Book Short:  Steve Jobs and Lessons for CEOs and Founders

First, if you work in the internet, grew up during the rise of the PC, or are an avid consumer of Apple products, read the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs (book, kindle).  It’s long but well worth it.

I know much has been written about the subject and the book, so I won’t be long or formal, but here are the things that struck me from my perspective as a founder and CEO, many taken from specific passages from the book:

• In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.  Man is that ever true.  I’ve come up with some ideas over the years at Return Path, but hardly a majority or even a plurality of them.  But I think of myself as innovative because I’ve led the organization to execute them.  I also think innovation has as much to do with how work gets done as it does what work gets done.

• There were some upsides to Jobs’s demanding and wounding behavior. People who were not crushed ended up being stronger. They did better work, out of both fear and an eagerness to please.  I guess that’s an upside.  But only in a dysfunctional sort of way.

• When one reporter asked him immediately afterward why the (NeXT) machine was going to be so late, Jobs replied, “It’s not late. It’s five years ahead of its time.”  Amen to that.  Sometimes product deadlines are artificial and silly.  There’s another great related quote (I forget where it’s from) that goes something like “The future is here…it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”  New releases can be about delivering the future for the first time…or about distributing it more broadly.

• People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”  Amen.  See Powerpointless.

• The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.  This is critical.  You can’t always be first in everything.  But ultimately, if you’re a good company, you can figure out how to recover when you’re not first.  Exhibit A:  Microsoft.

• In order to institutionalize the lessons that he and his team were learning, Jobs started an in-house center called Apple University. He hired Joel Podolny, who was dean of the Yale School of Management, to compile a series of case studies analyzing important decisions the company had made, including the switch to the Intel microprocessor and the decision to open the Apple Stores. Top executives spent time teaching the cases to new employees, so that the Apple style of decision making would be embedded in the culture.  This is one of the most emotionally intelligent things Jobs did, if you just read his actions in the book and know nothing else.  Love the style or hate it – teaching it to the company reinforces a strong and consistent culture.

• Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.  There’s always a tension between listening TO customers and innovating FOR them.  Great companies have to do both, and know when to do which.

• What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. I didn’t invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how—because we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me.  This is perhaps one of the best explanations I’ve ever heard of how creativity can be applied to non-creative (e.g., most business) jobs.  I love this.

My board member Scott Weiss wrote a great post about the book as well and drew his own CEO lessons from it – also worth a read here.

Appropos of that, both Scott and I found out about Steve Jobs’ death at a Return Path Board dinner.  Fred broke the news when he saw it on his phone, and we had a moment of silence.  It was about as good a group as you can expect to be with upon hearing the news that an industry pioneer and icon has left us.  Here’s to you, Steve.  You may or may not have been a management role model, but your pursuit of perfection worked out well for your customers, and most important, you certainly had as much of an impact on society as just about anyone in business (or maybe all walks of life) that I can think of.

Scaling the Team

(This post was requested by my long-time Board member Fred Wilson and is also running concurrently on his blog today.  I’ll be back with the third and fourth installments of “The Best Laid Plans” next Thursday and the following Thursday)

When Return Path reached 100 employees a few years back, I had a dinner with my Board one night at which they basically told me, “Management teams never scale intact as you grow the business.  Someone always breaks.”  I’m sure they were right based on their own experience; I, of course, took this as a challenge.  And ever since then, my senior management team and I have become obsessed with scaling ourselves as managers.  So far, so good.  We are over 300 employees now and rapidly headed to 400 in the coming year, and the core senior management team is still in place and doing well.  Below are five reasons why that’s the case.

1. We appreciate the criticality of excellent management and recognize that it is a completely different skill set from everything else we have learned in our careers.  This is like Step 1 in a typical “12-step program.”  First, admit you have a problem.  If you put together (a) management is important, (b) management is a different skill set, and (c) you might not be great at it, with the standard (d) you are an overachiever who likes to excel in everything, then you are setting the stage for yourself to learn and work hard at improving at management as a practice, which is the next item on the list.
2. We consistently work at improving our management skills.  We have a strong culture of 360 feedback, development plans, coaching, and post mortems on major incidents, both as individuals and as a senior team.  Most of us have engaged on and off over the years with an executive coach, for the most part Marc Maltz from Triad Consulting.  In fact, the team holds each other accountable for individual performance against our development plans at our quarterly offsites.  But learning on the inside is only part of the process.
3. We learn from the successes and failures of others whenever possible.  My team regularly engages as individuals in rigorous external benchmarking to understand how peers at other companies – preferably ones either like us or larger – operate.  We methodically pick benchmarking candidates.  We ask for their time and get on their calendars.  We share knowledge and best practices back with them.  We pay this forward to smaller companies when they ask us for help.  And we incorporate the relevant learnings back into our own day to day work.
4. We build the strongest possible second-level management bench we can to make sure we have a broad base of leadership and management in the company that complements our own skills.  A while back I wrote about the Peter Principle, Applied to Management that it’s quite easy to accumulate mediocre managers over the years because you feel like you have to promote your top performers into roles that are viewed as higher profile, are probably higher comp – and for which they may be completely unprepared and unsuited.  Angela Baldonero, my SVP People, and I have done a lot here to ensure that we are preparing people for management and leadership roles, and pushing them as much as we push ourselves.  We have developed and executed comprehensive Management Training and Leadership Development programs in conjunction with Mark Frein at Refinery Leadership Partners.  Make no mistake about it – this is a huge investment of time and money.  But it’s well worth it.  Training someone who knows your business well and knows his job well how to be a great manager is worth 100x the expense of the training relative to having an employee blow up and needing to replace them from the outside.
5. We are hawkish about hiring in from the outside.  Sometimes you have to bolster your team, or your second-level team.  Expanding companies require more executives and managers, even if everyone on the team is scaling well.  But there are significant perils with hiring in from the outside, which I’ve written about twice with the same metaphor (sometimes I forget what I have posted in the past) – Like an Organ Transplant and Rejected by the Body.  You get the idea.  Your culture is important.  Your people are important.  New managers at any level instantly become stewards of both.  If they are failing as managers, then they need to leave.  Now.

I’m sure there are other things we do to scale ourselves as a management team – and more than that, I’m sure there are many things we could and should be doing but aren’t.  But so far, these things have been the mainstays of happily (they would agree) proving our Board wrong and remaining intact as a team as the business grows.

B+ for Effort?

Effort is important in life.  If Woody Allen is right, and 80% of success in life is just showing up, then perhaps 89% is in showing up AND putting in good effort.  But there is no A for Effort in a fast-paced work environment.  The best you can get without demonstrating results is a B+.

The converse is also true, that the best you can get with good results AND without good effort is a B+.

Now, a B+ isn’t a bad grade either way.  But it’s not the best grade.  In continuing with this series of our 13 core values at Return Path, the next one I’ll cover is:

We believe that results and effort are both critical components of execution

We’ve always espoused the general philosophy that HOW you get something done is quite important.  For example, if the effort is poor and you get to the right place, maybe you got lucky.  Or even worse, maybe you wasted a lot of time to get there.  Or if you burned your colleagues or clients in the process of getting to the right place, a positive short-term result can have negative long-term consequences.

But when all is said and done, even with the most supportive culture that values effort and learning a lot (more on that in the next post in this series), results speak very loudly. Customers don’t give you a lot of credit for trying hard if you’re not effectively delivering product or solving their problems.  And investors ultimately demand results.

Our “talent development” framework at Return Path – the thing that we use to measure employee performance, reflects this dual view of execution:

The X axis is clearly labeled “Performance,” meaning results, and the Y axis is labeled “Potential – RP Expectations,” which basically means effort and fit with the culture at Return Path.  We plot out employees on the basis of their quantitative scores coming out of their performance reviews on this grid every year.  Which box any given employee falls in has a lot to do with how that employee is managed and coached in the coming months.  We’re always trying to move people up and to the right!

The definitions of the different boxes in this framework are telling and speak to the subject of this post.  To be an A player here, you have to excel in both effort and results – that’s our definition of successful execution.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!  We’re getting to the end of this series…only two more to go.

Sometimes, Things Are Messy

Many people who run companies have highly organized and methodical personality types – in lots of cases, that’s probably how they got where they got in life.  And if you work long enough to espouse the virtues of fairness and equality with the way you manage and treat people, it become second nature to want things to be somewhat consistent across an organization.

But the longer we’re in business at Return Path and the larger the organization gets, the more I realize that some things aren’t meant to fit in a neat box, and sometimes inconsistency is not only healthy but critical for a business to flourish.  Let me give a few examples that I’ve observed over the past few years.

• Our sales team and our engineering team use pretty different methodologies from each other and from the rest of the company in how they set individual goals, monitor progress against them, and compensate people on results
• The structure of our sales and service and channel organizations in Europe are very different from our emerging ones in Latin America and Asia/Australia – and even within Europe, they can vary greatly from country to country
• Although we have never been a company that places emphasis on job titles, our teams and leadership levels have become even more inconsistent over the years – sometimes a manager or director has a bigger span of control or more impact on the business than a VP does, sometimes individual contributors have more influence over a broad section of groups than a manager does, etc.

It’s taken me a while to embrace messiness in our business.  I fully acknowledge that I am one of the more hyper-organized people around, which means this hasn’t come naturally to me.  But the messiness has been very productive for us.  And I think it’s come from the combination of two things:  (1) we are a results-oriented culture, not a process-driven culture, and (2) we give managers a lot of latitude in how they run their teams.

I’m certainly not saying that striving for some level of consistency in organization is a bad goal – just that it’s probably not an absolute goal and that embracing messiness sometimes makes a lot of sense.  Or perhaps phrased more actionably, allowing individual managers to use their own judgment and creativity in setting up teams and processes, as long as they follow high-level guidelines and values can be an incredibly productive and rewarding way of maximizing success across an enterprise.

Counter Cliche:  Failure Is Not an Orphan

I haven’t written one of these for a while, but this week, Fred’s VC Cliche of the Week, Success Has a Thousand Fathers, definitely merits an entrepreneurial point of view.  Fred’s main point is right — it’s very easy when something goes right, whether a company/venture deal or even something inside the company like a good quarter or a big new client win, for lots of people to take credit, many of whom don’t deserve it.

But what separates A companies from B and C companies is the ability to recognize and process failures as well as successes.  Failure is not orphan.  It usually has as many real fathers as success.  Although it’s true that Sometimes, There is No Lesson to Be Learned, failure rarely emerges spontaneously. 

Companies that have a culture of blame and denial eventually go down in flames.  They are scary places to work.  They foster in-fighting between departments and back-stabbing among friends.  Most important, companies like that are never able to learn from their mistakes and failures to make sure those things don’t happen again.

Finger-pointing and looking the other way as things go south have no place in a well-run organization.  While companies don’t necessarily need to celebrate failures, they can create a culture where failures are treated as learning experiences and where claiming responsibility for a mistake is a sign of maturity and leadership.  And all of this starts at the top.  If the boss (CEO, department head, line manager) is willing to step up and acknowledge a mistake, do a real post-mortem, and process the learnings with his or her team without fear of retribution, it sets an example that everyone in the organization can follow.

Run, Brad, Run!

A few years ago we announced our support of a charity called the Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis (see the post about it here and learn more about Accelerated Cure here).  While we have a strong culture of giving back to the community at Return Path and do that in several ways, we chose this charity as the main beneficiary of our corporate philanthropy efforts for three reasons:

1. We wanted to support research into finding a cure for MS to honor and support one of our earliest colleagues, Sophie Miller Audette who was diagnosed with MS about 5 years ago (and is still going strong as one of our key sales directors!) – and since then, two other members of the Return Path extended family have also been diagnosed with MS
2. We wanted to support an organization with a focused mission and one where our contributions could really make a difference
3. Accelerated Cure has a very entrepreneurial, innovative culture that’s consistent with our own – and a solution-oriented approach to their cause that resonates with our business philosophy

We got introduced to Accelerated Cure by Brad Feld, one of Return Path’s venture investors, who is a friend of Art Mellor, Accelerated Cure’s founder and CEO.  Brad’s an interesting guy for many reasons, but one reason is that he has a goal of running 50 marathons (one in each state) by the time he’s 50.  He has eight years and 40 marathons to go, and to make it a little more significant he decided to try and drum up some sponsorships for his quest and donate the money to Accelerated Cure. 

Return Path has decided to be one of Brad’s anchor tenant sponsors by pledging $1,000 for every race he completes.  This is half of Brad’s goal of $2,000 per race, and we hope it will inspire others to donate so he can beat his goal.  Of course, Brad wants to do more than just run these marathons – he wants to, well, accelerate his performance.  So, taking a page out of the VC handbook, we’re setting up an incentive program for Brad of an additional $500 donation for every race that he completes in less than four hours. 

Besides liking both Brad and Accelerated Cure, this particular vehicle for donating money is especially meaningful to us.  A good number of Return Path employees past and present have run marathons and even competed in triathlons and Ironman competitions (including yours truly, but in a way that certainly makes me want to keep my day job).  And Seth Matheson, Accelerated Cure’s new development director who has MS, is an avid marathoner who is contemplating an Ironman competition himself.  And as I always tell our team members, running a startup is a marathon, not a sprint!

You can follow Brad’s progress – and make a donation yourself – here.

How to Wow Your Employees

Here at Return Path we like to promote a culture of WOW and a culture of hospitality.  Some of you may be asking, Why Wow your employees?   The answer is, there is nothing more inspirational than showing an employee that you care about him or her as an individual.  The impact a WOW has is tremendous.  Being a manger is like being in a fishbowl.  Everything you do is scrutinized by your team.  You lead by example whether you want to or not and showing your own vulnerability/humanity has an amazing bonding effect.

Why do you want to foster Wow moments with your team?  High performing teams have a lot of Wow going on.  If all members of a team see Wow regularly, they are all inspired to do more sooner and better.

Here are 15 ways to Wow your employees

1. Take them or her to lunch/breakfast/drinks/dinner quarterly individually, one nice one per year
2. Learn their hobbies and special interests; when you have a spiff to give, give one that is in line with these
3. Remember the names of their spouse/significant other/kids/pets
4. Share your development plan with them and ask for input against it at least quarterly
5. Respond to every email from your staff by the end of the day; sooner if you are on the TO line
6. Ask them what they think of a piece of work you’re doing
7. Ask them what they think of the direction the company is going, or a specific project
8. Periodically take something off each one’s plate, even if it’s clearly theirs to do
9. Periodically tell them to take a day off to recharge, ideally around something important in their lives
10. End every meaningful interaction by asking how they are doing and feeling about work
11. End every interaction by asking what you can be doing to help them do a better job and advance their career
12. Read all job openings and highlight ones that match their interests for future positions
13. Read the weekly award list and call out those FROM and TO your team in staff meetings
14. Send a handwritten note to their home when you have a moment of appreciation for them
15. (If your employee has a team he/she manages) Ask for input before every skip-level interaction and summarize each one after the fact in an email or in person

I try to have Wow moments regularly with people at all levels in the organization.  Here’s one that sticks with me.  At the Colorado summer party several years ago, I went up to someone who was a few layers down in the organization and said hi to her husband and dog by name.  I had met them before, and I work at remembering these things.  The husband was blown away – I hadn’t talked to him in probably two years.  In front of the employee, he gushed – “this is exactly why my wife loves working here – we are totally committed to being part of the RP family.”

There are as many ways to be a great manager and WOW your employees as there are stars in the sky…hopefully these ideas give you a framework to make these your own!

Fig Wasp #879

I have 7 categories of books in my somewhat regular reading rotation:  Business (the only one I usually blog about), American History with a focus on the founding period, Humor, Fiction with a focus on trash, Classics I’ve Missed, Architecture and Urban Planning (my major), and Evolutionary Biology.  I’m sure that statement says a lot about me, though I am happy to not figure it out until later in life.  Anyway, I just finished another fascinating Richard Dawkins book about evolution, and while I usually don’t blog about non-business books, this one had an incredibly rich metaphor with several business lessons stemming from it, plus, evolution is running rampant in our household this week, so I figured, what the heck?

The Dawkins books I’ve read are The Selfish Gene (the shortest, most succinct, and best one to start with), The Blind Watchmaker (more detail than the first), Climbing Mount Improbable (more detail than the second, including a fascinating explanation of how the eye evolved “in an evolutionary instant”), The Ancestor’s Tale (very different style – and a great journey back in time to see each fork in the evolutionary road on the journey from bacteria to humanity), and The God Delusion (a very different book expounding on Dawkins’ theory of atheism).  All are great and fairly easy to read, given the topic.  I’d start with either The Selfish Gene or maybe The Ancestor’s Tale if you’re interested in taking him for a spin.

So on to the tale of Fig Wasp #879, from this week’s read, Climbing Mount Improbable.  Here’s the thing.  There are over 900 kinds of fig trees in the world.  Who knew?  I was dimly aware there was such a thing as a fig tree, although quite frankly I’m most familiar with the fig in its Newton format.  Some species reproduce wildly inefficiently — like wild grasses, whose pollen get spread through the air, and with a lot of luck, 1 in 1 billion (with a “b”) land in the right place at the right time to propagate.  At the opposite end of the spectrum stands the fig tree.  Not only do fig trees reproduce by relying on the collaboration of fig wasps to transport their pollen from one to the next, but it turns out that not only are there over 900 different kinds of fig trees on earth, there are over 900 different kinds of fig wasps — one per tree species.  The two have evolved together over thousands of millenia, and while we humans might take the callous and uninformed view that a fig tree is a fig tree, clearly the fig wasps have figured out how to swiftly and instinctively differentiate one speices from another.

So what the heck does this have to do with business?  Three quick lessons come mind.  I’m sure there are scores more.

1. Collboration only works when each party benefits selfishly from it.  Fig wasps don’t cross-pollenate fig trees bcause the fig trees ask nicely or will fire them if they don’t.  They do their job because their job is independently fulfilling.  If they don’t — they probably die of starvation.  They’re just programmed with a very specific type of fig pollen as their primary input and output.  We should all think about collaboration this way at work.  I wrote a series of posts a couple years back on the topic of Collboration Being Hard, and while all the points I make in those posts are valid, I think this one trumps all.  Quite frankly, it calls on the core principle from the Harvard Project on Negotiation, which is that collaboration requires a rethinking of the pie, so that you can expand the pie.  That’s what the fig trees and fig wasps have done, unwittingly.  Each one gets what it needs far more so than if it had ever consulted directly with the other.  The lesson:  Be selfish, but do it in a way that benefits your company.

2. Incredibly similar companies can have incredibly distinct cultures.  900+ types of fig tree, each one attracting one and only one type of fig wasp.  Could there be anything less obvious to the untrained human eye?  I assume that not only would most of us not be able to discern one tree or wasp type from another, but that we wouldn’t be able to disdcern discern any of the 900+ types of trees or wasps from thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions (in the case or urbanites) types of trees or bugs in general!  But here’s the thing.  I know hundreds of internet companies.  Heck, I know dozens of email companies.  And I can tell you within 5 minutes of walking around the place or meeting an executive which ones I’d be able to work for, and which ones I wouldn’t.  And the older/bigger the company, the more distinct and deeply rooted its culture becomes.  The lessons:  don’t go to work for a company where you’d even remotely uncomfortable in the interview environment; cultivate your company’s culture with same level of care and attention to detail that you would your family — regardless of your role or level in the company!

3. Leadership is irrelevant when the operating system is tight.  You think fig wasps have a CEO?  Or a division president who reports into the CEO that oversees both fig wasps and fig trees, making sure they all cross-pollenate before the end of the quarter?  Bah.  While as a CEO, you may be the most important person in the organization sometimes, or in some ways, I can easily construct the argument that you’re the least important person in the shop as well.  If you do your job and create an organization where everyone knows the mission, the agenda, the goal, the values, the BHAG, whatever you want to call it — withoutit needing to be spelled out every day — you’ve done your job, because you’ve made a company where people rock ‘n’ roll all night and every day without you needing to be in the middle of what they’re doing. 

I’m sure there are other business lessons from evolutionary biology…send them along if you have good thoughts to share!

One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that as the organization scales, you have to be all-in, until you’re not.  What the heck does that mean?

It means that, other than confiding your indecision to a very small number of trusted advisors on a given issue, indecision is poison to the people around you and to the organization in general.  So even if you’re thinking of doing something new or different or making a tough call on something, you generally need to project confidence until you’ve made the call.

One example of this is around a decision to fire someone on the team, especially a senior executive.  Public indecision about this reminds me of years ago when George Steinbrenner owned the Yankees.  Every time he contemplated firing a manager, which was often, he was very public about it.  It turned the manager into a lame duck, ignored by players and mocked by the press.  No good for the manager or for the players, unhelpful for the team as a whole.  It’s the same in business.  Again, other than a small group of trusted advisors, your people have to have your full backing until the moment you decide to remove them.

Another example of this is a shift in strategy.  Strategy drives execution – meaning the course you chart translates into the goals and activities of all the other people in your organization.  Mobilizing the troops is hard enough in the first place, and it requires a tremendous amount of leadership expressing commitment.  If you’re contemplating a shift in strategy, which of course happens a lot in dynamic businesses, and you share your thinking and qualms broadly, you risk paralyzing the organization or redirecting activities and goals without intending to or without even knowing it.

Some people might look at this concept and cry “foul – what about Transparency?”  I don’t buy that.  As I wrote recently in The Difference Between Culture and Values, “When you are 10 people in a room, Transparency means you as CEO may feel compelled to share that you’re thinking about pivoting the product, collect everyone’s point of view on the subject, and make a decision together. When you are 100 people, you probably wouldn’t want to share that thinking with ALL until it’s more baked, you have more of a concrete direction in mind, and you’ve stress tested it with a smaller group, or you risk sending people off in a bunch of different directions without intending to do so. When you are 1,000 employees and public, you might not make that announcement to ALL until it’s orchestrated with your earnings call, but there may be hundreds of employees who know by then. A commitment to Transparency doesn’t mean always sharing everything in your head with everyone the minute it appears as a protean thought.  At 10 people, you can tell everyone why you had to fire Pat – they probably all know, anyway.  At 100 people, that’s unkind to Pat.  At 1,000, it invites a lawsuit.”

We’ve been in business at Return Path for almost 18 years now.  We’ve seen a number of competitors come and go across a bunch of different related businesses that we’ve been in.  One of the things I’ve noticed and never quite understood is that many of our competitors expend a lot of time and energy publicly trash talking us in the market.  Sometimes this takes the form of calling us or our products out by name in a presentation at a conference; other times it takes the form of a blog post; other times it’s just in sales calls.  It’s weird.  You don’t see that all that often in other industries, even when people take aim at market leaders.

During the normal course of business, one of sales reps might engage in selling against specific competitors — often times, they have to when asked specific questions by specific prospects — but one thing you’ll never see us do is publicly trash talk a single competitor by name as a company.  I’m sure there are a couple people at Return Path who would like us to have “sharper elbows” when it comes to this, but it’s just not who we are.  Our culture is definitely one that values kindness and a softer approach.  But good business sense also tells me that it’s just not smart for four reasons:

• We’re very focused and disciplined in our outbound communications — and there’s only so much air time you get as a company in your industry, even among your customers — on thought leadership, on showcasing the value of our data and our solutions, and on doing anything we can do to make our customers more successful.  Pieces like my colleague Dennis Dayman’s recent blog post on the evolution of the data-driven economy, or my colleague Guy Hanson’s amazingly accurate prediction of the UK’s “unpredictable” election results both represent the kind of writing that we think is productive to promote our company
• We’re fiercely protective of our brand (both our employer brand and our market-facing brand), and we’ve built a brand based on trust, reputation, longevity, and being helpful, in a business that depends on reputation and trust as its lifeblood — as I think about all the data we handle for clients and strategic partners, and all the trust mailbox providers place in us around our Certification program.  Clients and partners will only place trust in — and will ultimately only associate themselves with — good people.  To quote my long time friend and Board member Fred Wilson (who himself is quoting a long time friend and former colleague Bliss McCrum), if you lie down with dogs, you come up with fleas.  If we suddenly turned into the kind of company that talked trash about competition, I bet we’d find that we had diminished our brand and our reputation among the people who matter most to us.  Our simple messaging and positioning showcases our people, our expertise, and our detailed knowledge of how email marketing works, with a collective 2,000 years of industry experience across our team
• Trash talking your competition can unwittingly expose your own weaknesses.  Think about Donald Trump’s memorable line from one of the debates against Hillary Clinton – “I’m not the puppet, you’re the puppet” – when talking about Russia.  That hasn’t turned out so well for him.  It’s actually a routine tactic of Trump, beyond that one example.  Accuse someone else of something to focus attention away from your own issues or weaknesses.  Don’t like the fact that your inauguration crowd was demonstrably smaller than your predecessor’s?  Just lie about it, and accuse the media of creating Fake News while you’re at it.  Disappointed that you lost the popular vote?  Accuse the other side of harvesting millions of illegal votes, even though it doesn’t matter since you won the electoral college!  Think about all these examples, regardless of your politics.  All of them draw attention to Trump’s weaknesses, even as he’s lashing out at others (and even if you think he’s right).  We don’t need to lash out at others because we have so much confidence in our company, our products, and our services.  We are an innovative, happy, stable, profitable, and growing vendor in our space, and that’s where our attention goes
• Publicly trash talking your competition just gives your competition extra air time.  As PT Barnum famously said, “You can say anything you want about me, just make sure you spell my name right!”

Don’t get me wrong.  Competition is healthy.  It makes businesses stronger and can serve as a good focal point for them to rally.  It can even be healthy sometimes to demonize a competitor *internally* to serve as that rallying cry.  But I am not a fan of doing that *externally.*  I think it makes you look weak and just gives your competitor free advertising.

Brad wrote a fun post a couple years ago about rituals, including one about The Annual Dinner that he and Amy, Fred and Joanne Wilson, and Mariquita and I have been having not quite annually for almost 15 years now.  His most poignant comment (other than that apparently he and I are both getting larger and greyer in sync with each other) is about the power of marking the passage of time together with the same group of people.  We have a similar tradition at Return Path that’s worth noting in the context of my reboot program since it happened a few weeks ago and was part of the reboot cycle.

On the first anniversary of Return Path’s founding, I took my co-founder Jack Sinclair and our first two colleagues, Matt Spielman and Alexis Katzowitz, our to lunch where we shared lessons learned from the past year at the company and predictions for the company in the coming year with each other.  Jack, George Bilbrey, and I continued doing an end-of-year meal tradition with those two conversation topics for over a decade.  The last three years, since Jack left to join Stack Overflow, George and I have continued the tradition on our own.  Although some of our conversation every year isn’t really for public consumption, I’ve always regretted not blogging some highlights of it.  The tradition is a very powerful one of reflection and retrospective, which is deeply ingrained in Return Path’s culture, as a means of continuous improvement through renewal and refreshing.

Last month, we came up with a few good lessons learned that are featuring in my reboot.  Here they are:

• Growth covers up a lot of weaknesses.  While we still have a healthy growth rate as a company, it’s lower than is used to be – as is the case for all companies as they grow and face the law of large numbers.  What’s interesting, though, is how many weaknesses growth can cover up that start getting exposed as growth slows.  Think of it as an analogy to Technical Debt, call it Organizational Debt.  It’s the accumulation of small decisions over time to take an expedient path on a particular item.  It’s the “oh, we’ll throw a body at the problem now and automate the solution later” type thing that never gets automated, then gets compounded when the hired body needs to be replicated, then managed, then turned into a department.  You get the idea.
• Executive playbooks must be applied flexibly.  As is true of many growing companies, we’ve hired a number of outside senior executives over the last few years.  Some have worked out and others haven’t.  One thing we’ve learned, though, is that there’s a bit of a myth sometimes around the “I have the playbook” claim, the same way there’s a myth around hiring sales people who claim “I have a Rolodex” (or whatever the current version of that is).  Every company is unique, even in the same space.  Every situation is unique.  What makes an executive great is the ability to take learnings and experiences from prior roles and companies, both good and bad, and apply them thoughtfully to new situations, not the ability to run the same play over and over again in exactly the same way.  Sure, there are core business processes or systems that can be applied consistently, but most of those don’t require senior executive expertise.
• Know the job your customer is hiring you to do and what the alternatives are.  This is contemporary product management language, but it really rings true.  No matter who you are, no matter what job you do, you have a customer.  That customer is paying you something for a reason.  That money could go somewhere else.  Keeping that reason top of mind (and understanding when and why and how it shifts) is critical to developing the right solutions.

George, thanks for a decade and a half of reflections together (among other things!).