I hate just doing linkblogs, but Fred’s thoughts this morning on Facebook and privacy around the beacon issue are spot on. 

Two highlights I couldn’t agree with more:

When the internet knows who you are, what you do, who your friends are, and what they do, it goes from the random bar you wander into to your favorite pub where your friends congregate and the bartender knows your drink and pours it for you when you walk in the door

and

These privacy backlashes do some good though. They keep big companies like Google and Facebook sensitized to the issue. And so we hope that they ‘do no evil’ with this data they are collecting

Read the full post here.

Scaling Me

Two things have come up over the last couple years for me that are frustrations for me as a CEO of a high growth company.  These are both people related — an area that’s always been the cornerstone of my leadership patterns.  That probably makes them even more frustrating.

Frustration 1:  Not knowing if I can completely trust the feedback I get from deep in the organization.  I’ve always relied on direct interactions with junior staff and personal observation and data collection in order to get a feel for what’s going on.  But a couple times lately, people had been admonishing me (for the first time) when I’ve relayed feedback with comments like, “of course you heard that — you’re the CEO.”

So now the paranoid Matt kicks in a bit.  Can I actually trust the feedback I’m getting?  I think I can.  I think I’m a good judge of character and am able to read between the lines and filter comments and input and responses to questions I ask.  But maybe this gets harder as the organization grows and as personal connections to me are necessarily fewer and farther between.

Frustration 2:  Needing to be increasingly careful with what I say and how I say it.  This comes up in two different ways.  First, I want to make sure that while I’m still providing as transparent leadership as I can, that I’m not saying something that’s going to freak out a more junior staff member because they’re missing context or might misinterpret what I’m saying.  Ok, this one I can manage.

But the tougher angle on this is having unintended impact on people.  Throwing out a casual idea in a conversation with someone in the company can easily lead to a chain reaction of “Matt said” and “I need to redo my goals” conversations that aren’t what I meant.  So I’ve done some work to formalize feedback and communication loops when I have skip-level check-ins, but it’s creating more process and thought overhead for me than I’m used to.

Nothing is bad here – just signs of a growing organization – but some definite changes in how I need to behave in order to keep being a strong and successful leader.

Solving Problems Together

Last week, I started a series of new posts about our core values (a new tag in the tag cloud for this series) at Return Path.  Read the first one on Ownership here.

Another one of our core values is around problem solving, and ownership is intrinsically related.  We believe that all employees are responsible for owning solutions, not just surfacing problems.  The second core value I’ll write about in this series is written specifically as:

We solve problems together and always present problems with potential solutions or paths to solutions

In terms of how this value manifests itself in our daily existence, for one thing, I see people working across teams and departments regularly, at their own initiative, to solve problems here.  It happens in a very natural way.  Things don’t have to get escalated up and down management chains.  People at all levels seem to be very focused on solving problems, not just pointing them out, and they have good instincts for where, when, and how they can help on critical (and non-critical) items.

Another example, again relative to other workplaces I’ve either been at or seen, is that people complain a lot less here.  If they see something they don’t like, they do something about it, solve the problem themselves, or escalate quickly and professionally. The amount of finger pointing tends to be very low, and quite frankly, when fingers are pointed, they’re usually pointed inward to ask the question, “what could I have done differently?”

The danger of a highly collaborative culture like ours is teams getting stuck in consensus-seeking.  Beware!  The key is to balance collaboration on high value projects with authoritative leadership & direction.

A steady flow of problems are inherent in any business.  I’m thankful that my colleagues are generally quite strong at solving them!

Brilliant Client Service:  It’s Not Just for Peaceful Revolutionaries Any More!

I just read this quote, attributed to an unlikely source, Mahatma Gandhi, in an annual report from InfoUSA, one of the biggest public companies in our industry:

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises.
He is not dependent on us.  We are dependent on him.
He is not an interruption in our work.  He is the purpose of it.
He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it.
We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.

This quote is widely believed to actually be from Gandhi, despite questions about that authenticity, at least according to one expert.

But boy is the content spot on.  We literally just finished developing something we call the Return Path Client Promise a few weeks ago, which you can see here.  The trick to getting something like this to work is that it has to be truly genuine and come from within, not from on high.  Our marketing, sales, and account teams worked diligently over the course of a couple of months to draft and refine this document and make it accurate and meaningful.

OnlyOnce, Part II

After more than six years, my blog starting looking like, well, a six-year old blog on an off-the-shelf template.  Thanks to my friends at Slice of Lime, OnlyOnce has a new design as of today as well as some new navigation and other features like a tag cloud and Twitter feed (and a new platform, WordPress rather than Typepad).  I know many people only read my posts via feed or email (those won’t change), but if you have a minute, feel free to take a look.  The site also has its own URL now – https://onlyonceblog.wpengine.com.

With my shiny new template, I may add some other features or areas of content over time, as well.  There are still a couple things that are only 95% baked, but I love the new look and wanted to make if “official” today.  Thanks to Kevin, Jeff, Mike, Lindsay, and everyone at Slice of Lime for their excellent design work, and for my colleague Andrea for helping do the heavy lifting of porting everything over to the new platform.

Pendulum Swinging Back?

The TechCrunch news du jour is that Jason Calacanis has stopped blogging and is instead using email to communicate with his circle. 

It’s interesting to note that after months (years?) of “email is dead” stories specifically around blogging, RSS feeds, and social media in general, the pendulum seems to be swinging back to email.  You should read Jason’s words yourself, but his notes are mainly that there’s too much noise and self-promotion in the blogosphere, while email promotes intimacy and efficiency.

Not surprisingly, TechCrunch is a doubter, but we’ll have to see.

Automated Love

Return Path is launching a new mini feature sometime this week to our clients.  Normally I wouldn’t blog about this — I think this is mini enough that we’re probably not even saying much about it publicly at the company.  But it’s an interesting concept that I thought I’d riff on a little bit.

I forget what we’re calling the program officially — probably something like “Client Status Emails” or “Performance Summary Alerts” — but a bunch of us have been calling it by the more colorful term “Automated Love” for a while now.

The art of account management or client services for an on-demand software company is complex and has evolved significantly from the old days of relationship management.  Great account management now means a whole slew of new things, like Being The Subject Matter Expert, and Training the Client.  It’s less about the “hey, how are things going?” phone call and more about driving usage and value for clients.

As web services have taken off, particularly for small businesses or “prosumers,” most have built in this concept of Automated Love.  The weekly email from the service to its user with charts, stats, benchmarks, and links to the web site, occasionally with some content or blog posts.  It’s relatively easy (most of the content is database driven), it reminds customers that you’re there, working on their behalf in the background, it tells them what happened on their account or how they’re doing, it alerts them to current or looming problems, and it drives usage of your service.  As a bonus for you internally, usually the same database queries that produce a good bit of Automated Love can also alert your account management team when a client’s usage pattern of your service changes or stops entirely.

While some businesses with low values of any single customer value can probably get away with having a client service function based ENTIRELY on Automated Love, I think any business with a web service MUST have Automated Love as a component of its client service effort.

Yes, that’s me. I’m in an ice pocket inside a glacier on Antarctica, the most interesting place Mariquita and I have ever been, and I think the most interesting place on earth. We were there last winter with a great tour company called Adventure Network and had the trip of a lifetime.

And yes, the picture does have something to do with the theme of the blog, You’re Only a First Time CEO Once. 🙂

That’s not just the title of a mediocre 1980’s sitcom starring Tony Danza, it’s a question I get periodically, including last week in an interview. A writer I know is working on an article on entrepreneurship and asked me, “Before you started your own business, how did you like working for other people?”

The question made me think a little bit. I know what she was asking — how I liked being the boss instead of working for one — but the way she phrased it is interesting and revealing about what it’s like to be a CEO. One of the biggest differences between being in a company and starting or running one is that you’re not working for a person, you’re working for many people.

As CEO of the company, I work for a Board and shareholders, I work for our customers, and I work for our employees. That’s how I approach the job, anyway.

Return Path’s Board of Directors is my boss, even though I’m one of the people on it. I report to the Board, and the Board is responsible for hiring and (hopefully not) firing the CEO, so technically, that’s my boss. The Board is also made up (for small private companies, anyway) of representatives of our biggest shareholders. As the main owners of the business, they are concerned with the growth, profitability, and overall health of the company, and they want to make sure we are building shareholder value day in, day out. That’s one very important perspective for me to have every day.

But I also work for our customers. I have to see myself as serving them — and more important, I have to steer the organization to believe that our customers are at the top of our food chain. If I do, then things will go well in the business. We will have the right products in the market at the right time to bring in new accounts. We will have a tremendous service delivery organization that wows customers and keeps them coming back for more. We will beat out our competition any day of the week. We will keep people paying our bills!

Most important, though, I work for our employees. This is very simple. An organization thrives because the people who make it up come to work inspired, focused, and productive. When they don’t, it doesn’t. I can’t wave a wand and make everyone happy all the time, but I try to focus a significant part of my time on making sure this is a great work environment; that the managers and executives are religiously focused on developing, managing, and motivating their teams; and that we’re doing a good job of communicating our mission, our values, and why each person’s job is important to the cause. This one’s the hardest of the three to get right, but it’s worth the effort.

Certainly, I don’t respond to each of my “bosses” every day as I would a direct supervisor, but in the long haul, I have to balance out the needs and interests of all three constituencies in order to have the organization be successful.

There’s been much coverage in the news of Saturday’s passing of President Ronald Reagan, but I will add a new wrinkle by trying to distill down what I know and remember of The Great Communicator’s leadership style into a few simple lessons of note for CEOs.

Lesson 1: Sunny optimism motivates the people you lead, but only when it’s balanced with hard-headed realism. Reagan’s message that tomorrow can be a better day than today was powerful and timely for the American psyche, but he didn’t just assume that because he said it, it would be true. He backed up his message with (a) an understanding that the American economy itself was in the doldrums in the late ’70s, and (b) policies designed to fix the economy. Whether you agree with those policies or not, you have to respect the fact that Reagan as a leader wasn’t just talk — he combined the talk with reality-based action. That’s super important when communicating key messages to a company of any size.

Lesson 2: Simplicity of messaging beats out measured intellectualism in broad-based communications. Reagan’s view of the 40-year-old Cold War when he took office was “we will win, and they will lose.” Much easier to rally around than messages of detente and containment (this quote came from an editorial by former Reagan staffer Peter Robinson in today’s Wall St. Journal). Similarly, the bigger and more diverse the group you’re talking to inside your company or in a speech or in the press, the more important it is to boil your key message down to something people can easily take away with them and repeat at home later to their spouse or friends.

Lesson 3: Nobody’s perfect, and you don’t have to be perfect either. He may have been, electorally, the most popular president of our generation, but Reagan certainly had his many and sometimes glaring faults. History will acknowledge his faults but overall judge him on his performance. It was noted (also in today’s Journal, I think) that Reagan got a lot of little things wrong, but in the end, he will be remembered because he got a few big things very, very right. Perfection is something that most mortals can’t achieve, certainly not in a high profile position like President or CEO of anything, whether a 10-person startup or a nation.

Love him or hate him, the man was one of the most prominent leaders of our time. I’m sure there are more lessons from Reagan’s legacy than these three for CEOs, but this is a start, anyway.