Help Me, Help You

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Silly, Silly Patent Nonsense

Some news floated around the email marketing world yesterday that is potentially disturbing and destructive but highlights some lunacy at the same time.  I hope I’m getting enough of the details right here (and quite frankly that isn’t a joke, which it feels like).

Tom DiStefano of Boca-based PerfectWeb Technologies is suing direct marketing behemoth InfoUSA for patent infringement of a business process patent for bulk email distribution that he received in 2003.

I will first issue my disclaimers that I’m not a patent lawyer (nor do I even play one on TV) and that I have only quickly read both the legal complaint and the patent.  But my general take on this is that it’s more silly than anything else — but has the potential to be destructive at the same time.

Silly reason #1.  I’d like to go patent the process of blowing my nose with facial tissue predominantly using my left hand after a sneeze — will you pay me a royalty every time you do that, please?  That’s a short way of saying that I am increasingly finding that the patent system is deeply flawed, or at least very ill-suited to the way technology and Internet innovation work today.  For centuries, patents have been put in place to provide inventors adequate incentive to invest in innovation.  That made sense in a world where innovation was expensive.  It took a long time and a lot of capital to invent, say, the cotton gin or the steam engine.  It takes a long time and a lot of capital to invent a new life-saving drug.  But Internet-oriented business process patents are just silly.  It can take a guy with a piece of paper a few minutes to sketch out a business process for some niche part of the Internet ecosystem.  No real time, no real capital.  And worst of all, it’s generally easy to “design around.”  Disclaimers and all, this seems to be just such a patent.

Silly reason #2.  The patent was issued in 2003.  Really?  I’m not sure when the patent holder claims he invented the bulk email distribution process, but unless it was in the early 90s before the likes of Mercury Mail, First Virtual, Email Publishing, etc., then it’s highly likely to be “non-novel,” “obvious,” and conflicting with lots of “prior art.”

Silly reason #3.  Why wait four years to prosecute a patent that the inventor believes has been violated so obviously by so many (hundreds, maybe thousands) companies for so many years?  I don’t quite get that.

I’m not exactly seeing the David vs. Goliath here.

So here we go.  It will likely take months and millions before this thing gets resolved.  If our legal system doesn’t come through as it should, or worse, if InfoUSA punts and settles, this is going to cause big problems for many, many companies in the industry.

I hope our friends at InfoUSA are happy to dig in and fight to have the patent invalidated, although that’s expensive and time consuming.  And assuming that the patent holder is likely to go on a rampage of legal complaints against every other player in the industry — someone should tell Vin Gupta that we can all band together to fight this silliness.  We’re happy to help here at Return Path.

It Never Goes Without Saying

Remember that old adage, "It goes without saying…"?  That saying shouldn’t exist inside a well-run company.  Communication — real communication, not implied communication — is the foundation for a successful business.

We human beings live for "moments."  We mark time by observing regular occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays.  While religions and cultures differ on the details, we mark the cycle of life with things like baby namings, bar mitzvahs, confirmations, first communions, weddings, and funerals. 

There’s no reason the workplace should be any different.  Think about these few examples where it could "go without saying," but where you’re so much better off creating that "moment" by:

– Publicly acknowledging a member of your team for reaching an employment anniversary (the bigger the number, the heartier the acknowledgment)

– Laying the groundwork for a new initiative by reminding the team in a meeting or email about the company’s mission and how this initiative fits into the big picture

– Marking the end of a project or a transition period with a celebration

– Meeting two weeks after the end of a project or a crisis to do a post-mortem analyzing what went well and defining lessons learned for the next time

– Publicly thanking a colleague for helping out on something — anything

– Giving an employee a quick reprimand or constructive feedback right after an incident (probably privately) instead of letting the issue fester and its details slip from short-term memory

Clear, simple communication is the cheapest and easiest way to create a fun, rewarding, accountable, and focused work environment.

Back to Business?

Today is the day every year that everyone keeps saying, "well, it’s back to school time."  Ignore for a moment the fact that half of the schools I hear about now start in the middle of August…it’s interesting to see how some things in the business world really slow down in the summer, especially in August as well as the school system.

People really disappear for vacations, short and long.  Even if we aren’t like our European counterparts who really have it figured out and can virtually shut down in August, it’s just harder to get things done.  People might not all be out at the same time or for as long, but having one or two key people out any given week just makes it harder to make progress on things.

So, it’s time to get Back to Business.  September and October are the busiest months of the year in our industry with a packed conference schedule, planning cycles for next year, and the ever-present "holiday season" for our retail clients, so it should be a crazy fall!

Retaining good people has always been at the top of my list, even in the dark days.  But hiring and managing in an environment that’s once-stagnant-now-growing presents some real challenges.  Many of these aren’t unique to startups — it’s always tough to find A players — but there are three things I’ve observed that are uniquely tough about hiring in an entrepreneurial environment:

Sophisticated Negotiation Technique

Brad and our co-tenants in Colorado, Still Secure, have already documented this — including a dedication from Still Secure (thanks, guys – you took the words right out of my mouth).  But still, the story must be recorded here for posterity as well, if for no other reason than how absurd it was.

We share a lease in Colorado with Still Secure (the lease used to be Brad’s/Mobius’s), and the lease ends this fall.  Both we and Still Secure have grown to the point where we’re bursting at the seams, so someone is going to have to move out.  After months of polite wrangling, it was clear there was no easy solution.  Sometimes, win-win just doesn’t exist.

So we did what any civilized bunch of people would do.  We flipped a coin.  It just seemed more entertaining in the end than rock-paper-scissors.  And unfortunately, we came up short.  But we had pre-negotiated a buy-out with Still Secure whereby the party who got to keep the space paid $X to the other party to cover moving expenses, furniture, and presumably pain and suffering, so now we have a full piggy bank to go procure and set up new space for ourselves.

Harvard Program on Negotiation — do I see a case study in the works?

Curbing My Enthusiasm

For the first time since I started blogging over four years ago, I have recently run into several examples in a short period of time where I’d love to blog about something happening in the business, and I think it would make for a great blog posting, but I can’t do it.  Why can’t I?  Lots of different reasons:

– Don’t want to telegraph strategy to the competition

– Don’t want to compromise an employee (current or former)

– Worried about downstream legal ramifications

There are other reasons as well, but these are the main three.  I love transparency as much as the next person (and more than most), but these scenarios have to trump transparency in my position as a CEO.  Hopefully the passage of time and the release of news will mean that I can still do the blog postings, but as more of a post mortem than something in the moment. 

But I hate curbing my own enthusiasm.  It’s a definite frustration in this case, and a new one.

Just Ask a 5-Year Old

I heard this short but potent story recently. I can’t for the life of me remember who told it to me, so please forgive me if I’m not attributing this properly to you!

So there you go. What makes us get de-skilled or dumber as we get older? Nothing at all! It’s just our expectations of ourselves that grow. The bar goes up for what it takes to count yourself as knowing how to do something with every passing year. Why is that? When we were 5 years old, all of us were about the same in terms of our capabilities. Singing, painting, dancing, tying shoes. But as we age, we find ourselves with peers who are world class specialists in different areas, and all of a sudden, our perception of self changes. Sing? Me? Are you kidding? Who do I look like, Sting?

I see this same phenomenon in business all of the time. The better people get at one thing, the worse they think they are at other things. It’s the rare person who wants to excel at multiple disciplines, and more important, isn’t afraid to try them. But we’ve seen lots of success over the years at this at Return Path. The account manager who becomes a product manager. The tech support guy who becomes a software developer. The sales rep who becomes an account manager.

I love these stories! My anecdotal evidence suggests that people who do take this kind of plunge end up just as successful in their new discipline, if not more so, because they have a wider range of skills, knowledge, and perspectives on their job. Or it could just be that the kind of people who WANT to do multiple types of jobs are inherently stronger employees. Not sure which is the cause and which is the effect.

It’s even more rare that managers allow their people the freedom to try to be great at new things. It’s all too easy for managers to pigeonhole people into the thing they know how to do, the thing they’re doing now, the thing they first did when they started at the company. “Person X doesn’t have the skills to do that job,” we hear from time to time.

I don’t buy that. Sure, people need to be developed. They need to interview well to transition into a completely new role. But having the belief that the talent you have in one area of the company can be transferable to other areas, as long as it comes with the right desire and attitude, is a key success factor in running a business in today’s world. The opposite is an environment where you’re unable to change or challenge the organization, where you lose great people who want to do new things or feel like they are being held back, and where you feel compelled to hire in from the outside to “shore up weaknesses.” That works sometimes, but it’s basically saying you’d rather take an unknown person and try him or her out at a role than a known strong performer from another part of the organization.

And who really wants to send that message?

Angry, Defiant, and Replete with Poor Grammar

I didn’t see Bush’s farewell address on TV on Thursday, but Mariquita and I did see his press conference on Monday.  It was exactly what you’d expect it to be and quite frankly just like the last eight years:  angry, defiant, and replete with poor grammar.

I’ve said repeatedly that I think Bush has destroyed the Republican party and will go down in history as one of the worst presidents this country has ever had, if not the worst.  It’s not surprising that his tone at the end is as the title of this post describes.  But it is a shame.  His whole administration is a shame.  The really sad part is that it didn’t have to be.  People make mistakes — even really bad ones.  And they can recover from them and go on to do great things in life if two conditions exist:

1. They solicit feedback on their performance, and

2. The internalize and act on that feedback

Bush not only didn’t “get” these two points; he seemed to revel in them.  “Not paying attention to polls” and “At least you know where I stand” seemed to him to be pillars of strength as opposed to pillars of ignorance and complete and total lack of intellectual curiosity.  You don’t have to try to win a popularity contest to find out when something is going wrong on your watch.  And you can be bold, admit a failure, learn from it, and move on instead of just digging yourself deeper and deeper into the same hole.

I read a great article in The Economist last night that summarized its current view of Bush’s legacy, and in fact it noted a bunch of areas in which Bush appeared to learn from his mistakes, though he probably wouldn’t phrase it that way.  The fact that his second administration did do more to reach out to key allies in Germany and France is one example.  And to the article’s credit, it even noted some of Bush’s accomplishments, or at least the areas in which his thinking was right — those those are just dwarfed in the end by his failings.  

At any rate, I’m delighted he’ll be leaving office on Tuesday.  Inauguration day is one of my favorite days in America, and I look forward with optimism to the incoming administration as I always do, regardless of how I voted.

But as for Bush, I think I’d rather have the pilot of that USAir flight as my commander in chief.  Now there’s a guy (I don’t even know his name, and I probably never will) who had a quick grasp of a difficult situation and produced a brilliant and elegant solution in short order!

Living With Less…For Good?

Like all companies, Return Path is battening down the hatches a bit on expenses these days.  Our business is very strong and still growing nicely, but in this environment, the specter of disaster looms large, so there's no reason not to be more cautious and more profitable.

We weren't an extravagant company before this, and we never have been. But there is almost always room to save. Less travel, leaner budgets for office cafeterias, no more pilates classes in the Colorado office.  We've been very clear internally that our three priorities are protecting everyone's job, everyone's salary, and everyone's health benefits.  Hopefully things continue to go well and those can remain sacrosanct.

We are now a few months into our various cost savings plans, and it's great to see the results on the income statement and balance sheet.  More than that, it's great to see how everyone in the company is rallying around the common cause and looking for other ways to save money as well.  We've made it chic to be cheap.  And so far, there's no impact on the business. 

It will be interesting to me to see what happens on the far end of this economic badness.  It's often said the companies that make it through times like these emerge stronger on the other side, and I think I now understand why:  it's clear to me that some of the changes will work long term and some will only work short term, which means that we'll learn during this period that we can live with less. 

That doesn't mean we were profligate in the past; but it does mean that I think we are going to retrain ourselves.  We don't have to send 10 people to a big trade show to have an impact and drive the business forward.  We don't have to be the vendor who picks up the tab at the end of the night.  We don't need to pay for half the company to have cell phones (a very 1999 policy) to retain top talent.  I bet we will learn those things — and a bunch of others to come — in the next few months.

The Catcher Hypothesis

Here’s an interesting nugget I just picked up from Harvard Business Review’s March issue in an article entitled “Making Mobility Matter,” by Richard Guzzo and Haig Nalbantian.

Of the 30 teams in Major League baseball, 12 of the managers are former catchers.  A normal distribution would be 2 or 3.  Sounds like a case of a Gladwellian Outlier, doesn’t it?  The authors explain their theory here…that catchers face their teammates, that they are closest to the competition, that they have to keep track of a lot of things at once, be psychiatrists to flailing pitchers, etc.  Essentially that the kind of person who is a successful catcher has all the qualities of a successful manager.

What’s the learning for business?  Part of having a strategic orientation towards the people in the business is making sure that you’re creating development paths for people, which is both good for them and good for the organization to train future leaders.  Another part is making sure great people don’t get bored — especially in tough economic times when organizations aren’t growing, new roles aren’t opening up, and promotions and even lateral moves are harder to come by.

Back to the Catcher Hypothesis.  A good strategic people plan, whether or not you have a head of HR to develop it (if you don’t, it’s your job!), will identify “training ground” positions within your organization.  The larger we get, the more of these we try to carve out.  Sometimes it’s pulling people out of their current roles (fully or partially) and putting them in charge of a high-profile short-term, cross-functional project.  We have a couple more formal roles at the entry level, one in account management and one in application support, so we can start growing our own talent and reduce reliance on more expensive outside hires.  Another we are developing now is basically a “mini-GM” role, which should develop a whole future generation of leaders as the company grows from ~200 people to hopefully a much larger group down the road.

Who plays Catcher in your organization?