Keeping It All In Sync?

I just read a great quote in a non-business book, Richard Dawkins’ River out of Eden, Dawkins himself quoting Darwinian psychologist Nicholas Humphrey’s revolting of a likely apocryphal story about Henry Ford.  The full “double” quote is:

It is said that Ford, the patron saint of manufacturing efficiency, once

commissioned a survey of the car scrapyards in America to find out if there were parts of the Model T Fird which never failed. His inspectors came back with reports of almost every kind of breakdown:  axles, brakes, pistons — all were liable to go wrong. But they drew attention to one notable exception, the kingpins of the scrapped cars invariably had years of life left in them. With ruthless logic, Ford concluded that the kingpins on the Model T were too good for their job and ordered that in the future they should be made to an inferior specification.

You may, like me, be a little vague about what kingpins are, but it doesn’t matter. They are something that a motor far needs, and Ford’s alleged ruthlessness was, indeed, entirely logical. The alternative would have been to improve all the other bits of the car to bring them up to the standard of the kingpins. But then it wouldn’t have been a Model T he was manufacturing but a Rolls Royce, and that wasn’t the object of the exercise. A Rolls Royce is a respectable car to manufacture and so is a Model T, but for a different price. The trick is to make sure that either the whole car is built to Rolls Royce specifications or the whole car is built to Model T specifications.

Kind of makes sense, right?  This is interesting to think about in the context of running a SaaS business or any internet or service business.  I’d argue that Ford’s system does not apply or applies less.  It’s very easy to have different pieces of a business like ours be at completely different levels of depth or quality.  This makes intuitive sense for a service business, but even within a software application (SaaS or installed), some features may work a lot better than others.  And I’m not sure it matters.

What matters is having the most important pieces — the ones that drive the lion’s share of customer value — at a level of quality that supports your value proposition and price point.  For example, in a B2B internet/service business, you can have a weak user interface to your application but have excellent 24×7 alerting and on-call support — maybe that imbalance works well for your customers.  Or let’s say you’re running a consumer webmail business.  You have good foldering and filtering, but your contacts and calendaring are weak.

I’m not sure either example indicates that the more premium of the business elements should be downgraded.  Maybe those are the ones that drive usage.  In the manufacturing analogy, think about it this way and turn the quote on its head.  Does the Rolls Royce need to have every single part fail at the same time, but a longer horizon than the Model T?  Of course not.  The Rolls Royce just needs to be a “better enough” car than the Model T to be differentiated in terms of brand perception and ultimately pricing in the market.

The real conclusion here is that all the pieces of your business need to be in sync — but not with each other as much as with customers’ needs and levels of pain.

Alter Ego

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Best Place to Work, Part 7: Create a Thankful Atmosphere

My final installment of this long series on Creating the best place to work (no hierarchy intended by the order) is about Creating a thankful atmosphere.

What does creating a thankful atmosphere get you?  It gets you great work, in the form of people doing their all to get the job done.  We humans – all of us, absolutely including CEOs – appreciate being recognized when they do good work.  Honestly, I love what I do and would do it without any feedback, but nothing resonates with me more than a moment of thanks from someone on my exec team or my Board.  Why should anyone else in the organization be any different?

This is not about giving everyone a nod in all-hands by doing shout-outs.  That’s not sustainable as the company grows.  And not everyone does great work every week or month!  And it’s not about remembering to thank people in staff meetings, either, although that’s never bad and easier to contain and equalize.

It is about informal, regular pats on the back.  To some extent inspired by the great Ken Blanchard book Whale Done, and as I’ve written about before here, it’s about enabling the organization to be thankful, and optimizing your own thankfulness.

Years ago we created a peer award system on our company Intranet/Wiki at Return Path.  We enable Peer Recognition through this.  As of late, with about 350 employees, we probably have 30-40 of these every week.  They typically carry a $25 gift card award, although most employees tell me that they don’t care about the gift card as much as the public recognition.  Anyone can nominate anyone for one of the following awards, which are unique to us and relevant to our culture:

• EE (Everyday Excellence) -is designed for us to recognize those who demonstrate excellence and pride in their daily work.
• ABCD (Above and Beyond the Call of Duty) -is designed for us to recognize the outstanding work of our colleagues who go Above and Beyond their duties and exemplify exactly what Return Path is about
• WOOT (Working Out Of Title) -is designed for us to recognize those who offer assistance that is not part of their job responsibilities.
• OTB (On The Business)-is about pulling ourselves out of day-to-day tasks and ensuring we are continually aligned with the long-term, strategic direction of the business.  We make sure we’re not just optimizing our current tasks and processes but that we’re also thinking about whether or not we should even be doing those things.  We stop to think outside of the “box” and about the interrelationship between what we are doing and everything else in the organization.  In doing so, we connect the leaves, the branches, the trunk, the roots and soil of the tree to the hundreds of other trees in the forest.  We step back to look at the big picture
• TLAO ( Think Like An Owner)-means that every one of us holds a piece of the Company’s future and is empowered to use good judgment and act on behalf of Return Path.  In our day-to-day jobs we take personal responsibility for our products, services and interactions.  We spend like it’s our own money and we think ahead.  We are trusted to handle situations like we own the business because we are smart people who do the right thing.  We notice the things happening around us that aren’t in our day-to-day and take action as needed even if we’re not directly responsible
• Blue Light Special  is designed for us to recognize anyone who comes up with a clever way to save the company money)
• Coy Joy Award is in memory of Jen Coy who was positive, optimistic and able to persevere through the most difficult of circumstances.  This award is designed to recognize individuals who exemplify the RP values and spread joy through the workplace.  This can be by going above and beyond to welcome new employees, by showing a high degree of care and consideration for another person at RP, by being a positive and uplifting influence, and/or making another person laugh-out-loud.
• Human Firewall is awarded if you catch a colleague taking extra care around security or privacy in some way, maybe a suggestion in a meeting, a feature in a product, a suggestion around policy or practice in the office.

In the early days, we read these out each week at All-Hands meetings.  Today at our scale, we announce these awards each week on the Wiki and via email.  And I and other leaders of the business regularly read the awards list to see who is doing what good work and needs to be separately thanked on top of the peer award.

Beyond institutionalizing thanks…in terms of you as an individual person, there are lots of ways to give thanks that are meaningful.  Some are about maximizing Moments of Truth.  Another thing I do from time to time is write handwritten thank you notes to people and mail them to their homes, not to work.  But there are lots of ways to spend the time and mental energy to appreciate individuals in your company in ways that are genuine and will be noticed and appreciated.  To some extent, this paragraph (maybe this whole post) could be labeled “It’s the little things.”

That’s it for this series…again, the final roundup for the full series of Creating the Best Place to Work is here and individual posts are here:

1. Surround yourself with the best and brightest
2. Create an environment of trust
3. Manage yourself very, very well
4. Be the consummate host
5. Be the ultimate enabler
6. Let people be people
7. Create a thankful atmosphere

Anyone have any other techniques I should write about for Creating the Best Place to Work?

A friend of mine just emailed me and asked how I collect feedback from the Board after Board meetings. I have a good routine for this which I wrote about a little bit here but have since expanded.

First, we are disciplined about leaving an hour at the end of the board meeting for the following three things :

• Executive session – directors only, including me – sometimes I’ll have my CFO Jack come for a few minutes at the beginning, depending on the topics. The topics can be about people on the team, or things I’m concerned about that I didn’t want to talk about with observers and team present. I tee up any topics in a separate memo that I send only to board members when I send the main board book out. My board meetings are very inclusive – lots of team members and observers present, so it’s good to have this time available case the Board wants to talk more openly with me about something or ask questions they didn’t feel like asking with the broader group in the room.
• Closed session – I leave, so I give non-management directors an opportunity to talk about any issues related to me.
• CEO Debrief – I ask one director to take notes for me during Closed Session, then that person calls me back in to debrief anything.

All three of these are important, and it’s important to do them every meeting, even if you don’t have any specific issues to discuss. That way, no one freaks out (including you) if suddenly and unexpectedly, there’s a part of the meeting to which they’re not invited.

The key to this is really leaving time for it. Now that board meetings are often on Zoom, a lot of CEOs have shrunk the time to 2-3 hours to avoid Zoom fatigue, but that doesn’t usually leave a full hour for this end-of-meeting routine. Finish your main meeting, give everyone 10 minutes to breathe, then come back for the final three steps of the meeting.

Then, I use this form after every meeting, which was a suggestion from Fred a few years back (not here or here, though these are also really good posts he wrote on this topic). I sent it during Executive Session and ask people to fill it out immediately after the meeting while things are fresh in their minds.

Quick, easy, effective. You should never finish a Board meeting and have no idea how it went.