Taking Stock, Part II

Last year, I wrote about the three questions I ask myself at the beginning of every year to make sure my career is still on track. [https://onlyonceblog.wpengine.com/2012/01/taking-stock]   The questions are:

1. Am I having fun at work?
2. Am I learning and growing as a professional?
3. Is my work financially rewarding enough, either in the short term or in the long term?

This year, I am adding a fourth suggestion following a great conversation I had a bunch of months back with Jerry Colonna, a great CEO coach, former VC, and all around great person.  Question four is:

Am I having the impact I want to have on the world?

This last question was probably always implicit in my first two questions – but I like calling it out separately.  All of us have purpose in our lives and impact on others, whether it’s family, friends, colleagues, clients, or some slice of broader humanity.  Asking whether that impact is present and enough is just another check and balance on my own operating system to make sure that I’m still on track with my own goals and values.

Happy New Year!

In 2005, I wrote a post called Unfolding the Map in which I looked at these two seemingly opposing philosophies from successful entrepreneurs:

• If you don’t have a map, you can’t get lost
• If you don’t have a map, you can’t get where you’re going

and tried to combine them when thinking about product roadmapping. The same contradiction and combination could be applied to anything, including coaching and development.

That’s why I was excited to read my friend Matt Spielman’s new book, Inflection Points: How to Work and Live with Purpose. Matt worked at Return Path twice over the years — first as employee #3 (more on that in a minute) and then over a decade later as CMO. We live near each other and know each other’s families. I’ve been lucky enough to see his career unfold and develop into what it is today, a flourishing coaching business called Inflection Point Partners that helps clients tremendously…and that also feeds Matt’s soul.

When I first met Matt and he joined me and Jack to launch Return Path in 1999, he was fresh out of business school and focused on sales and marketing from his prior career in investment banking. Our idea was that he would do the same for us as we got our product in market. But as I started focusing more on what kind of company we wanted to build and how to get there, Matt became my leading thought partner on those topics. When we got to about 25 people, he and I created a new role for him — head of Human Capital and Organization Development. While a bit clunky, that title meant that Matt was the principal person helping me create at small scale what we later branded our People First philosophy. That philosophy and the practices we developed out of it led to 20 years of a strong track record of investing in people and helping over 1,300 colleagues grow their careers by being simple, actionable, and broad-based in the way we handled feedback and development planning. This started back in 2000.

Matt’s book puts the ethos that I saw percolating over 20 years ago into a tight framework around his coaching methodology of the GPS (Game Plan System). The book is short and sweet and walks through both the philosophy and the framework in accessible terms. And while it’s true that you have to be open to new ideas, open to serendipity, and go with flow sometimes…it’s also true that if you have specific goals in mind, you are unlikely to achieve them without a focused effort.

I’ve written a lot about coaching lately between The Impact of a Good Coach and another recent post about a strong coaching framework about intentionality in Russell Benaroya’s book. In that second post, I noted that “While I have become less and less of a life planner as I’ve gotten older under the headline of ‘man plans, God laughs,’ I am a huge believer in being intentional about everything. And that pretty much sums up Matt’s book: If you don’t have a map, you can’t get where you’re going.

Book short:  Life Isn’t Just a Wiki

One of the best things I can say about Remote: Office Not Required,  by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, is that it was short.  That sounds a little harsh – part of what I mean is that business books are usually WAY TOO LONG to make their point, and this one was blessedly short.  But the book was also a little bit of an angry rant against bad management wrapped inside some otherwise good points about remote management.

The book was a particularly interesting read juxtaposed against Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last which I just finished recently and blogged about here, which stressed the importance of face-to-face and in-person contact in order for leaders to most effectively do their jobs and stay in touch with the needs of their organizations.

The authors of Remote, who run a relatively small (and really good) engineering-oriented company, have a bit of an extreme point of view that has worked really well for their company but which, at best, needs to be adapted for companies of other sizes, other employee types, and other cultures.  That said, the flip side of their views, which is the “everyone must be at their cubicle from 9 to 5 each day,” is even dumber for most businesses these days.  As usual with these things, the right answer is probably somewhere in between the extremes, and I was reminded of the African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go farm go together” when I read it.  Different target outcomes, different paths.

I totally agree with the authors around their comments about trusting employees and “the work is what matters.”  And we have a ton of flexibility in our work at Return Path.  With 400 people in the company, I personally spend six weeks over the summer working largely remote, and I value that time quite a bit.  But I couldn’t do it all the time.  We humans learn from each other better and treat each other better when we look at each other face to face.  That’s why, with the amount of remote work we do, we strongly encourage the use of any form of video conferencing at all times.  The importance of what the authors dismiss as “the last 1 or 2% of high fidelity” quality to the conversation is critical.  Being in person is not just about firing and hiring and occasional sync up, it’s about managing performance and building relationships.

Remote might have been better if the authors had stressed the value that they get out of their approach more than ranting against the approaches of others.  While there are serious benefits of remote work in terms of cost and individual productivity (particularly in maker roles), there are serious penalties to too much of it as well in terms of travel, communication burden, misunderstandings, and isolation.  It’s not for everyone.

Thanks to my colleague Hoon Park for recommending this to me.  When I asked Hoon what his main takeaway from the book was, he replied:

The importance of open communication that is archived (thus searchable), accessible (transparent and open to others) and asynchronous (doesn’t require people to be in the same place or even the same “timespace”).  I love the asynchronous communication that the teams in Austin have tried: chatrooms, email lists (that anyone can subscribe to or read the archives of), SaaS project management tools. Others I would love to try or take more advantage of include internal blogs (specifically the P2 and upcoming O2 WordPress themes; http://ma.tt/2009/05/how-p2-changed-automattic/), GitHub pull requests (even for non-code) and a simple wiki.

These are great points, and good examples of the kinds of systems and processes you need to have in place to facilitate high quality, high volume remote work.

Why I joined the DMA Board, and what you can expect of me in that role

I don’t normally think of myself as a rebel. But one outcome of the DMA’s recent proxy fight with Board member Gerry Pike is that I’ve been appointed to the DMA’s Board and its Executive Committee and have been labeled “part of the reform movement” in the trade press. While I wasn’t actively leading the charge on DMA reform with Gerry, I am very enthusiastic about taking up my new role.

I gave Gerry my proxy and support for a number of reasons, and those reasons will form the basis of my agenda as a DMA Board member. As a DMA member, and one who used to be fairly active, I have grown increasingly frustrated with the DMA over the past few years.

1. The DMA could be stronger in fighting for consumers’ interests. Why? Because what’s good for consumers is great for direct marketers. Marketing is not what it used to be, the lines between good and bad actors have been blurred, and the consumer is now in charge. The DMA needs to more emphatically embrace that and lead change among its membership to do the same. The DMA’s ethics operation seems to work well, but the DMA can’t and shouldn’t become a police state and catch every violation of every member company. Its best practices and guidelines take too long to produce and usually end up too watered down to be meaningful in a world where the organization is promoting industry self-regulation. By aggressively fighting for consumers, the DMA can show the world that a real direct marketer is an honest marketer that consumers want to hear from and buy from.

2. Despite a number of very good ideas, the DMA’s execution around interactive marketing has been lacking. The DMA needs to accept that interactive marketing IS direct marketing – not a subset, not a weird little niche. It’s the heart and soul of the direct marketing industry. It’s our future. The acquisition of the EEC has been one bright spot, but the DMA could do much more to make the EEC more impactful, grow its membership, and replicate it to extend the DMA’s reach into other areas of interactive marketing, from search to display advertising to lead generation. The DMA’s staff still has extremely limited experience in interactive marketing, they haven’t had a thought leader around interactive on staff for several years, and their own interactive marketing efforts are far from best practice. Finally, the DMA’s government affairs group, perhaps its greatest strength, still seems disproportionately focused on direct mail issues. The DMA should maintain its staunch support of traditional direct marketers while investing in the future, making interactive marketing an equal or larger priority than traditional direct marketing. We have to invest in the future.

3. Finally, I think the DMA suffers from a lack of transparency that doesn’t serve it well in the hyper-connected world we live in here in 2009 – that’s a nice way of saying the organization has a big PR problem. The organization does a lot of great work that never gets adequately publicized. This whole proxy fight episode is another example, both in the weak response from the DMA and also in a lot of the complaints Gerry lodged against the organization, many of which the organization says are untrue or misleading. Senior DMA execs or Board members should be blogging. They should be active thought leaders in the community. They should be much more engaged with their members to both understand member needs and requirements and more aggressively promote their agenda.

In short, I will be an independent voice who advocates for progress and change in the areas that I consider to be most important, and I will be transparent and open about expressing my views. I’ve already been clear with the existing DMA Board and management that I do have this agenda, and that I hope the organization will embrace it. If they do, even if only in part, I think it will be to the DMA’s benefit as well as the benefit of its members. If they reject it wholesale, my interest in long-term involvement will be fairly low.

That’s the story. As I said up front, I am taking up this new role with enthusiasm and with the belief that the DMA is open to change and progress. We’ll see how it goes, and I will blog about it as often as I can.

Do you have thoughts on the future of the DMA? I’d love to hear from you. You can leave a comment below or email me directly at matt at returnpath dot net.

Alter Ego

A couple people have asked me recently how I work with an Executive Assistant, what value that person provides, and even questioned the value of having that position in the company in an era where almost everything can be done in self-service, lightweight ways. At my old company (in the 90s), each VP-level person and up had a dedicated assistant – the world certainly doesn’t require that level of support any more.  In our case, Andrea has other tasks for the company that take up about half of her time.

I happen to have the absolute best, world class role model assistant in Andrea, who I’ve had the pleasure of working with for almost seven years now (which is a reminder to me that she has a sabbatical coming up soon!).

This is an important topic.  It’s tempting for CEOs of startups, and even companies that are just out of the startup phase, to want to do it all themselves…or feel like they don’t need help on small tasks.  My argument against those viewpoints is that your time is your scarcest resource as the leader of an organization, and anything you can do to create more of it for yourself is worthwhile.  And a good assistant does just that – literally creates time for you by offloading hundreds of small things from your plate that sure, you could do, but now you don’t have to.

I asked Andrea to write up for me a list of the major things she does for me (although she didn’t realize it was going to turn into a blog post at the time).  I’ll add my notes after each bullet point in italics on the value this creates for me.

• Updates and maintains calendar, schedules meetings and greets visitors – My calendar is like a game of sudoku sometimes.  I can and do schedule my own things, but Andrea handles a lot of it.  She also has access to all my staff’s calendars so she can just move things around to optimize for all of us.  Finally, she and I review my calendar carefully, proactively, to make sure I’m spending my time where I want to spend it (see another item below)
• Answers and screens direct phone line – The bigger we get, the more vendors call me. I can’t possibly take another call from a wealth management person or a real estate broker.  Screening is key for this!
• Plans and coordinates company-wide meetings and events – This is an extension of managing my calendar and accessing other executives’ calendars…and a pretty key centralized function.
• Plans and coordinates Executive Committee offsite’s – Same, plus as part of my theme of “act like you’re the host of a big party,” I like this to be planned flawlessly, every detail attended to.  I do a lot of that work with Andrea, but I need a partner to drive it.
• Collects and maintains confidential data – Every assistant I’ve ever had starts by swearing an oath around confidentiality.
• Prepares materials for Board Meetings and Executive Committee meetings – Building Board Books is time consuming and great to be able to offload.  We put together the table of contents, then everyone pours materials into Andrea, and poof!  We have a book.  For staff meetings, she manages the standing agenda, changes to it, and the flow of information and materials so everyone has what they need when they need it to make these meetings productive from start to finish.  In our case, Andrea is part of the Executive Committee and joins all of our meetings so she is completely up to speed on what’s going on in the company – this really enables her to add value to our work.  She’s also not just a passive participant – some great ideas have come from her over the years!
• Coordinates and books travel (domestic and international) – Painful and time consuming, not because Expedia is hard to use but because there is a lot of change, complexity, and tight calendars to manage and coordinate for certain trips.  And while it takes a while to get an assistant up to speed on how you like to travel or how you think about travel, this is a big time saver.
• Prepares expense reports – Same thing – you CAN do it, but easier not to.
• Manages staff gifts and Anniversary presents for all employees – This is a big one for me.  I send every employee an anniversary gift each year and call them.  Once a month, a stack of things to sign magically appears on my desk…and then gets distributed.  Andrea manages the schedule, the inventory of gifts, the distribution of gifts to managers.
• Manages investor database – I assume someday we’ll have a system for this, but for now, IR is a function that Andrea coordinates for me and Jack, my CFO.
• Assist Executive Committee with project as needed – The person in this role for you ends up being really valuable to help anyone on your staff with major projects.  Good use of time.
• Prepares Quarterly Time Analysis for CEO – This is a big one for me.  Every quarter, Andrea downloads my calendar and classifies all of my time, then produces an analysis showing me where I’m spending time my classifications are – Internal, External, non-RP, free, travel, Board/Investor.  This really helps us plan out the next quarter so I’m intentional about where I put my hours, and then it helps her manage my calendar and balance incoming requests.
• Help with communications – This one was not on Andrea’s list, but I’m adding it.  She ends up drafting some things for me (sometimes as small as an email, sometimes as large as a presentation, though with a lot more guidance), which is helpful…it’s always easier to edit something than create it.  I also usually ask Andrea to read any emails I send to ALL ahead of time to make sure they make sense from someone’s perspective other than my own, and she’s very helpful in shaping things that way.

This may not be true of all companies at all sizes and stages, but for companies like ours, I’d classify a great assistant as a bit of an alter ego, one definition of which is “second self” – literally an extension of you as CEO.  That means the person is acting AS YOU, not just doing things FOR YOU.  Think about the transitive property here.  Everything you do as CEO is (in theory) to propel the whole company forward.  So everything your alter ego does is the same.  A great assistant isn’t just your administrative assistant.  A great assistant is an overall enabler of company success and productivity.  You do have to invest a lot of time in getting someone up to speed in this role for them to be effective, and you have to pay well for performance, but a great assistant can literally double your productivity as CEO.

Why Email Stamps Are a Bad Idea

(also posted on the Return Path blog)

Rich Gingras, CEO of Goodmail is an incredibly smart and stand-up professional.  I’ve always liked him personally and had a tremendous amount of respect for him.  However, the introduction of the email stamp model by Goodmail is a radical departure from the current email ecosystem, and while I’m all for change and believe the spam problem is still real, I don’t think stamps are the answer.  Rich has laid out some of his arguments here in the DMNews blog, so I’ll respond to those arguments as well as add some others in this posting.  I will also comment on the DMNews blog site itself, but this posting will be more comprehensive and will include everything that’s in the other posting.

It seems that Goodmail’s main argument in favor of stamps is that whitelists don’t work.  While he clearly does understand ISPs (he used to work at one), he doesn’t seem to understand the world of publishers and marketers.  His solution is fundamentally hostile to the way they do business.  I’m happy to have a constructive debate with him about the relative merits of different approaches to solving the false positive problem for mailers and then let the market be the ultimate judge, as it should be.

First, whitelists are in fact working.  I know — Return Path runs one called Bonded Sender.  We have documented several places that Bonded Senders have a 21% lift on their inbox delivery rates over non-Bonded Senders.  It’s hard to see how that translates into “bad for senders” as Rich asserts.  When the average inbox deliverability rate is in the 70s, and a whitelist — or, by the way, organic improvements to reputation — can move the needle up to the 90s, isn’t that good?

Second, why, as Goodmail asserts, should marketers pay ISPs for spam-fighting costs?  Consumers pay for the email boxes with dollars (at AOL) or with ads (at Google/Yahoo/Hotmail).  Good marketers have permission to mail their customers.  Why should they have to pay the freight to keep the bad guys away?  And for that matter, why is the cost “necessary?”  What about those who can’t afford it?  We’ve always allowed non-profits and educational institutions to use Bonded Sender at no cost.  But beyond that, one thing that’s really problematic for mailers about the Goodmail stamp model is that different for-profit mailers have radically different costs and values per email they send.

For example, maybe a retailer generates an average of $0.10 per email based on sales and proit.  So the economics of a $0.003 Goodmail stamp would work.  However, they’re only paying $0.001 to deliver that email, and now Goodmail is asserting that they “only” need to pay $0.003 for the stamp.  But what about publishers who only generate a token amount per individual email to someone who receives a daily newsletter based on serving a single ad banner?  What’s their value per email?  Probably closer to $0.005 at most.  Stamps sound like they’re going to cost $0.003.  It’s hard to see how that model will work for content delivery — and content delivery is one of the best and highest uses of permission-based email.

Next, Rich’s assertion that IP-based whitelists are bad for ISPs and consumers because IP-based solutions have inherent technology flaws that allow senders to behave badly doesn’t make sense.  A cryptographically based solution is certainly more sophisticated technology — I’ve never doubted that.

In terms of the practical application, though, I’m not sure there’s a huge difference.  Either type of system (IP or crypto) can be breached, either one is trackable, and either one can shut a mailer out of the system immediately — the only difference is that one form of breach would be trackable at the individual email level and the other would only be trackable in terms of the pipeline or IP.  I’m not sure either one is more likely to be breached than the other — a malicious or errant spammy email can either be digitally signed or not, and an IP address can’t be hijacked or spoofed much like a digital signature can’t be spoofed.

It’s a little bit like saying your house in the suburbs is more secure with a moat and barbed wire fence around it than with locks on the doors and an alarm system.  It’s an accurate statement, but who cares?

I’m not saying that Return Path will never consider cryptographic-based solutions.  We absolutely will consider them, and there are some things around Domain Keys (DKIM) that are particularly appealing as a broad-based standard.  But the notion that ONLY a cryptographic solution works is silly, and the development of a proprietary technology for authentication and crypotgraphy when the rest of the world is trying desparately to standardize around open source solutions like DKIM is an understandable business strategy, but disappointing to everyone else who is trying to cooperate on standards for the good of the industry.  I won’t even get into the costs and time and difficulty that mailers and ISPs alike will have to incur to implement the Goodmail stamp system, which are real.  Now mailers are being told they need to implement Sender ID or SPF as an IP-based authentication protocol — and DKIM as a crypto-based protocol — and also Goodmail as a different, competing crypto-based protocol.  Oy vey!

Email stamps also do feel like they put the world on a slippery slope towards paid spam — towards saying that money matters more than reputation.  I’m very pleased to hear Goodmail clarify in the last couple of days that they are now considering implementing reputation standards around who qualifies for certified mail as well, since that wasn’t their original model.  That bodes well for their program and certainly removes the appearance of being a paid spam model.  However, I have heard some of the proposed standards that Goodmail is planning on using in industry groups, and the standards seem to be much looser than AOL’s current standards, which, if true, is incredibly disappointing to say the least.

Jupiter analyst David Daniels also makes a good point, which is that stamps do cost money, and money on the line will force mailers to be more cautious about “overmailing” their consumers.  But that brings me to my final point about organic deliverability.  The mailers who have the best reputations get delivered through most filtering systems.  Reputations are based largely on consumer complaints and unknown user rates.  So the mailers who do the best job of keeping their lists clean (not overmailing) and only sending out relevant, requested mail (not overmailing) are the ones that will naturally rise to the top in the world of organic deliverability.  The stamp model can claim one more forcing function here, but it’s only an incremental step beyond the forcing function of “fear of being filtered” and not worth the difficulty of adopting it, or the costs, or the risks associated with it.

Rich, I hope to continue to dialog with you, and as noted in my prior posting, I think separating the issues here is healthy.

It’s a Little Weird When Your Best Customer Experience of the Week is with the Government

Mariquita has been doing a lot of personal admin lately for us.  This week had a little surprise in it.

Verizon continues to be one of the most awful, painful vendors in the history of the universe.
At least their phone network is solid, since any interaction with the people at the company is so bad.  We came to the conclusion this week that they actually do some things which aren’t just the usual bad customer service or outrageous pricing — they have some policies in place that are literally designed to systematically rip off their customers.  The one we ran into was (after 45 minutes on and off hold, of course) that the data plans for Treos are prepaid for a month, but when you go to cancel your data plan, they tell you they HAVE TO cancel it the day you call, even if you have days or weeks left on your plan, and they CAN’T issue a refund for unused days.  But if you complain loudly enough, a supervisor can keep your service active through the end of your pre-pay, or can issue you a refund.  So in fact, they are telling their customer service reps to lie to their customers in the hope that their customers don’t push back so they can keep your money while not delivering your service.

She had a similarly bad experience dealing with our insurance company about car insurance.  State Farm just has a ridiculous set of procedures in place around changing car insurance that cause their customers to jump through hoops several times over for no apparent reason at all.  There have been several stupid things, but this week was needing to take a brand new car to get inspected before insuring it within three days of buying it.  But we had to take it to a specific mechanic on the “approved list” to get it inspected.  That place required an appointment (which meant two trips).  It couldn’t be done at the dealer.  Then the actual inspection lasted about 30 seconds.  Maybe they were just making sure there was an actual car, not a pretend car.  Harry Potter, beware.

And then came the surprise — Mariquita’s trip to the DMV to trade in our old license plates.  She was in and out in under 5 minutes with a prompt, efficient, friendly person handling the transaction with a smile.  Wonders never cease.

It doesn’t take a lot to be great at customer service, just the right mindset and culture.  It’s amazing that Albany (or at least a small pocket therein) seems to have figured that out before some of the biggest companies around.

This is the third post in the series. The first one When to hire your first CPO is here and What does Great Look Like in a CPO is here).

Chief Privacy Officers who aren’t scaling well past the startup stage are the ones who typically have the following characteristics and you should look for some of these telltale signs.

First, if your Chief Privacy Officer looks at you sideways when you ask for a strategy or even a mitigation plan for a breach, then you might have a bigger problem than the fact that you don’t have a plan.  While we like to talk about things like Privacy by Design and using data protection as an offensive strategic weapon, the reality is that Chief Privacy Officers need to have actionable plans in place at all times for the areas where they judge your company to be the most vulnerable.  If you ask to see the plan or get briefed on it and you get back a blank stare, you know you have a reactive person on your hands for what needs to be a thoughtful proactive role.

Second, you might have a Chief Privacy Officer who is not scaling if they would rather lecture you on GDPR than talk about why your data protection plan will win business.  Privacy people can be geeky, legally-oriented, policy-focused and very technical.  All that is well and good but there is so much more that a great Privacy Officer can do. For example, if your Chief Privacy Officer can’t engage in strategy with you and other executives and understand the levers of your business and how their role can help further them, you may as well use an outside law firm instead of taking up a valuable seat at the table internally.

The Privacy team can be small and somewhat insulated from the business, but your Chief Privacy Officer needs to be able to engage the entire company, they need to be thinking strategically about the business, and they need to have short- and long-term plans in place for contingencies and forseeable roadblocks. If they can’t bring these skills to the table at startup scale, how can they bring them to the table when things really take off?

(You can find this post on the Bolster Blog here)

What a View

We’ve done 360-degree reviews for five years now at Return Path.  Rather than the traditional one-way, manager-written performance review, we instituted 360s to give us a “full view” of an employee’s performance.  Reviews are contributed by the person being reviewed (a self assessment), the person’s manager, any of the person’s subordinates, and a handful of peers or other people in the company who work with the person.  They’re done anonymously, and they’re used to craft employees’ development plans for the next 12 months.

The results of 360 are a wonderful management tool.  Mine in particular have always been far more enlightening than the one-way reviews of the past.  The commonality in the feedback from different people is a little bit of what one former manager of mine used to say — when three doctors tell you you’re sick, go lie down.

I know a lot of companies do 360s, but we had two great learnings this year that I thought were worth noting.  First, we automated the process (used to manual in Excel and Word) by using an ASP solution called e360 Reviews from Halogen Software.  It was GREAT.  The tool must have saved us 75% of the administrative time in managing the process, and it made the process of doing the reviews much easier and more convenient as well.  I strongly recommend it.

Second, we started a new tradition of doing Live 360s for the senior staff here.  All people who filled out a review for a senior staff member were invited into an hour-long meeting that was moderated by a great organizational development consultancy we work with, Marc Maltz and Nancy Penner from Triad Consulting.  The purpose of each meeting was to resolve any conflicting comments in the reviews and prioritize strengths as well as development objectives.  We also did a very quick session where the senior staff did “speed reviews” in person of the rest of the company’s leadership team that tried to accomplish similar objectives in a much more compressed time frame and format.

So far (we’re in the middle of them — actually, the team is doing my review as I write this), the results are wonderful.  We’re going to end up producing MUCH crisper and more actionable development plans for our senior staff this year than we ever have in the past.  And the tone of the meetings has been incredibly supportive and constructive.  Having an outside moderator made a huge difference.

And yes, just in case you’re wondering, it is a little bit unnerving to know that a room full of 15 people is discussing you.  Especially when you can hear them all laughing through the wall.  🙂

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:

1. We believe that people come first
2. We believe in doing the right thing
3. We solve problems together and always present problems with potential solutions or paths to solutions
4. We believe in keeping the commitments we make, and communicate obsessively when we can’t
5. We don’t want you to be embarrassed if you make a mistake; communicate about it and learn from it
6. We believe in being transparent and direct
7. We challenge complacency, mediocrity, and decisions that don’t make sense
8. We believe that results and effort are both critical components of execution
9. We are serious and passionate about our job and positive and light-hearted about our day
10. We are obsessively kind to and respectful of each other
11. We realize that people work to live, not live to work
12. We are all owners in the business and think of our employment at the company as a two-way street
13. We believe inboxes should only contain messages that are relevant, trusted, and safe

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!

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.