AOL and Goodmail: Two steps back for email

(posted on the Return Path blog a couple days ago here)

Remember the old email hoax about Hillary Clinton pushing for email taxation? When we first heard AOL’s plans for Goodmail today, we thought maybe the hoax had re-surfaced and a few industry reporters got hooked by it. But alas, this tax plan seems to be true.

AOL has long held the leading standard in email whitelisting. Every email sender who cares about delivery has tried to keep their email reputation high so that they could earn placement on AOL’s coveted Enhanced Whitelist. Now, AOL may be saying that those standards don’t matter as much as a postage stamp when it comes to email delivery.

AOL will begin phasing out its enhanced whitelist in favor of Goodmail’s brand new and untested certification program — which requires a fee for each email sent. This effectively encourages marketers and senders to focus not as much on email best practices but on paying cash for inbox reach. It punishes companies who already do everything right with email by adding another roadblock before they can reach customers.

With senders having to pay a fraction of a cent for each email sent, the fees for companies (and profits for AOL and Goodmail) will mount and good mailers will not always be able to participate — even if they have a pristine email reputation and customer relationship. This is in effect taxation of the good guys with cash – and it does nothing to help the good guys who can’t afford the cost or to deter the bad guys who just plan to spam anyway.

Email getting delivered to the mailbox should be based on the reputation of the sender — not whether they paid for guaranteed delivery. Now AOL is saying that isn’t enough. By charging significant dollars for email delivery, AOL and Goodmail are on the road to creating a “pay to play” model that puts subscriber benefit and sender equality second.

Goodmail reportedly uses some reputation data to determine “good” senders. What data do they use? Is it comprehensive? It is our strong opinion that email delivery should be based on a solid email reputation. That reputation should be based on a comprehensive set of data points including in-depth complaint rates, unknown user rates, spam trap data, permission practices, email infrastructure, volume of email sent and identity integrity, among a long list of other factors.
If Goodmail looks at less data than AOL currently uses … so how can it be better?

AOL stands to make a lot of money at the risk of setting back email as best practices-based marketing. This is bad for senders who care about setting high email standards, bad for consumers’ inboxes and simply, bad policy.

There’s been a ton of coverage of this problem, including this great one today in DMNews.  Look for a lot more reaction from the industry to this once people really understand what’s going on.

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.

Best CEO/Entrepreneur Quote Ever, By a Mile

I’ve seen and heard a lot of these.  But perhaps it’s fitting that on Independence Day, I realized that this gem of a quote, not specifically about entrepreneurs or CEOs but very applicable to them, comes from President Theodore Roosevelt in his “Citizenship in a Republic” speech at the Sorbonne in Paris, April 23, 1910:

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Amen, Brother Teddy.  This quote is so good that it appears twice independently (once from me, once in a contributor’s sidebar) in my almost-ready-to-pre-order book, Startup CEO.  In fact, let me quietly take this opportunity to start a bit of a hashtag movement around the topic at #startupceo.  More to come on this next week!

A Tale of Two Strategies

Two headlines right next to each other in today’s Wall Street Journal tell an interesting story.  First, they tell of Google’s strategy to allow advertisers to use Google’s web site to bid on and buy print advertising in over 50 leading newspapers. Then comes CBS’s strategy to bring in a new executive digital media M&A guru, Quincy Smith from Allen & Company, to “find the next YouTube.”

(These links should work for a week, but I think that’s all the Journal allows – sorry!).

So there you have it.  CBS’ grand interactive plans are about trying to do value-based Internet acquisitions.  Best of luck.  Les Moonves’ quote is somewhat sad — “This shows how serious we are about new media.”

All that against a backdrop of Google probably dropping three engineers and a case of Jolt Cola into a room for a week and coming up with an automated way of buying print ads in newspapers whose circulations are declining precipitously.  Eric Schmidt’s quote is equally interesting for its contrast to Moonves:  “Anything that we can do to improve the economic efficiency of the old model [of advertising] transfers money from the old model to the new model.”

Now to be fair, Google did say that eventually they would have 1,000 people working on offline media placements, 10% of its workforce, but they will probably grow their way there profitably, instead of turning into a private equity firm.

Book Short:  Which Runs Faster, You or Your Company?

Leading at the Speed of Growth, by Katherine Catlin at the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership is a must read for any entrepreneur or CEO of a growth company.  It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read targeted to that audience – its content is great, its format is a page-turner, and it’s concise and to the point.

The authors take you through three stages of a growth company’s lifestyle (Initial Growth, Rapid Growth, and Continuous Growth) and describe the “how to’s” of the transition into each stage:  how you know it’s coming, how to behave in the new stage, how to leave the old stage behind.

I didn’t realize it when I started reading the book, but Brad had one of the quotes on the back cover that says it all:  “There are business books about starting a company, but they tend to deal with the mechanics of business plans and financing.  Then there are books about ‘how to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.’  This is the first book I’ve seen that details the role of the CEO of a small but growing company.”  Thanks to my colleague George Bilbrey for pointing this one out to me.

UPDATE:  Brad corrects me and says that I should mention Jana Matthews, who co-wrote the book with Katherine Catlin and is actually the Kauffman Center person of the duo.

Years ago, I heard then General David Petraeus give a talk to a small group of us about leadership. He was literally coming to us live from his command center in Iraq or Afghanistan when he was running the whole theater of war over there. I realize he subsequently had some tarnish on his reputation after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor around handling classified information, but the main thrust of his talk, his Formula for Strategic Leadership, still stands as one of the more memorable talks on leadership I’ve ever heard and is no less relevant as a result.

Given that I still remember it vividly 14-15 years later, I thought I’d recreate it here with my own annotations after the four principles. It’s a simple 4-step formula:

1. Get the big ideas right. Obviously, you aren’t going to go down in history as a great leader if you consistently get the big picture wrong. That doesn’t mean you have to be right about everything and every detail. But if you pick the wrong market, bet on the wrong approach, happen to get your timing wrong by a few years…it’s hard to win.
2. Communicate them up and down the organization. Every mature leader knows that ideas and plans only go so far if they stay in your head or get filtered down through leadership teams. For your values to take root, for your strategy and strategic choices to make sense, and for people in the organization to be able to connect their daily execution to your company’s north star, you need to spend a lot of time communicating those things throughout the organization. Different groups, different meetings, different channels. And then, when you’re finally exhausted and sick of hearing yourself say those things over and over and over again…keep saying them.
3. Personally oversee their implementation. Leaders who throw things over the proverbial wall — “here’s what to do, now go do it while I move on to something else” — are not really strategic leaders. The devil is in the details. If you can’t bother to spend a few minutes overseeing the implementation of your strategy and carefully watching when and how it works and doesn’t (see next item), you may be a good visionary, but you’re not really a strategic leader.
4. Memorialize and institutionalize best and worst practices. This is where so many leaders fall down on the job. When something in your organization wraps up — a launch, a quarter, a project — you have to do a retrospective, curate learnings both good and bad, and publish them. That way your whole organization can have a growth mindset as a system.

There are about a zillion books on leadership out there. Most of them are probably between 200 and 400 pages long. While they may all have variations on this theme and colorful examples behind them, this still rings true for me as the essential formula for strategic leadership.

What a View, Part III

We are in the middle of our not-quite-annual senior team 360 review process this week at Return Path.  It’s particularly grueling for me and Angela, our SVP of People, to sit in, facilitate, and participate in 15 of them in such a short period of time, but boy is it worth it!  I’ve written about this process before — here are two of the main posts (overall process, process for my review in particular, and a later year’s update on a process change and unintended consequences of that process change). I’ve also posted my development plans publicly, which I’ll do next month when I finalize it.

This year, I’ve noticed two consistent themes in my direct reports’ review sessions (we do the live 360 format for any VP, not just people who report directly to me), which I think both speak very well of our team overall, and the culture we have here at Return Path.

First, almost every review of an executive had multiple people saying the phrase, “Person X is not your typical head of X department, she really is as much of a general business person and great business partner and leader as she is a great head of X.”  To me, that’s the hallmark of a great executive team.  You want people who are functional experts, but you also need to field the best overall team and a team that puts the business first with understandings of people, the market, internal dependencies, and the broader implications of any and all decisions.  Go Team!

Second, almost every review featured one or more of my staff member’s direct reports saying something like “Maybe this should be in my own development plan, but…”  This mentality of “It’s not you, it’s me,” or in the language of Jim Collins, looking into the mirror and not out the window to solve a problem, is a great part of any company’s operating system.  Love that as well.

Ok.  Ten down, five to go.  Off to the next one…

You, Too, Can Take Six Weeks Off

Note:  I have been really quite on OnlyOnce for a few months, I realize.  It’s been a busy stretch at work and at home.  I keep a steady backlog of blog topics to write about, and finally today I’ve grabbed a couple minutes on a flight to knock one out.  We’ll see if this starts me back on a more steady diet of blogging – I miss it!

I’ve written in the past about our sabbatical policy at Return Path, from what it is (here) to how much I enjoyed my own (here), to how great it is when my direct reports have been on Sabbatical so I can walk a few miles in their shoes (here and here).

But recently, a fellow CEO asked me if there was a special set of rules or advice on taking a sabbatical as a CEO.  My quick answer to his specific question was:

Well, first, you and your co-founder can’t take them at the same time. 🙂

But I have a longer list of thoughts as well.  It’s not easy, but as I’ve said many times, it’s important and wonderful.  Some tips:

• You have to make sure your balance sheet is strong and you’re not raising a round of financing
• You’re best off doing it a week or two after a Board meeting (and obviously, don’t miss one)
• You need everyone on your team to know about it and get excited for you!  They will rally/rise to the occasion more than you think
• You have to do a total disconnect, otherwise it doesn’t count.  Literally turn off email.  But make sure the team knows they can call you if there’s a true emergency
• Put someone in charge of keeping a running list of things that happened and be in charge of your “re-boarding”
• Put one person clearly in charge while you’re out, or tell your senior team that they’re responsible for collectively being in charge – either can work as long as you’re clear about it
• Be prepared to cancel or shift your plans if an emergency comes up before you leave

This last one is important.  I’ve postponed sabbaticals twice, and while it’s been a little tumultuous both at work and at home, it’s been better than going on a sabbatical and interrupting it with work, which I’ve also done.

Speaking of which…I’m coming up on my 17^th anniversary, which in our book means it’s time for another one!

It feels like it may be a bit premature to write a post with this title here in the summer of 2021. Even as vaccines are rolling out fairly quickly, the combination of the Delta mutation of the COVID-19 virus and a bizarrely large anti-vaccine movement in the US, plus slower vaccine roll-outs in other parts of the world, are causing yet another spike in infections. 

However, I read Michael Lewis’s The Premonition last week, a bit of a “mid-mortem” on the Pandemic, and it got me thinking about what lessons we as a society have learned in these past 18 months, and how they can be applied to entrepreneurs and startups. I am particularly drawing on the few weeks I was deeply engaged with the State of Colorado’s COVID response effort, which I blogged about here (this is the 7th post in the series, but it has links to all the prior posts in order).

Here are a few top of mind thoughts. 

First, entrepreneurial skills can be applied to a wide range of society’s challenges.  The core skills of founders and entrepreneurs are vision, leadership/inspiration/mobilization of teams, and a fearlessness about trying things and then seizing on the ones that work and rapidly discarding the ones that don’t, quickly absorbing learnings along the way. If you look broadly at the world’s response to the Pandemic, and at Colorado’s response as a microcosm, you can see that the jurisdictions and organizations that employed those types of skills were the ones that did the best job with their response. The ones that flailed around — unclear vision, lurching from plan to plan and message to message, pandering to people instead of following the science, sticking with things that didn’t make sense — those folks got it wrong and saw more infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. 

Second, parachuting in and out of leadership roles really works but is a little bit unsatisfying. I think that, even in a short period of time, I got a lot of good work done helping organize and stand up the IRT in Colorado. It was very much an “interim CEO” job, not unlike a lot of the roles we place at Bolster. Without a ton of context around the organization I was joining, I still had an impact. The unsatisfying part is more about me as the exec than it is about the organization, though. I’m so used to being around for the long haul to see the impact of my work that I found myself pinging Sarah, who took over the leadership of the group after I left, Brad, and Kacey and Kyle on the teamfor a few weeks just to find out what was going on and what had become of Plan X or Idea Y. 

Third, I came to appreciate something that I used to rail against in the business world, or at least came to appreciate an alternative to it. I frequently will say something like “don’t solve the same problem four different ways,” almost always in response to people facing a big hole in the organization and trying to hire four different people to fill the hole, when likely one hire will do (or at least one for starters). But what Michael Lewis calls the “Swiss cheese defense” or Targeted Layered Containment (TLC) that worked pretty well as defense and mitigation against the virus while there was no vaccine totally worked. He calls it the Swiss cheese defense because, like a slice of Swiss cheese, each layer of defense has holes in it, but if you line up several slices of Swiss cheese just right, you can’t see any of the holes. Some masking here, some quarantining there, couple closures over there, a lot of rapid testing, some working from home where possible, some therapeutics – and voila – you can blunt the impact of a pandemic without a vaccine. The same must be true for complex problems in business. I am going to amend my approach to consider that alternative next time I have a relevant situation. 

Fourth, blunt instruments and one size fits all solutions to complex problems (especially in this situation, with multiple population types in multiple geographies) — even those with good intentions — can’t work, drive all sorts of unintended consequences, with a lack of feedback loops can make situations worse or at least frustrating. Nationwide or even statewide rules, quite frankly even county-wide rules, don’t necessarily make sense in a world of hot spots and cool spots. Statewide regulations for schools when districts are hyper local and funded and physically structured completely differently, don’t always make sense. There are definitely some comparables in the business world here – you’d never want, for example, to compensate people across all geographies globally on the identical scale, since different markets have different standards, norms, and costs of living. 

Finally, I am left with the difficult question of why all the preparation and forethought put into pandemic response seemed to fail so miserably in the US, when several nations who were far worse equipped to handle it in theory did so much better in reality. I am struggling to come up with an answer other than the combination of the general American theme of personal choice and liberty meeting the insanely toxic and polarizing swirl of politics and media that has made everything in our country go haywire lately. Big government incompetence in general, and failures of national leadership on this issue, also factor in heavily.  I also gather from Michael Lewis that the transition from one administration to another frequently involves a massive loss of institutional knowledge which can’t help. Of all these, failure of strong leadership stands out in my mind. 

The lesson for startups from this last point is important. Leadership matters. Eisenhower once said something to the effect that “plans are nothing but planning is everything.”  The thoughtfulness, thorough planning, communication and inspiration, and institutional knowledge that come from effective leadership matter a lot in executing and growing a startup, because you literally never know what COVID-analog crisis is lurking quietly around the corner waiting to pounce on your startup and threaten its very existence.

I haven’t done short book summaries in a LONG time, but I’ll try to start adding that back into the mix as I read interesting and relevant books. Here’s one to add to your list: One Life to Lead, by Russell Benaroya. I was recently connected to Russell by a mutual friend, TA McCann at Pioneer Square Labs. TA had a sense Russell and I would hit it off, and we did. Russell is a multi-time founder/CEO, a Coach, and an author, so we have a lot in common.

One Life to Lead is an excellent book. First, it is short and easy to get through. Unlike a lot of business books, it doesn’t go on too long or contain anything extraneous. It’s to the point!

Second, the book is a business book that’s not really about business. It’s about life and what Russell calls Life Design, which is a great framing of how to be intentional about leading your life. While I have become less and less of a life planner as I’ve gotten older under the headline of “man plans, God laughs,” I am a huge believer in being intentional about everything, which I talk about in Startup CEO quite a bit in the nuts and bolts context of building your business.

Finally, Russell’s framework is easy to understand and full of concrete exercises you can to. Here are his five steps, but you’ll have to read the book to get the details:

• Ground stories with facts. This reminds me a lot of the principles we have taught team members over the years in our Action/Design (and related) trainings. First, start with absolute concrete facts that everyone will agree are facts.
• Establish your principles. This is brilliant. Your company has documented values or operating principles. Why don’t you?
• Harness energy from the environment. Figuring out what makes you tick, and what drains your energy, is so important.
• Get in and stay in your genius zone. Shouldn’t we all focus our time on the things we do best and love the most?
• Take action. How to put it together and make it all happen.

If you don’t get out in front of life, it will happen to you, and Russell’s framework is about how to make sure you are in the driver’s seat of your own life. Here’s to that.

Last week, I wrote about surrounding yourself with the best and brightest.  Next in this series of posts  is all about Creating an environment of trust.  This is closely related to the blog post I wrote a while back in my series on Return Path’s Core Values on Transparency.  At the end of the day, transparency, authenticity, and caring create an environment of trust.

Some examples of that?

• Go over the real board slides after every board meeting – let everyone in the company know what was discussed (no matter how large you are, but of course within reason)
• Give bad news early and often internally.  People will be less freaked out, and the rumor mill won’t take over
• Manage like a hawk – get rid of poor performers or cultural misfits early, even if it’s painful – you can never fire someone too soon
• Follow the rules yourself – for example, fly coach if that’s the policy, park in the back lot and not in a “reserved for the big cheese” space if you’re not in Manhattan, have a relatively modest office, constantly demonstrate that no task or chore is beneath you like filling the coke machine, changing the water bottle, cleaning up after a group lunch, packing a box, carrying something heavy
• When a team has to work a weekend , be there too (in person or virtually) – even if it’s just to show your appreciation
• When something really goes wrong, you need to take all the blame
• When something really goes right, you need to give all the credit away

Perhaps a bit more than the other posts in this series, this one needs to apply to all your senior managers, not just you.  Your job?  Manage everyone to these standards.