Book Short:  The Little Engine that Could

Authors Steven Woods and Alex Shootman would make Watty Piper proud.  Instead of bringing toys to the children on the other side of the mountain, though, this engine brings revenue into your company.  If you run a SaaS business, or really if you run any B2B business, Revenue Engine:  Why Revenue Performance Management is the Next Frontier of Competitive Advantage, will change the way you think about Sales and Marketing. The authors, who were CTO and CRO of Eloqua (the largest SaaS player in the demand management software space that recently got acquired by Oracle), are thought leaders in the field, and the wisdom of the book reflects that.

The book chronicles the contemporary corporate buying process and shows that it has become increasingly like the consumer buying process in recent years.  The Consumer Decision Journey, first published by McKinsey in 2009, chronicles this process and talks about how the traditional funnel has been transformed by the availability of information and social media on the Internet.  Revenue Engine moves this concept to a B2B setting and examines how Marketing and Sales are no longer two separate departments, but stewards of a combined process that requires holistic analysis, investment decisions, and management attention.

In particular, the book does a good job of highlighting new stages in the buying process and the imperatives and metrics associated with getting this “new funnel” right.  One that resonated particularly strongly with me was the importance of consistent and clean data, which is hard but critical!  As my colleague Matt Spielman pointed out when we were discussing the book, the one area of the consumer journey that Revenue Engine leaves is out is Advocacy, which is essential for influencing the purchase process in a B2B environment as well.

One thing I didn’t love about the book is that it’s a little more theoretical than practical. There aren’t nearly enough detailed examples.  In fact, the book itself says it’s “a framework, not an answer.”  So you’ll be left wanting a bit more and needing to do a bit more work on your own to translate the wisdom to your reality, but you’ll have a great jumping off point.

Book Short:  Which Runs Faster, You or Your Company?

Leading at the Speed of Growth, by Katherine Catlin at the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership is a must read for any entrepreneur or CEO of a growth company.  It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read targeted to that audience – its content is great, its format is a page-turner, and it’s concise and to the point.

The authors take you through three stages of a growth company’s lifestyle (Initial Growth, Rapid Growth, and Continuous Growth) and describe the “how to’s” of the transition into each stage:  how you know it’s coming, how to behave in the new stage, how to leave the old stage behind.

I didn’t realize it when I started reading the book, but Brad had one of the quotes on the back cover that says it all:  “There are business books about starting a company, but they tend to deal with the mechanics of business plans and financing.  Then there are books about ‘how to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.’  This is the first book I’ve seen that details the role of the CEO of a small but growing company.”  Thanks to my colleague George Bilbrey for pointing this one out to me.

UPDATE:  Brad corrects me and says that I should mention Jana Matthews, who co-wrote the book with Katherine Catlin and is actually the Kauffman Center person of the duo.

Book Short:  Crazy Eights

In honor of Return Path being in the midst of its eighth year, I recently read a pair of books with 8 in the title (ok, I would have read them anyway, but that made for a convenient criterion when selecting out of my very large “to read” pile).

Ram Charan’s latest, Know-How:  The 8 Skills That Separate People People Who Perform From Those Who Don’t, was pretty good and classic Charan.  Quick, easy to skim and still get the main points.  The book lost a little credibility with me when Charan lionized Verizon (perhaps he uses a different carrier himself) and Bob Nardelli (the book was published before Nardelli’s high profile dismissal), but makes good points nonetheless.  Some of the 8 Skills he talks about are what you’d expect on the soft side of leadership — building the team, understanding the social system, judging people — but his best examples were particularly actionable around positioning, goal setting, and setting priorities.  The book reminded me much more of Execution and much less of Confronting Reality (which is a good thing).

For years I’ve felt like the last person around to still not have read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, so I thought I’d skip straight to the punchline and read Stephen Covey’s newer book, The 8th Habit:  From Effectiveness to Greatness.  Fortunately, as I’d hoped, the new book summarizes the prior book several times over, so if you haven’t read the first, you could certainly just start with this one.  The book also comes with a DVD of 16 short films, some of which are great — both inspirational and poignant.  Unlike most business books, the 8th Habit is NOT skimmable.  It almost has too much material in it and could probably be read multiple times or at least in smaller pieces.  The actual 8th habit Covey talks about is what he calls Find Your Voice and Help Others Find Their Voices and is a great encapsulation of what leading a knowledge worker business is all about.  But the book is much deeper and richer than that in its many models and frameworks and examples/tie-ins to business and goes beyond the “touchy feely” into hard-nosed topics around execution and strategy.

Now I’m looking for the DVD of the first season of Eight is Enough!

Book Short:  Awesome Title, So-So Book

Strategy and the Fat Smoker (book, Kindle), by David Maister, was a book that had me completely riveted in the first few chapters, then completely lost me for the rest.  That was a shame.  It might be worth reading it just for the beginning, though I’m not sure I can wholeheartedly recommend the purchase just for that.

The concept (as well as the title) is fantastic.  As the author says in the first words of the introduction:

We often (or even usually) know what we should be doing in both personal and professional life.  We also know why we should be doing it and (often) how to do it.  Figuring all that out is not too difficult.  What is very hard is actually doing what you know to be good for you in the long-run, in spite of short-run temptations.  The same is true for organizations.

The diagnosis is clear, which is as true for organizations as it is for fat people, smokers, fat smokers, etc.  The hard work (pain) is near-term, and the rewards (gain) are off in the future, without an obvious or visible correlation.  As someone who has had major up and down swings in weight for decades, I totally relate to this.

But the concept that

the necessary outcome of strategic planning is not analytical insight but resolve,

while accurate, is the equivalent of an entire book dedicated to the principle of “oh just shut up and do it already.”  The closest the author comes to answering the critical question of how to get “it” done is when he says

A large part of really bringing about strategic change is designing some new action or new system that visibly, inescapably, and irreversibly commits top management to the strategy.

Right.  That’s the same thing as saying that in order to lose weight, not only do you need to go on a diet and weigh yourself once in a while, but you need to make some major public declaration and have other people help hold you accountable, if by no other means than causing you to be embarrassed if you fail in your quest.

So all that is true, but unfortunately, the last 80% of the book, while peppered with moderately useful insights on management and leadership, felt largely divorced from the topic.  It all just left me wanting inspirational stories of organizations doing the equivalent of losing weight and quitting smoking before their heart attacks, frameworks of how to get there, and the like.  But those were almost nonexistent.  Maybe Strategy and the Fat Smoker works really well for consulting firms – that’s where a lot of the examples came from.  I find frequently that books written by consultants are fitting for that industry but harder to extrapolate from there to any business.

Book Short: Chip Off the Old Block

I have to admit, I was more than a little skeptical when Craig Spiezle handed me a copy of The Speed of Trust, by Stephen M. R. Covey, at the OTA summit last week. The author is the son of THE Stephen Covey, author of the world famous Seven Habits of Highly Effective People as well as The Eighth Habit (book, post). Would the book have substance and merit or be drafting off the dad’s good name?

I dog-ear pages of books as I read them, noting the pages that are most interesting if I ever want to go back and take a quick pass through the book to remind me about it (and yes, Ezra, I can do this on the Kindle as well via the bookmark feature). If dog-ear quantity is a mark of how impactful a book is, The Speed of Trust is towards the top of the list for me.

The book builds nicely on Seven Habits and The Eighth Habit and almost reads like the work of Stephen the father. The meat of the book is divided into two sections: one on developing what Covey calls “self trust,” a concept not unlike what I blogged about a few months ago, that if you make and keep commitments to yourself, you build a level of self-confidence and discipline that translates directly into better work and a better mental state. The other core section is one on building trust in relationships, where Covey lists out 13 behaviors that all lead to the development of trust.

In fact, we just had a medium-size trust breach a couple weeks ago with one of our key clients. Reading the book just as we are struggling to “right the wrong” was particularly impactful to me and gave me a number of good ideas for how to move past the issue without simply relying on self-flagellation and blunt apologies. This is a book full of practical applications.

It’s not a perfect book (no book is), and in particular its notion of societal trust through contribution is a bit weak relative to the rest of the book, but The Speed of Trust is an excellent read for anyone who wants to understand the fastest way to build — and destroy — a winning culture. It reads like a sequel of Covey senior’s books, but that’s a good thing.

Book Short:  Best Book Ever

The Hard Thing About Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz, is the best business book I’ve ever read.  Or at least the best book on management and leadership that I’ve ever read.  Period.

It’s certainly the best CEO book on the market.  It’s about 1000 times better than my book although my book is intended to be different in several ways.  I suppose they’re complementary, but if you only had time left on this planet for one book, read Ben’s first.

I’m not even going to get into specifics on it, other than that Ben does a great job of telling the LoudCloud/Opsware story in a way that shows the grit, psychology, and pain of being an entrepreneur in a way that, for me, has previously only existed in my head.

Just go buy and read the book.

It feels like it may be a bit premature to write a post with this title here in the summer of 2021. Even as vaccines are rolling out fairly quickly, the combination of the Delta mutation of the COVID-19 virus and a bizarrely large anti-vaccine movement in the US, plus slower vaccine roll-outs in other parts of the world, are causing yet another spike in infections. 

However, I read Michael Lewis’s The Premonition last week, a bit of a “mid-mortem” on the Pandemic, and it got me thinking about what lessons we as a society have learned in these past 18 months, and how they can be applied to entrepreneurs and startups. I am particularly drawing on the few weeks I was deeply engaged with the State of Colorado’s COVID response effort, which I blogged about here (this is the 7th post in the series, but it has links to all the prior posts in order).

Here are a few top of mind thoughts. 

First, entrepreneurial skills can be applied to a wide range of society’s challenges.  The core skills of founders and entrepreneurs are vision, leadership/inspiration/mobilization of teams, and a fearlessness about trying things and then seizing on the ones that work and rapidly discarding the ones that don’t, quickly absorbing learnings along the way. If you look broadly at the world’s response to the Pandemic, and at Colorado’s response as a microcosm, you can see that the jurisdictions and organizations that employed those types of skills were the ones that did the best job with their response. The ones that flailed around — unclear vision, lurching from plan to plan and message to message, pandering to people instead of following the science, sticking with things that didn’t make sense — those folks got it wrong and saw more infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. 

Second, parachuting in and out of leadership roles really works but is a little bit unsatisfying. I think that, even in a short period of time, I got a lot of good work done helping organize and stand up the IRT in Colorado. It was very much an “interim CEO” job, not unlike a lot of the roles we place at Bolster. Without a ton of context around the organization I was joining, I still had an impact. The unsatisfying part is more about me as the exec than it is about the organization, though. I’m so used to being around for the long haul to see the impact of my work that I found myself pinging Sarah, who took over the leadership of the group after I left, Brad, and Kacey and Kyle on the teamfor a few weeks just to find out what was going on and what had become of Plan X or Idea Y. 

Third, I came to appreciate something that I used to rail against in the business world, or at least came to appreciate an alternative to it. I frequently will say something like “don’t solve the same problem four different ways,” almost always in response to people facing a big hole in the organization and trying to hire four different people to fill the hole, when likely one hire will do (or at least one for starters). But what Michael Lewis calls the “Swiss cheese defense” or Targeted Layered Containment (TLC) that worked pretty well as defense and mitigation against the virus while there was no vaccine totally worked. He calls it the Swiss cheese defense because, like a slice of Swiss cheese, each layer of defense has holes in it, but if you line up several slices of Swiss cheese just right, you can’t see any of the holes. Some masking here, some quarantining there, couple closures over there, a lot of rapid testing, some working from home where possible, some therapeutics – and voila – you can blunt the impact of a pandemic without a vaccine. The same must be true for complex problems in business. I am going to amend my approach to consider that alternative next time I have a relevant situation. 

Fourth, blunt instruments and one size fits all solutions to complex problems (especially in this situation, with multiple population types in multiple geographies) — even those with good intentions — can’t work, drive all sorts of unintended consequences, with a lack of feedback loops can make situations worse or at least frustrating. Nationwide or even statewide rules, quite frankly even county-wide rules, don’t necessarily make sense in a world of hot spots and cool spots. Statewide regulations for schools when districts are hyper local and funded and physically structured completely differently, don’t always make sense. There are definitely some comparables in the business world here – you’d never want, for example, to compensate people across all geographies globally on the identical scale, since different markets have different standards, norms, and costs of living. 

Finally, I am left with the difficult question of why all the preparation and forethought put into pandemic response seemed to fail so miserably in the US, when several nations who were far worse equipped to handle it in theory did so much better in reality. I am struggling to come up with an answer other than the combination of the general American theme of personal choice and liberty meeting the insanely toxic and polarizing swirl of politics and media that has made everything in our country go haywire lately. Big government incompetence in general, and failures of national leadership on this issue, also factor in heavily.  I also gather from Michael Lewis that the transition from one administration to another frequently involves a massive loss of institutional knowledge which can’t help. Of all these, failure of strong leadership stands out in my mind. 

The lesson for startups from this last point is important. Leadership matters. Eisenhower once said something to the effect that “plans are nothing but planning is everything.”  The thoughtfulness, thorough planning, communication and inspiration, and institutional knowledge that come from effective leadership matter a lot in executing and growing a startup, because you literally never know what COVID-analog crisis is lurking quietly around the corner waiting to pounce on your startup and threaten its very existence.

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.

As I mentioned the other day, the second edition of Startup CEO is out.  This post is a teaser for the content in one of the new chapters in this edition on Authentic Leadership.

As I mentioned last week, the book went to press early in the COVID-19 pandemic and prior to all the protests around racial injustice surrounding the George Floyd killing, so nothing in it specifically addresses any of those issues.  In some ways, though, that may be better at the moment since the book is more about frameworks and principles than about specific responses to current events. Two of those principles, which are timeless and transcend turmoil, uncertainty, time and place, are creating space to think and reflect and being intentional in your actions. In a world in which CEOs are increasingly called upon to deal with more than traditional business (pricing, strategy, go-to market approaches, team building, etc.) it’s imperative to approach and solve challenging situations from a foundation that doesn’t waver. 

At Return Path our values were the foundation that provided a lens through which we made every decision. Well, not every decision, only the good ones. When we strayed from our core values, that got us into trouble. The other principle, outlined in Chapter 1 of the Second Edition, is leading an organization authentically.

Let me provide a couple concrete examples of what I mean by “Authentic Leadership” since the term can be interpreted many ways.

One example is to avoid what I call the “Say-Do” gap.  This is obviously a very different thread than talking about how the company relates to the outside world and current events.  But in some ways, it’s even more important.  A leader can’t truly be trusted and followed by their team without being very cognizant of, and hopefully avoiding close to 100%, any gap between the things they say or policies they create, and the things they do.  There is no faster way to generate muscle-pulling eyerolls on your team than to create a policy or a value and promptly not follow it. 

I’ll give you an example that just drove me nuts early in my career here, though there are others in the book.  I worked for a company that had an expense policy – one of those old school policies that included things like “you can spend up to $10 on a taxi home if you work past 8 pm unless it’s summer when it’s still light out at 8 pm” (or something like that).  Anyway, the policy stipulated a max an employee could spend on a hotel for a business trip, but the CEO  (who was an employee) didn’t follow that policy 100% of the time.  When called out on it, did the CEO apologize and say they would follow the policy just like everyone else? No, the CEO changed the policy in the employee handbook so that it read “blah blah blah, other than the CEO, President, or CFO, who may spend a higher dollar amount at his discretion.”

What does that say about the CEO? How engaged are employees likely to be, how much effort are they willing to devote to the company if there are special rules for the executives? You can make any rule you want — as you probably know if you have read a bunch of my posts or my book over the years, I’m a proponent of rule-light environments — but you can’t make rules for everyone else that you aren’t willing to follow yourself unless you own the whole company and don’t care what anyone thinks about you or says about you behind your back.

Beyond avoiding the Say-Do Gap, this new chapter of the book on Authentic Leadership also talks about how CEOs respond to current events in today’s increasingly politicized and polarized world.  This has always felt to me like a losing proposition for most CEOs, which I talk about quite a bit in the book.  When the world is polarized, whatever you do as CEO, whatever position you take on things, is bound to upset, alienate, or infuriate some nontrivial percentage of your workforce.  I even give some examples in the book of how I focused on using the company’s best interests and the company’s values as guideposts for reacting (or not reacting) to politically divisive or charged issues like guns or “religious liberty” laws.  I say this noting that there are some people who *believe* that their side of an issue like this is right, and the other side is wrong, but the issues have some element of nuance to them.

Today’s world feels a bit different, and I’m not sure what I would be doing if I was leading a known, scaled enterprise at this stage in the game.  The largely peaceful protests around all aspects of racial injustice in America in the wake of the murder of George Floyd — and the brutality and senselessness of that murder itself — have caused a tidal wave of dialog reaching all corners of the country and the world.  The root of this issue doesn’t feel to me like one that has a lot of nuance or a second side to the argument.  After all, what reasonable person is out there arguing that George Floyd’s death was called for, or even that black Americans don’t have a deep-seeded and widespread reasonable claim to inequality…even if their view of what to do about it differs?

I *think* what I would be doing in a broader leadership role today is figuring out what my organization could be doing to help reduce or eliminate structural racial inequality where we could based on our business, as opposed to driving my organization to take a specific political stand. I know for sure that I wouldn’t solicit feedback from a select group of people only, but I would create a space where voices from across the organization (and stakeholders outside of it as well) could be heard. That’s not a solution, but a start, and in challenging times making a little bit of headway can lead to a cascading effect. It can, if you keep the momentum.

And, in line with “authentic leadership,” it’s okay to admit that you don’t have the answers, that you might not even know the questions to ask. But doing nothing, or operating in a “business as usual” way won’t make your company stronger, won’t open up new opportunities, won’t generate new ideas, and won’t sit well with your employees, who are very much thinking about these issues. 

So, in today’s challenging times I would follow my own advice, be thoughtful and reflective, and intentional in searching for common solutions.  I’d try to avoid “mob mentality” pressure — but I would also be listening carefully to my stakeholders and to my own conscience.

In the coming weeks, I’ll write posts that get into some of the other topics I cover in the book, but none of them will be as good as reading the full thing!

It’s election season, the GOP convention is literally in my backyard, and while this is not a political blog, I can’t help myself. As we as Americans grapple with the question of who we want to be our next leader (or at least those people who live in the 11 annointed swing states do), I have had a lot of thoughts lately about the question of what makes a good leader, and what the differences are between successful leadership in politics and successful leadership in business.

James O’Toole’s article on President Bush on page 31 of the September issue of Fast Company (no link available yet) brings up a really interesting point in comparing Bush to former president Ronald Reagan. He asserts that “what made Reagan effective and respected was that his actions followed consistently from a positive worldview.” (I’d also argue that the positive worldview as a starting point had something to do with it, but that’s beside the point.) He goes on to say that Bush has an “implementation problem” in that he “has vacillated between contradictory approaches to leadership: realism and idealism.” His central thesis is stated very clearly that

“Realists and idealists can both be effective leaders. But one cannot be both at once…The leadership lesson for GW – and for any leader – is simple: Followers don’t much care if leaders are realists or idealists, but they distrust inconsistency.”

This may or may not be true in the political arena, but I know it’s not true in business. Jim Collins’ watershed books Built to Last and Good to Great — both must reads! — describe the ideal CEO as someone who can simultaneously be optimistic and idealistic about the future of the company while simultaneously recognizing and dealing with the realities of the short-term situation. Ironically for this posting, Collins calls this the Stockdale paradox, after retired Admiral James Stockdale, a military leader and erstwhile vice presidential candidate of Ross Perot in the 1992 election.

As CEO, I have to constantly be selling the vision of the company — what we’re trying to become and how we’re going to get there — in broad strokes to my investors, board, management team, employees, and even customers. It’s that vision that keeps the whole machine running and keeps everyone focused and excited and working hard towards our long-term goals. But I have to be equally vigilant about the mundane realities of the current quarter, making our numbers, containing costs, and running the machine. If I did either one without the other, I think the whole system would break down.

Is Bush’s problem, as O’Toole asserts, that he articulated two different types of reasons for the war in Iraq — one rooted in Realism (WMD) and one rooted in Idealism (freedom and democracy)? Same goes for his states reasons for the tax cut — Realism on the one hand (to stimulate the economy) and Idealism on the other hand (shrink government). I agree that the Bush Administration has occasional implementation problems and doesn’t have nearly the “following” that Reagan and other more successful leaders in the past have, but I don’t think they’re caused by combining Realism and Idealism in the President’s leadership style. I think the leader of the free world has to do both well, each at its appropriate time, in order to be effective at his job.

Next up in this series: Admitting Mistakes.

5 Ways to Get Your Staff on the Same Page

[This post first appeared as an article in Entrepreneur Magazine as part of a new series I’m publishing there in conjunction with my book, Startup CEO:  A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business]

When a major issue arises, is everybody at your company serving the same interests? Or is one person serving the engineering team, another person serving the sales team, one board member serving the VC fund, another serving the early-stage “angels” and another serving the CEO? If that’s the case, then your team is misaligned. No individual department’s interests are as important as the company’s.

To align everyone behind your company’s interests, you must first define and communicate those goals and needs. This requires five steps:

1. Define the mission. Be clear to everyone about where you’re going and how you’re going to get there (in keeping with your values).
2. Set annual priorities, goals, and targets. Turn the broader mission into something more concrete with prioritized goals and unambiguous success metrics.
3. Encourage bottom-up planning. You and your executive team need to set the major strategic goals for the company, but team members should design their own path to contribution. Just be sure that you or their managers check in with them to assure that they remain in synch with the company’s goals.
4. Facilitate the transparent flow of information and rigorous debate. To help people calibrate the success, or insufficiency, of their efforts, be transparent about how the organization is doing along the way. Your organization will make better decisions when everyone has what they need to have frank conversations and then make well-informed decisions.
5. Ensure that compensation supports alignment (or at least doesn’t fight it). As selfless as you want your employees to be, they’ll always prioritize their interests over the company’s. If those interests are aligned – especially when it comes to compensation – this reality of human nature simply won’t be a problem.

Taken in sequence, these steps are the formula for alignment. But if I had to single out one as the most important, it would be number 5: aligning individual incentives with companywide goals.

It’s always great to hear people say that they’d do their jobs even if they weren’t paid to, but the reality of post-lottery-jackpot job retention rates suggests otherwise. You, and every member of your team, “work” for pay. Whatever the details of your compensation plan, it’s crucial that it aligns your entire team behind the company’s best interests.

Don’t reward marketers for hitting marketing milestones while rewarding engineers to hit product milestones and back office personnel to keep the infrastructure humming. Reward everybody when the company hits its milestones.

The results of this system can be extraordinary:

• Department goals are in alignment with overall company goals. “Hitting product goals” shouldn’t matter unless those goals serve the overall health of your company. When every member of your executive team – including your CTO – is rewarded for the latter, it’s much easier to set goals as a company. There are no competing priorities: the only priority is serving the annual goals.
• Individual success metrics are in alignment with overall company success metrics. The one place where all companies probably have alignment between corporate and departmental goals is in sales. The success metrics that your sales team uses can’t be that far off from your overall goals for the company. With a unified incentive plan, you can bring every department into the same degree of alignment. Imagine your general counsel asking for less extraneous legal review in order to cut costs
• Resource allocation serves the company, rather than individual silos. If a department with its own compensation plan hits its (unique) metrics early, members of that team have no incentive to pitch in elsewhere; their bonuses are secure. But if everyone’s incentive depends on the entire company’s performance, get ready to watch product leads offering to share developers, unprompted.

This approach can only be taken so far: I can’t imagine an incentive system that doesn’t reward salespeople for individual performance. And while everyone benefits when things go well, if your company misses its goals, nobody should have occasion to celebrate. Everybody gets dinged if the company doesn’t meet its goals, no matter how well they or their departments performed. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but it also important preventive medicine.