Getting Good Inc., Part II

It was a nice honor to be noted as one of America’s fastest growing companies as an Inc. 500 company two years in a row in 2006 and 2007 (one of them here), but it is an even nicer honor to be noted as one of the Top 20 small/medium sized businesses to work for in America by Winning Workplaces and Inc. Magazine.  In addition to the award, we were featured in this month’s issue of Inc. with a specific article about transparency, and important element of our corporate culture, on p72 and online here.

Why a nicer honor?  Simply put, because we pride ourselves on being a great place to work — and we work hard at it.  My colleague Angela Baldonero, our SVP People, talks about this in more depth here. Congratulations to all of our employees, past and present, for this award, and a special thanks to Angela and the rest of the exec team for being such awesome stewards of our culture!

Please, Keep Not Calling (Thank You!)

It’s been three years since the federal government passed one of its better pieces of legislation in recent memory, creating the Do Not Call Registry which is a free way of dramatically reducing junk phone solicitations.  At the time, registrations were set to expire every three years.  When I signed up my phone number, I stuck a note in my calendar for today (three years later) to renew my registration.  I was planning on blogging about it to remind the rest of the world, too.

To my great surprise, when I went to the site today, I saw this note:

Your registration will not expire. Telephone numbers placed on the National Do Not Call Registry will remain on it permanently due to the Do-Not-Call Improvement Act of 2007, which became law in February 2008.

That’s two great pieces of legislation.  What will they think of next?

In Defense of Email, Part 9,732

I commented today on our partner Blue Sky Factory’s CEO, Greg Cangialosi’s excellent posting in defense of email as a marketing channel called Email’s Role and Future Thoughts.  Since the comment grew longer than I anticipated, I thought I’d re-run parts of it here.

A couple quick stats from Forrester’s recent 5-year US Interactive forecast back up Greg’s points con gusto:

– 94% of consumers use email; 16% use social networking sites (and I assume they mean USE them – not just get solicitations from their friends to join).  That doesn’t mean that social networking sites aren’t growing rapidly in popularity, at least in some segments of the population, and it doesn’t mean that email marketing may not be the best way to reach certain people at certain times.  But it does mean that email remains the most ubiquitous online channel, not to mention the most “pull-oriented” and “on demand.”

– Spend on email marketing is $2.7b this year, growing to $4.2b in 2012.  Sure, email by 2012 is the smallest “category” by dollars spent, but first of all, one of the categories is “emerging channels,” which looks like it includes “everything else” in the world other than search, video, email, and display.  So it includes mobile as well as social media, and who knows what else.  Plus, if you really understand how email marketing works, you understand that dollars don’t add up in the same way as other forms of media since so much of the work can be done in-house. 

What really amazes me is how all these “web 2.0” people keep talking about how email is dying (when in fact it’s growing, albeit at a slower rate than other forms of online media) and don’t focus on how things like classifieds and yellow pages are truly DYING, and what that means for those industries.

I think a more interesting point is that in Forrester’s forecast, US Interactive Marketing spend by 2012 in aggregate reached $61b, more than triple where it is today — and that the percent of total US advertising going to interactive grows from 8 to 18 over the five years in the forecast. 

The bigger question that leaves me with is what that means for the overall efficiency of ad spend in the US.  It must be the case that online advertising in general is more efficient than offline — does that mean the total US advertising spend can shrink over time?  Or just that as it gets more efficient,
marketers will use their same budgets to try to reach more and more prospects?

Book short:  Proto Gladwell

I’m sure author Robert Cialdini would blanch if he read this comparison, but then again, I can’t be the first person to make it, either.  His book, Influence:  The Psychology of Persuasion, is an outstanding read for any marketing or sales professional, but boy does it remind me of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Blink (book; blog post).  Of course, Cialdini’s book came out a decade before Gladwell’s!  Anyway, Influence is a great social science look at the psychology that makes sales and marketing work.

Cialdini talks about sales and marketing professionals as “compliance practitioners,” which is a great way to think about them, quite frankly.  He boils down the things that make sales and marketing work to six core factors: consistency, reciprocation, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity.

Reciprocation – we hate being in a state of being beholden so much that we might even be willing to do a larger favor than the one done for us in order to remove the state.  Think about “free gifts” in merchandising as an example of this, or being in a negotiation where someone trying to make a cold sale on you offers a fallback, smaller sale.  For example, you don’t want to buy anything from the boy scout, but after you say no to the $5 raffle ticket and he asks about the $1 candy bar, you feel more obligated to buy the $1 candy bar because the boy scout has “given” on his initial request.

Consistency – once we have made a choice, personal and interpersonal pressures force us to back it up and justify our earlier decision – even more so when in writing or when declared to others.  This is why marketers love getting testimonials from customers; the testimonial locks the customer in emotionally, as well as encouraging others to buy the product.

Social proof – if others think it’s correct, it must be correct, especially if those other people are like us.  There are some scary examples in the book here, such as Reverand Jim Jones and The People’s Temple mass suicides.  Gripping, but creepy.

Liking – we listen to people we like, and we like people to whom we’re similar or who are physically attractive.  This section was especially reminiscent of Blink, but with different and more marketer-focused examples.

Authority – we have an extreme willingness to listen to authority, even when the authority isn’t quite relevant.  This is why celebrity endorsements work so well.

Scarcity – we have a extreme motivation of fear of loss, either or something, or of the opportunity to have something.  Who doesn’t like to keep doors open as long as possible?

The one place the book falls down a little bit is in the sections at the end of each chapter talking about how to resist that particular technique through jujitsu – the art of “turning the enemy’s strength to your advantage.”  While nice in theory, Cialdini’s examples aren’t super helpful beyond saying “when you think you’re getting suckered, stop — and then say no.”

Overally, though, the book is well written and choc full of examples.  Thanks to marketer Mallory Kates for sending me this great book!

Investment in the Email Ecosystem

Last week, my colleague George Bilbrey posted about how (turns out – shocking!) email still isn’t dead yet.

Not only is he right, but the whole premise of defending email from the attackers who call it “legacy” or “uninteresting” is backwards.  The inbox is getting more and more interesting these days, not less.  At Return Path, we’ve seen a tremendous amount of startup activitiy and investment (these two things can go together but don’t have to) in in front end of email in the past couple years.  I’d point to three sub-trends of this theme of “the inbox getting more interesting.”

First, major ISPs and mailbox operators are starting to experiment with more interesting applications inside their inboxes.  As the postmaster of one of the major ISPs said to me recently, “we’ve spent years stripping functionality out of email in the name of security – now that we have security more under control, we would like to start adding functionality back in.”  Google’s recent announcement about allowing third-party developers to access your email with your permission is one example, as is their well-documented experiment with NetFlix’s branded favicon showing up in the inbox starting a few months back.  And Hotmail’s most recent release, which has been well covered online (including this article which George wrote in Mediapost a couple months ago) also includes some trials of web-like functionality in the inbox, as well as other easy ways for users to view and experience their inboxes other than the age-old “last message in on top” method.  Yahoo has done a couple things along these lines as well of late, and one can assume they have other things in the works as well.

I wouldn’t be surprised if many ISPs roll out a variety of enhanced functionality over the next couple of years, although these systems can take a lot of time to change.  Although some of these changes present challenges for marketers and publishers, these are generally major plusses for end users as well as the companies who send them email – email is probably the only Internet application people spend tons of time in that’s missing most state of the art web functionality.

Second, although Google Wave got a lot of publicity about reinventing the inbox experience before Google shut it down a couple weeks ago, there are probably a dozen startups that are working on richer inboxes as well, either through plug-ins or what I’d call a “web email client overlay” – you can still use your Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail, or other address (your own domain, or a POP or IMAP account), but read the mail through one of these new clients.  Regardless of the technology, these companies are all trying, with different angles here or there, to make the inbox experience more interesting, relevant, productive, and in many cases, tied into your “social graph” and/or third-party web content.

The two big ones here in terms of active user base are Xobni, an Outlook plugin that matches social graph to inbox and produces a lot of interesting stats for its users; and Xoopit, which recently got acquired by Yahoo and wraps content indexing and discovery into its mail client.

Gist matches social graph data and third-party content like feeds and blogs into something that’s a hybrid of plugin and stand-alone web application.  That sounds a little like Threadsy, although that’s still in closed beta, so it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going to surface out of it.  There’s also Zenbe and Kwaga, and Xiant, which focus on creating a more productive inbox experience for power users.

Furthermore, services like OtherInbox and Boxbe aim to help users cut through the clutter of their inboxes and simultaneously create a more effective means for marketers to reach customers (say what you will about that concept, but at least it has a clear revenue model, which some of the other services listed above don’t have).

Finally, a number of services are popping up which give marketers and publishers easy-to-use advanced tools to improve their conversion or add other enhanced functionality to email.  For example, RPost, a company we announced a partnership with a couple months back, provides legal proof of delivery for email with some cool underlying technology.  LiveClicker (also a Return Path partner) provides hosted analytics-enabled email video in lightweight and easy-to-use ways that work in the majority of inboxes.

Sympact (another Return Path partner) dynamically renders content in an email based on factors like time of day and geolocation – so the same email, in the same inbox, will render, for example, Friday’s showtimes for New York when I open it in my office on Friday afternoon but Saturday’s showtimes for San Francisco after I fly out west for the weekend.  And a Belgian company called 8Seconds (you guessed it, another Return Path partner) does on-the-fly multivariate testing of email content in a way that blows away traditional A/B methods.  While these tools require some basic things to be in place to work optimally, like having images on by default or links working, they don’t by and large require special deals with ISPs to make the services function.

While these tools are aimed at marketers, they will also make end users’ email experiences much better by improving relevance or by adding value in other ways.

Some of this makes me wonder whether there’s a trend that will lead to disaggregation of the value chain in consumer email – splitting the front end (what consumers see) from the back end (who runs the mail server).  But that’s probably another topic for another day.  In the meantime, I’ll say three cheers for innovation in the email space.  It’s long overdue and will greatly enrich the environment in the coming years as these services gain adoption.

(This is the third post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT.  First two posts are here and here.)

Friday, March 20, Day 4

• Morning pilates going pretty well, a good daily routine here
• Wellness Screening on the way in for the first time.  Uniformed National Guard guys taking temperature on surface of face/temples.  Can’t get it to work – takes 6x
• Leadership and prioritization of important over urgent – staff the team
• Strategic National Stockpile failure – they send us 60,000 masks and Colorado is using 68,000/day.  They send us ZERO ventilators. Seems like it’s neither strategic nor a stockpile. Guess it really is every state for itself
• Unclear sometimes what the actual role of the state is – sometimes procuring, sometimes getting private sector to procure with some coordination, etc.
• Getting out in front of the parade – the private sector is swarming all over this, how can we help coordinate and channel the energy?
• State gov seems incredibly nimble here – seconding people from departments all over to the crisis, etc.  Bureaucracy is real, but it can melt away in an emergency, or when the governor wants it to. Really impressive
• Going to try DoorDash and see if it’s any different than UberEats.  (It’s not.) Big night.

Saturday, March 21, Day 5

• Saturday but office still 75%
• Wellness Screening again.  Still can’t get thermometer to work for quite a while
• Mike Willis asked for feedback and observations (good) – they are
  • Atmosphere in EOC calm, focused, integrated, SMART, nimble, fast – opposite of “government”
  • Opening meeting on Tuesday morning – calm, focused, caring, quiet urgency
  • Didn’t realize he was military
  • Mentioned yesterday’s “not vetted, not integrated, not helpful” moment, poignant but respectful
• Team pull up, drowning in emails, plan to get organized
• Governor briefing
• Working on replacing me…
• Seamless prioritization of things that are gateway items and enablers.  We have a project tracker, but it’s almost useless. Mostly we are just doing prioritization in the moment.  No choice. Crisis mode
• Gov call – carefully weighing isolation strategy (economic as well as risk of civil disobedience) with number of projected deaths – sounds like the same conversation I’m reading about in the papers at the national level, but really interesting to see it up close and personal. Asked for plan around making food and services safer – super thoughtful “it’s not the economic activity that causes problems, it’s social proximity, are there ways we can keep one and minimize the other?”
• Colorado still has around 500 cases statewide – about ¼ of Westchester County.  Denver has less than 100. Still, feels like we are watching the tsunami coming at us in slow motion
• Dinner at a very close friend’s house who lives in town – elbow bumps and sat at the other end of the table.  Fun and social, but feels like even things like this are about to come to an end. Got to do laundry

Sunday, March 22, Day 6

• Sunday but office still 75%
• Multiple failures again with wellness screen, then we figure it out – on the walk over from the hotel, it’s cold enough that my skin temperature is out of range for the contact thermometers they have.  Since I am coming in early when there is no line, my face is too cold when I get to the front
• Adding staff, nowhere to put them, no organized email lists, working on org charts, have to retool O/S for meetings/tasks.  A little chaotic, but at least I know how to do this stuff
• Finally got connection to NY State to do some benchmarking on testing – doesn’t seem like states coordinate or share info a lot, but the team there was happy to 
• Finally have a few minutes to do planning on major swim lanes
• More working on replacing me
• This is the problem with statistics.  Models are only as good as the inputs, and the inputs here seem like they’re all over the place…not just here in CO, but everywhere.  It’s not like we have a pandemic every year to refine our math
• Interviewing Sarah Tuneberg (came in via Brad) to replace me with Lisa and Stan – she’s AWESOME and she’s hired – starts on the spot by coming in to stand with us behind the Governor at a press conference.  Talk about a rapid recruiting process!
• Seems like she will be awesome.  Probably way better than me – has a ton of public health and emergency/disaster response experience in addition to some private sector/startup/tech experience
• Her first worry never even occurred to me – Fatality Management – morgue surge capacity.  “Gift to the living” – so awesome
• Lameness of Trump press conference – self praise followed by sycophants in the midst of a typhoon
• Gov press conference (here) – authentic and well received.  “Grim reaper” was quite poignant. He worked in the key messages we asked him to about public misinformation of testing, talking points was Google Doc with 30+ people in it – good example of collaboration and control, seamless, last minute but still came out great.  Announces social distancing and lots of good examples about groceries, jogging, still no lockdown
• Lots of RP Colorado people seeing press conference…phone buzzing like mad in my pocket!  So many awesome notes from friends and former colleagues thanking me for being there to help, only one or two snarky comments about my orange tee shirt while others were in blazers (hey, it was a Sunday and the presser was called last minute!)

Stay tuned for more tomorrow…

How to Get Laid Off – an Employee’s Perspective

One of my colleagues at Return Path  saw my post about How to Quit Your Job about 5 years ago and was inspired to share this story with me.  Don’t read anything into this post, team!  There is no other meaning behind my posting it at this time, or any time, other than thinking it’s a very good way of approaching a very difficult situation, especially coming from an employee.

In 2009 I was working at a software security start up in the Silicon Valley.  Times were exceedingly tough, there were several rounds of layoffs that year, and in May I was finally on the list. I was informed on a Tuesday that my last day was that Friday.  It was a horrible time to be without a job (and benefits), there was almost no hiring at all that year, one of the worst economic down turns on record.  While it was a hard message,  I knew that it was not personal, I was just caught up on a bad math problem.

After calling home to share the bad news, I went back to my desk and kept working. I had never been laid off and was not sure what to do, but I was pretty sure I would have plenty of free time in the short term, so I set about figuring out  how to wrap things up there.  Later that day the founder of the company came by, asked why I had not gone home, and I replied that I would be fine with working till the end of the week if he was okay with it.  He thanked me.

Later that week, in a meeting where we reviewed and prioritized the projects I was working on, we discussed who would take on the top three that were quite important to the future of the company.  A few names were mentioned of who could keep them alive, but they were people who I knew would not focus on them at all.  So I suggested they have me continue to work on them, that got an funny look but when he thought about it , it made sense, they could 1099 me one day a week.  The next day we set it up.  I made more money than I could of on unemployment, but even better I kept my laptop and work email, so I looked employed which paid off later. 

That one day later became two days and then three, however, I eventually found other full time work in 2010.  Layoffs are hard,  but it is not a time to burn bridges.   In fact  one of the execs of that company is a reference and has offered me other opportunities for employment.

I was trading emails a few weeks ago Elliot Noss from Tucows about the current state of the economy after being on a panel together about it, and he wrote:

The market is fascinating right now. Heated competition AND layoffs and hiring freezes. It feel like an old European hotel where there are two faucets, one is too hot and the other too cold.

While a quick rant about European hotel bathrooms could be fun…we’ll just stick to the sink analogy. As anyone who has ever tried to use one of these sinks that Elliot describes knows, they’re hard to use and illogical. Sure, sometimes you want freezing water and sometimes you want scalding water (I guess), but often, you want something in between. And the only way to achieve that is to turn on both freezing and scalding at the same time? That’s weird.

Then I was on another email thread recently with a group of CEOs, when John Henry from Ride With Loop said this:

Whatever the climate, we all surely agree there is no bad time to build a good business.

How true that is!

But here’s the worrisome part. It’s impossible to predict what’s going to happen next. We are in uncharted territory here with a land war in Europe, a partial global oil embargo of a top tier oil producer, a pandemic, supply chain problems, etc. etc. There are days and circumstances where everything feels normal. Plenty of businesses, especially in the tech sector, are kicking ass. And yet there are days and circumstances that feel like 2001 or 2009. It’s tough to navigate as a startup CEO. Yes, it’s obvious you should try to have a couple years of cash on hand, and that you should be smart about investments and not get too far ahead of revenue if you’re in certain sectors (presumably if you’re in an R&D intensive field and weren’t planning to have revenue for years on end, life isn’t all that different?). But beyond that, there’s no clear playbook.

And that’s where the worrisome line comes in. I saw Larry Summers on Meet the Press last weekend, who predicted that

a recession would come in late 2023.

Wait, what? Aren’t things messed up now? Yes, inflation is high, the stock market is down, and interest rates are creeping up. But the economy is still GROWING. Unemployment is still LOW. Summers’ point is a reminder that contraction is likely, but it may still be a ways off, it depends how the Fed handles interest rate hikes (and about a zillion other things), and it’s impossible to predict. That was more worrisome to me. If we’re navigating choppy waters now, it may not just be for a couple of quarters. It may be that 4-6 quarters from now, we are in for 2-3 quarters of contraction. That is a more than most companies are able to plan for from a cash perspective.

Frothy macro environments lead to bad businesses getting created, too many lookalike businesses popping up, or weak teams getting funded. When the tide goes out, as they say, you can see who is swimming naked. But if you’re building a good business, one that has staying power and a clear value proposition, with real people or clients paying real money for a real product or service, and if you’re serious about building a good company, keep on keeping on. Be smart about key decisions, especially investment decisions, but don’t despair or give up.

We’ll all get through this.

I’ve written a lot over the years about Return Path’s Core Values (summary post with lots of links to other posts here).  And I’ve also written and believe strongly that there’s a big difference between values, which are pretty unchanging, and culture, which can evolve a lot over time.  But I had a couple conversations recently that led me to think more philosophically about a company’s values.

The first conversation was at a recent dinner for a group of us working on fundraising for my upcoming 25th reunion from Princeton.  Our guest speaker was a fellow alumnus who I’ve gotten to know and respect tremendously over the years as one of the school’s most senior and influential volunteer leaders.  He was speaking about the touchstones in his life and in all people’s lives — things like their families, their faith, the causes they’re passionate about, and the institutions they’ve been a part of.  I remember this speaker giving a similar set of remarks right after the financial crisis hit in early 2009.  And it got me thinking about the origins of Return Path’s values, which I didn’t create on my own, but which I obviously had a tremendous amount of influence over as founder.  Where did they come from?  Certainly, some came from my parents and grandparents.  Some came from my primary and secondary education and teachers.  Some came from other influences like coaches, mentors, and favorite books.  Although I’m not overly observant, some certainly came from Hebrew school and even more so from a deep reading of the Bible that I undertook about 15 years ago for fun (it was much more fun than I expected!).  Some came from other professional experiences before I started Return Path.  But many of them either came from, or were strongly reinforced by my experience at Princeton.  Of the 15 values we currently articulate, I can directly tie at least seven to Princeton:  helpful, thankful, data-driven, collaborative, results-oriented, people first, and equal in opportunity.  I can also tie some other principles that aren’t stated values at Return Path, but which are clearly part of our culture, such as intellectually curious, appreciative of other people’s points of view, and valuing an interdisciplinary approach to work.

As part of my professional Reboot project, this was a good reminder of some of the values I know I’ve gotten from my college experience as a student and as an alumni, which was helpful both to reinforce their importance in my mind but also to remember some of the specifics around their origins – when and why they became important to me.  I could make a similar list and trade and antecedents of all or at least most of our Company’s values back to one of those primary influences in my life.  Part of Reboot will be thinking through all of these and renewing and refreshing their importance to me.

The second conversation was with a former employee who has gone on to lead another organization.  It led me to the observation I’ve never really thought through before, that as a company, we ourselves have become one of those institutions that imprints its values into the minds of at least some of its employees…and that those values will continue to be perpetuated, incorporated, and improved upon over time in any organization that our employees go on to join, manage part of, or lead.

That’s a powerful construct to keep in mind if you’re a new CEO working on designing and articulating your company’s values for the first time.  You’re not just creating a framework to guide your own organization.  You’re creating the beginning of a legacy that could potentially influence hundreds or thousands of other organizations in the future.

The Gift of Feedback, Part IV

I wrote a few weeks ago about my live 360 – the first time I’ve ever been in the room for my own review discussion.  I now have a development plan drafted coming out of the session, and having cycled it through the contributors to the review, I’m ready to go with it.  As I did in 2008, 2009, and 2011, I’m posting it here publicly.  This time around, there are three development items:

1. Continue to spend enough time in-market.  In particular, look for opportunities to spend more time with direct clients.  There was a lot of discussion about this at my review.  One director suggested I should spend at least 20% of my time in-market, thinking I was spending less than that.  We track my time to the minute each quarter, and I spend roughly 1/3 of my time in-market.  The problem is the definition of in-market.  We have a lot of large partners (ESPs, ISPs, etc.) with whom I spend a lot of time at senior levels.  Where I spend very little time is with direct clients, either as prospects or as existing clients.  Even though, given our ASP, there isn’t as much leverage in any individual client relationship, I will work harder to engage with both our sales team and a couple of larger accounts to more deeply understand our individual client experience.
2. Strengthen the Executive Committee as a team as well as using the EC as the primary platform for driving accountability throughout the organization.  On the surface, this sounds like “duh,” isn’t that the CEO’s job in the first place?  But there are some important tactical items underneath this, especially given that we’ve changed over half of our executive team in the last 12 months.  I need to keep my foot on the accelerator in a few specific ways:  using our new goals and metrics process and our system of record (7Geese) rigorously with each team member every week or two; being more authoritative about the goals that end up in the system in the first place to make sure my top priorities for the organization are being met; finishing our new team development plan, which will have an emphasis on organizational accountability; and finding the next opportiunity for our EC to go through a management training program as a team.
3. Help stakeholders connect with the inherent complexity of the business.  This is an interesting one.  It started out as “make the business less complex,” until I realized that much of the competitive advantage and inherent value from our business comes fom the fact that we’ve built a series of overlapping, complex, data machines that drive unique insights for clients.  So reducing complexity may not make sense.  But helping everyone in and around the business connect with, and understand the complexity, is key.  To execute this item, there are specifics for each major stakeholder.  For the Board, I am going to experiment with a radically simpler format of our Board Book.  For Investors, Customers, and Partners, we are hard at work revising our corporate positioning and messaging.  Internally, there are few things to work on — speaking at more team/department meetings, looking for other opportunities to streamline the organization, and contemplating a single theme or priority for 2015 instead of our usual 3-5 major priorities.

Again, I want to thank everyone who participated in my 360 this year – my board, my team, a few “lucky” skip-levels, and my coach Marc Maltz.  The feedback was rich, the experience of observing the conversation was very powerful, and I hope you like where the development plan came out!

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.