and credible on a stand-alone basis.  The business must be completely separated from the core already.  The business must have its own management team, completely aligned with the decision to sell.

You also have to be extremely cognizant of the human aspects of what you’re doing.  Every culture is different, and I’m not advocating one style over another, but selling or spinning out a business is very different than selling a company.  There’s going to be a big difference in reactions, perceptions, hopes, and fears between the people in the core who are staying, and the people in the business unit that’s going.  Having a heightened awareness of those differences and factoring them into your communications plan is critical to success, as a poorly managed effort can end up harming both sides.

In terms of valuation expectations, don’t expect to get any credit for synergies.  You have to present them and sell them, and they may make the different between getting a deal done and not, but they will most likely not impact the price you get for the divestiture.

Finally, remember that buyers understand your psychology as well.  They know you’re selling the business for a reason (you need to raise cash, you’re concerned about its future performance, it’s become a distraction or has the potential to suck scarce resources out of your core, etc.).  They will completely understand the costs you carry, whether financial, opportunity, or mental, in continuing to own the business.  And they will factor that into the price they’re willing to offer.  Of course, as with all deals, the best thing you can do to maximize price is have multiple interested parties bidding on the deal!

Everyone’s a Direct Marketer, Part III

With every company as a direct marketer, and with (hopefully!) every company embracing some of the best DM principles, what does this shift mean for the way companies will be structured in the future?

First, let’s talk about the internal structure of a company.  The biggest shift going on here is that customers are becoming a more important part of all employees’ daily lives, not just those in the advertising department.  I wrote an earlier posting called Everyone’s a Marketer which applies here.  Most likely, more and more members of your organization are touching customers every day — and they need to be trained how to think like marketers.

But beyond that, companies will be constructed differently in the future as well.  While not true in some industries, there are many industries founded on the “mass” which will never be the same again.  Here are three examples of how direct marketing is infiltrating — but enhancing the opportunities of — corporate America.

– Disney’s film unit used to make movies only for theatrical release.  Today, they have an enormous volume of direct-to-video (or DVD) movies that never see the big screen but that drive huge sales numbers when marketed to Disney’s customer email database.

– Ralph Lauren used to make Polo shirts with a fixed number of configurations of shirt color and knitting color of the logo.  Now, you can go onto Polo.com and custom build a personalized shirt for someone with the right size and color combination of their college or company or favorite baseball team.

– Barry Diller used to run a studio, then he bought a TV network called the Home Shoping Network (and, I’d add, a lot of people laughed at him for doing so).  He has now turned HSN into InterActive Corp, a true convergence company that mixes content and media with commerce and direct marketing with brands like Match.com, Ticketmaster, eVite, CitySearch, and Expedia.

That’s it for this series.  All thoughts and comments are welcome.

Chink in the Open Source Armor?

I discovered something by accident yesterday about Firefox (which I love) that is giving me a little pause around the beauty of open source.  Maybe I’m missing something – if I am, please comment.

I went to download some new extensions into Firefox, and the Mozilla site said I had to upgrade to the new version of Firefox (1.0.4) in order to access any extensions.

Before I did the upgrade on my machine, I upgraded my colleague Lisa’s (I was about to show her what extensions were, so I figured it would be best to make a clean start there with 1.0.4).  But once I upgraded her, I discovered that none of the extensions I use in Firefox are compatible with the new 1.0.4 version.

So, I can’t download any new extensions until I upgrade…but I can’t upgrade if I want to keep my existing extensions.  Seems like this is a problem with community-based development, although as my colleague Jack says, “I am surprised FireFox doesn’t build the backwards compatibility since open source extentsions are so important to their business model.”

The Very Unfriendly Skies of United

The 6 a.m. flight from LaGuardia to Denver is unpleasant to begin with, but the idiots who set customer-facing policies at United seem to have found a new way of making it even less pleasant.

I’ve long-hated United’s “Economy Plus” seating, which gives the first 5-10 rows of coach a huge amount of leg room at the expense of all the other rows in coach.  American, by contrast, has more leg room in all rows of coach, so I can actually work in any seat on an American plane, laptop and all.  On United, the seats in the majority of coach are almost unworkable.

United used to just automatically put you in Economy Plus if you were a frequent flier with status.  But now United is taking Economy Plus to a new level — they’re automatically NOT putting you in Economy Plus and then charging more for it on the spot.  You can move yourself into Economy Plus for free online ahead of time, assuming there are open seats in it.  So really, the new policy is just designed to hold a gun to customers’ heads at the airport.

This morning’s flight is a prime example of how not to treat your customers.  It’s 6 a.m., and coach is maybe — maybe — half full.  And the announcement comes on that United’s new policy is that you are forbidden to move seats into Economy Plus after takeoff, even if there are open seats (which there are).  You can only do that if you pay $44, and a United representative would be happy to take that money at any time.

My colleague Angela had the best line on this situation — it’s as if United has put up an invisible electric fence in the middle of coach.  Whether or not there’s a ringing and a shock, it certainly feels like United is treating its customers like dogs.  They now join my customer service Hall of Shame along with Verizon (the anchor tenant) and Fedex/Kinko’s.

Book Short:  Choose Voice!

I took a couple days off last week and decided to re-read two old favorites.  One –Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead — my fourth reading — will take me a little longer to process and figure out if there’s a good intersection with the blog.  One would think so with entrepreneurship as the topic, but my head still hurts from all the objectivism.  The second — Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, by Albert O. Hirschman — is today’s topic.

I can’t remember when I first read Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.  It was either in senior year of high school Economics or Government; or in freshman year of college Political Philosophy.  Either way, it was a long time ago, and for some reason, some of the core messages of this quirkly little 125 page political/economic philosophy book have stayed with me over the years.  I remembered the book incorrectly as a book about political systems, and I think it was born consciously in the wake of Eugene McCarthy’s somewhat revolutionary challenge to a sitting President Johnson for the Democratic Party nomination in 1968.  But the book is actually about business; it’s just about businesses and their customers, not corporations as social structures (the latter being more of an interest to me).  Written by an academic economist (I think), the book has its share of gratuitous demonstrative graphs, 2×2 matrices, and SAT words.  But its central premise is a gem for anyone who runs an organization of any size.

The central premise is that there are really two paths by which one can express dissatisfaction with a temporary, curable lapse in an organization:  exit (bailing), or voice (trying to fix what’s wrong from within).  The third key element, Loyalty, is less a path in and of itself but more an agent that “holds exit at bay and activates voice.”

You need to read the book and apply it to your own circumstances to really get into it, but for me, it’s all about breeding loyalty as a means of making voice the path of least resistance, even when exit is a freely available option (few of us run totalitarian states or monopolies, after all).  That to me is the definition of a successful enterprise, both internally and externally.

With your customers:  make your product so irresistible, and make your customer service so deep, that your customers feel an obligation to help you fix what they perceive to be wrong with your product first, rather than simply complain about price or flee to a competitor.

With your employees:  make your company the best possible place you can think of to work so that even in as ridiculously fluid a job market as we live in, your employees will come to their manager, their department head, the head of HR, or you as leader to tell you when they’re unhappy instead of just leaving, or worse, sulking.

With your company (you as employee):  make yourself indispensible to the organization and do such a great job that if things go wrong with your performance or with your role, your manager’s loyalty to you leads him or her to give you open feedback and coach you to success rather than unceremoniously show you the door.

Ok, this wasn’t such a short book short — probably the longest I’ve ever written in this blog, and certainly the highest ratio of short:actual book.  But if you’re up for a serious academic framework (quasi-business but not exclusively) to apply to your management techniques, this short 1970 book is as valid today as when it was written.  Thanks to David Ramert (I am pretty sure I read it in high school) for introducing it to me way back when!

Calling for the Boss’s Head

Maybe it’s just a heightened sense of awareness on my part, but I feel like our culture has really turned up the time-to-fire-the-boss-o-meter to a new level of late.  What is going on that has caused the media and vocal people among us feel this thirst for public lynchings over a single incident?  The list isn’t small — just in recent weeks or months, you have Rumsfeld, Dunn (HP), Gonzales, Imus, Wolfowitz, and even last week, Snyder (Vonage).  And I’m sure there are a dozen others, both corporate and political, that I’m not dredging up mentally here on a Sunday night.

Now I’m all for accountability, believe me, but sometimes it doesn’t help an organization for someone to resign at the top over a single incident.  Jarvis says it best when he says that he would have fired Imus a long time ago because he’s boring and because he’s always been a racist, not because of a few choice words last week.  Should chronic poor performers be dismissed regardless of level?  Absolutely.  Should a leader be forced to step down just to make a point?  I’m much less certain.  In some ways, to carry Jarvis’s theme forward, that kind of dismissal is just a sign to me of lackadaisical oversight along the way, finally coming to a head.

I’m no psychologist, but my guess is that in many cases, a flash dismissal of another otherwise competent leader can pretty bad and traumatic for the underlying organization (be it a company or country).  Consider the alternative — an honest apology, some kind of retribution, and a clear and conspicuous post-mortem — that leaves the ship with its captain and sends the message to the troops that honest mistakes are tolerated as long as they’re not repeated and amends are made.

This in no way is meant to defend the actions of any specifics of the above list.  For many of them, their actions may have prompted an unrecoverable crisis of confidence.  But for my part, I’d rather see regular accountability and transparency, not just at the peaks and troughs.

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.

Book Short:  Crazy Eights

In honor of Return Path being in the midst of its eighth year, I recently read a pair of books with 8 in the title (ok, I would have read them anyway, but that made for a convenient criterion when selecting out of my very large “to read” pile).

Ram Charan’s latest, Know-How:  The 8 Skills That Separate People People Who Perform From Those Who Don’t, was pretty good and classic Charan.  Quick, easy to skim and still get the main points.  The book lost a little credibility with me when Charan lionized Verizon (perhaps he uses a different carrier himself) and Bob Nardelli (the book was published before Nardelli’s high profile dismissal), but makes good points nonetheless.  Some of the 8 Skills he talks about are what you’d expect on the soft side of leadership — building the team, understanding the social system, judging people — but his best examples were particularly actionable around positioning, goal setting, and setting priorities.  The book reminded me much more of Execution and much less of Confronting Reality (which is a good thing).

For years I’ve felt like the last person around to still not have read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, so I thought I’d skip straight to the punchline and read Stephen Covey’s newer book, The 8th Habit:  From Effectiveness to Greatness.  Fortunately, as I’d hoped, the new book summarizes the prior book several times over, so if you haven’t read the first, you could certainly just start with this one.  The book also comes with a DVD of 16 short films, some of which are great — both inspirational and poignant.  Unlike most business books, the 8th Habit is NOT skimmable.  It almost has too much material in it and could probably be read multiple times or at least in smaller pieces.  The actual 8th habit Covey talks about is what he calls Find Your Voice and Help Others Find Their Voices and is a great encapsulation of what leading a knowledge worker business is all about.  But the book is much deeper and richer than that in its many models and frameworks and examples/tie-ins to business and goes beyond the “touchy feely” into hard-nosed topics around execution and strategy.

Now I’m looking for the DVD of the first season of Eight is Enough!

Book Short:  Finishing First

The Power of Nice:  How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness, by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, is one of those “airport books” that takes about an hour to read.  I had an ear-to-ear grin reading the book, in part because, well, it’s just a happy book, filled with anecdotes about how a smile here or a gesture of kindness there made a difference in someone’s life — both personally and professionally.

But part of my interest in the book was also driven by a long-standing debate we have at Return Path over whether we’re “too nice” as a company and whether we should have “sharper elbows.”  I was struck by a few comments the authors made, things you would expect like “nice doesn’t mean naïve” as well as things you wouldn’t like “help your enemies.”  To me, that says it all about success in business:  you can be a fierce competitor externally and demand accountability internally and still be a warm and kind person, and that’s the best (and most rewarding) place to be.