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Welcome to the new Return Path.

For a tech company to grow and thrive in the 21st century it must be in a state of constant adaptation. We have been the global market leaders in email deliverability since my co-founder George Bilbrey coined that term back in 2002. In fact, back in 2008 we announced a major corporate reorganization, divesting ourselves of some legacy businesses in order to focus on deliverability as our core business.

Since then Return Path has grown tremendously thanks to that focus, but we have grown to the point where it’s time for us to redefine ourselves once again. Now we’re launching a new chapter in the company’s history to meet evolving needs in our marketplace. We’re establishing ourselves as the global market leaders in email intelligence. Read on and I’ll explain what that means and why it’s important.

What Return Path Released Today

We launched three new products today to improve inbox placement rate (the new Inbox Monitor, now including subscriber-level data), identify phishing attacks (Email Brand Monitor), and make it easier to understand subscriber engagement and benchmark your program against your competition (Inbox Insight, a groundbreaking new solution). We’ve also released an important research study conducted by David Daniels at The Relevancy Group.

The report’s findings parallel what we’ve been hearing more and more recently. Email marketers are struggling with two core problems that complicate their decision making: They have access to so much data, they can’t possibly analyze it fast enough or thoroughly enough to benefit from it; and too often they don’t have access to the data they really need.

Meanwhile they face new challenges in addition to the ones email marketers have been battling for years. It’s still hard to get to the inbox, and even to monitor how much mail isn’t getting there. It’s still hard to protect brands and their customers from phishing and spoofing, and even to see when mail streams are under attack. And it’s still hard to see engagement measurements, even as they become more important to marketing performance.

Email Intelligence is the Answer

Our solution to these problems is Email Intelligence. Email intelligence is the combination of data from across the email ecosystem, analytics that make it accessible and manageable, and insight that makes it actionable. Marketers need all of these to understand their email performance beyond deliverability. They need it to benchmark themselves against competitors, to gain a complete understanding of their subscribers’ experience, and to accurately track and report the full impact of their email programs. In fact, we have redefined our company’s mission statement to align with our shift from being the global leader in Email Deliverability to being the global leader in Email Intelligence:

We analyze email data and build solutions that generate insights for senders, mailbox providers, and users to ensure that inboxes contain only messages that users want

The products we are launching today, in combination with the rest of our Email Intelligence Solution for Marketers that’s been serving clients for a decade, will help meet these market needs, but we continue to look ahead to find solutions to bigger problems. I see our evolution into an Email Intelligence company as an opportunity to change the entire ecosystem, to make email better, more welcome, more effective, and more secure.

David’s researchoffers a unique view of marketers’ place in the ecosystem, where they want to get to, how much progress they’ve made, and how big a lead the top competitors have opened up against the rest. (It can also give you a sense of where your efforts stack up vs. the rest of the industry.) There are definitely some surprises, but for me the biggest takeaway was no surprise at all: The factors that separate the leaders are essentially the core components of what we define as Email Intelligence.

Return Path Core Values, Part II

As I said at the beginning of this series, I was excited to share the values that have made us successful with the world and to also articulate more for the company some of the thinking behind the statements.

You can click on the tag for all the posts on the 13 Return Path’s core values, but the full list of the values is below, with links to each individual post, for reference:

As I noted in my initial post, every employee as of August 2008 was involved in the drafting of these statements. That’s a long post for another time, but it’s an important part of the equation here. These were not top-down statements written by me or other executives or by our People team. Some are more aspirational than others, but they are the aspirations of the company, not of management!

The Gift of Feedback, Part III

I’ve written about our 360 Review process at Return Path a few times in the past:

And the last two times around, I’ve also posted the output of my own review publicly here in the form of my development plan:

Here in 2008
Here in 2009

So here we are again. I have my new development plan all spruced up and ready to go. Many thanks to my team and Board for this valuable input, and to Angela Baldonero (my fantastic SVP People and in-house coach), and Marc Maltz of Triad Consulting for helping me interpret the data and draft this plan. Here at a high level is what I’m going to be working on for the next 1-2 years:

Institutionalize impatience and lessen the dependency dynamic on me. What does this mean? Basically it means that I want to make others in the organization and on my team in particular as impatient as I am for progress, success, reinvention, streamlining and overcoming/minimizing operational realities. I’ll talk more about something I’ve taken to calling “productive disruption” in a future blog post
Focus on making every staff interaction at all levels a coaching session. Despite some efforts over the years, I still feel like I talk too much when I interact with people in the organization on a 1:1 or small group basis. I should be asking many more questions and teaching people to fish, not fishing for them
Continue to foster deep and sustained engagement at all levels. We’ve done a lot of this, really well, over the years. But at nearly 250 people now and growing rapidly, it’s getting harder and harder. I want to focus some real time and energy in the months to come on making sure we keep this critical element of our culture vibrant at our new size and stage
I have some other more tactical goals as well like improving at public speaking and getting more involved with leadership recruiting and management training, but the above items are more or less the nub of it

One thing I know I’ll have to do with some of these items and some of the tactical ones in particular is engage in some form of deliberate practice, as defined by Geoffrey Colvin in his book Talent is Overrated (blog post on the book here). That will be interesting to figure out.

But that’s the story. Everyone at Return Path and on my Board – please help me meet these important goals for my development over the next couple of years!

More Good Inc.

Last year I was pleased and proud to write about our debut on the Inc. 500 list of America’s fastest growing companies. At that time I wrote that “Now our challenge, of course, is STAYING on the list, and hopefully upping our ranking next year!” Well, I am again please and proud to announce that we, in fact, stayed on the list. (You can read all the Inc. coverage here and see our press release about the ranking here.)

Unfortunately, we didn’t make the second part of our goal to up our rank. But, we did up our growth – our three-year revenue growth rate was 18% higher than last year. This is a testament to the hard work of our team (now 150 strong!) and wouldn’t be possible without the support of our many great clients (now 1,500 strong!). Most importantly, we see no end in sight. In fact, 2008 promises to be an even bigger year for us as we poise for continued growth. By the way, would you like to be part of a team that has now ranked as one of America’s fastest growing companies two years in a row? Check out our Careers page and join the team that is advancing email marketing, one company at a time.

It’s Copyright Time

Brad must be off his game this year, so…time to update all those copyrights to say 2008. Or as Brad gently suggested last year, make that field variable so you never have to worry about it again! (Thanks to our CTO Andy Sautins for the reminder here.)

The Gift of Feedback, Part II

I’ve written a few times over the years about our 360 feedback process at Return Path. In Part I of this series in early 2008, I spelled out my development plan coming out of that year’s 360 live review process. I have my new plan now after this year’s process, and I thought I’d share it once again. This year I have four items to work on:

Continue to develop the executive team. Manage the team more aggressively and intentionally. Upgrade existing people, push hard on next-level team development, and critically evaluate the organization every 3-6 months to see if the execs are scaling well enough or if they need to replaced or augmented
Formalize junior staff interaction. Create more intentional feedback loops before/after meetings, including with the staff member if needed, and cultivate acceptance of transparency; get managers to do the same. Be extra skeptical about the feedback I’m getting, realizing that I may not get an accurate or complete picture
Foster deeper engagement across the entire organization. Simplify/streamline company mission and balanced scorecard through a combination of deeper level maps/scorecards, maybe a higher level scorecard, and constant reinforcing communication. Drive multi-year planning process to be fun, touching the entire company, and culminating in a renewed enthusiasm
Disrupt early and often, the right way. Introduce an element of productive disruption/creative destruction into the way I lead, noting item 2 around feedback loops

Thanks to everyone internally who contributed to this review. I appreciate your time and input. Onward!

This question has been on my mind for years. In the wake of Georgia passing its new voting regulations, a many of America’s large company CEOs are taking some kind of vocal stance (Coca Cola) or even action (Major League Baseball) on the matter. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told CEOs to “stay the hell out of politics” and proceeded to walk that comment back a little bit the following day. The debate isn’t new, but it’s getting uglier, like so much of public discourse in America.

Former American Express CEO Harvey Golub wrote an op-ed earlier this week in The Wall Street Journal entitled Politics is Risky Business for CEOs (behind a paywall), the subhead of which sums up what my point of view has always been on this topic historically — “It’s imprudent to weigh in on issues that don’t directly affect the company.” His argument has a few main points:

CEOs may have opinions, but when they speak, they speak for and represent their companies, and unless they’re speaking about an issue that effects their organization, they should have Board approval before opening their mouths
Whatever CEOs say about something political will by definition upset many of their employees and customers in this polarized environment (I agree with this point a lot of the time and wrote about it in the second edition of Startup CEO)
There’s a slippery slope – comment on one thing, you have to comment on all things, and everything descends from there

So if you’re with Harvey Golub on this point, you draw the boundaries around what “directly affects” the company — things like employment law, the regulatory regime in your industry, corporate tax rates, and the like.

The Economist weighed in on this today with an article entitled CEO activism in America is risky business (also behind a paywall, sorry) that has a similar perspective with some of the same concerns – it’s unclear who is speaking when a CEO delivers a political message, messages can backfire or alienate stakeholders, and it’s unclear that investors care.

The other side of the debate is probably best represented by Paul Polman, longtime Unilever CEO, who put climate change, inequality, and other ESG-oriented topics at the center of his corporate agenda and did so both because he believed they were morally right AND that they would make for good business. Unilever’s business results under Polman’s leadership were transformational, growing his stock price almost 300% in 10 years and outpaced their peers, all as a “slow growth” CPG company. Paul’s thinking on the subject is going to be well documented in his forthcoming book, Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take, which he is co-authoring with my good friend Andrew Winston and which will come out later this year.

While I still believe that on a number of issues in current events, CEOs face a lose-lose proposition by wading into politics, I’m increasingly moving towards the Paul Polman side of the debate…but not in an absolute way. As I’ve been wrestling with this topic, at first, I thought the definition of what to weigh in on had to come down to a definition of what is morally right. And that felt like I was back in a lose-lose loop since many social wedge issues have people on both sides of them claiming to be morally right — so a CEO weighing in on that kind of issue would be doomed to alienate a big percentage of stakeholders no matter what point of view he or she espouses.

But I’m not sure Paul and Andrew are absolutists, and that’s the aha for me. I believe their point is that CEOs need to weigh in on the things that directly affect their companies AND ALSO weigh in on the things that indirectly affect their companies.

So if you eliminate morality from the framework, where do you draw the line between things that have indirect effects on companies and which ones do not? If I back up my scope just a little bit, I quickly get to a place where I have a different and broader definition of what matters to the functioning of my industry, or to the functioning of commerce in general without necessarily getting into social wedge issues. For want of another framework on this, I landed on the one written up by Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum in That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, which I summarized in this post a bunch of years ago — that America has lost its way a bit in the last 20-40 years because we have strayed from the five-point formula that has made us competitive for the bulk of our history:

Providing excellent public education for more and more Americans
Building and continually modernizing our infrastructure
Keeping America’s doors to immigration open
Government support for basic research and development
Implementation of necessary regulations on private economic activity

So those are some good things to keep in mind as indirectly impacting commercial interests and American competitiveness in an increasingly global world, and therefore are appropriate for CEOs to weigh in on. And yes, I realize immigration is a little more controversial than the other topics on the list, but even most of the anti-immigration people I know in business are still pro legal immigration, and even in favor of expanding it in some ways.

And that brings us back to Georgia and the different points of view about whether or not CEOs should weigh in on specific pieces of legislation like that. Do voting rights directly impact a company’s business? Not most companies. But what about indirect impact? I believe that having a high functioning democracy that values truth, trust, and as widespread legal voter participation as possible is central to the success of businesses in America, and that at the moment, we are dangerously close to not having a high functioning democracy with those values.

I have not, as Mitch McConnell said, “read the whole damn bill,” but it doesn’t take a con law scholar to note that some pieces of it which I have read — no giving food or water to people in voting lines, reduced voting hours, and giving the state legislature the unilateral ability to fire or supersede the secretary of state and local election officials if they don’t like an election’s results — aren’t measures designed to improve the health and functioning of our democracy. They are measures designed to change the rules of the game and make it harder to vote and harder for incumbents to lose. That is especially true when proponents of this bill and similar ones in other states keep nakedly exposing the truth when they say that Republicans will lose more elections if it’s easier for more people to vote, instead of thinking about what policies they should adopt in order to win a majority of all votes.

And for that reason, because of that bill, I am moving my position on the general topic of whether or not CEOs should wade into politics from the “direct impact” argument to the “indirect impact” one — and including in that list of indirect impacts improving the strength of our democracy by, among other things, making it as easy as possible for as many Americans to vote as possible and making the administration of elections as free as possible from politicians, without compromising on the principle of minimizing or eliminating actual fraud in elections, which by all accounts is incredibly rare anyway.

I love innovation, and process is no different than product or business model in that regard. I’ve run and attended several hundred board meetings over the years, both those of companies where I’ve been CEO or Chairman, and those where I’m a director. I’ve written a lot about how I like running board meetings in Startup CEO, and as I mentioned the other day, I’m a co-author of a Second Edition of Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors, which is coming out in June and is available to pre-order now, along with Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani.

There are two adaptations I’ve made to my standard board routines in the last year or so, one driven by the pandemic and one not.

In olden times (that makes me sound like I’m 400 years old, but “pre-covid” sounds so clinical), I used to have a board dinner the night before or after every board meeting, and of course, everything was in person. That was a really important ritual in my mind towards the end of building the board as an effective team, where people on the team know each other as people, share things going on in their lives, share vulnerabilities, and develop bonds of trust. Without regular in-person meetings and dinners or social events, that gets a lot harder. Even when we get back to “normal,” I imagine the most we’ll do in-person board meetings is 1-2x/year.

What’s the zoom version of this?

We now do two 30-minute Executive Sessions (directors only) one before the board meeting officially starts and observers and team join, as well as the traditional one after the meeting ends. The purposes of the two sessions are different. The standard post-meeting Executive Session follows up on the meeting and has me talk about business or team issues that I don’t want to talk about with the full group present or get feedback from the board. But the one before the meeting is almost entirely social. I try to come up with a different question or topic to get all of us talking that is not about Bolster. Last week’s meeting was a simple “what’s the best thing that’s happened to you so far in 2022, and what’s the worse?” One time I asked everyone to show a picture from their phone photo roll and talk about it. You get the idea. It’s not the same as a dinner, but it seems like an effective substitute given the medium.

The second adaptation, and full credit to Fred for suggesting this one a while back, is the post-meeting survey. Now immediately after every Board meeting, I send a simple Google form to each director with the following questions:

What are 1-3 areas/specifics where we are doing well?
What are 1-3 areas/specifics you’re concerned about or where we could do better?
Did the board book have the right level of detail and commentary? Is there anything you’d like to see change about the format or the content?
Did the meeting meet your objectives for learning and discussion?
If not, why not?
Do you have any other feedback for Matt at this time?

I get great feedback, almost immediately and always from all board members, while things are still fresh in everyone’s mind. I’m planning to do this whether or not the meeting is remote…although it’s definitely good when the meeting is remote, and things like Executive Session, Closed Session, and debrief with me after Closed Session are quick or sometimes rushed.

There’s always room for innovation, even in standard and time-tested processes like board meetings.

I Don’t Want to Be Your Friend (Today)

The biggest problem with all the social networks, as far as I can tell, is that there’s no easy and obvious way for me to differentiate the people to whom I am connected either by type of person or by how closely connected we are.

I have about 400 on Facebook and 600 on LinkedIn. And I’m still adding ones as new people get on the two networks for the first time. While it seems to people in the industry here that “everyone is on Facebook,” it’s not true yet. Facebook is making its way slowly (in Geoffrey Moore terms) through Main Street. Main Street is a big place.

But not all friends are created equal. There are some where I’m happy to read their status updates or get invited to their events. There are some where I’m happy if they see pictures of me. But there are others where neither of these is the case. Why can’t I let only those friends who I tag as “summer camp” see pictures of me that are tagged as being from summer camp? Why can’t I only get event invitations from “close friends”? Wouldn’t LinkedIn be better if it only allowed second and third degree connections to come from “strong” connections instead of “weak” ones?

It’s also hard to not accept a connection from someone you know. Here’s a great example. A guy to whom I have a very tenuous business connection (but a real one) friends me on Facebook. I ignore him. He does it again. I ignore him again. And a third time. Finally, he emails me with some quasi-legitimate business purpose and asks why I’m ignoring him — he sees that I’m active on Facebook, so I *must* be ignoring him. Sigh. I make up some feeble excuse and go accept his connection. Next thing I know, I’m getting an invitation from this guy for “International Hug a Jew Day,” followed by an onslaught of messages from everyone else in his address book in some kind of reply-to-all functionality. Now, I’m a Jew, and I don’t mind a hug now and then, but this crap, I could do without.

I mentioned this problem to a friend the other day who told me the problem was me. “You just have too many friends. I reject everyone who connects to me unless they’re a really, super close friend.” Ok, fine, I am a connector, but I don’t need a web site to help me stay connected to the 13 people I talk to on the phone or see in person. The beauty of social networks is to enable some level of communication with a much broader universe — including on some occasions people I don’t know at all. That communication, and the occasional serendipity that accompanies it, goes away if I keep my circle of friends narrow. In fact, I do discriminate at some level in terms of who I accept connections from. I don’t accept them from people I truly don’t know, which isn’t a small number. It’s amazing how many people try to connect to me who I have never met or maybe who picked up my business card somewhere.

The tools to handle this today are crude and only around the edges. I can ignore people or block them, but that means I never get to see what they’re up to (and vice versa). That eliminates the serendipity factor as well. Facebook has some functionality to let me “see more from some people and less from others” — but it’s hard to find, it’s unclear how it works, and it’s incredibly difficult to use. Sure, I can “never accept event invitations from this person,” or hide someone’s updates on home page, but those tools are clunky and reactive.

When are the folks at LinkedIn and Facebook going to solve this? Feels like tagging, basic behavioral analysis, and checkboxes at point of “friending” aren’t exactly bleeding edge technologies any more.

Book Short: Two New Ones from Veteran Writers

I’m feeling very New York this week. I just read both Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell, and Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – and How It Can Renew America, by Tom Friedman. Both are great, and if you like the respective authors’ prior works, are must reads.

In Outliers, Gladwell’s simple premise is that talents are both carefully cultivated and subject to accidents of fate as much as they are genetic. I guess that’s not such a brilliant premise when you look at it like that. But as with his other two books, The Tipping Point (about how trends and social movements start and spread) and Blink (about how the mind makes judgments), his examples are fascinating, well researched, and very well written. Here are a couple quick nuggets, noting that I don’t have the book in front of me, so my numbers might be slightly off:

Of the 200 wealthiest people in human history, 9 were Americans born within 5 years of each other in the 1830s – far from a normal distribution for wealth holders/creators
Most Silicon Valley titans were both within 2 years of each other in 1954-1955
40% of great hockey players are born in Q1; 30% in Q2; 20% in Q3; and 10% in Q4, as the “cutoff date” for most youth leagues is January 1, so the biggest/oldest kids end up performing the best, getting the best coaches and most attention that propels them throughout their careers

Also, as with his other books, it’s hard to necessarily draw great and sweeping conclusions or create lots of social policy, both of which are quite tempting, as a result of the data. Scholarly, comprehensive research it might not be, but boy does he make you think twice about, well, lots of things.

In Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Tom Friedman makes a convincing case that two wrongs can make a right, or more to the point, that fixing two wrongs at the same time is a good way of fixing each one more than otherwise would be possible. What I like best about this book is that it’s not just another liberal journalist trashing America — Friedman’s whole premise here (not to mention language) is fiercely optimistic and patriotic, that if we as a country take a sweeping global leadership role in containing CO2 emissions, we will both save the planet and revive our economy, sustaining our global economic leadership position into the next century at a time when others are decrying the end of the American empire.

His examples are real and vivid. Like Gladwell, one never knows how unbiased or comprehensive Friedman is, but he covers some of these topics very poignantly:

The very strong negative correlation between control of oil supply and democracy/freedom
A comprehensive vision for the energy world of the future that’s very cool, apparently has already been piloted somewhere, and feels like it’s actually doable
The startling numbers, even if you sort of know them already, about the sheer number of people who will be sharing our planet and consuming more and more resources in the coming decades
How too many years of being a privileged nation has led to politics he brilliantly calls “dumb as we wanna be”

Friedman calls his mood sober optimism — that’s a good description. It’s a very timely book as many Americans hold out hope for the new administration’s ability to lead the country in a positive direction and also restore American’s damaged image in the world come January 20. I have to confess that I still haven’t read Friedman’s The Earth Is Flat, although I read him in the New York Times enough and have seen enough excerpts (and lived in business enough the last 5 years!) to get the point. And actually, Hot, Flat, and Crowded has enough of the “Flat” part in it that even if you haven’t read The Earth is Flat, you’ll get more than just the gist of it.

(This is the second post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT. Introductory post is here.)

Tuesday, March 17, Day 1

Extended stay hotel does not have a gym. Hopefully there is one at work
Walking into office for the first time. We are in a government building in a random town just south of Denver that houses the State Emergency Operations Center (SEOC) and the Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. These are the teams who are on point for emergency response in Colorado when there is any kind of fire, flood, cyberattack, or other emergency
MAJOR Imposter Syndrome – I don’t know anything about anything
7:45 meeting with Stan
8:15 department briefing
Met two deputies – Kacey Wulff and Kyle Brown. Both seem awesome. On loan from governor’s health care office and insurance department
Team “get to know you” was 4 minutes long. So different than calm normal
Emergency Operations Center in Department of Public Health
Small open room with over 100 people in it and everyone freaking out about not following best practices – no social distancing
Leader giving remote guidelines
Lots of “Sorry, who are you and why are you here?”
Local ops leader Mike Willis excellent – calm, inspirational, critical messages around teamwork, self-management, check ego at the door (turns out he is a retired Brigadier General)
HHS call – maxxed at 300 participants, people not getting through, leader had to ask people to volunteer to get off the line (oops)
Lunch and snacks in mass quantities here – it’s not quite Google, but this part does feel very startup. I wonder if the Emergency Ops Center does this all the time or just in a crisis. Guessing crisis only but still super nice. Also guessing I will gain weight this week between this and all gyms in the state being closed down
Lots of new people and acronyms
Multiple agencies at multiple layers of government require a lot of coordination and leadership that’s not always there, but everyone was incredibly clear, effective, low ego. A lot of overlap
Got my official badge – fancy
Jared calls – just spoke to Pence, his guy is going to call you – tell him what we need…”uh, ok, now all I have to do is figure out what we need!”
Fog of War – this room is healthy and bustling and a little disconnected from what’s going on, no freak out
Kacey and call from Lisa about Seattle being on “Critical Care” because they don’t have enough supplies, meaning they are prepared to let the sickest people die – oh shit, we can’t let that happen here (or is it too late?)
Got oriented, sort of
Slight orientation to broader command structure and team
My charter and structure are a little fuzzy, guess that’s why I’m here to figure that out
Late night working back at hotel. Thinking I will become a power user of UberEats this week

Wednesday, March 18, Day 2

Gym at work is closed along with all gyms everywhere. Looks like a lot of hotel floor exercises are in order
Ideas and efforts and volunteers coming in like mad and random from the private sector – no one to corral, some are good, some are duplicative, all are well intentioned. Lots of “solve the problem 5 ways”
Shelter in place? Every day saves thousands of lives in the model – credibility with governor
State-level work is so inefficient for global and national problems, but Trump said “every man for himself” basically when it comes to states
Not feeling productive
Productivity is in the eye of the beholder. Kacey totally calmed me down. Said I am adding value in ways I don’t think about (not sure if she was just being nice!):
- Connection to Governor really useful for crisis team
- Basic management and leadership stuff good
- Asking dumb questions
- Out of the box thinking
- Liaison to industry and understanding that ecosystem
- Arms and legs
- People used to working in teams on things – different expectations in general
Ok, so maybe I am helping
Colleague tells me about Drizly, the UberEats equivalent for alcohol delivery. Good discovery.

Thursday, March 19, Day 3

Weird – my back feels better than it has in months. Maybe it’s the pilates, but still, seems weird. I wonder if the higher altitude helps. If so, we will be moving to Nepal. Have to remember to mention that to family later
Governor Policy meeting 9 am – “Cuomo is killing it” – words matter – “shelter in place” and “extreme social distancing” debate
“The models are wrong – so let’s average them”
We need 10,000 ventilators. We have 700. Uh oh.
Raised issues around test types and team capacity…Gov expanded scope to include app and still pushing hard on test scaling. Gov asked for proposal for expanded scope and staff by 4:30. Guess that’s the day today!
Recruited Brad to lead Private Sector side of the IRT’s work. Important to have a great counterpart on that side. Glad he agreed to do it, even though he’s already vice chair of another state task force on Economic Recovery
Senior Ops leader interrupts someone during daily briefing – quietly says to the whole room “not vetted, not integrated, not helpful” – incredible. In the moment, in public which normally you don’t want to do but had no choice in this circumstance – 6 words gave actionable and gentle feedback. Great example of quiet leadership
Private sector inbound – well intentioned and innovative but overwhelming and hard to figure out how to fit in with public sector (e.g., financing to spin up distributed manufacturing)
Team huddled and created proposal for new name, structure, staffing, charter, rationale, etc.
Present to senior EOC staff for vetting, feedback
Feels like I’m adding value finally – plan creation and “bring stakeholders along for the ride” presentation/vetting AND getting the team to stop being hair on fire and focus on thinking and planning and staffing
Present to Gov – “brilliant” – then after, Kyle says “I’ve worked for multiple governors and senators, and this is the first time I’ve heard something called brilliant” (not sure it was brilliant)
Now to operationalize it, stand up a team, replace myself so I can get home once this is marching in the right direction at the right speed
Transferable skills (leadership, comms, strategy, planning) – not just missing context here but missing triple context – healthcare, public sector, CO
Day 3. Feels like longer
Still, feels like adding value now. Whew.
Dinner with a Return Path friend who came down to my hotel’s breakfast room, picked up takeout on the way, and sat 6 feet apart.

Stay tuned for more tomorrow…

The Books

Email Intelligence and the new Return Path

Return Path Core Values, Part II

The Gift of Feedback, Part III

More Good Inc.

It's Copyright Time

The Gift of Feedback, Part II

Should CEOs wade into Politics?

A Couple Tweaks to Running Great Board Meetings

I Don’t Want to Be Your Friend (Today)

Book Short: Two New Ones from Veteran Writers

State of Colorado COVID-19 Innovation Response Team, Part II – Getting Started, Days 1-3