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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!

Book Short: What’s For Dinner Tonight, Honey?

The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, by Barry Schwartz, presents an enlightening, if somewhat distressing perspective on the proliferation of options and choices facing the average American today. The central thesis of the book is that some choice is better than no choice (I’d rather be able to pick blue jeans or black jeans), but that limited choice may be better in the end than too much choice (how do I know that the jeans I really want are relaxed cut, tapered leg, button fly, etc.?). We have this somewhat astonishing, recurring conversation at home every night, with the two of us sitting around paralyzed about where to eat dinner.

The author’s arguments and examples are very interesting throughout, and his “Laffer curve” type argument about choice vs. too much choice rings true. While there’s obviously no conclusive proof about this, the fact that our society is more rife with depression than ever before at least feels like it has a correlation with the fact that most of us now face a proliferation of choices and decisions to make exponentially more than we used to. The results of this involve ever-mounting levels of regret, or fear of regret, as well as internal struggles with control and expectations. Perhaps the best part of the book is the final chapter, which ties a lot of the material of the book together with 11 simple suggestions to cope better with all the choices and options in life — summed up in the last few words of the book suggestions that “choice within constraints, freedom within limits” is the way to go. Amen to that. We all need some basic structure and frameworks governing our lives, even if we create those constructs ourselves. The absence of them is chaos.

Overall, this is a good social science kind of read, not overwhelming, but definitely interesting for those who are students of human psychology, marketing, and decision making. It’s squarely in the genre of Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Blink, and Robert Cialdini’s Influence, most of which I’ve written about recently, and though not as engaging as Gladwell, worth a read on balance if you like the genre.

Thanks to my friend Jonathan Shapiro for this book.

Book Short: Internet True Crime

Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet, by Joseph Menn (book, kindle) was a bit of a disappointment. I was really hoping for more of an explanation of how the “business” of Internet crime works — what the economics are like, what the landscape/scope/sectors are like, who the players are.

What I got was a bit of a true crime novel, the story of Barrett Lyon and Andy Crocker, who are respectively a geek and a cop, and their very specific stories of tracking down a handful of internet criminals around a handful of technical tactics (DDOS attacks and botnets). It wasn’t bad, the stories were ok and occasionally entertaining, but it was very narrow.

It felt to me like there is a much more interesting story to tell around criminals who USE the Internet to commit crimes as opposed to people attacking the infrastructure. Has anyone ever run across a book like that?

Book Short: Is CX the new UX?

Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business, by Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine from Forrester Research, was a good read that kept crossing back and forth between good on the subject at hand, and good business advice in general. The Customer Experience (CX) movement is gaining more and more steam these days, especially in B2B companies like Return Path. The authors define Customer Experience as “how your customers perceive their interactions with your company,” and who doesn’t care about that?

A few years ago, people started talking a lot more about User Experience (UX) as a new crossover discipline between design and engineering, and our experience at Return Path has been that UX is an incredibly powerful tool in our arsenal to build great technical products via lean/agile methods. The recurring thought I had reading this book, especially for companies like ours, was “Is CX the new UX?”

In other words, should we just be taking the same kind of lean/agile approach to CX that we do with technical product development and UX — but basically do it more holistically across every customer touchpoint, from marketing to invoice? It’s hard to see the answer being “no” to that question, although as with all things, the devil is in the implementation details. And that’s true at the high level (the authors talk about making sure you align CX strategy with corporate strategy and brand attributes and values) as well as a more granular level (what metrics get tracked for CX, and how do those align with the rest of the companies KPIs).

The book’s framework for CX is six high-level disciplines: strategy, customer understanding, design, measurement, governance, and culture — but you really have to read the book to get at the specifics.

Some other thoughts and quotes from the book:

the book contains some good advice on how to handle management of cross-functional project teams in general (which is always difficult), including a good discussion of various governance models
“to achieve the full potential of customer experience as a business strategy, you have to change the way you run your business. You must manage from the perspective of your customers, and you must do it in a systematic, repeatable, and disciplined way.”
one suggestion the book had for weaving the customer experience into your culture (if it’s not there already) is to invite customers to speak all-hands meetings
another suggestion the book had for weaving the customer experience into everyone’s objectives was one company’s tactic of linking compensation (in this case, 401k match) to customer experience metrics
“Customer Experience is a journey, not a project. It has a beginning but it doesn’t have an end.”

Thanks to my colleague Jeremy Goldsmith for recommending this book.

Book Short: Fixing America

I usually only blog about business books, but since I occasionally comment on politics, I thought I would also post on That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, by Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum (book, Kindle), which I just finished.

There is much that is good about America. And yet, there is much that is broken and in need of serious repair. I wrote about some thought on fixing our political system last year in The Beginnings of a Roadmap to Fix America’s Badly Broken Political System?, but fixing our political system can only do so much. Tom Friedman, with whom I usually agree a lot, but only in part, nailed it in his latest book. Instead of blaming one party or the other (he points the finger at both!), he blames our overall system, and our will as a people, for the country’s current problems.

The authors talk about the four challenges facing America today – globalization, the IT revolution, deficits and debt, and rising energy demand and climate change, and about how the interplay of those four challenges are more long term and less obvious than challenges we’ve faced as a country in the past, like World Wars or The Great Depression, or even The Great Recession. The reason, according to the authors, that we have lost our way a bit in the last 20-40 years, is that we have strayed from the five-point formula that has made us successful 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

It’s hard not to be in violent agreement with the book as a normal person with common sense. Even the last point of the five-point formula, which can rankle those on the right, makes sense when you read the specifics. And the authors rail against excessive regulation enough in the book to give them credibility on this point.

The authors’ description of the labor market of the future and how we as a country can be competitive in it is quite well thought through. And they have some other great arguments to make – for example, about how the prior decade of wars was, for the first time in American history, not accompanied by tax increases and non-essential program cuts; or about how we can’t let ourselves be held hostage to AARP and have “funding old age” trump “funding youth” at every turn.

The one thing I disagree with a bit is the authors’ assertion that “we cannot simply cut our way to fiscal sanity.” I saw a table in the Wall Street Journal the same day I was reading this book that noted the federal budget has grown from $2.6T in 2007 to $3.6T today – 40% in four years! Sure sounds to me like mostly a spending program, though I do support closing loopholes, eliminating subsidies, and potentially some kind of energy tax for other reasons.

I’ll save their solution for those who read the book. It’s not as good as the meat of the book itself, but it’s solid, and it actually mirrors something my dad has been talking about for a while now. If you care about where we are as a country and how we can do better, read this book!

Book Short: Hire Great

It’s certainly not hiring season for most of America The World The Universe, but we are still making some limited hires here at Return Path, and I thought – what better time to retool our interviewing and hiring process than in a relatively slow period?

So I just read Who: The A Method for Hiring, by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. It’s a bit of a sequel, or I guess more of a successor book, to the best book I’ve ever read about hiring and interviewing, Topgrading, by Geoff Smart and his father Brad (post, link to buy). This one wasn’t bad, and it was much shorter and crisper.

I’m not sure I believe the oft-quoted stat that a bad hire costs a company $1.5mm. Maybe sometimes (say, if the person embezzles $1.4mm), but certainly the point that bad hires are a nightmare for an organization in any number of ways is well taken. The book does a good job of explaining the linkage from strategy and execution straight to recruiting, with good examples and tips for how to create the linkage. That alone makes it a worthwhile read.

The method they describe may seem like common sense, but I bet 95 out of 100 companies don’t come close. We are very good and quite deliberate about the hiring process and have a good success average, but even we have a lot of room to improve. The book is divided into four main sections:

Scorecard: creating job descriptions that are linked to company strategy and that are outcome and competency based, not task based
Sourcing: going beyond internal and external recruiters to make your entire company a talent seeker and magnet
Selection: the meat of the book – good detail on how to conduct lots of different kinds of interviews, from screening to topgrading (a must) to focused to reference
Sell: how to reel ’em in once they’re on the line (for us anyway, the least useful section as we rarely lose a candidate once we have an offer out)

One of the most poignant examples in the book centered around hiring someone who had been fired from his previous job. The hiring method in the book uncovered it (that’s hard enough to do sometimes) but then dug deep enough to understand the context and reasons why, and, matching up what they then knew about the candidate to their required competencies and outcomes for the job, decided the firing wasn’t a show-stopper and went ahead and made the hire.

I’d think of these two books the way I think about the Covey books. If you have never read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, you could just get away with reading Stephen Covey’s newer book, The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness, though the original is much richer.

Book Short: Sloppy Sequel

SuperFreakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, wasn’t a bad book, but it wasn’t nearly as good as the original Freakonomics, either. I always find the results of “naturally controlled experiments” and taking a data-driven view of the world to be very refreshing. And as much as I like the social scientist versions of these kinds of books like Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Blink (book; blog post), there’s usually something about reading something data driven written by a professional quant jock that’s more reassuring.

That’s where SuperFreakonomics fell down a bit for me. Paul Krugman has described the book in a couple different places as “snarky and contrarian.” I typically enjoy books that carry those descriptors, but this one seemed a bit over the top for economists — like a series of theories looking for data more than raw data adding up to theories.Nowhere is this more true than the chapter on climate change. It’s a shame that that chapter seems to be swallowing up all the public discussion about the book, because there are some good points in that chapter, and the rest of the book is better than that particular chapter, but such is life.

As with all things related to the environment, I turned to my friend Andrew Winston’s blog, where he has a good post about how the authors kind of miss the point about climate change…and he also has a series of links to other blog posts debunking this one chapter. If you’re into the topic, or if you read the book, follow the chain here for good reading. My conclusion about this chapter, being at least somewhat informed about the climate change debate, is that the book seems to have sloppy writing and editing at best, possibly deliberately misleading at worst. (Incidentally, the reaction in the blogosphere seems highly emotional, other than Andrew’s, which probably doesn’t serve the reactors well.)

But I’ll assume the best of intentions. Some of the points made aren’t bad – there is no debate about the problem or the need to solve it, the authors express legitimate concern that current solutions, especially those requiring behavioral change, will be too little too late, and most interestingly, they show an interest in alternative approaches like geo-engineering. I hadn’t been familiar with that topic at all, but I’m now much more interested in it, not because it’s a “silver bullet” approach to dealing with climate change, but because it’s a different approach, and complex problems like climate change deserve to have a wide range of people working on multiple types of solutions. I met Nathan Myhrvold once (I almost threw up on him during a job interview, which is another story for another day), and it makes me very happy that his brilliance is being applied to this problem as a general principle.

As I said, though, beyond this one chapter, the book is good-not-great. But it certainly is chock full of cocktail party nuggets!

The Gift of Feedback, Part IV

I wrote a few weeks ago about my live 360 – the first time I’ve ever been in the room for my own review discussion. I now have a development plan drafted coming out of the session, and having cycled it through the contributors to the review, I’m ready to go with it. As I did in 2008, 2009, and 2011, I’m posting it here publicly. This time around, there are three development items:

Continue to spend enough time in-market. In particular, look for opportunities to spend more time with direct clients. There was a lot of discussion about this at my review. One director suggested I should spend at least 20% of my time in-market, thinking I was spending less than that. We track my time to the minute each quarter, and I spend roughly 1/3 of my time in-market. The problem is the definition of in-market. We have a lot of large partners (ESPs, ISPs, etc.) with whom I spend a lot of time at senior levels. Where I spend very little time is with direct clients, either as prospects or as existing clients. Even though, given our ASP, there isn’t as much leverage in any individual client relationship, I will work harder to engage with both our sales team and a couple of larger accounts to more deeply understand our individual client experience.
Strengthen the Executive Committee as a team as well as using the EC as the primary platform for driving accountability throughout the organization. On the surface, this sounds like “duh,” isn’t that the CEO’s job in the first place? But there are some important tactical items underneath this, especially given that we’ve changed over half of our executive team in the last 12 months. I need to keep my foot on the accelerator in a few specific ways: using our new goals and metrics process and our system of record (7Geese) rigorously with each team member every week or two; being more authoritative about the goals that end up in the system in the first place to make sure my top priorities for the organization are being met; finishing our new team development plan, which will have an emphasis on organizational accountability; and finding the next opportiunity for our EC to go through a management training program as a team.
Help stakeholders connect with the inherent complexity of the business. This is an interesting one. It started out as “make the business less complex,” until I realized that much of the competitive advantage and inherent value from our business comes fom the fact that we’ve built a series of overlapping, complex, data machines that drive unique insights for clients. So reducing complexity may not make sense. But helping everyone in and around the business connect with, and understand the complexity, is key. To execute this item, there are specifics for each major stakeholder. For the Board, I am going to experiment with a radically simpler format of our Board Book. For Investors, Customers, and Partners, we are hard at work revising our corporate positioning and messaging. Internally, there are few things to work on — speaking at more team/department meetings, looking for other opportunities to streamline the organization, and contemplating a single theme or priority for 2015 instead of our usual 3-5 major priorities.

Again, I want to thank everyone who participated in my 360 this year – my board, my team, a few “lucky” skip-levels, and my coach Marc Maltz. The feedback was rich, the experience of observing the conversation was very powerful, and I hope you like where the development plan came out!

Book Short: A Good Dose of Introspection

I rarely blog about non-business books since this is a business blog — and I read a lot of them! But occasionally, one manages to slip in, and this time, it’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom. From the author of Tuesdays With Morrie, which I also liked quite a bit, this one is excellent. And a very, very quick read.

The book, in short (i.e., a book short <g>), is about a guy who dies, and who, in heaven, meets five people who have shaped his life and died before him. Some he knows well, some he knows barely, some he’s never met. Each one tells him a story that explains some part of his life to him and in doing so, helps him understand more about himself and why/how he lived on earth.

The book, as I said, is a short read. But more than that, it’s a wonderful story and provides an opportunity for a structured moment of introspection, one that I found very valuable. Quite frankly, this book should be a “once every year or two” read.

Book Short: You’d Never Run Your Business This Way…

I am an unabashed conservative, so you might wonder what I was doing reading A Country That Works, by union chief Andy Stern, the President of SEIU (Service Workers International Union) this weekend. Well, part of it is that my mother-in-law Carmen works for him. Part was that he was quite inspiring during his recent appearance on the Colbert Report a week or two ago. And part was that I always like reading about different points of view, especially with the current, somewhat dismal state of the Republican leadership in Washington.

The book was very short and a worthwhile read. I may not agree with Stern on some of his illustrations of the problems — his statistical presentations were a bit apples-to-oranges at times — and some of his solutions, which were a bit high on the big-government-tax-and-spend side for me, but the book was very plain-speak, apolitical, and solution-oriented, all of which I found refreshing.

He certainly had at least one underlying premise about “labor as electricity ” (compete on something else other than forcing wages to go lower) that is making me think hard about my long-standing philosophical opposition to federally-mandated minimum wages. His notion of the importance of a global labor movement to act as a check/balance on corporate globalization both make sense. Actually, now that I think about it, those two things put together start working well as one plank in a solution to global poverty.

But the best part of the book was the fact that Stern is clear that, like his ideas or hate them, he is at least proposing that we DEAL with them. America is missing serious debate about some critical issues facing our society. Anyone who doesn’t think we have serious problems facing our future around retirement savings, education, and health care is not facing reality. The debate happening in Washington today is weak at best, and over-politicized.

The bottom line is that I think we’re in danger as a country of boiling the frog when it comes to some major structural issues in our society, and, most important to me, You’d Never Run Your Business This Way. Any good entrepreneur knows that when danger lurks around the corner, you have to reinvent yourself, and we as a country aren’t doing that at this moment when we’d benefit from it greatly for the long term. Stern displays that mix of optimism for the future and serious reality check today known as the Stockdale Paradox and revered by Jim Collins in his two books on corporate leadership, Good to Great and Built to Last.

My biggest criticism of the book was that it was too short. It was basically 1/3 Andy’s story, 1/3 SEIU’s story, and 1/3 labor’s story — and it could have been at least twice as long and gone into more detail on Stern’s points, especially in the last chapter where he starts spelling out his plan to get America back on track. But presumably when Stern runs for national office or gets a cabinet appointment someday (no inside knowledge here, but the book certainly reads that way), he’ll flesh things out a bit!

Book Short: Chock Full O Management & Leadership

I just finished The Better People Leader, by Charles Coonradt, which was a very short, good, rich read. It was a pretty expansive book on management & leadership topics — 100 short pages of material that are probably covered by 1,000 pages in other books.

What separates this book from the pack is the rich examples from non-business life that Coonradt sprinkles throughout the book. They include the tale of a special ed kid who became a mainstream student within a year because his teacher had the courage to ask his fellow students to treat him normally, and the story of how Korean War POWs died in massive numbers not from physical torture but from negative feedback loops.

The closing quote of the book says it all, from Ronald Reagan: “A great leader is not necessarily one who does the greatest things. He is the one who gets the people to do the greatest things.” This book gives you quick tips on how to do just that.