Like an Organ Transplant
I’ve often said that hiring a new senior person into an organization is a bit like doing an organ transplant. You can do all the scientific work up front to see if there’s a match, but you never know until the organ is in the new body, and often some months have gone by, whether the body will take or reject the organ.
New senior people in particular have a vital role in organizations. Often they are brought in to fix something that’s broken, or to start up a new position that growth has created. Sometimes they are replacing a problematic person (or a beloved one). Usually the hope is that they will also bring a fresh perspective and good outside view to bear on people whose heads are too much “in the business.” In all cases, their role as leaders makes them higher visibility and higher profile than most, and therefore more impactful if they succeed. It also makes them more problematic if they don’t.
What happens that causes the body to reject the organ? It could be a few things, but in my experience it’s usually one of three. Sometimes the execution isn’t there — in other words, the person knows what needs to be done but isn’t effective in getting it done, for any number of reasons. Usually you feel like you were sold a bill of goods. Other times, specifically in cases where the person is coming into a new job that didn’t exist before, it turns out the job was poorly specified and doesn’t need to exist, or that the person coming in is the wrong person for it. Usually the person feels like he or she was sold a bill of goods.
But I think in most cases, the cultural fit just isn’t there. And that’s not really anyone’s fault, although it *should be* something you can interview for to a large extent. These are the most painful ones to deal with. Decent to stellar execution (good enough to not end employment over it), but poor cultural fits.
How quickly does this take? I’ve seen it take a quarter. I’ve also seen it take a year. But in both cases, the warning signs were there much sooner.
A footnote on this is that as Return Path has grown, I’ve come to a new thought about this — it doesn’t just apply to senior people. It applies to almost any new hire. It may be an outcome of having a really strong and consistent culture, or it may just be the natural extension of this axiom.
Startup CEO (OnlyOnce – the book!)
One of the things I’ve often thought over the years since starting Return Path in 1999 is that there’s no instruction manual anywhere for how to be a CEO. While big company CEOs are usually groomed for the job for years, startup CEOs aren’t…and they’re often young and relatively inexperienced in business in general. That became one of the driving forces behind the creation of my blog, OnlyOnce (because “you’re only a first time CEO once”) back in 2004.
Now, over 700 blog posts later, I’m excited to announce that I’m writing a book based on this blog called Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Building and Running Your Company. The book is going to be published by Wiley & Sons and is due out next summer. The book won’t just be a compendium of blog posts, but it will build on a number of the themes and topics I’ve written about over the years and also fill in lots of other topics where I haven’t.
The catalyst for writing this book was Brad Feld. Brad has been a friend, mentor, investor, and Board member for over a decade. We’ve had many great times, meals, and conversations together over the years, not the least of which was staggering across the finish line together at the New York City Marathon in 2005. Brad started writing books a few years ago, and I’ve been peripherally involved with them, first with Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup (I contributed one of the chapters) and then with Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist (I wrote all the “Entrepreneur Perspective” sidebars).
Those are great books, and they’ve been incredibly well received by the global entrepreneurial community. But then Brad got the bug, and now he’s in the middle of writing FOUR new books with Wiley that will all come out over the next year. They are:
These four books, plus the two earlier ones, plus Startup CEO, are all part of the Startup Revolution series. While I’ll continue to do most of my blogging and posting here on OnlyOnce, I’d also encourage you to check out the Startup Revolution site and sign up to be a member of that community. I’ll be doing some things on that site as well in connection with Startup CEO, and it’s a more concentrated place to post and comment on all things Startup. In addition, we’ll be putting a bunch of add-ons to the book on that site closer to publication time.
I hope Startup CEO becomes a standard for all new CEOs. I don’t think I have all the answers, but at least others can benefit by learning from my 13 years of successes and mistakes! Now all I have to do is go write the darned thing.
I haven’t done short book summaries in a LONG time, but I’ll try to start adding that back into the mix as I read interesting and relevant books. Here’s one to add to your list: One Life to Lead, by Russell Benaroya. I was recently connected to Russell by a mutual friend, TA McCann at Pioneer Square Labs. TA had a sense Russell and I would hit it off, and we did. Russell is a multi-time founder/CEO, a Coach, and an author, so we have a lot in common.
One Life to Lead is an excellent book. First, it is short and easy to get through. Unlike a lot of business books, it doesn’t go on too long or contain anything extraneous. It’s to the point!
Second, the book is a business book that’s not really about business. It’s about life and what Russell calls Life Design, which is a great framing of how to be intentional about leading your life. While I have become less and less of a life planner as I’ve gotten older under the headline of “man plans, God laughs,” I am a huge believer in being intentional about everything, which I talk about in Startup CEO quite a bit in the nuts and bolts context of building your business.
Finally, Russell’s framework is easy to understand and full of concrete exercises you can to. Here are his five steps, but you’ll have to read the book to get the details:
- Ground stories with facts. This reminds me a lot of the principles we have taught team members over the years in our Action/Design (and related) trainings. First, start with absolute concrete facts that everyone will agree are facts.
- Establish your principles. This is brilliant. Your company has documented values or operating principles. Why don’t you?
- Harness energy from the environment. Figuring out what makes you tick, and what drains your energy, is so important.
- Get in and stay in your genius zone. Shouldn’t we all focus our time on the things we do best and love the most?
- Take action. How to put it together and make it all happen.
If you don’t get out in front of life, it will happen to you, and Russell’s framework is about how to make sure you are in the driver’s seat of your own life. Here’s to that.
Book Short: The Religion of Heresy
At the end of Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, Seth Godin’s new book, Seth says this:
I’m going to get a lot of flak from people about what you just read. People might say that it’s too disorganized or not practical enough or that I require you to do too much work to actually accomplsh anything. That’s ok.
He’s kind of right. The book is a little breezy and meanders around, just like riffing with Seth. It’s not practical in the sense that if the entire world operated this way in the extreme, we’d have serious problems. But the fact that he requires you to do “too much work to actually accomplish anything” is part of the brilliance of his message.
This was Seth’s best book in years, mostly because it is fresh. It is not a rant about marketing; it is a wonderfully succinct look at how we as a society are rallying and organizing around causes, campaigns, companies, and collective beliefs. It’s not about the Internet, though its principles are easily implemented and amplified using online tools. It’s not a how-to guide to being a fancy corporate leader, but it’s one of the most pointed descriptions of the ethos of a certain type of leader (the upstart, or as Seth says, the heretic). It’s not about a particular revolution; it’s about how mini-revolutions are becoming the norm these days.
Tribes is short, inspirational, and pure Seth. Though quite different in its nature and mission, it really evoked for me Mark Penn’s Microtrends (post, link) — a study of larger tribes and heretics in contemporary America.
A listing of Seth’s books over the years follows:
Book Short: Alignment Well Defined, Part II
Getting the Right Things Done: A Leader’s Guide to Planning and Execution, by Pascal Dennis, is an excellent and extraordinarily practical book to read if you’re trying to create or reengineer your company’s planning, goal setting, and accountability processes. It’s very similar to the framework that we have generally adapted our planning and goals process off of at Return Path for the last few years, Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage (book, post/Part I of this series). My guess is that we will borrow from this and adapt our process even further for 2014.
The book’s history is in Toyota’s Lean Manufacturing system, and given the Lean meme floating around the land of tech startups these days, my guess is that its concepts will resonate with most of the readers of this blog. The book’s language — True North and Mother Strategies and A3s and Baby A3s — is a little funky, but the principles of simplicity, having a clear target, building a few major initiatives to drive to the target, linking all the plans, and measuring progress are universal. The “Plan-Do-Check-Adjust” cycle is smart and one of those things that is, to quote an old friend of mine, “common sense that turns out is not so common.”
One interesting thing that the book touches on a bit is the connection between planning/goals and performance management/reviews. This is something we’ve done fairly well but somewhat piecemeal over the years that we’re increasingly trying to link together more formally.
All in, this is a good read. It’s not a great fable like Lencioni’s books or Goldratt’s classic The Goal (reminiscent since its example is a manufacturing company). But it’s approachable, and it comes with a slew of sample processes and reports that make the theory come to life. If you’re in plan-to-plan mode, I’d recommend Getting the Right Things Done as well as The Advantage.
Book Short: A Twofer
My friend Andrew Winston, who is one of the nation’s gurus in corporate sustainability, just published his second book, this one from Harvard Business Press — Green Recovery: Get Lean, Get Smart, and Emerge from the Downturn on Top. It builds on the cases and successes he had with his first book, Green to Gold (post, link to book), which came out a couple years ago and has become the standard for how businesses embrace sustainability and use it to their financial and strategic competitive advantage rather than thinking of it as a burden or a cost center.
Green Recovery is a shorter read (my kind of business book), and it hits a few key themes:
The book reminds me a lot of my post Living With Less, For Good, which I wrote at the beginning of the financial market freefall last fall, talking about how we as a company were figuring out how to cut back without cutting people (something we’ve managed to do). Although I wasn’t talking about green initiatives specifically, the point of getting leaner on “stuff” really resonates with me.
At the end of the day, Andrew proves that steering your company to go green — no matter what industry you’re in — is a twofer: you can increase the strength of the business and simultaneously do your part to clean up the environment. That’s definitely the “change we can believe in” mentality applied quite pragmatically!
Book Short: Blogging Alone?
I usually only blog about business books, but since I read Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert Putnam, because of its connection to the topic of Internet community and social media, I’ll record some thoughts about and from it here.
It’s an interesting read, although a little long. Putnam’s basic thesis is that America’s social capital — the things that have brought us physically and emotionally together as a country throughout much of the 20th century such as church, voting, and participation in civic organizations like the PTA or the Elks Club — are all severely on the decline. The reasons in Putnam’s view are television (you knew all those re-runs of The Brady Bunch would eventually catch up to you), suburban sprawl, two-career families, and “generational values,” which is Putnam’s way of saying things like people in their 60s all read newspapers more than people in their 50s, who all read newspapers more than people in their 40s, etc. He believes the decline is leading to things like worse schools, less safe neighborhoods, and poorer health.
The book does a good job laying out the decline in social capital with some really interesting and somewhat stunning numbers, but the book’s biggest shortcoming is that Putnam doesn’t do the work to determine causation. I buy that there’s a correlation between less voting and less safe neighborhoods, for example, but the book doesn’t convince me that A caused B as opposed to B causing A, or C causing both A and B. What I really wanted at the end of the book was for Putnam to go mano-a-mano with the Freakonomics guy for a couple hours. Preferably in those big fake sumo suits.
The book was published in 2000, so probably written from 1997-1999, and therefore its treatment of the Internet was a little dated — so I found myself wanting more on that topic since so much of the social media revolution on the Internet is post-2004. His basic view of the Internet is that it is in fact a bright spot in the decline of community, but that it’s changing the nature of communities. Now instead of chatting with whoever is bowling in the next lane over at the Tuesday night bowling league on Main Street, we are in an online discussion group with other people who own 1973 BMW 2002 series cars, preferably the turbo-charged ones. So the micro-communities of the Internet circa 2000 are more egalitarian (“on the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog”), but more narrow as well around interests and values.
What has social media done to Putnam’s theories in the last seven or eight years? How have things like blogging, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Photobucket changed our concept of community in America or in the world at large? I welcome your comments on this and will write more about it in the future.
Book Short: Culture is King
Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love, by Richard Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations, was a really good read. Like Remote which I reviewed a few weeks ago, Joy, Inc. is ostensibly a book about one thing — culture — but is also full of good general advice for CEOs and senior managers.
Also like Remote, the book was written by the founder and CEO of a relatively small firm that is predominately software engineers, so there are some limitations to its specific lessons unless you adapt them to your own environment. Unlike Remote, though, it’s neither preachy nor ranty, so it’s a more pleasant read. And I suppose fitting of its title, a more joyful read as well. (Interestingly on this comparison, Sheridan has a simple and elegant argument against working remotely in the middle of the book around innovation and collaboration.)
Some of the people-related practices at Sheridan’s company are fascinating and great to read about. In particular, the way the company interviews candidates for development roles is really interesting — more of an audition than an interview, with candidates actually writing code with a development partner, the way the company writes code. Different teams at Return Path interview in different ways, including me for both the exec team and the Board, but one thing I know is that when an interview includes something that is audition-like, the result is much stronger. There are half a dozen more rich examples in the book.
Some of the other quotable lines or concepts in the book include:
- the linkage between scalability with human sustainability (you can’t grow by brute force, you can only grow when people are rested and ready to bring their brain to work)
- “Showcasing your work is accountability in action” (for a million reasons, starting with pride and ending with pride)
- “Trust, accountability, and results — these get you to joy” (whether or not you are a Myers-Briggs J, people do get a bit of a rush out of a job well done)
- “…the fun and frivolity of our whimsically irreverent workplace…” (who doesn’t want to work for THAT company?)
- “When even your vendors want to align with your culture, you know you’re on the right path” (how you treat people is how you treat PEOPLE, not just clients, not just colleagues)
- “One of the key elements of a joyful culture is having team members who trust one another enough to argue” (if you and I agree on everything, one of us is not needed)
- “The reward is in the attempt” (do you encourage people to fail fast often enough?)
- “Good problems are good problems for the first five minutes. Then they just feel like regular problems until you solve them” (Amen, Brother Sheridan)
The benefits of a joyful culture (at Return Path, we call it a People-First culture) have long been clear to me. As Sheridan says, we try to “create a culture where people want to come to work every day.” Cultures like ours look soft and squishy from the outside, or to people who have grown up in tough, more traditional corporate environments. And to be fair, the challenge with a culture like ours is keeping the right balance of freedom and flexibility on one side and high performance and accountability on the other. But the reality is that most companies struggle with most of the same issues — the new hire that isn’t working out or the long-time employee who isn’t cutting it any more, the critical path project that doesn’t get done on time, the missed quarter or lost client. As Sheridan notes though, one key benefit of working at a joyful company is that problems get surfaced earlier when they are smaller…and they get solved collaboratively, which produces better results. Another key benefit, of course, is that if you’re going to have the same problems as everyone else, you might as well have fun while you’re dealing with them.
If you don’t love where you work and wish you did, read Joy, Inc. If you love where you work but see your company’s faults and want to improve them, read Joy, Inc. If you are not in either of the above camps, go find another job!
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.
Book Short: Bringing it on Home
Silos, Politics and Turf Wars: A Leadership Fable About Destroying the Barriers That Turn Colleagues Into Competitors wasn’t Patrick Lencion’s best book, but it wasn’t bad, either. I think all six of his books are well worth a read (list at the bottom of the post). And in fact, they really belong in two categories.
The Three Signs of a Miserable Job (post, link), The Five Temptations of a CEO (post, link
), and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (post, link) are all related around the topic of management.
Death by Meeting (post, link), The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (post, link), and Silos, Politics and Turf Wars, on the other hand, are all related around the topic of leading a team and healthy team dynamics. This latest book, which is the last of his six books for me, rounds out this topic nicely, in a fun “novel” format as is the case with his other books.
The book hammers home the theme of an executive team needing to first be a team and then second be a collection of group heads as a means of breaking down barriers that exist inside organizations. It also lays out a framework for creating high-level alignment inside a team. The framework may or may not be perfect — we are using a different one at Return Path (the Balanced Scorecard) that accomplishes most of the same things — but for those companies who don’t have one, it’s as good as any.
The most compelling point in the book, though is the point that teams often make the most progress, change the most, and do their best work when their backs are up against a wall. And the point Lencioni makes here is — “why wait for a crisis?”
At any rate, another good, quick book, and absolutely worth reading along with the others, particularly along with the other two closely related ones. I’m definitely sorry to be done with the series. We may try the “field guide” companion to The Five Dysfunctions and see how the practical exercises work out.
The full series roundup is:
Book Short: Steve Jobs and Lessons for CEOs and Founders
First, if you work in the internet, grew up during the rise of the PC, or are an avid consumer of Apple products, read the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs (book, kindle). It’s long but well worth it.
I know much has been written about the subject and the book, so I won’t be long or formal, but here are the things that struck me from my perspective as a founder and CEO, many taken from specific passages from the book:
- In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important. Man is that ever true. I’ve come up with some ideas over the years at Return Path, but hardly a majority or even a plurality of them. But I think of myself as innovative because I’ve led the organization to execute them. I also think innovation has as much to do with how work gets done as it does what work gets done.
- There were some upsides to Jobs’s demanding and wounding behavior. People who were not crushed ended up being stronger. They did better work, out of both fear and an eagerness to please. I guess that’s an upside. But only in a dysfunctional sort of way.
- When one reporter asked him immediately afterward why the (NeXT) machine was going to be so late, Jobs replied, “It’s not late. It’s five years ahead of its time.” Amen to that. Sometimes product deadlines are artificial and silly. There’s another great related quote (I forget where it’s from) that goes something like “The future is here…it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” New releases can be about delivering the future for the first time…or about distributing it more broadly.
- People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.” Amen. See Powerpointless.
- The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind. This is critical. You can’t always be first in everything. But ultimately, if you’re a good company, you can figure out how to recover when you’re not first. Exhibit A: Microsoft.
- In order to institutionalize the lessons that he and his team were learning, Jobs started an in-house center called Apple University. He hired Joel Podolny, who was dean of the Yale School of Management, to compile a series of case studies analyzing important decisions the company had made, including the switch to the Intel microprocessor and the decision to open the Apple Stores. Top executives spent time teaching the cases to new employees, so that the Apple style of decision making would be embedded in the culture. This is one of the most emotionally intelligent things Jobs did, if you just read his actions in the book and know nothing else. Love the style or hate it – teaching it to the company reinforces a strong and consistent culture.
- Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page. There’s always a tension between listening TO customers and innovating FOR them. Great companies have to do both, and know when to do which.
- What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. I didn’t invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how—because we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me. This is perhaps one of the best explanations I’ve ever heard of how creativity can be applied to non-creative (e.g., most business) jobs. I love this.
My board member Scott Weiss wrote a great post about the book as well and drew his own CEO lessons from it – also worth a read here.
Appropos of that, both Scott and I found out about Steve Jobs’ death at a Return Path Board dinner. Fred broke the news when he saw it on his phone, and we had a moment of silence. It was about as good a group as you can expect to be with upon hearing the news that an industry pioneer and icon has left us. Here’s to you, Steve. You may or may not have been a management role model, but your pursuit of perfection worked out well for your customers, and most important, you certainly had as much of an impact on society as just about anyone in business (or maybe all walks of life) that I can think of.
