My latest book (I’m a co-author along with Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani), Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors, is now live on Amazon – today is publication day! The book is a major refresh of the first edition, now eight years old. I was quoted in it extensively but not an official author – Brad and Mahendra were nice enough to share that with me this time. The book includes a lot of new material and new voices, including a great Foreword by Jocelyn Mangan from Him for Her and Illumyn. It’s aligned with Startup CEO and Startup CXO in look and in format and is designed to be an easy-to-read operator’s manual to private company boards of directors. Brad also blogged about it here.

We’ve done a lot of work around startup boards at Bolster the past couple of years, including working with over 30 CEOs to help them hire amazing new independent board members. Our landmark Board Benchmark study last year highlighted the problem with startup boards, but also the opportunity that lies within: not enough diversity on the boards, but also not nearly enough independent directors — and a lot of open seats for independent directors that could be filled. That conclusion led me to my Startup Board Mantra of 1-1-1: Independent directors from Day 1, 1 member of the management team, and 1 independent for every 1 investor.

As we posted on the Bolster blog last week, our quick refresh of the Board Benchmark study revealed some good news and some bad news about progress on diversity in the boardroom with startups. The good news is that the needle is starting to move very slowly, and that independent directors present the best opportunity to add diversity to boards. Our data shows that half of all new directors brought onto boards in the last year were independents, and of those, 57.9% were women and 31.6% were non-White board members. Those numbers are well above the prior study’s benchmarks of 36% and 23%, respectively (our experience running board searches skews even further to women and non-White directors being hired).

The bad news is how slowly the needle is moving — only 20% of open independent board seats were filled over the previous year, which is a lot of missed opportunity. The main takeaway is that while overall representation on boards is still skewed largely White and male, the demographic profile of new board appointments looks a lot different from the representation on boards today, indicating that CEOs are making intentional changes to their board composition.

Startup boards are a great way to drive grassroots change to the face of leadership in corporate America. More CEOs need to follow up by filling their open board seats and fulfilling their stated desires to improve diversity in the boardroom. This takes time and prioritization — these are the places where we see board searches either never get off the ground, or falling down once they do, for all the searches we either run or pitch at Bolster.

Hopefully Startup Boards will help the startup ecosystem get there.

Should You Have a Board?

As I mentioned last week, Fred’s post from a few months ago about an M&A Case study involving WhatCounts had a couple of provocative thoughts in it from CEO David Geller.  The second one I wanted to address is whether or not you should have take on institutional investors and have a Board.  As David said in the post:

Fewer outsiders dictating (or strongly suggesting) direction means that you will be able to pursue your goals more closely and with less friction

Although I have a lot of respect for David, I disagree with the notion that outsiders around the Board table is inherently bad for a business, or at least that the friction from insights or suggestions provided by those outsiders is problematic.

While that certainly CAN be the case, it can also be the case that outside views and suggestions and healthy debate, as long as incentives are aligned, people are smart, and founders manage the discussion well, can be enormously productive for a business.  I recognize that I’ve been very lucky that the Board members we’ve had at Return Path over the years have not been dogmatic or combative or dumb, but I do think selection and management of Board members is something very much in a CEO’s control.

But beyond the issue of who sets the agenda, Boards create an atmosphere of accountability for an organization, which drives performance (and many other positive qualities) from the top down in a business.  Budgeting and planning, reporting on performance, organizing and articulating thoughts and strategy – all these things are crisper when there’s someone to whom a CEO is answering.

As a telling case in points, I’ve known two CEOs over the years in the direct marketing field who have more or less owned their companies but insisted on having Boards.  While I’m not sure if those Boards had the ultimate power to remove the owner as CEO (which is the case in a venture-dominated Board and of course an important distinction), I do know that having a Board served them and their organizations quite well.  The fact that they didn’t have to have “real Boards” but chose to anyway – and ran spectacular businesses – is a good controlled case study for me in the value of this discipline.

Why We Love Email Authentication, But Why It Won’t Stop Spam

Microsoft made a big announcement today that they’re taking email authentication, in the form of Sender ID, very seriously.  They’re using a stick, not a carrot.  Emailers who do not publish a proper Sender ID record are now going to (a) find themselves in the bulk mail folder at Hotmail and MSN, and (b) have a big fat disclaimer thrown on top of their emails from Microsoft warning users that the email’s source can’t be authenticated.

At Return Path, we’re big fans of authentication, and we’re sponsoring the upcoming Email Authentication Summit in a couple of weeks in New York as one way of supporting the effort — encouraging our clients to get on the ball with authentication is another one.  Here’s what we think it will (and won’t) do:

– It WILL make a big dent in spoofing, phishing, and fraud, right away.  Why?  Because those particular elements of the Internet Axis of Evil are identity-based…therefore, identity authentication will either stop those things, make it easier for consumers to steer clear of them, or make it easier for law enforcement to go after them.

– It WILL NOT make a big dent in spam right away.  Why?  Because spam is much more nuanced than fraud.  If I’m Microsoft, and I know that you are the particular sender of an email into my network, that’s all good and well, but I might not have any idea if I want to accept that mail or not.  Another way of saying this is that spammers can publish Sender ID records, too.

– It WILL lay the foundation for longer-term spam solutions.  Why?  Because it’s important to understand exactly who is sending mail into a network in order to answer that next question of “do I want to accept your mail or not?”  We think the answers to that question lie with accreditation and reputation services.

Obviously, I have my biases.  Return Path owns Bonded Sender, the leading accreditation service, which answers that question by saying “yes – you want to accept this mail, because Return Path and TRUSTe have examined me thoroughly and are vouching for my integrity, they’re measuring how many people are complaining about my mail, and if I get too many complaints, they fine me and kick me out of the program.”

Look for another announcement from us soon about what we’re up to in the reputation space, which is a more complex cousin to accreditation in answering that same question.

Book short:  Life Isn’t Just a Wiki

One of the best things I can say about Remote: Office Not Required,  by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, is that it was short.  That sounds a little harsh – part of what I mean is that business books are usually WAY TOO LONG to make their point, and this one was blessedly short.  But the book was also a little bit of an angry rant against bad management wrapped inside some otherwise good points about remote management.

The book was a particularly interesting read juxtaposed against Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last which I just finished recently and blogged about here, which stressed the importance of face-to-face and in-person contact in order for leaders to most effectively do their jobs and stay in touch with the needs of their organizations.

The authors of Remote, who run a relatively small (and really good) engineering-oriented company, have a bit of an extreme point of view that has worked really well for their company but which, at best, needs to be adapted for companies of other sizes, other employee types, and other cultures.  That said, the flip side of their views, which is the “everyone must be at their cubicle from 9 to 5 each day,” is even dumber for most businesses these days.  As usual with these things, the right answer is probably somewhere in between the extremes, and I was reminded of the African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go farm go together” when I read it.  Different target outcomes, different paths.

I totally agree with the authors around their comments about trusting employees and “the work is what matters.”  And we have a ton of flexibility in our work at Return Path.  With 400 people in the company, I personally spend six weeks over the summer working largely remote, and I value that time quite a bit.  But I couldn’t do it all the time.  We humans learn from each other better and treat each other better when we look at each other face to face.  That’s why, with the amount of remote work we do, we strongly encourage the use of any form of video conferencing at all times.  The importance of what the authors dismiss as “the last 1 or 2% of high fidelity” quality to the conversation is critical.  Being in person is not just about firing and hiring and occasional sync up, it’s about managing performance and building relationships.

Remote might have been better if the authors had stressed the value that they get out of their approach more than ranting against the approaches of others.  While there are serious benefits of remote work in terms of cost and individual productivity (particularly in maker roles), there are serious penalties to too much of it as well in terms of travel, communication burden, misunderstandings, and isolation.  It’s not for everyone.

Thanks to my colleague Hoon Park for recommending this to me.  When I asked Hoon what his main takeaway from the book was, he replied:

The importance of open communication that is archived (thus searchable), accessible (transparent and open to others) and asynchronous (doesn’t require people to be in the same place or even the same “timespace”).  I love the asynchronous communication that the teams in Austin have tried: chatrooms, email lists (that anyone can subscribe to or read the archives of), SaaS project management tools. Others I would love to try or take more advantage of include internal blogs (specifically the P2 and upcoming O2 WordPress themes; http://ma.tt/2009/05/how-p2-changed-automattic/), GitHub pull requests (even for non-code) and a simple wiki.

These are great points, and good examples of the kinds of systems and processes you need to have in place to facilitate high quality, high volume remote work.

I’ve written a lot about Boards this past year related to Bolster’s work in helping founders/CEOs build great boards:

• The New Way to Scale a Board of Directors
• My New Startup Board Mantra – 1:1:1
• The Startup Ecosystem Needs More Independent Board Members – That’s the Clearest Path to Having Better and More Diverse Boards
• Startup Boards eBook: How to Build Your Board
• Startup Boards eBook: How to Succeed in Your First Board Role

But more recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about Board effectiveness, as I’ve been working with Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani on a second edition of Startup Boards, which will be published in mid-2022. And in the middle of our feverish writing and editing, Reid Hoffman sent Brad a great document which I want to amplify here:

Some of these rituals are more important than others (or at least more widely applicable), but they’re all worth reading. I am definitely going to start incorporating some version of the “Dory and Pulse” ritual into my meetings to make sure we’re covering everything that each director wants to cover in meetings (or answer smaller things ahead of time).

Thanks to Reid for this great contribution to the world of Startup Boards.

There’s been a growing cry for tech companies to add diversity to their leadership teams and boards, and for good reason. Those two groups are the most influential decision making bodies inside companies, and it’s been well documented that diverse teams, however you define diversity — diversity of demographics, thoughts, professional experience, lived experience — make better decisions. 

Gender, racial, and ethnic representation in executive teams and in board rooms are not new topics.  There’s been a steady drumbeat of them over the last decade, punctuated by some big newsworthy moments like the revelations about Harvey Weinstein and the tragic murder of George Floyd.  

It’s also true that in people-focused organizations, and most tech companies claim to be just that, it’s beneficial to have different types of leaders in terms of role modeling and visibility across the company. As one younger woman on my team years ago said, “if you can see it…you can be it!”

My company Bolster is a platform for CEOs to efficiently build out their executive teams and boards. But while nearly every search starts with a diversity requirement, many don’t end that way. 

Here’s why, and here’s what can be done about it. 

For boards, the “why” is straightforward. Board searches are almost never a priority for CEOs. They’re viewed as optional. Bolster’s Board Benchmark study in 2021 indicated that only a third of private companies have independent directors at all;even later stage private companies only have independent directors two-thirds of the time. That same study indicated that 80% of companies had open Board seats. The comparable longitudinal study in 2022 indicated that the overwhelming majority of those open board seats were still open. 

Independent directors are usually the key to diversity, as the overwhelming majority of founders and VCs are still white and male. It takes a lot of time and effort to recruit and hire and onboard new directors, and in the world of important versus urgent, it will always be merely important. Without prioritizing hiring independents, board diversity may be a lofty goal, but it’s also an empty promise. I wrote about my Rule of 1s here and in Startup Boards – I wish more CEOs and VCs took the practice of independent boards and board diversity seriously. The silver lining here is that when CEOs do end up prioritizing a search for an independent director, they are increasingly open to diverse directors, even if those people have less experience than they might want. That openness to directors who may never have been on a corporate board (but who are board-ready), who may be a CXO instead of a CEO, is key. Of the several dozen independent directors Bolster has helped match to companies in the past year, almost 70% of them are from demographic populations that are historically underrepresented in the boardroom.

Diversity is stalling for Senior Executive hiring for the opposite reason. Exec hires are usually urgent enough that CEOs prioritize them. And they frequently start their searches by talking about the importance of diversity. But Senior Executives are much more often hired for their resume than for competency or potential. Almost all executive searches start with some variation of this line, which I’m lifting directly from a prior post: “I want to hire the person who took XYZ Famous Company from where I am today to 10x where I am today.” The problem with that is simple. That person is no longer available to be hired. They have made a ton of money, and they have moved beyond that job in their career progression. So inevitably, the search moves on to look for the person who worked for that person, or even one more layer down…or the person who that person WAS before they took the job at XYZ Famous Company. Those people may or may not be easy to find or available, but they feel less risky. In the somewhat insular world of tech, those candidates are also far less likely to be diverse in background, experience, thought, or, yes, demographics.

Running a comprehensive executive search based on competencies, cultural fit, scale experience, and general industry or analogous industry experience is much harder. It takes time, patience, digging deeper to surface overlooked candidates or to check references, and probably a little more risk taking on the part of CEOs. And while CEOs may be willing to take some risk on a first-time independent director, fewer are willing to take a comparable level of risk on an unproven or less known executive hire. 

For some CEOs, the answer is just to take more risk — or more to the point, recognize that any senior hire carries risk along a number of dimensions, so there’s no reason to prioritize your narrow view of resume pedigree over any critical vector. For others, the answer may be to bring the focus of diversity in senior hires to “second level” leaders like Managers, Directors, or VPs, where the perceived risk is lower, and the willingness to invest in training and mentorship is higher. Those people in turn can be promoted over time into more senior positions. 

Not every executive or board hire has to be demographically diverse. Not every executive team or board has to have individual quotas for different identity groups, and diversity has many flavors to it. But without doing the work, tech CEOs will continue to bemoan the lack of diversity in their leadership ranks, and miss out on the benefits of diverse leadership, while not taking ownership for those efforts stalling.

The Good, The Board, and The Ugly, Part II

Much has been written of late on various VC and entrepreneur blogs on effective management of a Board of Directors, Board materials, running good Board meetings, and the like.  A couple years ago, I even wrote out a few tips for those things myself.

But here’s one critical ingredient of a good Board you won’t find in all those posts:  have fun!  This picture was from today’s Halloween Board meeting at Feedburner…as one of Dick’s colleagues labeled it, The Dawn of the Living Costolos.

Happy Halloween!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Not-So-Short:  Not Just for Women

At the request of the women in our Professional Services team, I recently read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In:  Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, and while it may seem like dancing the meringue in a minefield for a male CEO to blog about it, I think it’s an important enough topic to give it a shot.  So here goes.

First, given the minefield potential, let me issue a few caveats up front.  These are deep, ages old, complex, societal issues and behaviors we’re talking about here.  There is no quick answer to anything.  There is no universal answer to anything.  Men don’t have the same perspective as women and can come across as observers (which in some respects, they are).  Working moms don’t have the same perspective as stay-at-home moms, or as single women.  We try to be good about all these issues at Return Path, but I’m sure we’ve only scratched the surface.  </caveats>

Perhaps most important, my overall take on the book is that it’s a very good business book that everyone should read – not just women.  I have a strong reaction to the reactions I’ve read and heard about the book – mostly from women dismissing the book because Sandberg has immense financial resources, so how could she possibly know the plight of the ordinary mom, and how could she understand what it is like to be a stay-at-home mom?  That reaction is to dismiss the dismissals!  I found the book to be very broadly applicable.  Of course things about life with a two-working parent family are easier if you have more money.  But that’s completely not the point of the book.  And Sandberg doesn’t once criticize stay-at-home moms for that choice – in fact, she acknowledges feelings of guilt and inferiority around them and admiration for the work they do that benefits all families and kids, not just their own.

Here are a few of the biggest areas of thinking, AHA, or questioning, that the book gave me:

• One of Sandberg’s underlying points is that the world would be a better place with more women in leadership positions, so that’s an important goal.  It’s interesting that few enough of our leaders are women, that it’s hard for me to draw that same conclusion, but it makes sense to me on the surface, and there’s some research about management teams and boards to back it up.  As far as I can tell, the world has yet to see a brutal female dictator.  Or a fair share of political or corporate scandals caused by women.  There are definitely some horror stories of “tough boss” women, but probably no more than “tough boss” men.  It’s interesting to note that in our society, leadership roles seem to be prized for their power and monetary reward, so even if the world wouldn’t be a better place with more female leaders, it would certainly be a more fair place along those two dimensions
• I felt that a bunch of Sandberg’s points about women were more generalizations about certain personality types which can be inherent in men and women.  Maybe they’re more prevalent in women, even much more, but some are issues for some men as well.  For example, her general point about women not speaking up even if they have something to say.  I have seen this trait in women as well as more introverted men.  As a leader, I work hard to draw comments out of people who look like they have something to say in a meeting but aren’t speaking up.  This is something that leaders need to pay close attention to across the board so that they hear all the voices around their tables.  Same goes for some of the fears she enumerates.  Many male leaders I know, myself included at times, have the “fear of being found out as a fraud” thought.  Same goes for the “desire to be liked by everyone” holding people back – that’s not gender specific, either.  All that said, if these traits are much more prevalent in women, and they are traits that drive attainment of leadership roles, well, you get the point
• The fact that women earn 77 cents on the dollar in equivalent jobs for men is appalling.  I’ve asked our People Team to do a study of this by level, factoring in experience and tenure, to make sure we don’t have that bias at Return Path.  I know for sure we don’t at the leadership level.  And I sure as heck hope we don’t anywhere in the organization.  We are also about to launch an Unconscious Bias training program, which should be interesting
• Sandberg made a really interesting point that most of the women who don’t work are either on the low end or high end of the income spectrum.  Her point about the low end really resonated with me – that women who don’t earn a lot stop working if their salaries only barely cover childcare costs.  However, she argues that that’s a very short term view, and that staying in the workforce means your salary will escalate over time, while childcare costs stay relatively flat.  This is compounded by the fact that women who lean back early in their careers simply because they are anticipating someday having children are earning less than they should be earning when they do finally have children.
• The other end of the income spectrum also made sense once I parsed through it – why do women whose husbands make a lot of money (most of whom make a lot of money as well) decide to off-ramp?  Sandberg’s point about the “Leadership ambition gap” is interesting, and her example of running a marathon with the spectators screaming “you know you don’t have to do this” as opposed to “you’ve got this” is really vivid.  See two bullets down for more on this one.  But it might not be straight-up Leadership Ambition Gap so much as a recognition that some of the high-earning jobs out there are so demanding that having two of them in the household would be a nightmare (noting that Dave and Sheryl seem to have figured some of that out), or that moms don’t want to miss out on that much of their children’s lives.  They want to be there…and they can afford to.  Another related topic that I wish Sandberg had covered in more depth is the path of moms who off-ramp, then re-on-ramp once their youngest children are in school, whether into the career they left or a different one.  That would be an interesting topic on many fronts
• Societal influences must matter.  The facts that, in 2011 – Gymboree manufactured onesies that say “smart like Daddy” and “pretty like Mommy,” and that JC Penney teenage girl t-shirts say “I’m too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me” are more than a little troublesome on the surface (unless Gymboree also produces “handsome like Daddy” and “wicked smart like Mommy,” which somehow I doubt).  The fact that women do worse on math and science tests when they have to identify their gender at the top of the test is surprising and shocking
• I am really fortunate that Mariquita only works part time, and it’s unclear to me how our lives would work if we both worked full time, especially given my extremely heavy travel schedule, though I am sure we’d figure it out.  And there’s no way that I carry 50% of the burden of household responsibilities.  Maybe 20-25% at best.  But I was struck by Sandberg’s comments (I am sure true) that in two-working-parent families, women still carry the preponderance of household responsibilities on their shoulders.  I totally don’t get this.  If you both work, how can you not be equal partners at home?  A quick mental survey of a couple of the two-working-parent families we know would indicate that the parents split household responsibilities somewhat evenly, though you can never know this from the outside.  This should be a no brainer.  Sandberg’s point that men need to “lean into their families” is spot on in these cases for sure
• On a related note, Sandberg’s comment that “as women must be more empowered at work, men must be more empowered at home…moms can be controlling and critical…if he’s forced to do things her way, pretty soon she’ll be doing them herself” made me smile.  I have definitely seen this “learned helplessness” on the home front with dads quite a bit over the years
• One really good point Sandberg makes is that younger employees who don’t have kids should be allowed to have a life outside of work just as much as women who do have kids.  And that she pays people for the quality and quantity of their output, not their hours.  These are principles that match our values and philosophy at Return Path 100%
• Probably the most startling moment in the book for me – and I suspect many other men – was Sandberg’s vignette about the young woman at Facebook who was starting to “lean back” because she might someday have a family – before she was even dating anyone!  This really gave me a lot of pause.  If widespread (and I assume it is), there are clearly societal forces at work that we need to do more to help women early in their careers overcome, if they want to overcome them
• Sandberg’s point that a rich and fulfilling career “is a Jungle Gym, not a Ladder” is spot on, but this is true for men as well as women.  It matches our philosophy of Scaling Horizontally perfectly
• Another very poignant moment in the book was when Sandberg talked about how she herself had shown bias against women in terms of who she called on in meetings or lectures during Q&A.  Again, lots of pause for me.  If female leaders have the same societal bias against women, that’s a sign that we all have real work in front of us to help level the playing field around giving women air time.  Similarly, her example of the Heidi/Howard study was fascinating around how women with the same characteristics are perceived differently by both male and female co-workers gives me pause (for the record, I know the Heidi in question, and I like her!).  Likewise, the fact that female leaders are often given unflattering nicknames like “The Iron Lady” – you’d never see something like that for a man in the same position.  At least Thatcher wore the name as a badge of honor

I hope this post doesn’t end up as a no-win piece of writing where all I do is touch a few nerves and inspire no ongoing dialog.  “Let’s start talking about it,” the ending theme of the book, is a great way to end this post as well.  As with all tough issues, articulating the problem is the first step toward solving it.  Women need to allow men (as long as the men are open-minded, of course!) to think what they think, say what they think in a safe space, and blunder through their own learnings without feeling threatened.  And men need to be comfortable having conversations about topics like these if the paradigmatic relationship between women and leadership is going to continue to shift instead of avoiding the topic or just calling in HR.

Hopefully this blog post is one step towards that at my company.  Return Path colleagues – feel free to comment on the blog or via email and share stories of how we’ve either helped you or held you back!  But overall, I’m glad I read this book, and I’d encourage anyone and everyone to read it.

Symbolism in Action

A couple months ago, I wrote about how the idiots who run the Big 3 US automakers in Detroit don’t have a clue about symbolism — the art or the science of it.  Yesterday, I wrote about how I think the non-headcount cuts to G&A that we’re making at Return Path during these challenging economic times will be positive for the company in the long run.  The two topics are closely related.

Obama announces on Day 1 that White House staffers who make more than $100k won’t be getting a pay raise this year.  Presumably all of those people just started their jobs on January 20 and wouldn’t be eligible for a raise until 2010.  Return Path cuts pilates classes in its Colorado office — an expense that must cost around $3,000/year.  Practically speaking, it won’t make a difference to our budget one way or another.  Microsoft lays off 1,400 people — a real number, certainly for those families — but that’s the equivalent of Return Path laying off 2 people. 

Sometimes the symbolic is just that.  It is something designed to send a signal to others, and not much more.  You could argue that all three examples above mean nothing in reality, so they were just symbolic.  A waste of time.

You can also make the argument that sometimes, when done right, symbolism turns into action as it motivates or serves as a catalyst for other changes.  Obama’s cuts may be fictitious, but they set the tone for broader action across a 2mm person bureaucracy.  Pilates in the office?  Feels too excessive these days, even for a company obsessed with its employees and their well being, in an era where we’re cutting back other things that are more serious.  Microsoft has gobs of cash and doesn’t need to worry about its future, but it wants to tell the other 99% of its employee population that it’s time to buckle down and fly straight.  And they will.

Anyone who thinks the synbolic doesn’t influence the practical should think again.  Or just talk to Caroline Kennedy about the impact of her admission that she hadn’t voted in years on her political ambitions.

Closer to the Front Lines, II

Last year, I wrote about our sabbatical policy and how I had spent six weeks filling in for George when he was out.  I just finished up filling in for Jack (our COO/CFO) while he was out on his.  Although for a variety of reasons I wasn’t as deeply engaged with Jack’s team as I was last year with George’s, I did find some great benefits to working more directly with them.

In addition to the ones I wrote about last year, another discovery, or rather, reminder, that I got this time around was that the bigger the company gets and the more specialized skill sets become, there are an increasing number of jobs that I couldn’t step in and do in a pinch.  I used to feel this way about all non-technical jobs in the early years of the company, but not so much any more. 

Anyway, it’s always a busy time doing two jobs, and probably both jobs suffer a bit in the short term.  But it’s a great experience overall for me as a leader.  Anita’s sabbatical will also hit in 2010 — is everyone ready for me to run sales for half a quarter?