Great Exchange on Newspapers’ Future

Dave Morgan and Jeff Jarvis trade excellent thoughts here on the future of newspapers.  Read the posts in this order:

Jarvis:  Why newspapers aren’t making it in the new world (and what they can do about it)

Morgan:  What they can do about it (disaggregate their vertically integrated business models)

Jarvis:  Disaggregate even further!

The exchange is really thought-provoking about other forms of traditional media whose businesses are being turned upside down by the Internet.  Yellow Pages.  Music.  Movies.  The current Hollywood writers’ strike may actually be unsolvable with the Movie and TV industry’s current structure.

How to Ask For a Raise

I’m guessing this topic will get some good play, both internally at Return Path and externally.  It’s an important topic for many reasons, although one of the best ones I can think of is that most people aren’t comfortable asking for raises (especially women and more introverted people, according to lots of research as well as Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In).

My whole point in writing this is to make compensation part of normal conversations between a manager and a team member.  This requires the manager making it comfortable (without negative stigma), and the employee approaching it maturely.

My guess is that the two most common ways most people ask for raises when they bother to do so are (1) they get another job offer and try to get their current employer to match, or (2) they come to their boss with a very emotional appeal about how hard they are working, or that they heard Sally down the hall makes more money than they do, and that’s not fair.  Although either one may work (particularly the first one), there’s a better way to think about the whole process that removes the emotion and produces a better outcome for both employer and company.

Compensation is fundamentally a data-driven process for companies.  The high-level data inputs are the size of payroll, the amount of aggregate increase the company can afford, and the framework for distributing that aggregate increase by department or by level of performance.  A second set of position- or person-specific data looks at performance within a level, promotions, and internal leveling, and external comparables.  Fundamentally, smart companies will approach compensation by paying people fairly (both internally and externally) to do their jobs so they keep their best people from looking for new jobs because of compensation.

If compensation is a data-driven process for companies, employees should treat asking for raises as a data-driven process, too.  How can you go about that?  What data can you bring to a compensation conversation with your manager to make it go as smoothly as possible?

1. Let your manager know ahead of time that you’d like to discuss your compensation at your next 1:1, so he or she is prepared for that topic to come up.Blindsiding will never result in a calm and collected conversation.
2. Be mindful of the company’s compensation cycle timing.  If the company has an annual process and you are just about to hit it (within 2-3 months), then consider carefully whether you want to ask for a raise off-cycle, or whether you just want to give your manager data to consider for the company’s normal cycle.  If you’re really off-cycle (e.g., 4-8 months away), then you should note to your manager that you’re specifically asking for off-cycle consideration
3. Bring internal data:  your most recent performance review or ratings as well as any other specific feedback or praise you’ve received from your manager, colleagues, or senior people.  See below for one additional thought on internal data
4. Bring external data:  bring in compensation and job requirement and scope data from multiple online sources, or even from recruiters if you’ve been called recently and asked about comp and scope of roles.  The most important parts here are the two I bolded – you can’t just bring in a single data point, and you also have to include detailed job scope and requirements to make your point.  If you only find one data point that supports a raise, expect your manager or HR team to counter with five that don’t.  If you bring in examples that aren’t truly comparable (the title is right, but the scope is way off, or the job requirements call for 10 years of experience when you have 5), then expect your manager to call you out on that
5. Recognize that cash compensation is only one part of the mix.  Obviously an important part, but not the only part.  Incentive compensation, equity, perks (gym membership, healthcare, etc. – they all add up!), and even company environment and lifestyle are all important considerations and important levers to pull in terms of your total compensation
6. Have the conversation in a non-emotional manner.  State your position clearly and unambiguously – you feel you deserve a raise of Q because of X, Y, and Z.  Tell your manager that you enjoy your job and the company and want to continue working there, fairly paid and amply motivated.  Don’t threaten to quit if you don’t get your way, leave the acrimony at the door, set a follow-up date for the next conversation to give your manager time to think about it and discuss it with HR, and be careful about citing your colleagues’ compensation (see next point)

The one piece of data that’s tricky to surface is internal comparables.  Even the most transparent organizations usually treat compensation data as confidential.  Now, most companies are also not idiots, and they realize that people probably talk about compensation at the water cooler.  But bringing up a specific point like “I know what Sally makes, and I make less, and that’s not fair” is likely to agitate a manager or executive because of the confidentiality of compensation.  However, as one point among many, simply asking your manager, “do you feel like my compensation is fair relative to internal comparables for both my position and performance?” and even asking questions like “which positions internally do you think are good comparables for my compensation?” are both fair game and will make your point in a less confrontational or compromising manner.

Managers, how can you best handle situations where employees come in to discuss their compensation with you?

1. Most important are two things you can do proactively here.  First, be sure to set a tone with your team that they should always be comfortable talking to you about compensation openly and directly.  That you might or might not agree with them, but the conversation is safe – remove the stigma.  Second, be proactive yourself.  Make sure you’re in touch with market rates for the roles on your team.  Make sure you’re rewarding high performers with more responsibility and more money.  And make sure you don’t let “job scope creep” happen where you just load up your good people quietly with more responsibility and don’t officially change their scope/title/comp
2. If the employee does not more or less follow the steps above and approach this in a planful, non-emotional way, I’d suggest stopping him before the conversation gets more than one or two sentences in.  Empathize with his concern, hand him a copy of this blog post, and tell him to come back in a week ready to talk.  That saves both of you from an unnecessarily uncomfortable conversation, and it gives you time to prepare as well (see next item)
3. If the employee does more or less follow the steps above and approaches this rationally, then listen, empathize, take good notes, and agree to the follow-up meeting.  Then sit with your manager or department head or HR to review the data surfaced by the employee, develop your own data-driven perspective, and respond in the meeting with the employee with data, regardless of your response.  If you do give a raise, the data makes it less about “I like you.”  If you don’t, you can emphasize the employee’s importance to you and steer the discussion towards “how to make more money in the future” by expanding role scope or improving performance

I hope this advice is helpful for both managers and employees.  Compensation is a weird topic – one of the weirdest at companies, but it need not be so awkward for people to bring up.

The Art of the Post-Mortem

It has a bunch of names — the After-Action Review, the Critical Incident Review, the plain old Post-Mortem — but whatever you call it, it’s an absolute management best practice to follow when something has gone wrong. We just came out of one relating to last fall’s well document phishing attack, and boy was it productive and cathartic.

In this case, our general takeaway was that our response went reasonably well, but we could have been more prepared or done more up front to prevent it from happening in the first place.  We derived some fantastic learnings from the Post-Mortem, and true to our culture, it was full of finger-pointing at oneself, not at others, so it was not a contentious meeting.  Here are my best practices for Post-Mortems, for what it’s worth:

• Timing:  the Post-Mortem should be held after the fire has stopped burning, by several weeks, so that members of the group have time to gather perspective on what happened…but not so far out that they forget what happened and why.  Set the stage for a Post-Mortem while in crisis (note publicly that you’ll do one) and encourage team members to record thoughts along the way for maximum impact
• Length:  the Post-Mortem session has to be at least 90 minutes, maybe as much as 3 hours, to get everything out on the table
• Agenda format:  ours includes the following sections…Common understanding of what happened and why…My role…What worked well…What could have been done better…What are my most important learnings
• Participants:  err on the wide of including too many people.  Invite people who would learn from observing, even if they weren’t on the crisis response team
• Use an outside facilitator:  a MUST.  Thanks to Marc Maltz from Triad Consulting, as always, for helping us facilitate this one and drive the agenda
• Your role as leader:  set the tone by opening and closing the meeting and thanking the leaders of the response team.  Ask questions as needed, but be careful not to dominate the conversation
• Publish notes:  we will publish our notes from this Post-Mortem not just to the team, but to the entire organization, with some kind of digestible executive summary and next actions

When done well, these kinds of meetings not only surface good learnings, they also help an organization maintain momentum on a project that is no longer in crisis mode, and therefore at risk of fading into the twilight before all its work is done.  Hopefully that happened for us today.

The origins of the Post-Mortem are with the military, who routinely use this kind of process to debrief people on the front lines.  But its management application is essential to any high performing, learning organization.

Yiddish for Business

Contrary to popular belief, Yiddish isn’t “Jewish slang” (I hear that a lot).  According to Wikipedia, Yiddish is a basically a High Germanic language with Hebrew influence of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. It developed as a fusion of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages.  It is written in the Hebrew alphabet.

I don’t speak Yiddish.  Like many American Jews whose families came to America in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, my grandparents spoke it somewhat, or at least had a ton of phrases they wove into everyday speech.  Presumably their parents spoke it fluently before coming here and Americanizing their families.  My own parents have a handful of stock phrases down.  My brother and I have even less.

What I like best about Yiddish is that I find it to be a very descriptive and also onomatopoetic language.  I can never verbally describe a Yiddish word without a lengthy description and some examples, and usually some level of gesticulation.  I’ll try to be more succinct below.  But in the end, words mean a lot like what they sound like they should mean.  A lot of New Yorkers who aren’t Jewish end up knowing a handful of Yiddish words because they’re pretty prevalent in the City, but many people outside New York don’t.  So I thought I’d have a little fun here and do something different on the 6^th anniversary of launching this blog (today) and list out some of my favorite Yiddish words and describe them with a business context.  In no particular order…

–          Schmooze – to chat someone up, work them, frequently with some kind of hidden agenda in mind.  Business application:  “She showed up at the charity event just to schmooze Alice, who was a potential client.”

–          Chutzpah – nerve, as in “wow, he has some nerve.”  My dad always said the classic description of chutzpah was the kid who murdered both of his parents, then pleaded with the judge for leniency because he’s an orphan.  Business application:  “He missed all his goals this quarter and asked for his full bonus and a raise?  Now that takes real chutzpah!”

–          Spiel (pronounced schpeel) – a monologue or lengthy pitch.  Business application:  “I’m raising money, so I have to really organize my spiel before I go talk to the VCs.”

–          Schtick – someone’s standard song-and-dance.  Business application:  “I stood up in front of the room and gave my usual schtick about our values and mission.”  Kind of like Spiel.

–          Schlep – to make a long, pain-in-the-ass kind of trip.  Business application:  “I had to schlep all the way to Toledo for a meeting with that guy, and he didn’t even end up signing the deal.”

–          Mazel tov – literally means “good luck” but usually used in regular conversation to mean “congratulations.”  Business application:  “You got a promotion?  Mazel tov!”

–          Noodge – someone who inserts himself into a conversation in a somewhat unwelcome manner.  Related to Kibbitz – to give unsolicited advice from the sidelines. Business application:  “Sally is such a noodge.  She kibbitzes about my unit’s strategy all the time and just stirs up trouble.”

–          Maven – an expert, even a self-styled one, in a very niche area.  Business application:  “You want to figure out what smartphone to  buy?  Ask Fred – he’s the maven.”

–          Kosher (a Hebrew word as well) – completely by the books, originally referring to dietary laws that religious Jews follow.  Business application:  “Ask Marketing if it’s kosher to use our partner’s logo like that.”

–          Verklempt – choked up, overcome.  Business application:  “When I got my review and promotion and raise, I was so verklempt that I couldn’t speak for a minute or two.”

–          Schlock, Dreck, Chazerai, Bupkis – all have slightly different literal meanings (apparently Bupkis means “goat droppings”), but I use all of them somewhat interchangeably to mean junk or something of limited or no value.  Business application:  “That presentation was nothing but chazerai.  What did I get out of it?  Bupkis.”

–          Kvell – to beam or burst with pride, related to Nachus – warm “gooey” feeling of pride.  Business application:  “I had so much nachus when my company won that award for being the best place to work, I was just kvelling.”

–          Mishegas or Bubbamyseh – craziness or self-imposed silliness.  You might have heard the word Meshugenah before, which means crazy.  Business application:  “I can’t get all caught up in his mishegas.  I’m going to make my own decision here.”

–          Kvetch – either a noun or verb meaning complain, in a harpy kind of way.  Business application:  “Frank is such a kvetch.  He is just never happy.”

–          Mensch – a good guy.  Business application:  “Michael is such a mensch.  He always helps his colleagues out even when he doesn’t have to or doesn’t get credit for it.”

–          Fercockt (pronounced Fuh-cocktah) – crazy, messy.  Business application:  “John’s project plan is totally fercockt.  No one can follow it even when he tries to explain it.”

–          Mishpochah – family.  Business application:  “Welcome to the company – we’re happy to have you in the mishpochah.”

–          Tsuris – heartache or sadness.  Business application:  “Boy that’s one client that gives me nothing but tsuris.”

–          Tchotchke (pronounced chach-kee) – a trinket or little toy.  Business application:  “What kinds of tchotchkes are we giving away at our booth at the upcoming trade show?”

Pull one of these out in your next meeting – see what it gets you!

Senders No More

February marked the official end of Return Path being in the email sending business, even a little bit. Of course we still have corporate email servers, and we still have basic retention email marketing programs for our customers and prospects (with explicit permission of course!), but after a 9 1/2 year run, we no longer have direct consumer email-based relationships.

As we announced last fall, we recently divested all of our businesses other than our deliverability and whitelisting business — Postmaster Direct (list rental), Authentic Response/MyView.com (surveys), and ECOA (change of address). Those were great businesses, but they increasingly diverged over the years from each other and from our core deliverability business, so it made sense for them to belong to different companies in the end.

Besides diverging from each other, being a bulk sender of email had both advantages and disadvantages for us as a company. On the one hand, it was good for us to see firsthand what some of the issues are that impact our clients. We were, in fact, our own clients, one business unit to another. But on the other hand, being a bulk sender carried a real business risk of compromising our position as a trusted intermediary between senders and receivers. It was always a fine line to walk, and while we never got in trouble for it, we were always concerned — to the point where for a long time we didn’t allow our other business units to apply for our whitelist, Sender Score Certified, even at “arm’s length.” At least we weren’t an ESP!

But now that risk is gone. We are senders no more. Be sure to read our CTO’s description of what it was like to send a transactional privacy policy notification to 20mm addresses, most of which hadn’t been mailed in months or years.

The Beginning of the DMA’s Next Chapter

As I wrote a few months back, I recently joined the DMA’s Board of Directors and its Executive Committee to try to help the association – one of the largest and highest profile groups representing marketers – advance its agenda in a few specific ways.  At the time, I noted that my interests would be on consumer advocacy and engagement, execution around interactive marketing issues and the internet community, and transparency around the organization itself.

Yesterday, John Greco, the association’s CEO, announced he is stepping down to make way for the next generation of leadership.  John has done some great work the past five years running the DMA and has advanced it materially from where the association was when he took over in terms of interactive marketing, but he recognized (the hallmark of a good leader) that it was time for a change.

There are all sorts of questions people have about this announcement, and I’ve already gotten a number of calls and emails from people trying to read between the lines and get some inside scoop.  Some of the questions have answers – others don’t at this stage or can’t given confidentiality agreements. 

That said, as a new Board member helping the DMA build some bridges to the interactive marketing community, I thought I would share a few perspectives on this situation:

–          There is not a final search committee yet, nor are there final search criteria.  That said, there is a strong commitment to find a leader for the DMA who is not only capable of running a broad-based $30mm+ trade association and running a world class advocacy operating in Washington, but who also has deep roots in the Internet

–          There are many, many initiatives in the works – some of which have been underway for quite some time now – for the DMA to evolve as an association to more effectively execute its mission in the interactive marketing arena.  These will start to unfold relatively quickly

–          The DMA’s Board and Executive Committee are fantastic groups with very progressive, committed volunteers who understand the things that need to happen.  “Reform,” which probably isn’t quite the right word anyway, isn’t being pushed on the association – it is coming from within

–          The DMA is committed in its search process, and in its new “operating system” going forward, to embrace not just its membership but the broader interactive and direct marketing community as it evolves its strategy, broadens its mission, and looks for a new leader

So the bottom line is – this announcement of one change is the first of many.  Stay tuned, and look for much more open and transparent communication from the DMA, including a lot more community-oriented dialog as opposed to just one-way statements, than you’ve ever seen before in the coming weeks and months.

Well, not everything yet, but that day is getting closer.

Jack, my VP Finance and an avid blog reader (but not yet publisher) pointed me to Beyond Bullets, a relatively new blog about Powerpoint written by Cliff Atkinson, described in his bio as “a leading authority on Powerpoint and organizational communications.” Who knew such an expert existed?

The blog is pretty good and worth reading for people who regularly design and give stand-up presentations and are tired of the same old, same old Powerpoint templates. I read through most of the postings so far, and while some are a little esoteric, many of the tips are great. Most are either about the actual software and things you can do with it or presentation design and organization. I’ve always thought I was good at Powerpoint, but I don’t hold a candle to Cliff.

After reading Brad’s post this morning on The Torturous World of Powerpoint, I can’t help but wonder if he’d be less tortured if more people knew how to design and give good presentations.

Post 4 of 4 in the series of Scaling CMO’s- the other posts are, When to Hire your First Chief Customer Officer, What does Great Look like in a Chief Customer Officer and Signs your Chief Customer Officer isn’t Scaling.

You can engage with each person on the executive team one-on-one to understand what their issues and challenges are, but I’ve found that engaging with the CCO offsite with customers is far more productive and leads to a better understanding of the service organization than any other meeting time. I have typically spent the most time with or gotten the most value out of CCOs over the years doing the following.

In person at “Canary in the Coal Mine” customers. They don’t use canaries any more in coal mines, but the principle applies to companies: What are the early warning signs that you’ve got big problems looming? The earlier you discover those problems the better, and the CCO is usually the first person to figure out that something isn’t right with your product or service. I always find that the largest clients, the most demanding ones, the ones who push you around, the ones who are highly critical or you, are the ones who make your company a better company.  At Return Path, we had those types of clients over the years, from eBay, to DoubleClick, to Microsoft, to Groupon, to Facebook, to Bank of America—and that’s just the short list off the top of my mind.  The demanding customer is the one who breaks things and forces you to own up to your lack of scalability.  They also either take you to task or threaten to pull their business if you don’t clean up your act.  As painful as some of those meetings are, they are also ones I always wanted to attend in person with my CCO, both so I could eat whatever form of crow needed to be eaten as the Chief Crow Eater (which sends a very powerful message to the customer), and also because the CCO and I could experience the chirping of the canary in the coal mine and learn from the experience together.

While it’s important to engage with the CCO in the critical meetings with demanding customers, it’s also important to understand the base.  There’s an old saying from the hardware world that goes, “God was able to create the world in only 7 days because God didn’t have an installed base.”  The new world of Internet technologies, SaaS, and agile development is one where your installed base of customers is your biggest asset, not a millstone around your neck.  Some of the most meaningful experiences I had over the years with our CCOs was to be in market, spending time with all kinds of customers together in small groups and large, deeply understanding their needs and use of our product.

The CCO role is one that is easy to ignore or put on the back burner if things are going smoothly at your company, but as CEO I feel that it is best to stay close to the market and engaging with the CCO with demanding customers and with the base is a good way to understand your company and CCO better.

(You can find this post on the Bolster Blog here)

Agile Development

Sometime last year, our engineering and product teams embraced the Agile Software Development framework.  Without going into too much detail (here’s the Wikipedia entry for those who want it), the concept of Agile Development is to run software development in small pieces with a focus on more communication between product and development teams resulting in collaborative requirements development.  This leads to a “release early and often” environment where there are continual improvements.  For us, we group development projects now into a “release” that consists of a series of usually six, two-week “iterations.”

The release planning and iteration planning meetings are reasonably long meetings that involve the major stakeholders, product management and engineering.  The process also includes a very short, 10-minute Daily Stand-Up meeting with everyone on the team to review progress and identify roadblocks to completing the two-week iteration.  Requirements are not heavily documented and discussed more or less on the spot during the iteration meetings.  Because there’s a major pull-up every two weeks and a minor one every day, it’s easy to be light on requirements and for product management to constantly be in the loop with engineering to see progress, test functionality, and make mid-course corrections.

This methodology isn’t for everyone, but it’s particularly well suited to the kind of work we do at Return Path — small team, multiple internal and external stakeholders, very dynamic market, and web services as opposed to packaged software.

Our efforts have been bolstered by some limited consulting and more important, a fantastic web-based workflow management tool geared towards Agile Development run by a company called Rally Development in Boulder.  Think of it as Salesforce.com for your engineering and product team.

We’ve had great success with this methodology to date.  Engineering productivity is way up, product management visibility and input into development is way up, the level of friction/noise between product management and engineering is way down, and we have a much tighter grip on our development milestones than we ever have in the past.

Agile and Rally have worked so well for us, in fact, that we’re starting to extend the concept to other parts of our business, which I’ll write about separately.

I recently returned from a six-week sabbatical. It was fantastic. I blogged about it here if you’re curious about the experience. It turned out that, while I was gone, we had probably the most successful, least dramatic six weeks in our 10 year history. I had assumed that’s because the team buckled down while I was out, and so did our Board.

Little did we know what really happened during that six week stretch. It’s often said that when the cat’s away, the mice play. The short video below is what greeted me today at an all-hands meeting. If the team can crank out such great work and have this much fun while I’m out, well, I guess I should take more time off!

The old carpenter’s axiom of being extra careful to plan before executing is something not enough executives take to heart in business. Just like cutting a piece of wood a little too long, sometimes you execute in ways that can be modified on the fly; but other times, just like the cases where you cut a piece of wood too short, you can’t. And of course, in business, sometimes it’s somewhere in between. Some examples:

• One example that’s a little more literal is around cutting staff or planning a layoff. Layoffs are traumatic for everyone involved – mostly those impacted, but for you as CEO and for your remaining organization as well. Being thoughtful about how much you cut and (unlike the case of a piece of wood) erring on the side of cutting more than you think you need to can prevent you from having to do a second set of even more traumatic layoffs down the road
  
• Getting a lease on a new office? Plan, plan, and plan again – you can end up spending too much if you get too much space and can’t sublet it…you have a real headache if you don’t get enough space and need to scramble for more
  
• Planning a major investment in a new product? You don’t want to spin up a whole new effort internally and hire people before you’ve done enough discovery and planning to know it’s worth it

It’s an interesting question as to whether or not this axiom conflicts with the startup mentality of moving quickly and with agility. I don’t think it does, although in the startup ecosystem, a lot of fixed decisioning has moved to variable, which means you may be faced with fewer times where you need to measure twice. For example, a lot of SaaS licenses you have to buy are per-seat, or AWS costs are fluid. All that is much easier than perpetual license software models or standing up servers in a data center.

I’m a big fan of Eisenhower’s line that “plans are nothing but planning is everything.” That’s why I like to measure twice, cut once when I’m working on something big. It just raises the odds of getting it right, whatever it is.