Starbucks, Starbucks, Everywhere, Part II

In 2004, I blogged about Starbucks’ implausible Forbidden City location (post includes picture) in the heart of one of China’s most prominent national monuments.

Today, under pressure from the Chinese government, Starbucks announced that they’re closing the location, reflecting “Chinese sensitivity about cultural symbols and unease over an influx of foreign pop culture,” according to a very short blurb about this in today’s Wall Street Journal.

It must be indescribably different to live in a society that’s so tightly controlled.

The iPad’s Limitations as a Business Device

I love my iPad.  Let me just start with that.  I’ve found lots of use cases for it, and it’s very useful here and there for work.  But I’ve seen a bunch of people trying to use it as a primary business device, which I can’t quite figure out.  Here are the things that prevent me from making it my main business device:

• lack of keyboard (can mitigate with the keyboard dock, which I have)
• lack of mouse (not a killer limitation, just takes some getting used to, also the arrows on the keyboard dock help)
• lack of connection to files and true Office compatibility (this can largely be mitigated through a combination of the Dropbox or Box.net app and the QuickOffice app)
• lack of multitasking (this is the main killer)

Much of the time, I need to be rapidly switching between and simultaneously using email, the web, and multiple Office documents.  Having to basically shut down each one and then fire up another instead of having them all up at once on multiple monitors or at least easily accessible via alt-tab is a big pain, especially when trying to cut and paste things from one to another.   The iPad is awesome for many many things, and for limited work usage (other than complex spreadsheets), it works “well enough.”  But I would find it difficult to make it my primary business machine other than for a fairly short (1 day) business trip.

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!

(Excerpted from Chapter 12 of Startup CEO)

As a CEO, one of the most important things you can do is solicit feedback about your own performance. Of course, this will work only if you’re ready to receive that feedback! What does that mean? It means you need to be really, really good at doing four things:

1. Asking for feedback
2. Accepting feedback gracefully
3. Acting on feedback
4. Asking for follow‐up feedback on the same topic to see how you did

In some respects, asking for it is the easy part, although it may be unnatural. You’re the boss, right? Why do you need feedback? The reality is that all of us can always benefit from feedback. That’s particularly true if you’re a first‐time CEO. Even more experienced CEOs change over time and with changing circumstances. Understanding how the board and your team experience your behavior and performance is one of the only ways to improve over time. It’s easier to ask for feedback if you’re specific. I routinely solicit feedback in the major areas of my job (which mirror the structure of this book):

Strategy. Do you think we’re on target with what we’re doing? Am I doing a good enough job managing to our goals while also being nimble enough to respond to the market?

Staff management/leadership. How effective am I at building and maintaining a strong, focused, cohesive team? Do I have the right people in the right roles at the senior staff level?

Resource allocation. Do I do a good enough job balancing among competing priorities internally? Are costs adequately managed?

Execution. How do the team and I execute versus our plans? What do you think I could be doing to make sure the organization executes better?

Board management/investor relations. Do you think our board is effective and engaged? Have I played enough of a role in leading the group? Do you as a director feel like you’re contributing all you can? Do I strike the right balance between asking and telling? Are communications clear enough and regular enough?

Accepting feedback gracefully is even harder than the asking part. You may or may not agree with a given piece of feedback, but the ability to hear it and take it in without being defensive is the only way to make sure that the feedback keeps coming. Sitting with your arms crossed and being argumentative sends the message that you’re right, they’re wrong, and you’re not interested. If you disagree with something that’s being said, ask questions. Get specifics. Understand the impact of your actions rather than explaining your intent.

The same logic applies to internalizing and acting on the feedback. If you fail to act on feedback, people will stop giving it to you. Needless to say, you won’t improve as a CEO. Fundamentally, why ask for it if you’re not going to use it? And that leads right into the fourth point, closing the loop with the person who gave you feedback on whether or not your actions achieved the desired change.

In the Land of Too Many Conferences, This is a Good One

It’s rare that I’m sad to leave a conference — usually I can’t leave fast enough.  But such is my mood today leaving Mediapost’s third Email Insider Summit.

Our industry is way over-conferenced in general.  I’m guessing that our company’s full conference calendar has 40+ events on it over the course of a year.  It’s more than we can afford to exhibit at, participate in, speak at, attend.  We do our best, and what money we spend is much more carefully monitored and measured than it used to be, but usually it’s with that sick feeling in the pit of our collective marketing stomach that we’re throwing money away just because our competitors are there.

But the Email Insider Summit is different.  While there are some aspects of the show that I don’t love — four days is a long time, and three half days of golf and snorkeling is a little too heavy on the boondoggle side for my personal taste — the content and attendees are fantastic.  Mediapost’s formula of comping marketers and charging vendors very high prices to attend ensures an intimate, high level, and vendor-light crowd.  That’s a recipe for success in my book!

The two most interesting nuggets from today:

1. John Stichweh from Coca-Cola’s observation that brand marketing and direct marketing continue to rapidly converge, and that measurement of outcome (e.g., ROI) as opposed to measurement of process (e.g., GRPs or impressions) are gaining steam, never to look back.  I couldn’t agree more.  What can be counted will be counted.  And it can all be counted in the world of advertising, somehow.

2. Lisa Galli from CNET’s discussion of mobile marketing and what they’re doing to take advantage of the channel.  The best example I’ve heard in years of a marketer leveraging a medium is their new SMS Reviews product — just text message CNET1 the words Review xxx (insert name of product here), and you’ll get a text message back with a product review.  Now THAT ought to make shopping for electronics much more interesting.

I’m ready for more conferences like these, and fewer mammoth trade shows.

Education and Entrepreneurship

Fred posted his thoughts the other day that you don’t need a college degree to be a successful entrepreneur. He is clearly right in that one CAN be successful without it.  Gates, Zuckerberg, Dell have proven that. 

I’ve always said that I didn’t think an MBA was a prerequisite for a successful business career.  That’s easy for me to say, as I don’t have one despite many years of applying, deferring, cancelling, reapplying and general hand-wringing over whether or not to go in the mid-90s.  An MBA is probably a positive on a resume for the most part (hard to argue it’s a negative), but it’s not a prerequisite.  Every time I see “MBA preferred” on a job posting, I cringe (we never say that at Return Path).  Really?  You’d *prefer* to hire someone with an MBA over someone with two additional years of relevant work experience? 

That said, I’d note that there are things one gets out of a good college education that are critical to success in life.  Yes, they can be learned outside the classroom.  But unlike business school material, which is in many cases the stuff of work experience and more easily augmented by observation and the occasional business article or book (as far as I can tell), the things one learns in college which are applicable to entrepreneurship aren’t about the subject matter of the course.  They are things like:

– learning and applying new concepts quickly

– critical reasoning

– crisply presenting ideas

– respecting deadlines and guidelines

– understanding and appreciating other points of view

As with business school, these things *can* be learned outside a university environment, and certainly there are unusually talented people who have these traits hard wired.  But I do think the university environment cultivates and nurtures these skills in a way that is easier than the “do it yourself” world of teenage entrepreneurship. 

Good Help is Hard to Find

We’re having a bitch of a time lately hiring good sales people.  We’re growing like crazy this year and are trying to invest more in our salesforce, but it’s not easy.  And we’re a good catch.  Good brand, healthy company, good comp and benefits, charming CEO, the works.

I just traded emails with a friend who is CEO of another online marketing services firm who said the same thing, with the exact same explanation I have:

I have been so unimpressed with everyone from our space (weak links drop out, mediocrity churns from company to company, and true talent is retained).

Anyway, we have gotten very lucky with a few key hires the past few months — and we certainly work like mad to retain the talent we have (or at least we try hard!) — but the reality is that it’s a good year for Internet businesses, and it’s hard to get people to jump ship when they have an established book of business and good commission check flow. 

Most of the people I know who are doing well with sales recruiting in our space these days, including ourselves, are mostly pulling people out of adjacent industries or even out of clients.  I’d ask my general readership for advice, but I assume if you have the secret sauce here, you’ll hoard it for yourself!

Counter Cliche:  How Much Paranoia is Too Much Paranoia?, Part II

After the original posting, one of my readers wrote in with the following question:

I was one of the first employees at a pre-funding enterprise social networking company, after having consulted on doing their business plan for them (not coming up with it; mainly turning the CEO and CTO’s engineer-speak into English). 

So with all that background, when you say “open book” to your employees, can you break that out some more?  I have an idea of what I think that means, and what it doesn’t, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on it too.

My thoughts on this are quite simple.  We are willing to share everything internally other than compensation.  We publish detailed monthly financials and reporting to the team, and we ask that they treat the information as extremely confidential.  We have had only good things come from this level of openness with our team.  Good ideas, good esprit de corps, and a radical reduction in fear of the unknown (the old "Looks like we had a bad quarter, does that mean I need to look for a job now?  Are we running out of money?"). 

In fact, I know one other CEO who goes so far as to publish an only-slightly modified version of his Board books to the entire company.

Transparency is a good thing.

OnlyOnce – The Car

Not really contemplating a brand extension to my blog — the book is enough, but my friend Bill Wise just saw this car today in Larchmont, NY!

Do Business Books Suck for Entrepreneurs?

Ben thinks they do.  Some of his reasons are pretty good, but I’d challenge a few of them, or at least his finer points.

My experience over the years is that while most business books are not geared toward entrepreneurs, a good entrepreneur will figure out how to milk them for what they’re worth quickly and apply key learnings to his or her company. 

The reality is that running a startup or high growth company is a multi-faceted and incredibly dynamic experience, and having a bunch of outside inputs in the form of business book examples and theories can be really helpful. 

Even bad ideas can spur good thinking.

Five Years On

As of this past weekend, I’ve been blogging on OnlyOnce for five years.  My main reflection as I was thinking about it during this morning’s run is that blogging is different.  I started blogging to try out what was at the time the “new, new thing” (there were almost no CEO blogs at the time), just like I have tried out lots of other new technologies or web services from time to time over the years — from Skype to Facebook to Twitter to about 50 others.

You’ll never see a tweet from me about an anniversary of using Twitter.  Or any other comparable from that above list.  Blogging has ended up being fundamentally different.  It’s not just another expression of my status updates or another way to connect with friends and colleagues.  It’s become a core part of my business operating system, although I suppose that’s the case for many other tools as well. 

I think the main difference is that OnlyOnce has become a true form of creative expression for me.  It’s like (I imagine) writing a book or composing a piece of music. I’m not suggesting it’s high art, but I view it more as an ongoing project than most other online tools or sites I’ve tried out over the years.

Here’s to the next five years of it.