As I mentioned in last week’s post, I’m rebooting my work self this year, and this quarter in particular.  One of the things I am doing is getting back to basics on a few fronts.

Over the holiday break, as I was contemplating a reboot, I emailed a handful of people with whom I’ve worked closely over the years, but for the most part people with whom I no longer work day in day out, to ask them a few questions.  The questions were fairly backward looking:

1.       When I was at my best, what were my personal habits or routines that stand out in your mind?

2.       When I was at my best, what were my work behaviors or routines that stand out in your mind?

3.       When our EC was at its best, what were the team dynamics that caused it to function so well?

I got some wonderful responses, including one which productively challenged the premise of asking backward-looking questions as I was trying to reboot for the future.  (The answer is that this was one of several things I was doing as part of Rebooting, not the only thing, and historical perspective is one of many useful tools.)

Although the question clearly led itself to this, the common theme across all the answers was “back to basics.”  Part of evolving myself as a CEO as the company has grown over the years has been stopping doing particular things and starting others intentionally.  I try to do that at least once a year.  But what this particular exercise taught me is that, like the proverbial boiled frog, there were a slew of small and medium-sized things that I’ve stopped doing over the years unintentionally that are positive and productive habits that I miss.  I have a long list of these items, and I probably won’t want or need to get to all of them.  But there are a few that I think are critical to my success for various reasons.  Some of the more noteworthy ones are:

• Blogging, which I mentioned in last week’s post as an important way for me to reflect and crystallize my thinking on specific topics
• Ensuring that I have enough open time on my calendar to breathe, think, keep current with things.  When every minute of every day is scheduled, I am working harder, but not smarter
• Be more engaged with people at the office.  This relates to having open time on the calendar.  Yesterday I sat in our kitchen area and had a quick lunch with a handful of colleagues who I don’t normally interact with.  It was such a nice break from my routine of “sit at desk, order food in” or “important business lunch,” I got to clear my head a little bit, and I got to know a couple things about a couple people in the office that I didn’t previously know
• Get closer to the front lines internally.  Although I’ve maintained good external contacts as the company has grown with key clients and partners, our multi-business-unit structure has had me too disconnected from Sales and Engineering/Product in particular.  This one may take a couple months to enact, but I need to get closer to the action internally to truly understand what’s going on in the business
• Get back to a rigorous use of a single Operating System.  I’ve written a lot about this over the years, but having a David-Allen style, single place where I track all critical to do’s for me and for my team has always been bedrock for me.  I’ve been experimenting with some different ways of doing this over the last couple years, which has led to a breakdown in Allen’s main principle of “put it all in one place” – so I am going to work on fixing that
• Reading – while I have been consistently and systematically working my way through American history and Presidential biographies books over the years, I’ve almost entirely stopped reading other books for lack of time.  A well-balanced reading diet is critical for me.  So I’m working in some other books now from the other genres I love – humor (Martini Wonderland is awesome), architecture (see last week’s post on The Fountainhead), current events (I’m in the middle of Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project and next up is Tom Friedman’s Thank You For Being Late), and business books (about to start Kotter’s A Sense of Urgency)
• Like reading, doing something creative and unrelated to work has always been an important part of keeping my brain fresh.  Coaching little league has helped a lot.  But I need to add something that’s more purely creative.  I am still deciding between taking guitar lessons (I halfway know how to play) and sculpting lessons (I don’t know a thing about it)

That’s it for now.  There are other basics that I never let lapse (for example, exercise).  But the common theme of the above, I realize now that I am writing it all out, isn’t only “back to basics.”  It’s about creating time and space for me to be fresh and exercise different muscles instead of grinding it out all day, every day.  And that’s well worth the few minutes it took me and my friends to work up this list!

Hopefully I’ll have more to say on the general topic of rebooting in another week or two as January craziness sets in with our annual kickoff meetings around the world.

How to Ask For a Raise

I’m guessing this topic will get some good play, both internally at Return Path and externally.  It’s an important topic for many reasons, although one of the best ones I can think of is that most people aren’t comfortable asking for raises (especially women and more introverted people, according to lots of research as well as Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In).

My whole point in writing this is to make compensation part of normal conversations between a manager and a team member.  This requires the manager making it comfortable (without negative stigma), and the employee approaching it maturely.

My guess is that the two most common ways most people ask for raises when they bother to do so are (1) they get another job offer and try to get their current employer to match, or (2) they come to their boss with a very emotional appeal about how hard they are working, or that they heard Sally down the hall makes more money than they do, and that’s not fair.  Although either one may work (particularly the first one), there’s a better way to think about the whole process that removes the emotion and produces a better outcome for both employer and company.

Compensation is fundamentally a data-driven process for companies.  The high-level data inputs are the size of payroll, the amount of aggregate increase the company can afford, and the framework for distributing that aggregate increase by department or by level of performance.  A second set of position- or person-specific data looks at performance within a level, promotions, and internal leveling, and external comparables.  Fundamentally, smart companies will approach compensation by paying people fairly (both internally and externally) to do their jobs so they keep their best people from looking for new jobs because of compensation.

If compensation is a data-driven process for companies, employees should treat asking for raises as a data-driven process, too.  How can you go about that?  What data can you bring to a compensation conversation with your manager to make it go as smoothly as possible?

1. Let your manager know ahead of time that you’d like to discuss your compensation at your next 1:1, so he or she is prepared for that topic to come up.Blindsiding will never result in a calm and collected conversation.
2. Be mindful of the company’s compensation cycle timing.  If the company has an annual process and you are just about to hit it (within 2-3 months), then consider carefully whether you want to ask for a raise off-cycle, or whether you just want to give your manager data to consider for the company’s normal cycle.  If you’re really off-cycle (e.g., 4-8 months away), then you should note to your manager that you’re specifically asking for off-cycle consideration
3. Bring internal data:  your most recent performance review or ratings as well as any other specific feedback or praise you’ve received from your manager, colleagues, or senior people.  See below for one additional thought on internal data
4. Bring external data:  bring in compensation and job requirement and scope data from multiple online sources, or even from recruiters if you’ve been called recently and asked about comp and scope of roles.  The most important parts here are the two I bolded – you can’t just bring in a single data point, and you also have to include detailed job scope and requirements to make your point.  If you only find one data point that supports a raise, expect your manager or HR team to counter with five that don’t.  If you bring in examples that aren’t truly comparable (the title is right, but the scope is way off, or the job requirements call for 10 years of experience when you have 5), then expect your manager to call you out on that
5. Recognize that cash compensation is only one part of the mix.  Obviously an important part, but not the only part.  Incentive compensation, equity, perks (gym membership, healthcare, etc. – they all add up!), and even company environment and lifestyle are all important considerations and important levers to pull in terms of your total compensation
6. Have the conversation in a non-emotional manner.  State your position clearly and unambiguously – you feel you deserve a raise of Q because of X, Y, and Z.  Tell your manager that you enjoy your job and the company and want to continue working there, fairly paid and amply motivated.  Don’t threaten to quit if you don’t get your way, leave the acrimony at the door, set a follow-up date for the next conversation to give your manager time to think about it and discuss it with HR, and be careful about citing your colleagues’ compensation (see next point)

The one piece of data that’s tricky to surface is internal comparables.  Even the most transparent organizations usually treat compensation data as confidential.  Now, most companies are also not idiots, and they realize that people probably talk about compensation at the water cooler.  But bringing up a specific point like “I know what Sally makes, and I make less, and that’s not fair” is likely to agitate a manager or executive because of the confidentiality of compensation.  However, as one point among many, simply asking your manager, “do you feel like my compensation is fair relative to internal comparables for both my position and performance?” and even asking questions like “which positions internally do you think are good comparables for my compensation?” are both fair game and will make your point in a less confrontational or compromising manner.

Managers, how can you best handle situations where employees come in to discuss their compensation with you?

1. Most important are two things you can do proactively here.  First, be sure to set a tone with your team that they should always be comfortable talking to you about compensation openly and directly.  That you might or might not agree with them, but the conversation is safe – remove the stigma.  Second, be proactive yourself.  Make sure you’re in touch with market rates for the roles on your team.  Make sure you’re rewarding high performers with more responsibility and more money.  And make sure you don’t let “job scope creep” happen where you just load up your good people quietly with more responsibility and don’t officially change their scope/title/comp
2. If the employee does not more or less follow the steps above and approach this in a planful, non-emotional way, I’d suggest stopping him before the conversation gets more than one or two sentences in.  Empathize with his concern, hand him a copy of this blog post, and tell him to come back in a week ready to talk.  That saves both of you from an unnecessarily uncomfortable conversation, and it gives you time to prepare as well (see next item)
3. If the employee does more or less follow the steps above and approaches this rationally, then listen, empathize, take good notes, and agree to the follow-up meeting.  Then sit with your manager or department head or HR to review the data surfaced by the employee, develop your own data-driven perspective, and respond in the meeting with the employee with data, regardless of your response.  If you do give a raise, the data makes it less about “I like you.”  If you don’t, you can emphasize the employee’s importance to you and steer the discussion towards “how to make more money in the future” by expanding role scope or improving performance

I hope this advice is helpful for both managers and employees.  Compensation is a weird topic – one of the weirdest at companies, but it need not be so awkward for people to bring up.

Job 1

The first “new” post in my series of posts about Return Path’s 14 Core Values is, fittingly,

Job 1:  We are all responsible for championing and extending our unique culture as a competitive advantage.

The single most frequently asked question I have gotten internally over the last few years since we grew quickly from 100 employees to 350 has been some variant of “Are you worried about our ability to scale our culture as we hire in so many new people?”  This value is the answer to that question, though the short answer is “no.”

I am not solely responsible for our culture at Return Path. I’m not sure I ever was, even when we were small.  Neither is Angela, our SVP of People.  That said, it was certainly true that I was the main architect and driver of our culture in the really early years of the company’s life.  And I’d add that even up to an employee base of about 100 people, I and a small group of senior or tenured people really shouldered most of the burden of defining and driving and enforcing our culture and values.

But as the business has grown, the amount of responsibility that I and those few others have for the culture has shrunk as a percentage of the total.  It had to, by definition.  And that’s the place where cultures either scale or fall apart.  Companies who are completely dependent on their founder or a small group of old-timers to drive their cultures can’t possibly scale their cultures as their businesses grow.  Five people can be hands on with 100.  Five people can’t be hands on with 500.  The way we’ve been able to scale is that everyone at the company has taken up the mantle of protecting, defending, championing, and extending the culture.  Now we all train new employees in “The RP Way.”  We all call each other out when we fail to live up to our values.  And the result is that we have done a great job of scaling our culture with our business.

I’d also note that there are elements of our culture which have changed or evolved over the last few years as we’ve grown.  That isn’t a bad thing, as I tell old-timers all the time.  If our products stayed the same, we’d be dead in the market.  If our messaging stayed the same, we’d never sell to a new cohort of clients.  If our values stayed the same, we’d be out of step with our own reality.

Finally, this value also folds in another important concept, which is Culture as Competitive Advantage.  In an intellectual capital business like ours (or any on the internet), your business is only as good as your people.  We believe that a great culture brings in the best people, fosters an environment where they can work at the top of their games even as they grow and broaden their skills, increases the productivity and creativity of the organization’s output through high levels of collaboration, and therefore drives the best performance on a sustained basis.  This doesn’t have to be Return Path’s culture or mean that you have to live by our values.  This could be your culture and your values.  You just have to believe that those things drive your success.

Not a believer yet?  Last year, we had voluntary turnover of less than 1%.  We promoted or gave new assignments to 15% of our employees.  And almost 50% of our new hires were referred by existing employees.  Those are some very, very healthy employee metrics that lead directly to competitive advantage.  As does our really exciting announcement last week of being #11 in the mid-sized company on Fortune Magazine’s list of the best companies to work for.

How to Wow Your Manager

Last week, I talked about how to Wow your employees.  Now I am going to discuss the converse of that – How to Wow your Manager.  Why Wow your manager?  Even if you are senior leader in an organization, the Wow factor is still important.

What impact does a Wow have?  It sends the signal that you are on top of things.  Symbolism is important.  It also advances the cause further and faster.  Why do you want to foster Wow moments with your team?  High performing teams have a lot of Wow going on.  If all members of a team see Wow regularly, they are all inspired to do more sooner, better.

Here are my top 10 examples on how to WOW your manager, along with the intended impact:

1. Show up for every check-in with the full agenda – send it a day or more ahead (Give your manager time and space to prepare)
2.  When you are asking your manager to communicate something (an email to the team, a reference letter, etc.), draft it for him or her (Editing is much easier than creating)
3.  Do a start-stop-continue analysis once a year on all of your key activities (Make yourself as efficient and effective as possible – that’s your responsibility as much as your manager’s)
4.  Own your own development plan and check in on it at least quarterly (Those who own their own career paths progress more quickly down them)
5. Read a relevant business book and ask your manager to discuss insights with you (Staying current with best practices in your field – books, articles, blog posts, videos, mentors, lectures –  is key in a learning organization)
6.  Dress for success – even casual can be neat and “client ready” (Your presence has an impact on those around you.  There’s no reason anyone should ever have to comment on your clothes, your hair, or any aspect of your personal hygiene)
7. Respond to every email where you are on the TO line within a day, even if it’s to say you will respond longer form later (At Return Path,  you have to be in the jet stream of communications. Otherwise, you find yourself in the exhaust of the jet stream)
8. End every meaningful interaction by asking for informal feedback on how you’re doing and what else you can be doing (Again, part of being in a learning organization…and taking more tasks on is always a sign that you are ready for more responsibility)
9. Do something that’s not required but that you feel is a best practice (This shows you’re on top of your game.  One example:  I send the Board a summary, the details, and the YoY trending of all of my expenses every year.  I don’t have to, but enough CEOs out there have high profile expense problems that I decided it’s a good practice.  They all LOVE it)
10.  (If you have staff reporting into you) Show up for every check-in with  your manager with a list of all staff issues and highlights (You need to bubble things up, both good and bad, so your manager is on top of his or her overall team and (a) is never surprised by events, (b) knows how best to handle skip-level communications, and (c) can think more broadly about resource deployment across the organization)

B+ for Effort?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Short:  Great Marketing Checklists

Trade Show and Event Marketing:  Plan, Promote, and Profit, by our direct marketing colleague Ruth Stevens, is hardly a page-turner, but it is a great read and well worth the money for anyone in your B2B marketing department.  That’s true as much for the event marketing specialist as the marketing generalist.

The author brings a very ROI-focused approach to planning and executing events – whether big trade shows or smaller corporate events, which are becoming increasingly popular in recent years for cost, focus, and control reasons.  But beyond events, the book has a number of excellent checklists that are more general for marketers that I found quite useful both as a reminder of things we should be doing at Return Path as well as ways we should be thinking about the different elements of our B2B marketing mix.

Some of the best tables and charts include:  strengths, weaknesses, and best applications of trade shows vs. corporate events; comparative analysis of marketing tools by channel (this was great – talks about best applications for all major tools from events to newsletters to search to inside sales); 12-month exhibitor timeline for trade shows; a great riff on bad booth signage vs. good booth signage (hint:  don’t make the visitor do the work – be obvious!); business event strategic planning grid; pre-show campaign and post-show follow-up checklists; dos, don’ts and options for corporate events; a great section on qualifying and handling leads that extends well beyond trade shows; and several good case studies that are show-focused.

Thanks to Ruth herself for an autographed copy!  Team Marketing and sales leaders at Return Path – your copies are on the way.

Book Short:  Next, Write a Sequel

Written by Rodd Wagner and James K. Harter and billed as “the long awaited sequel to First, Break All the Rules” (one of the best management books I’ve ever read), I thought 12: The Elements of Great Managing, was good, but not great.  12…, along with the original book First… and Now, Discover Your Strengths, the latter two both by Marcus Buckingham, are all based on an extensive database of research done on corporate America by the Gallup organization over many years.  All three are valuable reads in one way or another, although I found this to be the weakest of the three.  (Note that Now… is different from the other two in that it’s not about management, it’s about self-management — very different, though based on the same research.)

Anyway, the elements of great managing, so say the authors, is all about creating employee engagement.  I totally buy into that.  And since no book short on 12… would be complete if it didn’t list out the 12…

1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?
8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?
9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
10. Do I have a best friend at work?
11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
12. This last year, have I had the opportunities at work to learn and grow?

The book fleshes out each of the 12, gives examples (some of which are better/clearer than others), and then addresses compensation in a very interesting chapter at the end.  Key takeaways on comp:

– Higher pay doesn’t guarantee greater engagement
– Good and bad employees are equally likely to think they deserve a raise
– Money without meaning isn’t enough
– Most employees, most of the time, feel undercompensated
– Individual pay can/should be private, but comp criteria should be very public
– People who feel well-compensated generally work harder

The book also cites a very provocative article suggesting that organizations would handle comp better if they made everyone’s comp public (in contrast to the final bullet above, yes).  I’m going to write more about compensation in future postings, so I’ll leave this section on those notes.

Finally, the book’s two closing thoughts are perhaps its most prescient:  one critical element of BEING a great manager is HAVING a great manager; and the managers who put the most into their people, get the most out of their people.

The Facebook Fad

I’m sure someone will shoot me for saying this, but I don’t get Facebook.  I mean, I get it, but I don’t see what all the fuss is about.  I made similar comments before about Gmail (here, here), and people told me I was an idiot at the time.  Three years later, Gmail is certainly a popular webmail service, but it’s hardly changed the world. In fact, it’s a distant fourth behind Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL.  So I don’t feel so bad about not oohing and ahhing and slobbering all over the place about Facebook.

Facebook reminds me of AOL back in the day.  AOL was the most simple, elegant, general purpose entree for people who wanted to get online and weren’t sure how in the early days of online services, before the Internet came of age.  It was good at packaging up its content and putting everything “in a box.”  It was clean.  It was fun.  People bragged about being an AOL member and talked about their screen name like it was on their birth certificate or something.  And the company capitalized on all the goodwill by becoming a PR machine to perpetuate its membership growth.

Now Facebook — it’s the most simple, elegant, general purpose social networking site here in the early days of social networking.  It’s pretty good about packaging up its applications, and certainly opening up its APIs is a huge benefit that AOL didn’t figure out until it embraced the open web in 1999-2000.  It is pretty good about putting everything in a box for me as a member.  And like AOL, the company is turning into a PR juggernaut and hoping to use it to perpetuate its registration numbers.

But let’s look at the things that caused (IMO) AOL’s downfall (AOL as we knew it) and look at the parallels with Facebook.  AOL quickly became too cluttered.  It’s simple elegance was destroyed by too much stuff jammed into its clean interface.  It couldn’t keep up with best of breed content or even messaging systems inside its walled garden.  Spam crushed its email functionality.  It couldn’t maintain its “all things to all people” infrastructure on the back end.  Ultimately, the open web washed over it.  People who defected were simply having better experiences elsewhere.

The parallels aren’t exact, but there are certainly some strong ones.  Facebook is already too cluttered for me.  Why are people writing on my wall instead of emailing me — all that does is trigger an email from Facebook to me telling me to come generate another page view for them.  Why am I getting invitations to things on Facebook instead of through the much better eVite platform?  The various forms of messaging are disorganized and hard to find. 

Most important, for a social network, it turns out that I don’t actually want my entire universe of friends and contacts to be able to connect with each other through me.  Like George Costanza in Seinfeld, I apparently have a problem with my “worlds colliding.”  I already know of one couple who either hooked up or is heavily flirting by connecting through my Facebook profile, and it’s not one I’m proud to have spawned.  I think I let one of them “be my friend” by mistake in the first place.  And I am a compulsive social networker.  It’s hard to imagine that these principles scale unfettered to the whole universe.

The main thing Facebook has going for it in this comparison is that its open APIs will lead to best of breed development for the platform.  But who cares about Facebook as a platform?  Isn’t the open web (or Open Social) ultimately going to wash over it?  I get that there are cool apps being written for Facebook – but 100% of those applications will be on the open web as well.  It’s certainly possible that Facebook’s marrying of my “social network” with best of breed applications will make it stickier for longer than AOL…but let’s remember that AOL has clung to life as a proprietary service for quite a while on the stickiness of people’s email addresses.  And yet, it is a non-event now as a platform. 

It will be interesting to see how Facebook bobs and weaves over the coming years to avoid what I think of as its inevitable fate.  And yes, I know I’m not 18 and if I were, I’d like Facebook more and spend all day in it.  But that to me reinforces my point even more — this is the same crew who flocked to, and then quickly from, MySpace.  When will they get tired of Facebook, and what’s to prevent them moving onto the next fad?

Are You As Versatile As Running?

Today was my first day back in the city after two weeks working and playing at our house in the mountains.  And a beautiful day it was — 46 and sunny!  I went for a great run, reflecting on how incredibly versatile running is.  Less than 48 hours before, I had also been running, but bundled up, in a 17 degree snowfall, wearing my new Icebugs (thanks for the tip, Brad), up and down the hills of a quiet country road at 6500 feet in Idaho.  Today — sea level, flat, urban, sunny and crisp out, wearing shorts (I’ll let you guess which was easier).  How versatile can a sport be?

Are you as versatile at work?  Can you be that go-to person for your manager, the all-weather team member who gets called on to take on any kind of project as needed?  I don’t care how specialized your job is or how big your company is.  That’s the kind of employee you want to be, trust me.

But, you say, what about me?  Don’t I get a say in things?  Can’t I have my own career ambitions and interests and steer the kind of work that I do?

You can!  You should!  I tell people at Return Path that all the time.  And the best part about is that while the two above statements may seem at odds with each other — be able to do anything (with a smile) and do what you want to do — they’re actually not.  The very best employees who I’ve worked with or who have worked for me over the years do both and mix them together to their advantage.

Work your career path with your manager, your mentor, your HR leader, your CEO.  Understand what’s possible long term at the company.  Figure out what you’re good at and what interests you (read, among other things, Now, Discover Your Strengths to get there).  Learn what it takes to earn a promotion to the next level.  Get yourself generally in line to rise through the ranks the way YOU want to.  Obviously, to get to that next level, you’ll need to work your butt off, harder than others around you, with better results and higher quality.

But you also have to be a utility infielder, to mix sports metaphors.  If your company or your team needs you to do something a little different from what you’re doing today, the difference between doing it well with a smile on your face and doing it merely satisfactorily with a grimace could be the difference between that next promotion and not.  And it’s really both those things — doing it well, and having a great attitude about it. 

I love running, because I can do it at any place, at any time, as long as have my running shoes.  Our best employees are similarly versatile, because they are self-directed and work hard and do things right, but also because they do what needs to be done when it needs to be done, even if it’s outside the scope of their day-to-day or not explicitly in the critical path of their next promotion.

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.

What if There’s No Reason to Eat the Dog Food?

There’s an expression in software about producing a product and market testing it — “seeing if the dogs will eat the dog food.”  I’ve heard it mangled many times around the employees of a software company using the software their own company produces as “seeing if the dogs will eat their own dog food.”  This is always true in consumer software and service companies. 

Employees are often the best users, the power users, and the source of the best feedback to the organization about the product and competition.  We certainly saw this phenomenon in spades at MovieFone, where I used to work before starting Return Path.  There was no more of a power user to be found than Andrew, the CEO, and there was a frenzy every Thursday and Friday as employees called into 777-FILM to buy their own tickets for the upcoming weekend.

But what if there’s no reason to eat your own dog food?  What if your software company develops a specific business application that only one or two people inside your company even care about?  Our services are a great example.  One or two people in Marketing, maybe one or two people in Technology, are users.  When I think about some of the web applications we as a company use, the same must be true of their companies as well.

If this is the case with your company, how do you make sure you get that same level of raw feedback from passionate users inside the four walls of your office, and not just from user groups, which are ok but have some inherent problems in terms of their objectivity and representation. 

I’m not sure I have a good answer to this – it’s more of a question to my readers than a prescription.  I’ll happily reblog the best responses!