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)

Good Help is Hard to Find

We’re having a bitch of a time lately hiring good sales people.  We’re growing like crazy this year and are trying to invest more in our salesforce, but it’s not easy.  And we’re a good catch.  Good brand, healthy company, good comp and benefits, charming CEO, the works.

I just traded emails with a friend who is CEO of another online marketing services firm who said the same thing, with the exact same explanation I have:

I have been so unimpressed with everyone from our space (weak links drop out, mediocrity churns from company to company, and true talent is retained).

Anyway, we have gotten very lucky with a few key hires the past few months — and we certainly work like mad to retain the talent we have (or at least we try hard!) — but the reality is that it’s a good year for Internet businesses, and it’s hard to get people to jump ship when they have an established book of business and good commission check flow. 

Most of the people I know who are doing well with sales recruiting in our space these days, including ourselves, are mostly pulling people out of adjacent industries or even out of clients.  I’d ask my general readership for advice, but I assume if you have the secret sauce here, you’ll hoard it for yourself!

Five Years On

As of this past weekend, I’ve been blogging on OnlyOnce for five years.  My main reflection as I was thinking about it during this morning’s run is that blogging is different.  I started blogging to try out what was at the time the “new, new thing” (there were almost no CEO blogs at the time), just like I have tried out lots of other new technologies or web services from time to time over the years — from Skype to Facebook to Twitter to about 50 others.

You’ll never see a tweet from me about an anniversary of using Twitter.  Or any other comparable from that above list.  Blogging has ended up being fundamentally different.  It’s not just another expression of my status updates or another way to connect with friends and colleagues.  It’s become a core part of my business operating system, although I suppose that’s the case for many other tools as well. 

I think the main difference is that OnlyOnce has become a true form of creative expression for me.  It’s like (I imagine) writing a book or composing a piece of music. I’m not suggesting it’s high art, but I view it more as an ongoing project than most other online tools or sites I’ve tried out over the years.

Here’s to the next five years of it.

Vertical (Dis)Integration

A couple years ago, Dave Morgan wrote one of the best thought pieces on the future of the newspaper business in his Mediapost column.  Essentially his observation was that newspapers are an outdated vertical integration, and that to survive, smart papers would disaggregate into 5 separate companies and run each one as a separate business, taking on a new life unshackled from the newspaper:  local ad sales (they could own that franchise for the Yelps and Yodles of the world), local content (who better to syndicate local content?), local distribution (no other companies drop something on every doorstep every day), printing (still a business that requires scale), and digital.  It’s just a brilliant idea.

And it’s a shame none of them followed his advice, since they’re all going out of business now.

What occurred to me this week as I’m soaking in the goodness that is my new Amazon Kindle is that while newspapers may need to disaggregate to stay alive, Amazon is slowly amassing a strategy of very clever vertical integration that could well fuel its growth for decades to come.

The Kindle is brilliant vertical integration — it’s the device, the distribution, and the retail model all in one.  And if Amazon is smart, eventually once they have enough market share, they’ll just start doing deals directly with authors and cut out the publishing industry altogether and own the content as well.  They can hit both the long tail (with publishing and distribution costs approaching zero, the risk associated with signing a new untested writer for a revenue share deal are nil) as well as the head (cool place to release your newest book if you’re, say, Steven King).  And at that point, they’ll have a model that should produce an enormous amount of profit for them.

It’s interesting to look at these two situations in parallel — the transition of old media to new media, with one set of losers and a winner, where winning strategies are polar opposites.

I Don’t Want to Be Your Friend (Today)

The biggest problem with all the social networks, as far as I can tell, is that there’s no easy and obvious way for me to differentiate the people to whom I am connected either by type of person or by how closely connected we are.

I have about 400 on Facebook and 600 on LinkedIn.  And I’m still adding ones as new people get on the two networks for the first time.  While it seems to people in the industry here that “everyone is on Facebook,” it’s not true yet.  Facebook is making its way slowly (in Geoffrey Moore terms) through Main Street.  Main Street is a big place.

But not all friends are created equal.  There are some where I’m happy to read their status updates or get invited to their events.  There are some where I’m happy if they see pictures of me.  But there are others where neither of these is the case.  Why can’t I let only those friends who I tag as “summer camp” see pictures of me that are tagged as being from summer camp?  Why can’t I only get event invitations from “close friends”?  Wouldn’t LinkedIn be better if it only allowed second and third degree connections to come from “strong” connections instead of “weak” ones?

It’s also hard to not accept a connection from someone you know.  Here’s a great example.  A guy to whom I have a very tenuous business connection (but a real one) friends me on Facebook.  I ignore him.  He does it again.  I ignore him again.  And a third time.  Finally, he emails me with some quasi-legitimate business purpose and asks why I’m ignoring him — he sees that I’m active on Facebook, so I *must* be ignoring him.  Sigh.  I make up some feeble excuse and go accept his connection.  Next thing I know, I’m getting an invitation from this guy for “International Hug a Jew Day,” followed by an onslaught of messages from everyone else in his address book in some kind of reply-to-all functionality.  Now, I’m a Jew, and I don’t mind a hug now and then, but this crap, I could do without. 

I mentioned this problem to a friend the other day who told me the problem was me.  “You just have too many friends.  I reject everyone who connects to me unless they’re a really, super close friend.”  Ok, fine, I am a connector, but I don’t need a web site to help me stay connected to the 13 people I talk to on the phone or see in person.  The beauty of social networks is to enable some level of communication with a much broader universe — including on some occasions people I don’t know at all.  That communication, and the occasional serendipity that accompanies it, goes away if I keep my circle of friends narrow.  In fact, I do discriminate at some level in terms of who I accept connections from.  I don’t accept them from people I truly don’t know, which isn’t a small number.  It’s amazing how many people try to connect to me who I have never met or maybe who picked up my business card somewhere.

The tools to handle this today are crude and only around the edges.  I can ignore people or block them, but that means I never get to see what they’re up to (and vice versa).  That eliminates the serendipity factor as well.  Facebook has some functionality to let me “see more from some people and less from others” — but it’s hard to find, it’s unclear how it works, and it’s incredibly difficult to use.  Sure, I can “never accept event invitations from this person,” or hide someone’s updates on home page, but those tools are clunky and reactive.

When are the folks at LinkedIn and Facebook going to solve this?  Feels like tagging, basic behavioral analysis, and checkboxes at point of “friending” aren’t exactly bleeding edge technologies any more.

Education and Entrepreneurship

Fred posted his thoughts the other day that you don’t need a college degree to be a successful entrepreneur. He is clearly right in that one CAN be successful without it.  Gates, Zuckerberg, Dell have proven that. 

I’ve always said that I didn’t think an MBA was a prerequisite for a successful business career.  That’s easy for me to say, as I don’t have one despite many years of applying, deferring, cancelling, reapplying and general hand-wringing over whether or not to go in the mid-90s.  An MBA is probably a positive on a resume for the most part (hard to argue it’s a negative), but it’s not a prerequisite.  Every time I see “MBA preferred” on a job posting, I cringe (we never say that at Return Path).  Really?  You’d *prefer* to hire someone with an MBA over someone with two additional years of relevant work experience? 

That said, I’d note that there are things one gets out of a good college education that are critical to success in life.  Yes, they can be learned outside the classroom.  But unlike business school material, which is in many cases the stuff of work experience and more easily augmented by observation and the occasional business article or book (as far as I can tell), the things one learns in college which are applicable to entrepreneurship aren’t about the subject matter of the course.  They are things like:

– learning and applying new concepts quickly

– critical reasoning

– crisply presenting ideas

– respecting deadlines and guidelines

– understanding and appreciating other points of view

As with business school, these things *can* be learned outside a university environment, and certainly there are unusually talented people who have these traits hard wired.  But I do think the university environment cultivates and nurtures these skills in a way that is easier than the “do it yourself” world of teenage entrepreneurship. 

Driving Out of the Bubble

It’s easy for those of us who live in the Internet bubble to confuse the words “startup” and “entrepreneur” with the word “technology.”  Every once in a while, I am struck by a fantastic entrepreneurial idea that’s low-tech or no-tech. 

In the last few weeks, I’ve learned of two of them — oddly, very similar ideas.  They’re both going after the New York City black car limo market (all those car services that take business travelers to and from airports and meetings), which is a lucrative but kind of gritty business.  I’ve used black car services for 16 years now, and while I’ve found one that’s pretty good, they all have massive customer service problems and are pretty expensive.  It’s a market ripe for revolution.  But how to execute it?

Kid Car New York is one new service that is attacking this market with an alternative car service that’s oriented around families and kids.  The cars are mini-vans.  The drivers are trained in safety and friendly.  The cars all have car seats and bases in them, which are sanitized from one passenger to the next.  The drivers are actually employees with benefits — this company is trying to do to car services what Starbucks did to convenience store workers.  There is a membership/subscription pricing model that makes it feel more like a club.  While it’s moderately more expensive than black car competition, Kid Car is a natural alternative that appeals to a big niche audience.  The entrepreneur is a friend and former Return Pather, Topher McGibbon.  He’s excited about revolutionizing a sleepy, rough industry.  Mariquita and I have used Kid Car for a bunch of trips with the kids, and it’s like night and day.

In a different way, Ozocar is doing the same thing.  It’s a black car service with a fleet 100% made up of Toyota Priuses (if that’s the plural — I keep wanting to call them Prii). That’s the hook.  If you care about your carbon footprint but still have to do things like fly on planes and get to and from airports, why wouldn’t you pick a service that’s more environmentally friendly?  I tried Ozocar last night for the first time, and it was perfectly fine.  Plus, I felt better about myself the whole 18 minutes home from LaGuardia. 

Ozocar reminds me of my friend Andrew Winston’s book, Green to Gold (I posted about it here), and how businesses can be both more sustainable and more valuable at the same time.  Both Ozocar and Kid Car are great examples of innovation being driven by customer needs and market opportunity unrelated to high tech.  They’re great services, and I hope they succeed.  I just wonder how businesses like these get funded with all of the venture focus in the world on high tech and life sciences.

Do Business Books Suck for Entrepreneurs?

Ben thinks they do.  Some of his reasons are pretty good, but I’d challenge a few of them, or at least his finer points.

My experience over the years is that while most business books are not geared toward entrepreneurs, a good entrepreneur will figure out how to milk them for what they’re worth quickly and apply key learnings to his or her company. 

The reality is that running a startup or high growth company is a multi-faceted and incredibly dynamic experience, and having a bunch of outside inputs in the form of business book examples and theories can be really helpful. 

Even bad ideas can spur good thinking.

Child Prodigies, or Misspent Youths?

I just got an email from a reader of this blog with a subject line of "15 year-old entrepreneur" and a series of engaging questions around starting a business (and actually, quite a good idea for one as well).  It got me thinking about being a kid and being an entrepreneur at the same time.  The author of this email is impressively savvy and focused on the world of business and startups.

Ben Casnocha is another one.  Ben is 19, has already started two companies, and has written and published a book called My Startup Life. 

When I was 15, I actually did have an inkling that I was going to go into business someday, and probably even that I wanted to start a business someday.  After all, it’s what my dad did, and what both of my grandfathers did.  But the key words in that sentence are INKLING and SOMEDAY.  I’m not sure it would have occurred to me in a million years to actually start a real business.  I suppose I could have figured out how.  But I wasn’t interested in doing it, or I didn’t have a good peer network of business-minded teens, or something.

It’s interesting to think about whether or not I’d be a better entrepreneur or CEO today if I’d started entrepreneurial pursuits at age 15 instead of age ~25.  Certainly, one makes a huge number of mistakes the first time one does anything, so perhaps better to get those out of the way early.  But I have to imagine that there are some things that one learns with age about dealing with other people that can’t be hurried up just because one starts businesses early.

Anyway, my hat is off to guys like Ben and the even younger guy who wrote into me…I just hope they’re making enough time for more standard teenage fun with their friends as well!

A New (Old) Favorite Returns as a Blog

Andy Sernovitz’s very cleverly-named Damn, I Wish I’d Thought of That is back, this time in blog and RSS feed format as well as, of course, email newsletter format.  Andy is a Return Path alum and does a great job of crystallizing smart and clever ideas for marketers into manageable nuggets, particularly around viral and word-of-mouth marketing (Andy wrote a great book on WOM marketing, which I reviewed here).

He was nice enough to interview me for his blog.  As a teaser, Andy asked me (and a bunch of other people) three questions:

Great marketing comes down to one simple idea: Earn the respect and recommendation of your customers, and they will do the rest. What is your advice for any company that wants to …

1 … make people happy?

2 … earn respect?

3 … get a word of mouth recommendation?

The full interview is on Andy’s new site here.

In the Land of Too Many Conferences, This is a Good One

It’s rare that I’m sad to leave a conference — usually I can’t leave fast enough.  But such is my mood today leaving Mediapost’s third Email Insider Summit.

Our industry is way over-conferenced in general.  I’m guessing that our company’s full conference calendar has 40+ events on it over the course of a year.  It’s more than we can afford to exhibit at, participate in, speak at, attend.  We do our best, and what money we spend is much more carefully monitored and measured than it used to be, but usually it’s with that sick feeling in the pit of our collective marketing stomach that we’re throwing money away just because our competitors are there.

But the Email Insider Summit is different.  While there are some aspects of the show that I don’t love — four days is a long time, and three half days of golf and snorkeling is a little too heavy on the boondoggle side for my personal taste — the content and attendees are fantastic.  Mediapost’s formula of comping marketers and charging vendors very high prices to attend ensures an intimate, high level, and vendor-light crowd.  That’s a recipe for success in my book!

The two most interesting nuggets from today:

1. John Stichweh from Coca-Cola’s observation that brand marketing and direct marketing continue to rapidly converge, and that measurement of outcome (e.g., ROI) as opposed to measurement of process (e.g., GRPs or impressions) are gaining steam, never to look back.  I couldn’t agree more.  What can be counted will be counted.  And it can all be counted in the world of advertising, somehow.

2. Lisa Galli from CNET’s discussion of mobile marketing and what they’re doing to take advantage of the channel.  The best example I’ve heard in years of a marketer leveraging a medium is their new SMS Reviews product — just text message CNET1 the words Review xxx (insert name of product here), and you’ll get a text message back with a product review.  Now THAT ought to make shopping for electronics much more interesting.

I’m ready for more conferences like these, and fewer mammoth trade shows.