Book Short:  Way, Way Beyond Books

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, by Brad Stone, was a great read.  Amazon is a fascinating, and phenomenally successful company, and Jeff is a legendary technology leader.  The Everything Store is a company and personal biography and totally delivers.

Forget about the fact that Amazon is now almost $100B in revenues and still growing like mad.  I find it even more amazing that a single company could be the largest ecommerce site on the planet while successfully pioneering both cloud computing services and e-readers.  The stories of all these things are in the book.

As a CEO, I enjoyed reading more of the vignettes behind the things that Amazon is reputationally known for in the tech world – doors as desks, their unique meeting formats, the toughness of the culture, the extensive risk taking of growth over profits, and what works and does not work about Bezos’ authoritative and domineering style.  And it’s always great to be reminded that even the biggest and best companies had to cheat death 10 times over before “arriving.”

This is good fun and learning for anyone in the business world.  It reminded me most of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs ,which I wrote about here, although it’s more of a company history and less of a biography than the Jobs book.

Book Short:  I Wish This Existed 12 Years Ago

Brad Feld has been on my board for over a decade now, and when he and his partner Jason Mendelson told me about a new book they were writing a bunch of months ago called Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist, I took note.  I thought, “Hmmm.  I’d like to be smarter than my lawyer or venture capitalist.”

Then I read an advanced copy.  I loved it.  At first, I thought, I would really have benefited from this when I started Return Path way back when.  Then as I finished reading it, I realized it’s just a great reference book even now, all these years and financings later.  But as much as I enjoyed the early read, I felt like something was missing from the book, since its intended audience is entrepreneurs.

Brad and Jason took me up on my offer to participate in the book’s content a little bit, and they are including in the book a series of 50-75 sidebars called “The Entrepreneur’s Perspective” which I wrote and which they and others edited.  For almost every topic and sub-topic in the book, I chime in, either building on, or disagreeing, with Brad and Jason’s view on the subject.

The book is now out.  As Brad noted in his launch post, the book’s table of contents says a lot:

1. The Players
2. How to Raise Money
3. Overview of the Term Sheet
4. Economic Terms of the Term Sheet
5. Control Terms of the Term Sheet
6. Other Terms of the Term Sheet
7. The Capitalization Table
8. How Venture Capital Funds Work
9. Negotiation Tactics
10. Raising Money the Right Way
11. Issues at Different Financing States
12. Letters of Intent – The Other Term Sheet
13. Legal Things Every Entrepreneur Should Know

Fred has posted his review of the book as well.

Bottom line:  if you are an aspiring or actual entrepreneur, buy this book.  Even if you’ve done a couple of financings, this is fantastic reference material, and Brad and Jason’s points of view on things are incredibly insightful beyond the facts.  And I hope my small contributions to the book are useful for entrepreneurs as well.

Please go put Decide and Conquer: 44 Decisions that will Make or Break All Leaders by David Siegel on your reading list, or buy it. David’s book is up there on my list with Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It’s a totally different kind of book than Startup CEO, and in some ways a much better one in that there’s a great through-line or storyline, as David shares his leadership framework in the context of his journey of getting hired to replace founder Scott Heiferman as Meetup’s CEO after its acquisition by WeWork, including some juicy interactions with Adam Neumann, through the trials and tribulations of WeWork as a parent company, through COVID and its impact on an in-person meeting facilitator like Meetup, through to the sale of Meetup OUT of WeWork.

It’s hard to do the book justice with a quick write up. It’s incredibly concise. It’s clear. It’s witty. Most of all, it’s very human, and David shares a very human, common sense approach to leadership. I particularly like a device he uses to reinforce his main points and principles by bolding the key phrases every time they show up in the book: be kind, be confident, be bold, expand your options, focus on the long-term picture, be pragmatic, be honest, be speedy, do what’s right for the business, work for your people and they’ll work for you, be surprised only about being surprised. These all resonate with me so much.

One of the interesting things about the book is that David is a CEO, but not a founder (although he was sort of a re-founder in this case). A lot of CEO books talk about how to run a company, or give stories from the trials and tribulations thereof, but few focus on the elements of interviewing for the CEO job, or taking over the reins of a company in the midst of a turbulent flight. So the book is about getting the job, starting the job, doing a turnaround, leading a company through growth, a buy-out, and managing a company inside of another company. And because Meetup is such an iconic brand and business, it’s easy to understand a lot of the backdrop to David’s story.

I just met David for the first time a few weeks ago. We knew a bunch of people in common from his DoubleClick days. We instantly hit it off and traded copies of our books, and then were reading them at the same time trading emails about the parts that clicked. I just can’t recommend the book enough to any CEO or founder. In my view, it joins a pretty elite canon.

Book Short:  On The Same Page

Being on the same page with your team, or your whole company for that matter, is a key to success in business.  The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, by Patrick Lencioni, espouses this notion and boils down the role of the CEO to four points:

1. Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team
2. Create organizational clarity
3. Overcommunicate organizational clarity
4. Reinforce organizational clarity through human systems

Those four points sound as boring as bread, but the book is anything but.  The book’s style is easy and breezy — business fiction.  One of the most poignant moments for me was when the book’s “other CEO” (the one that doesn’t “get it”) reflects that he “didn’t go into business to referee executive team meetings and delivery employee orientation…he loved strategy and competition.”  Being a CEO is a dynamic job that changes tremendously as the organization grows.  This book is a great handbook for anyone transitioning out of the startup phase, or for anyone managing a larger organization.

I haven’t read the author’s other books (this is one in a series), but I will soon!

I love stealing/borrowing other people’s good ideas for management and leadership when they’re made public, and I always encourage others to do so from me. I call it “plagiarizing with pride.” So I was intrigued when I saw a new way of doing all-hands meetings published by my friend Daniel Odio (DROdio) on his founder community called FounderCulture. You can see the original post here.

We’ve experimented with different formats and cadences for all-hands meetings over the years. They tend to vary with the size of the company and complexity of the material to cover. Larger companies usually fall into the rhythm of doing quarterly all-hands meetings sometime after the end of the quarter, usually around a Board meeting, with a quarterly recap and forecast for next quarter.

But for early stage companies, there’s no tried-and-true method. We struggled with that for a while at Bolster. Weekly felt too much. Quarterly felt like too little. It seemed weird for me or my co-founders to just have a meeting where we talked at everyone…and it also seemed weird to just host an “open mic night” type meeting. Then I saw DROdio’s video, and we adapted it. It’s working pretty well for us. Here’s what we do in what we’re calling our Open All-Hands Meeting:

• We hold an all-hands meeting every Monday for :30
• A different team member is responsible for being the host/chair/emcee for each meeting
• We run the meeting off of a dedicated Trello board with specific columns of information. Everyone is invited to contribute to the Trello board in the days leading up to the meeting. The columns are:
  • Values-Kudos-Good News: Anyone can call out anyone for doing something that demonstrates one of the company’s values, that is just a big thank you, or that is some other piece of karmic goodness they want to share
  • Wins: All client wins are shown here with some detail, each in its own card with its owner highlighted
  • #MAD: This is where we trade items on which we Made A Decision during the prior week, big or small. We’ve always struggled with the best way to keep everyone informed on things like this…and this works really well for that purpose
  • Learnings/Product Ideas: Anyone can populate this with anything they want as they go about their work and either come across learnings or product ideas they want to share
  • Announcements: Pretty self-explanatory, any corporate announcement, new employee introductions, etc.
  • Swim Lane Updates: Each we, we ask one or two of our functional or project areas to do a deep dive update — Product, Finance, Sales, Marketing, Ops, etc. — and this is also where we’ll do product demos of newly released functionality
  • Permanent Items: this isn’t a column that’s read…it just warehouses things we want on the board like the schedule of hosts, schedule of swim lane updates, instructions for running the meeting, recordings of prior meetings
  • BOLSTER 2022: this isn’t a column that’s read…it contains our mission, values, strategy, and key strategic initiatives and metrics for the year
  • Archive: this isn’t a column that’s read…it just contains the prior week’s items
• There’s a series of light integrations between Slack, Hubspot, and Trello to automatically populate Trello based on certain channels, keywords, and emojis. Every week, the board is automatically wiped clean after the meeting
• The host moves the meeting from column to column and card to card, sometimes reading the cards, and sometimes asking the person who submitted the card to read it or give color commentary on it
• I do jump in from time to time, as do some of my co-founders or our other leaders, to give extra commentary or amplify something or help connect the dots. But that’s about as formal as my role gets other than…
• …when we do have a quarterly board book and board meeting, I host that one meeting and recap the meeting, ask other leaders to comment on specific topics, and facilitate Q&A on the materials we send out ahead of time. So I’m hosting 4 meetings per year
• The host can add a personal touch to any meeting. Custom wallpaper for the Trello board. Asking everyone in the company who has a pet to send in a photo of the pet ahead of time and introducing their furry friends during the meeting. Playing intro or outro music to fit the occasion. Doing spot surveys or game show questions to keep things lively. Interviewing new team members. Asking everyone to do a one-sentence “here’s what I’m working on this week” at the end of the meeting
• Finally, the host passes the baton from one person to the next each week. No one can escape this responsibility!

In addition to the Open All-Hands Meeting format, I send the company an email every Friday with some musings on the prior week. The content of these varies widely – from “what I did last week,” to “here’s something I saw that’s interesting,” to welcoming new team members with their bios, to customer testimonials. Sometimes other founders write these. They’re a good way to add a personal touch to the operating system of the company — and we also send these to our board and major shareholders every week so they, too, can keep a finger on the pulse.

These two things together are proving to be a good Operating System for keeping everyone informed, aligned, and connected on a weekly basis.

Book short:  Blink

Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, is a must read for marketers, entrepreneurs, and VCs alike, just as is the case with Gladwell’s first book, The Tipping Point.

Where The Tipping Point theorizes about how humans relate to each other and how fads start and flourish in our society, Blink theorizes about how humans make decisions and about the interplay between the subconscious, learned expertise, and real-time inputs.  But Gladwell does more than theorize — he has plenty of real world examples which seem quite plausible, and he peppers the book with evidence from some (though hardly a complete coverage of relevant) scientific and quasi-scientific studies.

Blink for Entrepreneurs/CEOs:  What’s the most critical lesson in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, as it relates to entrepreneurs/CEOs?  It’s about bias in hiring.  Most of us make judgments about potential new hires quite quickly in the initial interview.  The symphony example in the book is the most painfully poignant — most major symphony orchestras hired extremely few women until they started conducting auditions behind a screen.  It’s not clear to me yet how to stop or even shrink hiring bias, but I suspect the answer lies in pre-interview work around defining specific criteria for the job and scoring all candidates on the same set of criteria.

Blink for VCs:  What’s the most critical lesson in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, as it relates to VCs?  It’s about picking companies to back.  Even VCs who are virtuosos, as Gladwell would call them, can make poor judgments on companies to back based on their own personal reaction to a company’s product or service, as opposed to the broader marketplace’s reaction.  Someone poured a whole lot of money into Webvan, Pets.com, eToys, and the like.

Blink for Marketers:  What’s the most critical lesson in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, as it relates to Marketers?  It’s the importance of multivariate regression testing.  No, really, I’m not kidding, although there’s no doubt a less math-y way of saying it — “test everything.”  The Coca-Cola Company thought they were doing the right thing in creating New Coke because they were losing the Pepsi Challenge.  But what they didn’t realize was that Pepsi (unintentionally or not) had suckered them into believing that the single-sip test was cause for reengineering a century of product, when in reality Coke was probably just being out-advertised.  Christian Brothers Brandy was going out of its mind losing market share to competitor E&J until someone realized that they just needed to change the shape of their bottle.

If you haven’t yet done so, go buy the book!  It’s a very quick read and incredibly thought provoking.  And if you haven’t yet read The Tipping Point, it’s a must as well.

Startup CEO (OnlyOnce – the book!), Part III – Pre-Order Now

My book, Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, is now available for pre-order on Amazon in multiple formats (Print, Kindle), which is an exciting milestone in this project!  The book is due out right after Labor Day, but Brad Feld tells me that the more pre-orders I have, the better.  Please pardon the self-promotion, but click away if you’re interested!

Here are a few quick thoughts about the book, though I’ll post more about it and the process at some point:

• I’ll be using the hashtag #startupceo more now to encourage discussion of topics related to startup CEOs – please join me!
• The book has been described by a few CEOs who read it and commented early for me along the lines of “The Lean Startup movement is great, but this book starts where most of those books end and takes you through the ‘so you have a product that works in-market – now what?’ questions”
• The book is part of the Startup Revolution series that Brad has been working on for a couple years now, including Do More (Even) Faster, Venture Deals, Startup Communities, and Startup Life (with two more to come, Startup Boards and Startup Metrics)
• Writing a book is a LOT harder than I expected!

At this point, the best thing I can do to encourage you to read/buy is to share the full and final table of contents with you, sections/chapters/headings.  When I get closer in, I may publish some excerpts of new content here on Only Once.  Here’s the outline:

Part I: Storytelling

• Chapter 1: Dream the Possible Dream…Entrepreneurship and Creativity, “A Faster Horse,” Vetting Ideas
• Chapter 2: Defining and Testing the Story…Start Out By Admitting You’re Wrong, A Lean Business Plan Template, Problem, Solution, Key Metrics, Unique Value Proposition and Unfair Advantages, Channels, Customer Segments, Cost Structure and Revenue Streams
• Chapter 3: Telling the Story to Your Investors…The Business Plan is Dead. Long Live the Business Plan, The Investor Presentation, The Elevator Pitch, The Size of the Opportunity, Your Competitive Advantage, Current Status and Roadmap from Today, The Strength of Your Team, Summary Financials, Investor Presentations for Larger Startups
• Chapter 4: Telling the Story to Your Team…Defining Your Mission, Vision and Values, The Top-down Approach, The Bottom-Up Approach, The Hybrid Approach, Design a Lofty Mission Statement
• Chapter 5: Revising the Story…Workshopping, Knowing When It’s Time to Make a Change, Corporate Pivots: Telling the Story Differently, Consolidating, Diversifying, Focusing, Business Pivots: Telling a Different Story
• Chapter 6: Bringing the Story to Life…Building Your Company Purposefully, The Critical Elements of Company-Building, Articulating Purpose:  The Moral of the Story, You Can Be a Force for Helping Others—Even If Indirectly

Part II: Building the Company’s Human Capital

• Chapter 7: Fielding a Great Team…From Protozoa to Pancreas, The Best and the Brightest, What About HR?, What About Sales & Marketing?, Scaling Your Team Over Time
• Chapter 8: The CEO as Functional Supervisor…Rules for General Managers
• Chapter 9: Crafting Your Company’s Culture…, Introducing Fig Wasp #879, Six Legs and a Pair of Wings, Let People Be People, Build an Environment of Trust
• Chapter 10: The Hiring Challenge…Unique Challenges for Startups, Recruiting Outstanding Talent, Staying “In-Market”, Recruitment Tools, The Interview: Filtering Potential Candidates, Two Ears One Mouth, Who Should You Interview?, Onboarding: The First 90 Days
• Chapter 11: Every Day in Every Way, We Get a Little Better…The Feedback Matrix, 1:1 Check-ins, “Hallway” Feedback, Performance Reviews, The 360, Soliciting Feedback on Your Own Performance, Crafting and Meeting Development Plans      
• Chapter 12: Compensation…General Guidelines for Determining Compensation, The Three Elements of Startup Compensation, Base Pay, Incentive Pay, Equity              
• Chapter 13: Promoting                …Recruiting from Within, Applying the “Peter Principle” to Management, Scaling Horizontally, Promoting Responsibilities Rather than Swapping Titles               
• Chapter 14: Rewarding: “It’s the Little Things” That Matter…It Never Goes Without Saying, Building a Culture of Appreciation
• Chapter 15: Managing Remote Offices and Employees…Brick and Mortar Values in a Virtual World, Best Practices for Managing Remote Employees
• Chapter 16: Firing: When It’s Not Working…No One Should Ever Be Surprised to Be Fired, Termination and the Limits of Transparency, Layoffs

Part III: Execution

• Chapter 17: Creating a Company Operating System…Creating Company Rhythms, A Marathon? Or a Sprint?
• Chapter 18: Creating Your Operating Plan and Setting Goals…Turning Strategic Plans into Operating Plans, Financial Planning, Bringing Your Team into Alignment with Your Plans, Guidelines for Setting Goals
• Chapter 19: Making Sure There’s Enough Money in the Bank…Scaling Your Financial Instincts, Boiling the Frog, To Grow or to Profit? That Is the Question, First Perfect the Model, Choosing Growth, Choosing Profits, The Third Way
• Chapter 20: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Financing…Equity Investors, Venture Capitalists, Angel Investors, Strategic Investors, Debt, Convertible Debt, Venture Debt, Bank Loans, Personal Debt, Bootstrapping, Customer Financing, Your Own Cash Flow
• Chapter 21: When and How to Raise Money…When to Start Looking for VC Money, The Top 11 Takeaways for Financing Negotiations
• Chapter 22: Forecasting and Budgeting…Rigorous Financial Modeling, Of Course You’re Wrong—But Wrong How?, Budgeting in a Context of Uncertainty, Forecast, Early and Often
• Chapter 23: Collecting Data…External Data, Learning from Customers, Learning from (Un)Employees, Internal Data, Skip-Level Meetings, Subbing, Productive Eavesdropping
• Chapter 24: Managing in Tough Times…Managing in an Economic Downturn, Hope Is Not a Strategy—But It’s Not a Bad Tactic, Look for Nickels and Dimes under the Sofa, Never Waste a Good Crisis, Managing in a Difficult Business Situation
• Chapter 25: Meeting Routines…Lencioni’s Meeting Framework, Skip-Level Meetings, Running a Productive Offsite
• Chapter 26: Driving Alignment…Five Keys to Startup Alignment, Aligning Individual Incentives with Global Goals
• Chapter 27: Have You Learned Your Lesson?…The Value (and Limitations) of Benchmarking, The Art of the Post-Mortem
• Chapter 28: Going Global…Should Your Business Go Global?, How to Establish a Global Presence, Overcoming the Challenges of Going Global, Best Practices for Managing International Offices and Employees
• Chapter 29: The Role of M&A…Using Acquisitions as a Tool in Your Strategic Arsenal, The Mechanics of Financing and Closing Acquisitions, Stock, Cash, Earn Out, The Flipside of M&A: Divestiture, Odds and Ends, Integration (and Separation)
• Chapter 30: Competition…Playing Hardball, Playing Offense vs. Playing Defense, Good and Bad Competitors
• Chapter 31: Failure…Failure and the Startup Model, Failure Is Not an Orphan

Part IV: Building and Leading a Board of Directors

• Chapter 32: The Value of a Good Board…Why Have a Board?, Everybody Needs a Boss, The Board as Forcing Function, Pattern Matching, Forests, Trees, Honest Discussion and Debate
• Chapter 33: Building Your Board…What Makes a Great Board Member?, Recruiting a Board Member, Compensating Your Board, Boards as Teams, Structuring Your Board, Board Size, Board Committees, Chairing the Board, Running a Board Feedback Process, Building an Advisory Board
• Chapter 34: Board Meeting Materials…“The Board Book”, Sample Return Path Board Book, The Value of Preparing for Board Meetings
• Chapter 35: Running Effective Board Meetings…Scheduling Board Meetings, Building a Forward-Looking Agenda, In-Meeting Materials, Protocol, Attendance and Seating, Device-Free Meetings, Executive and Closed Sessions
• Chapter 36: Non-Board Meeting Time…Ad Hoc Meetings, Pre-Meetings, Social Outings
• Chapter 37: Decision-Making and the Board…The Buck Stops—Where?, Making Difficult Decisions in Concert, Managing Conflict with Your Board
• Chapter 38: Working with the Board on Your Compensation and Review…The CEO’s Performance Review, Your Compensation, Incentive Pay, Equity, Expenses
• Chapter 39: Serving on Other Boards…The Basics of Serving on Other Boards, Substance, or Style?

Part V: Managing Yourself So You Can Manage Others

• Chapter 40: Creating a Personal Operating System…Managing Your Agenda, Managing Your Calendar, Managing Your Time, Feedback Loops
• Chapter 41: Working with an Executive Assistant…Finding an Executive Assistant, What an Executive Assistant Does
• Chapter 42: Working with a Coach…The Value of Executive Coaches, Areas Where an Executive Coach Can Help
• Chapter 43: The Importance of Peer Groups…The Gang of Six, Problem-Solving in Tandem
• Chapter 44: Staying Fresh…Managing the Highs and Lows, Staying Mentally Fresh, At Your Company, Out and About, Staying Healthy, Me Time
• Chapter 45: Your Family…Making Room for Home Life, Involving Family in Work, Bringing Work Principles Home
• Chapter 46: Traveling…Sealing the Deal with a Handshake, Making the Most of Travel Time, Staying Disciplined on the Road
• Chapter 47: Taking Stock of the Year…Celebrating “Yes”; Addressing “No”, Are You Having Fun?, Are You Learning and Growing as a Professional?, Is It Financially Rewarding?, Are You Making an Impact?
• Chapter 48:  A Note on Exits…Five Rules of Thumb for Successfully Selling Your Company

 If you’re still with me and interested, again here are the links to pre-order (Print, Kindle).

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:  Multiplying Your Team’s Productivity

No matter how frustrated a kids’ soccer coach gets, he never, ever runs onto the field in the middle of a game to step in and play.  It’s not just against the rules, it isn’t his or her role.

Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown (book, Kindle) takes this concept and drives it home.  The book was a great read, one of the better business books I’ve read in a long time.  I read a preview of it via an article in a recent Harvard Business Review (walled garden alert – you can only get the first page of the article without buying it), then my colleague George Bilbrey got the book and suggested I read it.  George also has a good post up on his blog about it.

One of the things I love about the book is that unlike a lot of business books, it applies to big companies and small companies with equal relevance.  The book echoes a lot of other contemporary literature on leadership (Collins, Charan, Welch) but pulls it into a more accessible framework based on a more direct form of impact:  not long-term shareholder value, but staff productivity and intelligence.  The book’s thesis is that the best managers get more than 2x out of their people than the average – some of that comes from having people more motivated and stretching, but some comes from literally making people more intelligent by challenging them, investing in them, and leaving them room to grow and learn.

The thesis has similar roots to many successful sales philosophies – that asking value-based questions is more effective than presenting features and benefits (that’s probably a good subject for a whole other post sometime).  The method of selling we use at Return Path which I’ve written about before, SPIN Selling, based on the book by Neil Rackham, gets into that in good detail.  One colorful quote in the book around this came from someone who met two famous 19th century British Prime Ministers and noted that when he came back from a meeting with Gladstone, he was convinced that Gladstone was the smartest person in the world, but when he came back from a meeting with Disraeli, he was convinced that he (not Disraeli) was the smartest person in the world.

Anyway, the book creates archetypal good and bad leaders, called Multipliers and Diminishers, and discusses five traits of both:

• Talent Magnet vs. Empire Builder (find people’s native genius and amplify it)
• Liberator vs. Tyrant (create space, demand the best work, delineate your “hard opinions” from your “soft opinions”)
• Challenger vs. Know-It-All (lay down challenges, ask hard questions)
• Debate Maker vs. Decision Maker (ask for data, ask each person, limit your own participation in debates)
• Investor vs. Micromanager (delegate, teach and coach, practice public accountability)

This was a great read.  Any manager who is trying to get more done with less (and who isn’t these days) can benefit from figuring out how to multiply the performance of his or her team by more than 2x.

Book Short:  Like Reading a Good Speech

Leaders Eat Last, by Simon Sinek, is a self-described “polemic” that reads like some of the author’s famous TED talks and other speeches in that it’s punchy, full of interesting stories, has some attempted basis in scientific fact like Gladwell, and wanders around a bit.  That said, I enjoyed the book, and it hit on a number of themes in which I am a big believer – and it extended and shaped my view on a couple of them.

Sinek’s central concept in the book is the Circle of Safety, which is his way of saying that when people feel safe, they are at their best and healthiest.  Applied to workplaces, this isn’t far off from Lencioni’s concept of the trust foundational layer in his outstanding book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team.  His stories and examples about the kinds of things that create a Circle of Safety at work (and the kinds of things that destroy them) were very poignant.  Some of his points about how leaders set the tone and “eat last,” both literally and figuratively, are solid.  But his most interesting vignettes are the ones about how spending time face-to-face in person with people as opposed to virtually are incredibly important aspects of creating trust and bringing humanity to leadership.

My favorite one-liner from the book, which builds on the above point and extends it to a corporate philosophy of people first, customer second, shareholders third (which I have espoused at Return Path for almost 15 years now) is

Customers will never love a company unless employees love it first.

A couple of Sinek’s speeches that are worth watching are the one based on this book, also called Leaders Eat Last, and a much shorter one called How Great Leaders Inspire Action.

Bottom line:  this is a rambly book, but the nuggets of wisdom in it are probably worth the exercise of having to find them and figure out how to connect them (or not connect them).

Thanks to my fellow NYC CEO Seth Besmertnik for giving me this book as well as the links to Sinek’s speeches.

In Search of Automated Relevance

A bunch of us had a free form meeting last week that started out as an Email Summit focused on protocols and ended up, as Brad put it, with us rolling around in the mud of a much broader and amorphous Messaging Summit.  The participants (and some of their posts on the subject) in addition to me were Fred Wilson (pre, post), Brad Feld,  Phil Hollows, Tom Evslin (pre, post), and Jeff Pulver (pre, post).  And the discussion to some extent was inspired by and commented on Saul Hansell’s article in the New York Times about “Inbox 2.0” and how Yahoo, Google, and others are trying to make email a more relevant application in today’s world; and Chad Lorenz’s article in Slate called “The Death of Email” (this must be the 923rd article with that headline in the last 36 months) which talks about how email is transitioning to a key part of the online communications mix instead of the epicenter of online communications.

Ok, phew, that’s all the background. 

With everyone else’s commentary on this subject already logged, most of which I agree with, I’ll add a different $0.02.  The buzzword of the day in email marketing is “relevance.”  So why can’t anyone figure out how to make an email client, or any messaging platform for that matter, that starts with that as the premise, even for 1:1 communications?  I think about messaging relevance from two perspectives:  the content, and the channel.

Content.  In terms of the content of a message, I think of relevance as the combination of Relationship and Context.  The relationship is all about my connection to you.  Are you a friend, a friend of a friend, or someone I don’t know that’s trying to burrow your way onto my agenda for the day?  Are you a business that I know and trust, are you a carefully screened and targeted offer coming from an affiliate of a business I trust, or are you a spammer? 

But as important as the relationship is to the relevance of your message to me, the context is equally important.  Let’s take Brad as an example.  I know him in two distinct contexts:  as one of my venture investors, and as an occasional running partner.  A message from Brad (a trusted relationship) means very different things to me depending on its context.  One might be much more relevant than the other at any moment in my life.

Channel.  The channel through which I send or receive a message has an increasing amount to do with relevance as well.  As with content, I think of channel relevance as the combination of two things –  device, and technology.  For me, the device is limited to three things, two with heavy overlap.  The first is a fixed phone line – work or home (I still think cell service in this country leaves a lot to be desired).  The second is a mobile device, which could mean voice but could also mean data.  The third is a computer, whether desktop or laptop.  In terms of technology, the list is growing by the day.  Voice call, email, IM, Skype, text message, social network messaging, and on and on.

So what  do I mean about channel relevance?  Sometimes, I want to send a message by email from my smartphone.  Sometimes I want to send a text message.  Sometimes I want to make a phone call or just leave a voicemail.  Sometimes I even want to blog or Twitter.  I have yet to desire to send a message in Facebook, but I do sometimes via LinkedIn, so I’m sure I’ll get there.  Same goes for the receiving side.  Sometimes I want to read an email on my handheld.  Sometimes a text message does the job, etc.  Which channel and device I am interested in depends to some extent on the content of the message, per above, but sometimes it depends on what I’m doing and where I am.

So what?  Starting to feel complex?  It should be.  It is.  We all adjusted nicely when we added email to our lives 10 years ago.  It added some communication overhead, but it took the place of some long form paper letters and some phone calls as well.  Now that we seem to be adding new messaging channels every couple weeks, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get the relevance right.  Overlaying Content (Relationship and Context) with Channel (Device and Technology) creates a matrix that’s very difficult to navigate.

How do we get to a better place?  Technology has to step in and save the day here.  One of the big conclusions from our meeting was that no users care about or even know about the protocol – they just care about the client they interact with.  Where’s the ultra flexible client that allows me to combine all these different channels, on different devices?  Not a one-size-fits-all unified messaging service, but something that I can direct as I see fit?  There are glimmers of hope out there – Gmail integrating IM and email…Simulscribe letting me read my voicemail as an email…Twitter allowing me to input via email, SMS, or web…even good old eFax emailing me a fax – but these just deal with two or three cells in an n-dimensional matrix.

As our CTO Andy Sautins says, software can do anything if it’s designed thoughtfully and if you have enough talent and time to write and test it.  So I believe this “messaging client panacea” could exist if someone put his or her mind to it.  One of the big questions I have about this software is whether or not relevance can be automated, to borrow a phrase from Stephanie Miller, our head of consulting.  Sure, there is a ton of data to mine – but is there ever enough?  Can a piece of software figure out on its own that I want to get a message from Brad about “running” (whatever channel it comes in on) as a text message on my smartphone if we’re talking about running together the next day, but otherwise as an RSS feed in the same folder as the posts from his running blog, but a voicemail from Brad about “running the company” (again, regardless of how he sends it) as an email automatically sorted to the top of my inbox?  Or do I have to undertake an unmanageable amount of preference setting to get the software to behave the way I want it to behave?  And oh by the way, should Brad have any say over how I receive the message, or do I have all the control?  And does the latter question depend on whether Brad is a person or a company?

What does this mean for marketers?  That’s the $64,000 question.  I’m not sure if truly Automated Relevance is even an option today, but marketers can do their best to optimize all four components of my relevance equation:  content via relationship and context, and channel via device and technology.  A cocktail of permission, deep behavioral analysis, segmentation, smart targeting, and a simple but robust preference center probably gets you close enough.  Better software that works across channels with built-in analytics – and a properly sized and whip smart marketing team – should get you the rest of the way there.  But technology and practices are both a ways off from truly automated relevance today.

I hope this hasn’t been too much rolling around in the mud for you.  All thoughts and comments (into my fancy new commenting system, Intense Debate) are welcome!