I’d like to think that Mark Twain would wholeheartedly approve of me paraphrasing his famous quote for this purpose, but I’m getting a little tired of all these reports about how email is dead. The latest one comes in the form of an op-ed in Computerworld this week. This will be a longer post than usual — my apologies in advance.

The writer talks about how email will die soon because there are too many issues with viruses, spam, IT management costs, and employment practices. The writer says email is close to having a bigger downside than upside, and that email will go the way of the typewriter or the floppy disk drive.

I say that this is a writer who has a bad IT department or a bad email service, a stunning lack of faith in technology’s ability to overcome adversity, and perhaps a misunderstanding of basic economic productivity.

Email is alive and well, as far as I can tell:

– Consumer email adoption is huge and rising. Every time I see one of those market research surveys from Pew or NFO, email activity and adoption is on the rise. It’s the number one Internet-based activity, with nearly 100% of people using it and a huge percentage of those people addicted to it.

– Email business usage is now mission critical for most employees. Enough said, for this audience, anyway. Economic productivity gains from email usage are outpacing the costs of having email system administrators and spam filters by orders of magnitude. For a quick flashback, compare the time spent firing off an email to 5 members of your staff, cc’ing your boss, and bcc’ing two of your other colleagues to the analog analog of making phone calls, holding meetings, or dictating/longhanding a memo, typing it with carbon paper or even using a photocopier, then physically distributing it.

– Spam filters are getting better by the day. While there is still a cat-and-mouse game going on between spammers and spam filters that will always result in a certain amount of false positives (good email that gets filtered) or false negatives (spam that sneaks into your inbox anyway), how many heavy email users can honestly say that their actual inbox spam problem is worse now than it was a year ago? The false positive and false negative problems will be largely solved in one way or another within 24 months. They won’t be completely solved despite Bill Gates’ optimistic prognostications, but they’ll be well under control to the point of being inconsequential.

– People are signing up for email newsletters and marketing at astonishing rates. If email was on the way out, this is the single metric you’d expect to be falling as a precursor to the crash. Well, guess what? This metric is on the rise! My company alone is getting almost 80,000 people each day to sign up for our various email-related services. Many companies who sell direct to consumers online are generating upwards of 25% of their revenue via email. Those are not exactly the signs of a sick medium.

– The email industry will not allow itself go the way of the typewriter (by the way, you will note, there was never really a “typewriter industry” the way that email has turned into its own sector). There are simply too many companies, with too much at stake, with too much capital to invest and too much reward to be gained, to permit obsolesence.

For those of you who know that my company Return Path is in the email business, you may say that my comments are self-serving, and I suppose that’s true. I’m always open to a disruptive technology, but changing human behavior is much more difficult than replacing floppy disks with DVDs or hard drives, and at this point, email as a viable communication medium is much less about the technology than about human behavior. It takes a “super disruptive” technology to make that fundamental a change.

Perhaps the writer of that op-ed should think about another technology with much grizzlier characteristics that would be sure to put it on the verge of extinction. The technology is dirty. It’s smelly. It’s terrible for the environment. Some say it’s imperling the future of the planet. All it tries to do is a simple thing, but it can cost people who live at the U.S. median income level as much as 15% of their net income every year (all headier issues than those created by email). We all generally refer to that technology as the automobile. Does anyone think that the cars is going away soon?

As for the comparison of the typewriter to email, I’ll quote Twain again: “History doesn’t repeat itself – at best it sometimes rhymes.”

Fred Wilson has a great posting today about how as a VC, it’s important to tell CEOs the truth when you don’t fund them so they can learn from the experience. As someone who’s been dinged by his share of VC’s (although not yet by Fred), I completely agree. He drew a great comparison to a conversation he had with a woman on an airplane about telling someone she didn’t want to go on a second date with him.

I’ve always felt that as a manager, firing someone is a lot like breaking up with a significant other. As the song says, Breaking Up is Hard to Do! This is particularly true when the person is either a long-time employee or is someone you have to lay-off, where the termination is not his or her fault.

When I think back to the first time I ever had to fire a person while I was at MovieFone, I remember it as one of the most horrific experiences of my life. Not to be glib about it, but I think it was harder on me than it was on her (and it was a lay-up – she was being fired for cause!).

Anyway, for an empathetic person, it is hard to look people in the eye and tell them they don’t have a job any more, whatever the reason. And I also think that people are generally well-served, even if they don’t think about it that way at the time, if they can understand why they’re being let go so they can continue to constructively develop their careers going forward and seek out jobs for which they might be a better fit.

Of course, in a non-layoff situation, someone being terminated should know why they’re being fired because a good manager would have coached them and given them appropriate warnings and conversations along the way, but that’s the subject of another posting.

Jim Collins, in both Good to Great and Built to Last talked about the BHAG – the Big, Hairy Audacious Goal – as one of the drivers of companies to achieve excellence.  Perhaps that’s true, especially if those goals are singular enough and simplified enough for an entire company of 100-1000-10000 employees to rally around.

I have also observed over the years that both star performers and strong leaders drive themselves by setting large goals.  Sometimes they are Hairy or Audacious.  Sometimes they are just Big.  I suppose sometimes they are all three.  Regardless, I think successfully managing to and accomplishing large personal goals is a sign of a person who is driven to be an achiever in life – and probably someone you want on your team, whether as a Board member, advisor, or employee, assuming they meet the qualifications for the role and fit the culture, of course.

I’m not sure what the difference is between Hairy and Audacious.  If someone knows Jim Collins, feel free to ask him to comment on this post.  Let’s assume for the time being they are one and the same.  What’s an example of someone setting a Hairy/Audacious personal goal?  My friend and long-time Board member Brad Feld set out on a quest 9 years ago to run a marathon in each of the 50 states by the age of 50.  Brad is now 9 years in with 29 marathons left to go.  For those of you have never run a marathon (and who are athletic mortals), completing one marathon is a large, great and noteworthy achievement in life.  I’ve done two, and I thought there was a distinct possibility that I was going to die both times, including one I ran with Brad .  But I’ve never felt better in my life than crossing the finish tape those two times.  I’m glad I did them.  I might even have another one or two in me in my lifetime.  But doing 50 of them in 9 years?  That’s a Hairy and Audacious Goal.

For me, I think the Big goal may be more personally useful than the Hairy or Audacious.  The difference between a Big goal and a Hairy/Audacious one?  Hard to say.  Maybe Hairy/Audacious is something you’re not sure you can ever do, where Big is just something that will take a long time to chip away at.  For example, I started a quest about 10-12 years ago to read a ton of American history books, around 50% Presidential biographies, from the beginning of American history chronologically forward to the present.  This year, I am up to post-Civil War history, so roughly Reconstruction/Johnson through Garfield, maybe Arthur.  I read plenty of other stuff, too – business books, fiction, other forms of non-fiction, but this is a quest.  And I love every minute of it.  The topic is great and dovetails with work as a study in leadership.  And it’s slowly but surely making me a hobby-level expert in the topic.  I must be nearing Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours by now.

The reason someone sets out on a personal quest is unclear to me.  Some people are more goal-driven than others, some just like to Manage by Checklist, others may be ego-driven, some love the challenge.  But I do think that having a personal quest can be helpful to, as Covey would say, Sharpen the Saw, and give yourself something to focus personal time and mental/physical energy on.

Just because someone isn’t on a personal quest doesn’t mean they’re not great, by the way.  And someone who is on a quest could well be a lunatic.  But a personal quest is something that is useful to look for, interesting and worth learning more about if discovered, and potentially a sign that someone is a high achiever.

Another CEO with whom I trade notes on the craft of running a company asked me this question the other day, and I thought the answer would make a for a good blog post.  Any product team (or other kind of team) who has Agile practices, does some kind of a Daily Standup (DSU) meeting in which each team member reviews progress against goals for a given period and highlights issues where he or she is blocked and needs help.  I wrote about Return Path‘s journey to implement Agile across the whole company last year here.

My meeting routines have been shaped over the years but the current versions are largely influenced by Lencioni’s Death by Meeting, which is worth a read. My blog post isn’t all that helpful about this specific subject, but it’s here.  Anyway…here’s what I wrote to my friend:

I love our DSU. We do it at 11 eastern because we have people in Colorado and California on it. We just make the time. We block 15 minutes, but most people block the full :30 and sometimes a small sub group will need to stay late to cover something in more depth (we call that the after-party or the 16th minute). If I had everyone in the same time zone, I would do it at 8:30 or 9:00. 

We usually just “run the calendar” at the DSU. What’s everyone doing today, anything notable from yesterday, anything people need broader quick hit updates on, especially things that are cross-team. It’s great daily connectivity. We have tried to run the exec team like a true agile team in the past with cards and demos, etc., but that didn’t really work other than the occasional time when all of us were working on something together (e.g. Annual budgeting and planning), since a lot of our work as leaders is down, not across. 

We do the meeting Tuesday through Friday. We probably cancel 1 a week on average if too many people have to miss it. People know it’s a priority and not to schedule over it unless unavoidable, but sometimes travel, client conflicts, etc. invade. 

Mondays we still do our Weekly Tactical for an hour. I have a whole standing agenda format for that (as well as our Monthly Strategies for 2-3 hours and Quarterly Offsites for a couple days). I find that the Weekly Tactical actually goes much better with the four DSUs because we don’t have to spend time checking in on the basics…so we are much more effective in using that time on bigger items like sales forecast and recruiting review, progress against major initiatives and OKRs, having other people come in and present things to us, etc. 

The Best Place to Work, Part 4: Be the Consummate Host

Besides Surrounding yourself with the best and brightest , Creating an environment of trust,  and Managing yourself very, very well, it’s important for you as a creator of The Best Place to Work to Be the Consummate Host.

What does that mean?  This is how I approach my job every day.  I think of the company as a party, where I’m the host.  I want everyone to have a good time.  To get along with the other guests.  To be excited to come back the next time I have a party (e.g., every day).

By the way, I always have co-hosts, as well – anyone who manages anyone in the company.  If I can’t do something specific below, someone on my executive team does it.  Sometimes, two of us do it!  Examples include:

• I interview people like I’m a bouncer at an exclusive club.  We do very personal new employee orientations.  We do personal check-ins after 30 and 90 days to make sure new employees are on track
• I attend every company function that I can and work the room as a host, even if it’s not “my” event – sometimes it means sacrificing long conversations and conversations with friends for smaller ones and meeting new people
• I call every employee (voicemail ok) and write a note and/or send a gift every anniversary of their employment with the company
• I write notes to people when they do something great or get a promotion

Full series of posts here.

As part of the new section on Exits in the Second Edition of the book (order here), there’s a final chapter around you as CEO and thinking about what you do next.  I’ll start this post by saying, while am really happy with where I am now (more to come on that!), I am not happy with the way I handled my own “next steps” after the Return Path exit.  I did follow some of my own advice, but not enough of it.  I jumped back into the fray way too quickly.

Some exits leave CEOs in a position of never having to work again – those are good in that they give you more time to think about what’s next and more options for what’s next, but no financial forcing function to do anything.  Some CEOs want to work again in the same field, doing another startup or being hired to run a larger company or focusing on serving on boards and mentoring other CEOs.  Some want to transition to a different kind of work entirely.  

But no matter what your circumstances are, the most important thing you can do after selling your startup is to downshift and take time off.  You probably haven’t done that in years, maybe decades.  You may feel like you only have one gear – ON – but in fact, you can get into new patterns of life and take time to enjoy and appreciate things you may have neglected for years and do some of what Stephen Covey calls “Sharpen the saw.”  Here’s an excerpt from the book about this:

There’s more to thinking about your next step than just clearing your head, of course.  You have to spend some cycles being reflective about the journey you just went on.  Our senior team, including a couple long time alumni, gathered and did what I call the “ultimate post mortem,” reflecting on lessons learned over 20 years.  I spent some time thinking about how to tell my story, what my own narrative was about the journey.  And I came up with my framework for deciding what to do next – that checklist of the things I wanted and didn’t want in my next job, which is detailed in the book, and which I’ll talk about more in the weeks to come as we prepare for the public launch of our new company.  But for now, this is the final teaser post I’ll write about the Second Edition of Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business. Next week, though, I will write about the sequel my colleagues and I are writing at our new business.

A Ball Bearing in the Wheels of E-Commerce

As an online marketing professional, I’ve long understood intellectually how e-commerce works, how affiliate networks function, and why the internet is such a powerful selling tool.  But I got an email the other day that drove this home more directly.

When I started my blog about a year and a half ago, I set myself up as an Amazon affiliate, meaning that any time someone clicks on a link to Amazon from one of my postings or on the blog sidebar, I get paid a roughly 4% commission on anything that person buys on Amazon on that session.

According to the email report I just got from Amazon on Q2 sales driven by my blog, I am responsible for driving traffic that buys about $2,500 worth of merchandise from Amazon every quarter, which yields about $100 to me in affiliate fees.  All I really link to are business books that I summarize in postings, although people who click from my blog to Amazon end up buying all sorts of random things (according to my report, last quarter’s purchases included a Kathy Smith workout DVD and a new socket wrench set in addition to lots of copies of Jim Collins’ Built to Last and Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink.

This is a true win-win-win — Amazon gets traffic for a mere 4% of sales, a relatively low marketing cost; I get a small amount of money to cover the various fees associated with my blog (Typepad, Newsgator, Feedburner), and people who read my blog pay what they’re going to pay to Amazon anyway – and maybe get something they otherwise wouldn’t have gone out to get in the process.

My blog is certainly not a top 1,000 blog, or probably not even a top 10,000 blog in terms of size of audience.  This is merely a microcosm that proves the macro trends.  If I’m driving $10,000 per year of business to Amazon, now I REALLY understand how there are now approximately 500,000 people who make their LIVING by selling goods on eBay, and how probably another 500,000 people are making good side money or possibly even making their living by running offers and affiliate marketing programs from their web sites.  I’m like a little ball bearing in the finely tuned but explosively growing wheel of e-commerce.

If my quarterly affiliate fees keep growing, I’ll find something more productive or charitable to do with them than keep them for myself.  But for now, I am covering my costs and marveling on a personal level at how all this stuff works as well as it does.

Most psychologists, and lots of executive coaches, end up talking to their clients about their “Family of Origin” as a means of more deeply understanding the origins of their clients’ motivations, fears, hopes, and dreams.  Presumably they do this in service of helping their clients gain self-awareness around those things to be more effective in their personal or professional lives.

A smattering of highly-ranked search results on the term yields snippets like these for its definition:

• One’s family of origin—the family one grew up in, as opposed to the people one currently lives with—is the place that people typically learn to become who they are
• From the family of origin a person learns how to communicate, process emotions, and get needs met
• People also learn many of their values and beliefs from their families

…and these for its impact:

• As a worker, your experiences in your family of origin are likely to impact on the way you work
• Families always involve negative and positive dynamics, which may lead to members gaining strengths and abilities or experiencing difficulties
• Differentiation from family is a significant concept. Well-differentiated people function better
• Greater awareness of the impact of your family of origin on you will benefit your work

I’m no shrink, nor am I an executive coach, but this makes sense to me, and I’ve seen it in action many times in both my personal and professional life.

The concept I want to introduce today is a related and in some ways parallel one, and one that I think may be equally if not more important to how someone behaves professionally.  That concept is the Company of Origin.  I’ll define one’s Company of Origin is the first place or places one has meaningful work experience.  For most working professionals, that is probably the first full-time job we held for at least a couple of years after college or graduate school.  For others, it may be a couple of long-held part-time jobs during school.  There are probably other cases, but hopefully you get the point.  A couple of my trusted colleagues in the HR/OD profession suggested that this could also be labeled Profession of Origin or Manager of Origin or “When I came into my own as a professional.”  I think the same concepts apply.

Going back to the definition above of Family of Origin and modifying it (only slightly) to define Company of Origin would look something like this:

• One’s Company of Origin – the first place or places one has a meaningful work experience, as opposed to the place one currently works – is the place that people typically learn to become who they are professionally
• From one’s Company of Origin, a person learns how to communicate at work, how to experience success and failure, what accountability means, what reward and recognition mean, what good and bad management and leadership look like, etc. etc.
• People also learn many of their professionals values and beliefs from their Companies of Origin

I know this rings true for me in my own life.  My first job as a management consultant still has a profound influence over my work today.  My first few jobs before I started Return Path all had a profound influence over how I decided to set a culture and make decisions (and still do, though a bit less with each passing year).  Some of those influences were positive – “let’s do more of that!” – and some were negative – “if I ever become the boss, I’ll never…” – but you’d expect that from a Company of Origin, just as you would a Family of Origin.

It also rings true for countless other people I’ve worked with over the years.  Think about people you’ve worked with.  Have you ever said or thought anything like this before?

• Bob used to work at GE.  That’s why he has such strong leadership skills
• Why is Jane so concerned with expenses?  Her first job was at a family-run business where every dollar spent was a dollar out of the CEO’s pocket
• Wow is Harry political at work.  I guess it’s because he used to work at XYZ Corp where people stab each other in the back to get promoted
• Oh, Sally is ex-military.  That’s why she’s so hierarchical
• Doesn’t Doug understand that part of being an employee here is doing XYZ?  That’s not how he was conditioned to think at work when he worked at PDQ Corp.  He’s just hard wired that way
• Frank just loves standing up in front of a room and drawing things on a whiteboard.  I guess that’s because he started his career as a teacher

Of course, unlike a Family of Origin, you don’t have to live in some way with your Company of Origin forever, and unlike family configurations, where the average person will have a few in a lifetime, the average person will have many places of work.  All of those workplaces will shape one’s behaviors in the workplace.  But there’s something about the Company of Origin that sticks with professionals more than other workplaces.

Again, going back to those “impact” comments about Family of Origin and modifying them only slightly for Company of Origin, you get this:

• As a worker, your experiences in your Company of Origin are likely to impact on the way you work
• Companies always involve negative and positive dynamics, which may lead to employees gaining different strengths and abilities or experiencing difficulties or experiencing the workplace differently
• Differentiation from Company of Origin is a significant concept. Well-differentiated people function better as they move from job to job
• Greater awareness of the impact of your Company of Origin on you will benefit your work

As I wrote several years ago, People Should Come with an Instruction Manual.  Understanding your potential employees’ and actual employees’ Companies of Origin would go a LONG way towards fleshing out their strengths, weaknesses, likely behaviors, likely fits with your culture and organization, and on and on.  Whether during the interview process for candidates or the development planning/360 process for employees, I hope this concept is something useful to consider.

I love the concept of Servant Leadership.  From the source, the definition is:

While servant leadership is a timeless concept, the phrase “servant leadership” was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in The Servant as Leader, an essay that he first published in 1970. In that essay, Greenleaf said:

“The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.

“The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?“

A servant-leader focuses primarily on the growth and well-being of people and the communities to which they belong. While traditional leadership generally involves the accumulation and exercise of power by one at the “top of the pyramid,” servant leadership is different. The servant-leader shares power, puts the needs of others first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible.

This is a very broad societal definition, but it’s fairly easy to apply to a more narrow corporate, or even startup environment.  Are you as a CEO oriented primarily towards your people, or towards other stakeholders like customers or shareholders?  By the way, trying to do right by all three stakeholders is NOT a problem in a world of being oriented towards one.  It’s just a philosophy around which comes first, and why.  Our People First philosophy at Return Path is fair clear that at the end of the day, all three stakeholders win IF you do right by employees, so they do the best possible work for customers, so you build a healthy and profitable and growing business.

CEOs who practice Servant Leadership aren’t necessarily focused on power dynamics, or on helping those least privileged in society (at least not as part of their job)…but they are focused on making sure that their employees most important needs are met — both in the moment, as in making sure employees are empowered and not blocked or bottlenecked, and over the long haul, as in making sure employees have opportunities to learn, grow, advance their careers, make an impact, and have the ability to live a well balanced life.

I was in a meeting a couple weeks back with another leader and a few people on his team.  He *seemed* to practice Servant Leadership the way he was speaking to his team members.  But he wasn’t, really.  He was doing something I refer to as Sucking Down.  He was telling them things they clearly wanted to hear.  He was lavishing praise on them for minor accomplishments.  He was smiling and saying yes, when what he really meant was no.  He was practicing the art of Sucking Up, only to people on his team, not to a boss.  I got a sense that something wasn’t right during the meeting, and then post meeting, he actually fessed up to me — even bragged about it — that he was being disingenuous to get what he wanted out of his people.

There’s a clear difference between Servant Leadership and Sucking Down in the long run.  The danger comes in the moment.  Just as managers need to build good detection skills to sniff out evidence of someone on their team Sucking Up, employees need to be able to understand that clear difference in their managers’ behavior as they think about how to manage their careers, and even where to work.

I’ve posted a lot over the years about feedback in all forms, but in particular how much I benefit from my 360 reviews and any form of “upward” feedback.  I’ve also posted about running a 360 process for/with your Board, modeled on Bill Campbell’s formula from Intuit.

I have a lot of institutional investors in our cap table at Return Path.  I was struck this week by two emails that landed in my inbox literally adjacent to each other.  One was from one of our institutional investors, sharing guidelines and timetables for doing CEO reviews across its portfolio.  The other was from one of our other institutional investors, and it invited me to participate in a feedback process to evaluate how well our investor performs for us as a Board member and strategic advisor.  It even had the Net Promoter Score question of would I recommend this investor to another entrepreneur!

The juxtaposition gave me a minute to reflect on the fact that over the 18 years of Return Path’s life, I’ve been asked to participate in feedback processes for Board members a few times, but not often.  Then I went to the thought that all of my reviews over the years have been self-initiated as well.  Just as it can be easy for a CEO to skip his or her review even when the rest of the company is going through a review cycle, it can be easy for investors to never even think about getting a review unless they get one internally at their firms.  I suspect many CEOs are reviewed by their Board, if not formally, then informally at every quarterly Board meeting.

It’s unfortunately a rare best practice for a venture capitalist or any other institutional investor to ask for CEO feedback.  I bet the ones who ask for it are probably the best ones in the first place, even though they probably still benefit from the feedback.  But regardless, it is good to set the tone for a portfolio that feedback is a gift, in all directions.

I had a great networking meeting yesterday along with Tami Forman, the CEO of our non-profit affiliate Path Forward, and Joanne Wilson, my board co-chair.  It was a meeting that Joanne set up that the three of us had been talking about for over a year.  Joanne made a great comment as we were debriefing in the elevator after the meeting that is the foundation of this post.  Tami and I shaped her comment into this metaphor:

Finding wood to help start a fire is different from pouring gasoline on a fire

As an entrepreneur, you need to constantly be asking for help and networking.  Those meetings will shape your business in ways that you can never predict.  They’ll shape your thinking, add ideas to the mix, kill bad ideas, and connect you to others who can help you in your journey.

But you need to have a good sense of who to meet with, and when, along the way.  Some people, you can only meet once, unless they become core to your business, so you have to choose carefully when to fire that one bullet.  Others will meet with you regularly and are happy to see longitudinal progress.  Regardless, being clear on your ask is critical, and then backing up from that to figure out whether this is the one bullet you can fire with someone or whether it’s one ask of many will help you figure out if you should push for that networking meeting or not.

Why?

Because asking someone to help you find wood to start a fire (the early stages of your business) is different from pouring gasoline on an existing fire (once you’re up and running).  If you’re in the super early stages of your business and looking for product-market fit, you won’t want to meet with people who aren’t conceptual thinkers, who aren’t deep in your space, or who might only see you once.  Maybe they can help you brainstorm, but you’ll find better partners for that.  They might be able to provide concrete help or introductions, but you’re probably not ready for those yet.  It’s a waste of time.  You need wood to start your fire, and people like this aren’t helpful scouring the forest floor with you to find it.

However, those people can be fantastic to meet with once you have product-market fit and are deep in the revenue cycle.  You have clear demonstration of value, customer success stories, you know what works and what doesn’t and why.  You can have short, crisp asks that are easy for the person to follow-up on.  They will be willing to lend your their name and their network.  You have a fire, they have a cup of spare gasoline, and you can get them to pour that cup on your fire.

The judgment call around this isn’t easy.  Entrepreneurial zeal makes it abnormally comfortable to call on any stranger at any time and ask for help.  But developing this sense is critical to optimizing your extended network in the early years.