Book Short: What’s For Dinner Tonight, Honey?

The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, by Barry Schwartz, presents an enlightening, if somewhat distressing perspective on the proliferation of options and choices facing the average American today. The central thesis of the book is that some choice is better than no choice (I’d rather be able to pick blue jeans or black jeans), but that limited choice may be better in the end than too much choice (how do I know that the jeans I really want are relaxed cut, tapered leg, button fly, etc.?). We have this somewhat astonishing, recurring conversation at home every night, with the two of us sitting around paralyzed about where to eat dinner.

The author’s arguments and examples are very interesting throughout, and his “Laffer curve” type argument about choice vs. too much choice rings true. While there’s obviously no conclusive proof about this, the fact that our society is more rife with depression than ever before at least feels like it has a correlation with the fact that most of us now face a proliferation of choices and decisions to make exponentially more than we used to. The results of this involve ever-mounting levels of regret, or fear of regret, as well as internal struggles with control and expectations. Perhaps the best part of the book is the final chapter, which ties a lot of the material of the book together with 11 simple suggestions to cope better with all the choices and options in life — summed up in the last few words of the book suggestions that “choice within constraints, freedom within limits” is the way to go. Amen to that. We all need some basic structure and frameworks governing our lives, even if we create those constructs ourselves. The absence of them is chaos.

Overall, this is a good social science kind of read, not overwhelming, but definitely interesting for those who are students of human psychology, marketing, and decision making. It’s squarely in the genre of Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Blink, and Robert Cialdini’s Influence, most of which I’ve written about recently, and though not as engaging as Gladwell, worth a read on balance if you like the genre.

Thanks to my friend Jonathan Shapiro for this book.

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!

Clients at Different Levels

Recently, I’ve become more aware that we have a huge range of clients when it comes to the level of the person we interact with at the client organization.  I suppose this has always been true, but it’s struck me much more of late as we’ve really ramped up our client base in the social networking/web 2.0 arena, where most of our clients are CEOs and COOs as opposed to Email Marketing Managers.

Of course, we don’t care who our day-to-day client is, as long as the person is enough of a decision maker and subject matter expert to effectively partner with us, whether it’s on deliverability via Sender Score or on list management or advertising via the Postmaster Network.  There are two main differences I have seen between the levels of client.  I suppose neither one is an earth-shattering revelation in the end, though.

First, the CEO/COO as client tends to be a MUCH MORE ENGAGED and knowledgeable client.  Some of these people know far, far more about the ins and outs of micro details of their businesses (and in the case of deliverability, the micro details of how ISPs filter email) than our average client.  I’d expect this type of client to be in command of the macro details of his or her business, but the level of "in the weeds" knowledge is impressive.  These clients are thirsty for information that goes beyond the scope of our work together.

Second, the CEO/COO as client is MUCH MORE PASSIONATE about his or her business.  It pisses them off when their email doesn’t get delivered.  They care deeply that our Postmaster opt-in might impact their registration rates by 0.5%.  They get very animated in discussions and tend to nod and gesture a lot more than take notes in a notebook.

My main takeaway from this?  If you run a business — how do you make sure your front line people are as fired up as you are?  You may never be able to give people the same kind of macro view you have of the company or the industry (although you can certainly make a good effort at it), but keeping people excited about what they do and igniting their intellectual curiosity on a regular basis will almost certainly lead to more successful outcomes in the details of your company.

The Wheels of Justice Move Slowly

I am on Jury Duty this week, or Jury Service, as it seems to have been renamed since the last time I did it.  Although it’s a pain and disruptive to my schedule, I never mind doing this — it’s all part of the social contract here, right? 

I have two main observations so far from my general view of the world:

1.  How on earth does the justice system actually function?  "Business hours" are basically 10-12 and then 2:30-4:00.  I assume that at least some work happens before and after, but yeesh.  If I ran my business that way…well, you know.  Could it be that our government might be a little more effective if people worked a little more?

2.  On a very impressive note, the courthouse now has free wi-fi in it.  You should have heard people applaud when the clerk announced that.  The processes and systems may be antiquated here, but at least they figured this one thing out!

Personal Reputation

There was a recent New York Times article that covered a relatively new company called Rapleaf that aggregates publicly available and privately submitted data about individuals, mostly from social networks, and then resells that data in bulk to marketers to help them target advertising more effectively, supposedly to names they already have permission to mail.  I’m sure the company would think I butchered that description, but it’s close, anyway.

While there are a lot of comments and posts flying around about the ethics of that data collection, I won’t focus on that here.  Publicly available data is publicly available data.  This isn’t a lot different than banks swapping your data to create a FICO score, Abacus swapping your purchase data to cataloggers, or InfoUSA compiling tax and DMV records.

What I think is interesting is the notion of having a global online personal reputation, which, despite Rapleaf’s verbiage, isn’t exactly what they’re doing at scale just yet.  I have often wondered if such a thing would work, especially since Return Path has gotten big into the corporate reputation business through our Sender Score service that monitors companies’ email sending reputations.

Here’s why I think it’s a good idea: the world of peer production and user generated content means that everyone can publish any media at any time.  As a result, the amount of content that’s available out there has exploded to unmanageable proportions.  Lots of sites are and have been working on making it easier to find and discover stuff.  That’s a good start.  But how are we going to start figuring out what things we want to consume and who to trust when even the most efficient search and discovery mechanisms produce too many options?  Think about it like this — you’d never buy something on eBay from someone who had a crappy seller reputation as noted by other eBay buyers who had bought things from the same seller.  Would you watch a random YouTube video (even if you liked the subject) if the producer had a horrible rating?  Would you bother trying to get into that person’s blog?  Would you allow someone to introduce that person to you via LinkedIn?

Here’s why I think it will be difficult to make it work: I’m not convinced that there is such a thing as an accurate universal measure of someone’s reputation.  Yes,  you CAN certainly aggregate a lot of information about people from publicly available sources online.  And many of those sources do have data that point to someone’s reputation.  But do they translate well across sources and dimensions?  To go back to the prior example, if a person has a bad reputation as a seller on eBay…does that mean I don’t want to read his blog?  Or just that I don’t want to buy stuff from him sight unseen?  He might be a marvelous writer but a thief.  Or maybe he has a great credit score but is lousy at follow up.  Also, the notion that someone can lobby for and garner a whole slew of private recommendations from friends on the system, while a nice idea to complement and correct inaccuracies of public data, feels like a system ripe for gaming.

Anyway, it’s an interesting concept, and I look forward to seeing how it unfolds.

Keeping Commitments

Today’s post is another in the series about our 13 core values at Return Path, about making commitments.  The language of our value specifically is:

We believe in keeping the commitments we make, and we communicate obsessively when we can’t

Making and keeping commitments is not a new value – it’s one of Covey’s core principles if nothing else.  I’m sure it has deeper roots throughout the history of mankind.  But for us, this is one of those things that is hard wired into the social contract of working here.  The value is more complicated than some of the other ones we have, and although it is short, it has three components that worth breaking down:

• Making commitments:  Goal setting, whether big company-wide goals, or smaller “I’ll have it to you by Tuesday” goals, is the foundation for a well-run, aligned, and fast-paced organization
  
• Keeping commitments:  If you can’t keep the overwhelming majority of your commitments, you erode the trust of your clients or colleagues and ultimately are unable to succeed
  
• Communicating when commitments can’t be met:  Nobody is perfect.  Sometimes circumstances change, and sometimes external dependencies prevent meeting a goal.  The prior two parts of this value statement are, in my mind, pay to play.  What separates the good from the great is this third piece — owning up loud and clear when you’re in danger of blowing a goal so that those who are counting on you know how to reset their own work and expectations accordingly
  

It’s worth noting on this one that the goal is as relevant EXTERNALLY as it is INTERNALLY.  Internal commitments are key around building an organization that knows how to collaborate and hand work off from group to group.  External commitments — from meeting investor expectations to client deliverables — keep the wheels of commerce flowing.

I’m enjoying articulating these values and hope they’re helpful for both my Return Path audience and my much larger non-Return Path audience.  More to come over time.

Counter Cliche:  Connected at the Top

Fred hasn’t written an official VC Cliche of the Week for a while, but his post yesterday on Connectors is close enough — in it, he talks about how he likes to be a good Connector between people and thinks it’s a quality of great VCs.

First, we should give credit to Malcolm Gladwell for a great definition of Connectors in The Tipping Point.  Gladwell not only defines Connectors as Fred has but also defines two other types of people who are critical in the social networking/buzz building arena:  Mavens and Salesmen.  I’d argue that a great VC has to have a bit of all three!

But in terms of entrepreneurs (the point of the counter cliche series), is being a Connector a prerequisite for success?  I think the answer is nuanced, but it’s probably no.  I’ve met great CEOs who are fairly introverted and whose brains don’t work in the Connector kind of way.  And they can be great at developing product, even running operations.  But if you’re an entrepreneur and not a Connector, you’d better have one or more of them on your management team (think sales or business development or marketing) to make up for that missing piece of the equation to make sure your company is connecting the dots outside the corporate walls.  Otherwise, you’re sure to miss out on opportunities.

The one area where I would say that being a Connector is critical for an entrepreneur is internally within the company.  If you’re going to lead the troops effectively, you do need to be able to make Connections between people within the company, especially as the business grows.  And off-topic a bit (literally if not figuratively), you also need to be able to connect with your staff members on a personal level and make sure that people are connected to the company and its mission.  I’m not sure these are things that an entrepreneur can delegate as long as he or she is CEO.

An Execution Problem

My biggest takeaway from the TED Conference this week is that we — that is to say, all of us in the world — have an execution problem.  This is a common phrase in business, right?  You’ve done the work of market research, positioning, and strategy and feel good about it.  Perhaps as a bigger company you splurge and hire McKinsey or the like to validate your assumptions or develop some new ones.  And now all you have to do is execute — make it happen.  And yet so many businesses can’t make the right things happen so that it all comes together.  I’d guess, completely unscientifically, that far, far more businesses have execution problems than strategic ones.  Turns out, it’s tough to get things to happen as planned BUT with enough flexibility to change course as needed.  Getting things done is hard.

So what do I mean when I say that humanity has an execution problem?  If nothing else, the intellectual potpourri that is TED showed me this week that we know a lot about the world’s problems, and we don’t lack for vision and data on how to solve them.  A few of the things we heard about this week are the knowledge — and in many cases, even real experiences — about how to:

– Steer the evolution of deadly disease-causing bacteria to make them more benign within a decade

– Build world class urban transportation systems and growth plans to improve urban living and control pollution

– Drive down the cost of critical pharmaceuticals to developing nations by 95%

– Dramatically curb CO2 emissions

We have the knowledge, and yet the problems remain unsolved.  Why is that?  Unlike the organized and controlled and confined boundaries of a company, these kinds of problems are thornier to solve, even if the majority of humans agree they need to be solved.  Whether the roadblock is political, financial, social — or (d) all of the above — we seem to be stuck in a series of execution problems.

The bright spot out of all of this (at least from this week’s discussions) is that, perhaps more than ever before in the history of mankind, many of our most talented leaders AND our wealthiest citizens are taking more of a personal stake in not just defining the problems and solutions, but making them happen.  They’re giving more money, buiding more organizations, and spending more time personally influencing society and telling and showing the stories.  It will take years to see if these efforts can solve our execution problems, but in the meantime, the extraordinary efforts are things we can all be proud of.

Pivot, Don’t Jump!

I spoke last night at the NYC Lean Startup Meetup, which was fun.  I will write a couple other posts based on the experience over the next week or so.  The Meetup is all about creating “lean startups,” not just meaning lean as in cheap and lightweight, but meaning smart at doing product development from the perspective of finding the quickest path to product-market fit.  No wasted cycles of innovation.  Something we are spending a lot of time on right now at Return Path, actually.

My topic was “The Pivot,” by which the group meant How do you change your product idea/formation quickly and nimbly when you discover that your prior conception of “product-market fit” is off?  I talked a bit about the pivots we’ve done over the years here, not just the corporate ones, but some of the essential product ones as well.  One of the comments a member of the Meetup made that really stuck with me was that you have to “Pivot, Don’t Jump” when making changes to your business or product.

This has been true of Return Path’s pivots over the years.  Our pivots have all had two very solid foundation points — the company’s deep expertise in email, and our customer base.  Every pivot we’ve done has been in some way at the request/urging of our clients, and the new directions have always been in line with our core capabilities.  While we have a talented team that probably could execute lots of different businesses well, it’s hard to see us being successful in other areas that are farther afield.

People over the years, for example, have suggested that we should get into SMS deliverability — isn’t that going to be a hot topic?  We don’t know.  We don’t spend our lives immersed in text messaging.  What about getting into measurement of social media messaging — isn’t that related?  Maybe, but it’s not in our wheelhouse.  Expanding from email deliverability software and analytics, into services, into data, into whitelisting on the other hand – those were pivots, not jumps.

One other note of course, is that the larger your business is, and the more investors have a stake in it, the harder it is to make BIG pivots or any kind of jumps.  Innovation is still critical, but innovating from a well-protected core is what it’s all about, not chasing new shiny objects.

Doing Well by Doing Good, Part IV

This series of posts has mostly been about things that people or companies do that help make the world a better place — sometimes when it’s their core mission, other times (here and here) when it becomes an important supporting role at the company.

Today’s post is different — it’s actually a Book Short as well of a new book that’s coming out later this fall called Green to Gold:  How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage, published by Yale Press and written by Daniel Esty (a Yale professor and consultant), and a good friend of mine, Andrew Winston, a corporate sustainability consultant.

Green to Gold is a must-read for anyone who (a) holds a leadership position in business or is a business influencer, and (b) cares about the environment we live in.  Its subtitle really best describes the book, which is probably the first (or if not, certainly the best) documentation of successful corporate environmentalstrategy on the market.

It’s a little reminiscent to me of Collins Built to Last and Good to Great in that it is meticulously researched with a mix of company interviews/cooperation and empirical and investigative work.  It doesn’t have Collins “pairing” framework, but it doesn’t need to in order to make its point.

If you liked Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, this book will satisfy your thirst for information about what the heck the corporate world is doing or more important, can do, to do its part in not destroying our ecosystem.  If you didn’t like Gore’s movie or didn’t see it because you don’t like Al Gore or don’t think that many elements of the environmental movement are worthwhile, this book is an even more important read, as it brings the theoretical and scientific to the practical and treats sustainability as the corporate world must treat it in order to adopt it as a mainstream practice — as a driver of capitalistic profit and competitive advantage.

This is a really important work in terms of advancing the cause of corporate social responsibility as it applies to the environment.  Most important, it proves the axiom here that you can, in fact, Do Well by Doing Good.  If you’re interested, you can pre-order the book here.  Also, the authors are writing a companion blog which you can get to here.

Book Short:  Choose Voice!

I took a couple days off last week and decided to re-read two old favorites.  One –Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead — my fourth reading — will take me a little longer to process and figure out if there’s a good intersection with the blog.  One would think so with entrepreneurship as the topic, but my head still hurts from all the objectivism.  The second — Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, by Albert O. Hirschman — is today’s topic.

I can’t remember when I first read Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.  It was either in senior year of high school Economics or Government; or in freshman year of college Political Philosophy.  Either way, it was a long time ago, and for some reason, some of the core messages of this quirkly little 125 page political/economic philosophy book have stayed with me over the years.  I remembered the book incorrectly as a book about political systems, and I think it was born consciously in the wake of Eugene McCarthy’s somewhat revolutionary challenge to a sitting President Johnson for the Democratic Party nomination in 1968.  But the book is actually about business; it’s just about businesses and their customers, not corporations as social structures (the latter being more of an interest to me).  Written by an academic economist (I think), the book has its share of gratuitous demonstrative graphs, 2×2 matrices, and SAT words.  But its central premise is a gem for anyone who runs an organization of any size.

The central premise is that there are really two paths by which one can express dissatisfaction with a temporary, curable lapse in an organization:  exit (bailing), or voice (trying to fix what’s wrong from within).  The third key element, Loyalty, is less a path in and of itself but more an agent that “holds exit at bay and activates voice.”

You need to read the book and apply it to your own circumstances to really get into it, but for me, it’s all about breeding loyalty as a means of making voice the path of least resistance, even when exit is a freely available option (few of us run totalitarian states or monopolies, after all).  That to me is the definition of a successful enterprise, both internally and externally.

With your customers:  make your product so irresistible, and make your customer service so deep, that your customers feel an obligation to help you fix what they perceive to be wrong with your product first, rather than simply complain about price or flee to a competitor.

With your employees:  make your company the best possible place you can think of to work so that even in as ridiculously fluid a job market as we live in, your employees will come to their manager, their department head, the head of HR, or you as leader to tell you when they’re unhappy instead of just leaving, or worse, sulking.

With your company (you as employee):  make yourself indispensible to the organization and do such a great job that if things go wrong with your performance or with your role, your manager’s loyalty to you leads him or her to give you open feedback and coach you to success rather than unceremoniously show you the door.

Ok, this wasn’t such a short book short — probably the longest I’ve ever written in this blog, and certainly the highest ratio of short:actual book.  But if you’re up for a serious academic framework (quasi-business but not exclusively) to apply to your management techniques, this short 1970 book is as valid today as when it was written.  Thanks to David Ramert (I am pretty sure I read it in high school) for introducing it to me way back when!